School of Sustainability

Eleven years of doing almost nothing brought the orchids back

The field's last crop came off in 2005, and after that the tractors stopped. What followed, on a two-hectare corner of North Norfolk farmland, was close to nothing: no ploughing, no fertiliser, no commercial seed mix scattered across the soil. The one management that continued was a traditional annual hay cut, taken year after year as it had been before. Everything else the field did on its own, while a team from UCL Geography came back each year to keep count.

Researchers led by Professor Carl Sayer watched what happened next, year by year, from 2011 to 2022. The plant life changed slowly and then noticeably. Within ten to fifteen years of the farming ending, the old arable field had become a species-rich wildflower meadow. Among the plants that turned up on their own were southern marsh orchid - appearing in the thousands - plus greater tussock-sedge, yellow rattle and common centaury, several of them locally rare.

The finding, published in Restoration Ecology, pokes at a settled assumption in habitat restoration: that making a species-rich grassland requires bought seed mixes and costly intervention. Here, none of that happened. The plants that arrived did so through natural processes, and because of that they carry the genetics of the local area - stock already fitted to that soil and that weather, rather than something grown elsewhere and shipped in.

What the field needed, it turns out, was not more inputs but fewer of them, plus a single cut a year and enough time. Eleven years of it, in this case, before anyone could stand in the meadow and count orchids in the thousands. That is the awkward lesson the researchers draw: the natural recovery did not merely match the expensive alternative, it preserved something money cannot buy back once gone - the genetic diversity of plants already adapted to that particular place.

Regeneration International · Read the source

After a century, cinereous vultures breed again in the Iberian Highlands

This spring, in the pine forests of Alto Tajo Natural Park, a cinereous vulture chick hatched. It was the first to do so in Spain's Iberian Highlands for around a hundred years. A second chick hatched nearby and died within days. The survivor is doing well and now carries a GPS transmitter, so the team watching it will know where it goes once it leaves the nest.

Neither chick happened by accident. Since 2020, a reintroduction programme covering Alto Tajo and the Serranía de Cuenca has released 37 birds into these forests. The work is led by the Regional Government of Castilla-La Mancha and carried out on the ground by Rewilding Spain and the NGO Terra Naturalis. Alongside the releases, the team has put up 21 artificial nesting platforms, set out feeding stations, and built an acclimatisation aviary where new arrivals can get used to the landscape before they are let go.

Five pairs settled this spring, the first resident pairs in the region in a century. One of the successful breeders nested on a platform; the other built its own nest. Three more pairs took up platforms without laying. Jorge Layna, the Terra Naturalis biologist responsible for the programme, thinks the forests of Alto Tajo and the Serranía de Cuenca can hold a large colony. His reasoning rests on the bird's habits: the species returns to nest near its birthplace, and mated birds keep one territory permanently. Pairs matter more than chicks.

The same year brought the species back to breeding in Bulgaria's Rhodope Mountains after thirty years away, with three chicks from eight pairs. In Spain the Highlands already hold griffon and Egyptian vultures, and there are plans to reintroduce bearded vultures too, which would put Alto Tajo on course to support all four of Spain's native vulture species again. A complete scavenger community strips carcasses quickly, checks disease, and draws the wildlife watchers whose spending the villages have begun to count on.

Rewilding Europe · Read the source

Seven hundred embroiderers, ten rupees a share, and no middlemen

On an afternoon in Indira Nagar, a neighbourhood in the border district of Barmer, several women gather in one small room with needles and bright thread, working through a batch of orders together. They move between one another's homes, stitching the traditional Sindhi embroidery their mothers and grandmothers taught them, fitting it into whatever hours remain after cooking, washing, tending animals and minding children. They are among thousands of Pakistani Hindu artisans who fled Sindh and settled in Rajasthan's border districts, carrying the craft with them.

Neeta Devi Meghwal's family crossed from Jhande Ka Tala village in Sindh during the 1971 war, when she was young. In Mithrau village, among the dunes, even drinking water was scarce; her father took daily-wage labour when he could find it, and her mother's embroidery became one of the only ways to feed the household. Meghwal learned it from her, taught her own daughter, and trained her daughters-in-law.

The Society to Uplift Rural Economy, known as SURE, has been training Barmer's artisans since the early 1990s, and in 2020 helped them incorporate the Thar Artisans Producer Company, owned and run by the women themselves. All 700 members hold identical stakes: each put in ₹500 for fifty shares at ₹10 apiece. They elected ten of their own as directors, vote on the business, are paid per order and stand to receive dividends, while SURE stays on only as management support.

For decades the women sold through middlemen who set the piece rates and kept the difference. Most earn about ₹150 a day, well under Rajasthan's ₹285 minimum wage for unskilled work, while a single embroidered cushion cover retails abroad for ₹800 to ₹900. Whether dividends arrive, and whether the company can hold its buyers without a new layer of intermediaries growing back, remains to be seen. But for the first time in three generations of stitching, the women in that small room are working for a company that is theirs.

Shareable · Read the source

In Budongo, sick chimpanzees seek out plants that clear their parasites

In the Budongo forest of Uganda, primatologist Elodie Freymann spends her days watching chimpanzees eat, and writing down exactly what they choose. Not the everyday feeding - the odd choices. A chimp that is off colour will seek out a plant it otherwise ignores, and her job is to catch the moment and identify the species. She is trained as a botanist and social anthropologist as well as a primatologist, which tells you how many kinds of knowing this work asks for.

The discipline is zoopharmacognosy - animal, medicine, knowledge. The word was coined in the late 1980s, after researchers working through the late seventies and eighties established that chimpanzees were deliberately selecting plants that rid them of internal parasite infections. They were the first species documented doing it. Over the nineties and early two-thousands the same behaviour turned up in other animals, and the last few years have brought another surge of researchers.

Bottlenose dolphins in the Red Sea rub against corals with antifungal and antibacterial properties. Male great bustards in Spain eat antiparasitic plants in the mating season, apparently to clear their parasite load before the costly business of displaying. Bears, elephants, civets, snow geese - the list lengthens every year, and each addition came from someone watching one animal long enough to notice it doing something out of the ordinary.

None of this is news to everyone. Indigenous communities and traditional healers had watched animals treat themselves long before science gave the behaviour a Greek name; what the last few decades added is documentation, chemistry and a frame for asking harder questions. How much of the behaviour is instinct and how much is learned, passed down the generations the way ours is? And how far do other species' medicine cabinets overlap with our own?

Humans have been browsing the same pharmacy for a while - the medicinal fungus found on Ötzi the iceman, dead these five thousand years, suggests as much. Freymann's wager is that it was always open, to every species with the patience to learn it. What the work asks of a researcher, in the end, is not brilliance but duration. You cannot hurry a chimpanzee into being ill in front of you.

Bioneers · Read the source