UK Nature and Environment

Bison are up to two metres tall. An adult male can weigh up to a ton. If you ended up on the wrong side of one sitting down, you wouldn’t live to tell the tale. And for all I knew, peering through the bushes, I was just a few metres away from a wild one. In Kent… A deadly wild animal! In England! My sense of excitement is easy to understand. No place in the world has lost so much of its natural habitat as us.

No one walking around the English countryside will ever fear being attacked by wolves or bears, nor will they have a feeling of being truly lost. It is both tranquil and sedate. That isn’t to say that it’s impossible to have a meaningful interaction with the natural world. Anyone who watched David Attenborough’s latest series based in the UK would have felt the excitement of seeing unfamiliar creatures in our familiar landscape.

And that’s why I went in search of the Kentish bison. We arrived in Canterbury on a drizzly Friday morning. Our destination was the Blean Woods, an ancient piece of woodland about five miles outside the city. Sally Smith, comms tsar of this bison rewilding project, drove us out to the woods. She’d recently switched from the Kent police and was luxuriating in her new life as a bison hype-person.