The environmental charity Friends of the Earth has launched legal action to try to stop the government from ordering the capture of a family of beavers living in the wild in Devon.
FoE lawyers have submitted legal papers seeking to challenge licences that allow the capture the animals, believed to be the first beavers to live in the wild in England for centuries.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) plans to trap the colony and transfer the creatures to a zoo or wildlife park. It argues they are a non-native, invasive species and could carry a disease.
FoE argues that because Britain was part of the beavers’ natural range before they were hunted to extinction, they are protected under European law.
Friends of the Earth has picked up the gauntlet and will challenge DEFRA under EU law. Unlike their English overlords, they think 500 years of extinction is enough, and want beavers back on the landscape. I can’t tell you how happy this makes me for those lucky beavers and for all of us who get to read quotes like this over and over in international media.
“We know that beavers can bring many benefits, such as boosting fish stocks, improving biodiversity and helping to prevent flooding – as well as injecting a little more joy into our landscape.
The story was picked up by the BBC this morning, and will be everywhere by tomorrow. The first step was to write a protocol letter to ‘Natural England’ who very unnaturally issued the license for the beavers to be trapped in the first place. This forces them to release more information and is the first step in a judicial review. If you would like to help you can donate to the campaign or sign up for alerts here:
Let’s hope the next step is “Liberty and Justice for all beavers”
Believe it or not, this program aired this very Saturday on the Children’s BBC program “Wild”. It was obviously filmed before DEFRA had made up its mind to ruin everything so there is no mention of beavers being illegally released or carrying parasites. It’s just an irresistible story of beaver adventure. I’m guessing someone at the BBC got a memo Monday morning and scrubbed it because if you search for the program online you get this.
Fortunately for us, stalwart beaver protector Peter Smith had already uploaded it to Youtube and we get to watch it first hand. I think I have a crush on host Naomi Wilkinson, because her enthusiasm for beavers is entirely infectious. Meanwhile pay attention to the language. This is alarmingly accurate for beaver-TV! If I were you I’d watch it today because tomorrow British government television might come lumbering along and swallow the youtube version next.
Wasn’t that amazing? The other amazing thing that came across my desk this weekend (besides a memory card problem, did you know your computer can actually send telegraphic messages and beep to tell you why it broken? Me neither!) was the Moorhen Marsh Study done in 1998 on the beavers at Mt. View Sanitation. For years we’ve been running into the odd person at displays who has mentioned that they were on the volunteer beaver study group between the Lindsay Museum and Mt. View Sanitation. I was fascinated by this and stunned that no information or observations about this study existed or ever found its way to our beaver sub-committee. That is until Kelly Davidson was cleaning out her desk and sent us this.
There’s a description of their methods and the some 15 volunteers who participated, as well as an excellent species list of 26 in all. It doesn’t say much that is startling about beavers and sadly there are no photos attached, but it did have a description of the behaviors they observed, all but one of which we see in Alhambra Creek. See if you can spot they outlier?
Beavers were observed swimming, chewing, diving, eating reeds, laying on their backs to eat, carrying stick or weeds in their mouth, patrolling or circling the ponds, shaking their heads, wiggling their ears, rubbing their faces with their paws and splashing.
Those beavers built a full lodge in the marsh and two kits were observed at the site. What I love best is thinking that one of those kits was probably one of our original parents. Bear with me here, but those beavers didn’t live in the bank and none of our 22 beavers have ever built a lodge but our original mom. In fact she built two in the span of three years and no one has done it since she died. This would make her 12 when she died, which is a nice life span for a wild beaver. So I’m going to assume it was mom that grew up in Moorhen Marsh. I’m reading this report as if I were looking at her baby pictures, which is a lot of fun. I will upload it to the website or you can read it here yourself.
Yesterday was crazy with beaver activity in the news, but the awesome part that tipped my scales on the wow-meter was that one of the folks of the friends of the free beavers on the River Tay in Scotland got a Freedom of Information Act request from DEFRA with all the correspondence on beavers in the British waterways.
That means all the emails where they talked about lying, got ready to lie, lied and bragged to each other about lying are there for the world to see. The request had been public around 6 hours when this story was published in the Guardian.
Officials at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) have repeatedly said that the beavers, thought to be the first in the wild in England for centuries, could threaten human health because they may be carrying a disease that the UK is currently free of.
But Defra documents and emails, released under Freedom of Information rules, reveal that while Public Health England (PHE) is concerned about the disease, it does not believe the beavers would increase the risk to human health from the tapeworm, Echinococcus multilocularis (EM).
“PHE accept that the main risk of an incursion is likely to be through international movements of pets, both legal and illegal… Therefore they are not convinced that the three Devon beavers necessarily represent a significant increase in overall risk,” a Defra official emailed colleagues after meeting with Public Health England.
But that’s the special lie we picked! Are you saying it doesn’t sound true enough to the experts? We’re DEFRA. We’ll make it true! So they went on their merry way saying there was a chance of disease even though the experts told them there wasn’t. And that’s why THIS was the email heard around the world.
The whole cache is a treasure trove, especially the indignant letters from citizens outraged at the decision and their pained justifying responses.See if you can find mine! It’s nice to know that those things are kept somewhere, although it did give me a mad longing to see the FOIA on correspondence regarding the Martinez Beavers in 2007.
(Mostly I just want to see letters between the mayor and Mary Tappel. But that’s just me.)
If you’re too mature to have fun playing in DEFRA’s dirty underthings, there was also an EXCELLENT beaver report on NPR KNAU in Arizona yesterday. Click to listen to a short but sweet reminder of why beavers matter.
And just in case you thought the beaver news cycle passed Martinez by, they rolled out the swanky new website for our sponsor Inquiring Systems Inc yesterday. Check us out under ““projects“. I think we’re placed according to how many hits we get, because we keep moving around. So CLICK on this, please and remind the world that beavers matter.
I’m very happy they highlighted this quote:
AS CALIFORNIA FACES MORE DROUGHT YEARS, IT IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER TO COEXIST WITH THESE IMPORTANT ‘WATER SAVERS’.
We haven’t heard much from Devon lately on the great beaver trapping from DEFRA. If you’ll remember, a slew of citizens and farmers came to the meeting asking that they be allowed to remain.
DEFRA took this opportunity to blow off the meeting and pick up the traps instead. We heard they haven’t been too successful at catching any quarry, and it is looking like the good guys were winning this round. At least by default.
There seems to be a movement in this country to re-introduce species that have long been extinct, of which the beaver is one of many. These people will support their argument by declaring the beaver has only been extinct for 200-300 years. Not so. It became extinct in this country in the 12th century. As Derek Gow says they are great engineers building dams and constructing homes in rivers and streams from trees they have felled. Derek says they create wetlands. I do not think so. The likely outcome is more floods. Surely we have had enough floods in the last two years without additional problems caused by beavers.
Do not upset the status quo – the freshwater habitat in this country is a fragile ecosystem. Much damage can be done by reintroducing an alien species which the beaver is. We as humans do not have to feel guilty just because we were instrumental in the destruction of the beaver all those years ago. The world has moved on, so has our country and our rivers.
The beaver should be considered an alien in this country just like the grey squirrel, coypus, mink and Japanese knotweed. The damage they can do is too great to take the chance.
Those who put these animals in the River Otter should help the Environment Agency trap them – act now before it is too late.
Alien beavers! Thank goodness the West Morning news printed this ANONYMOUS letter before it was too late! I wonder who penned this thoughtful treatise? (Mr. George Eustice, don’t be so modest!) You should go read the whole thing because it contains a lovely passage from HBN Hynes which makes beaver restoration sound very heroic – and then argues ‘we can’t STAND this much repair in our rivers’! I especially like how it warns us of what’s to come and ends with the recognition that the government trappers have absolutely no idea what they’re doing and need assistance.
(The good news is that I see this morning another very popular badger cull is coming so they’ll have something else to keep them busy for a while.)
Your pro-beaver comment is needed now. I’m particularly of mine.
And just so you know not all of Europe is ignorant of beavers, I got this from Duncan Haley this morning.
The Voronezhsky Biosphere Reserve is pleased to invite you to take part in 7-th International Beaver Symposium! The symposium will take place in Russia, Voronezh, September 14-17, 2015
Organizers of symposium:
MINISTRY OF NATURAL RESOURCES AND ENVIRONMENT OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
Department of State Policy on Environmental ProtectionVoronezh Region GovernmentRussian Research Institute of Game Management and Fur FarmingVoronezhsky Biosphere Reserve
The seventh symposium! And before you start thinking this event is exactly as old as our beaver festival, it’s actually much older, since it’s held every two years. You might remember back when Skip Lisle was invited to the one in Lithuania and our beaver friend Alex Hiller met him there.
OTTERY Town Council has pledged its support for a family of beavers, whose future hangs in the balance, to be allowed to remain on the banks of the River Otter downstream.
At the full council meeting on Monday, September 1, there was a unanimous vote among town councillors for the Department for the Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra) to leave them be.
Ottery ward member, Councillor Roger Giles had requested that the council discussed and gave its backing to the beavers and proposed that the council ask East Devon MP Hugo Swire, to insist that DEFRA return the beavers to the river as soon as they have been tested.
Defra say catching East Devon’s beavers could take months after rumours the wild animals are now in Honiton
Pass me the popcorn. Something tells me this is about to get very, very interesting. Just imagine the kind of civic pressure it would take to get the Martinez City council to give a unanimous vote to support the beavers. They never even voted to tolerate the beavers. Devon must be a hotbed of public beaver-protection about now, with farmers keeping an eye on their lands and hurrying beavers along when ever the government trappers lumber into the area.
Councillor Claire Wright, independent member of East Devon District Council, said there was “general bafflement” in the area as to why they should be removed.
She said: “Human beings were responsible for the extinction of beavers in this country several hundred years ago because they were hunted for their fur, so it is now our responsibility to do what we can to support beavers’ reintroduction to our rivers.
“And they are good for rivers too, helping with water purity and they are completely vegetarian, so are no threat to small animals.
“The decision to let them stay should be made by the community, not by officials from London. There is a lot of support locally for them remaining on the river and general bafflement about why Defra would want to remove them. There needs to be a full consultation before any decisions are made.”
Someone pinch me, I think I’m dreaming. City government fighting the feds over the benefits of beavers. I hope I don’t wake up before it gets to the good part. Even if, God forbid, this doesn’t end well for these particular beavers, it’s put the issue in the public eye and dramatically made a point. Beavers are good for creeks. And Anglers are wrong.
The Angling Trust has been campaigning against moves to introduce beavers to England because of the damage that they can do to rivers, migrating fish runs and the potential spread of diseases.
Mark Lloyd, chief Executive of the Angling Trust, said: “Nowadays too many people seem to want to see ‘rewilded’ mammals introduced to our landscapes, but we must re-build damaged river ecosystems from the bottom up, not from the top down.
“Urgent and concerted Action is needed to restore habitats and fish populations in our rivers rather than irresponsible re-introduction programmes.”
Of course you know what’s really happening. The UK can’t protect fishermen interests from dams or culverts or sewers or water quality or power plants. They can’t keep fish alive by reducing pollution or human waste or global warming. But dammit they CAN get rid of those pesky beavers. That’s something right?
Obviously Worth A Dam offers all our support to the Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories that are doing the actual trapping. Here’s some helpful advice for your hunt.
Oh and there’s a new DEFRA game you might want to play. It’s called “Change the Acronym to fit the Crime”. I started with
Let’s hope the next step is “Liberty and Justice for all beavers”
