I had a genuinely inspirational day at the Nattergal Ltd Boothby Wildland rewilding project in Lincolnshire yesterday being shown around by Ben Hart and Lloyd Park. It is a large site at 600 hectares and following three years of carefully managed retreat from farming - the last arable crops were harvested from the site this summer - the space already has the faintly magical, other-worldly quality of more established rewilding sites such as the Knepp Estate.
I'll be writing a lot more about the visit in the coming weeks, but there were two immediate impressions that are worth recounting.
The first is the remarkable pace with which nature can recover when it is given the space to do so. Boothby Wildland is only three years into a journey that is being planned on a century-long timescale. It is 17 years behind the much more established Knepp Estate. Conventional farming has only just halted on parts of the site. It was a cold and grey December day. And yet natural life was remarkably visible.
In two hours we saw a stonechat, buzzards, two herds of deer, multiple grey herons, a flock of pink footed geese snaking across the sky, kestrels, a skylark, a sparrowhawk, a red kite, blackbirds, flocks of wood pigeons, a startled hare the size of a large dog, and several pheasants hoping to escape those farms where they will get shot at or run over. Next year the first wave of stock fences will go in and part of the site will become the UK's largest beaver habitat, as well as home to the first few wild pigs. Many more animals, large and small, will follow.
The second crucial point about Nattergal is it is a commercial business. It has raised £40m and the plan is to build a world-leading nature restoration company that can make natural capital an investible asset.
As in any new sector there are risks here, but the early signs are encouraging. The plan is to show how across a mix of sites it is possible to develop Biodiversity Net Gain credits, high integrity 'charismatic carbon' credits, and voluntary biodiversity credits that can be sold to developers and other companies. To that end, Boothby is currently one of the most monitored and tracked pieces of land in the UK, with multiple metrics creating a baseline from which Nattergal should be able to show its approaches have resulted to both a recovery of nature and a major expansion in natural carbon sinks.
These credits should provide reliable revenues that can then be augmented through government subsidy schemes - the site is in the mix for the first wave of funding through Defra's Landscape Recovery Scheme - and eco-tourism and local business partnerships.
It is a hugely exciting and potentially transformative proposition. It will be fascinating to see how it evolves as both a home for nature and a commercial business.
