REWILDING is quite a buzz word these days, but what does it actually mean? And did you know there is a thriving rewinding project in Dorset? Learn more about it at a Gillingham Action for Nature meeting, on Thursday 1st May, at 7pm at Gillingham Vicarage schoolrooms.

Many people will have heard of, or even visited, Knepp in Sussex, where Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell have converted a conventional (and failing) farm into a thriving wildlife conservation and regeneration project. Alongside long horn cattle, Exmoor ponies, Tamworth pigs and fallow deer, the 3,500-acre Knepp estate is now home to nesting storks, a thriving and growing chorus of nightingales, beavers and one of the UK’s most important populations of purple emperor butterflies.

Nearer to our region, just 25 miles from Gillingham, at Woodbury near Bere Regis, Dorset Wildlife Trust is rewilding 150 acres, returning it to nature.

ON 1st May, Daisy Meadowcroft from DWT will give an illustrated talk showing how this project is developing. It is free and there will be refreshments. (GANG will be making a trip to Woodbury later in the year.)

White Storks at Knepp

For those interested in the connection between landscape and culture, in which rewinding is a significant factor, Frome composer has a work inspired by Knepp’s white storks at the White Stork and Nature Revival Festival and Concert on 5th May at 6.30pm in the parish church of the nearby village of Storrington.

The festival will feature Helen Ottaway’s White Storks string octet, which was commissioned in 2020 by the Bernardi Music Group and Shipley Festival to celebrate the return of breeding white storks to the Knepp Estate in Sussex after an absence from the UK of 600 years.

The growth of the stork population at Knepp in Sussex is remarkable. Over the last five years numbers of new chicks fledged have increased from four in 2020 to more than 50 last year. This success has been rewarded with the announcement that Knepp and the village of Storrington are to be named the UK’s first European Stork Village.

The programme for the concert is full of bird related music including Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, Handel’s Organ Concerto in F major,“The Cuckoo and the Nightingale”, selection from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Summer, including The Goldfinch and Il cucù (The Cuckoo).