Bringing Back the Beaver: The Story of One Man’s Quest to Rewild Britain’s Waterways

We are only just beginning to understand the extent of the beaver’s role as a ‘keystone species’ – a creature that has a disproportionately large effect on its environment. Like the keystone of an arch, biological structures, entire ecosystems, depend on it. No other creature it seems – other than perhaps elephants and humans – has such a profound and dramatic impact on the landscape. The beaver is an ecosystem engineer, architect of watery kingdoms and riparian habitats teeming with life, restorer of natural hydrology, creator – even – of soil itself.

Our world without them, since we hunted them to the verge of extinction for their sleek, water-repellent fur, has been a poorer place. And we have grown used to this depleted, simplified, beaver-less world. In the UK, where beavers disappeared centuries earlier than in Europe, they have been relegated to the fairy tales of Narnia where C.S. Lewis, to his eternal disgrace, has these obligate herbivores eating fish – misinformation that, like the man-eating wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, refuses to lie down.

The idea that the long-lost beaver should be returned to our countryside stirs up all sorts of feelings of discomfort and distrust. The very fact that its impact is so great engenders concern, particularly amongst the inhabitants of the British Isles, which lost most of its large, charismatic, native mammals long, long ago. In our tight, micro-managed, densely populated modern landscape, it is hard to envisage how the creative dynamism of the beaver will fit in. How will it affect our river systems? Will it cause flooding to farmland, crops, property? Is today’s environment appropriate for an animal that has been absent since the Middle Ages?

It takes knowledge, imagination and pragmatism to assuage these anxieties, to bring the fears and fantasies back down to earth and shift the mindset of the intransigent. All these qualities Derek Gow has in spades. But he is not your archetypal nature conservationist. Not for him the diplomatic chess-game, the ticking of boxes, the subtle play of compromise, of deferential negotiation with policy makers, NGOs and the powers-that-be. His story, told here with the vim of the crusader and the no-holds-barred stab of the stand-up comedian, is about the nonsensical levels of bureaucracy, the petty feuds, the miasma of misinformation and the overbearing caution that stood in his way as he and a few dedicated beaver exponents and reintroduction specialists, most of whom we meet in this book, tried – and ultimately succeeded – bringing this charismatic creature back to Britain.

What Derek appreciates, more than most, is the urgency of the situation. There is no time, he rages, for prevarication and yet more environmental impact studies. Research in Europe and the United States has shown, incontrovertibly, the beneficial effects that beavers have on the environment. Beavers are native to Britain. They populate our archaeological records, our parish registers, our place names, the parliamentary acts that required us to treat them as vermin. Nature in the UK needs all the help it can get, and the beaver is key to ecological recovery, the desperately needed shot in the arm.

To many of the government officials, farmers, anglers, landowners and conservationists with whom he has locked horns, Derek Gow is a ‘one-man wrecking ball’, a ‘cowboy operating outside the law’, a ‘complete pain in the arse’. Some of his friends might say the same. But most also appreciate his candour and bull-headed determination, his ability to cut through the nonsense, to get things done. For environmental campaigners who share his vision but lack his gumption, he is a potent megaphone. Put Derek on stage and he will often have his audience weeping with emotion and whooping encouragement. His passionate eloquence stems, above all, from a fundamental need to communicate and inspire, to get the ball rolling.

Like many mavericks he is, largely, an autodidact – an independent thinker who has acquired his knowledge of wildlife and animal husbandry through voracious reading, hands-on experience and astonishingly astute powers of observation. He grew up in the Scottish Borders in the tiny village of Broughton in the upper valley of the River Tweed. Having left school at seventeen (he was tempted by art college but pragmatically opted for a surer way of making a living), he spent six years as a livestock auctioneer in Edinburgh, building on his childhood hobby of raising a small flock of sheep for market. His eye for a good animal and his ability to communicate with the market drovers, dealers and punters landed him a job in environmental education at Palacerigg Country Park on a seasonal basis, as a ranger. In 1990 he attended a summer school on captive breeding endangered species at Gerald Durrell’s zoo on Jersey. He’d read every one of Durrell’s books. He left the programme a changed man – committed, as he puts it, to ‘the salvation of wild creatures’.

Since then, Derek has bred and housed everything from wildcats, white storks, European field hamsters and harvest mice to night herons, stoats, water shrews and polecats at his farm in Devon. To date, he has released over 25,000 water voles – another keystone species, whose population in the UK has crashed 95% according to a survey conducted in 1992 – into twenty-five restored areas of wetland from Aberfoyle in Scotland to the River Meon in Hampshire. It was his observations of the water vole and its ecosystem that drew him to the beaver. Left to their own devices, he noticed, restored wetlands would sooner or later silt up, becoming engulfed by reeds and, eventually, scrub and trees – requiring enormous human effort and management to keep them open. What would have kept these wetlands open and dynamic in the past, before humans? Soon, he was interpreting the landscape in a totally different way, recognising beneath the veneer of modern human activity the ghosts of ancient beaver dams and the silted pans they’d left behind.

His first encounter with beavers in the wild in Poland opened up a world of biological connectivity. Amongst the swamps generated by gigantic active beaver dams, he saw floating islands carpeted with orchids and wolves bouncing roe deer into the bogs to trap them. In Bavaria he watched a sand lizard basking on the edge of a beaver dam. She slid off into the water at his approach, her tail propelling her downwards like a marine iguana, and popped up onto a beaver-gnawed log some distance away to bask again. The Bavarian ecologist with him said this was common. The sand lizards (according to all guide books, a definitively dry heathland or sand-dune reptile) were – like so many other unexpected species in these swamps, including red-backed shrikes – attracted to the insects swarming around the water-sodden beaver logs. If he hadn’t seen it for himself, Derek could never have imagined it. It led him to appreciate how little we know. Our modern landscape is generally so changed, so desperately impoverished, we may be observing species not in their preferred habitat at all, but where they are simply clinging on for dear life. Given richer opportunities – better habitat and resources – wildlife might behave in entirely different ways. Only by releasing man’s constraints on nature, by letting the genie out of the bottle, can we ever know what might be.

In many ways, Derek appreciates, this is a leap of faith, but it is one, he feels, that is desperately worth making. For this consummate doer, this man of action, letting go, surrendering the driving seat to keystone species like the beaver, is the best thing we can possibly do for nature. He knows the battle is not yet won. Beavers might be back in starter populations in Scotland, on trial on the River Otter in Devon and in licensed, enclosed release sites elsewhere in England but their presence here is still tenuous. Perhaps Derek’s greatest contribution yet to the future of the beaver in Britain may be his ability to break down barriers, bash heads together, inform, cajole, inspire and excite, as he does so convincingly in this refreshingly candid book.

ISABELLA TREE
May 2020