New reports released on Knapdale Scottish Beaver Trial

Six new reports examining the Scottish Beaver Trial in Argyll have been published. The studies will help the Scottish government in considering any future reintroductions of the animals.

The first Norwegian beavers were released in Knapdale in 2009 after six months of quarantine at the Highland Wildlife Park near Aviemore.

The reports cover the health and diet of the mammals and their impact on the landscape and local economy.Researchers noted that the beavers changed the shape of woodland close to loch shores and increased the water level of one loch after building a dam on it.

The presence of the animals at Knapdale boosted visits to the area by “beaver tourists” and volunteers to the project, according to one of the reports. The same research suggested the benefit to local businesses was “modest”.

The only beavers in the world more famous than Martinez beavers. They’ve been studied, observed, weighed, poked and prodded. The water they backed up has been counted and the very trees they chewed have been measured for regrowth. The trial was finally concluded and the data is in. Now they only need to prepare summaries for the government and recommend Aye or Nay. I can’t seem to find the reports online, but I’ll keep looking. This part made me smile.

Martin Gaywood, who leads the independent scientific monitoring of the trial for Scottish Natural Heritage, said it was essential that any species reintroduction project was properly managed and monitored.

He said: “The independent monitoring of the Scottish Beaver Trial has helped us understand how they behave in a Scottish environment.

Umm very like they behave in any other environment?

I couldn’t resist. These adorable buttons and many others are being donated to our silent auction by Tevah and Jody Platt from Michigan. They were so excited when I asked them to think about donating that they designed buttons just for us! It turns out they grew up in the Bay Area and their mom was a HIV/AIDS counselor in Martinez. (Small beaver world.) They had never heard the beaver story and were thrilled to learn about it. They have many fantastic designs, but I sent these right away to our friends of the Tay beavers. You can go check out their creative buttons here:

Our sponsor ISI was kind enough to update our profile page with the recent radio appearance. They describe it as a National Public Radio show, which it was, but thank goodness I only thought of it as limited to CT.

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.

Health watchdog contradicts claims Devon beavers pose human health risk

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.