Dr Helen Taylor
Conservation Programme Manager, Royal Zoological Society of Scotland
Dr Taylor has a background in wildlife reintroductions and conservation genetics and, among other RZSS conservation projects, currently works on the Scottish Beavers Project at Knapdale. This partnership follows the five-year Scottish Beaver Trial which resulted in the first official mammal reintroduction in the UK. scottishbeavers.org.uk
“The Scottish Beavers Knapdale project is a big success, and one of the key factors in that was how and why Knapdale was selected. We released beavers into an area with very little other human use, where there’s little chance of them being able to get out and modify habitat nearby that might be used for farming. There were months of consultation with local people to make sure that everybody was on board and understood what was happening and why, and to ask questions and raise concerns. That was really important.
“There are areas of Knapdale Forest that look completely different now because the beavers are there. They’re what we call an ecosystem engineer. By building dams, cutting down trees and creating wetland habitats, they provide habitat for loads of other species like amphibians, fish and invertebrates.
We’ve got videos of lots of different kinds of animals using beaver structures. By putting beavers back into an environment, you can start restoring the environment to its natural state and bring a massive boost in biodiversity.
“The beavers in Tayside were an unauthorized release. The detailed consultation, thinking about which site to use and what kind of impact the beavers would have... none of that happened. Nobody really had any warning and the Tayside catchment has a very high proportion of agricultural land. The land use has changed drastically since beavers were last present in the UK. If you were doing a planned reintroduction, like in Knapdale, Tayside is pretty much the last place in Scotland you would choose to put beavers.
“Unfortunately, what you then have is an instance of human-wildlife conflict. People are using that land in a different way, in some cases relying on it as their major source of income. Beavers can cause massive modifications to the landscape and can do that very, very quickly. So if you’re managing land, and all of a sudden beavers arrive, you might very quickly see changes, such as crop fields getting flooded. That’s why things like the Scottish Beaver Forum are really important, because it gets everybody around the table. People from the National Farmers Union, Forestry and Land Scotland, Scottish Environment Protection Agency, conservation organizations like ours and the SNH. Everybody then has a voice.
“At the RZSS, I also look after the pine hoverfly breeding program, which is a critically endangered species that desperately needs to be reintroduced. Invertebrates are overlooked all the time but if you want to release big animals, like beavers, you better hope somebody is doing invertebrate translocations because without them, there is no ecosystem to bring other animals back into.”