Donovan Wright is the UK’s first wild bison ranger. At present, he is all job title and no wild bison. He hopes that will change early next month. Four of the animals are due to arrive by truck. Wright and colleagues at Kent Wildlife Trust and Wildwood Trust, two charities, will prepare to release them into West Blean and Thornden Woods, five miles from Canterbury in Kent.
This would be a big step forward for advocates of rewilding — restoring parts of the countryside to closer to their original state. “This is a unique keystone species,” Wright said when I visited him. “Bison open up the canopy, letting light through to the woodland floor.” The animals thin out tree cover by ring barking, rubbing off the bark near the base of trees. Wright added: “They make trails and dust baths, creating a richer mosaic of habitats.”
Critics of rewilding may be less enthusiastic about the Kent bison project, which has £1.125mn in funding from the People’s Postcode Lottery. The rewilding movement alarms landscape conservatives. Some farmers are irked by the challenge to food production as a land use. Some anglers resent beaver dams. And a fellow FT columnist fears wolves may eat his family pet.
Bison are Europe’s largest land mammal and are classified as dangerous animals under UK law. Bulls can weigh more than 1,000kg and stand almost 2 metres tall at the shoulder. They resemble American bison, but without the 1970s-style disco wigs. Prehistoric cave paintings from the Ardèche and Cantabria better capture their primal power than photographs.
No matter how bison are represented, they are magnificent. That description certainly applies to Orsk, a European bison resident at Wildwood, an animal park run by the charity of the same name. Orsk was in his stable when Wright took me to see him. He was ruminating — in both senses of the word, I imagined.
Bison spend a lot of time chewing the cud. Orsk meanwhile had a look in his eye which seemed to say: “Why have I bothered coming to a party that no one’s invited any girls to?”
Wright explained that Orsk would not be joining the new herd in West Blean Woods because he was raised in captivity. The bull and three females constituting the nucleus of a breeding group will have grown up in conditions closer to the wild. Orsk stood up at this point and took a gargantuan, disdainful dump.
Wright is Kent’s antithesis to notorious US animal park huckster Joe Exotic. A quietly spoken man, who was formerly a wildlife ranger in Africa, he does not want anyone to get too close to the animals. The public will have the chance to see the bison from platforms and trails, keeping 50 metres away at all times. Dogs, which bison correctly and aggressively identify as varieties of wolf, will be excluded. Similar approaches have worked safely at one Dutch rewilding project.
The next problem is stopping the bison from escaping. To this end, their 200-hectare woodland is surrounded by three layers of fencing. I drove down a long stretch of this. It resembled the perimeter of Jurassic Park. Admittedly, that comparison may alarm some locals. In the movies, the dinosaurs escaped as easily as the real-life wild boar whose descendants now roam the Forest of Dean. Canterbury residents may wonder how long can it be before bison bulls are stampeding through the chinaware department of Fenwick.
The bison should also give conservationists plenty to chew on. The question is whether this would really be a reintroduction. Steppe bison probably roamed England 6,000 years or more ago. A few things have changed since. A land bridge to the continent has disappeared, the human population has exploded and steppe bison have become extinct. The West Blean herd would be European wood bison, a similar species.
Natural England sounds lukewarm about the bison. In an email, Mark Usher, strategy boss at the government body, said its main focus was on recovering resident species in decline. Reintroductions needed careful scrutiny, he said. West Blean and Thornden Woods has special status as a Site of Special Scientific Interest and more information was needed on changes to the site, he added.
Usher was channelling the fence-sitting spirit of officialdom down the ages. But — tragically, for an opinion writer — I am up there with him, perched atop the formidable steel barrier that surrounds West Blean.
I believe wholeheartedly in rewilding. It is the only way to reverse nature’s dispiriting decline in these islands. Knepp Estate in West Sussex, the UK’s flagship project, has been a storming success. But big herbivores are represented there by cattle and deer, animals everyone is used to.
Bison are cool. I cannot wait to see them roaming through Kent woodland. But I am not sure they are really a British animal now, any more than the rhinos and hyenas that once lived here.
That argument is too subjective for anyone to conclusively win. It will not matter to Wright if he and his bison can prove two other propositions. The first is that these huge, powerful animals are safe around people. The second is that they can create a biodiversity hotspot in a county where nature has been pushed to the margins.
Jonathan Guthrie is head of Lex
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