A Beaver’s right to roam
We’re unfortunate in England to have an environment ministry - Defra - that claims to want a wildlife-rich countryside but does (nearly) everything to frustrate a wildlife comeback. Beavers are a case in point: they’re a native species that many people love and that ought to be widespread.
But Defra has thus far done everything to ensure that English Beavers remain (largely) behind bars. In compounds.
Fenced Beaver families were a start. A way of getting some back and demonstrating how well they slot back into the English countryside. But Beavers behind bars can’t fully express their wildness and we need now to move them beyond their confinements.
Of course Beavers took matters into their own paws, ‘spontaneously’ appearing in east Devon a while ago. There, on the whole, the animals have been welcomed by landowners - championed by some - and are much loved by others in the community. Still, Defra has failed to allow Beavers to ‘officially’ return to the wild elsewhere in England.
Some other Beavers have turned up in the wild elsewhere in English river systems. Often a rather long distance from the east Devon population, these new recruits to wild England presumably received an anthropogenic helping hand. They’re settling in nicely, and building their own constituency of human supporters locally.
A couple of years ago I was a much more patient bloke. I was happy to let Defra dither a little. Let them take their time in working out how to officiate over the wild release of Beavers in England. Now I’ve lost faith. A thoroughly useless Environment Secretary from her polluted backwaters of Suffolk did nothing but talk nonsense about Beavers. Defra itself has stagnated. Formal licensing of wild Beaver reintroductions in England look mired.
What to do? Let’s embrace the ‘spontaneous’ return of Beavers in the wild in England. I don’t condone illegal releases. Of course not. But I think we should help them return. Beavers should return to all English river catchments.
Alongside the return of the Beaver we should work out a new deal for England’s river-floodplain systems. Treat them as strategically important water management infrastructure. Require that the owners of functional floodplains work in a. coordinated way along entire river corridors to manage the functional floodplain as a coherent whole. Pay landowners - farmers and other riparian land users - to step back and allow rivers space to re-occupy their wider,. floodplain corridors.
Not buffers of a fixed width, but whole functional floodplains. Say those inundated by a one in one-hundred year flood event. Let these corridors adjust and function as storers and conveyers of as much water as reaches them. And let Beavers manage the flows of water into, through and out of these systems.