Are we too eager for beavers?

Valuable eco-engineers or destructive pests? The busy beaver is a friend to biodiversity, but can pose a threat to farmland. The key to reaping the benefits and avoiding the drawbacks lies in sensible management plans

- Simon Lester

THE European beaver (Castor fiber) is probably the most innocuous of the larger mammals that have been or might be reintroduced to the British countryside. This large, vegetarian rodent with an incredible work ethic has been absent from British waterways for some 400 years, having been hunted to extinction for its fur, castoreum and meat, which is said to taste like grass-fed beef.

This situation was not unique to Britain. The beaver became a threatened species in Europe, its population reaching a frighteningly low 1,200 animals after the Second World War. After a great reintroduction effort, however, the beaver is once again well established across most of its former range and the Inter-national Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classifies its status as of ‘least concern’.

The UK has been slow to join other nations’ enthusiasm over re-establishing this ecoengineer. Many of the Continental reintroductions were in the 1960s, whereas the first notable occasion that beavers popped up in Blighty was in the early 2000s, on the River Tay catchment in Perthshire, Scotland. Unfortunately, this was either an accidental or an illegal release into a highly productive agricultural area. Farmers bore the brunt of the beavers’ drain-blocking, which led to waterlogged fields, and digging, which resulted in the collapse of their tunnels when machinery passed over them. As a consequence, the rodents were shot and the experiment caused resentment and opposition to an official reintroduction.