As I say, I have introduced Andy, fantastic veterinary pathologist, but obviously I had a passion for rewilding. It's interesting, I think his children are also involved in this. They've, they've very much grown up with Andy's er passion for, for the natural world, and I think both of them are involved in biodiversity projects.

You can see the little hut on the left hand side. Andy, myself, his wife and my wife had er a little packed lunch there. In October time, it's getting a bit chilly, but you know, when you can hear the, the owls hooting and the birds flying over and the bats starting to appear, it's a magical place.

He's doing magical work, again another vet. I'm gonna pass it over to Andy's video presentation. I'm sure you're gonna love this, this presentation as well as Amazon.

Again, Anna, see you later, but thank you for a fabulous presentation. I'm hoping I will get to see the golden eagles one day as an ornithologist, never seen golden eagles in the wild, so I'm very keen to er to pop up, but over to Andy. So this session is called entitled The Pond, A Family Adventure in Rewilding, and, I'm very fortunate because my sons have joined me, to talk about this project that we did as a family, together.

Let me just introduce us first. So I am Andy Torrance, I am a veterinary pathologist. I'm the founder of the veterinary pathology group.

Bing is my eldest son, and he's been doing some work, in London with. The conservation, group up there, and Guy, is doing a master's in environmental biology at University College, and is just finishing up, his thesis at the moment, and is very interested, in reintroductions of rare species. So let's start with how, how does a pathologist develop an interest in conservation and in rewilding?

Well, it, it was very natural for me. Here you have a picture of a macrophage with Leishmaniasis in it. I've always been very observant, and I've loved rivers from as long as I can remember.

And so I became a trustee of the West Country Rivers Trust in 2006, and they kindly gave me this wonderful schematic that they produced. About good farms and bad farms on waterways. And on the right hand side is the good farm, and on the left hand side the bad farm.

This is a very hot topic at the moment because of the problems with flooding and pollution that we're suffering in nearly all our river catchments in this country. The area we're going to focus on in this session is the flood plain, where you can see that in the good farm it is allowed to rewild that it becomes a buffer zone for the agricultural pollutants and also the floodwaters that are coming down, from the agricultural fields. In 2007, just when our businesses were really getting going and things were quite high stress, we were living in a rented house.

I, I decided I wanted a little piece of England where I could be what I would call a natural man, wander around with a fishing rod over my shoulder or whatever. And I followed an advert for some amenity land in northwest Devon. And I went up there and this is what I saw on that day in February 2007.

It wasn't really amenity land, it was a sort of agricultural desert, really. They'd taken a floodplain, and they had drained it fully, semi-improved it, and they were grazing sheep on it. The hedges were trimmed down to the absolute limits.

All the ditches were all dredged, and there were field drains taking water straight into the river, which had been canalised. So instead of wandering across the flood plain as a series of braided channels, it had become a single channel. And this has a very significant impact on the environment and also flooding and problems downstream.

There was a pond there, and I am a self-confessed confessedonaholic. So that was my main interest. But here you can see the pond in the background you can see the river, which is the River Torridge.

Tarka River, still has full of otters still. And in the foreground, or just behind the pond there, you can see the floodplain, which has been semi-improved and with an attempt to make it into pasture. But the reason they wanted you to sell the land is because This was subject to flooding because of the way the river's being managed, and they couldn't really fence it because the fences just washed away and they couldn't really maintain it, and they certainly couldn't make a profit of it.

And I think this is true of many floodplains, and it's certainly, floodplains are buffer zones, and we should always regard them as that to protect the river catchment. So we then stopped all agricultural operations on this bit of land, and, we basically used it as a family retreat. So we were only up there maybe once every couple of months.

And so it was left to its own devices. And over the next few years, a, a, a miracle occurred up there, which I think astounded all of us, and, and really caught our attention because The retained soil memory of what this was before it was a drained floodplain was, this is calm grassland, which is a very unique North Devon habitat. And it is incredibly diverse, 200 species of plants, enormous numbers of insects, amphibians, a huge range of fauna.

And basically, this returned with amazing speed, as soon as agricultural operations were stopped here. And it became an absolute jewel of a place in terms of the wildlife, and, and for our family, it became an extraordinary experience and a great adventure. And I'm just going to show you a series of slides now where I compare what we saw in 2007 with what it's become, in 2024.

So here is 2007. Let's just meditatively watch this. And there it's transformed into an amazing temperate savannah, wetland savannah, teeming with plants and wildlife.

And again, More of it Hm. I never tyre of watching these images because. It's, it's, it is just really rather incredible what has happened there, and.

What this means for sustainability and diversity, and it's a very small area of land. 35 acres only. And it's, we're already having a big impact on diversity in this part of the upper catchment of the torrid.

Final one. This is where we built a 2nd pond which is tucked in behind here. So what we're seeing there is the restoration of calm grasslands, species rich grassland, and also the ingre growth of willow and things like that.

And that brings with it, a, a, a wonderful opportunity for diverse wildlife. So we built a hut up there, and this became a retreat, and we've spent many, many happy hours just watching what's happening up there and seeing some amazing wildlife events, which we'll talk about a bit later on. But this is the type of thing which we're not just talking about megafauna, we're talking about insects, amphibians, and these are this is a poplar hawk moth on the left, and that is an emperor moth on the right.

I never knew a beast like the emperor moth existed in the UK. I found this coming out of a chrysalis when I was clearing some willow. It's as big as the palm of your hand.

It's an absolutely amazing creature. We have a lot of bats up there. This is, these are two pipistrelles and a long-headed, loads and loads of amphibians and huge numbers of tadpoles in, in the spring, and that fuels the reptiles, and we have lots of grass snakes up there that feed on these.

And interestingly, we have the European eel. The European eel has a 95% reduction in numbers in the last few years. It's a sort of terrifying.

Story of, of the problems at sea because they migrate to the Sargasso Sea to, to breed, but we still have them up there in numbers, an incredible primitive and amazing fish of the UK. So suddenly we were in a sort of seasonal transition of the most amazing flora and fauna. And I think one of the things that really struck us was the arrival of warblers.

In the summer, so we have the grasshopper warbler, we have the willow warbler, and we have sedge warblers, and sometimes the whole air is full of the sound of warblers, particularly in the early and mid-spring. We have the reed bunting. We've seen an osprey.

We have hobbies, we have barn owls, cuckoos. These things have all returned. They they pour in as soon as habitat is created, that is actually suitable for them.

And of course, we have the otter, and there's plenty of those up there. And this, the list is almost endless. 11 species of dragonflies, which feed the hobbies that come in, amazing raptor, and then a wide range of species of plant which are associated with the calm grassland.

So this is the chronology of our adventure. So Purse 2007, we kept purchasing more of it because we began to realise how incredible it was. Building the huts, digging second ponds, and then Devon Wildlife got interested in it around about 2014, and we did a calm restoration on six acres, where they actually helped to restore some of the calm flora from other areas using a green hay application and seed.

Around about 2018, the two seminal books on rewilding appeared, Isabella trees wilding. And Ben McDonald's rebirthing, and, and suddenly it was almost as though reading those books, we realised what we had done there and what was going on and why it was so incredible and exciting. Because these, the transition from a farming desert to temperate savannah with this type of diversity occurs very, very quickly, if it's given the right chance in the right location.

We finally purchased the whole floodplain, and that's now the subject of a big project, which I'll describe in a few minutes. We've done some very extensive tree planting, but very selectively to enhance and improve the mosaic of habitats rather than create too much woodland. And we've done Lowland Meadow Recreation as well.

In recently, Devon Wildlife got very excited about the site and have designated it as a county wildlife site. And on the basis of that, we, they helped us to apply to Natural England for higher tier stewardship, to actually complete a, a, a floodplain restoration. And that's the next big project that I just want to introduce you to.

So this is how you just effectively you destroy a floodplain. Basically, this is a map of the site, obviously, and these are two huge field drains which have taken all the, the water off the floodplain, thus draining all the braided channels which used to wend their way across. And the, the, there are also field drains coming down from above on the downlands, so water goes very quickly, full of agricultural pollutants straight through and across the floodplain.

And into the river. And also the volume of water is enormous. So rather than having a meandering river that is storing water in the upper catchment, we have effectively a canal which floods because the water, the the flow of water in heavy rainfall is more than the channel can actually withstand.

And the flooding causes erosion of the river gravels, which is where all the invertebrates breed and also the fish. And you end up with the river being cut right down or incised down to bedrock. And the result of that is that you lose diversity, you get pollutants straight into the river, and also you get massive problems with flooding downstream.

So here's the canalised river torrid, Tarkas River, the great river torrage of North Devon, and you can see that the banks are becoming under undermined here because by the, by the high water flows. And here, here it is flooding, and you can see why the farmers wanted to get rid of this land. They wanted to sell it to someone because it just washes the fences away.

You can't, you can't maintain this, you can't make a profit. There's too much work involved. So this is the basis of our higher tier stewardship, which is the floodplain restoration, which has two arms, which is restoration and management of species rich grasslands.

So we, we've got lots of species rich grassland already and can't grass them, but we're going to develop species rich meadow pasture down by the river. And we're going to do flood mitigation, by re-canalising the floodplain and allowing water to flow across it in a series of channels, scrapes, and ditches and ponds to hold water in the upper catchment, allow pollutants to philtre out of the water, properly use this floodplain as a buffer zone, and reduce flooding and pollution downstream. And in order to do this application, we, we had to, you know, do quite a lot of in depth investigation of things.

So this is a a digital terrain map taken by a drone. And what's really interesting about this is you can see where the old channels ran across the flood plain, carrying water. The the water flow is all in this direction.

We can see where and how the flooding occurs, and we can see where low areas are where which previously would have been filled with channels that were flowing across. And this is where we're going to restore the floodplain. And this is an ortho mosaic map also taken by drone, which shows you the mosaics of the river, so that the band of of trees that we planted along the riverbank, the, the species rich grassland, which is the calm grassland, which is mostly around here, the pasture, the species rich meadow pasture, which we're going to restore down here, and the actual marshland here.

Yeah, and, and this wonderful mosaic of habitats, including the ponds, enables the incredible diversity of wildlife to thrive. And here are some beautiful drawings done by a company who helped us develop this showing the new works are in dark blue, so you can see where the channels that we're going to create will take water across the floodplain. We're going to stop the water with a huge what's called a bund here to create a shallow lagoon for wading birds and ducks and so on, and a series of scrapes for the night.

And this is an artist's impression of what it's gonna look like after the project. I really wanted to talk about this because of the, the unanticipated inspiration that this created for our family. It had a profound effect on my sons, which I hope they'll share with you now.

And it was just a wonderful project to have going in the background of our life as a family. And here the boys are younger, enjoying the the pond in the early days, and here they are in their conservation projects now. So with that, I'm gonna turn over to Guy who's gonna talk a little bit about what he's doing during his Masters.

The pond project has been, been a huge inspiration to us as a family, and I think what Dad hasn't said there, which is a big part of, of why this is interesting, is, is that we have this, this issue in the UK and that in general we really care about wildlife as a, as a, society. And yet we live in one of the most degraded natural systems in, in the world really. And being exposed to.

Nature in the way that we were growing up through this project has really helped kind of us realise, how big an issue this is and how big an issue the global biodiversity crisis is. And as a result, I, I, that's kind of led my decisions in, in forming my, my career and I have, I've just started in a career in in conservation. And Dad said that I've, I've been doing a master's at UCL and I'll talk a bit about, about that project in a bit.

What I've also been doing is, is for the past two years, I've been working, for the, the National Parks and Wildlife Service of Ireland, as part of their, their reintroduction project for, for white-tailed eagles. I've ended up working and studying, reintroductions biology, which I think is fascinating and, and there's a lot of depth to it as a, as a study, . But this really only represents one small part of, of what's needed for for the movement for for rewilding in in general.

Rewilding at its core is about the restoration of ecological processes, not necessarily about individual species or individual habitats, and that's what, kind of floodplain restoration is about, is about restoring a process which leads to a diverse, ecosystem. . And reintroductions can be one tool in achieving these goals and that's what I've ended up being involved in.

So in Ireland, we've been, been reintroducing white-tailed eagles. Last year was the, the 9th year of reintroductions. They've done, they're bringing in about 25 birds a year, .

They're taken from from nests in in Norway as as chicks, flown over to Ireland, it's an incredible operation and then we keep them in in these outdoor aviaries for a period of 4 to 6 weeks. Make sure that they are strong enough for the wild and then. Tag them with satellite trackers which you can see on the left here, and, and then release them into the wild, continue tracking them, continue supporting them into their first winter.

It's been an incredible project to be involved with, and it's, it's an iconic species, and I'm sure in veterinary audience, there's going to be lots of people here who've experienced handling dangerous animals, and I was really kind of, jumped in the deep end with these guys cause the, the, the talent and the beak and everything are are quite something to handle. But it's been, it's been an awesome, project to be involved in, and I'd really implore anyone who's interested in it to, to have a look because Reintroductions, like I said before, are, are key to restoring British landscapes in particular, which are, which are so degraded to, levels of, of diversity that they've seen in the past. Where I was based was, was in the beautiful west coast of Ireland, and, as much as it is a beautiful landscape, it is, it is still degraded and .

And while reintroduction is, is bringing back one species at a time, it's one step in a, in a long process to, to try and produce really diverse ecosystems on these islands. I included this, this graphic, these slides are from a presentation I gave previously to the Conservation Society of the of UCL. But I'm sure to to those of you who haven't been lucky enough to see eagles in the wild, their their size can be quite breathtaking and can take you back.

I'm sure most of you will be familiar with the common buzzard and and what kind of . What kind of size you expect a buzzard to be, and, and there are the, the two species of eagle we find in, in the UK and Ireland, and they're just a different scale of animal, and in terms of . Those ecological processes I was talking about, what, what the eagles provide is as a, as an apex predator with an incredibly diverse, feeding range, they, they can, facilitate something called mesoredator release, where you have, that they will, prey on the most abundant, species present, which then allows, release of the species that they that that their prey are then preying on.

And because they, are not selective, they're so diverse in what they can feed on, they're a really good stabling, species within an ecosystem. So yeah, I'd I'd implore anyone, anyone who's interested in, in these kind of projects to, to look up what's going on because there's a lot of drive for these, for these reintroductions and for trying to bring diversity back to the UK, but it is, it will take time and support. So the other project I wanted to talk about, .

Going in a slightly different direction here is, to do with my, my masters, and I've been very fortunate to work with the team at at ZSL, Zoological Society of London, on their project to bring back European sturgeon to the UK, they. The European sturgeon is critically endangered and was really restricted to a single ex situ breeding facility in France in the 1990s. They are historically relevant to the UK.

They're they're designated as a royal fish, so in the past any catches of sturgeons in the UK have had to be presented to the crown, . And they, they only were excavated in in the early 20th century, so it's pretty recent in the history of the the ecology of this country. This is an example of of one such fish caught in the early 20th century just before they they went locally extinct.

And what's really interesting is the picture on the right shows a European sturgeon caught in 2024 off the south coast of Devon, and this individual. Was part of one of the reintroduction programmes in Europe. So this one came from France, and they've been reintroducing these fish for for the for the last 14 years in France.

And this has kind of triggered a big movement in terms of the UK trying to decide whether we should be following suit and, and trying to reintroduce them ourselves. So these fish, they. They spawn in freshwater like a salmon, and then migrate to sea, so you had occurrences of these enormous fish turning up in in British freshwater ecosystems in the past.

This is yet to happen with the reintroduced fish, this century, but we're hoping that we can facilitate this happening either from the the European reintroductions or by doing one ourselves. So this formed to the, this led to the formation of the UK Sturgeon Alliance and ZSL, making a sturgeon conservation strategy action plan. And this is, again, just an example of the kind of, conservation work that is going on, that can, that works alongside projects like what Dad's been involved in and what's happening on a larger scale across the UK to, to rewild British landscapes.

And what Dad has achieved as an individual and is an example of what you can do if you have that, that passion and that drive for for nature, and then alongside what these, these larger organisations are trying to achieve in terms of reintroductions, we can bring back diversity to to UK landscapes, . And yeah, that's all for me. Thank you guy, it's wonderful.

Yeah. I'm not sure how I can follow both those presentations really, but I'll do my best. I thought I'd talk a little bit more about.

What the pond means to me personally and to us as a family, and the kind of things that have happened there which have influenced us, . Obviously, growing up with the pond as somewhere to go and retreat to. As a, as a, you were, you know, in your early teens really, when we bought, when we bought the, the pond and it it did have a profound effect on you.

At first, I remember you being rather nonplussed about it. And then you sort of, you know, things keyed you into what was going on there and, and there are a few wonderful sightings that we had, weren't there, that sort of transformed things and. We had this, so we have the decking in front of the hut, where we used to sit out and sitting out there late in the evening, some remarkable things happened.

Do you want to just describe what happened with the hobbies and the bats that time? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we, we have the phrase we call it the pond effect, which is where you sit out on the terrace and.

There's no road noise, it's complete silence. You can just listen to all the birds. Dad mentioned grasshopper wobblers earlier and that's a great one in the evenings, cos, you know, all of a sudden it sounds like you're in Southern Europe listening to cicadas and grasshoppers and things, that it's actually a grasshopper warbler.

And you know, you just get immersed in the, the wild of the place, and so. Sitting there, we've had hobbies flying, flitting over the pond, catching bats, and we were just there watching them, which is an incredible sight. We've also had a barn owl.

I remember once a barn owl just flying straight across the front and watching it the whole way and yeah, I think that happened as a sequence, didn't it? I think we had the hobbies. Chasing bats, and the bats were incredibly good at eluding them, weren't they, because they were picking them up on their sonar and darting out of the way.

And then we were busy watching that and we were completely gobsmacked by that, as I recall. And then, and then we looked down and there's a bar now working its way across the, across the flood plain at the same time, all in the sort of in the, in the, in the, the, the dim light of the evening. It was incredible.

And certainly the sounds of the place a great guy, yeah. These kind of sightings and experiences as a family, firstly have kind of drawn us together, but also that's what makes you really passionate about, about nature is actually being in it, immersed in it and experiencing it. And I think it's worth saying, none of us have said it yet, that we're extraordinarily privileged to have that access, and.

Through projects like this, we can bring these experiences to more people, cultivate that interest in more people, and that's the way that that we're gonna action this this change. Yeah, You know, on that vein, you know, it's, we've done a few big, larger scale projects down there. We did a planting of about 900 trees along the torrid.

And Devon World Trust came down and helped us with that, and it was just really fun getting other people down. They had some volunteers who came with them to see the place and contribute and. It's very rewarding and that type of thing, and you know it's the same with when we.

Take our friends and family down there, it's such a pleasure to share it with other people, . It's very fulfilling. You found and you found that when you went to London, didn't you?

Well, yeah, I, I. I moved up to London. I've actually moved back now, but I was up there for a couple of years and I did really miss it.

And so I actually just typed into Google what conservation volunteering there is around London, and I found TCV, which is the conservation volunteers who basically run urban conservation projects with volunteers as the labour all over the country. But they do a lot in London and so I ended up just going around parks in Haringa doing conservation work, meeting loads of people who are equally as enthusiastic and. Delighting and sharing that type of work with, with each other, .

And you know, it's amazing to see that even in London, there are so many places where this type of work is happening. It has been happening for years and more and more people are taking part from all different backgrounds. So that was really great for me and, you know, I've ended up.

Doing some work at Horsenden Hill, which is this farm in Ealing. It's a city farm. So it's surrounded by a suburb, basically, and it's just a hill.

And they have all sorts of amazing, wildlife there. They have dormice, in fields, they have, they've introduced beavers down there, they have a bit of wetland, . It's a really amazing place, and then there are others as well.

I, I mean, one of the joys of living in London for me was really exploring it and. There's a place called which TCV run called the Greenwich Peninsula. Forgotten the full name but it's Greenwich Peninsula, ecological Park, I think, tiny little.

Area of wetlands just down from the 02 Arena. So it's surrounded by flats, quite smart new flats, this tiny little area with a little hut and a pond, of course, there's always has to be a pond. And the bird life there, walking around is incredible, you get all sorts, sette's warblers and.

Green finches, I remember hearing, you know, I mean they have, they have a list of birds in their hut which everyone's seen and so you can go in and see exactly what people have seen and then go out and try and find them yourself. So, yeah. It's been A really great part of living in London, just great to see all that's going on there.

Yeah, I was really impressed when I saw the London Wetlands centre, when I went to the Green Forum last year. Wonderful, wonderful place. So I, I've got a video now which is taken by our trail cams up at the pond, and we, we might do a little bit of chat over the top of it, but this is really a kind of meditative session just to enjoy some of the wildlife.

It's not particularly exotic, but it is very beautiful. And you're seeing the wonderful thing about trail cams is that you see wildlife, that is behaving as wildlife without them having any idea of any human intervention. And, and that's the incredible thing about it.

So I'm gonna share my screen now, and, and put the video on and then we'll just watch that. And maybe end the session with this sort of meditation, and if you want to turn your volumes up, you can hear the sounds of warblers and things in the background. I know we're running a bit over, but I thought we should watch that video, which is fascinating.

We're now gonna move on to and thank you so much Andy, I know you're not listening, but . This is what moves me to, to kind of try and highlight some of the things that vets are doing, cos that's just amazing and lovely to see the family being so involved in it as well.