BRINGING BACK THE BEAVER The Story of One Man’s Quest to Rewild Britain’s Waterways

By Derek Gow

The beaver is one of the animal kingdom’s most proficient landscape engineers. By cutting down trees and using them to build dams across watercourses, they create vast, biodiversity rich, wetlands that can help, among other things, to mitigate drought.

Britain’s beavers were extirpated during the 16th century, killed for their meat, fur and the scent glands located in their cloacae, which produce a substance rich in salicylic acid, the main ingredient in aspirin. Now, however, with flooding on the rise in many parts of the UK, people are calling for their return. Leading those calls is farmer-turned-ecologist Derek Gow. And he’s clearly rather cross that his calls have largely been ignored.

Gow is a man of action, a ‘maverick’ with little regard for rules and regulations, for the ‘petty individuals in positions of power’ who ‘preen and prance’, or for their ‘silly forms’. His new book, Bringing Back the Beaver, is part memoir, part polemic, part history lesson, part biology textbook. It’s also his chance to do a bit of scoresettling, as he rails against the ‘ignorantly obdurate old men’ and ‘bewhiskered, tweedy opponents in fortified castles of great antiquity’ who’ve had the temerity to thwart his ambition. Unfortunately, he’s so busy railing against all and sundry that he never really takes the time to explain why reintroducing beavers is a good idea. To make matters worse, Gow’s love of beavers is very nearly matched by his affection for short, verb-less sentences, which occasionally make the reader feel as if they, too, have provoked his ire. Frequently funny and full of fascinating facts about beavers and insights into their return to the UK, Bringing Back the Beaver would have profited from an editor with a firmer hand (and, I suspect, some very thick skin).