The Welsh Beaver Project has been investigating the feasibility of bringing wild beavers back to Wales since 2005. This work is being led by North Wales Wildlife Trust on behalf of all five Wildlife Trusts in Wales as part of their Living Landscapes strategy. The nearest we have got in twenty years of bureaucratic delays are a few beavers in a pen on a nature reserve. The Welsh Beaver Project’s aim - to have free-living beavers in Wales – seems no nearer. Why has Wales had to wait for twenty years, when there have been beavers on the River Tay in Scotland since 2001? Is it any wonder that activists release beavers? Beaver reintroductions in Europe have been going on for 100 years and beavers are back in 24 European countries where they were formerly extinct. Research in Europe – and in Devon - has already given us all the answers. We know the benefits, we know the problems and we know the solutions. We do not need any more feasibility studies.
The work that beavers do to restore ecosystems is now well known, and acknowledged even by some farmers and landowners, though they may worry that beavers might build dams in inconvenient places. (Beavers may even replace some of the half million ponds and countless marshes that farmers have destroyed over the last 100 years.) Farmers are increasingly going to be paid for improving the environment, which will of course mean being paid to take some farmland out of production, but meanwhile, as we wait for changes that we hope will start reversing biodiversity loss, the introduction of beavers has been delayed by bureaucracy, timidity and fear of the farming community. We should have brought beavers back years ago, and the natural world would now be in a better state as a result. Sweden reintroduced beavers 100 years ago.
Were it not for these delays we could have had beavers in many parts of the UK, demonstrating their value as ecosystem engineers, biosphere restorers and eco- tourist attractions. But this might have been limited by the lack of suitable sites where beavers could find the food as well as the water they need. Beavers need trees such as willow, aspen and alder to eat and to build dams. And they need initially to be returned to places where they will not be controversial.
Much of upland Britain is in extreme need of beavers. Tree cover in the uplands has been destroyed by unrestricted sheep grazing, and in the hills we need beaver dams to even out river peak flows, to counter downstream flooding, to impound silt so that anaerobic bacteria can reduce the pollution by phosphate run-off from agriculture, as well as their massive benefits to wildlife. In the uplands beavers would not flood arable land, and would fit in with the new landscape restoration schemes.
While the bureaucracy grinds on there is nothing to stop nature trusts and landowners making a start, getting ready for beavers. Much of what beavers do flows, as it were, from their impounding water. We can have beaver dams before we have the beavers, and grow trees alongside upland becks so that when the bureaucracy is done there may be habitat there ready for the beavers. Some conservationists in the UK have started building ‘leaky dams’ to improve rivers and streams. These are often just logs across the streams, that slow floodwaters temporarily and have no other benefits. I suggest that it is time that we started to explicitly build structures that mimic beaver dams and to restore habitats alongside suitable streams and rivers so that they are ready for beavers. These dams could create permanent ponds and wetlands before the beavers arrive. Rewilding has to come before reintroductions are possible in much of the UK, and by building beaver dams in advance we could have many of the benefits before the beavers arrive. They are simple enough to build and we, like the beavers, don’t need planning permission to construct them.
In many of the drier western parts of the US the rivers, or creeks, as they call them, suffered badly from the activities of the settlers. Hunters killed between 100 and 200 million beavers for their fur. The creeks were no longer moderated by beaver ponds, so they ran faster and eroded rapidly downwards. This led to the creeks becoming disconnected from their floodplains, where lush grasses, willows and cottonwoods had grown. The creeks were often fed mainly by snowmelt in the spring, stored during the summer in the beaver ponds and the water table around them. Without the beaver dams the water ran straight through and by the summer the ranchers, who had contributed to the problems of the creeks by overgrazing, had difficulty finding water for their cattle. The creeks, without the beaver dams, eroded their beds and dropped way below their floodplains. The vegetation along the creeks died for lack of water or from grazing and browsing by cattle. Fishermen and hunters, too, found that there was now little fish or game to be had along creeks that in summer were little more than stagnant pools among the gravel. The creeks – essential to 70% of the wildlife - had become dead and useless to man and beast.
Creek restoration projects are now prolific in the States, often collaborations between conservationists and state or federal organisations like the Fish and Wildlife Service. A major tool of the river restoration movement, alongside the hydraulic digger, is the BDA – the beaver dam analogue. The problem there, as in much of the UK, is that there are now often no trees along these creeks, and until suitable vegetation has been restored the beavers can’t move in. The solution is to make beaver dam analogues, by driving lines of stakes into the creek beds and weaving branches between the stakes. This reproduces almost all of the benefits of beaver ponds. It is not a replacement, but rather a strategy to gain many of the benefits of beaver reintroduction while waiting for the beavers. These dams silt up and raise the eroded creek beds, re-watering the land alongside the creeks, connecting them with their flood plains, and providing habitat for all the species associated with beaver dams and beaver meadows.
Here, as in the States, we badly need the work of beavers in places where we have destroyed the habitat so grossly that even beavers cannot restore it. The Beaver Dam Analogue is a neat solution that will bring beaver benefits while creating habitat to which beavers can soon return. It has not been proposed in the UK yet, as far as I am aware, although ‘Leaky Dams’ have been built in a few places to slow the flow of floodwaters and protect communities downstream. Leaky dams don’t aim to create ponds but merely to slow floodwaters a little. If we were to build proper Beaver Dam Analogues this would produce far more benefits to the ecosystem, because they would create more permanent ponds and marshy areas; in fact they would create wetlands with almost all the benefits of beaver dams and beaver meadows. To build Beaver Dams rather than Leaky Dams would be to make clear that the objective is to have beavers in these places as soon as possible, restoring the ecosystem.
There are a limited number of wooded streams in lowland Britain where beavers can thrive. Making spaces for them in the uplands would achieve a wider range of conservation and habitat reconstruction objectives, and I suggest that we should start a Beaver Dam movement now. There are many suitnature reserves in the UK where this could be started, where we know that if beavers arrived, with or without official sanction, they would be welcomed. Beaver experts may feel that there is, for the time being, plenty of suitable beaver habitat already in the UK, but if one widens one’s perspective beyond the needs of beavers to the need for a vision for ecosystem restoration in the uplands, the case for BDAs in upland areas is clearer.
To all those visionary landowners planting trees in our uplands, and to those organising teams of volunteers on our nature reserves, may I suggest as your next move the installation of Beaver Analogue Dams? Bureaucracy may be able to delay the arrival of actual beavers, but in the meantime your land could have all the other benefits of beavers.
https://www.anabranchsolutions.com/beaver-dam-analogs.html
I've sent this to a Welsh lass called Rachel, Countryside Alliance - along with your suggestion to sell the big corporations bracken infested land to grow native deciduous trees on. If the planting near even the smallest water course was willow, alder, aspen...