Bison Transformed This UK Forest. Here 's How.

Four years ago a small herd returned to UK soil after a 6,000 year absence and that's following an incredible breeding program over the past century which quite literally saved this species from the brink of extinction. Their impact here has already been immense for nature within this forest but also for people too because you see the bison are in a forest directly next to the Wildwood Trust, a charity which is dedicated to restoring Britain's native wildlife. They breed, release and care for animals all within a Wildwood setting and everyone's welcome to come and visit. I got a tour from the Trust's director Paul. Upon my arrival Paul checked the GPS and we could see that the herd was close so we headed in to the edge of the enclosure to see if we could catch a glimpse. They're there they are literally in a clearing on the other side of these sorry these beech trees. I can see an ear twitching. Oh you've got good eyes you've got oh hold on oh it's lying down. Yeah okay so it's not far at all is it? No. So European bison they are a forest species right they are well I mean I guess they engineer these landscapes which are a bit more diverse than just yours. I mean I think that's that's really the key thing there's a myth that European bison live in the woods and American bison live on the prairies and actually neither of those is completely true. European bison's ideal habitat is a mosaic a mosaic of open space a mosaic of woodland. I say that's what they prefer that's what they create that's exactly the complex mosaic habitat of sort of almost woodland pasture that large herbivores like bison will create and that's where they thrive and likewise the American bison if they have naturalistic herds and the opportunity they will also browse an awful lot and spend a lot of time in the woods. Don't you want to get some beavers and some and some elk in there as well? I would love to have beavers in here but there's no streams or rivers at all. No they need yeah. And the elk would need a bigger fence than the electric one to keep them in. Yes. And to that literally we've got our elk on the other side of that fence. Blimey yeah I can see it I mean they're taller than the bison. Much much taller yeah. So this is Jürgen he came from Lithuania and we brought him in about about two or three years ago and he is one of two male elks in the entire of the UK to the ones up in Scotland so we're actually looking to bring him a girlfriend in fairly soon and the idea that elk the breed here would be heading off to future rewilding projects. This time of year it's calm peaceful wonderful animal when his antlers are full and he's in the rut and he's dripping with testosterone and he's got a girlfriend. Don't want to go anywhere near him. So are there any other animals in with them? No the bison are just on their own. Yeah. And the plan and it's again in terms of linking up the bits of the area the long-term plan is that we'll have bison on that side of the fence and horses and cattle on this side. There's just horses the minute there were cattle before but it's moving around and so we can look at what impact bison have that cattle don't because a lot of people have said why bother with bison it's complicated it's expensive you should just use a you know a rare breed British cattle species and actually what we can see here is the bison have a huge impact on the woods that the cattle don't. I mean cattle have their place and they do a fantastic job but they will not smash through this thick regrowth in the same way that the bison do they'll nibble around the edges if there's a path they'll use the path and widen it out but the bison will literally just smash through it. There's various willow species in here goat willow is one of their favorites they will find it in the middle of the woods strip all the bark off it and sort of smash a path to it eat it and then break their way out again and again cattle just wouldn't do that. Obviously we hope that in the coming decades this is a species which can move off out into other parts of the UK and hopefully be wild semi-wild. Absolutely. So we already share the landscape with you know think of the New Forest where you've got ponies and cattle how different is a European bison to those creatures? I mean it's not it's like a very large cow they're not an aggressive species if you get between a mum and its calf you're in trouble but exactly the same as a cow if there's a bull and you go up to it and annoy it and try and take a selfie with it you are in trouble but exactly the same as a bull they're no more dangerous than a cow it's just they're legally they're defined as a dangerous wild animal and therefore you need a specific license to hold them but you know we're we're looking at potential projects in the future where there'd be public footpaths through where the bison would be and we need to try and get the government and councils who create those licenses to accept what they're what they're really like. I think beavers will always sit at the apex right of engineering yeah I mean they they end they physically engineer the landscape they they change they'll change a ditch into a really beautiful complex wetland it's always anything yeah like a beaver but in terms of sort of woodland and mosaic habitat creation I think anything does it like a bison you know I've said to people that you know bison are not the solution to the biodiversity crisis but I don't think we can solve it without them you know I'm a huge advocate for predator reintroductions I really am but I think large herbivore reintroductions are more important particularly now. What I want to know is why aren't we seeing more bison in more places around the UK? Because it's expensive and complicated legally with the licensing it's really complex you need it's not just a dangerous wild animals license you need because they are effectively dangerous animals legally that have been kept and looked after you also need a reintroduction into the wild license from Natural England and then they need to deal with APHA and the cattle movement guys because they are effectively recognized as cattle and so they have to be TB checked and all that sort of stuff and so you have layers of overlapping legislation with different agencies who don't talk to each other and so it just makes it really difficult really complicated and expensive. Sounds like a common story for any large animal coming back are farmers interested in having these these these creatures like conservation? They are yeah so the second project in Cumbria's its official launch is on the 4th of June yes and they're a farm yeah they're an estate up in Cumbria and they want to talk about bison as being part of regenerative farming they've also got beavers they've got wetlands it's a fascinating site but they will still be farming and they want to have that conversation with other farmers as to how you can have areas of your land that are rewilded that have these large herbivores back but you're still operating a farm. Absolutely that's what we need isn't it we need you can't have one without the other that's it's never a debate in my mind you know it's not there is a through in the media there's a huge public argument between farmers and nature and farmers and rewilding and actually it's a real distortion of the fact there are a few rewilders who don't like farmers there are a few farmers that really hate rewilders the vast majority of people want to work together and the vast majority of these projects work because people do work together yeah exactly it's it's been a hugely positive story yeah it's got a huge amount of media attention every time we do anything around the bison it gets a lot of press which is fantastic yeah and i think it does because it's it's a really good new story it's a story of hope you know here are these handsome beautiful creatures making the world a better place here at leave curious i'm trying to share more hopeful stories about the recovery of nature across the world there are incredible people restoring landscapes bringing species back and repairing damaged ecosystems but most of these stories barely get seen so the aim of this channel is pretty simple to visit as many of these places as possible and document what's happening and the people who make that possible are the members by joining you're not only helping support the channel you'll also get exclusive updates from restoration projects and wild places around the world right now leave curious is growing quickly and i'm working on building something that can shine a bigger spotlight on projects like this one here at wild oblien the more support the channel gets the more stories that we can tell so if you'd like to be part of that i'd love to see you over there so just heading into the do you call it a zoo what you call this bit we we don't use the word zoo no i wouldn't it's our animal park animal park i like that you know and yeah this is our sort of yeah this is where we tell the story of british wildlife really yeah so it's european otter enclosure okay uh when he's out he's amazing he's a real ambassador for the otters um but because he's an officer most of the time he's asleep fair enough i would be if i could be and all the animals here have got enough space to be able to disappear off public show if they want to yeah that's important yeah most of our members really understand that and appreciate it the fact that the animals have all their own space yeah i mean it's nice that you're this doesn't feel like a zoo like you say it is an animal park of british animals yeah gone and coming back and absolutely you know ones which we still have we've got a pair of black storks there you go making his nest at the minute literally on top of the shed here oh yeah it's just building the nest they've bred the past two years linked by the tunnels of love so they can bond and be in each other's territory without being able to fight and then when it's a breeding season you open up the slides and let them breed see the tunnels of love up here that there are tunnels to allow the pine martins to pass through when they are in the mood so this is haze and fury never never let animal keepers name their animals um and there he is munching away on a bit of browse and you can see that really thick winter coat just starting to molt to molt off and to get that off is when they're really really rub against trees in terms of the recovery of bison from from europe how close were we to losing the species oh we came literally that that close to losing them completely extinct as a species you know we came down to them being extinct in the wild i think it was 56 in captivity at the end and then through captive breeding 12 of those animals have produced the entire world population of european bison now and we're at over 6 000 of them bocce our young bear climbs trees and so that one's a bit close to the perimeter so yeah i can see that one a lot yeah so they put some aluminium tin yeah just in to stop the bears climbing yeah quite quite hard to grip on that i can imagine so we've got three bears in here so fluff and scruff who've been here 10 years yeah came from a bulgarian canned hunting center it's horrible they had 10 years of living in solitary confinement in concrete pits jesus sorry why were they in there what's the purpose of that uh it was it was basically a paid-for hunting center where people would turn up to hunt a bear they bred bears in this facility and chuck a bear out in the woods you go shoot it it's awful i mean there's you know there's some pictures of where they were but it was dreadful yeah but they came in really traumatized stressed bears yeah they had like sores on their paws from just rubbing on concrete they just paced the size of their concrete enclosures i mean there's you can still see cut into the ground in there they got an acre and a half here the size of their old enclosure because when we first put them in that's all they did was paint still paste the size of it but we've worked with them now for 10 years totally transformed them they are fat happy healthy bears that just spend their life doing bear stuff in this woodland we created so a species which we've covered a lot on the channel recently is the eurasian lynx and you have what how many do you have here just one no two we've these are brother and sister but she's on a contraceptive implant so they don't breed right we've just designed this it's literally just been finished talking to the missing lynx project and guys in europe so this is designed that if we ever do a reintroduction in the uk we can breed lynx here for it yeah that's it yeah no i mean it's great you've got such a hustle and bustle here i mean that's the school coming in you said 12 12 000 12 000 school it's our best year so far yeah but no we regularly have over 10 000 school kids awesome this is one of our red squirrel breeding enclosures oh yeah we've got three babies in here at the minute how do they breed are they quite easy to breed or uh no oh actually there you go they're up at the top so three baby squirrels they'll be heading off for release in wales so we've i don't know how many we've we've been breeding red squirrels now for over 20 years here must have bred a couple hundred of them be released into the wild wonder why they have the ear tufts i mean i often wonder that with the lynx as well i've no idea whole suite of invertebrate projects we're going to be launching if we can get the funds yeah so mole crickets oh yeah glow worms glow worms my brain's gone blank um tadpole shrimp uh we're looking at some pot beetles um some really cool little tiny things yeah um you know and swallowtails is also one of those so to actually do a proper reintroduction project of swallowtails you know poly tunnels full of swallowtails releasing thousands of caterpillars out into the landscape i mean it would be transformational very exciting very cool absolutely need the funds to make it happen yes yeah yeah well if people want to support you you've got your membership here you take donations yeah absolutely so you know if you're a if you're a member of wildwood it's it's not even very expensive for an individual it's it's four or five pounds a month yeah and it supports everything we do yeah 80 of our income comes from our visitors and our members yes you know that funds most of our conservation work we do get some grants which is amazing yeah but yeah we're fundamentally a sort of grassroots self-funded organization that's brilliant uh but again this is a rescue rehabilitation facility for beavers um the last pair we had were orphans from scotland their parents had been shot and so they came here when they were little we bred sort of looked after them till they were fully grown and strong and healthy yeah yeah and they both gone off for reintroduction amazing most of them come from scotland would you say or maybe other place uh we've got a wild population of beavers in kent oh really on the stour so it's probably the someone said to me when are you going to go and see the the first true wild beavers yeah kent kent there's been beavers in kent for 25 years so why am i under the impression it was always in devon and scotland because the kent beavers were always not talked about well we're gonna have to change that we're gonna have to change that i mean they are now i mean people do talk about the kent beavers and oh wow this is nice this is all new so generally we'll have like little nest boxes in there the beavers quite often be snoozing in there and people could see them this is a dormouse bridge by the way nice does it get used yeah we've got wild dormice in the park we've got all our dormice breeding facilities over in the trees as well so we've got 37 dormouse bred here heading off release in june as well oh awesome yeah they're fantastic so the wildwood trust and the wild obline project has you know really reminded me again that you know nature is coming back here in britain and i know it can sometimes feel like things are moving slowly and it's doom and gloom but you know things are moving in the right direction and and here you've got an incredible creature which is the bison which is you know moving through a british woodland once again yes there's an enclosure but you know these are the first steps to having like properly wild wild animals back in this country i think we can do it if you've got this far in the video and you haven't yet subscribed to leave curious then please do in the description of this video will be links to everything which they're doing here on the screen here is the leave curious membership do go and check that out and here's a video for you to keep watching but in the meantime thank you so much for watching leave curious