Yesterday’s interview went well but it must have tired me out. I slept until 7:15 which has almost never happened since beaver-watching changed my habits. Never mind, the grant application for the city is done, I heard from Alan Newport thanking me for sending Jon Greigg’s presentation at Tufts, and writer Ben Goldfarb says this morning he is going to contact the McAdams. I sent along his phone numbers and email and now it’s just coast and focus until earth day. A quiet beaver front today, so it’s a great day to talk about this article.
UK’s most talented architects are not human
In a green, idyllic corner of southwest England, the beaver – a once common, but now long-absent inhabitant – is making its mark again on the British countryside. After being hunted into extinction for its fur and meat in the United Kingdom some 400 years ago, locals discovered a small, wild population of Eurasian beavers living along the confusingly named River Otter in east Devon in 2008. The discovery delighted scientists.
“It’s a keystone species, an animal that manipulates its environment and benefits other species,” Mark Elliott of theDevon Wildlife Trust (DWT) told DW. “And we have some fantastic examples of things that have benefited.”
A team of scientists and conservationists from DWT and the University of Exeter are hoping to win over opponents by demonstrating the animal’s advantages, thus paving the way for reintroduction across the country.
The DWT is managing two beaver projects in Devon. One focuses on the population on the River Otter, where the animals are allowed to exist more or less naturally in what is the only licensed wild trial in England.
The other is further west, on an enclosed and well-fortified, isolated site near the quaint market town of Okehampton. It is at the enclosed site that the science happens, via a series of camera traps and state-of-the-art monitoring equipment.
“This is some of the leading research going on in the world about beaver hydrology,” says Elliot, a beaver aficionado and wetland ecologist who has been with the DWT for 10 years.
Since their introduction to the site five years ago, the beavers’ prodigious engineering skills have transformed a once densely wooded willow grassland into what Elliott describes as a “huge complex wetland.”
Nice article! For a moment reading this I imagined how very lucky a beaver would be to come back to a land they have been missing 500 years. Not that they know they’re the only ones or the first, but imagine what it’s like to have no competition for resources, no habitat to defend from intrusion, endless trees to choose from that haven’t been browsed in 500 years. Do they even scent mark? Because why bother? Do they still disperse? Or maybe they go off looking for a mate and come back when they find none?
I’m sure they behave just like they did in Bavaria or wherever they’re from. Maybe their world’s no different through a beavers eyes. But its a big wide world. No competition. Like being locked in a department store over night, or left behind on mars. They are the only ones there. And they have their run of it.
