To see our 2024 date options, click here

2025 Dates

2 weeks: 2 weeks terrestrial only – 22 June – 5 July 2025
2 weeks: 2 weeks terrestrial only – 6 July – 19 July 2025
2 weeks: 2 weeks terrestrial only – 20 July – 2 August 2025

Please note – the terms and conditions for our Knepp bookings state that payment of the balance of the training course is due 3 months before the course start date.  Therefore, balance payments are due very soon or immediately after the deposit for bookings made from late March onwards.

This project is based at the Knepp Estate in the Low Weald of Sussex, which is Britain’s premier and most famous rewilding site.  The 3500 acre estate is being returned to a pre-human habitat by almost abandoning human intervention in the management of the landscape and allowing fields to revert to natural vegetation. Fallow and red deer, wild horses, long-horn cattle to mimic the effects of the extinct auroch and pig to mimic wild boar control the vegetation on this unique estate to produce a patchwork of different habitats.  Beavers are also being introduced to help restore the wet grassland and wetland habitats.

This approach was started in 2002 and has turned out to be visionary with many other farmers now looking to similarly restore areas of the country using this approach.  The effect on wildlife has been breathtaking including massive increases in floristic diversity, insect abundance, many more butterflies including special species such as Purple Emperor, growth in the abundance of threatened bird species such as nightingales, and turtle doves and 13 of the 17 bat species returning to the land.

This course is aimed at those positioning themselves to benefit from the anticipated explosive growth in career opportunities in wildlife management and climate change careers in the UK (see Opportunities in the UK jobs market for ecology and climate change careers). The course is designed to give a brilliant overview of conventional conservation methods compared to rewilding, as well as practical field skills for different UK survey types.

In this 2 week course, the practicals are aimed at developing applied skills for wildlife careers. In their first week on site, volunteers will get involved with a variety of different surveys including a bird ringing demo, as well as a point count and breeding bird transect, large mammal camera trapping and DISTANCE sampling, refugia checking for herpetofauna, and a range of invertebrate survey methods such as pan trapping, sweep netting and Malaise trapping. Bat surveys give a greater understanding of bat ecology and species that can be found in the UK, as well as teaching volunteers how to use bat detectors. Light trapping is a brilliant opportunity to appreciate moth species diversity and get familiar with how identify species. UKHAB mapping and calculation of the biodiversity of a site using the DEFRA biodiversity metric will be taught through habitat surveys, which will open up opportunities for planning authorities and developers.

In the second week volunteers will get to experience an ever wider range of surveys! This includes surveying small mammals through trapping and tracking with hedgehog print tunnels and learning how to trap, identify and handle newts, which will help volunteers to work towards a Great Crested Newt license if they wish to in the future. Volunteers also get to join a freshwater invertebrate survey to quantify biodiversity of ponds, and also get to take part in some wildlife photography workshops to improve scientific communication. There is also an additional survey of dragonflies and damselflies in Knepp’s beaver pen with the aim to understand the impact of beavers on a landscape as ecosystem engineers. All of these surveys will give volunteers a brilliant understanding of survey methods, and prepare them for a career in UK conservation.

Volunteers will also get to go on a rewilding safari with one of the Knepp ecologists, which is an amazing chance to put things into perspective and really see how diverse the wildlife is at Knepp. On the weekend in the middle of the course volunteers will get to join some of the other safaris, which could include the Purple Emperor, White Storks, and Exmoor ponies safaris. There will be talks on the theory behind rewilding and in the evenings there will be presentations from professional ecologists or climate change specialists in how they developed their careers.