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WHEN I sat down at my kitchen table at the tail end of winter to write my first column under lockdown, I didn鈥檛 think I would still be there come midsummer. That piece was about the health benefits of contact with nature and how to get them in a locked-down world.

I was reminded of this last week during a bike ride with my wife through the still-quiet streets of central London. We swung through St James鈥檚 Park and stopped at the lake to admire the pelicans. The sun was shining, the water was clear and the big, ungainly birds were splendidly alien. It was a painful reminder of our decision to cancel a planned holiday to Greece, and with it the hope of seeing wild Dalmatian pelicans.

Thankfully, the country I am stuck in is becoming increasingly exotic. The pandemic has done little to slow Britain鈥檚 accelerating rewilding movement. In the past few months, we have heard that European bison will soon be coming to Kent, that pine martens are making a comeback in England and that a pair of white storks at the Knepp Estate in West Sussex have successfully raised chicks 鈥� the first wild storks to breed in Britain for more than 500 years.

Two major rewilding projects have also been announced during lockdown. Solar power entrepreneur Jeremy Leggett has bought a 500-hectare estate in the Highlands of Scotland to restore nature there, and farmers in East Anglia are planning to turn over 250,000 hectares of intensively farmed agricultural land that could one day support lynx, beavers and, yes, pelicans.

Rewilding is largely a matter of humans getting out of the way and letting nature take charge. That, of course, has been happening in spades of late due to the sudden suspension of life as we know it 鈥� a period that a group of biologists has proposed calling the

鈥溈烀ǘ淌悠祍 plan to use animal tracking from before, during and after the crisis to see how our activity affects them鈥�

We know that the anthropause has benefited the environment in multiple ways, but its impact on wildlife isn鈥檛 yet clear. There have been anecdotal reports of wild animals venturing into cities: jackals in Tel Aviv, pumas in Santiago, wild boar in Barcelona. But these are small and temporary incursions. What lessons can we learn as we come out of this period and try to build a better world?

To answer this question, conservation biologists have set up an international project called the . Before the crisis, field biologists were already fitting wild animals with bio-loggers, small devices that track their movements and behaviour. The stage was inadvertently set to discover the effects of a global cessation of normal human activity. The scientists plan to analyse animal movement and distribution before, during and after the anthropause to determine exactly how human activity affects them, and then, once life can return to normal, to apply those lessons to the global rewilding movement.

鈥淣obody is asking for humans to stay in permanent lockdown, but we may discover that relatively minor changes to our lifestyles and transport networks can potentially have significant benefits for both ecosystems and humans,鈥� says Martin Wikelski at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Radolfzell, Germany, one of the project鈥檚 leaders. The human benefits include clearer knowledge of potentially dangerous human-wildlife interactions that increase the risk of viruses jumping species, according to the scientists.

I like the term anthropause. It captures the current hiatus in human domination of the planet, but also reminds us that the worst aspects of the Anthropocene could simply come roaring back. Rewilding is a quintessentially Anthropocene project, though it is often criticised for being more of an aesthetic than a scientific one. The pandemic presents a unique opportunity to put it on a more secure scientific footing.