Does Britain need bison?

The Blean is just north of Canterbury. It’s ancient woodland – mentioned by a couple of Chaucer’s pilgrims – now managed by a conglomerate of well-meaning wildlife trusts and charities. Drive through a small industrial estate and past a garage and you’ll reach the visitors’ centre. Beyond that is bison country. Four wild European bison now roam the 50 hectares of woodland and scrub, merrily smashing through young birch trees and tearing up the earth. They have been introduced as part of a rewilding project. The latest, the first male of the herd, was brought over from Germany two days before Christmas.

Rewilding is controversial and easily mocked. After all, bison went extinct in Britain just after the Ice Age, about 10,000 years ago, around the time that Doggerland was consumed by the North Sea. What possible need could there be for them now? Paul Whitfield, the tweed-wearing, ponytailed director of the Wildwood Trust, makes a good case. ‘Traditional conservation hasn’t been working,’ he says. And given how barren and depleted the countryside is, we can’t simply conserve, we need to recreate. ‘We are trying to protect something that is already massively damaged.’

Paul Hadaway, director of conservation at the Kent Wildlife Trust, agrees: ‘In traditional conservation, we would have gone out and coppiced an area of woodland and burned all the brush and stacked all the logs neatly and not left any dead trees because of that almost Victorian obsession with tidiness.’ Hadaway changed his mind about conservation after visiting the Knepp Estate. Half an hour’s drive from Gatwick, it pioneered rewilding in the UK. ‘I was standing there in a field and thinking, “Well that’s in the wrong place, that shouldn’t be there”. But when I heard turtle doves and nightingales and saw peregrines nesting in a tree and there were yellowhammers, I thought, “Hang on a minute, this is all the stuff we’re micromanaging to try to preserve.