Folly of bringing back the beavers
They rip through trees, block rivers and flood farmland. So why, ask critics, are even MORE of them being reintroduced in Scotland?
YOU don’t have to go far on Gus Greenlees’s Perthshire farm to see the damage. Down by the River Earn the evidence is everywhere. Some trees have been felled completely. Others – ash, oak, rowan, alder and silver birches, all planted within the past eight years on the land – have been stripped of their bark, large pieces of wood lying discarded on the grass.
‘They’re all going to go, every one of them,’ says Greenlees, who bought the farm at Dunbarney, near Bridge of Earn, four years ago.
‘It’s merely a question of time. It’s quite tragic to see these trees go like that. And the thing is, the animals aren’t even eating the trees. They’re just sharpening their teeth, and then they are left lying there.’
He is talking, of course, about beavers. It is a subject that has vexed many farmers across Perthshire and Tayside ever since a wild population of the animals appeared in the area around 15 years ago after some captive beavers escaped. Greenlees estimates the beavers have so far felled between 30 and 40 trees on his land.
‘I had never come across beavers before moving here,’ he says. ‘I have to say I’m not a fan. They are very, very destructive.’
He is not alone. It is a similar story down the road on Loch Monzievaird, near Crieff, where again beavers have gnawed through dozens of trees, felling them into the water, and on many farms across the area. In some places damage has extended to dams being built, which have gone on to flood crop fields, causing thousands of pounds worth of damage.
‘Tayside has lots of low-lying agricultural land and because beavers increase water levels by damaging drainage channels and felling trees, that often causes flooding of the agricultural land,’ says Karen Ramoo, policy officer at Scottish Land & Estates.
‘It is having a significant impact on land that is being managed. Beavers also have an impact on fish and fisheries. Beaver dams sometimes limit salmon and trout moving along waterways and that can mean the loss of valuable spawn habitat.’
Given the destructive nature of beavers, you might wonder why it is that just last week, plans were announced to introduce more of them. And yet that – under the partnership of the enthusiastically named Scottish Beavers, formed by the Scottish Wildlife Trust and the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) – is exactly what is about to happen around 100 miles west of Tayside, in the wilds of Argyll’s Knapdale forest.
REINFORCING the population at Knapdale is an exciting step forward for the future of beavers in Scotland,’ says Susan Davies of the Scottish Wildlife Trust (SWT). ‘What we are doing is putting more animals in there so they are able to move out of that area and gradually spread across Scotland.’ You can almost hear the groans from farmers.
The beaver population at Knapdale has so far been highly controlled. In 2009, 16 were reintroduced in the area, the first wild beavers released in Scotland in more than 400 years, as part of a Scottish Government-backed project.
One of the largest field trials in Europe, it was closely monitored by SWT and the RZSS, along with Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH), which assessed the environmental impacts of letting these large furry creatures loose in a land that hadn’t played host to them for four centuries. The trial was deemed a success, and on November 24, 2016, the Scottish Government announced beavers would be allowed to remain in Scotland, the first time a mammal has been formally reintroduced in UK history.
This will officially come into place within the next few months, with new legislation and guidelines which will give the beaver European protective species status.
Meanwhile, up to 28 beavers will be released at Knapdale over the next three years – the first three were due to be set free this week – to boost the population (current estimate: nine).
Make no mistake, the beaver is back. There is little doubt the Knapdale beavers have had a positive impact on their surroundings.
Tourism firms report business is booming as wildlife tours take off and there has been a knock-on effect on the local economy as more visitors stream into the area, keen to see one of the world’s largest rodents in the wild.
Because they have been so closely monitored, and because the site at Knapdale was specifically chosen because it is surrounded by sea lochs and conifers, which beavers dislike, there has been little damage to surrounding farmland, and their spread highly controlled.
The Knapdale beavers have also changed the ecosystem, building a dam across the outflow of Dubh Loch that raised the water level, flooding nearby woodland that killed off trees, creating new habitats for bats and woodpeckers.
‘They create new wetland areas and that increases structural diversity for different types of habitat. That’s better for wildlife all round,’ says Davies of SWT. ‘But it’s not just about wildlife. What we have seen with some of the monitoring is that beavers help to control waterflows and water storage, and that actually helps control pollution.’
But detractors say that outwith such a controlled environment, things are not quite so simple.
‘The eco-system is an incredibly complex structure and even experts don’t fully understand how it affects everything,’ says Greenlees. ‘I do find it slightly simplistic to think well, “Yes, we’ll just stick in these animals and it will all be hunky dory”. It’s going to affect people. But I don’t think anyone worries too much about how it affects farms or trees.’
Many land managers are concerned that without proper control, any beaver population could spread, wreaking havoc on farm land far beyond their original habitat and causing a major issue for the agricultural industry as they continue to fell trees and build dams.
In southern Argentina, for example, a few dozen North American beavers were introduced in the 1940s. Last year, a cull of 100,000 was announced as the population was having such a detrimental effect on the environment.
For Adrian Ivory, of Strathisla Farms at Meigle in Perthshire, battling the beavers on his land is a constant problem.
‘I have had tree damage, riverbank damage, ditch damage, collapsing of ditch bankings, flooding – it has got progressively worse over the past four years. In the last month alone I’ve removed eight dams. We try to remove dams as quickly as we can and try to keep the water moving, to encourage the beavers to move on.’
The Tayside beaver population, he says, has severely impacted his business. ‘It costs me about £4,500 a year to hire diggers to dig out the dams. That doesn’t take into account the time I spend walking up and down water courses looking for dams, or trying to remove them by hand rather than spend money getting a digger in.
‘My job is to provide quality food to the public, not run around finding beaver dams all over the place and trying to keep the fields free of water because the drainage has stopped working.’
There has always been a certain amount of mystery surrounding how, exactly, beavers first arrived on the Tay, although fingers are regularly pointed.
IN 2002, landowners Paul and Louise Ramsay set about turning their 1,300-acre Bamff Estate in Perthshire into a haven for beavers, importing animals from Bavaria and Norway and even rehoming some from zoos.
The self-confessed beaver-mad couple watched as the animals built dams and eventually bred on their land, producing young beavers, called kits. Over the same period conservationists started reporting a growing population of
wild beavers across Tayside and Perthshire.
The Ramsays say they never deliberately let any go, but concede that some may have managed to escape. ‘We didn’t purposefully let them out, definitely not,’ Paul Ramsay said earlier this year. ‘But I think later it became difficult to keep them enclosed because the numbers were going up. We also had three very wet winters, so there will have been escapes.’
While there have also been dark mutterings about illegal releases in the years since, the beavers of Tayside have flourished, and in far greater numbers than in Knapdale. There are now estimated to be around 250 beavers in Tayside, and the National Farmers Union Scotland has fielded many calls from concerned farmers who have been inundated with beavers on their land. Just recently, one beaver burrowed into a flood bank, causing thousands of pounds of damage when it collapsed. The farmer also lost two-thirds of the field of wheat behind it, which meant he had to recultivate the land.
‘It’s really important to ensure that farmers aren’t being asked to undertake anything too excessive that is costing them a lot of time and a lot of money, on top of their job as a farmer,’ says Ramoo. ‘At the end of the day they were not consulted, they were not asked, those beavers were essentially just put there.’
Land managers feel they have been left, for the most part, to deal with the issues alone.
‘There is absolutely a need for more detailed guidance to be out there,’ says Ramoo. ‘That’s where some of the frustrations have come from. There has not been a framework there to guide land managers and give them that expert advice on managing a species that has now been there for a substantial number of years.’
When the protective species status kicks in around the turn of the year, new guidelines from SNH will be introduced which land managers hope will help control the situation and give them more support. But there will also be restrictions.
In the past, frustrations have led to more than 20 Tayside beavers being shot in an attempt to control the population, something that is allowed under current laws.
THAT is likely to change. Last year’s Government announcement included the statement that ‘beavers will need to be managed’, but there has yet to be any clarity on what this means, although most believe it means that there will be stricter licensing requirements.
‘I think there a political agenda here to reintroduce these animals and it’s going to happen irrespective of what evidence is put in front of them,’ says Greenlees.
‘It’s people who aren’t living in the countryside making these decisions, yet are not affected by them. It’s a nice notion to have some of these animals around but there is a knock-on effect.’ Ivory says: ‘I don’t think the Government bodies are sure what to do. I worry people haven’t got a grasp on the numbers and the damage, and the problems that are going to come down the road. I actually believe we will get to the stage here where we will start to see the flooding of people’s houses.’
Meanwhile, the swell of support for reintroduction keeps growing. The report put together for Scottish Environment Secretary Roseanna Cunningham in November 2016 suggested that a quarter of a million acres of woodland across Scotland could support beaver populations, and that they could even find homes as far afield as Skye, Mull and Islay, even though their impact is not truly known.
The charity Trees for Life, meanwhile, strongly supports a widerscale reintroduction of beavers and is raising money to fund an assessment into a possible reintroduction to the north-west Highlands.
On his farm at Dunbarney, Greenlees despairs. ‘We’ve got these wonderful trees being knocked down, and to replace them would cost hundreds and hundreds of pounds,’ he says.
‘Instead we clear them up and take them away, which takes time and effort, and they won’t be replaced. It’s a real mess.’