Students spend 10 days at Knepp on the School's first rewilding field course.
Seven students travelled to the Knepp Estate in West Sussex in August for the first running of a new field course based at the Operation Wallacea expedition site. The first week combined training in ecological survey methods with guided tours of the estate, giving students a close look the first large-scale lowland rewilding project in England while learning important employability skills.
The final three days were given over to student-led work. Working in small groups, students planned and ran their own mini-research projects, each looking at a different ecological aspect of Knepp's rewilding. Projects ranged from studying how different habitats at Knepp impact Tamworth pig behaviour to the impacts of beavers on plant, insect and bird communities
The wildlife did not disappoint. Students saw beavers and all the “Knepp Big Five”: longhorn cattle, Tamworth pigs, Exmoor ponies, red deer and fallow deer. Brown and white-letter hairstreaks were seen alongside good numbers of clouded yellows, and nightingales and turtle doves were seen and heard on site. Students had the opportunity to see bird and bat species close up during ringing sessions and across the week the group averaged more than fifty bird species seen each day.
The trip also coincided with the release of fifty juvenile white storks on the estate, which spent the afternoon circling over the camp catching thermals; a spectacular site dubbed a “Stork-nado”
Dr Leejiah Dorward , who led the course, commented:
The students got a huge amount out of the trip. Seeing rewilding at this scale, and then designing their own research projects based on the methods and theory learnt during the course gives them a practical grounding in field ecology, conservation and research skills that’s beyond what they can learn in textbooks or lecture theatres!