Rebirding: Winner of the Wainwright Prize for Writing on Global Conservation: Restoring Britain's Wildlife

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Seeing them spread along the south coast, where they have only vanished due to centuries of persecution, will feel like the robbery of previous centuries is finally being reversed.

British birds have evolved over millennia, part of the ecosystem which developed as the glaciers retreated, then as humans settled and farmed. As nature takes centre stage at Cop15, so too will market-based solutions to the ecological collapse of life on Earth. In Dumfries and Galloway, a group of friends are attempting to recreate the ancient Scottish wildwood across 1,600 acres. The alternative, that the screaming skies fall silent each summer, is, as the Prince of Wales says, simply too much to bear.Praised as ‘visionary’ by conservationists and landowners alike, Rebirding sets out a compelling manifesto for restoring Britain’s wildlife, rewilding its species and restoring rural jobs – to the benefit of all. Nonetheless, his plan to turn his vision into reality could amount to a significant step-change in how conservationists approach rewilding in the UK. So stirrings, but these very quickly need to turn into a hurricane to really get this issue into the public sphere. Macdonald is not a professional conservationist; rather, he is a lifelong birder who specialises in making nature documentaries.

They were peacocks and small tortoiseshells, after raising them from caterpillars found in clumps of nettles.Species that in my childhood were famous and abundant – wood warblers and pied flycatchers – are now virtually gone. For example, if a large grouse moor owner wants to turn this land back to a more wooded state with golden eagles, he is uniquely free to do so in a way that you or I are obviously not, and our NGOs are not,” he says. Quite rightly, Benedict Macdonald acknowledges that we face a double whammy of biodiversity loss and the climate crisis, which threatens not just Britain’s birds but also our own existence on this planet. After baby is floating and has settled, you bring the top of baby’s head against your abdomen and place your free hand on their forehead.

There has to be a much better effort in linking personal behaviour to protecting the natural world – we’ve gone backward with that, it seems that asking politicians to declare a climate emergency is about the extent of our responsibility these days. This arresting image opens David Quammen’s The Song of the Dodo, a prescient, global tour of extinction published just over 25 years ago. There is a sense here that the polarised fight which we see in action in the English uplands could, in Ben’s eyes, be solved more subtly by championing European-style hunting. For example, in the second half of the book there’s a whole chapter dedicated to grouse moors, with the author not holding back with his analysis of the current management of these areas (which cover some 8 per cent of Britain). Rebirding maps out how we might finally turn things around: rewilding our national parks, restoring natural ecosystems and allowing our wildlife a far richer future.I was all too willing to believe that most of the decline in the bird population was down to things beyond my control and to not even consider post-fledgling starvation and how that might effect migration. The author presents compelling evidence that ecotourism could rejuvenate failing rural economies, and that in fact the status quo is actively strangling the economic possibilities of our land. The picture is far worse than most people think, and shifting baseline syndrome makes us blind to the richness that has already been lost. Other RSPB wetland sites include Ham Wall and Otmoor as well as St Aidans and a host of others, many of them wetlands, but there is Abernethy too! Conservation also seems to suffer from a ‘one road to God’ syndrome – if one idea is right others must be wrong.