How the British Beaver is back in business
Along with boar, otters and water voles, beavers and red squirrels are being brought back to Britain in places like the beautiful Escot Estate in West Devon.
Over the past 35 years, conservationists have started to reintroduce the species. Today, there are believed to be at least half a million of the fat, furry herbivores (they don’t eat fish) swimming about all over Europe.
Apart from Britain, that is. We’ve been a bit slow to catch on. But, finally, in 2009 three beaver families were released in Argyll and there have been small projects in England, too. Just last month a young male was discovered living in a slurry pit in Cornwall, suggesting that beavers could well be breeding in the wild.
Escot led the way in this revival. They acquired a pair of Bavarian beavers in 2006, after John-Michael saw them in Poland and fell in love with the species. The pair bonded and in 2008 produced some of the first kits seen in the UK in 400 years.
Ohh, I just love reading an article in the Telegraph where people admit they fell in love with beavers! Seems Johm-Michael Epcot has been working hard to teach locals and tourists about the benefit of bringing beavers back to the landscape. He already has a sympathetic ear in the media: the article reads like a eulogy.
Beavers might be thriving at Escot, but their fate throughout Britain is still far from certain. While conservationists lobby for the reintroduction all over the UK, many landowners object to their impact on the habitat.
“What people don’t understand is that they’re actually helping the environment,” says John-Michael. “Yes they can change the landscape. But by creating small tributaries and still pools of water, they help encourage insects. Which, in turn, attracts bird life. “They can help people, too. At Escot we had a disused Victorian brick bathing pool, which I spent most of my childhood trying to repair. Within weeks of the beavers’ arrival, they’d filled it up. And they keep the trees nice and neat. If there are any we don’t want nibbled, we just pop some chicken wire around the base of the trunk.”
Nicely done – (although I would only recommend chicken wire if your beavers happened to be the same size as chickens.) Still, it effectively communicates that there are ways to protect what you want without killing beavers. Apparently the breeding female was killed last year when the tree she was chewing fell on her. Her two kits eventually died as well. In a manner I can only describe as obliquely British Mr. Epcot describes her as beloved, fondly missed, and DELICIOUS!
Yes, they ate her.
Go read the article for yourself, it makes sense in a respecting-nature living-off-the-land kinda way. Anyway he is obviously a friend, and just a nudge away from starting beaver festival UK. There are sure a lot of ‘private beavers’ in Devon. I’d be very surprised if they didn’t take reintroduction matters into their own hands — er — paws eventually!
Last night at the dam we were entertained by a very enthusiastic juvenile western grebe who fished like he was chasing greased pigs through a commuter train platform, and dove like the water surface was so hard that penetrating it required a running start. Here, let me show you a little of what I mean.
There was a cluster of old friends, beaver defenders and Worth A Dam regulars on the bridge, and we were all rewarded with lots of this:
Really, in the few weeks we have left before solstice starts to rob our very log days, you should come down and see Alhambra Creek’s version of waterworld for yourself.
