Happy Labor Day!

Now thi s is a pleasant surprise! Check out Derek Gow’s article about the beavers on his farm in Devon, England. The article expressly specifies you shouldn’t cut and paste, but I’m sure you’ll help me avoid prosecution and click on the original many times so that they are reassured!

I have a lot of unusual animals on my farm here in Devon: water voles, otters, pine martens, wild cats – but the most unusual are probably the beavers. They’re the only beavers on a working farm in Britain. I wanted them because they produce life; if you put them into a stream system on your land, you get more life in it.

See, that’s the kind of opening paragraph a girl like me wants to read on a Saturday morning. The kind where you tuck your feet under you in the chair and settle down for a nice ambling browse – pausing to savor each lovely word and phrase. Devon is in the southeast of England, a good long way from our beaver friends in Scotland, but not very far at all from my ancestors in Cornwall. We travelled once in that direction and stayed in a breathtakingly old farm house listed in the Doomsday book — (1066 to be exac t). That night we walked to a tiny neighborhood pub for dinner where everyone knew everyone else but us, slept in an ancient four poster bed, and stumbled down for breakfast in the morning to a huge dining hall with a great stone fireplace that was big enough for a family to stand in. While the gracious hostess gave us eggs and tea her son wheeled around the great hall with a plastic red and yellow tricycle singing loudly. We could only speculate on the transformations of time and culture that that table had seen!

Let’s just say that if you maintain a farm in Devon you’ve seen a thing or two!

People have the idea that because beavers have huge teeth they chop their way through forests like furry chainsaws, but they’re a creative, not a destructive, force. They open up the river banks to many other species: plants, butterflies, beetles, amphibians and fish. These are the building blocks of life, the species that support others.

Goodness, I’m liking this article, Mr. Gow. I can’t imagine it will be very long before the beaver reintroduction of England takes hold if you keep writing like this. (Just between you and me, there are these free beavers on the river Tay in Scotland that recently got a stay of execution. They probably won’t get all the way to Devon in three years, but I’d be surprised if they don’t cover some reproductive ground.)

Beaver impoundments play a significant role in trapping water and releasing it slowly. If you’re growing crops and leaching silt and chemicals into the water, beaver dams help trap this material and hold it so it doesn’t end up silting up main rivers or getting washed out to sea. In short, beavers help purify fresh water and can also reduce floods in lower-lying landscapes and human settlements by trapping and slowing extreme flows.

Beavers have been managing water for millions of years; they’re adapted to do a far better job than us. We can no longer pay to maintain flood walls and flood defences so beavers are a rational option when it comes to water management and flood control. When you look into every argument against the reintroduction of beavers, you’re left with dust.

What a perfect introduction to tomorrow’s Agents of Change interview with Brock Dolman, who told me sagely yesterday ‘California doesn’t have a water shortage problem, it has a water STORAGE problem.” And guess which furry quaduped can help us fix that problem? Mr. Gow certainly knows. Seriously, go read the entire article. It’s definitely Worth A Dam!!!

There’s a new “Save the Wild Beavers of Tay” group on facebook, you should go join and show your support. A letter from Derek Gow, the conservationist involved with the Beaver trial, has been sent to the Guardian. I thought you’d enjoy it.

Louise Ramsay 4:47am Nov 29

Here is a letter to the Guardian by Derek Gow, the wildlife specialist who quarantined the beavers for the Argyll trial. As the Guardian may not publish it, since it is rather long, I am putting it up here for group members to see. Please keep spreading the word.

Dear Sir,

Your article on the 26th of November 2010 “Fury at Campaign to catch escaped beavers” brings to the fore an issue which has been known and discussed in nature conservation circles for some time. If Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) decides to move against this population then they will do so for reasons which have nothing to do with welfare and little with legality. Their action will be principally inspired because they are the “wrong beavers” in their reckoning. This will probably be coupled with a desire to quietly assuage individual landowners or land use groups who are implacable and to eliminate a perceived threat to the integrity of their official trial in Knapdale, Kintyre.

In the view of very many nature conservationists this course of action is ill considered and profoundly wrong.

Although little is known about the distribution of the beaver population on the Tay they are known to be breeding – juveniles have been filmed playing outside their lodges – and are probably of mixed European origin – Polish, German and Scandinavian. Beavers do not hibernate and rely instead for over winter survival on their autumn body fat reserves coupled with “feeding caches” of branches which they collect and submerge in the bottom of water courses. While these strategies assist the survival of healthy adults they are less effective for juveniles in their first year of life. These small individuals cannot retain significant fat and are therefore reliant on the large, strong adults retrieving food from the caches. They also depend – as a social species – on the close contact of their parents and older siblings for warmth. Beavers live in families based around a central monogamous pair. The splitting of these bonded units through a regime of random capture will result in significant distress. The random removal of adults by trapping in winter could easily result in the death of 1 year olds from starvation or hypothermia. There is no sentient animal welfare case to be made for this casual action.

I have a beaver family on my farm in Devon and have been involved with the species for many years. I know most of the centres who maintain this species in Britain. A hidden detail in the Tay agenda is the ultimate fate of the captured individuals. If they are not to be sterilised and released then there is currently no zoological facility in Britain or Europe which has the capacity to keep 50 beavers. Even if they could be exported to Europe there is little wild space for them there as a result of either natural re-colonisations or past reintroductions. If there is therefore no space in captivity for captured individuals and no prospect of their release elsewhere then they will have to be killed in significant numbers by rifle shots to their heads or lethal injections. It is inconceivable that SNH, the Scottish Executive and their partner organisations are not perfectly well aware of this.

An official study undertaken by Natural England (NE) suggests that once established in the wild that European beavers would be protected by EU law. This situation is however complex. Normally it would be an offence to “release or allow to escape into the wild any animal” which “is not normally resident…….to Great Britain”. European beavers undoubtedly were a former resident and may have survived as a wild species until the 16th century. No definition of what is ordinary resident has ever been recorded in UK law and if the Tay beavers are established then no licence may be required from any nature conservation body in Britain for further releases.

The Tay beavers in the opinion of SNH are not the “right beavers”. To understand this position it must be considered that by the beginning of the 20th century the beaver population in Western Europe had been reduced by human hunting to less than 400 individuals. These were confined to small populations in France, Germany and Norway. A study undertaken for SNH of the semi-fossil remains of beavers in Britain suggested that those in Scotland were more closely allied to the French population than any other. On the basis however that the English sample were closer in type to modern Scandinavian beavers a decision was made to use these for Knapdale. The genetic difference between these populations is insignificant and physical abnormalities have been widely recorded in Europe where reintroduced populations have been formed from these single source stocks alone. In Eastern Europe a population of perhaps 2000 beavers survived. These are much more genetically variable than those in the west and will readily interbreed. Both subspecies are already mixed throughout their current wild range as a result of natural re-colonisation and past reintroductions. As far as the wider ecology of the beaver is concerned the otters that hunt in the pools they create, the frogs that spawn in their wetlands and the woodpeckers which bore holes in the dead wood they provide will be un-influenced by what type of beaver created the habitat. If the restoration of the beaver in Britain is based on the significant ecological benefit they bring to wetland environments for other species then this dogma makes little sense.

It is to the tremendous credit of SNH and their partner organisations that they persevered with the return of the beaver for so long and were ultimately successful with a licence grant for their Knapdale Trial. Those involved with the project however recognise its limits. It will not answer many of its critic’s queries regarding game fish interaction with beavers or the impact of beavers in intensively developed agricultural environments. At its conclusion in opponents will direct their opposition at these limitations and deride its results as inapplicable. In truth with regard to these factors Knapdale will be. The Tay beavers are living in a landscape which affords these study opportunities in abundance.

Knapdale is an unusual site in respect of its ownership being largely held by the Forestry Commission. Throughout most of mainland Britain the opportunity to replicate projects of this type will be negligible. The single largest consummate challenge for those who wish to restore the beaver will be the development of a process which works in landscapes with multiple landownership. This is a social rather than scientific exercise. European beavers are a very well studied species. We know exactly the benefits they bring to riparian habitats and the problems which arise from their presence in modern countryside. There are effective blue prints in Europe which show that the presence of beavers in developed landscapes is quite possible and that where issues do arise these can be managed. These projects rely absolutely on “whole community” engagement. The fact that beavers have survived on the Tay for some time now with no recorded conflict suggests either a degree of tolerance from private landowners or their pragmatic resolution of any arising issues.

The beaver population on the Tay is therefore of considerable importance. It has no parallel in contemporary Britain and there is little chance of its like arising for many years to come. Although its creation is unconventional its existence offers significant opportunity. All that is required to develop this resource is an informed, unbiased rational appraisal of its worth coupled with a flexible approach to its development.

Yours Sincerely

Derek Gow.