Beavers on the Wye

The wildlife trusts have finally admitted that there are beavers on the River Wye. We now have two exterminated species back in Herefordshire, the Wild Boar and the Beaver. The wildlife trusts published a Draft Position Statement in 2017, probably because the reports of beavers being run over in the catchment could no longer be ignored, and now the presence of beavers in the River Wye has been acknowledged by the government and reported in the Guardian (see link below). The River Wye catchment area is 4136 sq. km  so this gives them access to a huge area from which other catchments may be easily reached. This is a national not a local story. Whether they reached the Wye themselves, or were helped to reach it, the same can happen elsewhere.

We have not yet had much public reaction from farmers and landowners here, though the Hereford Times will no doubt be asking for their views. They might already have been complaining if the beavers had done anything they found inconvenient. In fact the beavers have gone largely unnoticed, because when they live in wide rivers they tend not to build dams, and are rarely seen in the daytime. An early canoeist might hear the tail-slap alarm signal as a beaver dived but the rest of us are unlikely to see them. If this continues there need be no friction, and we could simply enjoy the cosy knowledge that beavers were back. But if beavers are to reach their potential as restorers of broken ecosystems, they need to build dams. Beavers quietly living in the river are not really what we need. Nor what we want – we may prefer to be able to take our children to see the tangible evidence of beaver ponds as part of teaching the ecological awareness that they are going to need.

It seems likely that these beavers, like those in the River Otter in east Devon, may continue to live in the main river fairly unobtrusively, but they will also spread to smaller brooks and tributaries where the water is too shallow for beavers to feel safe. One function of the dams is to create safe underwater routes for beavers to swim to feeding grounds around the river, and provide water transport for branches being taken back to their underwater food stores. It is when they build these dams that their work begins to benefit the ecosystem, while also potentially irritating farmers and landowners. Most pragmatic conservationists acknowledge that landowners believe they have rights that we need to respect, possibly because beavers lack proper legal protection, in England at least, from the largest heavily-armed group of people in our society. It is my contention that, wise as this placatory diplomatic stance may be, it needs to be said that morally our farmers and landowners do not have a leg to stand on.

Many creatures benefit from the activities of beavers; otters and water voles will have enjoyed the habitats created by beavers in the past, and even shared their lodges. Fish and freshwater invertebrates thrive in beaver dams, which form habitats for frogs, newts, toads and grass-snakes as well as the many species of insects that spend all or part of their lives in fresh water. The resulting habitat enrichment may lead to the area around the beaver dam supporting more birds, for example, and maybe bats that like to hunt over water. These are just a few all the benefits of beaver activity (see links below). If you wish to improve the biodiversity the land you hold, there is nothing you can do that will be as dramatically effective as allowing beavers to build a dam. And you won’t have to lift a finger – the beavers will do all the work. 

That’s not all. Beaver dams will slow the flow of watercourses and raise water levels to create new wetlands near their dams. In times of flood a beaver dam will hold back water, slow the flow, and spread and lower the flood peak. A series of dams on a river will be even more effective in lowering downstream flood risks. The beavers in the Forest of Dean are already working hard on their flood alleviation plan for the village of Lower Lydbrook. (See link below).

Beaver dams will also improve water quality. Silt and agricultural pollutants like phosphates and nitrates and pesticides settle out in the bed of the dam where there is evidence that microbial action can break down some of these pollutants. Settlement of the silt onto the bed of the beaver pond will also reduce the polluting effect on rivers of water-borne silt, and mitigate the soil  erosion that gives rise to much of the river’s silt burden. Instead of damaging the lower river or being lost at sea, eroded soil will eventually form a flat beaver meadow when the beavers abandon the dam, creating an ecosystem niche that we last had in the UK six hundred years ago. These meadows are important for carbon capture and storage as well as being an exciting opportunity to revive an historic kind of habitat.

We face a range of major ecological crises, such as rising CO2 levels, flood risks, soil erosion and depletion, losses of biodiversity in all areas (mammals, birds, insects, reptiles, fish, invertebrates, plants and so on) across the whole country. We have lost half our farmland ponds in the last 50 years, and more than a million in the last 100 years, and those we have are now have been impoverished by farming practices. (See links below). Loss of equally important wetlands to farm drainage is by the very diffuse nature of wetlands more difficult to quantify, but it is also substantial enough to have pretty well eradicated lapwings and snipe and curlews, for example, from most of the UK.

It seems to me extraordinary that we as a nation have still not quite cottoned on to just how many of these problems can be helped by beavers. They have a role to play in carbon sequestration, flood mitigation, water quality improvement, and reduction of agricultural and other pollution in our watercourses, and surveys of the habitats that they create record increases across the whole range of threatened species.  There is no quicker and simpler way to start to undo or at least mitigate some of the catastrophic damage that we continue to inflict on our environment. And their charisma will also create a kind of tourism that may engage our children with the natural world. And they do all this work without us having to help except by our tolerance and our recognition of their importance.

So what’s not to like? To find that out, you have to ask a farmer, though you may not find he knows much about the natural world apart from how to squeeze income from it. There are farmers around here who think fish flourish on farmyard slurry and that beavers eat fish. But their main objection to beavers is that they may make some bits of farmland too wet to farm.

In the UK we have an assumption, completely untroubled by any coherent policy making or strategic planning, or any concern for the natural world, that all land is there to be exploited either as farmland or for forestry. Every landowner is supported to extract money from the land and from the taxpayer, and his right to exploit a portion of the planet for private gain is seen as sacred.  Farmers and landowners benefit from tax regimes and subsidy payments for all this supposed farmland, even when they own infertile mountains and moorland of no real agricultural value, used mainly for their private sporting pleasures. No government has bothered to question why we call such land farmland and give taxpayers’ money to the people who own it. Nevertheless landowners are reluctant to give a little land to the beavers, and in general want to have the right to shoot them. In England it is not illegal to shoot beavers, and their recent protection in Scotland is undermined by the willingness of the government agency NatureScot (formerly Scottish Natural Heritage) to grant derogations allowing landowners to shoot inconvenient beavers. Farmers and landowners (and a few ignorant anglers who haven’t read the science) are the only opponents of free-living beavers.

The irony here – and I’m pretty sure I am using this much-misused  word correctly here – is that the ecological  and other remedial work carried out by beavers, some of which is listed above, is needed either wholly or partly as the result of the way farming is carried out in this country. And I’m careful here not to use the term ‘industrial farming’ in order to spare the feelings of my less industrial neighbours, because pretty well all farming in the UK is now industrial by nature or in its effects. All farming is a major emitter of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane from the breakdown of fertilisers, from soil degradation, animal husbandry, and high dependence on fossil fuel for power and for making farm chemicals. Farming is a major source of soil and water pollution from farm waste, pesticide and fertiliser run-off and soil erosion (see link below). Land drainage has diminished our wetlands and their ecology, released stored carbon and deprived us of the curlew and the lapwing. Our extraordinary fenlands have been dried and pulverised and oxidised and their peat-based soils allowed to blow away, releasing countless tonnages of carbon dioxide and utterly devastating the extraordinary ecological richness the fens once contained. Farmland birds have suffered catastrophic declines. We have lost most of our rural ponds and the sticklebacks and grass-snakes that used them. I could continue to depress you and myself with the list of our atrocities, but the more significant and cheerful point of this list is that these are all things which the introduction of beavers will start to remedy - the damage caused to our environment, damage for which industrial farming is responsible. The damage to our ecosystems has been caused overwhelmingly by the way that farming is done, and by the insistence that all land should be farmed, and that we, who actually care more about the natural world than we do about farmers, should have to pay for it, and pay through a system that does not even recognise the need for some land not to be farmed but to be set aside, used not for private gain but for the good of all. Or even, not used at all – part of the problem has always been the biblical notion that the whole of the natural world was ours to exploit and control. If you disagree, maybe you can tell me who got rid of our skylarks, our curlews and our peewits, and are complicit in badger eradication, and uses sheep-scab spray chemicals to kill ravens and birds of prey? Sure, governments hand in glove with the chemical industry promoted much of this, but if it is harsh to lay all the blame on the farmers and landowners for the state of nature, it is equally harsh for the farmers to shoot beavers when they reclaim a little land for nature and undo the damage done by generations of farmers. A very pertinent example would be the loss of ponds – thought to be in the region of a million farm ponds in the last 100 years, with all the biodiversity they supported. We have 107,000 active farmers in the UK, which gives a rough figure of 9.3 lost ponds per farmer. My neighbour volunteered one of the last ponds on his farm to me as a dump for rubble, because he has no use for ponds, having had water piped to drinking troughs in all his fields. He only values ponds for duck shooting. Farmers have no moral right to object to beavers recreating the kinds of habitats that farmers have destroyed, and no moral right to shoot them when their dams slightly reduce the acreage that a farmer can exploit, when in the past farmers have increased their farmable land by deliberately destroying habitats such as ponds and hedgerows. There are almost no farmers who do not bear some personal or inherited responsibility for the loss of habitat and biodiversity, and they should all be welcoming the return of a creature that will work hard to undo some of their damage.

Footnote: I grew up on farms, and take no pleasure in criticising farming methods. I hope in the future to be making the case for alternative ways to produce food without doing this kind of damage. Such ways do exist, and if they didn’t we would have to invent them anyway.  

(https://www.herefordtimes.com/news/19569452.herefordshire-now-home-beavers-says-government/

https://beavertrust.org/index.php/beavers-create-healthy-rivers-for-wildlife-and-people/

https://dartmoorlinks.co.uk/lifestyle/naturalist/river-otter-beaver-trial/

( https://potomac.org/blog/2016/1/19/beaver-dam-nitrogen-water )

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969716323099

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23883-dam-beavers-have-been-busy-sequestering-carbon/

https://www.wwt.org.uk/our-work/projects/restoring-lost-farmland-ponds/

http://adlib.everysite.co.uk/adlib/defra/content.aspx?id=000HK277ZW.09SUFIYDQ4SEB6

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8497217.stm  (“Pollution leaves British ponds ‘in terrible state’”).

https://www.nrdc.org/stories/industrial-agricultural-pollution-101