The wise old oak and its feathered friend

I am still making my way through Wilding, a book which seems particularly relevant to read in current times as we see nature recover in interesting ways. It is packed of examples where leaving this piece of land known as Knepp return to a wild state, or ‘creating a mess’ as perceived by their neighbours, resulted in turtle doves returning, becoming a breeding ground for purple emperor butterflies and nightingales, once synonymous with the british countryside sounds and documented for centuries in English literature but declined by 90% in recent decades.

The book is all about taking a non human intervention approach to returning land to a wilded landscape. It talks about shifting baselines which is particularly relevant in my work as we have become more complacent about dwindling numbers of endangered species and pockets of habitats. And covid has been interesting as an almost a global wilding shift watching nature reclaim itself without human interference to levels we could have sometimes only have dreamed of with human interventions.

Relevant to the oak though is the role of Jays in acorn dispersal. ‘A single jay can plant over 7500 acorns in 4 weeks’. The way in which it selects the acorns and buries them at the base of hawthorns only returning to eat parts of the saplings which still allows for growth in oak trees is fascinating! Now, every time I come across a young oak on my walk I wonder whether a jay indeed planted it.