2024 is the third full year for Consano Earth having been formalised in 2021. Our objective for this year, and every year going forward, is to add momentum to the fantastic work being done by our charity partners through rising financial and other support. Our efforts focus on smaller organisations where we believe our unrestricted funding can make a real difference and where we hope to be able to add value either ourselves or through our personal and professional contacts.
Up to now we have published a letter every Christmas that looks back on what we have been up to as well as some of the things we are looking forward to for the following year. However, given all the exciting projects we have visited already in 2024, we have broken with tradition and decided to publish this mid-year review. Our two core charities remain Heal Rewilding and Project Seagrass but so far in 2024 we have added the Great Bustard Group to the organisations we support. This page provides details of all our charities as well as links to their websites for those wanting to learn more.
An April Road Trip to Dorset and Somerset
In early April we took a short road trip to see several rewilding projects in Dorset and Somerset. First, we visited Wild Woodbury. Dorset Wildlife Trust purchased the previously farmed site in 2021 using a philanthropic loan provided from Julia Davies of We Have The Power (more on philanthropic loans later). The land was not good for farming as it had incredibly complex soils, starting with chalk and moving to thick clays that could go as hard as rock in the summer, squidgy as porridge in winter, down through gravels and acid sands. The farm therefore required quite high levels of input. Shortly after acquiring the site the team started their water work. River Sherford goes through the land which had been straightened resulting in minor flow in many places. At a relatively low cost the previously engineered channels were filled in returning the river to “Stage-0” which simply lets water find its own way. Over 100 bird species have moved in and we saw for ourselves it is a great place for adders! There is a great video on the making of Wild Woodbury available here. We are very grateful to Rob Farrington for showing us around.
We then travelled to Somerset to Heal Rewilding’s first site which we first visited in March 2023. We started supporting Heal only months after they were founded in March 2020. In January 2023 Heal became the owner of a 460-acre former dairy farm in Somerset, just outside Witham Friary, a village halfway between Frome and Bruton near the border with Wiltshire. To go from an idea to acquiring a £5m+ site in only three years is testament to the passion and determination of Jan and all the team.
Heal Somerset has huge potential for nature recovery. Having now seen the site one year on it has already begun! Recently a beaver dam has been discovered with a trail camera recording footage of a beaver. It was known that wild-living beavers were in the locality so the team had been hopeful beavers would turn up and they have duly obliged. The beaver sighting followed some footage of two otters a few months before. It shouldn’t be too long before pigs are reintroduced and with it will come all that wonderful disturbance that helps wildlife flourish. Thanks to the Heal team (pictured) for looking after us.
After Heal Somerset we stopped off for lunch at our friend Ben Goldsmith’s rewilding estate (many thanks Ben and Jemima for having us!) before making our way home via a small detour to a wet and windy Wiltshire. We were off to see David Waters who we first met in mid-2023 to learn more about the wonderful work his small team do at the Great Bustard Group. Created in 1998, the Great Bustard Group’s mission is to save this beautiful bird and it took a huge step forward with this given several releases from 2004 to 2019. This was enough to achieve a self-sustaining population in the UK but the charity still has a lot of important work to do. The poor weather certainly was not enough to dampen David’s spirits and despite the challenging conditions we managed to spot several of this magnificent bird on the fields of Salisbury Plains.
We have committed some initial funding for David and the team which we hope we can grow over time. They put in incredibly long and back breaking hours to help this important species. If you are partial to a gin why not buy a bottle or two of the delicious award winning Great Bustard Gin from Downton Distillery (available here)? The Great Bustard Group get £10 for every bottle sold.
Revisiting Knepp in June and seeing their fabulous film “Wilding”
In early June we revisited Knepp over two days enjoying a couple of walks, visiting our friend Charlie Burrell for a catchup, as well as being taken around the magical estate by safari guide Tom Forward and Bonnie Metherell, Partnerships Lead at Knepp Wildland Foundation.
The Knepp Wildland Foundation (“KWF”) are working on some exciting initiatives especially their Weald to Waves project that is establishing a 100-mile nature recovery corridor across Sussex. We previously helped fund some of the important mapping software that underpins the project. We believe other landowners who are keen to develop nature corridors with their neighbours would benefit from replicating the software used by Weald to Waves and we are currently discussing “copying and pasting” this to several other projects. KWF have also brought together 27 land managers to revitalise and restore the River Adur in West Sussex (more here) and continue to work closely on the White Stork Project. This year we have stepped up our level of ongoing support for KWF’s work.
There were many highlights as we walked around Knepp but top of the list were the fabulous White Storks, the Tamworth Pigs with piglets in tow, two Barn Owl chicks, wonderful dragonflies, and damselflies (a growing obsession of ours given our logo) and the beaver area. We last visited the beaver enclosure two years prior shortly after the beavers arrived. What a transformation!
Speaking of Knepp, we also attended a pre-release screening of the inspirational movie “Wilding” in mid-June. This included a Q&A featuring Isabella Tree, author of the bestselling book of the same name. Both book and movie tell the story of how Charlie and Issy took a failing, four-hundred-year-old estate and placed the fate of the farm into the hands of nature. It was wonderful to see a film about rewilding hit the big screen in Mayfair, London and hopefully it will be a catalyst for many more landowners, large or small, to start their own rewilding journey.
We also bumped into Charlie and Issy and their children during the “Restore Nature Now” march on 22nd June in London. They were all sporting rather fabulous White Stork hats! It was great to see many of our charity partners represented including our friends from Rewilding Britain and Wildwood Trust.
A trip to The Highlands
In June we travelled up to the Highlands to stay at Aigas Field Centre owned by Sir John and Lady Lucy Lister-Kaye. Conservationist, naturalist, and author Sir John discovered The House of Aigas in 1976 when it was on the verge of demolition. Over the next 40 years Aigas has been expanded and transformed into a place where small groups can go to experience, share, and learn about the wonders of the Wild Highlands.
Sir John has documented their incredible journey in his writings, notably “Song of the Rolling Earth”. Many of his other books feature his and his family’s experiences at Aigas most recently “Footprints in the Woods”.
We met Sir John last summer at the “If not now when” rewilding gathering when he opened and closed the event with talks packed with many wonderful and funny stories. He very kindly invited us to visit Aigas so we could experience for ourselves some of the wonders of the estate.
In addition to small groups of adults visiting Aigas, they also host over 5,000 school children from over 160 Highland schools each year in their efforts to promote environmental education. This is facilitated through the charity The Aigas Trust for Environmental Education which was founded in 1979 to support the work of the Aigas Field Centre. The education they offer is heavily subsidised through donations meaning the children pay very little for this wonderful experience.
The jewel of the estate is the loch, which hosts a huge array of birds, mammals and much more. Raptors regularly fly by, and during our stay we were treated to Buzzards, Osprey and Red Kite. In fact, not far from the loch is an Osprey nest. After over 25 years of the team encouraging Osprey’s to nest at Aigas this year they finally did.
Around the estate are several hides giving visitors the chance to spot wildlife including Beavers, Badgers, Pine Martens, Otters and Red Squirrels. After a day of adventure guests are spoiled with dinner in the grand Victorian hall where over delicious food and a dram you can share your stories with other guests. One evening we were delighted to meet Zoe Smith who works for the inspirational Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation. Roy’s contribution to wildlife conservation is legendary. We were rather shocked to learn that Zoe is only the third member of the team working with Roy and Tim Mackrill given everything they have achieved over the years.
During our stay we were treated to an abundance of wildlife including on a trip out with one of the rangers our first Golden Eagle sighting. We enjoyed seeing the Red Squirrels too for the first time in the wild in the UK.
One important project that has been a feature at Aigas since it started in 2011 is The Aigas Wildcat Conservation Breeding Programme, something close to our hearts, given the wildcat work we support with Derek Gow at Rewilding Coombeshead.
Aigas are breeding wildcats in collaboration with a large number of organisations who share the ultimate goal of releasing wildcats back into large tracts of healthy Highland habitat. In 2023 the first wildcats were released back into the Highlands and it has just been announced that at least two of these females have given birth in the wild this year.
Many thanks to Sir John, Lady Lucy and all the Aigas team for a fabulous few days. During our trip we also visited Bunloit Estate, a rewilding estate (shown below) owned by Highlands Rewilding, an organisation focused on nature recovery and community prosperity through rewilding at scale across Scotland. We are grateful to Jeremy Leggett for having us.
An update on the Ealing Beavers
One of our highlights in 2023 was supporting the reintroduction of beavers at Paradise Fields in Ealing, London for the first time in 400 years. The project is led by Sean McCormack of Ealing Wildlife Group and Elliot Newton of Citizen Zoo.
Having attended the release on 11 October, we were excited to return to the site in mid-June to see what the beavers have been up to. We were not disappointed. There has already been a huge increase in biodiversity and water quality as the beavers continue to perform their magic restoring the wetlands.
Shown below is the first dam the beavers made and a comparable shot of the place where the beavers were released in October and what the same place looks like now. The red dots are the same water’s edge.
Speaking of beavers, we continue to support the excellent work of Beaver Trust. In April we were one of two backers of a matched funding BBC Radio 4 Appeal with Megan McCubbin sharing the benefits beavers bring to British landscapes, how Beaver Trust is helping and how we can all help too.
Some of our earlier work at Consano Earth was supporting WildEast and their important promotion of WildEdges (more here) which called on landowners to add a modest amount of regenerating scrub and grass buffers to land edges like hedgerows. Whilst the WildEdges initiative focuses on hedgerows the concept of having messier edges has much broader applications. It is just as important for rivers to have messy edges too. Consequently, we commissioned Beaver Trust and the award-winning Stop-Motion animator Lauren Cook to make an exciting animation that highlights the importance of river buffers and why we all need to embrace wilder edges. You can watch this below.
We will also be supporting Beaver Trust’s Big Give campaign later this year so keep an eye out for that.
Expanding our impact……our first philanthropic loans
Whilst Consano Earth remains the primary method through which we conduct our philanthropy its structure, as a Donor Advised Fund, is limited to donations to charities and similar organisations.
We have been looking at ways to expand our impact notably looking into whether we could offer philanthropic loans in a similar way to Julia Davies of We Have The Power. An exciting opportunity presented itself in the summer of 2023 when a 23-acre plot of river meadows and woodland came up for sale very close to Rewilding Coombeshead owned by our friend Derek Gow which is already home to the wildcat enclosures we funded last year. We visited the site with Derek and saw a place already full of biodiversity given it had been left alone for several years. It offers a look into the future and what similar places could be if left to nature.
Whilst we were there standing next to the river discussing the site’s potential a kingfisher decided to come and say hello which is the closest we have ever been to this much-loved bird. It had to be a sign.
Subsequently we helped Derek purchase the land by providing an interest free loan to Derek’s CIC Keep It Wild. The team have got some exciting plans for the site which we look forward to sharing in due course. Some pictures from the site taken this year follow.
We also provided a loan to Sea Ranger Service which helped fund the establishment of their first Sea Ranger Bootcamp in the UK with an initial focus in Port Talbot, South Wales. The Sea Ranger Service was founded in 2016 by the inspirational Wietse Van Der Werf with a mission to create combined social and environmental impact to strengthen coastal regions and improve the protection of the world’s oceans. Their focus lies on the regeneration of fragile ocean biodiversity in some of the world’s marine hotspots, whilst simultaneously training and coaching young unemployed people as Sea Rangers towards a maritime career. Since its launch, the organisation has trained over 120 young people to carry out biodiversity restoration at scale in the Netherlands and France. Our funding has helped them launch in the UK. Their ambition is to restore 1 million hectares of ocean biodiversity by 2040 whilst training 20,000 young people to kickstart a maritime career.
After running their first Sea Ranger Bootcamp in March at Port Talbot the Sea Ranger Service has now employed its first UK Sea Rangers. For its first UK assignment they are working in the Celtic Sea, in partnership with The Crown Estate, carrying out wildlife monitoring as part of a multi-year surveying programme in support of floating offshore wind developments. Wietse commented in May when this important work was announced:
“We are proud to bring these new green jobs to Port Talbot, where anticipated redundancies from the steel works will see extensive jobs cuts within the community. These first Sea Rangers have undergone a rigorous bootcamp to get to this point and their hard work really starts now. They are thrilled to be setting sail in May and kickstarting their maritime careers.”
Rebecca Williams, Director for Wales at The Crown Estate commented:
“This is an incredible opportunity for a group of young people from the UK to start a new career and learn how to look after the country’s precious marine environment. We are delighted to support the Sea Ranger Service as it sets out to restore our oceans while giving young people a helping hand.”
Sea Ranger Service uses low emission ships for all its offshore services and most of its ocean landscape generation is seagrass restoration.
Wishing you a wonderful Summer
We will again publish our Christmas letter in December which will preview what some of our key projects hope to achieve in 2025. Until then, we hope everyone finds some time over the summer months to enjoy nature and remind friends and family if we all do our little bit, collectively, we can make a big difference in what remains a climate and biodiversity emergency.
Nick & Elena Martin
Consano Earth Co-Founders
July 2024