午夜福利1000集合

Derek Gow

Chelsea Green Publishing Company

LAST month, the UK government made a long-anticipated ruling on the future of a colony of beavers that has been living freely on the in Devon since at least 2014. Against expectations, it decided they could stay 鈥� the first time an extinct native mammal has been legally reintroduced into the wild in England. Scotland鈥檚 government made a similar call in 2016, and in 2019 declared the beaver to be a protected species.

As Derek Gow says in his charmingly irascible little book Bringing Back the Beaver: 鈥淚n England, Wales and Scotland, beavers are returning. Slowly.鈥� Gow, a farmer-turned-zookeeper-turned-ecologist, has done as much as anyone to make it happen, though he makes it clear that it would have happened much more quickly were it not for the implacable hostility of a handful of powerful interest groups.

Gow cut his conservation teeth reintroducing endangered water voles, and he helped to establish the UK鈥檚 first enclosed beaver trial at Ham Fen nature reserve, near Sandwich in Kent.

He has been fighting tirelessly to reintroduce beavers ever since, often against entrenched opposition. His 鈥渨ar鈥� stories make up most of the book and they are a great, though maddening, read.

At every turn, he and his fellow conservationists are stymied by pettifogging bureaucrats, ignorant politicians, grumpy farmers, greedy landowners and the hunting, shooting and fishing lobby. All of these Gow regards as fools 鈥� whom he doesn鈥檛 suffer gladly. His portrayal of them is brutal, and the times when he outwits them are recounted with relish.

On one occasion, a 鈥渟mall man in a brown serge suit鈥� left his briefcase in Gow鈥檚 office. Gow promptly photocopied the contents and discovered that even though the UK鈥檚 Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) claimed to have legal authority over enclosed beaver trials, it did not. Needless to say, Gow squirrelled that information away and used it later to his considerable advantage, deliciously wrong-footing Defra in the process.

Even so, progress was glacial. Compared with continental Europe, where beaver reintroductions have been under way since the 1960s, Britain has been slow to follow suit (as far as anyone knows, there have never been beavers on the island of Ireland). Attempts have been endlessly blighted by unscientific beliefs that beavers will destroy farmland, fell big trees, harm fish or spread disease.

鈥淣obody knows (or will admit) where the beavers on the River Otter came from鈥�

Gow is a great and funny storyteller and acute observer of people. Admittedly, he has a fantastic cast of characters to work with. The world of beaver reintroductions attracts more than its fair share of eccentrics, misfits and mischief-makers 鈥� in short, people very much like Gow who love nothing more than to stick a finger up at authority.

One such colourful character is the Belgian activist Olivier Rubbers. He got so fed up with the way his country鈥檚 government constantly thwarted the reintroduction of beavers that he went to Bavaria, bought 100 beavers from a farm, drove back to Belgium and simply released them into the wild. He fought a five-year legal battle, outmanoeuvred the authorities and escaped with a nominal fine.

Incidentally, nobody knows (or will admit) where the River Otter beavers came from. The official version is that they escaped from a local wildlife centre. But with rogues like Rubbers around, you can鈥檛 help wondering.

As a nature writer, Gow is less compelling. I just wanted him to keep doing what he does best, which is skewering his foes and sometimes also his friends with his barbed wit. But one description of a beaver-engineered landscape struck me as beautiful: it was, he wrote, 鈥渁 complex wet, woody Venice鈥�.

I am fortunate enough to have visited two enclosed beaver trials, one in Devon (not the River Otter) and the other in North Yorkshire, where I saw one of the resident beavers. Gow鈥檚 description of the landscape they create is spot on; it is unlike any other you will see in the nature-denuded British countryside.

We need more beaver reintroductions, and thanks in no small part to the bull-headed and tireless work of Gow, it looks like we are finally going to get them.