news/editorial

27 November 2016 News/Editorial

There is something wonderfully ironic about the Scottish beaver news this week. Those 250 beavers in Tayside which are only there because of deliberate illegal introductions have now been given protected status, effectively rewarding those who did it with exactly what they want….which is beavers everywhere.

At the same time the Scottish Government (SG) says that any further introductions will be, well, “illegal”.

Brilliant!

SG also said that beavers could be “managed”, but that any culling/removal of them would have to be approved by SNH, but as SNH supported the whole introduction process, cynics might say that such approval will never be given.

Short of that, we will be “allowed to cut water channels through dams” and “protect valuable trees”. And who exactly is going to pay for all that, you can bet it will not be either SG or SNH, but it will be landowners and fishery owners?

The irony is that in the Times last week, both Argentina and Chile reported that they are to cull over 100,000 beavers because they are “destroying the ecosystem”, and all this from “a few dozen” beavers, similar numbers to those released here, 60 years ago.

So, let me tell you what will happen here.

Without culling, the Scottish population will expand at 16% compound, as it did in all the Baltic states after their introductions, also about 60 years ago.

If you do the maths, from a 250 start, after 10 years there will be little impact, as numbers are still quite low, say around 1,000, and they are beginning to spread well outside Tayside.

After 20 years, there are over 5,000 and they have spread well outside Tayside; humans are beginning to complain big time, and the costs of damage and control are mounting.

After 40 years, there are over 100,000, and beavers are everywhere, as are adverse human/beaver interactions and the costs amounting to £millions every year.

This is exactly what has happened elsewhere (Lithuania, Latvia) in much less populated countries than this.

Beavers are top of their particular food chain, nothing other than humans will predate on them, which means they will expand quickly and unchecked.

I will not be here to see it, but it will happen, as night follows day, and it will be an expensive disaster.

And this week’s pathetically misguided and weak decision of the Scottish Government will be to blame.

They have caved in to the rabid re-wilding brigade, to Scottish Wildlife Trust and to SNH.

As they were always going to.

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Whereas I rather like the idea of being a climate change agnostic, I am never quite sure either (a) that I should be or (b) if I am, is it because I am a grumpy old man and naturally dislike those holier-than-thou, downright priggish, climate change, “we humans are to blame for everything”, fundamentalists?

You can imagine the agnostic glee at discovering this week that the Antarctic ice has not retreated one jot since Scott’s (not Sir Walter’s) ill-fated day, the breaking news all accompanied by the deafening sound of those self-same fundamentalists scrabbling around for plausible explanations.

I find myself in almost exactly the same spot re. our fish…..or rather lack of them.

For just as the climate has changed before, without the benefit of my deodorant, or the belching diesel fumes from my gas guzzling 3 litre Audi Quattro (take that, Lord Melchett and Jonathan Porritt….I was at school with the latter), so has the Tweed had bad years, or clusters of bad years, before.

What’s more, these bad years were long before pelagic trawlers (ah, those pesky Russians again), before those disorientating windfarms at sea, before all those goosanders and cormorants came up-river, and before there were countless thousands of salmon-eating seals (they used to be culled) on the Farne Islands…..and, of course, before the current round of global warming.

My ancestor, he who wrote about the Court case “ The Earl of Tankerville versus a Dog, the property of the Earl of Home” (the Dog won), said in 1837 “But alas! Those halcyon days in Tweed are ended; rod fishing is all but entirely over, and is now reduced to a few days in the spring and a few days in autumn……..Last year in 1836 we had not one single opportunity and in 1835 it was much the same….”

He blamed the drainage of the sheep farms in the hills and the rapid run-off of floods. He should see it now, lacking as they then did, that ubiquitous master drainer, the JCB.

Of course, he also blamed the nets.

In 1900, Sir Herbert Maxwell waded in with “ It is hardly worth any man’s while to cast a line in the waters above Floors until the nets are removed in September”. He too blamed the nets and the toxic run-off from the mills in Hawick, Galashiels, Peebles and Selkirk.

But the root of my piscatorial, as opposed to climatic, agnosticism is this.

There have always been bad years, just as there have always been good, and some even exceptional, years. Are they not just what we have to accept with a wholly wild resource?

A massive industry has arisen from the climate change debate. Whilst there is no chance of the same happening with our fish, for Lord Melchett and Jonathan Porritt are not interested, there is a danger that we all read into the current decline, much more than that decline really merits.

Theories are legion as to why things have gone downhill here since 2013, just exactly as those trying to rationalise a decline had their own, if different, theories 100 and 200 years ago.

The chances are that the current lot, no more proven than those of yore, are also wrong.

The trouble with all this piscatorial agnosticism is that those who are intent on finding blame, those who want to do something, even if they don’t know what, treat the “keep doing the right things in managing the river and it will all come right” brigade, of which I am undeniably one, as complacent, as unforgivably smug.

They may well have a point, but I’m sticking to it, and to the belief that whatever is happening is mainly cyclical and there is nothing we can, or should, do to try to influence it.

Those who have been watching the TV programme “The River” all about the Tweed, will have seen George Purvis, Paxton netsman extraordinaire and the man who 30 years ago put my terrestrial TV aerial at the top of a 100 ft high Wellingtonia Gigantea, saying that this year he has seen more smolts going past him, into the sea, than he has seen for many years past.

He knows what he is talking about, and, just maybe, enough of those smolts will come back over the next year or two…….

………... to keep us all happy.

If that happens, we agnostics will be forgiven/forgotten and the theorists will stop theorising.

Until the next time.