Forest trails aren’t just useful for people. We bought 5ha of scrubby forest in Portugal two years ago, absolutely cluttered with dead trees, brambles, and stu

Forest trails aren’t just useful for people. We bought 5ha of scrubby forest in Portugal two years ago, absolutely cluttered with dead trees, brambles, and stunted, overcrowded saplings. 30 years ago it was agricultural land, but with abandonment has rewilded, but badly. We cut a number of trails through the forest, cleared some of the undergrowth, and we now have boar and deer maintaining said trails and cropping the undergrowth down in the areas around them. What was just dense thickets of dead thorns is now grassy and flowering, and we’ve started seeing all sorts of wildlife appear that just couldn’t get in previously.