Public urged to help with beaver study
Sightings can be called in using app
Scottish Natural Heritage has commissioned additional survey work to provide an upto- date estimate of beaver family numbers in Tayside.
The work, which began last week, follows environment secretary Roseanna Cunningham’s decision in November to allow beavers to remain in Tayside and Argyll and expand their range naturally.
The survey aims to help develop management and mitigation measures.
A spokesperson for SNH said: “We have designed the project and awarded the contract to an experienced team led by the University of Exeter and involving specialists based in Scotland and England.”
The organisation is appealing to the public to record any sightings of beavers through the Mammal Tracker app, which is available free from the iTunes App Store and Android Market.
Evidence of beavers in the Strath is becoming more common, with reports of damaged trees, and dams being built by the herbivores, and many locals have spotted the creatures on the Earn.
The survey will take place throughout spring and covers the beavers’ range in east- central Scotland. It will update the earlier Tayside Beaver Study Group survey in the Tay catchment.
The spokesperson added: “The new survey will also provide the opportunity to investigate some areas where beaver sightings have recently been reported but not confirmed.
“These include the River Devon, the Balvaig and Garbh Uisge upstream of Callander, the Forth in the Carse of Stirling and the Black Water around Brig O’ Turk.”
Beavers were hunted to extinction in Scotland about 400 years ago.
In 2008 the Scottish Government gave permission to the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland and the Scottish Wildlife Trust for a five- year trial reintroduction of Eurasian beavers to Knapdale Forest in midArgyll. Beavers have been in Tayside since at least 2006 and are thought to originate either from escapes or illegal releases from private collections.
In 2012 Scotland’s minister for environment, Stewart Stevenson, opted to allow the Tayside beavers to remain in the wild for the duration of the Knapdale trial.
In November cabinet secretary for the environment Roseanna Cunningham, the MSP for Perthshire South and Kinross-shire, announced that both the Tayside and Knapdale beaver populations would remain.
The SNH ‘ Beavers in Scotland’ report is available at www.snh.gov. uk/beavers-in-scotland.