Month: December 2010

Is it me or does that beaver sound vaguely Scottish? On a related note Louise Ramsay of the Tay Beaver Bruhaha offers this excellent read…

Here is an article by Jim Crumley in the Dundee Courier today. It is very entertainly written and highly recommended if you have a moment.

Jim Crumley

I SUPPOSE I should really know better by now, but I have been trying to fathom the logic that underpins the thought processes of the denizens of that strange and faraway land known as Scottish Natural Heritage.

“Oh, what now?” I hear you ask, the answer to which is,“Beavers.”

It seems that SNH has commissioned the services of SASA, that’s the Scottish Agricultural Sciences Agency since you ask, and no, I’d never heard of it either, but I do lead a rather sheltered life, and have never had cause to prompt an investigation of potato blight, which I gather is the agency’s stock-in-trade. But SASA has another arrow in its quiver, which is to go Pied-Piper-like around the land ridding it of vertebrate pests – rabbits, mink, rats, that kind of thing – a skill that SNH has called on in an attempt to rid Tayside of its beavers.

“Hold on,” I hear you say, you being of a thoughtful turn of mind, “surely SNH wants to establish a beaver population in Scotland? Didn’t it fund a reintroduction scheme in Argyll?”

You see, I knew I could count on you to ask intelligent questions. Yes is the answer to both questions. You may be surprised to learn (I know I was pretty astounded), that putting a handful of beavers back in to Argyll has cost £2million, which seems to my o-level arithmetic to work out at rather more than £100,000 a beaver.

The figure is all the more astounding when you consider that the Tayside population has established itself free of charge and is apparently self-sustaining, a state of affairs which poses a number of problems for SNH.

Firstly, the Argyll project begins to look like not very good value for money.

Secondly, the Tayside population seems to suggest that allowing nature to manage nature is a better idea than allowing people to do it, which is embarrassing at the very least for SNH, the Scottish Government’s advisor on conservation. Reading between the lines, it is fairly safe to assume that SNH feels that its Argyll project is threatened by the Tayside beavers. As the government scours the public sector for every unnecessary scrap of spending it can strike from the record as if it has never been, there must already be mutterings in dark corners that if we can have beavers on Tayside for nothing, why don’t we do away with the £100,000-a-head beavers in Argyll?

Hence the involvement of SASA whose role in all this will be to trap the Tayside beavers and either send them off to sundry zoos or otherwise dispose of them, which means killing them. They are, after all…wait for it, wait for it…the wrong kind of beavers.

The £100,000-a-head beavers are from Norway, and are thought to be genetically more or less identical to the long-extinct Scottish population. The problem with them is that they come from a localised Norwegian population and they have brought with them some of the obvious defects of sustained in-breeding. Several have died as a result.

The free Tayside beavers are from Bavaria. Actually they’re from Perthshire, which is where the origins of the population are thought to have escaped from a wildlife park, and where they seem to have established a breeding population in 2001, and from that small beginning they have migrated up into Angus and other parts of east Perthshire No-one knows how many there are and estimates seem to vary between about 30 and about 100.

So they seem to be prospering, and the slightly hybridised nature of the Eurasian beavers of Bavaria has none of the defects of the genetically pure but inbred European beavers from Norway. In other words, those animals defined as the wrong kind of beavers seem to be the right kind if the object of the exercise is to establish a wild population of breeding beavers.

And here is where the logic starts to fall apart at the seams. Instead of studying the Tayside animals to learn more about them from nature, SNH’s response has been to take nature out of the equation so that the only beaver study in the land is the one it has spent £2million on. Of course, studying the Argyll beavers is made simple by the fact that every beaver is radio-collared and micro-chipped and generally equipped with enough technology to make it worthwhile establishing a new branch of PC World in Oban. The Tayside animals have none of these things, and the only way you can watch is to practise stealth and patience and get cold and sit still and just watch them when they turn up.

When you watch their behaviour patterns represented as meandering lines on a graph on a laptop screen, you have achieved little more than reducing a wild animal to a computer game, which is hardly an accomplishment to be proud of. When you sit still outside in their world and watch their behaviour patterns unfold before your very eyes, you pay them the compliment of allowing them their mystery. They may or may not reveal their mysteries to what they judge to be the right kind of watching eyes.

And what is more valuable in terms of our understanding of this animal we have invited back into the land that once extinguished it: to watch it hamstrung with technology and fankled by bureaucracy, or to watch it on its own terms, as nature intended?

And here is another question I feel certain you are about to ask as the SASA people confront their task of capturing and quite possibly killing wild beavers: is that legal?

We may not have got around to a specific beaver protection law in Scotland yet: the introduction project is still officially a trial, which may yet be abandoned. But the EU species and habitats directive of 1992 requires member governments to look at ways of re-introducing lost mammal species, and the beaver is one of these, and whether it is Norwegian or Bavarian should not affect its right to protection within the reintroduction process.

In the same way, a sea eagle that wandered across the North Sea from mainland Europe would be given the same level of protection here as a sea eagle raised from the egg at a Scottish nest.

So it seems to me that nature is trying to tell us something with its Tayside beaver colony. We spend so much of our time and energy and resources trying to persuade nature to do our bidding, to operate within conditions we impose on it. Here is an all too rare opportunity to bear witness as nature unfolds the direct opposite of that process, as nature imposes new conditions on us. We should watch and learn and delight in the possibilities that will flow whenever we are willing to give nature its head.”