Isabella Tree

you Welcome to the Net Wilding Podcast with me, Isabella Tree, author and co-owner of the Net Rewilding Project.

My guest today is the wonderful Tim Mackrill, a man who is everything to ospreys.

He has a PhD on osprey migration, he's travelled to West Africa to study ospreys, and he's the author of two books, The Rutland Water Ospreys and Spotlight Ospreys.

I love switching off and digesting a few films when I am unreachable between takeoff and landing.

The Knapp story begins when Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree, farmers in southeast England, contact a tree expert to understand why an oak tree on their property seems to be losing stability.

The remarkable tree man quickly diagnoses the issue and suggests a way forward, but is drawn to other oak trees on their 3,500-acre estate that he's much more worried about.

The farmland has been ploughed ever since the Dig for Victory agricultural drive during the Second World War, when the German bombing of supply lines threatened England's food supply.

It's funny how quickly we conform to the behaviour of those around us.

I finished the movie Wilding on the plane and later picked up the book by the same name.

Isabella Tree takes you on their journey, from deciding in 2000 that they would dismantle their farming operation and allow nature to be the driving force in shaping the land.

Reading what unfolded opened my eyes to the invisible connections in the natural world too.

So I think that as a country, we've come a long way since my childhood, and that's a source of real tremendous optimism.

About 15 or 18 years ago, my brother Zach and I were introduced by legendary rewilders Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree of the famous NEP rewilding project to a man called Derek Gow, and I was immediately in love with Derek Gow.

He is a former sheep farmer with a broad Scottish accent, a big beard.

He's turned into a rewilder and a legendary one.

Over two decades, the environment has done most of the reclamation there unaided as part of a wider rewilding effort that lets natural processes govern the landscape.

But Isabella Tree, the conservationist who co-owns NEP, is giving it something of a push with the storks.

Unlike other birds that could strike out and breed from just one pair, storks are a sociable species that are more likely to survive in a colony, she said.

To build that colony, conservationists have released captive-bred storks at NEP every summer for the past eight years.

There are other examples.

Isabella Tree's work in the UK where they've just let things go and all of a sudden they've got purple emperor butterflies existing in habitats they've never been recorded before.

Systems can reform in different ways.

So, you know, new recipe, same ingredients, but we have to allow ourselves to be guided a little bit by that as well.