Thread by @IrelandsFarmers

Good morning all.

Today is my (@IrishRainforest) last day curating this account, and I'm going to use it to talk about the other essential side of the coin in turning around the ongoing death spiral of Irish nature (along with High Nature Value farming):

Rewilding.

You've probably already heard various things about rewilding, some of them true, some less so.

But I want to say straight off that rewilding is NOT anti-people, anti-farmer, anti-rural communities, or any other rubbish of that sort.

Quite the opposite. Let's look deeper...

What is rewilding?

Since the concept was borne in the 1990s, there's been a lot of debate about what it means exactly.

A welcome advance in this respect was the 2021 publication by the @IUCN of @LandEthics et al.'s 'Guiding Principles of Rewilding'
iucn.org/commissions/co…

For me, an important aspect of what defines rewilding is an absence of any human extractive activities, such as farming.

Only in that way can *natural*, rather than human-imposed, processes have the upper hand, another key element of rewilding.

To give this some context, let's start by looking at the part of my farm where I'm putting what I consider rewilding into effect: the 21.5 acres of mostly temperate rainforest.

The other day I described the terrible ecological state the place was in when we arrived, grazed bare by goats and sika, and being taken over by a host of invasive plant species incl. rhododendron.

And how I resolved those threats by fencing the place and removing the rhodo etc.

The problems that were afflicting the forest were all *man-made*.

Our ancestors introduced goats, sika deer, rhodo and many other invasive species into the Irish landscape.

They also killed off many of the wild native species that would have naturally kept them in check.

And we now have landscapes that have been totally and utterly transformed, largely into monocultures of one form or other: whether perennial rye grass, sitka, molinia, rhodo...

Landscapes that leave little or no space for nature.

In that context, artificial solutions like fencing are often required, to get natural processes flowing again.

Excluding the goats and sika released the most amazing explosion of life in the woods, as self-seeded wild trees and oceans of wildflowers began popping up everywhere.

Fencing is far from ideal though, as it replaces one artificial situation - overly high densities of herbivores - with another: no grazing/browsing at all.

Here though, the fence is nearing the end of its life, with many rotten stakes; soon deer will start getting back in.

Luckily however, the goats are now gone from the area, probably due to culling, and local hunters also seem to be keeping sika deer numbers reasonably low.

So as the deer fence falls apart, I'm hoping there won't be a return to the devastation I found on my arrival in 2009.

The fact that I'm both farming Dexter cattle (only bringing them in off the commonage in the winter) and, separately, rewilding, will allow some interesting comparison in the results as time goes on.

For now, it seems there are benefits to both.

The cattle disturb the ground, helping the seeds of trees and other flora germinate. They also help keep the briars and bracken from dominating, and their organic dung is great for invertebrates.

Large fauna are an important part of ecosystems, and their absence leaves big gaps.

But I've also noticed that the Dexters eat out certain flora like woodrush and many of the ferns, such as scaly male fern.

It's an ongoing experiment, and I regularly tweak what I'm doing based on my observations.

And it's all very small-scale of course, limited to one farm.

To come back to rewilding, it's most often associated with the release of species that were made extinct in the past by people, and that's certainly a part of it.

And while that's often unnecessarily sensationalised by the media, the reality can be very different. For example...

The white-tailed eagle, one of Europe's largest birds of prey (the wingspan of females can be close to 2.5m), disappeared from Beara in 1894, and became extinct as a breeding species across Ireland in 1909.

For almost a century, they were absent from our land- and seascapes.

Then in 2007-11, 100 chicks were brought from Norway in a joint reintro project organised by the @npwsBioData / @eagle_trust, and overseen by @KerryeagleMee.

Initially there was much opposition to the project from farmers, who feared losing lambs, for eg.
irishtimes.com/news/ifa-oppos…

A bit more than a decade later (not without its ups and downs), and the situation has shifted totally.

The birds have given a great tourism boost to places like Beara, exactly as happened in Mull, Scotland, where WT eagles bring in £5 million/year.
walkhighlands.co.uk/news/5m-sea-ea….

Rather than being seen as an unwanted imposition thrust upon them by outsiders, here in Beara the eagles are now well accepted, and generally viewed as an asset to the local economy and a source of pride.

(In so far as people think about them at all.)
m.independent.ie/business/farmi…

In fact, NPWS Ranger for Beara, Clare Heardman @GlengarriffWood, told me that some local sheep farmers now watch over the eagles protectively, and, in one case, left out dead lambs for them when a female eagle died, leaving the male to raise a chick alone.

https://twitter.com/GlengarriffWood/status/1273924888714194944?t=yOqCp_x-ct86gIiJEiXiGw&s=19

I may be painting a slightly over-rosy picture here, but people's lives haven't changed in any negative way since the eagles arrived.

As Clare says, most of the time you'd never even know you had these immense birds in your midst, and many local people have still never seen one.

Is boosting remote rural economies the only reason to bring back missing native species? No, it's not even the main one.

Ecosystems can't operate properly with essential elements gone, and Ireland is one of the most ecologically dysfunctional parts of Europe. That *must* change.

To finish, rewilding is *not* a threat to farmers or rural communities, totally the opposite.

To make it happen on a bigger scale, we need to give farmers the option of continuing to receive farm payments for 'growing' wild natural habitat instead of farming, if they so choose.

So that's my week up on this account, I hope you enjoyed it.

I know many will disagree with some of my views, but as I said at the outset, like most of you I genuinely want what's best for nature *and* rural communities.

You can continue to see what I'm at on @IrishRainforest.

From tomorrow William Chestnutt @Chestnuttsfarm will be taking over.

He's based up in Portrush, Co. Antrim, about as far away from Beara as you can get on this island of ours, and it should be very interesting to see what he's doing in his place.

Good luck, and all the best!