ALL CREATURES GREAT & SMALL
Patrick Barkham celebrates the long-standing residents that make up Britain’s rich fauna This month BEAVERS
Patrick Barkham celebrates the long-standing residents that make up Britain’s rich fauna. This month: beavers
TAKE A STROLL ALONG THE RIVERBANK BEYOND THE Devon village of Otterton on a fine evening this summer and you’ll encounter an unusual number of people. Picnic blankets are placed beside the River Otter, small children sit on parents’ shoulders and all eyes are fixed on the languid midsummer flow. A bubble of water and, suddenly, plop! A tail the colour of mud slaps against the water. A blunt nose, big black nostrils and a sizeable, flat-topped head rises above the surface. Watching an otter in the wild is still a thrill, but this is something much, much rarer – a beaver.
The beaver was hunted to extinction in Britain nearly five hundred years ago but is now swimming along a select number of rivers in Scotland and England. Its return is captivating, curious and controversial, for not everyone is keen to have these great engineers reshaping our waterways. It is easy to mistake a beaver for an otter simply because that’s the only large mammal we’re used to glimpsing on a river, but the two animals are completely different. The otter is a sinuous predator, a mustelid or member of the weasel family. Its life is a ceaseless patrol in search of fish. Many people assume the beaver also eats fish – blame CS Lewis, who put fish-eating beavers in Narnia – but the stockier beaver is a herbivorous rodent. As soon as you see one on the water, the difference is obvious: while beavers are famed for their busyness, they are much slower, calmer and more relaxed than the otter, pottering about, grooming their rather dishevelled-looking wet fur. In late summer, the beavers’ kits appear, which are a big draw for the crowds in Devon: these adorable baby animals paddle through the water like aquatic guinea pigs. But such idyllic scenes do not reflect the beaver’s history in our country. It was already rare by medieval times, when illustrated compendiums of beasts known as ‘bestiaries’ depicted the hapless creature on the run, pursued by a hornblowing hunter and his dogs. The beaver’s thick fur was very desirable – it was also quite meaty, but most of all it was sought out for its musk, a pleasant-smelling substance that it secretes to mark its territory. This is still used today in some perfume and flavourings; in earlier times, it was considered to have medicinal value, and treated everything from headaches to hysteria. After being wiped out in Britain, the Eurasian beaver was hunted almost to extinction – just 1,200 remained by the beginning of the 20th century.
Today, however, the beaver is being welcomed back for a different purpose: as a boon for biodiversity and as a floodwater engineer. In Europe, reintroductions and legal protection have seen populations increase by more than 14,000 per cent since the 1960s, with the beaver thriving everywhere from Norway to Germany to Romania. In Scotland, an official trial reintroduction of the beaver into Knapdale, Argyll, in 2009 has been followed by beavers mysteriously reappearing on far-distant river systems, including the Tay and the Beauly. Someone, somewhere, is determined to see wild beavers swimming free again, for beavers have also suddenly appeared on the River Otter in Devon.
ENVIRONMENTAL BENEFITS
Beavers may look like placid animals but they wreak profound change on their environment. The phrase “busy as a beaver” reflects their industry: they fell riverside saplings and trees with their bright orange teeth to dam rivers, creating deeper water in which they feel secure. In doing so, beavers build a wildlife
paradise of amphibian and insect-friendly ponds. Scientists counted ten clumps of frogspawn in a small valley in West Devon in 2011; after the site was securely fenced, a pair of beavers were introduced and built their dams and pools. Last year, there were 681 clumps of frogspawn. Water beetle species increased from eight to 26, and water-loving creatures, from kingfishers to willow tits and rare barbastelle bats, all returned. In Scotland, ecologists found that beavers increased the number of plant species by nearly 50 per cent because these industrious animals create boggy meadows and sunny glades, where many more plants, as well as dragonflies and butterflies, thrive. The West Devon experiment also demonstrates how beaver dams filter out pollutants such as phosphates from the stream.
The Scottish authorities have recognised the beaver again as a native animal, ensuring it has protected status. In England, they now number 27 adults across eight territories along the River Otter, and are still ‘on trial’, with the Government due to conclude in 2020 whether they can stay. The reason for this tentativeness is that farmers in Scotland have objected to the animal’s return. Beavers have been shot because their dams can, potentially, cause water to flood onto valuable farmland in lowland areas. In the right places, however, beavers provide a useful form of natural flood defence. Because they create so many extra ponds along rivers, they slow the flow of water downstream. They turn riverside land into a giant sponge, holding back water and dramatically reducing peak flows after heavy rain. This can reduce the risk of flooding fields and towns further downstream.
A PROMISING FUTURE
In the past year, beavers have been released into fenced areas of the Forest of Dean and Cornwall to help prevent rivers flooding. Other conservationists and landowners – including at Knepp, a rewilded farm in West Sussex – are set to apply to the Government for permission to release beavers on their land. “It’s really encouraging,” says Mark Elliott of Devon Wildlife Trust, which is managing the beaver trial in the county. “They are such impressive engineers of water – that’s what’s so exciting about them.” According to Mark, local landowners, farmers and anglers on the River Otter are positive about the reintroduction: “It shows that people and beavers can live alongside each other.”
Beaver dams will collapse in extreme floods but, as one pro-beaver farmer says, they quickly build another. Better still, they work for free and don’t take holidays! For the rest of us, it’s fast becoming a treat to go beaver-watching. Over the coming decades, this peaceable, hard-working animal is likely to become a more widespread riverine attraction.