I mostly agree with our friends that the Scottish Government should get it’s act together and protect beavers BUT I’m just loving these headlines and positive news stories! Maybe they could just continue to be stubborn and drive this narrative a little longer?
Give beavers permanent British residence!
Beavers are Britain’s native aquatic engineers and their return to sites in Scotland and England is doing wonders for the local environment, write Nigel Willby & Alan Law: restoring wetlands, recreating natural river dynamics and ecology, filtering farm pollutants from water, and improving habitat for trout and other fish.
Should we let these beavers take up permanent residence? The Scottish government has first refusal. It is overdue to make a decision on the back of five years of scientific monitoring and other evidence.
While conservationists wait with bated breath, we think there’s only one sensible choice – beavers should be allowed back. None of this is about nostalgia. Beavers are often referred to as ‘ecosystem engineers‘ and herein lies much of the reasoning and controversy behind their reintroduction.
There is extensive evidence from Europe and North America that wetlands created by beaver dams benefit everything from water plants, dragonflies and amphibians to fish and ducks to song birds and bats. In Knapdale, damming by beavers transformed a small pond into a wetland of a type and complexity probably unseen in Britain for centuries.
Beavers can also restore habitats without the need for a bulldozer or planning permission. On the Bamff estate on Tayside, we found that grazing by beavers trebled the number of wetland plants over a nine-year period.
Where raised water levels saturated a meadow thanks to damming of ditches, the number of plant species increased by 49% and the multitude of habitats created increased the total diversity of aquatic invertebrates by almost 30%.
Indeed the benefits were even further reaching. We found that the beaver dams also acted as a sink for agricultural pollutants, and may also help to reduce the risk of flooding. Individually these findings are not that surprising, though it is unusual to demonstrate them all in parallel.
…We might incentivise this with subsidies to recognise the ecosystem services that species like beavers provide, while compensating inconvenienced landowners. And as well as mitigating against the impacts that reintroduced creatures can cause, we’ll need to think more about the wider risk of further divorcing people from nature by creating wilderness areas.
But be all that as it may, the positives greatly outweigh the negatives. When it comes to conservation, we have lacked ambition for too long. Saying yes to reintroducing beavers is the sort of bold and forward-looking move that would resurrect the UK’s conservation credentials.
Can I get an Amen? Well done Nigel Willby and Alan Law! Watching Scotland strive for what we have come to take for granted reminds me of an aspiring country planning its first democratic election. Yes democracies are messy and bring all kinds of problems with them. But I’m reminded of that famous quote attributed to Winston Churchill.
“Democracy is the worst form of government.
Except for all the other ones.”
Having beavers brings all kinds of challenges and lots of things could go wrong, I fully agree. But not having them on the landscape, storing water, making habitat, and enriching streams, is much, much worse. Take it from every single other country around the world who destroyed their beaver population and then regretted it and reintroduced them.
Like Us.
Yesterday I was playing around with an idea for our award at Earth Day, linking John Muir and beavers. I had to work hard to find the signatures of each man and am thinking about this as a shirt. Thoughts?
