Red deer could make a come-back in ‘rewilding’ project
Rhun ap Siôn explains how the Cambrian Wildwood project aims to rewild a corner of Wales - through crowdfunding
We have raised more than £2,000 towards a plan to ‘rewild’ part of Wales, replanting trees and bringing back animals that have been removed from the landscape through catastrophic loss of habitat, persecution and, in some cases, domestication.
The Cambrian Wildwood project was kick-started by the Wales Wild Land Foundation in 2013 through a crowdfunder.co.uk appeal. The appeal was launched to raise funds to help pay for assessing the value of an area of suitable land that we have identified in our home area of Ceredigion in Wales. The idea for the wildwood and re-wilding has been in the trustees’ minds for some time, and was the inspiration for the establishment of the WWLF back in 2007 by three inspired conservationists.
The board of trustees now includes eight people alongside George Monbiot as our patron and Sue Jones-Davies as our president, together with a growing band of supporters, all sharing the commitment to re-wild an area of over-grazed and ecologically impoverished hill-land in North Ceredigion. Our ambition is the wholesale ecological restoration of as big an area as possible, in order to return the still-extant habitats to their previous health and extent, to create new habitats, re-foresting a large area. By doing this we hope to eventually bring back the missing animals.
The animals we wish to return to the land include red squirrels, pine martens, mountain hares, wild cats, roe and red deer, and wild horses and cattle. Large herbivores are an essential part of the ecosystem as they provide micro-habitats and nutrient-cycling opportunities for many of our native plants and animals. Natural systems are incomplete without large predators, however the debate regarding their re-introduction is an on-going and sensitive issue to the public and many landowners, making it beyond the scope of our plans for the foreseeable future.
As I write, our crowdfunding appeal is fast nearing its £2,000 target [Update: since this post was submitted, the target has been met and exceeded.] and this bodes well for our campaign as we are hoping to launch our main fund-raising appeal around Easter of this year. Through this main appeal we will be inviting people to become ‘wildwood founders’.
We anticipate that the money needed to buy the core area for the Cambrian Wildwood will be in the region of a million pounds, which is a great deal of money by most people’s standards, especially in these straitened times; but we feel that it is a small price to pay for the possibility of seeing the wildwood come back to life in a small corner of our world.
It gives us hope for the future, not just for nature but for people too. We often forget while living our busy, technology-filled lives that we are also part of nature.
