Will romance blossom for the beavers of Love Pond?
The rare herbivore is being reintroduced courtesy of an exciting National Trust trial on an Exmoor estate, says Boudicca Fox-Leonard
In early January Dr Roisin Campbell-Palmer drove from Perthshire to Devon. In the back of her V W Caddy were two wooden crates, both with lots of ventilation, a deep bed of straw, and plenty of apples. Also inside were two adult Eurasian beavers. One male, one female, aged roughly two-to-three years old, that ecologist Campbell-Palmer had trapped earlier in December.
While special care had been made to introduce them by scent, they were yet to meet each other until they finally reached their new home, two standing ponds on the National Trust-owned Holnicote estate on the edge of Exmoor in Somerset, where they were released on Thursday.
It’s a measure of how exciting their reintroduction is that the bank of the pond selected for their new home was lined with tripods and photographers, waiting for these herbivorous wildlife stars to emerge.
One ranger whispered that his colleagues were sick of him saying that these are the most exciting times to be a National Trust ranger.
First up, the female, thought to be a calmer creature than her prospective mate. Four-and-a-half frozen minutes passed once her crate was opened. Finally the noted ecologist Derek Gow, to whom Campbell-Palmer had delivered them two weeks earlier, stepped forward and pronounced her asleep. With a tap of her bum she bumbled out, into the water and took a lap of her new home before taking cover in a thicket of brambles. So far, so smooth.
“He’s going to be a bolter,” remarks Gow, a man of sturdy beaver-like proportions himself. Since 1994 he has been arguing the need for beavers in our landscape. Known as “nature’s engineer”, they are prized by ecologists for an ability to improve river catchments in a sustainable way. Many point to their ability to help make our landscape more resilient to climate change and the extremes of weather it will bring.
Once an important part of the natural environment, they have been missing from our landscape since the 16th century, driven to extinction by hunting for their fur, meat and scent glands.
Reintroduction, said Gow, was discussed in the Thirties and came to nothing, and then in the Sixties and Seventies. Today, thanks to the work of the likes of Gow and Campbell-Palmer, there have been numerous trials and releases. Campbell-Palmer worked on the first of these, the official unenclosed Scottish Beaver Trial in Argyll in 2009, which sourced beavers from Norway. Yet it was the very unofficial “appearance” of beavers in Perthshire around the River Tay that today fuels most of the UK’s reintroductions, and conflicts.
Unlike Argyll, the Tay is surrounded by prime agricultural land. It is a drained landscape of very flat floodplain where a lot of potatoes and carrots are grown, but what the beavers want to do is put the water back in. “You could say it was the least favourable place for beavers to emerge first,” Campbell-Palmer says. “You’re straight into conflicts with farming communities.”
The last census in 2017 revealed there were a minimum 114 active territories, each with at least two beavers in it. Protests from farmers have led to Scottish Natural Heritage issuing a number of licenses for lethal control, which is where Campbell-Palmer has stepped in to offer farming communities a less terminal solution, by relocating the unwanted beavers.
She’s moved five to the River Otter over recent years. The Devon site is seen as a success, but was also another unofficial “appearance”, which has retrospectively become a trial site. Campbell-Palmer won’t be drawn on whether these sudden populations are the work of man or not. She calls beavers the “ultimate escape artist” able to travel miles by river at night. Indeed a news story from last month told how one beaver, nicknamed Mr Beaver, had fled the River Otter project and travelled around three miles to Somerset. While he was spotted after gnawing down a large tree, it is possible for beavers to go unnoticed for years, like those on the River Otter.
Their success there, with the population embraced by the local community, has also produced data on how beavers can help natural flood management, water quality and wider biodiversity. It has without doubt helped build confidence for more trials.
“England is refreshing because people are positive about beaver reintroductions and it’s being managed so that people can slowly but surely learn to live with them,” Campbell-Palmer says.
She has also relocated Tayside beavers to Wales, the Forest of Dean and a Yorkshire Forestry Commission project. In the latter case the beaver pair were found in someone’s ornamental pond. “They definitely shouldn’t have been in there,” Campbell-Palmer adds. “They needed a bigger home and were not welcome”. Since arriving in Yorkshire last April they have already had kits.
The pair being reintroduced at Holnicote, trapped a few miles apart to be sure they aren’t related, have no doubt dodged a bullet. However Campbell-Palmer is diplomatic about the situation on the Tay, born of working day-to-day with landowners trying to resolve beaver conflicts. Gow is more strident.
“That situation is really bad, it’s dancing to the tune of people who don’t care about the generations to come, or the environment, all they care about are their potatoes,” he says. “All of those farming operations wouldn’t operate without taxpayers’ subsidies.
“If we are ever going to look seriously at what we are going to do with this island and this planet, we’re going to have to learn to tolerate animals that change things for the better.”
He refers to the weight of independent science which he says clearly shows beavers bring life with them. “They take landscapes that are largely dead and make things more complex,” he explains. “Felling trees and making piles of woody debris creates environments that wildlife can colonise.”
He calls the National Trust’s decision to do beaver trials at Holnicote, “a courageous view of the future”.
“They’re starting to do something that everybody else is talking about. They’re showing leadership,” he says.
At Holnicote, the beaver reintroduction is part of the wider riverlands project. The aim is to work with natural processes to give nature the time and space it needs to recover, and freedom to adapt to the challenges it faces.
Holnicote is a lovely estate but project manager Ben Eardley sees it as a “very neat garden” at the moment. “We want to mess things up a bit and create a bit of variety and a bit of complexity and beavers are one tool to deliver that,” he says. “They’re good at making mess, they’re good at creating those opportunities for other animals. We’re hoping the dams they build will slow the flow, holding water in dry periods which will reduce the impact of drought. They will help to lessen flash-flooding downstream, reducing erosion and improving water quality by holding silt and pollutants.”
Eardley and his team were inspired by a project in the US state of Oregon that has successfully restored and connected channel-wetland-floodplain systems known as “Stage 0”, producing remarkable benefits to river health, wildlife, sustainability and resilience. Beavers played a key role in achieving that.
Already at Holnicote they have released one beaver into a smaller area, with a faster-flowing stream, and another will join the site in the coming weeks.
Thursday’s release, at an accessible site, was deemed more logistically appropriate for a publicised release. The pond site, part of 2.7 hectares of fenced unmanaged woodland, seems light and airy now, but come summer it will be dense, closed canopy. Eardley hopes the beavers will bring more light, more water and create a habitat mosaic.
His team has installed time-lapse cameras, and as well as the animals, will be monitoring water flow and the ecology of the area.
“Within a year we should really start to see some changes,” he says.
First though, the beavers need to meet. Lots of jokes were made about it all being a bit “Love Pond”. The male is known to be feisty. Indeed he comes out looking huge and clearly not happy about his audience. Finding his way to a creek he thwacks his tail, a common warning to other beavers. Who knows what the female will make of her new companion.
“They’ve got lots of withdrawal space so they can go their separate ways for a while,” says Gow. “It might take them a day or two to think ‘OK, I quite like you’. Experience has shown me that providing they’re left on their own and have plenty of space they usually get on.”
Once settled the beavers will build a lodge or burrow and then begin to modify the enclosure to suit their needs. All being well, they might just have time to mate this year. Beavers form strong partnerships and live in small, tight family units, able to produce a litter of two-to-four kits each year. They won’t reach full sexual maturity until they are two to three years old, at which point the National Trust team will step in to help them establish new territories of their own.
“The long-term vision is that these beavers will be throughout the landscape. There needs to be a balance between food production and nature,” says Gow.
Campbell-Palmer, sadly unable to make it to the release because she was trapping wildcats, agrees, adding: “My only concern is that [projects like Holnicote] are lovely demonstration projects, but if we want to learn the full effects, we need to see them out in the wild.”
‘Providing they’re left on their own and have plenty of space they usually get on’