' generally' nesting on 'the side of a bank and occasionally in a shrub or bush.' That's a far cry from 'woodland.' When the Burrells allowed their hedges to burgeon and their Tree wrote a biography of the Victorian naturalist John Gould, (who worked with Darwin) and so she knew that Gould had described nightingales, which were far more common in his day, as If Tree and her husband, Charles Burrell, had consulted these text-books on how to create a habitat for nightingales, they would have planted 'close canopy woodland', since nightingales areĭescribed as 'a woodland species.' And they would have failed - as modern attempts to enourage the breeding of nightingales in other places have failed. This desperate, marginal survival is 'natural' and write it up in our text books. We uproot and plough-up and spray and destroy and so force birds, insects and animals to struggle for survival in the tiny areas we have no use for or deign to leave for them - and we then think Knepp may be the only place in Britain where numbers have increased in recent years. ThereĪre estimated to be fewer than 5000 pairs left in the whole of Britain and only 200 pairs in Sussex. More exciting even than the nightingales has been the arrival, from the very brink of extinction, of turtle doves. In the same way - by being brave enough to 'sit on their hands' and allow Nature to come back on its own terms - they have created a haven for nightingales.

Lead in wilding their land they, unwittingly, created the best possible breeding environment for 'His Purple Majesty.' Thanks to theĬourage and initiative of Isabella Tree and her husband, the purple emperor is now more numerous on their estate of Knepp, in Sussex, than anywhere else in Britain. Thanks to our destruction of the environment, not only by our roads and shopping malls but also by modern farming practices, this large, blue-tit bothering butterfly, the purple emperor, has become very rare.

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