India, Oct. 15 -- What if the best thing a farmer could do for his land was to do nothing? An English farmer gave up farming his 377 acres in Bedfordshire in the late 1980s and let it go wild. That land is now known as Strawberry Hill. The Wildlife Trust for Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire says that by the end of 2024 it was home to half of all the nightingales in Bedfordshire. It was also home to vast numbers of other threatened species, including turtle doves, warblers and bats.

The story began when the farmer stopped farming, and the land was left to its own devices. Without the farming, the old fields changed slowly. Over time, young trees, hawthorn and blackthorn, took over. Eventually this dense growth provided th...