Your Rewilding Advent Calendar: 24 Days of Getting Gloriously Feral
Unleash your inner David Attenborough with our Rewilding Advent Calendar! Forget chocolate, these 24 days will take you on a journey of discovery and delightful delusions of grandeur. 🌳🦋
Forget chocolate. This December, LettsSafari is opening windows onto something far more satisfying: your inner wildlife documentary narrator.
While everyone else is stress-shopping for inflatable reindeer, you’ll be out there becoming the David Attenborough of your local patch, one delightfully unhinged day at a time. Think of it as rewilding, but make it festive. And achievable. And possibly involving wellington boots.
Week One: Baby Steps Into the Wild
Days 1-3: Start gentle. Identify three trees on your street. Not just “that green one” – actual names. Bonus points if you hug them. Double bonus if a neighbour sees you and you maintain unwavering eye contact.
Days 4-6: Dawn chorus challenge. Set your alarm obscenely early and listen to the birds before the world drowns them out with traffic and Christmas pop. You’ll discover robins are basically tiny feathered philosophers with opinions about everything.
Day 7: Treat yourself to some aggressive puddle-jumping. Channel your inner six-year-old. Wellington boots mandatory. Dignity optional.
Week Two: Leveling Up Your Feral
Days 8-10: Create a “wildlife café” – aka scatter some birdseed, leave out water, maybe some fruit for the bold blackbirds. Congratulations, you’re now a restaurateur for creatures who never leave tips but have excellent table manners.
Days 11-13: Night safari in your own garden or local park. Grab a torch (red light if you’re fancy) and see who’s active after dark. Foxes, hedgehogs, moths the size of your hand – it’s like a nightclub, but everyone’s hairier and no one’s pretending to enjoy themselves.
Day 14: Learn one constellation. Just one. Then bore everyone at Christmas dinner by pointing it out through the window while they’re trying to watch the Queen’s speech.
Week Three: Peak Wilderness Behaviour
Days 15-17: Photography safari with your phone. Macro mode on frost patterns, spider webs, or that weird fungus growing on the fence. You’re basically a National Geographic photographer now. The fungus doesn’t need to know it’s not photogenic. And remember to journal it!
Days 18-20: Foraging walk (legally and safely, obviously). Even if you just identify what’s edible rather than actually eating it. Nothing says “I’m one with nature” like confidently pointing at a hedge and announcing “That’s hawthorn!”
Day 21: Build something – a bug hotel from sticks and hollow stems, a stone cairn, a leaf mandala. Ephemeral art that says “I was here, and I cared enough to stack these pebbles in a moderately aesthetic way.”
Week Four: Full Rewilding Redemption
Days 22-23: Teach someone else one thing you’ve learned. Drag a friend, partner, or bewildered family member out for a “quick walk” that becomes a full nature lecture. They’ll thank you later. Probably.
Christmas Eve (and beyond): Sit outside for ten minutes in silence. No phone, no agenda. Just you and whatever shows up – a robin, a gust of wind, existential clarity about why we put trees indoors and cover them in lights.
Safari Garden Video Tour - Part 1
The video above takes you on a short tour of the lower rewilded gardens at Exeter’s Capability Brown gardens, a part of the LettsSafari Network of Parks. The lower gardens feature wild grasses and wild flowers surrounded by copses of magnolia, maple and willow trees. A new wetland area supports reeds and wild scrub.
The point isn’t to become Bear Grylls overnight (please don’t drink your own urine). It’s to remember that wildness isn’t somewhere else, waiting for an expensive safari holiday. It’s right there, happening every day, in the gap between the bins and the bus stop.
So this December, while everyone’s decking halls, you’ll be tracking foxes. While they’re trimming trees, you’ll be naming them. And when someone asks what you want for Christmas, you can confidently say: “Binoculars. And to be left alone with this very interesting moss.”
Now get out there. The woodlice are waiting.
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