Early this morning (5:30) stalwart beaver defender Jon Ridler saw two kits together, one who ducked under to go in the bank hole just downstream of the primary dam, and one who went back to the hole next to the footbridge. I’m as happy as I can be to know that there are at least two members of our favorite team around.Hopefully there are more than two, but this is encouraging. Now if they could just start the heavy lifting!
On a much less happy note there is sad news from Scotland yesterday where the Edinburgh Zoo announced that their lone captured beaver “Erica” had died. Remember that Scottish National Heritage had decided that the ‘free beavers’ of the river Tay should be called the “Feral beavers” and captured to protect the ‘official’ beaver trial. Erica was the first and only capture of their grand campaign and was never displayed or even much discussed in captivity. A Back-flipping truth-as-pretzle BBC article about the news has even invented the word ‘re-homed’ to avoid saying “captured” when discussing the death.
Re-homed? Really? Have you suggested that term to the Scottish Prison Service because it’s a winner! (I would have gone with ‘kit-napped’ myself, but I’m a traditionalist). I guess dying in captivity is another kind of “Re-Homing”….re-final-homing….No mention of that fact that since beavers are inherently social animals stealing one child from the family and locking it alone in concrete with no other beavers was pretty much a death sentence anyway. A few days before the death was announced (god knows when it happened, January?) SNH announced that they were done playing beaver re-homers for now, and the ‘trial’ had been a success. Remember the 20 beavers they said they were going to catch when this started, and the 50 they were afraid eventually they wouldn’t have room for, I guess I’d call it a success to. If they only capture one at a time, keep them in isolation for 6 months, and let them die, they won’t ever run out of re-homing space.
I made this for Erica yesterday, and I truly hope the dark furry stain of this story will halt any plans SNH might have for this in the future.
