The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Give blessing to our beavers
An open letter to Roseanna Cunningham MSP, Cabinet Secretary for the Environment
Dear Minister, If my O-Level arithmetic is still more or less intact, I calculate that there are 67 days left in which to announce a final decision on the fate of Scotland’s beavers, given that a decision was promised by the end of the year.
As I imagine Holyrood is pretty quiet between Christmas Eve and New Year, let’s round it down to 60 days.
I understand there may be more pressing issues in your in-tray, what with the Brexiteers running the asylum in Westminster, and the implications of the second Independence Referendum Bill.
But as a Scottish nature writer I would like to suggest that giving the beaver your blessing would be an immense stride forward for the wellbeing of the environment of Scotland.
When I was writing my own book on the subject, Nature’s Architect, it occurred to me that efforts to create a climate of understanding about the place of beavers in Scotland’s ecological make-up are crucially hampered by a lack of cultural memory.
It was rendered extinct several hundred years ago, and unlike the beaver itself, it cannot just be reintroduced then go to work immediately.
Nor can it be restored or reclaimed; we have to create a new one, and that can only be achieved by living with the beaver in our midst and absorbing what it has to teach us.
To get an idea of how that might work, I contacted a friend in New Hampshire called David Carroll.
He is a nature writer and artist of international distinction, and a wetland specialist, and his books are redolent with the essential role of beavers in the cause of our most fragile habitat, wetland.
He encouraged me to quote at length from his work, so I was able to show how the beaver landscape evolves over time, and how the complete cycle of beaver occupation in a particular landscape takes decades to show its hand.
So if – as I believe we should – you choose to give Scotland’s beavers their freedom and the protection of the law, it would be well worth considering a programme of public events to provide the information and awareness that people in other countries can simply absorb through cultural memory because they have always lived with beavers.
Any wildlife reintroduction project needs time, time for us to get used to the presence of the creature, and time for the creature to get used to our presence, our way of using the landscape. It is, it must be, a two-way process. To assist the process of widening the beavers’ presence in the landscape, reintroduction should ideally take place in other parts of the country beyond the official trial area in Argyll and the unofficial population on Tayside, and the obvious places to begin are in the national parks.
In the Cairngorms, the Insh Marshes are now wholly owned by the RSPB, and would be perfect beaver habitat.
In the Trossachs, where the Tayside population has already sent out a few exploratory missions, the Great Trossachs Forest project has many suitable locations like Loch Achray, Loch Ard and Loch Lubnaig.
The beaver’s contribution to our environment would be multi-faceted.
Firstly, it creates almost limitless opportunities for other creatures that thrive in a beaver-designed landscape.
Secondly, they mitigate against downstream flooding by slowing currents and spreading shallow water over wide areas, the precise opposite of 21st Century land use techniques that obliterate flood plains and straighten rivers away from their natural courses.
Thirdly, they are good for the economy. Already you can find hotels and guest houses in Argyll and Tayside which advertise themselves as “beaver friendly”.
Sometimes it is necessary to make decisions that put the wellbeing of the natural environment first, and I believe that this is one of these. I wish you well in your deliberations and your decisionmaking. Then we can go on to wolves!
The beaver’s contribution to our environment would be multifaceted