Sara King – rewilding manager at Rewilding Britain
It was a family of beavers that inspired Sara King’s career choice. Now a manager at Rewilding Britain, the charity restoring the nation’s ecosystems, King had been working as an ecological consultant when she visited a beaver enclosure in Devon.
She was astounded by the complexity of the wetlands these industrious furry mammals had created there. “It was a turning point that took me on the rewilding journey I’m on now,” she says. “Seeing nature return to this small fenced enclosure made me think: ‘I don’t think we [as humans] would have been able to create such an amazing wetland if we’d designed this and got the diggers out and created it ourselves.’ [I realised that] keystone species like beavers can actually restore nature much better than we can.”
Working at Rewilding Britain often leaves her in awe of what can happen, she says, “when we put nature in the driving seat, rather than trying to control it”. Take the Knepp Estate in Sussex, which is now home to the largest colony of purple emperor butterflies in the UK, thanks to the sallow scrub emerging there after almost 25 years of rewilding. The triumph has challenged traditional wisdom that these spectacular butterflies prefer woodland habitats.
