We are treated to the delights of recovering wildlife in dazzling and sometimes confusing variety. Sometimes the vocabulary is unfamiliar, but the meaning is almost always clear from the context. I wasn't familiar with the verb 'cover', for example, when appplied to a bull and cows. Not hard to work out. This is an important book, exploring a new and yet not so new concept. It is, effectively, conservation in a different guise, but updated for the 21st century.

For anyone unfamiliar with rewilding science, Rebirding is a great place to start, as the author gives a great outline of the key literature. There’s obviously a focus on birds, given the title, but it’s tied in to the effects of wider restoration – there are almost no birds without insects, as he points out, and no insects without the plants and habitats they need to survive.

After all, humans have impacted ecosystems way before Industrialisation. There is strong evidence that human migration lead to the extinction of megafauna throughout the world. Megafauna that often played a role in shaping regional geography and carving out niches for a range of other wildlife (an evocative idea in itself). Biodiversity that has been lost as environments transform with the extincition of megafauna. The book begins and ends with the soil. During the WWII, Britain faced severe food shortages and the only way to survive was to increase food production somehow. So began intensive farming which increased yields and enabled the country to survive those war years. When the war finished, however, the country did not return to the pre-war methods, but rather intensified the the pressure on the land to produce more and more at cheaper and cheaper cost. Today, the cost of food takes a remarkably low percentage of our income compared with previous generations. But we pay for this in other ways. There is scientific evidence to suggest that food quality has dropped significantly, even to levels that could explain the apparent sudden rise in things like lactose intolerance or other allergies: there could be more of this around nowadays because the products themselves have altered in response to the intensive farming methods used to increase yields. Isabella Tree would argue, I think, that this pursuit of higher yields has gone beyond the point where it is self-defeating: we apply more and more pressure to the land to produce more when the reason it does not is because of all the pressure we have already applied that has damaged it.

You had already been wilding for more than a decade when your next choice, George Monbiot’s Feral, was published in 2013. What does his book add? I think it is important to note that I do have experience when it comes to this topic area and have somewhat of a basis of knowledge that helped me to consume this book fully. I therefor would say that this may not be the best starting point if you are looking to research into rewilding as a topic, as whilst it is comprehensive it can be overwhelming and complex at some points. Knepp may be a familiar name if you follow British environmental news: it’s synonymous with what’s known as rewilding. Tree’s husband, Sir Charlie Burrell, inherited the estate in 1987 and tried running it as an intensified dairy farm, but the enterprise was bleeding money and in 2000 they gave up and let the land return to nature. That wasn’t a totally hands-off process, though; it involved restoring the forest and river ecosystems and reintroducing traditional species like fallow deer, Exmoor ponies, ancient-breed cattle and Tamworth pigs. And if I had enough money to buy every Member of Parliament a copy, and the ability to force them to read it, I would.In the UK and Europe, rewilding typically involves the restoration of former agricultural land, sometimes via species reintroductions, sometimes not. Elsewhere, rewilding revitalises wilderness areas, many of which are protected-yet-degraded, and hinges on the reintroduction of locally extinct keystone species. Now the book. Isabella Tree writes a language as floral as the honey produced on the land, and I loved it. I found some messy sentences with missing words or clauses, or that seemed to suffer from having been poorly operated on during revisions, but my enjoyment of the book in spite of this is manifest in the fact that I managed to read it in three days. Three days of late nights spent reading. For context, I'm on my honeymoon. I'm literally honeymooning, as I type. I was given this book, which I would never have considered buying, as a Father's Day gift. I am so grateful! Thank you to NetGalley who provided me with a copy of this book prior to its release in exchange for an honest review.