Rewilding for nature recovery

To date, a total of 245 white-tailed eagles, golden eagles and red kites have been released through the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) programme to reintroduce these endangered and once-extinct species. File picture: Valerie O’Sullivan

Just 10 years ago, barely anyone had heard of the term ‘rewilding’. Just as many people were becoming aware of the severity of the biodiversity and climate crises, rewilding represented a paradigm shift in how we might approach nature restoration.

A decade ago, many thought of rewilding as a practice too radical to have any merit in Irish context. Some in the conservation community were fearful that rewilding would alienate farmers. Now, individuals, communities, landowners, and conservation organisations all across the country have been embarking on their own rewilding projects, as the concept inspires us all to rethink how conservation can succeed.

Indeed, rewilding is now accepted as being especially relevant for Ireland because we have barely any wild habitats here at all. Now, as rewilding permeates popular culture, far more people than ever before have been engaging with environmental themes and getting involved.

An active community of enthusiasts are rewilding small landholdings; giving space to self-seeded flowering plants to grow tall through summer months and watching insect life rebound. Encouraged by the return of butterflies, bumblebees and hoverflies, it's easy to see the benefits of letting natural processes take the reins. Reinstating natural processes is at the core of most definitions of rewilding.

A rewilding landscape, with behind the snow-covered Kerry mountains.

In the years to come, may similar vistas start to blossom across Ireland. 🌎 pic.twitter.com/osoHiEMzWv

— Eoghan Daltun 🌍 (@IrishRainforest) January 8, 2025

I lean towards the straightforward definition that ‘rewilding is about the development of self-sustaining, self-organising and resilient ecosystems shaped by natural processes'. Natural processes are what allow the natural succession of species over time, for example, letting wild trees seed themselves, rather than sourcing saplings and deciding what shall be planted where.

In the right places, allowing a dense scrub develop is all that’s needed to get the process going. Soon, willow, blackthorn, hawthorn, birch and bramble will become established according to soil type, and it is they who then act as nursery species for other tree species. Thickets of thorny species keep grazers at bay, protecting other young trees through their infancy from deer and sheep — the mortal enemy of tree seedlings.

In time, natural woodlands will develop all by themselves, supporting rich and diverse communities of fungi, flowering plants, invertebrates, birds and mammals. Diverse, resilient, naturally-established ecosystems in turn provide incalculable benefits for our human societies, especially in terms of adaptation to the impacts of climate change.

But lest we think that rewilding is simply about walking away and allowing nature to take its course, that’s rarely the case. Interventions are often necessary:

— Invasive species need to be removed

— Bog drains actively blocked.

— Rivers reprofiled to reconnect them to their floodplain and remove the barriers that prevent salmon and trout from migrating upstream. 

— Sometimes, tree planting is necessary, where natural regeneration would be hampered by a lack of wild seed sources in the landscape.

— Digging ponds helps wetland species reestablish.

One of the common misconceptions about rewilding is that we humans are not part of it — we are! People are part of nature and our collaboration is often needed as natural processes re-establish.

As well as being a process that invites healthy ecosystems to reestablish, rewilding asks us to change the attitudes and behaviours that have led us into this predicament. We have to unlearn our controlling tendencies; nurture respect rather than dominance over wild creatures; and let go expectations of specific outcomes.

Sometimes, rewilding involves species reinductions, especially keystone species or apex predators that are ‘missing’ from the landscape. In Ireland, more than 100 species of plant and animal have gone extinct due to human activities. Some of these can be reintroduced, and strategic reintroductions bring far-reaching knock-on benefits to the wider ecosystem.

For example, golden eagles, white-tailed sea eagles and red kites have been successfully reintroduced in Ireland. These are apex predators that influence ecosystems from the top down. Initially, there were concerns, especially from those in the farming community. Now, more than a decade after these reintroductions began, eagles are keeping crow populations in check, rebalancing the trophic chain in which middle predators come to dominate when top predators are absent. For this, the presence of eagles are now widely welcomed by farmers and non-farmers alike.

A newly fledged juvenile White Tailed Eagle, finding 'his wings' on Lough Lein, Killarney National Park. File picture: Valerie O'Sullivan

Beneficial reintroduction here would include sturgeon to be reintroduced into Irish rivers. 

And oyster reefs established at sea that boost marine biodiversity by providing nursery habitats for a host of other marine species.

Scale is another major consideration in rewilding. Because of the land ownership patterns in Ireland, most rewilding so far has been on privately-owned pockets of land that range from a few acres to a few hundred hectares. But where rewilding really comes in to its own is at the landscape scale — for example where whole river valleys or mountain ranges are given space to recover lost habitats and species, where healthy ecosystems are given the chance to really thrive.

In Scotland, rewilding is taking place across vast swathes of the Scottish Highlands. Trees for Life is one of the organisations there working with local communities, conservation groups, landowners, and volunteers to reinstate the iconic Caledonian forests. There they have been excluding browsing deer to allow natural regeneration and planting trees where natural regeneration is not possible.

Across Europe, in the Alps, the mountains of Iberia, the southern Carpathians in Romania, and the Taiga landscapes of northern Sweden, to name but a few, rewilding is underway.

Here in Ireland, there is massive potential for reinstating native woodlands in upland areas and restoring peatlands too, approaches that would do much to attenuate flooding, enhance soil carbon stocks, and restore populations of wild animals on the brink of extinction, from wild bees to big birds of prey.

Restoring rivers will help recovery of wild salmon and trout and act as antidote to declining water quality.

Enormous swathes of publicly owned land in the uplands, currently owned by Coillte, are the most obvious landholdings to begin the process. Welcome news this month that there will be renewed efforts to restore the upland habitats of Wild Nephin National Park in Mayo.

In the face of accelerating extinction and climate collapse, rewilding can bring resilience and adaptation, offering much needed ways forward.