All week Peter Smith (of Wildwood in Kent) has been bursting with news he couldn’t talk about on the Save the Free Beavers of the River Tay forum. Now he can finally come clean.
Wonderful news -a proper release probably in a river system, excellent backing from key stakeholders and being led by all the Welsh Wildlife Trusts. Well done to Adrian and all those involved. Lots of stuff on the website including reports etc. We will be helping with importation and the initial release which I am enormously excited about.
See Wales had a ‘JR beaver release’ of sorts last year, with two females added to private fenced land and the usual freaking out from farmers and fishermen reported on the BBC. They would ruin the land! Eat all trees! Destroy the countryside! Rape the women and children! (Well, maybe not that last one.) But they were slow, and steady and patient like only someone who’s waited 500 years for something can be. Since then they’ve been working and collaborating and educating and soothing feathers, and now they get to release an actual mating pair in an actual stream!
Hooray for CYMRU!!!
(And if you knew how hard I worked to find this particular scene on Youtube, you would play it!)
Last night our OWN beavers did NOT disappoint. It seemed to be a ‘coming out party’ for JR who actually crossed the secondary dam and stuck around long enough to photograph for once. Make sure to check out last night’s post, and here’s an additional wonder:
