Interview: Sally Smith of Kent Wildlife Trust on Bison in Britain
Sally Smith is a representative of the Kent Wildlife Trust, whose Wilder Blean project brought bison to Britain in 2022! The first wild bison in Britain in (at least) thousands of years, they were “wilded” by the Kent Wildlife Trust into the Blean woodlands. KWT currently continues ecosystem-level wilding work with the growing bison herd and other wildlife.
In the interview below, this writer’s questions and comments are in bold, Ms. Smith’s words are in regular text, and extra clarification added after the interview are in bold italics or footnotes.
All photos without links in their caption are courtesy of Wilder Blean.
From the start, what is the story of the Wilder Blean project and the Kent Wildlife Trust itself? How did you start? What is the origin story of how people started thinking about rewilding like this in Kent?
So the Blean itself, though it is an ancient woodland, it was commercially cropped for quite a few years before it came into our ownership. I believe it was actually owned by a bank who used it for the commercial production of timber. We got it 20-odd years ago, and we were looking at ways to manage that woodland for wildlife. It's very resource intensive, it's been coppiced and has a lot of volunteers in it and costs a lot of money to manage. We were looking at using more of a nature-based way to manage that woodland, to boost biodiversity and also make it less resource intensive.
Now the woodland backs onto the Wildwood Trust land, who are our project partners in the bison introduction, and my understanding is that their CEO was having a chat with our CEO, Evan Bowen-Jones, about what they could do to work together to make the Blean a more natural environment. And they kind of had a “Eureka!” moment about how bison might be a great solution to manage that woodland. From there they established some partnerships with some existing bison projects in the Netherlands, they ran a few fact-finding trips to go and see those projects and how they've been used for wilding out there. It was felt that the bison might be a perfect solution for managing the Blean complex.
I assume that it was not an easy thing to introduce bison into Britain. How many years did it take? How much work did it take? How many rounds of permitting or negotiation with the government did it take to get permission to import bison from Germany and release them into a Kentish woodland?
It was a complex situation and there were so many hurdles for the team to navigate. The legislation in the UK isn't fit for purpose when it comes to rewilding projects for using animals like European bison. They are considered a “dangerous wild animal” by law. And that law, that isn't the purpose. The DWA Act was brought in to try and clamp down on people that were getting tiger cubs and pythons as pets in the 70s. to try and discourage that and encourage responsible ownership of animals. I don't think it was ever intended to be used to stop rewilding, and it has become a barrier to rewilding projects and similar projects like ours moving forward.
So the dangerous wild animal thing was the first hoop that we had to navigate. And what it meant was the fencing that we need in place around the bison, they had to be double fenced. We not only have to have an electric fence, we also have to have what we call a “people fence.” So you've got an electric fence to keep the bison in and a six-foot steel fence to keep people out. That external fencing was one of the primary costs of the project, for which we were really fortunate to get over £1 million from the players of the People's Postcode Lottery Dream Fund. The vast majority of that funding was put towards fencing in the Blean. So obviously that's a huge barrier to other people. We were very fortunate to get that grant, but that will be a barrier moving forward for people to replicate the project. And it's something we have been advocating to the government to change moving forward so other people can run similar projects.
So tell me more about the facts on the ground there. You've essentially fenced in a pre-existing woodland ecosystem, which is why this isn't a zoo, right? This is a big chunk of forest that is already interacting with the landscape. And then you got the bison from Germany, I believe?
The bison actually came from three different locations. And what we were trying to do with that was to get the most genetically diverse herd that was possible. Bison, by their nature, are quite genetically fragile. After the First World War, their numbers were in steep decline and they're on the verge of extinction. All the bison that you see today were brought together from private collections in zoos.
When people realised that the species was in such decline, they brought together 12 bison from private collections to start the European Breeding Programme. So all of the 9,000 odd bison registered with that programme today all came from that founding herd of 12. They're quite an environmental success story in their own right!
But because of that, having those 12 as their foundation herd, they are genetically fragile. So we're really keen to ensure that we have the best breeding population of bison possible. Therefore we sourced two females from [captive facilities in] Ireland, a place called Fota Park in Ireland, there was one from Highlands in Scotland, that's our matriarch, and then the bull arrived from Germany. It was actually the bull, in terms of legislation, that was really difficult to bring into the country because we were navigating “dangerous wild animal” transport and movement into the country in a post-Brexit situation, which was incredibly difficult.
Fascinating! And once the bison arrive, I'm assuming they arrive maybe by truck from Scotland, by plane or ship from Germany, they're released into the wild. What happens then? I know they create a mosaic woodland/fieldland ecosystem. Tell me about how the grazing patterns affect the landscape, the stuff that they do on the land that other animals don't do.
We were expecting to see some changes in the woodland. We weren't sure how quickly that would take shape, but it was pretty much immediately on their release that they started changing the habitat around them!
They have a number of unique behaviours. One of them is that they like to dust bathe, which is great for burrowing insects and other invertebrates. And also the birds that will come along, they will take the bison hair to lay in nests. I understand there have been some studies in other countries which are showing the hatch rate of birds improving where the nests have been lined with bison fur!
So we've seen those dust bathing bowls opening up across the woodland. The bison also, just through their sheer size, they push through vegetation and they create these bison corridors in the woodland, which is creating more light and space within the woodlands for other animals to come and thrive. The other very unique behaviour that we don't see with our other grazing animals in the UK is the ability to de-bark trees and create standing deadwood. That becomes a whole other habitat, for bats and invertebrates and then birds to come along and feed.
One of the first things that we saw that they did…so the three females were the first to be released, two from Scotland and it was on the hottest day of the year that we'd had. It was the first time ever that the UK had seen heats of over 40 degrees (Celsius) in the woodland. And the matriarch, she made a beeline for some rhododendron, which is actually an invasive species in the UK, and she started thrashing around with it, almost doing a figure eight motion with her head. She came out of the vegetation with this, like, crown of rhododendron. We made a few calls and had a chat with a few experts, and it seems that the rhododendron actually has some oils in it which are a great insect repellent. It was almost like she was going in there to protect herself from the flies on one of the hottest days of the year.
That's an amazing story. What other interactions have you observed?
One of the most fascinating things so far that we think has come out of it, obviously to say it scientifically a lot more study would need to be done, is that the bison rangers observed the matriarch eating a small amount of yew tree, which obviously has some toxins in it and can be poisonous to animals. And one of the scientists who'd been doing some fecal studies on their dung samples rung up and asked about this particular bison's behaviour, and what might have changed since she'd been in the woodland. Because when she had arrived from Scotland, she had quite a high parasitic load in her dung. And after a few weeks in the Blean, that had dropped significantly. The rangers actually think she was targeting yew trees to almost self-medicate herself against these parasites that she had. So, you know, nature finds a way and maybe nature does know these things. And I thought that was quite a fascinating potential find, that do bison actually self-medicate.
That's fascinating. I love this kind of story! That might have been the first time in millennia that a bison had eaten some yew tree to get rid of parasites in Britain, but they probably did that for thousands of years.
Exactly. You know, there's lots of fascinating anecdotal stories that we've had since they've been in the woodland. Literally, almost immediately after they arrived, the bison ranger actually found dung beetle larvae in the bison's dung. How the dung beetles got the memo so fast that the bison were in the Blean, he doesn't know. It was amazing that that had happened. We weren't expecting that kind of thing quite as quickly. From the front end to the back, the bison impact the environment around them, whether it's through physically carrying seeds and dispersing them around the woodland, to punching these big corridors throughout the woodland, creating this space and the glades, to literally their dung being a magnet for birds and fungi and dung beetles.
Fascinating. What amazing ecological relationships.
I mean, it's absolutely incredible. And we are monitoring the Blean very extensively, so I'll just give you a little overview of how that monitoring works. Even before the bison arrived, we've had one of the biggest baseline monitoring programs ever carried out in the UK of its kind, where we looked at vegetation, plant surveys, insect surveys, and all the species that live in that woodland. And this is a study that we are looking to carry out between the next 20 to 30 years, to actually be able to say how the bison have changed that habitat.
The Blean itself is actually set into three different treatment areas. So you have one area where the bison are, and eventually they will have some Exmoor ponies and Iron Age pigs that are grazing alongside them in their treatment area. Elsewhere in the woodland, we've got longhorn cattle. They'll also be grazing alongside the Exmoor ponies and Iron Age pigs. And then we have a third area, which is how we've always managed the Blean, your coppicing, your management of the woodland.
The ecologists are looking at each of those treatment areas and comparing and contrasting how biodiversity is affected in those areas. So whilst we've done our first year of monitoring, we're not at a stage to say “bison do this,” or “bison do that” at the moment. That will be with years and years and years of work, and we still haven't got the ponies and pigs in with the bison yet. They are in the woodland, but they're not all grazing together That's going to come once we've got our bison bridges in place, which opens up a little bit more of the woodland to the animals.
That is absolutely wonderful. And that's different from the bison underpasses, which already exist, right?
That's right. At the moment, the bison are in 50 hectares of West Blean, Thorden Woods, which is a very big area. But the intended size for them to roam is actually 200 hectares of the project. The dangerous wild animal legislation means that they cannot move across the footpaths that are open to the public within the Blean. So we're installing what we're calling bison bridges, or a bison tunnel, where the bison will go underneath and people can go over the top. And the cost of those, we've fundraised for those, is one million [pounds], and we're beginning construction of those shortly.
That is incredible.
And then, of course, there was the the big surprise, that one of the female bison was pregnant when she arrived and unexpectedly gave birth!
It was incredible. It's probably the buy one, get one free deal of the century! Bison, by their nature, will conceal their pregnancies to ward off predators and people that might be targeting them for food, so it's quite difficult to know when a bison is in calf. The other thing with this particular pregnancy, it was outside the breeding season window. You wouldn't expect for a bison to be shown to be pregnant and giving birth at the time of year that she did. She was also a very young female, so she wouldn't normally be breeding around the time that she did. She was a young mum, bless her.
And the other thing is the pregnancy symptoms are very similar to a bison being in heat. Swollen udders, etc. There’s not a very straightforward way to tell if a bison is pregnant. We did notice with our second calf, the rangers did pick that one up, but then they'd had time to get to know these animals. We think with this young female, she arrived in July [2022] and she gave birth in late August [2022]. So they didn't have a lot of time to be seeing these animals every day, to see those changes in behaviour, etc.
So, yes, it was an absolute surprise, a wonderful surprise to have that first wild baby bison born in the UK in thousands of years. And we were absolutely delighted. We were not expecting that to happen so soon.
Amazing, that's amazing. And then you got a second calf. Tell me, when did that happen? I don't think I saw as much news coverage of that.
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