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Real people share real stories of their dialogue with Nature. Hear how it feels to talk with animals, birds and landscape. Share the magic of cross species communication.
Created by award winning Nature writer and poet Estelle Phillips.
Instagram @estelle_writer44
TikTok @EstellePhillips
I was incredibly lucky to talk with Derek Gao. Derek is a farmer turned nature conservationist rewilding over 300 acres at his rewilding coombe's head. As well as being author of Bringing Back the Beaver and Hunt for the Shadow Wolf, he has reintroduced beavers, over 60,000 water voles and the white stork. He's presently working on reintroducing the wild cat. But I came across Derek as one half of the two Dericks in the film Derek versus Derek.
Estelle Phillips:I urge you to find the trailer for this film on YouTube because it's hilarious. Search Derek versus Derek doc. We started this podcast with a discussion about what the aspirations for the film were.
Derek Gow:Did we have any aspirations for it? I can't even remember what the bloody aspirations were. It was all so long ago. So I guess it was just very simply to tell one to exhibit one perspective of what land use should be about or could be about and then to look at another. So so it was really quite simple.
Derek Gow:And of course, then the thing lingers on over two and a half years and I think we're doing another wee bit of top up for filming in two weeks time. And and of course, when you do over two and a half years, they they it all becomes quite unguarded because you get very very used to to to the people being there and they get your your eyes lows. And and and in the end, you see an awful lot of things, you know, as they as they just come to mind and you don't really think them through and then the legacy of it all is they go back and cut it all to produce an article which, you know, is is quite quite stark at the beginning and with regard to what's said by both of us about how we feel about what's happening on the other side of the hedge. And then as the thing progresses, you see some things just being intolerable and some things that that people initially consider to be intolerable, the things that really are not that much of an issue at all. And then also what you see is you see some of the pressures that are on these guys and then some of the desires that they also had and some of the of the memories that they have of a very different landscape when they were young men and and that landscape and they haven't forgotten it.
Derek Gow:And and when it's actually and of course, never think about it because you just do it and you get caught up in the the huddly, bodily of what's happening in your day and your moment in life. And then when it's presented back to them, well, you care. It's okay. You're not exactly left with a hall of people sniffling, but you certainly don't have anybody that's arguing at all about what's being said or the sadness of where we now are. And then it's down to after that what we do about it, whether we just accept that it's going to have a very unhappy ending in very many parts of of the it's not just the British Isles, it's the world or whether there's gonna be whether there's any possibility of a different way.
Derek Gow:And that really is the kind of key question is, well, there you go. This is the journey. This is where we've come to. Do we just finish it here or do we say it doesn't have to be this way? And that's where the film ends.
Derek Gow:And at the moment, you know, I've got many things to do in life. This is one part of the things I have attention to. So so when it comes to it, I mean, I had no real wish for this to be anything other than our film. I mean, they're now looking at whether they can restart to run it around village halls and farming communities and and and explore what the the resonance of it is with very many other people. They they still don't have a screening opportunity for it yet, but I think they're pretty confident that's gonna come.
Derek Gow:And then so it would be then the idea would then be to screen it, you know, with BBC or whoever else and then to basically run around after that. And then, you know, see I mean, know, there are people who are interested in using it to campaign. Am I interested in campaigning? I don't have a life that is endless now. I've got to the stage where you realize that you've got a time span within which you might function, and you have to look at that time span and decide that you are going to use it, one for for best effect as far as as as you're concerned when it comes to outcomes for nature, and then also without being selfish about it for best effect, with regards to outcomes for yourself as well.
Derek Gow:So I'm not that sure that I won't spend an awful lot of time talking to people. I've spent long enough in life doing that. So so yeah, I mean, it's we're gonna be a bit of a crossroads and I'll be interested to see where it goes.
Estelle Phillips:Was there something that came out of the film or the process that surprised you?
Derek Gow:Well, the thing that was kind of of course most surprising but is very very obvious and is that they filmed Derek saying things when I'm not there and they film me saying things when he's not there. So of course, the first time he sees what I've said about him is when the film runs. The first time I see what he said about me is when the bastard film runs. So so yeah. I mean, that was quite surprising, in the sort of negative ways that you could take it which were well, it was actually all quite funny because in reality, we're pretty good friends.
Derek Gow:We're not gonna it won't be cutlasses at dawn at any stage as this this draws out. But that was quite surprising and the most surprising part of it is when you come to the end is how he actually feels about it, you know. It's you know, it has it is probably for him more than for me being something that really is has made an individual look back into what the the the the where and or are and really start to think about whether this is right. So you've got them in a bit saying, I don't know what to do. I don't know what's right.
Derek Gow:And and and, you know, I'd be loved to see more nature and I remember this and I remember that and all these these different things. So in in for him, I think it's been a bit more of a a thing you wrestle with than it has been for me.
Estelle Phillips:I can imagine that, but also isn't that wonderful? Because that's progress, isn't it?
Derek Gow:Well, it depends with the bugger actually does any of the things he says he's gonna do now, doesn't it? So it's all very well to say when the camera's pointing in your face, I don't know what Derek will do. Know what I mean? As I said halfway through the ask, they asked me whether I think he pays any attention to anything I say, and the answer is I wouldn't have really thought so, but I think it's an extent. He doesn't pay any attention.
Derek Gow:I don't think he pays any attention, but it does the whole process has made him think. So, I mean, they just about start refencing large areas of the farm, and if they just move the fences in by two meters from the edge of the trees, then what you get is this classic edging habitat which is tall grasses and shrubs and fruits and pollens and everything that nature likes. And then the key thing for Derek is you don't bloody cut it, you just leave it and or you cut it maybe in sections every five years. And his thing is you'll see played out in the film is that you can't stand the idea of not having neat tidy hedges. So for Derek, you know, the only hedge that's acceptable is one that's, you know, it looks like you get a set of kids kids, I don't know, building blocks running right away through the landscape and it's all covered colored green, but it's all neat tidy and ship shape and that's it.
Derek Gow:So So, yes. Yeah. That's the big challenge for him.
Estelle Phillips:I feel that he represents lots and lots of farmers. There's lots and lots of farmers with exactly the same opinion, aren't there?
Derek Gow:Of course, there is. I mean, he has so his psyche is their psyche. He's part of that. Yeah. And and he's probably at the better end of it and that he's not psychotic, but, you know, he's part of that.
Derek Gow:I mean, he'll be I don't think he's got any great interest in shooting, but you know, they have parties that come down from Lloyd's or whoever else it is and, you know, walk across this landscape blowing a snipe out of the air and I do know. Yeah. I don't think they'll think very much about that one way are tuller. And and also they'll be supporters of things like fox hunting and things like that obliquely. They won't be be jumping up and down and going hurrah, but they'll they'll more or less agree that it is part of what should be here.
Derek Gow:Exactly. So that's but all of it without a a particularly fanatical tinge, whereas many of the others, they have a fanatical tinge.
Estelle Phillips:Yeah. What would be the most effective thing that people like me could do?
Derek Gow:Well, the thing is the thing that makes all the difference in the world is what the politicians are gonna do. It doesn't really matter what you think I do. It definitely doesn't matter what I think I do. Derek's, you know, will tell you that he they all feel in the same boat. And the problem you've got is you've got a landscape out here in this rural community which is is more or less ignored by everybody until it comes to some of the things that really hurt.
Derek Gow:And if you look at all the debate that's kicked about with regard to the end of trail hunting, well, you go. There's an example. You know, this is one where you're gonna get your, you know, all these rusty old, you know, fanatics from the past coming wheezing out of the darkness and screaming their faces off the, you know, what Keir Stammer's doing is alienating the countryside. Of course, it isn't. The vast majority of people who live around here couldn't give a shit about them.
Derek Gow:One way or the other, and if they do have an opinion, it's the it's the they're just a bunch of trespassing louts and they shouldn't be, you know, we they're unwanted. But of course, what they'll do is they'll jump up and down and scream and make a huge fuss. And before you know where you are, there you go. That's that's the representative image you've got or you have something. You know, the opportunity I guess for this is it could become something as much more considerate.
Derek Gow:It could come something that starts to look at the nuances of of of, you know, well, what is it like to live in a landscape where the beavers are through all the valley bottoms, you know, where they're cutting down trees, slowing the flow of water, holding water, just just just restoring nature in the way they do without everybody jumping up down about it.
Estelle Phillips:Can you describe those? First of all, the beavers and then the trees, please.
Derek Gow:So what the beavers do is right away through the valley bottoms here. The valley bottoms are woodland because our use of things like Willow finished, you know, more or less after the 20 the the World War two. And before that, what you'd have are rural communities, stuff full of people who use, you know, things like, alder, the the bark of alder for black powder, for gunpowder. They would use, you know, the ash for making things like cartwheels and cogs for mills. Because even though it's very very hard as a wood, if it's subject to any kind of stress, it will just shatter.
Derek Gow:Therefore, if you're putting it in a in the complex, machinery of a of a of, you know, that makes a mill run, then you use ash for the cogs because if you're doing something that shatters, then it basically blows the whole mill apart. So you everything that was here was used and willow would be used for, things like, wicker baskets and creels for catching eels and and and the so the long and short of it is that all finishes in around that time. The valley bottoms very rapidly go back to to to Willow Basins, but when the trees come up, everybody even though people look at them and think, well, that's all very green, there's nature there. There's actually not a lot of anything there because once the the trees over shade the water courses, then the iris goes, the sedges go, all the other plants go, the sunlight goes, the dragonflies go, the frogs go, blah blah blah blah blah blah. And what happens is the beavers come back, fell the willow to create their own dams because they want to work in and around water all the time for their own safety.
Derek Gow:Because in their heads, in their ancient heads, they don't know that the you know, if you're an animal that's been on this planet for forty million years, how can you rationalize all your predators have gone in the last Jimbo, in the last in the last, you know, two hundred or 2,000. So, of course, they still assume that the bears and wolves are here and the bears and wolves are long gone. So they build these things for their own protection. They they can feed from the water from the the pools that they create. They can hold territories in areas where otherwise, it would just wouldn't be safe to do so if the predators were here.
Derek Gow:And by doing so, by creating these very complex habitats, all other riparian life return. So the fish go up by 80%, the amphibians go up by 80%, the aquatic invertebrates go up by 80%, the water bills return, the herons return, life starts to revolve again. It's like having it's like having a house with a boiler in it and and deciding one morning when you walk past the pilot light in the boiler, you're just gonna go like that and turn turn it off. Well, your house is still here. Okay?
Derek Gow:There's the bricks, there's the mortar, there's the books, but there's nothing functioning anymore. There's no heating system. The heating system's off long enough, the ceiling will fall in. Everything will become damp, the books will fall apart, your furniture will fall apart. The beavers, that's what happens when the beaver's not there.
Derek Gow:Nothing is working properly. So the beaver returns, they start to to work properly but then an animal that is a common animal in Britain has almost certainly been gone for a thousand years as an animal in Britain has maybe been gone for two hundred. So of course, the vast majority of people who live here in the landscape have no idea what a beaver does or doesn't do and therefore every single time you propose the return of an animal like this, no matter how rational it is or how scientifically justifiable it is, it's always one big wearing fight with people, you know, and the people who don't want any kind of change at all will tell you that, you know, if you're looking at the fox out there, countrymen, they understand the countryside, they understand this, they understand that. But what they understand if they understand anything at and they're generally not smart enough to understand much, is is that their understanding of the countryside is something that will be barely a 150, 200 years old because it starts with the industrialists with money buying land. It also begins with empire of the great estates with the if you haven't held them since the Norman conquest being things that are are bought by merchants, you know, when you can you'd become so ludic, so really rich, you can afford money.
Derek Gow:So all the stuff we see running around and we consider it to be normal, it's actually not there's no great heritage to any of it. So so when you propose that you're gonna return beavers to an environment that is really theirs and is near ideal for them, what you have is twenty five years worth of fighting. And and and fighting like a lump is incredibly wearing all round and in the end, well, you might win a few battles but, you know, war is a very difficult things to ever conclude. So, you just end up in a situation where people become more aware with every generation that goes by, many people understand the beavers. With that understanding, it can come great love.
Derek Gow:With that understanding, it can come great hate. So there's huge complication in that. And then you look at other changes. So if you look at changes like I mean, the one thing that's showcased in the film is the boar getting out of here. Now the boar are not things that just live in river corridors and eat the willow and really don't have any great effect on anything you're doing.
Derek Gow:The boar are things that can live anywhere where there's woodland and they come out of the woodland at night and they raid your corn and your crops and dig holes under your fences and, you know, and and dig your pastures up and and and. So before you know where you are, you've got this thing that has been there since, you know, the time of the Plantagenets and there it is living in the dark of a woodland and all you see is what happens has happened overnight. And if you really wanna piss your neighbors off, that's the way to do it. Then the next one up would be of course releasing some big predators. We had quite haven't quite got to that stage yet.
Derek Gow:So so that's how it works.
Estelle Phillips:What you were talking about in the boar reminds me of we were walking in in the Black Mountains, and we met this Welsh farmer who farmed pigs.
Derek Gow:Alright.
Estelle Phillips:And, apparently, there was a boar who regularly came out and saw all his ladies. Great. Yeah. And then, of course, they all had these
Derek Gow:Stripey piglets. Yeah. Was he pleased about that?
Estelle Phillips:Yeah. Yeah. He was one of those people who's living for life rather than what life can give him. So I would say he was pleased about it. Yeah.
Estelle Phillips:He he liked it. What about the trees?
Derek Gow:Well, the trees, I mean, basically these things that willow, hazel, rowan, alder, aspen, all these trees have a relationship with a beaver that's 40,000,000 years old. We are, as a species, somewhere in the region of 800,000 years old. So compared to the ancients of the beaver, we know nothing. So I mean, even if you consider us to be hominids, then we're 800,000 years old. If we're not hominids, we're moving into to the time the time of early people.
Derek Gow:Well, we're not very old at all. Thousands years old or something like that. No. Sorry. 100,000 years old.
Derek Gow:So the so the long and short of it is that all these trees are adapted to beavers and when the beaver comes along and feeds on the tree, the tree coppices again or if it's an aspen, it suckers or if it's a poplar, it takes from all the little severed bits of upper branches which flow to be in a river and reroute or if it's a willow, that's when the seed falls and the seed falls in wetland, it grows by a meter in a year. All these trees are completely adapted to this ancient animal. What's not adapted is our ladybird book understanding of them because we haven't even bothered to read it. So so there's no issue with the trees. All other life has adapted to that animal and the fact that we've removed it from where it should be for two hundred fifty years doesn't made a blind bit of difference to the adaptability of the trees.
Derek Gow:And if you consider that to be absurd, then you look at things that sort of black thorn, you look at the big thorns of that that tree produces when it starts sending out its early suckers into fields and these big thorns are there to stop the browsing of animals at rhinos. And the rhinos again in in in a space of time, you know, since the last ice age, which is what, eight nine thousand years ago, the rhinos were there before every time. There have always been rhinos here and that's why these trees are adapted to animals like this. We've just forgotten because we've jumped into this incredibly tiny space and time which we've, you know, during which we've adapted entirely to create a landscape that we think is natural and that suits ourselves and we forget that this is not a pattern of any kind of pattern that ever has been before anywhere on this earth. So
Estelle Phillips:I think about that quite a lot about the timeline because I drew a I drew a map of a time map of the world and humanity was so
Derek Gow:I know it was something like twenty milliseconds before you get to twenty hour, twenty four hours or
Estelle Phillips:something. Yes.
Derek Gow:Indeed it's there. Yeah. Yeah.
Estelle Phillips:Where did your would you call it a passion?
Derek Gow:Where did my interest start? So I mean, basically, I let I read a lot of Gerald Durrell's books when I was very little. I've always been fascinated by animals, but my mom and dad got divorced when we were quite little, so we didn't we really didn't have she didn't have time for pets or anything like that. So I would, I guess, start keeping sheep when I was about 10. And and then I kept a lot of different rare beads of sheep and cattle and pigs and things like that eventually.
Derek Gow:And then, you know, that's when you look back at what small kids want to be, I always wanted to be a zookeeper. So I spent sixteen years or so working in zoos. And then when I finished, I decided I just wanted to work with specific creatures for which there was a point. I just can't see the point keeping things in cages for the sake of keeping things in cages. So I began to work with water bowls and over the in the time I've worked with water bowls, I produced somewhere in the region of about, I don't know, somewhere in about 60,000 for reintroduction projects right away through Britain from the the edge of the Cairngorm line to the the Channel Coast.
Derek Gow:And we have so we produced very many of those, capture bread them, reintroduced them, then I became involved with beavers because, of course, something had to be creating a habitat the water voles wished. And now I work and and now working on with a variety of other species of white storks and various other things as well.
Estelle Phillips:So that's how come I saw white storks?
Derek Gow:There are white storks down the bottom of the farm. Yeah.
Estelle Phillips:Yeah. And so what's going to happen with the white storks?
Derek Gow:So the white storks this year, we will take some of the chicks, and some of the chicks will go to navery that will be built in London, in Dagenham. In an area of space socially deprived but with very complex inter ethnic communities and many of whom I I think we're going to find have an interest in this bird for all sorts of cultural reasons we can't even possibly begin to imagine. And we will start a flock of birds that think they belong there. Those will be bred and added to for the next three years. And in three years time, some of the first chicks that are hatched there will be released out into the wider landscape thinking that that is home.
Derek Gow:And what we aim to do is create a flock of storks that think this is where we're from that come and go and come and go and get stronger and stronger and larger and larger until this bird is nesting in some of the the London parks and potentially in Saint Paul's Cathedral and and places like that. We know it's absolutely doable. We always focus on wilderness and wildlife as being something that happens out with the cities, but there is no reason why this bird that's been associated with us since well before the time of ESOP, you know, shouldn't be coming and going from London again. So that's what the white storks are for. They will be the beginning of that.
Estelle Phillips:I can see that. Can't you? The birds. Yeah?
Derek Gow:Well, I might not live to see it, but I'll I'll live long enough to start it. And that's the main thing. Yeah. That's the first step on any journey is always the most difficult.
Estelle Phillips:But also don't you think that as soon as you've got things like storks flying over a densely populated area like London, the you
Derek Gow:can't see No. The The whole the whole idea of the birds being there's nothing to do with the instruction of another bird. It's everything to do with the reinstruct it's everything to do with triggering a conversation about what this landscape's for. Mhmm. Because the landscape you see when you look out that window there, you've got all the fields and all the domestic animals and everything else, that is a landscape we have made.
Derek Gow:It's entirely artificial. It's been made to suit a purpose and that purpose since the time of the second world war has been to an inverted commerce to produce food. But you know, create that landscape in the immediate aftermath of the war, we destroyed hundreds of thousands, millions of hectares of land that was considered to be unproductive. It was the poor land, the cold land with deep clays, it was the wet land. It was all the things that people looked at and there was never any sense to it until the taxpayer started to pay to make it happen and at one point in time, you know, even at the peak of what was being paid, but you you know, until the last decision was made during conservative government's term of office to say that's it.
Derek Gow:You know, everybody's paying a 106 a £187 a year from the taxis to destroy that landscape out there. And at that time, we've gone from being an island that was it was nature rich to tell an island is amongst the the the tenth bottom in the world ranking when it comes to to ecological diversity. I mean, it's just shocking what's been achieved. And and now of course, you know, many parts of the shells, what you're seeing are these big these landscapes that use the last of the goodness and the and the leaf mulch and the grass mulch and the nutrients that were in the soil. It's it's long lost all that that ideal growing material because of course everything was grown on the basis that you could just slap a whole bunch of chemicals and pesticides on the land.
Derek Gow:This would always work, and you're never gonna get those yields again now. So what you've got is usually you've done this. There's your yields going up like that. They've peaked, and now what you've got are the yields going back down, but then and they're going back down, you've destroyed everything. Absolutely everything to the point where the bacteria don't even exist in the soil anymore.
Derek Gow:We still have this cursed mindset which is the the it runs along the lines of whatever we can do, we can solve it by farming and we can't. We just can't. I mean, nature doesn't need more bloody farming. What nature needs is the land to come out of production and that land to revert back to thorn scrub and tall grassland and reed swamp and wetland and a whole variety of other things that have nothing whatsoever to do with farming and yes, might be able to run a few hardy cattle through there at incredibly low densities and they might do good, but they won't do good if they're full modern drugs and insecticides. So it's a completely different approach to it and that's what we need to do if we're gonna make any difference with regard to any of this shit.
Derek Gow:And and in that, you know, we might as well, you know, if he's gonna start to look at those kind of changes, then you might as well start to address some of the mental changes that the adjustments that need to be made as well. And of course, the mental adjustments are always with regard to the creatures that take things from us because we have an evangelical view of what we should do to any wolf that kills a sheep. And of course, a wolf's just been a wolf. I mean, it's it's not being bad to us, it's just a wolf. And as far as a wolf's concerned, the sheep is a stupid deer and there are very many of them.
Derek Gow:So why would you go and chase that cunning deer when you can make your way through your fox with these fairly dim things that are fairly easy to catch? So, you know, it's it's if we're going to have much of a future on this planet, any of us, and end with regard to any of these creatures that live amongst us. Well, there are two choices. One is three, I suppose you just just just keep on going and see what happens next, and that will just be at some stage a wasteland of sorts, you know. So, you know, when you look back at all these kind of old films in the past of like quater mass and stuff like that, it will be an utterly destroyed earth and and in the end that will destroy us too because you'll have, you know, polluted there'll be nothing we can live on left.
Derek Gow:And and then you have your middle way which is which where everything's fenced and that's the way the world's going at the moment and and there's an argument of whether we should be even doing that at all. And then the other is, you know, how do you come to any kind of understanding with these other creatures? And that, you know, yeah, they are gonna change things, but does it really matter if if if, you know, the whole valley bottom goes back to water and and it slows the flow, purifies, it holds more water, creates natural reservoirs, creates living space for the ducks and frogs. Does that really really matter in the scheme of things? It's financially, it's it's nothing to anybody from a food production point of view, you know, it's been estimated some of the 35% of the landscape that's farmed at the moment produces 2% of the of the calories we eat.
Derek Gow:We don't need it. We just don't need it. So we could we could adjust. It could be a different ending. It could be a happier ending but to make that happier ending possible, you asked what you can do.
Derek Gow:You need people pressure, you know, on the politicians and and the very and the most effective way of doing that is not to be fighting with farmers groups is to see whether you can take the reasonable people with you and you persuade them that it's a very good thing to spend taxpayers money on doing this. That benefits farmers, they have an income, they become something else and and it benefits all of us, wider society because what we have is we we have a a robust nature that starts to rebound rather than, you know, wither and and desiccate in the way that it's doing.
Estelle Phillips:That's absolutely brilliant.
Derek Gow:There you go.
Estelle Phillips:Derek, thank you so much. That's really really wonderful.
Derek Gow:Well, I hope that's been some use.
Estelle Phillips:Yeah. Know. Absolutely wonderful. It's wonderful listening to you, and thank you.
Derek Gow:That's very kind.
Estelle Phillips:Subscribe to Nature Talks With Humans for more true stories of people communicating with animals, birds, and landscape. Follow me on Instagram at Estelle underscore writer forty four, and TikTok at Estelle Phillips. Bye.