The Knepp Wilding Podcast

Knepp.co.uk

Join Knepp co-owner Isabella Tree and experience some of the wildlife wonders encountered, the secrets uncovered and the remarkable people who are part of the Knepp Wilding project.

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20 episodes
Updated July 7

Episodes20

Newest first

July 7 · 26 min
Slippery Slope: The Secret Life of Eels
Isabella Tree catches up with Carl Sayer, Professor of Limnology & Freshwater Ecology at University College London - aka the Eel Man - as he prepares for this year’s survey of Knepp’s eels. Once bountiful in the UK, eels have all but disappeared from most water systems, impacted by overfishing and obstructive dams and weirs that prevent their migration. Carl has loved eels since he discovered them as a boy and relishes the mystery that still surrounds their adventurous lifecycle. Happily, his surveying at Knepp provides grounds for optimism and giggles all round for his students attempting to measure and weigh the slippery customers. Isabella Tree co-founded the Knepp rewilding project with her husband, Charlie Burrell. She is the award-winning author of ‘Wilding’, which was made into a major motion picture in 2024. Send us a message or leave a comment Find out more about Knepp on our website and why not follow us on Instagram?
June 2 · 35 min
Snakes and lizards
Meet Reuben Martin, a seventeen-year-old herpetologist who has been monitoring Knepp’s snakes and lizards with his father Tim. Reuben’s ability to read a landscape and know where snakes and lizards lurk is extraordinary. He is passionate about communicating the wonders of these secretive creatures to those of us who may be a little less certain of their charms. Learn about the habitat that keeps snakes and lizards safe, and how we can improve conditions for them in our landscapes and gardens. Isabella Tree co-founded the Knepp rewilding project with her husband, Charlie Burrell. She is the award-winning author of 'Wilding', which was made into a major motion picture in 2024. Send us a message or leave a comment Find out more about Knepp on our website and why not follow us on Instagram?
May 6 · 35 min
Bug Life Garden
Compared to other insects, bees are pretty hopeless pollinators. Flies, on the other hand, can pollinate plants and kill your aphids. Join Isabella Tree as she finds out what gets Erica McAlister, Principal Curator at the Natural History Museum and bug-crazy fly afficionada, really excited about the hidden life in wilder gardens. And pick up some simple tips to encourage the best pollinators, predators, soil fertilisers and decomposers in your garden. Isabella Tree co-founded the Knepp rewilding project with her husband, Charlie Burrell. She is an award-winning author, including of the best-selling book, Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm, which was made into a major motion picture in 2024. Send us a message or leave a comment Find out more about Knepp on our website and why not follow us on Instagram?
April 7 · 30 min
Graze Expectations – how Knepp’s animals capture carbon
For many people, rewilding is a one-trick pony – it’s great for restoring nature and wildlife, but does it do anything for climate change? In this episode, Isabella asks her daughter Nancy Burrell about her doctorate research at Knepp and the astonishing findings that are changing how rewilding is valued as a mechanism for storing carbon. Join them as they wander through the scrubland at Knepp, visiting the sites where Nancy and her team excavated 270 trees, roots and all, to measure how much carbon they contained – a massive undertaking, producing the biggest dataset ever used for this kind of research. The browsing of our animals on hawthorn, blackthorn, dogrose, sallow and oak saplings, Nancy found, stimulates the growth of roots underground, as well as regrowth aboveground – storing 4x more carbon than was previously thought. This has huge implications for how projects that aim to capture carbon are funded in the future. Should we planting trees – the default mechanism currently used to fight climate change which, however, does not produce good results for wildlife and is often environmentally destructive? Or should we be encouraging the natural regeneration of trees and shrubs, with animals to browse them – rewilding projects, essentially – which captures huge amounts of carbon and provides wonderful habitat for wildlife at the same time? Isabella Tree co-founded the Knepp rewilding project with her husband, Charlie Burrell. She is an award-winning author, including of the best-selling book, Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm, which was made into a major motion picture in 2024. Send us a message or leave a comment Find out more about Knepp on our website and why not follow us on Instagram?
March 3 · 33 min
Look Who’s Storking Too!
Isabella Tree catches up with two of the White Stork Project volunteers, Tim Morgan and Rosemary Dewan, as they prepare food for the non-flying storks in the pen at Knepp. It’s a freezing day with slashing rain, typical of the weather the unflinching volunteers have had to face almost every day this winter. The project relies on around 25 stork-feeding and 30 stork-monitoring volunteers – out in the wildlands of Knepp come rain or shine. Their purpose – to help establish and observe the first breeding white stork colony in Britain for over 600 years. Begun in 2016 and with 25 nests at Knepp to date, the stork reintroduction is proving an astonishing success. With Tim in charge of data crunching, the project - partnered by Cotswold Wildlife Park, Wadhurst Estate and the Roy Dennis Wildlife Foundation - is uncovering new insights into stork behaviour. This year is already throwing up surprises, with the unfolding drama of the pair of storks who have reliably brought up chicks under the eye of the live webcam for the past three years. The male, Bartek, has forsaken his partner Ania and hooked up with a new mate, busting the myth that storks make faithful, lifelong pairs. With the webcam now live on the White Stork Project website, tens of thousands of viewers around the world will be able to watch the mating, egg-laying, chick-rearing and fledging of this year’s storks. Isabella Tree co-founded the Knepp rewilding project with her husband, Charlie Burrell. She is an award-winning author, including of the best-selling book, Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm, which was made into a major motion picture in 2024. Send us a message or leave a comment Find out more about Knepp on our website and why not follow us on Instagram?
February 3 · 30 min
Talking Trees
Isabella’s guest is Harriet Rix, the Indiana Jones of tree science. She’s chased down rare trees in some of the remotest, wildest places in the world, and in the UK she’s worked for DEFRA, researching tree diseases and strategies for trees in cities. Her latest book The Genius of Trees explains how trees have influenced, even controlled, life on our planet. Wandering through the ancient oaks and young saplings of Knepp’s scrubland, Harriet opens up a perspective of millions of years of tree evolution. Far from being static and vulnerable, as we tend to think of them, trees are resilient survivors, agents of their own destiny – and quite possibly ours. Harriet explains the secrets of genetic diversity and how, by encouraging natural regeneration as we do at Knepp, we can help trees adapt to climate change and resist disease. She shares extraordinary insights, including that the English oak, our country’s pride and joy, is originally American. Isabella Tree co-founded the Knepp rewilding project with her husband, Charlie Burrell. She is an award-winning author, including of the best-selling book, Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm, which was made into a major motion picture in 2024. Send us a message or leave a comment Find out more about Knepp on our website and why not follow us on Instagram?
January 6 · 38 min
Is England Beaver Ready?
Not according to Mark Elliot, beaver expert and Isabella Tree’s latest podcast guest. Licensed beaver pens – designed by Government as the first stage to wider release over three years ago – are beginning to fail. Beavers, including those installed in a six-acre pen at Knepp, have begun burrowing out of their watery prisons. As Isabella leads Mark through the incredible new wetlands created by Knepp’s AWOL beavers, he describes the importance of beavers in flood defence, neutralising water pollution, storing carbon and restoring biodiversity. But with the Government reluctant to come up with a workable Beaver Management Plan, some farmers and land managers are nervous about the prospect of these furry water engineers turning up on their land. Meanwhile, frustrated by government inaction, ‘beaver bombers’ have been illegally releasing beavers into rivers up and down the country. The beavers are already colonising England after an absence of over 400 years – but can we learn to live with them again? Where will the funding for troubleshooting beaver-human conflicts come from? Mark shares his experience leading the landmark River Otter trial and gives some fascinating insights into how communities – including farmers – can find solutions and enjoy a world where these incredible creatures once again live free. Isabella Tree co-founded the Knepp rewilding project with her husband, Charlie Burrell. She is an award-winning author, including of the best-selling book, Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm, which was made into a major motion picture in 2024. This podcast is produced by The Podcast Coach. Send us a message or leave a comment Find out more about Knepp on our website and why not follow us on Instagram?
Dec 2, 2025 · 33 min
Headwinds and hope: Tony Juniper on Why Nature Restoration is a Path to Economic Growth
This time we are absolutely delighted to welcome Tony Juniper to the Knepp Wilding Podcast. Tony is well-known to us here at Knepp. A massive supporter of rewilding and an important figure in the conservation world, Tony is currently serving as the Chair of Natural England. In this stimulating conversation, Tony tackles the deepest issues behind our inability to act with the pace and scale needed to address the emergencies of climate change and nature decline. He confronts the idea that economic growth and nature recovery are opposing forces - stressing that if we want a resilient economy into the future, we must restore nature. We also discuss his profound new book, Just Earth, which argues that environmental recovery is inextricably linked with achieving human happiness, economic fairness and social cohesion. Tony says that to achieve this long-term change, we need to heal the massive disconnection between people and the natural world. He sees Knepp as a "real beacon of hope" and a practical demonstration of what can be done. Isabella Tree co-founded the Knepp rewilding project with her husband, Charlie Burrell. She is an award-winning author, including of the best-selling book, Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm, which was made into a major motion picture in 2024. This podcast is produced by The Podcast Coach. Send us a message or leave a comment Find out more about Knepp on our website and why not follow us on Instagram?
Nov 4, 2025 · 32 min
Rebelling with Integrity: Geetie & Guy Singh-Watson on Food, Farming, and Fairness
Geetie and Guy Singh-Watson are powerhouses of the organic and regenerative food and farming movement. They’re the inspiration behind the Knepp Wilding Kitchen and Market Garden. In this month’s podcast with Isabella Tree, Geetie and Guy vent their frustration with supermarkets, industrial farming, restaurant supply chains and lack of accountability. They explain the thinking behind Riverford Organic Farmers and Geetie’s rigorously ethical pub, The Bull Inn in Totnes - where Isabella’s son Ned Burrell, Executive Chef at the Knepp Wilding Kitchen, began his restaurant career. They may not agree with the landownership of Knepp or want to dive into rewilding themselves but they admit a little bit of Knepp’s magic has rubbed off on them. Isabella Tree co-founded the Knepp rewilding project with her husband, Charlie Burrell. She is an award-winning author, including of the best-selling book, Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm, which was made into a major motion picture in 2024. This podcast is produced by The Podcast Coach. Send us a message or leave a comment Find out more about Knepp on our website and why not follow us on Instagram?
Oct 7, 2025 · 29 min
Penny’s farewell - fond memories of runaway beavers and sloe carpets
In this very special episode Penny Green officially hands the host’s mic to Isabella Tree. Penny has been behind the Knepp podcast since it launched in 2020 and has been Knepp’s ecologist for a decade. She's moving on for pastures new (in fact, just down the road to the Wiston Estate). In this warm and poignant episode, Isabella asks Penny to take her to the corners of Knepp’s Wildland which meant the most to her over the years. Together they recall the peaks and troughs of her time at Knepp, including capturing fugitive beavers and how nightingale song in lockdown – ringing out without anyone to hear it - inspired the very first episode of the podcast. Isabella Tree co-founded the Knepp rewilding project with her husband, Charlie Burrell. She is an award-winning author, including of the best-selling book, Wilding: the return of nature to a British farm, which was made into a major motion picture in 2024. This podcast is produced by The Podcast Coach. Send us a message or leave a comment Find out more about Knepp on our website and why not follow us on Instagram?
Sep 23, 2025 · 29 min
Owl Quiet on the Nesting Front
In Owl Quiet on the Nesting Front, Penny Green interviews Matt Phelps, Knepp’s lead ecologist. They’re out on the Wildland checking 22 owl boxes. In this episode, they discuss barn owls’ silent grace and striking beauty… as well as how much people love to investigate their pellets to discover what the owls have had for breakfast! It’s a quiet year for owl breeding. Last autumn’s poor acorn yield spelled tough times for the small mammals who feed on them. That’s translated into a challenging year for owls. But this resilient species will bounce back. Send us a message or leave a comment Find out more about Knepp on our website and why not follow us on Instagram?
Aug 22, 2025 · 26 min
The Plant People Love to Hate
It’s been a bumper summer for ragwort, the plant folks love to hate. In this month’s Knepp Wilding Podcast, Isabella Tree unearths the truth about this spectacular native wildflower with ragwort specialist, Mick Crawley. Is it a toxic killer or a bountiful source of life? And what happens when you pull it up? Could trying to eradicate it actually be helping the plant to proliferate? The Knepp Wilding Podcast is generously supported by Ecosia – the search engine that plants trees and restores nature. All of us at Knepp are now changing our default search engine to Ecosia – and I do recommend you do too. You can help restore the planet from your desk! Find out more at www.ecosia.org Send us a message or leave a comment Find out more about Knepp on our website and why not follow us on Instagram?
Jul 23, 2025 · 25 min
A Bonanza Year for Purple Emperors
Join Knepp’s Isabella Tree and an over-excited Matthew Oates, the purple emperor’s No 1 devotee, to celebrate a bonanza year for this rare, beautiful and thuggish butterfly. Numbers at Knepp have broken all records and Matthew takes us to three of the emperor’s favourite haunts in the hope of catching a last glimpse of His Imperial Highness as the flight season draws to a close. Matthew explains why this has been the butterfly year of his life and his hopes for the future as habitat for the purple emperor and others begins to improve in Britain. Send us a message or leave a comment Find out more about Knepp on our website and why not follow us on Instagram?
Jul 23, 2025 · 40 min
A Wild Way to Grow
It’s an early morning start for episode 38, as we meet with wonderful grower Rosanna before the heat of the day kicks in, and before she and the rest of the team get to work on the day’s harvest. We talk about the incredible transformation of a three-acre pony paddock to a bountiful market garden, producing delicious seasonal veg for the Knepp Wilding Kitchen and Shop. We consider their regenerative approaches to growing, everything from encouraging good soil health to keeping living roots in the soil and attracting pollinators through to natural predators. We touch on the importance of watching and learning from the nature around us, and we hear about some of the grower team’s aspirations for the future. We marvel at Rosanna’s carrots (a proud moment) and take in the beauty and scale of the tomato tunnel. Rosanna’s enthusiasm and love for growing is so infectious you’ll be inspired to get growing yourself. Send us a message or leave a comment Find out more about Knepp on our website and why not follow us on Instagram?
Jun 22, 2025 · 27 min
The Dove From Above
Join us on a beautiful June evening for episode 36 of the Knepp Wildland Podcast. We’re joined by Knepp’s lead ecologist, Matt Phelps, deep in the scrubland to learn all about one of the jewels in Knepp’s crown…the rare and beautiful Turtle Dove. We talk about migration, how they’re doing in Europe following a recent hunting ban, what we’re learning about them at Knepp and the features they need in a landscape to successfully nest. We end this episode by touching on what the future holds for this pretty, shy bird and a moment to enjoy the soft purring song to send us on our way. Send us a message or leave a comment Find out more about Knepp on our website and why not follow us on Instagram?
May 25, 2025 · 40 min
Queen of the Flies
Buckle yourselves in for episode 35 of the Knepp Wildland Podcast with the vivacious Erica McAlister, Principle Curator for Diptera and Siphonaptera (that's flies and fleas to you) at the London Natural History Museum. Erica has made it her life’s work to make flies cool - her enthusiasm has inspired so many people to love and value flies during her career. Erica teaches us a lot of new things about flies: we talk about twerking flies, egg-bombing flies, migratory flies, cheesey flies, desiccating flies, cryofreezing flies, and most importantly…how we wouldn’t have chocolate without flies. Fly sample collections being made by Erica at Knepp Wildland through malaise trapping are providing some fascinating data through genome sequencing. This episode may leave you with more questions that answers but you will certainly have some fun facts to share with your friends, and a new respect for flies. Send us a message or leave a comment Find out more about Knepp on our website and why not follow us on Instagram?
Apr 21, 2025 · 37 min
The Return of the Stork
It’s episode 34 of the Knepp Wildland Podcast and we return to the White Stork Project, five years on, to hear the latest news with White Stork Project Manager, Laura Vaughan-Hirsch. We tune in to the live stork nest camera to check in on Ania and Bartek, a breeding pair bonded since 2020. We talk about this year’s nests and meet up with long-serving volunteer Silla to hear about what she does for the project and what the project means to her. We have a wander around the pen to visit some of the rehabilitated storks’ ingenious ground nests and Laura brings us up to speed on all the exciting news including the first successful return of a migrant bird and an announcement about the forthcoming inaugural Storrington White Stork and Nature Revival Festival, coming up in May 2025. Send us a message or leave a comment Find out more about Knepp on our website and why not follow us on Instagram?
Mar 24, 2025 · 30 min
Dam Good News for Beavers!
In episode 33 of the Knepp Wildland Podcast we meet Knepp’s brilliant new Lead Ecologist, Matt Phelps. We chat about the exciting news, released just a few hours before, of wild release licencing for beavers and how this might affect the Knepp beaver family. We discuss the abundance of Hawfinch here over the winter and speculate what opportunities are made available to them by the habitat that's emerged from the rewilding here at Knepp. As spring approaches, we talk about ongoing and upcoming surveys and how this has got Matt eager and ready to leap into the season ahead. Send us a message or leave a comment Find out more about Knepp on our website and why not follow us on Instagram?
Mar 16, 2025 · 37 min
Ground Control to Ranger Tom
It's episode 32 and we’re joined by Tom Burns, Knepp’s marvellous ranger and woodsman. We learn what Tom gets up to in his daily work at the Knepp Rewilding Project - everything from managing the huge team of fab volunteers to managing the public rights of way across the estate. Not to mention collecting stork nesting materials from the coppice! We spend most of our time, however, discussing Tom's main passion and that is trees - ancient and veteran ones in particular, and why Knepp is so special for these old giants. Send us a message or leave a comment Find out more about Knepp on our website and why not follow us on Instagram?
Nov 1, 2024 · 14 min
The Inoculated Boxes
Episode 31 is a short n’ sweet one which sees the return of Dr Matt Wainhouse to Knepp, in his exciting role as Natural England’s Fungi and Lichen Senior Specialist. We’re also joined by Tom Burns, Knepp’s fantastic ranger and woodsman. We catch up with Matt about the findings from his tree-coring project at Knepp back in 2021 (check out episode 14) and also learn about a new project that he’s trialling at the moment. We join Matt whilst he’s fitting some curious wooden boxes to some of our oaks. The boxes have been filled with sawdust that’s inoculated with different rot fungi to provide a rot-hole habitat to lure in saproxylic (deadwood) insects – these are some of our rarest insects. The contents will be sampled in the autumn and DNA analysis will show what’s been utilising the boxes. Send us a message or leave a comment Find out more about Knepp on our website and why not follow us on Instagram?