If you go down to the woods today, you could stumble upon a pig or two. Or some wild ponies. Or a bunch of long-horned cattle. To run into all three, specifically, you’d have to head to West Blean and Thornden Woods, between Canterbury and Herne Bay in Kent – where loads of ancient species have been reintroduced by conservationists.
Last summer, the Kent Wildlife Trust brought a herd of European wild bison to the woods. One of them even welcomed the first baby bison to be born in the UK in thousands of years.
Those giant animals have now been joined by six Exmoor ponies, four ‘Ice Age’ pigs and four long-horn cattle.
The move is part of the trust’s £1.1 million Wilder Blean conservation project. These species have apparently been chosen to help rewild the area and tackle the climate crisis.
The long-horns have been selected for their grazing habits – they snack on twigs and scrubs, which in turn helps to open up the woodland canopy. Exmoor ponies similarly create more space for other species through their diets, while the pigs will encourage seeds to grow when they root around with their snouts, disturbing the soil.
A spokesperson for the trust said: ‘This type of grazing is about using native wild breeds of livestock to mimic the things that mega-herbivores would have done in the past when wild horses, aurochs and bison roamed around the country.
‘They were inextricably linked with their habitats and we want to mimic that using the animals available to us now.’
Half of the ponies are roaming freely in a section of woodland, along with the long-horn cattle, while the other half are in an enclosed space, like the bison. The pigs have free rein of two different areas, which they can move between via flaps or by digging underground tunnels.
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