To celebrate 10,000 downloads of our first ever episode, The Nightingale, I'm delighted to be able to offer you a bite-size version of it!

It seems apt to be able to release this at this time of year as the Nightingale is back at Knepp in brilliant numbers and is singing away in the scrubland. 

Many thanks indeed go to Rob Burns for distilling the magical essence of the Nightingale in to a short podcast. Enjoy!

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It’s episode 23 and we are taking a blustery walk with some fascinating researchers from Oxford Archaeology and Historic England… we are stepping back in time! We discuss an innovative and collaborative research project called ‘Rewilding Later Prehistory’ exploring Bronze Age and Iron Age ecology from around 4,500yrs ago to 2,000yrs ago. 

Where the focus of this period is usually based around human progress, this project aims to discover more about the wildlife that would have been found in our landscape around this time. From this research the hope is that we can use archaeology to link in with current nature recovery practices – thinking about restoring landscapes and bringing back lost species.

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It’s a wet and wild episode 22! We’re joined by national beaver specialist, Mark Elliott, down in the Knepp beaver pen after a night of heavy rain. We marvel at the amazing work of the beavers - how they’re creating the most wonderful wetland area that’s holding on to water during winter floods and providing an oasis for life during droughts. 

We tap into Mark’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the natural history of beavers in Britain: why they became extinct, how they’re making an incredible come-back and the amazing benefits they bring to wildlife and us humans too. 

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Episode 21 finds us at an uplifting event surrounded by a hundred young people: a youth rewilding summit held at Knepp in September in collaboration with Heal Rewilding and Young Wilders. 

The event was created by young people to connect and inspire other young people with a passion for rewilding, and to give the next generation of rewilders a platform and an opportunity to drive change. Join us to hear more about the day from the brilliant people who organised it, and some of the enthusiastic bunch who came along for the day.

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Episode 20 takes us on an early morning mission to catch a Cuckoo or two with the brilliant Lee Barber, from the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO). With a special net configuration and lure set up to entice the birds in, we waited like coiled springs to jump in to action if we saw one come into the nets. 

Tune in to hear if we were successful (we may have struck lucky otherwise this would have been a very short podcast!) and to learn more about this African migrant’s story, and why satellite tagging contributes to integral research to learn more about why these long-distance migrants are facing difficulty on their journeys.

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Episode 19 finds us in a newly rewilded location at Knepp – the garden! 

Charlie Harpur, Suzi Turner and Moy Fierheller are our keystone species, or garden team, in the 1.3-acre Victorian walled garden and have kick-started natural processes to make the garden more sustainable and buzz with biodiversity. We talk about how this horticultural experiment is challenging traditional gardening and how we can all do something to rewild our gardens and window boxes too.

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It’s episode 18 so it’s about time we go underground, delving well below the surface to unearth the life cycle of a rather brilliant ecosystem engineer: the earthworm. We join a survey session at Knepp with four brilliant scientists: Emma Sherlock from the Natural History Museum, Inez Januszczak and Chris Fletcher from the Darwin Tree of Life Project, and Keiron Brown from the Field Studies Council. They teach us about the different groups, or eco-types, of worms; how they recover in rewilded landscapes; and how they are quite picky when on the look-out for a mate. 

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Episode 17 takes me and my brilliant team-mate, Ivan de Klee, outside of the Knepp Estate boundaries. Ivan is our rainbow chaser and helps us imagine what a wilder landscape might look like as we explore the idea of the Weald to Waves corridor. We talk about how such collaborative landscape scale projects, and new rewilding projects, could be funded by new agri-environment schemes, biodiversity net gain and carbon sequestration – and how these markets might work. Ivan explains what natural capital is and how rewarding landowners for ecosystem services, such a biodiversity and soil restoration, could pave the future for nature conservation in the UK. 

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Isabella Tree is joint owner of Knepp, and author of the best-seller Wilding book, and has been a long-awaited guest on the podcast. In episode 16 Issy and I go for a lovely wintery walk and chinwag in the scrubland, where we talk about the importance of scrub for wildlife. We explore many facets of the scrub, including the influence of the large herbivores, ‘Vera’ oak saplings, the role of the Jay and what the Knepp landscape might look like in the future. The hot topic of tree-planting comes up, as does the local development that’s been proposed on Knepp’s neighbouring land.

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It’s episode 15 and we’re exploring a different part of the Knepp Estate! Join me as I find out more about our new regenerative farm from farm manager Russ Carrington. We visit the grazing herd of Sussex cattle, learn about mob-grazing and NoFence collars, and talk about the plans for this exciting new venture, sitting alongside the Knepp Rewilding Project. 

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