Scottish Beaver Trial publishes its final report
The Scottish Beaver Trial, the first formal reintroduction of a mammal ever to take place in the UK, has published its final report. The five-year-trial, at Knapdale forest, Argyll, is a partnership led by the Scottish Wildlife Trust and the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland.
The first Norwegian beavers were released in Knapdale in 2009 and monitoring ended in May. This report will help ministers decide on the future of beavers in Scotland.
Now this is worth curling up and reading next to a good fire with a cup of hot chocolate. Or maybe Scotch. It’s a huge file and is taking forever to download but the entire thing is accessible here and you can count on me for some highights. I thought it was impressive but Victor Clements just scoffed that its mostly presentation with little information. I was interested in details of the beavers lives. Here’s the family tree, (ours is so much better!)
The first thing that really caught my eye is that the trial site turned out not to be secure and maybe some of the beavers got away into the sea!! (Which our friends of the River Tay Beavers should find fascinating!) They installed a kind of flow device in the first dam and then realized it didn’t matter if the pond flooded! I was also interested to learn that two of their kits were predated, one by a fox and one probably by a large domestic dog. This surprises me not at all, but is worth remembering the next time someone says beavers don’t have predators.
Two kits were also found predated during the course of the Trial. One of these was a Dubh Loch kit found dead on 8 September 2011 in shallow water at the edge of a flooded track at the marshy eastern end of the loch by the SBT Field Officer while carrying out a routine field-sign survey. The cadaver was collected and taken for full post-mortem examination, which indicated that the beaver had been in good body condition but had died as a result of traumatic injuries to the head, possibly caused by a large predator. Although unconfirmed, it was felt by SBT staff that this could have been caused by a domestic dog–a diagnosis strengthened by later comparison with a kit killed by a fox. The second kit was found on Loch Linne by researchers from the University of Stirling, who were undertaking vegetation transects as part of their annual data collection. This kit was quite badly decomposed, and all internal organs were missing, so full post-mortem examination was not possible, though from the location of the puncture wound and marks on the bones it was presumed that this individual had been predated by a fox.
Remember that these beavers got “injected, inspected, detected, dis-infected, neglected and selected.”They had Ear Tags, tail radios and GPS systems on their backs. They were weighed, sexed, measured and monitored at regular intervals. Their private moments were caught on film and they still managed to elude the researchers at times. Dispersal, it seems was really hard to catch, and the first and second year it didn’t happen at all. Population density seemed to really effect behavior because where there was only one male at Dubh Loch the father (Bjornar) surprised everyone by mating with his own undisperssed offspring (Mille) who went on to have several kits. This is not totally unprecedented, but theu didn’t exactly issue a press release!
And speaking of press releases, there is an entire section on how they educated the media and the public for this monumental undertaking. They really included public support at every level and I am not at all surprised it worked for them. This is a great learning activity they did with the lower grades that has me thinking about the beaver festival! They made sure there was accessible, inviting viewing for the public 
and encouraged visitors. They did what they could to bring the public along with them and make sure everyone understood where their tax dollars were going. There’s a very good reason why the Scottish Beaver Trial received an award for being the best Conservation Project of the year.
The report concludes with these exciting remarks:
The authors of this report, along with many others across Scotland, Wales and England, look forward to the coming months when a decision on the future of beavers in Scotland will be made. Perhaps one day we shall see the widespread return of this native species to our lochs, rivers and burns.
Worth A Dam welcomed the trial in 2009 and is proud of its conclusion in 2014. And when you watch this inspiring baptism think about how much bigger our festival is now.
