The likes of Geri Halliwell ignore the dull dreariness of true conservation work
7 February 2021 • 6:37pm
‘Oh my God!” squeaks Geri Halliwell, addressing a substantial owl perched on her leather-gauntleted forearm, “I feel like you’re looking into my soul. He wants to tell me something.” The owl looks underwhelmed. Possibly it would like to tell Geri that it is a she, not a he. The white-bearded owl-wrangler overseeing Geri’s introduction to birds of prey for her arrestingly eccentric YouTube vlog, Rainbow Woman, remarks that the owl thinks of him as its partner. “We get them sexually responsive to humans,” he confides. The owl continues to look underwhelmed.
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Anselm Guise, the son of the baronet of Highnam, was dubbed the hedonistic heir after rejecting his father’s plan that he follow him into banking. Instead, he became a DJ running psychedelic trance parties and founded the ‘Glade Festival’ (thought by many to be one of the world’s leading electronic music festivals) and studied ‘the art of staying awake’ at the University of Bristol (according to his LinkedIn profile). This was all before going on to take up the reins on his family’s 750-year-old seat, Elmore Court in Gloucestershire, in 2007.
Now, his latest plan is to follow a handful of fellow aristocrats – as well as some multimillionaire tycoons in Scotland – and embrace the rewilding movement. 49-year-old Anselm plans to rewild his 250 acres of land and allow nature to take over. Such a decision has pitted him against a number of local farmers who are against the idea of returning prime arable land to nature rather than growing crops.