The Dramatic History of Bringing Beavers Back to Britain
The movement to rewild the British landscape with beavers has become one of the most dramatic and subversive nature conservation acts of the modern era. From gun-toting locals to queens, the quest to reintroduce beavers in Britian has been thwarted at every turn. This hasn’t stoped farmer-turned-ecologist Derek Gow from trying, though.
The following is an excerpt from Bringing Back the Beaver by Derek Gow. It has been adapted for the web.
The idea of bringing beavers back to Britain in the mid-1990s was not new. Various estates imported and maintained beavers as oddities at different times.
In the 1600s a single beaver in the menagerie of the tower of London was described by one of its onlookers as the most curious beast he had ever seen.
Illustration by Derek Gow
In the 1860s a Canadian beaver family was released into Sotterley Park in Suffolk and later destroyed when their constructions were considered to be an eyesore. When the survivors migrated from their release location into the nearby Benacre Broad, they, too, were killed, and of the last of the colony it was written that ‘two were sent to London to be stuffed for Lady Gooch and the head keeper took the skin of the third.’ By the mid-1870s they were all gone.1
In the mid-1860s an attempt may have been made to start a beaver farm, although the evidence at present for this is not clear. If true, it is unlikely that it was a philanthropic undertaking and was probably a fur-based enterprise.
In 1874 it was the Marquess of Bute’s turn. After a failed breeding experiment between a pair of French and a pair of Canadian beavers (the Eurasian beaver is a separate species from the Canadian with a different chromosome number and as a result, even if they do breed in captivity, their matings produce no offspring) that fought savagely and did not survive long, a further group of Canadians were acquired, which flourished for a time.2 These were enclosed in a large, barred enclosure, which they rapidly denuded of trees. Although provided with fresh fodder on a regular basis, the colony eventually dwindled, with the last dying in approximately 1890. The place name Beaver wood, near Rothesay on the Isle of Bute, commemorates their presence to this day.
Another colony established in a large enclosure in the late 1800s by Sir E.G. Loder on his Leonardslee Estate near Horsham survived until 1948. His grandson could still remember them in 2014 quite clearly as the gardeners grumbled constantly about their requirement for a regular supply of trees. To the best of his recollection the last of these beavers was delivered to London Zoo not long after World War II.3
In 1946 a male Canadian beaver dubbed ‘Jock’ who was gifted to the zoo by the Canadian Government escaped into Grand Union Canal and was shot over 13 miles away by a Mr Fred Neighbour who assumed it was an otter and therefore worthy of instant death. Interestingly locals who visited its decomposing carcass before its origins were known expressed no surprise at its presence, and considered that it had simply been swept away from its home in the bank of a northern river by recent floods.
Lord Onslow, writing in the Countryman magazine in 1939 was the first to suggest that as the ‘beaver have become extinct in England only within the last few centuries . . . there seems no reason at all why they should not be reintroduced.’4 The sixth earl, William Onslow was an interesting figure who had a wide-ranging interest in the preservation of fauna, and although unheeded at the time his recommendation was perhaps the first to suggest that the species should be returned for nature conservation reasons to restore the depleted fauna of a proposed system of British national parks.
In the late 1960s, a near-remarkable project almost occurred. Bill Grant, who was a visionary district manager for the Forestry Commission (FC) at that time, was awarded a Winston Churchill Fellowship to study the recreational use of the North American national parks. At a time when the Commission’s approach to the creation of its forest estate in Britain involved nothing much more cerebral than the blanket coverage of whichever cheap landscapes it could acquire with single species plantations of North American conifers, he returned with some very different ideas about forest use. In Grizedale Forest in the Lake District he established a theatre where the leading thespians of his time performed in forest settings. He commissioned and created sculpture trails and was very interested in reintroducing lost species of wildlife.
One of these was the beaver.
Autumn colours and cloud shadows at Grizedale Forest. Wikimedia Commons.
In the early 1960s, in collaboration with his forest conservator, Jack Chard, he devised a plan. Grizedale Forest was and still is a good choice of release site for beavers. It constitutes a valley with a river and agricultural land, much of which is owned by the FC. The lower slopes of both sides of the valley have broad leaved trees with planted conifers on the upper hills. Jack believed that any beavers, once introduced, were unlikely to stray over the ridges that contained the valley. To enhance the site for beavers, they planted willow round its tarns.
In late 1969, Jack’s proposal for the introduction of beavers was submitted to the Nature Conservancy Council (NCC), the then government’s nature conservation advisors. They took little time to consider and reject his idea, and G.G. Stewart, the commissioner responsible for the region, stated later in a letter that ‘I wonder how much thought was really given to the matter. But perhaps I am using the wisdom of hindsight. It was with considerable sadness that I had to tell Jack Chard that he could not go ahead with his plans.’5
There are few people now left alive who recall this project, and the FC holds no records beyond a pencilled scribble on a sheet of paper in Grizedale’s dusty archive, which states the project was abandoned due to quarantine issues. It would seem initially that the beavers were sought from Canada, but this changed when it was realised that these were the wrong type and an arrangement was made instead to import beavers from Sweden. Martin Noble, the former head keeper of the New Forest, was tasked with the removal of the quarantine pens erected to hold them when he started his career with the Commission in 1973. He did not do a very good job; in 2010, when the site was again assessed for beavers, the remains of the original enclosures were still quite clearly visible around the high tarn on a hilltop at Peat Moss.6
Illustration by Derek Gow
In 1977, British Wildlife magazine advanced a case for the restoration of beavers to celebrate the Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. It is unlikely that she was ever aware of this gesture, and given the somewhat desultory record of royal interest in species reintroductions, it’s pretty unlikely even now that it would have met with much enthusiasm – unless of course its chasing with hounds was possible. The wildlife artist Barry Driscoll was its principal proponent. His belief was that as beavers by then had been so widely restored in other European countries their return would be acceptable in Britain.7 The former Lord Mayor of London and conservationist Sir Christopher Lever perplexingly put down this effort with some pride.8
In the early 1990s, the veteran tree expert Ted Green led a beaver trip to Switzerland. Now as old and gnarled as an Ent with a complex system of underpants containing so many forms of ancient fungi that the government’s nature authorities are preparing to declare them Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), Ted was and is a pioneer. He understood with clarity the suite of relationships that riparian tree species had developed with the beaver, wrote articles for dull forest magazines about how we should learn to coppice like them and was determined to do what he could as an individual to promote their return.
His Swiss trip, which was stuffed to the brim with beaver sceptics, foundered however, when they identified to their great glee an ancient black poplar over a meter in girth that a beaver colony had happily collaborated to bring down. Despite Ted’s correct assurance that beavers generally feed on shoots of much smaller diameters and that veteran trees of this sort could be protected quite effectively with wire mesh or rubberised anti-game paint with grit mixed through, his gloating audience gibbered with glee and focused on this single image alone.
The time, yet again, was not right. But the dream refused to die.
Notes
- Bryony Coles, Beavers in Britain’s Past (Oxford, UK: Oxbow Books, 2006); Barry Driscoll, ‘Bring Back the Beaver’, British Wildlife 19, no. 11 (1977): 493–7.
- R.S.R. Fitter, The Ark in Our Midst (London: Collins & Harvill, 1959), 105.
- R. Loder, personal communication.
- William Onslow, ‘Why not a National Park in the Highlands?’, The Countryman (January 1939): 496–507.
- G.G. Stewart, personal communication, 2004.
- Martin Noble, 2019, personal communication.
- Driscoll, ‘Bring Back the Beaver’, 497.
- Sir Christopher Lever, 2018, personal communication.