2027 Dates

5 days – 13 June – 19 June
5 days – 20 June – 26 June
5 days – 27 June – 03 July
5 days – 04 July – 10 July
5 days – 11 July – 17 July
5 days – 18 July – 24 July
5 days – 25 July – 31 July
5 days – 01 August – 07 August

Please note – the terms and conditions for our Knepp bookings state that payment of the balance of the training course is due 3 months before the course start date.  Therefore, balance payments are due very soon or immediately after the deposit for bookings made from late March onwards.

This project is based at the Knepp Estate in the Low Weald of Sussex, which is Britain’s most famous rewilding site.  The 3500 acre estate is being returned to a pre-human habitat by removing human intervention in the management of the landscape and allowing fields to revert to natural vegetation. Fallow and red deer, Exmoor ponies, English long-horn cattle to mimic the effects of the extinct auroch and Tamworth pigs in place of wild boar all control the vegetation on this unique estate to produce a patchwork of different habitats.  Beavers have also been introduced to help restore the wet grassland and wetland habitats.

This approach was started in 2002 and has turned out to be visionary with many other farmers now looking to similarly restore areas using this approach.  The effect on wildlife has been breathtaking, including massive increases in floristic diversity, insect abundance (including special species such as the Purple Emperor), growth in the abundance of threatened bird species such as nightingales and turtle doves, and 13 of the 17 bat species returning.

This course is aimed at those positioning themselves to benefit from the anticipated explosive growth in career opportunities in wildlife management and climate change careers in the UK (see Opportunities in the UK jobs market for ecology and climate change careers). The course is designed to give a brilliant overview of both conventional conservation methods and rewilding, as well as practical field skills for different UK survey types.

Activities are aimed at developing relevant skills for wildlife careers. These include pollination surveys that can be used in land management, while others such as UKHab mapping and calculation of the biodiversity value of a site using the DEFRA biodiversity metric will open up opportunities for planning authorities and developers. Volunteers will learn to identify different bird species by sight and sound and get involved in bird ringing, point counts and breeding bird transects. The introduction of large mammals at Knepp is the key to its success as a rewilding project, and these species are surveyed through a DISTANCE transects and camera trapping, while invertebrates are surveyed through pan traps, sweep netting and Malaise traps. Volunteers also learn how to process invertebrate samples, and these then go to the Natural History Museum for analysis. Bat surveys and light trapping for moths give insight into some of our nocturnal species and how to identify them. Reptiles including slow worms and grass snakes are surveyed using artificial refugia, and volunteers also get to learn about the voluntary carbon market while quantifying carbon sequestration in fields, hedgerows and trees. All of these survey skills will help to improve employability in the field of UK conservation.

Volunteers will also get to go on a rewilding safari with one of the Knepp ecologists, which is an amazing chance to put things into perspective and really see how diverse the wildlife is at Knepp. There will be talks on the theory behind rewilding and in the evenings there will be presentations from professional ecologists and members of the wider Knepp team on their areas of focus and on how they developed their careers.