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  • From: Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Beavers reestablished in England after 200 years.
  • Date: Wed, 9 Jul 2014 11:54:00 -0400

On Saturday, July 5, 2014 3:02 AM, George Monbiot <news@monbiot.com>
wrote:
Monbiot.com <http://www.monbiot.com/>
------------------------------
Beaver Baiters <http://www.monbiot.com/2014/07/04/beaver-baiters/>
Posted: 04 Jul 2014 04:21 AM PDT
The government’s decision to capture England’s only free-living population
is unjustified and irrational.
By George Monbiot, published on the Guardian’s website, 4th July 2014
British people love wildlife, but the government, yet again, seems
determined to show that it hates it.
An opinion poll in Scotland found that 86 per cent of respondents were in
favour <http://www.creativelens.net/index.cfm/articles/european-beavers/>
of reintroducing the beaver. As most people seem to understand, it’s a
magnificent animal which can enrich our lives and our countryside. It was
once part of our native fauna, but was exterminated by hunting. It’s also a
critically important species, essential to the functioning of aquatic
ecosystems.
So when beavers were discovered, living and breeding on the River Otter
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/27/wild-beavers-england-devon-river>
in Devon, after they escaped from a collection somewhere, the public
reaction was, overwhelmingly, delight. It’s the first population to live
freely in England for hundreds of years.
The five-year Scottish Beaver Trial <http://www.scottishbeavers.org.uk/> at
Knapdale in Argyll has also been wildly popular, drawing in visitors from
all over Britain, entranced by the prospect of seeing this wonderful
creature spreading once more into its native habitat.
A couple of months ago, I visited Bamff in Perthshire, where beavers have
been allowed <http://www.bamff.co.uk/beaver-project/> to recolonise the
valley of a small stream. The results are astonishing: a transformation
from dull pastureland to a mosaic of ponds and marshes, little lawns
(maintained by the beavers) and coppiced trees, swarming with life of all
kinds.
In the evening, hiding under the trees, I watched the beavers, which are
shy animals, emerging from their dams, swimming around the pools they have
created, feeding and playing. I defy you to do the same without becoming
entranced. Watching them turn from hippo to dolphin and back again as they
moved between land and water, picking up hints about their elaborate social
structures as they groomed each other and swam together, seeing them
navigate the marshy maze they’ve built, I was overtaken by an awe and
enchantment that I have seldom felt in this country.
So how does the government respond to this enthusiasm? “We intend to
recapture and rehome the wild beavers in Devon,” says the environment
minister
<http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/30/first-england-beavers-in-centuries-captured>,
George Eustice. Why?
Before exploring this question, let’s consider for a moment the beaver’s
remarkable natural history.
We don’t know exactly when the species became extincct in Britain, but in
her book *Beavers in Britain’s Past*, Bryony Coles suggests that it might
have persisted until the mid-18th Century. Beavers were hunted to
extinction for their beautiful warm fur, for their rich meat and for
castoreum, the secretion from the scent sacs close to the tail, which was
used for making perfume and medicines.
They once lived throughout our river systems: they were as much a part of
the native ecosystem here as they are in Canada today. Beverley in
Yorkshire, Beverston in Gloucestershire, Barbon in Cumbria and Beverley
brook, which enters the River Thames at Battersea, are some of the places
named after them.
The beaver is a keystone species. This means a species that has a larger
impact on its environment than its numbers alone would suggest. They create
the conditions that allow other living creatures to thrive.
By altering the structure of the rivers, creating dams and pools, riffle
runs and ditches, they build the habitats that many other species need for
their survival. They provide niches for water voles, otters, ducks, frogs,
fish and insects.
In Wyoming, streams where beavers live harbour 75 times as many waterbirds
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320711004046> as
those without. The total weight of all the creatures living in the water
may be between two and five times greater
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/1310784> in beaver ponds than in the undammed
sections.
Just as forests in Britain are desperately short of the dead wood that many
species need, our rivers are desperately short of the submerged wood on
which a wide range of aquatic life depends. The branches that beavers drag
into the water provide shelter for fish, amphibians and invertebrates, and
food for creatures such as freshwater shrimps, caddis larvae and water
hog-lice on which many other species depend for their survival. Their dams
help to hold back floods, prevent scouring and erosion and stabilise
rivers’ banks and beds. They also filter out the sediments containing
faecal bacteria
<http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3898902?uid=3738032&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21103924713861>,
reducing the risks of contamination and disease.
In Yorkshire, where the town of Pickering has been repeatedly flooded,
government agencies are now pulling woody debris
<http://www.forestry.gov.uk/fr/INFD-7ZUCL6> back into the streams feeding
Pickering Beck
<http://www.forestry.gov.uk/pdf/Slow_the_flow_Pickering_factsheet.pdf/$FILE/Slow_the_flow_Pickering_factsheet.pdf>,
to slow their flow, protecting communities downstream. This requires a good
deal of expense. Beavers would do it for nothing – and keep doing it long
after government funds dried up.
Beavers have been re-introduced in 161 places in 24 European countries. The
results, of course, have been appalling. As the Agriculture and Rural
Development Directorate of the European Commission notes, “By these was the
third part of men killed, by the fire, and by the smoke, and by the
brimstone, which issued out of their mouths.”
Oh, sorry, wrong report. No, beavers have been welcomed back all over
Europe. They are so widely accepted and loved wherever they’ve been
re-established that proposals to remove them would probably cause a minor
riot.
Here too many people are furious about the government’s decision, and a
petition against it
<https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/save-the-free-beavers-of-england>
is rapidly gathering signatures. Please sign it.
The government gives the following reasons for capturing England’s only
free beavers:
“Depending on the source of the animals, they could be carrying a disease
not currently present in the UK. In addition, beavers have not been an
established part of our wildlife for the last 500 years. Our landscape and
habitats have changed since then and we need to assess the impact they
could have.”
Let’s take these one by one. The disease it’s referring to is alveolar
echinococcosis, which infects animals and (less frequently) humans,
and is caused
by the fox tapeworm
<https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/180934/qra-echinococcus-101101.pdf>,
*Echinococcus multilocularis. *It can be carried by many species. As the
government says, the disease is not present in the UK, and it should
certainly be kept out.
A government assessment notes
<http://www.defra.gov.uk/animal-diseases/files/qra-non-native-species-echinoccocus-120627.pdf>
that the probability of a beaver brought to Britain being infected with
this tapeworm “is negligible if sourced from a free area (e.g. Norway) and
low if sourced from an endemic area (e.g. Bavaria).” Free means places
without fox tapeworm; endemic means places where some animals are infected.
We don’t yet know where the Devon beavers (or their ancestors) originated.
But there’s a straightforward, single-step test for determining whether or
not they are carrying *Echinococcus multilocularis*: a DNA analysis of
their faeces. It’s so accurate that you can detect the presence of the
tapeworm from less than a single egg
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304401713006900>. In
other words, you can discover whether or not England’s only free beavers
are carrying the disease without having to capture them.
In the unlikely event that the tests prove positive, I would have no
complaint about the beavers being trapped or killed – with the proviso that
they were then replaced with a disease-free population, re-released into
the River Otter. But if the tests prove negative, this excuse for rounding
them up evaporates.
As for the claim that “Our landscape and habitats have changed since then
and we need to assess the impact they could have”, Miles King has neatly
swatted it
<http://anewnatureblog.wordpress.com/2014/06/28/angling-trust-calls-for-beavers-to-be-shot-defra-evicts-beavers-from-otter/>
on his excellent blog:
“Sorry? Defra are suggesting that a once ubiquitous native mammal, which
was hunted to extinction, might not fit into our modern landscape and
habitats. Surely that’s a problem with our perception of landscape, not an
argument for removing a native mammal. As for habitats, look at the
equivalent habitats in Europe with beavers and compare them with the UK
habitats without, then tell me we will be better off without them … The
point is that beavers create habitats and public environmental goods that
we have missed for the last 500 years; habitats that support a whole range
of other species. Is it better to create a pond with a Hy-mac
<http://www.hy-mac.com/>, or have a beaver create one?”
When the given excuses fall apart so readily, we need to look for other
explanations. One, perhaps, is this government’s obsession with control,
and its apparent desire to imprison anything and anyone that does not
conform to an ever narrower range of prescribed behaviour
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/06/law-to-stop-eveyone-everything>.
Another is its determination to appease powerful interest groups, even if
they carry almost none of the public with them.
In this case the group lobbying hardest for their removal is,
incomprehensibly, the Angling Trust.
In fact the government’s statement seems to be a summary of the trust’s
statement. Here, to remind you, is what the government says:
“beavers have not been an established part of our wildlife for the last 500
years. Our landscape and habitats have changed since then and we need to
assess the impact they could have.”
Here’s what the trust said
<http://www.anglingtrust.net/news.asp?itemid=2189&itemTitle=Angling+Trust+Welcomes+Action+to+Remove+Beavers+from+Devon+River&section=29&sectionTitle=Angling+Trust+News>
:
“Although beavers were native to some parts of the British Isles more than
500 years ago, our rivers have changed dramatically in the past five
centuries”
When government departments uncritically repeat the claims of lobbyists,
you know we’re in trouble.
I find the trust’s position astonishing. Throughout the period in which
beavers last lived in Britain, almost all our rivers swarmed with vast runs
of migratory fish such as salmon, sea trout, lampreys and shad. Giant
sturgeon swam from the sea into the heart of Britain. Huge burbot lurked on
the river beds. Today, burbot and sturgeon are extinct here and the
populations of many other species, especially the migratory fish, have been
greatly reduced.
Studies show that in both Sweden and Poland, the trout in beaver ponds
<http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378112798004046> are on
average larger
<http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/aopf.2010.18.issue-1/v10086-010-0004-1/v10086-010-0004-1.xml?format=INT>than
those in the other parts of the streams: the ponds provide them with
habitats and shelter they cannot find elsewhere. Young salmon grow faster
and are in better condition
<http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1577/T05-159.1> where beavers make
their dams than in other stretches.
The trust rightly points out that our rivers “suffer from endemic
pollution, over-abstraction of water and the presence of tens of thousands
of man-made barriers to fish migration.” It then claims that “beaver dams
would only increase the number of obstacles that fish have to overcome.”
But fish have been negotiating beaver dams for 200,000 years. Unlike many
manmade structures, they are both low and permeable. In the rare cases in
which they create a genuine obstacle, they can be removed in just a couple
of hours.
Yes, there’s a problem with manmade structures impeding fish migration, so
let’s campaign to remove or alter them wherever possible. But far from
adding to the problems our native fish face, the net impact of beavers is
greatly to reduce them, by creating the shelter, habitat and food sources
that fish require.
The trust says we can afford to think about re-establishing beavers only
when <http://www.anglingtrust.net/news.asp?section=29&itemid=476> “good
ecological status has been achieved in all catchments”. In other words – given
the way things are going
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/17/farmers-uk-flood-maize-soil-protection>
– never. But little would restore good ecological status to our rivers as
rapidly as the return of this keystone species.
I’m an angler, and the Angling Trust does not represent me on this issue. I
know others who are disgusted by the trust’s position, and it would not be
surprising to discover that the majority of its members belong to the 86%.
Most anglers, in my experience, have a powerful connection with nature. The
chance of seeing remarkable wild animals while waiting quietly on the
riverbank is a major part of why we do it.
When I visited Bamff in May, the pools and runs the beavers had created
were stippled with rising brown trout, feasting on the resurgent insect
life. Hawthorn flies and iron blue duns – species of great interest to
anglers – clouded the air, in greater numbers than I’ve seen anywhere else
in Britain. Why would people who fish not want this?
The Angling Trust and government ministers are making a terrible mistake
here, as they would know if they had been to Bamff, or Knapdale, or any of
the 161 places in which beavers have been introduced to Europe, and seen
the remarkable and thrilling transformation taking place there.
www.monbiot.com

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  • [permaculture] Beavers reestablished in England after 200 years., Lawrence London, 07/09/2014

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