Storks, beavers and beetles: all natural life is flourishing on the Knepp estate. Bruce Millar finds rewilding at its beguiling best...
Picture the scene: a big, open sky and a large, bare tree with the unmistakable silhouettes of four or five tall, dagger-beaked birds outlined against the setting sun. Where are we? The Serengeti National Park in East Africa? Further south perhaps, in South Africa’s Kruger?
Actually, we are in West Sussex, a few miles south of Horsham, surveying the territory of the first breeding colony of white storks in England since the species was hunted to extinction here more than 600 years ago. These stately birds are the pride of Knepp and a symbol of its pioneering rewilding project.
Charlie Burrell
Neighbouring farmers thought Charlie Burrell and his wife, the writer Isabella Tree, had lost their senses when they decided to abandon the struggle to turn a profit from farming their 3,500-acre ancestral Sussex estate and return it instead to nature.
The land – set around the ruins of ancient Knepp Castle in the Adur Valley – was beautiful but unproductive, its heavy Wealden clay turning to undrainable bog for six months every winter, then setting like concrete in the summer. Conventional farming, backed up by decades of national food policy, government subsidy and modern agricultural machinery, had reached its limits.
A quarter of a century on, the rewilding ‘experiment’ has proved a huge success, however you measure it.
In animal terms, beavers have joined storks as keystone reintroduced species, while Old English Longhorn cattle and Tamworth pigs roam freely, increasingly ‘de-domesticated’ on the estate.
Neil Hulme
Biodiversity has far outrun the Burrells’ most optimistic projections, with a 916% increase in breeding birds since 2005, including a quarter of all the turtle doves in Sussex.
Last year, 62 male nightingales were recorded, each with his own unique song. Insects thrive too, with rarities such as the red and black tortoise beetle, which looks like a ladybird redesigned by Salvador Dali.
In scientific terms, the latest figures show the rewilded landscape removing carbon from the atmosphere at four times the rate predicted. The least productive 20% of British agricultural land – which includes Knepp – contributes only 3% of its produce; if all of it were rewilded, it would absorb the entire CO2 emissions of the agricultural industry.
In human terms, the estate now employs four times as many people as it did as a farm, and in a wider range of high-quality jobs: scientists, ecologists, builders, chefs and more. The scientists work with visiting research teams on a dozen different projects at any one time; one study this year is exploring antimicrobial resistance in the push to develop a new generation of pharmaceuticals.
Lia Brazier
Knepp also brings sheer joy to tens of thousands of visitors each year, who flock to its guided safaris or tramp its 16 miles of public footpaths for views of the wildlife of southern England as it was in the dim and distant past.
A key driver of visitor numbers is the Wilding Kitchen run by chef Ned Burrell, Charlie and Isabella’s son. Starting out as a simple coffee wagon during the pandemic, it has developed into a serious restaurant serving Knepp’s own beef, pork and venison with vegetables, fruit and micro herbs grown on the estate’s kitchen garden, supplemented by produce from local fishermen and farmers.
Earlier this year it was awarded a Michelin green star in recognition of its eco credentials, although Michelin controversially scrapped the Green Star accolade altogether three months later. Nevertheless, Wilding Kitchen has established itself as one of the best restaurants in the area, its 200-seat capacity fully booked for lunch every weekend of the year and often midweek too.
Knepp Wilding
“With these numbers we have to keep the cooking simple,” says Ned. “You won’t find tweezers in the kitchen – we rely completely on the high quality of the ingredients.”
Wilding Kitchen and Shop now attracts 140,000 visitors a year – up from 9,000 ten years ago when it was just a modest shop – all of whom leave with increased awareness of Knepp’s importance.
“We often serve guests who live nearby and say they had no idea about the rewilding project before they came,” adds Ned.
As the number of employees indicates, rewilding does not mean simply leaving nature to its own devices. Just as humans domesticated the land and its flora and fauna in the first place, so human intervention is required to manage the process of revival.
Charlie Burrell Knepp
White storks are the prime example. There is evidence to suggest that they were once in Sussex – Storrington,
10 miles south of Knepp, was originally called Estorchestone, meaning ‘village of the storks’ – but the last recorded nest in Britain was on St Giles’s Cathedral in Edinburgh more than 600 years ago.
In 2016, however, the White Stork Project established a starter colony at Knepp of storks that had been rescued from the wild in Poland and were unable to fly because of injuries, using them to attract storks from across the Channel scouting for summer nesting grounds.
The lure worked. In 2020, the first wild stork chicks hatched, and the colony produced a record 53 fledglings two years ago. Laura Vaughan-Hirsch, who manages the project, explains that adult storks never venture far from their young, which makes the large birds easily visible for visitors with no ornithological experience.
Knepp Wilding
“You don’t need binoculars,” she says. “You can see them all day in the fields, feeding on anything they find. They’re opportunistic carnivores, eating small mammals and kills from birds of prey, but also worms, beetles, ants, caterpillars, crickets and even spiders.”
Their nests, too, are a spectacular sight. Huge, scruffy platforms, often in a large oak tree, they are reused each year and constantly repaired and extended. In older colonies they can weigh over a ton, and at Knepp they are already large enough for smaller bird species to build their own nests in the underpinnings.
If you do have binoculars, you can read the rings on the stork’s legs and identify it individually – Vaughan-Hirsch knows the regulars by name.
Each one is ringed under licence from the British Trust for Ornithology at about 50 days and some have satellite trackers attached, so she can trace their migratory routes using data collected by colleagues in France, Spain and North Africa. They fly as high as 5,000 metres, where their two-metre wingspan enables them to glide using high-altitude thermals, saving energy on their long aerial voyages.
Lia Brazier
“One hatched here in 2021, was recorded in Spain in 2022 and Morocco in ’23, came back in ’24, built a nest with his partner and had three chicks. It was wonderful to trace the whole life cycle.”
Knepp’s beavers are a more recent revival, now in their fourth breeding season on a restricted site. This year, the estate opened talks with Nature England and local landowners, hoping to obtain a licence to release them into the wild.
And the beavers have already been busy.
“They’re amazing engineers, creating wetlands out of very little,” explains Matt Phelps, Knepp’s lead ecologist.
Charlie Burrell
The proof came during the heatwave in May: the area ‘managed’ by the beavers retained its water while everywhere else dried up. Better still, Knepp’s de-domesticated cattle and deer were seen wallowing belly-deep in the beavers’ newly created wetland – a brilliant example of symbiosis taking place before our eyes.
There is a strange magic about Knepp, as if the animals somehow know they are in their own element here. As I chat with Phelps and Vaughan-Hirsch in one of the estate’s old timber outbuildings, a young rabbit contentedly munches grass outside the window – a scene straight from Beatrix Potter. A
pair of his older relatives race around the field next door. None of them run away when we step outside, and a pair of blackbirds scrapping furiously over territory also ignore us.
How wonderful it is to be so invisible.
For information about visiting Knepp: knepp.co.uk
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Comment FeedExcellent story
Jan Stannard 12 days ago