Bison are big. At almost two metres tall and over three metres long they are Europe’s heaviest living land animal, and haven’t called the UK home in around 6,000 years.
But times are changing. A small herd of these “woolly bulldozers” are being released into a nature reserve near Canterbury in Kent as part of a £1m landmark project to boost biodiversity and tackle the climate crisis.
The project, at West Blean and Thornden Woods, will not only help provide a boost for the endangered species, which, it is hoped will breed in their new woodland environment, but it is hoped the bison will demonstrate a radically new kind of landscape management.
The species is expected to damage trees, knocking them over, browsing branches and clearing patches of woodland where they will dust bathe.
The result will be the creation of innumerable microhabitats and different ecosystems that cannot be created by human intervention, but will replicate the natural coppicing of the large species which existed in woodlands when the trees we still have in Britain evolved.
For example, standing deadwood – something seen in natural ecosystems, but rarely encountered in modern managed woodlands in the UK – will provide new opportunities for species including woodpeckers and insects, and in turn these species will help bring others back.
“Seeing bison in the wild is a very visceral experience,” director of conservation at Kent Wildlife Trust Paul Hadaway tells The Independent.
“It is a UK first. It is very exciting and very challenging as well. People say ‘when were bison last in the country, and are they really native?’ but actually, what we’re trying to do is bring in an animal that is an ecosystem engineer – an animal that does something transformative to the habitat.”
The UK’s dwindling wildlife “will begin to come back”, he says. “We’re expecting things like nightjar and goshawk and the site is already a national stronghold for heath fritillary butterflies.”
As well as the bison and the wildlife they could help bring back, Kent Wildlife Trust has brought in longhorn cattle, Exmoor ponies and iron age pigs, all of which will play different roles in the landscape.
While the site is enclosed, visitors will be able to book safaris which will enable them to find the satellite-tagged bison, which Hadaway says will be “elusive”.
The plans mean the project has hired the UK’s first ever bison rangers to help manage the animals.
Tom Gibbs is one of two rangers at Blean. He tells The Independent when he first saw the job advert it “looked amazing” and he “knew whoever gets this job is going to be one lucky son of a gun”.
He says the project aims “to change the mindset about what our countryside ‘should’ be like”.
“We’re deprived of that in the UK, so I really want to give people that experience of being in a wilder place and being around wild animals. I think we all need that in our lives.”
There will be chances for the public to see the bison from raised platforms and tunnels which will maintain the footpaths which cross the site, while also being fenced off. The safaris for the public will begin once the bison have become comfortable at the site.
In the future the team hopes one day legislation designating bison as “dangerous wild animals” will be changed and the fences in some parts of the project could come down, as they are at other projects in the Netherlands where people and bison are free to mix together.
Gibbs says: “Things like Covid proved that people need their local parks and woods. But the reality is the baseline for what people are experiencing in woodlands, compared to even 50 years ago, is that we’re not seeing the same species and we’re not seeing much biodiversity.
“The traditional forms of management of these habitats just isn’t working.”
