Why flooding means we must bring the beaver back to the South West
A wildlife expert says Britain should bring back the beaver to stop the growing menace of flooded homes and businesses. Ecologist Derek Gow says the water-loving creatures would gnaw through trees and build dams, holding back the floods when rivers get swollen by heavy rain.
Britain is lagging behind other European countries who have already re-introduced the beaver and studies in places like Belgium and Germany have proved they can help alleviate flooding, he says.
Remember our old friend Derek Gow from Devon Cornwall? He has beavers on his estate and really values their contribution, got some press because one ‘escaped’ a while ago and was ‘found‘ in a slurry pit. Only it turned out that the ‘found beaver’ was not HIS beaver but was some escapee/refugee/I’m-sick-of-waiting-for-England-to-bring-back-beavers-so-the-beavers-are-just-going-to-do-it-themselves kinda beaver!
I wrote Derek after that first lovely article where he extolled beaver benefits and he kindly wrote back. Turns out he and Paul Ramsay of Scotland know each other and he is very interested in reeducating the population about beavers!
Hi Heidi – thanks for your mail. Things are changing here but sometimes it takes a lifetime to turn round ignorance. Free beavers on the Tay and in Knapdale now and some breeding in England. Ironic that the country which did so much to destroy the species has been so slow to re-understand them.
BW – Derek
So Derek and his team have been using some basic ‘plug and pond’ techniques (beavers without beavers) to slow water in the study area, leaky dams, retained soil and the like. And how do you suppose all that is working? Of course its been excellent! But it takes a lot of time and effort. Farmers are busy men with only so much effort to spare. If ONLY there were some kind of creature that would move in and do all that work for free. Gosh.
“There is nothing about this which is novel – they’ve been re-introduced all over Europe, so we have blueprints on how we go about living with and managing this animal. The only thing that is new is that we here in England are last to do it.
“The real issues are likely to be pretty minor. They are going to block a few culverts, yes, but not stuff that’s unmanageable, and there are ways of resolving these things. You can put beaver guards in place over the culverts.
“You’d look at negatives and cost them, and then the positives. Do they have a significant influence on water retention? If you have a village in the catchment, do they prevent flooding? Do they help hold more water in upper catchment? Do their dams catch silt, nitrates, phosphates?
“If the answer is yes – and the European experience is that they do all these things successfully – you will have significant benefits.”
Derek! We LOVE you! You are changing hearts and minds and obviously know what you’re talking about! Maybe Cornwall needs a beaver festival. Did I mention that my grandfather was from St. Austell?
“For years farmers and others have been doing their best to drain land better, but that water has to go somewhere. If you imagine one million cubic metres of water going through a town quickly in the peak of flood, that’s much higher than you’d have had before the drainage was improved. What we are trying to do is spread that peak by slowing the flow.”
Derek says that natural dams built by beavers across the rivers can do the “slowing-water-down” job effectively and it costs nothing.
Maybe if Derek is spouting beaver benefits in Cornwall and Paul is reciting them in Scotland and Duncan is shouting them in Norway and Glynnis is enumerating them in Canada, California will eventually come plugging along? A girl can only hope.
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Beaver Festival Alert: This weekend I assembled the good work by our friends at Folkmanis and Wildbryde to make basket with 50 of these. Honestly there should be some kind of criminal action taken against anything this cute.
