news/editorial

24 May 2015 News/Editorial

I have always enjoyed reading Magnus Linklater in the Times.

We are back on beavers this week, after a long absence, but I have been rumbling like one of those dormant volcanoes, waiting for an opportune moment to explode.

Magnus has set me off, so here goes.

On Thursday he wrote about BBC’s Springwatch presenter Chris Packham’s completely lunatic idea to reintroduce wolves to keep down the UK deer population, lunatic not because the wolves will go around eating children a la Little Red Riding Hood, but….. because why would any self respecting wolf go chasing an agile and elusive deer when it can happily mop up 1,000s of farmers’ sheep and lambs lying around in fields into which Mr and Mrs Wolf can easily get, but out of which those tasty sheep and sweet little lambykinses cannot?

Mr Packham will have made lots of lifelong friends amongst our many sheep and cattle (Mr and Mrs Wolf just love a bit of veal) farmers.

Magnus attended the spring Scottish Land and Estates conference in Edinburgh last week and I quote:

“Even conservationists at the conference conceded that, while the carefully controlled beaver experiment in Knapdale in Argyll was probably worthwhile, the population explosion of beavers on the Tay was a disaster in the making.”

Readers may recall the Tweed’s gallant stand, almost alone and sadly largely unsupported by other rivers and fishery organisations in Scotland, against beaver reintroductions, both (a) because of the hideous experience of other countries who have been down the same path

(Latvia and Lithuania each now having well over 100,000 of them from reintroductions of a few hundred) and (b) because those cuddly little beavery things like nothing more than damming our spawning tributaries for fun, and stopping our migratory fish getting where they want to go to lay their eggs.

At the time we also alluded to beavers blocking drainage pipes and culverts, burrowing into flood banks, which then collapse, resulting in flooding of farmers’ fields, and also that every young tree which you want to survive to old age will have to be wire protected to keep it from being cut down by those razor sharp teeth.

All of this is now going to happen/is happening on Tayside via unauthorised introductions and escapes from supposedly secure contained colonies.

Not just that, but they have already spread, I am told, to the Forth/Teith area and the next big catchment down from that is the Tweed, so all they have to do is wander around the Edinburgh bypass (permanently gridlocked, so little chance that the little beavery darling cutey things will be run over) and just a short waddle south into the headwaters of the Gala, and so into the Tweed.

If I ever see the then responsible Scottish Minister again, and with whom Nick Yonge and I had a pretty frank exchange of views, I will tell him that we warned him it would all end in disaster, that neither we nor he would be here to see the full extent of it, that privilege being reserved for our children.

So let me tell you as well; the beaver population, if left unchecked, will expand at 16% compound per annum which will mean that in 50 years time the current Tayside population will have spread UK wide and number in the 10s of 1,000s, with vastly expensive human/beaver interactions, far worse than Latvia or Lithuania because we are so much more populated with humans.

My conclusions from all this are twofold:

1. You should never be frightened of telling Government they are wrong, especially when they are. You might say we are going through this again with the Wild Fisheries Review, where some seem remarkably unwilling to defend themselves from the long term consequences of what is proposed, and

2. Maybe Chris Packham’s wolves will eat some of those 1,000s of darling cuddly beavery things as a variation to their diet of mutton, lamb and veal?

On second thoughts, I am warming to the idea.

Wolves, lynxes….bring them on, can we genetically programme them just to eat beavers?.

Can you too hear Baldrick saying:

“I’ve got a cunning plan, Mr B…….”

to be followed by “Ow” from the unfortunate Baldrick as Mr B delivers yet another whack to his head in recognition of another truly appalling idea.