I have just finished George Monbiot’s excellent book on the subject of rewilding, called Feral.
In the book, Monbiot takes an in-depth look at just how much of a change to our environment would be if we reintroduced some of the larger mammals ranging from beavers to bears.
For more than ten years now, I have been experimenting with a little rewilding project of my own.
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My Rewilding Project
To the rear of my house, I have a pocket handkerchief-sized walled garden of just over thirty square yards.
As is often the case in ancient French villages, the garden is an oddly shaped patch of ground walled in by irregular houses and an old barn.
When I bought the property, the garden consisted of a coal shed and a tiny patch of land that probably once housed either a pig or a goat. I knocked down the coal shed, put up a tiny deck, and then crowded the rest of the space with plants and an olive tree.
A garden just isn’t a garden in southern France unless it has an olive tree to lend it some degree of credibility.
When I was satisfied with what I had achieved, I then put in the most important addition of all — the bird-feeder, which would become the operational headquarters of the garden.
Within days I was receiving regular visits from a variety of bumblebees, honeybees, swallowtail butterflies, and the delightful hummingbird hawk moth, but not a single bird. I would see birds flying by occasionally, but none of them seemed particularly attracted to the offerings I was trying to tempt them with.
I suppose it would be a little like you or me driving the same stretch of empty highway year after year and then suddenly seeing a burger joint pop-up offering free food.
You might slow down as you passed and peer through the windscreen suspiciously, but then you’d shake your head and accelerate away. There had to be a catch somewhere, burgers made of horse meat or a Jehovah’s Witness handing out tracts as soon as you stepped through the door.
Eventually, one slightly adventurous blue tit was unable to resist testing the sunflower seeds that awaited him in such abundance.
After that, things began to change fast. The feeder quickly gained a reputation based entirely on word of the beak. First came the blue tits, and they were followed in short order by great tits and coal tits.
Then, the nuthatch started dropping in with his long kingfisher like beak and eyes painted by the same make-up artist who Queen Cleopatra once employed. As the only European bird that can hop headfirst down a tree or branch, he has a distinct advantage because he can approach the feeder bouncing down the nearby grapevine.
Over time a vole, who we nicknamed Nigel, made an unexpected appearance. He was ridiculously cautious at first. He would poke his nose from the stonewalling at the end of the garden, and only once he deemed it safe — would he traverse the deck at such speed it was as though he had been fired from a catapult.
On the far side, he would vault off the deck, snatch up a sunflower seed, and then, with a quick athletic heave, haul himself back onto the deck for the return sprint.
Shortly after that, the sparrows moved in. Up until then, all of the visitors to the feeder had adhered to an almost orderly approach pattern. They would perch along the vine or on the pergola and then drop down to the feeder one or two at a time in more or less the order in which they had arrived.
The sparrows, on the other hand, moved in like a gang of hairy bikers.
They were not the least bit interested in any pre-existing etiquette, and instead of treating the feeder as an upmarket restaurant, they turned it into a busy roadhouse.
Sparrows come with a technical disadvantage when it comes to eating sunflower seeds. The tits and finches sit on a branch and hold seeds between their toes. Using their beaks like a jackhammer, they then peck open the shell and eat the contents.
If they choose to do this while sitting on the gutter, the noise is very similar to someone knocking on my front door, and for the first few days after their arrival, I was forever rushing to the door in the expectation of receiving visitors.
Sparrows, on the other hand, crush seed with their beaks, not having mastered the more sophisticated art of holding it with their toes. For several days they hung about the garden watching the other birds fill their feathery little bellies, but unable to figure out quite how to access this free supply of nutrients. Eventually, they devised a system of their own, which was far more in keeping with a gang mentality.
Two or three of them would land directly in the seed and then throw it out as fast as they could. The rest of the mob would wait for the seed to fall onto the ground beneath the feeder and deal with it there.
Over time, Nigel has grown in both courage and stature. Instead of crossing the deck in a lightning sprint, he now takes a steady saunter, and rather than opting for takeout — he prefers to eat in, sitting on his haunches surrounded by bickering sparrows. It wasn’t long before he began to pay the price for his high carb diet.
There was a noticeable thickening to his waist, and he developed a pronounced beer belly. Climbing the deck turned into something of a challenge.
He would jump up, and on the second or third attempt, would usually manage to catch the lip with his front feet. After that, he would heave himself onto the deck, propelled by frantic scrabbling with his back feet. It was easy, when watching this, to imagine him grunting, with all the effort.
At one point, he disappeared altogether for several days, and we were left wondering whether he had suffered some sort of cardiovascular attack or had been placed on a strict Keto diet by his wife.
To our delight, Nigel suddenly reappeared but this time via a different route. He had dug himself a tunnel at the base of the deck, and now he could access the food source from underneath without the need for the humiliating after-dinner workout.
As the pecking order started to become more established and my diners began to resolve the different eating habits, I decided it was time to upgrade, and so I introduced another luxury.
The birdbath is a shallow affair placed directly on the deck, and it has changed my garden from a flyby restaurant into a theme park.
Over recent summers, we have seen temperatures soaring as a result of global weather change or by sheer coincidence, if you happen to be a MAGA supporter. Both Nigel and all the birds were delighted not just to have a source of easy drinking-water, but also a Jacuzzi.
Even the bees are grateful for a water source right next to the flowers they appreciate so much, although when the hairy bikers are in the pool, there is little chance of anyone else getting in on the act.
The sparrows will enter the water five or six at a time, and once they start their ablutions, there is an explosion of water droplets, and the birdbath is often half-empty by the time they have finished.
Some of the birds become so wet that it alters their body-weight, and this always seems to catch them by surprise when they take off. Instead of being able to effortlessly glide up to the branches of the olive tree or one of the surrounding rooftops, they suddenly veer off and crash into the shrubbery where they are obliged to sit until they weigh a little less.
Other birds have begun to arrive now. A robin has become a regular visitor even though he does not eat the seed.
I think he’s just suffering from FOMO with such a crowd in the garden.
I have discovered that he has a soft spot for grated cheese. Although he prefers an Italian pecorino, he is not above taking domestic cheese if there’s nothing more exotic available.
One pair of collared doves are virtually permanent residents now. The female is easily identifiable because she has a damaged wing, but it hasn’t stopped her from producing young every season for several years in a row. When she is nesting, we gather twigs and place them on top of one of the walls. She then picks these up and flies off with them to wherever it is she has decided to build a home in that particular year.
Magpies and jays are both members of the corvid family and among the most intelligent of birds. They too have no interest in eating the seed, but the commotion seems too difficult for them to resist, and so they pop in just to see what’s going on and maybe steal a grape or two — to make the detour worthwhile.
Blackbirds are territorial creatures, but several pairs take turns in visiting the garden as though they are unable to make up their minds quite who it belongs to. They were highly impressed by the birdbath, but its shallow depth made it difficult for them to bathe in and so I was forced to introduce a deeper version.
They are now able to engage in full water aerobics classes undisturbed by flashy little tits or marauding gangsters.
None of these birds are particularly unusual in Europe, but I am not a twitcher, desperately trying to up my bird count.
It is the behavior and comic interactions that give most pleasure — an everyday pantomime complete with princes, princesses, and evil, ugly sisters. Two sliding glass doors front onto the garden, and even as I write, I only have to look up if I want to see who’s winning the latest brawl or flicking water all over my deck.
I cannot tell you how much pleasure this constant coming and going gives me. It is not an entirely perfect view because to prevent the birds from crashing into the glass, we have to leave our Christmas stickers up permanently.
It seems a little strange to be peering at the birds between images of delicate snowflakes and portly depictions of Santa Claus in mid-July, but one adapts.
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Rewild Your Environment
My tiny rewilding project may have been too small to house a wolf or a bear. It would have been an incredibly tight squeeze for even a lone beaver, but I still believe it has really benefitted the ecosystem in my little village.
Many of the birds, that now visit me, will have been doing so for successive generations and will never have known a time in their lives when this little oasis didn’t exist.
Man has had a devastating effect on the environment as we have gradually come to dominate it so heavily. I believe it is beholden on all of us to create space in which nature can thrive despite our overwhelming presence.
You too could rewild your environment with a little effort, a little ingenuity, and very little cost.
I have lived in apartments in cities where I was still able to attract birds to a feeder on the patio, and on one occasion where I didn’t have a patio, the feeder was simply suspended from the window frame.
The point I’m trying to sell here, and the one that I’m hoping you will latch onto is that you don’t have to be a zoologist or have a degree in environmental science to make a difference.
Nature is all around you, and all it takes is for you to give it a bit of a toehold for it to occupy. You can change the world. You just have to do it a little at a time.
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This post was previously published on Medium.com.
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Photo credit: iStock