Derek Gow’s maverick efforts to breed and reintroduce rare animals to Britain’s countryside.

Derek Gow decided to abandon conventional farming about ten years ago, not long after the curlews left. At the time, Gow, who is thickset and white of beard, had a flock of fifteen hundred breeding ewes and a hundred and twenty cows, which he kept on a three-hundred-acre farm of heavy clay close to the border between Devon and Cornwall, in southwest England. He was renting an extra field from a neighbor, and a pair of curlews had come to forage for a few days. A farm worker spotted the distinctive brown birds; they have long beaks that slope downward, like violin bows. “He didn’t even recognize what they were,” Gow told me.

In its way, what Gow is doing is similar to other “rewilding” projects across Britain—a term that has become faddish and covers everything from letting a few fields go to seed, for tourist purposes, to major conservation projects, such as breaching a seawall along the Lancashire coast to restore salt marsh that had been claimed for agriculture. But what is different about Gow’s farm is that he wants it to be a breeding colony, a seedbed for a denuded island. “The outreach, if we can get this right, is going to be much bigger,” he told me. Gow is a disciple of Gerald Durrell, the writer and conservationist. In 1990, when Gow was working at a country park in Scotland, he attended a summer school at Durrell’s zoo, on the island of Jersey, in the English Channel, about the captive breeding of endangered species. In the book “The Stationary Ark,” which Durrell wrote in 1976, he argued for the creation of small, specialized zoos dedicated to propagating “low-ebb species” that were vulnerable in the wild. Such “zoo banks” would be motivated by saving animal populations rather than attracting human visitors. “The whole organization would act not only as a sanctuary, but as a research station and, most important, as a training ground,” Durrell wrote.

Derek fucking Gow in the New Yorker! I am still blinking to think that this is someone I met, know and has our tshirt! Of course I met him in Canyonville at the State of the beaver Conference some years back. And he has been plugging away ever since at his goals and published a very well regarded book to boot.

You won’t be a bit surprised that this is my favorite paragraph,

Gow’s triumph has been the reintroduction of the Eurasian beaver. He parked his car by a reed-lined pond, near the base of a small valley. A family of four beavers lives in this part of his farm (three or four families and around a dozen penned beavers live on Gow’s land over all) and they had blocked a stream and rerouted the flow of water around an old levee and flood defenses, to Gow’s obvious satisfaction. “Every single one of these medieval gutters is blocked, many, many times over,” he said. British place names are strewn with beavers: Beverston, Beaverdyke, Bevercotes, Beverbrook. John Bradshaw, the judge who presided over the trial and execution of King Charles I, in January, 1649, wore a bulletproof beaver-skin hat. But the animals were killed off by the early nineteenth century. One of the last records of their existence is a bounty of two pence paid for a beaver head in Bolton Percy, near York, in 1789.

Never let it be said that saving beavers won’t take you places, It  got within spitting distance of national geographic, (Ben Goldfarb AND Emily Fairfax) the atlantic (a short beaver mention that described us as the ‘delightful couple; in 2012) and now Derek Gow in the fucking New Yorker. Because life is like that sometimes.

There are now around eight known populations of wild beavers in England. Their return delights Gow and unnerves him, too. He is sometimes known as “Beaver Man,” and landowners often call him to see if he can obtain animals for them. Gow’s farm has a quarantine facility, for imported beavers, and he has the capacity to distribute around fifty animals per year. (I watched a beaver, known as Brian, while away a few minutes of his six-month quarantine by chewing on some willow and flopping about in a steel bath.) But there is a growing resistance to their reintroduction and signs of political unease. In Scotland, farmers have been granted licenses to cull beavers that they deem a nuisance on their land. Last year, a hundred and fifteen animals—slightly more than ten per cent of the Scottish beaver population—were killed. Ill-founded rumors of the damage that beavers can cause (such as eating fish; they are herbivores) are widespread. The perfect circle of death remains. Gow senses a conflict looming in England, as well. Last month, the government proposed a “cautious approach” to reintroducing beavers, which would depend on the support of local farmers, landowners, and river users. “I think we have a bigger fight in our hands than we ever imagined possible,” Gow said. “And I don’t think any of us that began this journey—to get the animals, to bring them back to release—at least some, ever thought it would come to this. But I think that’s going to be elemental. And I think it’s going to be really brutal.”

Well I can’t say I disagree. But I would clarify that whether beavers have been gone from the landscape for 500 years or 5 minutes it’s still really hard to manage public attitudes and fears about them to let them come back,

Trust me.

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