Beavers at Bamff

2012-02-15T19:28:00.003Z

If it were not for the forecast of colder weather, with the possibility of snow, to come it would be tempting to think that Spring was near.

Just to remind you of the recent cold weather here is a photograph:

A beaver has broken the ice and entered the pool.

This photograph shows the neatly piled heap of ice on the left of the now frozen over hole at the edge of the pool, where beavers came and went through the nights.

Windy Monday and that willow, so long held up by so little, fell.

Niall Benvie and Charlotte visited us recently and Niall has sent us this splendid advertisement for Beaver Engineering plc.

We plan to put this sign at the end of our drive.

I am reading Flaubert's Madame Bovary at the moment and noticed that, in the wonderful description of the wedding of Charles Bovary to Emma Roault, her father is described as wearing a new silk hat (un chapeau de soie neuf). Was this one of the new style top hats that destroyed the market for beaver felt hats and so saved the North American beaver from probable extinction? I should like to think so.

World Wetlands Day

2012-02-02T18:45:00.000Z

It seems suitable to publish a few photos of the wetlands the beavers have made here. Not that you haven't seen a lot already. These photos were taken by my daughter, Sophie, who took my camera for a walk in the Wet Wood.

Here is a photo of the longest dam built by beavers in the British Isles

Sophie's eye view of the canal from the little pond to the new pool

Another shot of the longest dam in the United Kingdom. How long before beavers build a longer one somewhere else? The length they have to beat stands at 110 metres as of today. What will the beavers do when it comes to Spring time and the work season begins again?

I took this photograph early in January. In fact, another photo of that willow, taken at the same time, figured in this blog on about the 6th January. To my amazement the tree is still standing despite some blustery days and nights.

Here are two photographs, taken of that tree today. Still standing, but for how long?

And again.

Notice the frigid looking rhododendrons near the willow. The Dundee Conservation Volunteers have been doing great work along the path through which runs the Cateran Trail. Our Dutch friend, Chris Schipper, brought some friends over last summer to bash rhododendrons and we are set to do a whole lot more of this work with the help of exuberant volunteers. This weekend the New Caledonian Woodland Volunteers are coming to work in our woods. What will they do: bash rhodies, respace birch?

Perhaps some of the wood can be converted into charcoal?

Into the last week of January 2012

2012-01-23T23:26:00.000Z

The first snowdrops of 2012 at Bamff.

Still no mink!

I continue to be surprised by the agility of beavers.

2012-01-14T19:26:00.000Z

The tension is building. Stewart Stevenson, Environment Minister, is to pronounce on the fate of the free beavers of the Tay sometime soon. It would have been surprising if those guardians of our natural heritage the Scottish Gamekeepers Association had not trumpeted its hostility to any species of which they disapproved. Accordingly, today's 'Scotsman' has an article, fed to it by the SGA. I am glad to say that it does not disappoint.

'A hundred strong colony of foreign beavers are wreaking environmental havoc across Tayside, according to gamekeepers.' On it goes with a wild and fierce nonsense. What less was to be expected from the group that announced that White-tailed eagles would eat babies?

One of the new dams along the Burnieshed Burn.

And just downstream of that dam a photo to show the clarity of the water. The orange object in the middle of the picture is an ancient plastic cartridge case. I removed it.

Clear Running Water in Streams and Canals Inhabited by Beavers

2012-01-13T20:02:00.000Z

A correspondent wrote to say that he found the clarity of the water that I showed in a photograph in a recent post was interesting. It is interesting, but it is also the norm whether the water is flowing fast or slow. In slow flowing water it depends much more on what the beavers are doing. If they are dredging or building dams the water may be cloudy. Then again if there has been heavy rainfall and more sediments are being washed downstream, or off the banks where dams have overflowed round them, then turbidity may result.

Here are some photos I took this morning, a bright sunny day with frost, using a polaroid lens in my camera. They were taken in the burn below the Third Dam, which is east of the drive to Bamff House.

Not withstanding what I just wrote, this one was taken in the overflow channel below the Third Dam. The topsoil and grassy sward have long since been washed away and a gravelly bed remains.

And so was this.

Now we have reached the main burn below the Third Dam and water is pouring into the main stem from an underground channel - the hyporheic zone?

The pool above the Third Dam, whose southern end you see in the bottom right of my photograph.

After feeding the wild boar in the Burnieshed Den enclosure I sped on to Kinkeadly to feed the bêtes rousses and then to take a look around the Wet Wood.

These photographs were all taken in the canal that the beavers have dug to take water from the western pond in that enclosure down to the new pool.

There has been no rain to speak of for a few days now, the water levels are dropping and the flow from the top pond is slower. Perhaps it qualifies for lentic?

All the same the water is clear.

You can make out the line of the Long Dam where the water ends in the middle distance.

Back to the Pond enclosure for this last photo:

I am still astonished by the gymnastic abilities of the beavers. In this case a beaver has clambered along a fallen birch to gnaw off the bark. Did it jump into the water at the top of the stem, or did it back down to the bottom left corner of the picture?

A willow still standing and the growing swamp

2012-01-05T21:22:00.001Z

This willow has withstood the recent gales despite being mostly gnawed through - remarkable really.

The canal has been dredged a bit more to cope with the runoff from the recent rains and snow.

This is some more of it.

The fence beside this length of the canal is part of an exclosure put up some years ago for Kevin Jones's study of the vegetation in the Wet Wood at the outset of the beavers' first years of occupation.

Nice clear water!

In this photograph we are looking east towards the Long Dam.

Here I am, looking east from the long dam, which you see just beyond the fallen grey alder.

This afternoon I went back to the Wet Wood from the east side and photographed this old fence straining post that has been such a marker of water levels over the last ten years.

This is the familiar dam with the water lapping to its crest.

And from here we see the old lodge. It looked as though beavers were living in the lodge from its state of repair and there is that other one nearby, which is clearly occupied.

2011-12-27T19:44:00.000Z

On the 3rd of November Anne-Marie Macmaster from the Scottish Mink Initiative visited me and brought this walk through arrangement that would ensure that any mink would leave their footprints in the clay.

This photograph, taken on the 26th December shows no sign of mink so far.

I am relieved that this is the case (so far) because I have seen no mink here since 2002.

The Wet Wood aka the New Beaver Swamp and Pools

2011-12-23T22:02:00.002Z

There has been a bit of a hiccough since the 13th December due to the complexities of the Festive Season. Here are a couple of photographs that I wished to present to my loyal followers.

A grey afternoon and the New Pool is seen from the west.

Here is a section of the 100 yard dam.

Happy Christmas! (Old Style)

Paw Marks in the Snow

2011-12-13T14:23:00.000Z

Footsteps in the snow - the front paw of a beaver:

A little snow fell in the early hours of the morning, leaving enough for a beaver to make clear marks.

The front paw marks are easily seen in these photographs, but the hind feet with their webs are not so obvious.

Above the front foot in this photograph is a hind foot print.

The beaver whose tracks I have photographed does not seem to have been pulling a branch along behind it, otherwise the tracks would be less clear.

This photograph of a feed cache was taken on the 4th December

I took this photo this morning. The beavers don't seem to have added anything to the cache since the day I took the preceding picture.

First Snow at Bamff

2011-12-04T17:54:00.001Z

The dams by the drive are looking splendid with their dusting of snow.

And the food cache in the downstream section of the Burnieshed Burn is growing, I think.

A Breached Dam and its Repair

2011-12-03T14:11:00.001Z

My last post showed a breach in the Long Dam in the Wet Wood. When I found it I wondered if a human had dug a gap in the dam, but I could see no sign of boot prints and there were no signs to show that a spade had been used to breach the dam. I think that the water level must have risen to a point where the beavers in the new lodge on the banks of the ditch upstream of this pool found that their living space was being flooded and so lowered the water level.

As you see from the photograph above, taken at the place that I think was breached (and there is no other place along that dam that has been breached or has such obvious signs of recent structural work), the dam has been repaired.

Some may ask if beavers are really capable of such a capacity to resolve problems. The answer is 'Yes, they can.'

Looking across the dam, this photo shows a substantial food cache that the beavers have been preparing for winter.

After checking on the dam and finding that the gap had been repaired, I walked round the pool to its western side and took this photograph to show the increasing extent of the water. You may be able to make out the dam at the furthest away extent of the pool.

This is the new dam which, I think, may have been flooded by the recent rains and so encouraged the beavers to breach the dam about 30 metres to the east and then repair it once the lodge had been extended.

2011-11-27T19:51:00.001Z

On the 22nd of this month, taking advantage of a sunny day between the days of mist and rain, I walked out to the Wet Wood and found that the Long Dam had been breached.

Here is the breach

And here is the pool upstream of the dam.

Today I visited the Wet Wood again. A heron lifted off as I approached and a flock of mallard rose noisily and flew away. I found that the breach had been fully repaired and the water level of the pool was as high as ever. Why had the beavers breached the dam?

I remember seeing a new lodge on the banks of the main ditch and think that the rainfall of some days and nights before the 22nd had flooded the new lodge. I guess that the beavers have now built a new chamber in their lodge, higher than the earlier one. This is just supposition. I must go out again and look for the lodge.

Here is a view of the pool from the downstream side of the dam.

The main canal has developed considerably. It is interesting to note the scouring out of channels. First, the bottoms of the canals and overflow channels are of mud. Then, the mud is scoured away and one sees a gravelly bed appearing.

The lodge has been cemented with mud, ready for the winter.

2011-11-20T11:52:00.001Z

At last, a couple of clips with the trail camera: in this one a beaver is caught dragging a branch of aspen away from the now cut over clump.

Here are some stumps from the reduced grove of trees.

And here is the small pond across which the trunks and branches of the aspen have been floated to be stored in the pond with the lodge downstream. Before they reach their destination the timber will have to be steered down the canal the beavers have dug between the little pond and the dammed pool that lies upstream of the Lodge Pond.

Returning to the Burnieshed Burn east of the drive, here are the makings of a cache of birch branches for the winter. At least, that is what it looks like to me.

Here are three newish dams. The nearest one dates from late summer, I think. The next dam above began to be built early this autumn and the one furthest upstream in the photograph, and visible only as a white splash, was started about a month ago.

Trout or Salmon?

2011-11-04T17:30:00.000Z

Walking back along the burn after an unsuccessful search for a lost knife, I saw a fish jumping about on the bank, just below the Third Dam. I closed with it and managed to take a photograph, the second lower down. I tried to get a hold of the fish, but eventually it slid out of my hands and escaped into the meshwork of the dam, to find its way into the water downstream.

Here is that first fish.

As I grappled with the fish, which I took to be a young trout of a fair size, I realised that it was not alone. There seemed to be three others lying in the shallow water that ran dry just beyond where they lay.

Beyond the group of three there lay a dead fish. This is it with my Leatherman Utility Tool to give an idea of scale (about 20 cm/ 8 inches). The first fish I photographed was considerably longer.

Later, when I looked at pictures in Peter Maitland and Keith Linsell's 'Guide to Freshwater Fish of Britain and Europe' I wondered if this was a salmon parr that was undergoing smoltification.

As I had left the dead fish on the bank of the burn I hurried back to find it and put it in our deepfreeze so that it could be examined. At the dam, I found another live fish and photographed it.

Here it is again. Trout or salmon parr?

The fish were lying in the water just to the left of the dead fish and the Leatherman tool. They seem to have swum from the pool upstream, over the overflow in the dam towards the top of the picture and got stuck when they ran out of water. If they had tried the other two overflows they would have found their way downstream safely.

Climbing beavers

2011-10-24T19:24:00.002+01:00

Continuing with the theme of the athletic beaver, here are some photos I took recently of a fallen sycamore that had been ringed by beavers and had then fallen to a winter wind- note the bottom right hand corner of the picture. The tree fell last winter, I think and is held up against another sycamore that beavers have ringed, but which has not fallen yet. The fallen tree has been barked for a certain distance along its trunk, so you may imagine my surprise when I saw that beavers were still interested in it.

Has a beaver mounted the trunk from the bank?

I think it must have and has then padded up the trunk of the tree.

But what has it won in the way of nutrition?

Lichens here, but what about the lower parts of the trunk that have been gnawed?

Perhaps slightly acidic water gives a vinegary taste? Do slime moulds have a flavour?

2011-10-14T15:46:00.000+01:00

Beavers are full of surprises. Having felled this birch, a beaver has walked along the trunk, gnawed off the bark and jumped down onto the bank on the other side of the burn. At least that is what I suppose happened.

Beavers use stones a good deal in the course of building dams, but usually they are scattered around the structure. Here, in this small dam, you can see some stonework, which I thought unusual.

Fiona McLean of Stirling University has produced some interesting results from her sampling of the water in the Burnieshed Burn, but more of that for next time.

A Visit to the Wet Wood

2011-09-28T17:46:00.001+01:00

Since I last posted the beavers have been busy with the aspen. When Kevin Jones was working on his PhD thesis he counted about 75 stems of aspen, the suckers of the original 12 trees that were planted in 1992.

All but 18 had been cut when I took these photographs on the 26th September 2011.

For the most part the stems had been dragged away, but a few had been left.

This is the path that leads from the aspen clump to the western pond in the Wet Wood. It is along this path that the beavers have dragged the felled aspen stems to the pond. One stem has been discarded.

Debouching from the small pond is a canal which is punctuated by, a series of little dams that serve as locks. This dam, however, has been extended to make a pool.

Here, you see the canal as it flows towards the pond that lies next to the pond excavated by John Lister-Kaye in September 2001.

This photograph shows the newly extended northern end of what we may call the Long Pond. With its new extension this dam is around 110 metres long. Is this a record for the British Isles?

New coppice growth from grey willow in the Wet Wood.

Here is a reminder of the vigorous activity of the beavers of the Wet Wood

And here we are back at the aspen grove. Let us look forward to the suckering next spring!

2011-09-13T13:24:00.002+01:00

I forgot to mention that the beavers have returned to fell the aspen clones they last (and first) felled in the autumn of 2002. No aspen were touched by beavers during the last nine years, but now they are back, cutting, dragging away and consuming.

Presumably the quantities of bitter chemicals in the bark that deterred felling and browsing have declined and aspen bark and leaves are good to eat again.

Cut stems in the group.

The path from the aspen clump to the little pond in the Wet Wood.

More of the path.

2011-09-12T22:08:00.001+01:00

Nearly a month since my last post. How can this be? Not for loss of interest, that's for sure. August is a month for visitors and so, I suppose, it is less easy to catch photographs of the beavers themselves.

Here are photographs of Owen and Sharon Brown from Beavers, Wetlands and Wildlife in New York State. We were delighted to have a visit from them and to learn a little of their long experience with beavers in the USA.

Now, however, we are into September and autumn is with us. This is the time of year when beavers prepare for winter and are working on dams and lodges. It would be nice to think that autumn was not just yet, but outside I hear the tail end of hurricane Katia blowing itself out on the western shores of Eurasia and am convinced that this is autumn.

If this is autumn, where was summer?

This is one of the newest dams along the Burnieshed burn. It has a surprising amount of stonework in one part of it. For a while I wondered if the dam was the construction of Chris Schiffer and his friends and had been built as a cooler for beer, but as time went by, and as the work developed, I saw that this was all the work of the beavers.

I was pleased to catch an unintended shot of this young roe buck in my trail camera: the instrument had toppled over on its support and photographed upside down, the opposite direction from that intended.

Young Mallards and a Pair of Beavers

2011-08-16T13:13:00.008+01:00

One day I shall get my HCO Scoutguard trail camera to work at night, but in the meantime I pushed out the boat and bought a Bushnell Trophy camera. The first time I put it out I ignored the instructions with the result that I found a huge number of clips of ten second video, showing water flowing over a dam and waving grasses in the foreground.

For my next effort, I shifted the camera, paid more attention to the instructions, and caught this group of young mallard. They are benefitting from renewed work by the beavers, extending the watery landscape they like.

And then, at night, the camera worked, despite the heavy rains of the week. I should say that the next two clips were taken on the night of the 12th August.

You can hear the rain.

I did manage to centre the clip after all and exchanged the wrong one for the right one.

Black Darters and an Archaeological Visit

2011-08-10T19:09:00.000+01:00

When John Thorpe first came to visit Bamff, he asked me if I had noticed whether dragonflies were more abundant since the arrival of the beavers in 2002. I replied that I hadn't noticed any change then but, later that summer, came across a whole lot of black darters (Sympetrum danae). I didn't notice any of these dragonflies last year, but have seen some by the pools of the Burnieshed burn in the last ten days. Here is one lying out sunning itself on the bark-stripped trunk of a birch tree that the beavers felled last winter. It seems that these darters like to lie out in rows, warming them selves in the sun.

On the 31st July I had a very pleasant visit from Nick Dixon and Barrie Andrian from the Scottish Trust for Underwater Archaeology. I attended a meeting of the Scottish Freshwater Group in 2009 at which Dr. Dixon spoke most interestingly about the discovery of ancient woodland in what is now a submerged part of Loch Tay. Among the remains of the woodland they found a dam built by beavers.

Here is a description of their work taken from their website

www.crannog.co.uk/docs/whats_new/ArchiveNews.html :

'The remains of ancient oak, pine, and alder trees embedded in the shallows of the loch below Ben Lawers were first discovered in 2005 during work carried out by the Scottish Trust for Underwater Archaeology (STUA) for the National Trust for Scotland’s Ben Lawers Historic Landscape Project. Initial radiocarbon-dated samples placed the submerged tree remains in the Neolithic period more than 4,000 years ago, but further dating has revealed the timbers range between 1,500 and 8,000 years old.'

And

'With support from Historic Scotland, underwater archaeologists from the STUA and the Scottish Crannog Centre at Kenmore have returned to the area to try to determine the origins of the tree remains, possible causes for their inundation, and any evidence of human activity. Last year charred grain was found in a sample collected from deposits one metre below the lochbed. Given previous discoveries of Neolithic stone axes nearby on land and the proximity of Scotland’s only known stone axe factory near Killin, it is possible that further evidence will be preserved in the loch.

Now, in the course of searching for the root systems of one of the most upright stumps, the archaeologists have discovered upright and jumbled sticks buried up to one metre below the lochbed which have been gnawed and cut by beaver. Dr Nicholas Dixon, Chairman of the STUA and Research Fellow at Edinburgh niversity said “We were hoping to find timbers cut by early farmers using prehistoric tools; we never expected to find evidence of beaver activity. It will be exciting to date these finds – many of which have well-preserved teethmarks - and to try to establish if they represent the remains of a dam or lodge.”'

Here are Barrie Andrian and Nick Dixon photographing something that a present beaver has gnawed.

They kindly sent me the following photographs that show some of their underwater beaver gnawed finds.

Another go at salmonid parr feeding.

2011-07-28T18:46:00.000+01:00

http://vimeo.com/27013432

Vimeo and Youtube seem both to be fixated on my beavers and otter video. Or is it just my incompetence at loading the right one? Probably the latter. Anyhow, I am trying again.

A young yellowhammer sitting on a fence post.

Water Forget-me-not (Myosotis scorpioides), I suppose, growing out of one of the dams in the Wet Wood.

And here is an aspen leaf: the beavers have not yet, after nine years, returned to fell this group of trees - the celebrated 76 suckers that grew out of the original dozen trees that were planted, after they were felled in 2002.

When will the beavers return and cut them down again?

Salmonid Parr feeding in the Burnieshed Burn at Bamff

2011-07-28T16:39:00.000+01:00

Here is the link that should lead you to a video of salmonid parr feeding. I think I took this clip last Saturday evening but, as I mentioned in my last post, I walked out yesterday evening and filmed similar activity in the same pool.

http://vimeo.com/27010638

Gradually, the water level will creep up to cover this ground, but over how long a period of time? What will seed into the silts? In the meantime it will be interesting to see what walks about and leaves its footmarks.

Hydraulic Support

2011-07-28T15:51:00.001+01:00

Beavers often build dams close downstream to previously built 'high dams' to give the upstream dam hydraulic support. Before its breaching about three weeks ago there was a little dam about thirty metres downstream of the dam in the photo (now called the Third Dam) and this was breached at the same time. Since the 6th July the beavers have been building a dam about ten metres downstream of the main dam. What made them do that? Lars Wilsson, the Swedish zoologist would have said they were programmed to do this: the late Donald Griffin would have allowed them powers of problem solving. I tend toward the Griffin school of thought.

Here is the small dam that gives hydraulic support to the bigger one, seen from the parapet of the Third Dam.

Yesterday evening I sat by this pool as the dusk approached and video'd the parr of brown trout and, perhaps, Atlantic salmon as they fed on the invertebrates that flew about.

This is what I filmed in one of several clips that I took.

http://vimeo.com/27007011 - This turns out not to be of parr feeding, but of beavers and otters. I will try again.

Chris Potter, handyman and gamekeeper, told me recently that he had seen a salmon of about 10 lbs (4.5kg) in the Burnieshed burn sometime around 1990. As I may have mentioned in an earlier post, Chris said back in 2007 that he thought that we might be seeing salmon parr jumping in the first of the new pools that the beavers had created that year. It looks very much as though he was right, but the abundance of salmonid parr that we are seeing has to be due to the increase in area of habitat and the proliferation of invertebrates on which the fish may feed.

The reductionist management of salmon that cannot allow the presence of pike, or eels, or goosanders, or cormorants, or herons, or otters, or beavers should have no place these days.

2011-07-26T12:20:00.000+01:00

The breaching of this dam, the lowest of the big dams on the Burnieshed Burn, happened around the night of the 6th July. This photograph was taken on the 7th.

and this, I think, on the 8th

as, perhaps, was this.

A lot of little frogs are going about.

Here is that dam again, taken this morning, the 26th July.

Otters and Beavers

2011-07-14T10:16:00.000+01:00

The repair of the breached dam is well underway and the pool behind the dam is full of parr, leaping up to catch the insects.

Our friend, David Wilson, stayed for the night, so he accompanied me to see the beavers. We reached the pool to the east of the drive, striving to avoid crunching the road metal that has been spread to fill the pot-holes formed during the winter. It was soon apparent that something was up: the beavers were out and about, patrolling the pool. I became aware of a high whistling sound, wondering first if it was a bird: but which bird? Then, looking right, along the drive I saw an otter emerging from the vegetation: the cries came from it. I could see the movements of its mouth as the whistles sounded. The animal turned about and disappeared back into the pool.

The video on YouTube is a sticking together of two or three separate clips, the last of which shows two otters as they came up onto the drive, walked away from us and then disappeared down the bank to swim upstream in the Burnieshed Burn.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zV8-9xmR28

Moments after the otters had left, we saw the five young mallard swimming serenely among the tumble of dead dogwood in the pool.

2011-07-08T12:54:00.001+01:00

The heavy rains of the day before yesterday proved too much for the lowest of the big dams along the Burnieshed burn.

It burst sometime between the late mornings of the sixth and seventh July.

The tree tube in the top right of the photograph gives a helpful reference point for both pictures: the one above and the one below.

This photo is a 'before' photo, which you probably guessed.

Yesterday evening Paul Scott found the lower one of these salmonid parr just below the surviving part of the dam. It may be a salmon parr. The two little fish must have been washed over the parapet of the dam and left behind when it was breached and the water rushed through the gap this made in the dam.

I found the lighter parr this morning, close to the darker one. It is probably a brown trout parr.

While Paul was watching beavers and finding the darker of the two parr, I was standing by the drive watching a kit feed and swim around.

Here is the link to Youtube to see it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px2TIwjfDK8

The sighting of the kit made the reason for the defensive activity of the beavers last Friday very plain. They recognised the otters as predators and were determined to protect their own. In doing so they protected the five mallard duckling which have been sharing the burn with them.

Beavers eat ferns

2011-07-06T16:20:00.000+01:00

The evening before last I was out at the Big Pond with friends and was able to film this beaver, eating the fronds of a fern.

Here is the link: it's the first time I have seen beaver eating fern fronds. It must have taken them there from some place along the shore where there are ferns.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-jJJDiLX4A

This is a day of downpour. I have managed, at last, to discover how to delete all the old bits of video on my camcorder and have uploaded the most recent clip on to YouTube.

I was impressed by the galls on this birch tree while looking around for a place to fix my trail camera.

Otters and Beavers

2011-07-01T14:49:00.000+01:00

After feeding the wild boar down the drive this morning I thought it would be time to remove the trail camera and see what activities it had recorded during the last week.

Here is what I found:

Disappointing, really: however, yesterday evening I walked out with my camcorder. I walked along the Burnieshed path and stood behind a patch of ferns. The wind was from the North. The five adolescent mallard ducks swam by me in single file and settled down to feed some distance upstream. A beaver climbed out of the water on the opposite bank and began to graze.

It did not settle, though, and turned back to re enter the water. I watched it swim about for a little and then land on the bank near the dam. It settled there and grazed for some minutes. While this was going on another beaver appeared where the first beaver had started feeding. It was rather bigger than the first beaver, so I took it that the new beaver was the female and that the first one was her mate. For while they grazed. Occasionally the water near me stirred. I wondered about trout. There was a sharp, short splash sound at one point and the bigger beaver looked up. What's up with you, I thought to be disturbed by that - probably only a trout. She went on grazing.

Then the first beaver took to the water again, circled around a bit near the dam and made for the bank where his mate was feeding. Suddenly, there was a lot of splashing and what I thought sounded like rather aggressive activity, out of my sight, behind the rushes that fringe the burn. Odd, I thought, are they playing together? And then, but was it then, I saw the otter. It ran off. The beavers rushed into the water swam about, met each other and rubbed noses and then headed off together at speed. I lost continuous sight of them as they disappeared behind the fallen fir in the pool. They gave long keening cries. A short while later they turned back a returned to view, but not before the otter, joined by a second otter, ran out from behind the rushes. One of the beavers rushed out of the pool and the otters fled, chased by the beaver.

After this the beavers patrolled the pool vigorously. The wind had veered a little to the East of North. I thought, 'Now the beavers will get wind of me'. One of them swam across the pool about thirty yards upstream of me, followed the scent downstream and faced me, sniffing about. It got a good contact and crash-dived.

What a fascinating experience! I think the otters must have been waiting around in the hope of attacking a kit and the beavers were probably aware of this for some time. I had not heard the single keening warning note before.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phdDrSIK5fg

Dams and Pipes

2011-06-30T12:57:00.001+01:00

The new dams by the drive have been creeping up and with the rains of last week, the beavers felt obliged to raise them still further. They have crowned this dam with rhododendron, brought down from the bushes upstream.

The height of the water level upstream began, however, began to present a potential problem for the drive. We do not want the drive to become a water course and, by means of cuts in the side of the drive have been carrying out work, familiar to anyone who maintains roads, of taking the water off the road as soon as possible.

Therefore, we have taken this opportunity to instal a pipe through the dam. The perforated polythene pipe is fixed at both ends and wire mesh covers the upstream end to prevent beavers blocking it.

Paul Scott and Alan Ross came here last Saturday to carry out this work. So far it has proved completely successful and the water level of the stream upstream of this dam has been reduced by about 4 inches (100 mm) as you see from the tide mark in the photo.

2011-06-17T13:49:00.000+01:00

Contrary to what I wrote yesterday, this is surely the same doe as figured in the other photograph, but taken at a different time and day. What I took to be the antlers must be a combination of the ears and some grass stems.

Some pupils from the New School at Butterstone came to watch beavers with me earlier this week. One of them wondered what he might see at close quarters and found this invertebrate drama in progress. A spider is stalking a fly. I put my iPhone to the eyepiece and this was the result.

Walking round the Wet Wood recently I noticed this and wondered what it was: a gall of some kind, or a chrysalis?

http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/947367

showed a nice photograph of what I had seen: Dasineura urticae, a very common gall of nettles - beautiful, all the same.

Wildlife along the Bamff Drive

2011-06-16T19:30:00.002+01:00

The sequences of film in Springwatch that showed beavers cutting trees and swimming down canals of their own digging made me think it was time to put out my own trail camera, so I did: and this is what I found on the memory card after a week.

Someone with a sieve. Was she looking for tadpoles?

A young roe doe going for a drink.

Wild boarlets, having passed through the stock mesh that detains their parents, on the rake.

And wild boys.

Where were the beavers? By mistake I had not set the machine to work at night.

Rich brown waters - there was heavy rain yesterday evening and the beavers have been active, clarting the dam with mud.

This is the lower of this pair of dams.

Up a nearby ditch there is another beginning.

This mud sculpture was very pleasing.

This time a roe buck goes for a drink.

2011-06-09T17:50:00.000+01:00

Alan and Cyril came from Stirling University to take samples of the vegetation in the ponds. As one can see from the surviving exclosures the bog bean is less abundant than formerly, but where there are spaces in the bogbean, horsetail is growing. So, it seems, less biomass but greater biodiversity.

I have learned since that horsetail (Equisetum spp.) has very extensive and deep growing rhizomes. These transfer nutrients from deep in the soil up into the plants themselves. Something interesting is going on here, I suspect.

Here is a sward of Bogbean (Menyanthes trifoliata).

I can only make out three beavers in this photograph, but there was another one close by.

This past weekend we celebrated the tenth anniversary of the return of beavers to the Tay.

There was a good turnout, but best of all was the number of children who came to see our displays.

Some of us canoed from Ballinluig to Dunkeld.

This photograph shows some of our party before setting off for Dunkeld. Hugh Chalmers, who sighted a beaver in the River Earn ten years ago is in the middle of the picture, wearing a red life jacket.

Springwatch!

2011-06-01T18:55:00.002+01:00

Destructive Capability of Beavers...Unbelievable

I’m a lumberjack and I’m OK

I've seen damage done by beavers in the past but this is the worst!!

Beavers, left unattended, can clear a forest in no time.....

This legend accompanied the above photograph that Aileen sent me. A friend of her father, Jim Broun, had sent it to him and he forwarded it on to Aileen. I expect it will get this blog identified as one that deals with 'adult' subjects.

Well, there you go! I thought this was a most entertaining photograph. I wonder where the event it depicts took place. I must say that I would not like to go a wooding with no clothes on: least of all when wielding a chain saw. Still, the picture is very lovely.

And now for something quite different! This and the photo below are of a couple of new dams. One, it is true, was begun last year, but left. With the onset of spring the beavers have come back to this work and have added to the dam begun last year and built this new one. It is, of course, work in progress.

As a matter of fact, this is the new one.

A little upstream this tributary ditch has a couple of tentative little plugs. Here

and here.

I took a look at the dead trees on and behind the barrage that closes the big pond or lochan this morning. I wondered if any more had fallen during the windy weather last week.

Several have. Three stems have broken along the barrage now and some more in the ground below the barrage. More light is coming in and willow and birch are making a come back.

The swamp behind the barrage.

The Morning after the Storm

2011-05-24T12:53:00.000+01:00

The night before last 25 mm of rain fell. Yesterday the wind blew, the Forth and Tay road bridges were closed and Edinburgh Airport shut down. I am glad to say that the dams in the Burnieshed Burn did not collapse.

The second big dam below the drive.

Much of the grass here has been grazed by the beavers.

I find it odd that the beavers are still eating bark. Perhaps the bulk of the bark balances the nutritive value of the young grass they are consuming?

The lowest of the big three dams below the drive is abundantly green: a true filtre.

Two channels of water gush through the lower part of this dam. Do fish use them to swim up and down the burn?

A young willow has found a place to grow on the wall of the dam.

The pool above the dam.

2011-05-16T16:20:00.000+01:00

This is a small dam that Chris breaches from time to time. The beavers always repair it within a day or two of its breaching. This time, as though irritated by its removal, they have placed to large logs to buttress the dam and prevent its destruction.

I should have taken my SLR camera and a polaroid lens for this photo. You should be able to make out the head of a beaver below the dock plant.

The scene is the Alyth Burn, or Water of Quiech (as it is known further down) as it flows through the town. The stream is contained by stone walls. A beaver, dispersing from, perhaps the Isla downstream or somewhere else, reached this place with its walls and shallow water at daybreak and needed to find a place to stay until dusk. At least that is what I think happened. Terrified by the sounds and smells of humans, and unable to dig into the wall, but fearful of swimming on, it tried to hide and was noticed eventually.

Just south of the Quarry Cottages at Little Bamff is the burn where Mary, the runaway beaver from Bamff went to live during the winter of 2006/7. The willow she cut has been replaced by luxuriant coppice growth. Who could ever tell that a beaver had lived there?

An apple tree flowered in the further garden; the hedge between the two needed trimming.

Spring!

2011-04-30T18:35:00.001+01:00

We stopped for a walk along a short length of the Perthshire River Garry earlier this week, wondering if we should see signs of beavers. Instead, we found this Solomon's seal. I suppose it is an escape from a garden. It doesn't look like the rare Whorled Solomon's seal.

The Garry is part of a project to restore water levels to a point where the river can once again support salmon. I wonder how it is progressing.

Further on we noticed a couple of morels. I was excited to see the fungus, a first sighting for me, and resisted the temptation to pick it.

We have been watching beavers a good deal lately and I wondered how the bogbean was faring this spring. Here is a photograph of one of the plants in flower.

I had hoped to put up a link to You Tube of some clips of beavers feeding and swimming about, but I cannot remember how to transfer bits of film from my Sony camcorder to my Macintosh laptop.

Watching Beavers at the Big Pond

2011-04-17T22:12:00.000+01:00

'Spring is here' in the words of the immortal mathematical songster of Harvard, but we will not go poisoning pigeons in the park or any other light-hearted activities that appealed to Tom Lehrer.

I went out beaver watching this evening. This time of year is particularly good because the vegetation has not grown up on the rafts of sedge and so, although beavers can hide in the rushes, there is still plenty of open ground.

I think I saw five beavers this evening, but it is not always easy to know. Beavers can move swiftly from one feeding place to another, which makes it difficult to count them if you are on your own.

Of course, if you trap them all, puncture their ears with colourful tags and pierce their tails with radio transmitters you can probably get a fairly good idea of how many you have and where they are, but run other risks. As Rob Thomas of RZSS told his audience at the talk he gave the Edinburgh Centre of SWT the other day, some beavers in the Knapdale project tried to tear the transmitters out of their tails. If that isn't stressful for the animals I don't know what is. The new approach is to stick radios on the lower rump, which must be better, but still be risky to a beaver negotiating a narrow way among some branches of a fallen tree under water.

And now for another photograph -

Fading light is a particular difficulty with digiscoping and the shutter speed in this photo was about 1/10th of a second: no wonder the result is a bit blurry.

Evening grazing

2011-04-15T21:08:00.000+01:00

Digiscoping for the first time this year, running out of battery with my Canon Ixus, resorting to an iPhone.

Failing light and a trembling hand make it difficult enough to take a reasonable photograph without the added hindrance of lack of practice.

Still, I think I saw as many as four beavers. They are very hungry at this time of year and the fresh growth is just beginning, so there is little to hide them if they sit on the sedge rafts. The two in the rushes have more to conceal them.

2011-04-14T11:18:00.000+01:00

Yesterday evening we attended our now monthly meeting of the Scottish Wild Beaver Group. We had a useful and news-filled evening because this was the first time that we had met since the Freedom of Information papers reached us. We spoke, too, about our meeting with Rob Thomas and Roisin Campbell-Palmer of the RZSS and, following from that the publication of the results of the autopsy on Erica.

Crossing Allan Street in Blairgowrie after the meeting I saw this newspaper billboard: a classic of its kind and interesting because there is no need to explain who Erica was to the people of Blairgowrie.

Petri Nummi, a Finnish zoologist with a particular interest in beavers, has kindly sent me a paper on beavers and their relations with bats.

UNCORRECTED PROOF

1 ORIGINAL PAPER

2 Bats benefit from beavers: a facilitative link

3 between aquatic and terrestrial food webs

4 Petri Nummi • Saara Kattainen • Paula Ulander • Anna Hahtola

5 Received: 2 November 2009 / Accepted: 28 December 2011

6 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

7 Abstract Bat populations are declining in many areas, partly because up to two-thirds

8 of their wetland habitats have been lost. One natural agent creating wetlands is the

9 beaver, which is recolonizing its former range. Beaver flowages are known for their high

10 production of aquatic invertebrates. We tested the hypothesis that the high numbers of

11 insects emerging from beaver flowages influences their use by foraging bats. We com-

12 pared bat use and bat numbers above flowages of introduced Canadian beavers Castor

13 canadensis and in nearby control ponds where beavers were absent. The two bat species

14 detected, Eptesicus nilssoni and Myotis daubentoni, used beaver flowages more than non-

15 beaver ponds. This is especially the case for Eptesicus nilssoni. Bats also seemed to

16 forage in larger groups while above beaver ponds compared to the control ponds. Beaver

17 flowages appeared to improve bat habitats. A plausible reason for this could be the high

18 number of insects emerging from beaver ponds. Favouring the beaver in habitat man-

19 agement is a tool for creating suitable conditions for many other species, such as bats. In

20 areas not suited for the beaver, insect production can be achieved by imitating the beaver

21 with man-made impoundments. This is especially important in areas which have lost most

22 of their wetlands.

23 Keywords Bat conservation Beaver Emerging insects Eptesicus nilssoni

24 Facilitation Foraging habitat Myotis daubentoni Wetland management

25 Introduction

26 Bat populations are facing serious declines in many countries. This decline is largely

27 due to human-caused habitat loss and modifications, affecting both the roosting places

28 and feeding habitats of bats (Daan 1980; Walsh and Harris 1996; Hutson et al. 2001).

A1 P. Nummi (&) S. Kattainen P. Ulander A. Hahtola

A2 Department of Forest Sciences, University of Helsinki, P.O. Box 27, 00014 Helsinki, Finland

A3 e-mail: petri.nummi@helsinki.fi

123

Journal : Small 10531 Dispatch : 31-12-2010 Pages : 9

Article No. : 9986 h LE h TYPESET

MS Code : BIOC2686 h4 CP h4 DISK

Biodivers Conserv

DOI 10.1007/s10531-010-9986-7

Author Proof

Here is the abstract and a sentence or two of the introduction.

Aspen and a Peacock Butterfly

2011-04-12T21:08:00.000+01:00

Victor Clements of Scottish Native Woods offer of a dozen aspen from different clones around the Highlands was an exciting and welcome one. Last Sunday Victor came here with another of our Scottish Wild Beaver Group members, Tina and her son Mungo, and we planted two of these small saplings. The photo shows my grandson, Adam, helping Victor plant one of them.

The link is to a blog site that deals with aspen and has some more photographs of this auspicious occasion.

http://aspen2020.blogspot.com/

Louise drew my attention to this Peacock Butterfly, sunning itself on a warm afternoon.

The news that Erica died of septic shock comes as little surprise. She was stressed, suffered an injury, her immune system was weakened and she died. That's what they call best practice, I suppose.

Externalities and Grey Willow

2011-04-07T17:39:00.000+01:00

The name of Jules Pretty came to mind recently when I received an email from Chris Spray, professor of Water Science and Policy at Dundee University.

Here is a quotation from part of Chris's email.

'At a UK scale the total cost of environmental externalities arising from agriculture has been estimated by Jules Pretty at Essex to be roughly £2.3 billion - contamination of drinking water with pesticides is estimated to cost £120million/year, with nitrates £16m, and phosphate and soil £55m. The cost of damage to wildlife, habitats, hedgerows and dry-stone walls was estimated at £125million, from emissions of gases £1113m, from soil erosion and organic carbon losses £106m and from food poisoning £169m. Huge figures, and this doesn't even consider the more recent interest we have in Scotland in such areas as flooding and flood risk reduction.'

This problem of the externalities is one that affects us all. At one level you may see the problem as one in which individual farmers and landowners profit at the expense of the rest of the community. At another level it means there must be recognition that rivers cannot be treated merely as drains in the winter and sources of irrigation water in the summer. There have to be solutions that make sense for us all and the environment on which we depend.

Nearly every year there is some planting of trees to be done, so when I order the trees I include some extra ones. This year, in a moment of enthusiasm, I ordered 100 crab apples and 1,000 willows. I have just spent a rewarding hour planting one hundred grey willows. In the past I have planted at rather wide intervals: two paces apart, but while in Oregon in February someone talked about the importance of planting at close spacing. I have been planting at about one pace apart today There is no doubt that the roe deer will get some of the saplings, but some should survive, and that is the main point.

Here is the lowest of the big dams. Grasses are growing along it already. Soon there will be cress.

Below the dam I see clean gravel. The sediments that ran off the fields have been caught by the dam.

Freedom of Information

2011-04-05T22:46:00.000+01:00

Home from London and I see the daffodils nervously coming into flower. They are fully out in Perth and in London the gardens of Islington were full of brilliant magnolia.

Our chief excitement on returning home has been the reading of the package-full of Freedom of Information documents, received from SNH, about the free beavers in the Tay.

What dread secrets are they hiding?

Thankfully the programme of capture, ineffective as it was, has been abandoned.

I came across this much pockmarked snag in a plantation this evening.

A Break in London

2011-04-01T13:13:00.000+01:00

Away for a break in London; a change, you might think, and so it is physically speaking, but laptops, Google, facebook and twitter, mean that we are yoked to the same tasks and projects.

News has reached us that Erica is dead. She died in Edinburgh Zoo, having not taken well to captivity, it seems. So much for the curious notion that the free beavers of the Tay were being captured for their own good.

In his obituary for Erica on the Scottish Wild Beavers Group blog, Paul Scott speaks of Erica as being one of the first beavers to be born in the wild. This is not quite right: it is very likely that beavers have been breeding in the Tay and its catchment since 2001.

Roseanna Cunningham said, at the second Brian Taylor 'Big Debate' in Perth (was it the 17th or 18th of March?) that policy could not be decided on 'cuddleability'.

Here is an interesting link about flooding at Belford in Northumberland in 2008. The report recommends the kind of management that beavers do for nothing.

http://research.ncl.ac.uk/iq/download/BelfordBHSpaper.pdf

Having said that, I should recognise that beavers have their own approach to what constitutes a desirable landscape and this may not coincide with what humans would like but, as we know from the experiences of others, there are solutions that enable beavers and humans to coexist to both species' advantage. And, of course, to the great benefit of many other species.

And here is a link to YouTube, which shows the morning after the floods at Belford of September 2008:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYYbCVMhk0g

A windblown sycamore, whose bark beavers have been eating. The tree has been dead for two to three year: I suppose there must be some nutritional value in the lichens and mosses that are growing on the dead bark

An otter's track in the silt.

Freshly stripped twigs by one of the Burnished dams.

Spring comes - learn your plants again!

2011-03-20T18:28:00.001Z

I meant to post this photo this morning, but forgot. The picture shows the outlet of the Big Pond. It is fenced around with stock netting and there is a piece of concrete reinforcing mesh to guard the main outlet. I have always been worried that this might be a place through which beavers might try to escape, but I have never seen any signs of it. On the contrary, today I noticed that they have been damming the outlet at one end.

Water Forget-me-not, some grass and water cress are beginning to grow. How the beavers must be relieved to become aware of the return of Spring! The new growth is very dense and tight. Looking at it I was uncertain about identification.

Was a beaver responsible for this?

This looks more like water forget-me-not, or was I looking at speedwell?

Grey alder in the developing wetland. A wet strype runs through the woodland from the little pond to the bigger one downstream.

Roseanna and the Frog

2011-03-20T13:25:00.002Z

A few days away and then back to a milder Perthshire, we missed Brian Taylor's Big Debate on Radio Scotland, but I have just listened to it on iPlayer.

I find Roseanna Cunningham's arguments increasingly thin. She claims to take the advice of scientists, but which I wonder, and haven't their arguments about the right sort of beaver and so forth been discredited? In the past she has spoken about democratic processes, but were these not covered by the Scott Porter public opinion survey work of 1998?

And then, as Roger Crofts (former Chief Executive Officer of SNH) pointed out at the Scottish Wildlife Trust talk in Edinburgh on Tuesday, 15th March, what other country has gone in for a 'trial' such as the one in Knapdale: a meaningless project from the point of view of finding things out about beavers that are not already known in the matter of the species's restoration to this country? None is the answer.

How would you carry out an 'exit' to the release of beavers in Knapdale when you had taken money from charitable organisations and persuaded thousands of school children of the necessity of the return of beaver? Imagine turning round and saying, 'Our project has failed, so we want rid of these beasts. The Norwegians don't want them back, so we are going to have to kill them.' How absurd!

I am glad there are beavers in Knapdale and wish them every success, but it would be good if their minders allowed their charges some space and stopped treating the beavers as though they were in a zoo.

While we were away one of the sycamores that the beavers ring barked three or four years ago fell.

There are a few marks of beavers' teeth to show that they have thought it worth trying the bark.

The fallen tree is leaning against another ring barked sycamore. This tree will fall over the dam near it. What will happen then?

This big frog jumped slowly across the path as I drove back from feeding the Burnieshed family of wild boar. It stopped by the side of the path and I was able to dismount and take some photographs of it.

Visit to the Wet Wood

2011-03-14T22:49:00.000Z

Louise Ramsay

09 March 11:47

The Writing on the Wood

I admire the graphic way you chop trees
to pencil points
and the ogham of your toothmarks
on fallen trunks. I note
the hieroglyphic of your foot printed
in soft mud by the pool.

Your dam is an alphabet of shapes
While runes, stripped white,
tell the story of your last meal.

Trout draw concentric circles
in the water’s glossy surface.
and a dipper dips
like pen into ink.

This landscape has beaver written all over it.

A front paw mark in the mud.

The eighty metre dam wanders about a bit. Here is a rather more than ninety degree turn.

This is the fifty metre dam. The high water levels of the winter have dropped somewhat to reveal the structure. In the foreground you can see the fence straining post that has figure on this blog so often.

Hard to make out, but this dam runs for around eighty metres.

An email from George Fleming and some other thoughts

2011-03-14T22:09:00.001Z

You never know who is reading your blog, so here is an email from George Fleming of Grange of Aberbothrie:

Morning Paul, Read your blog--and the Times. Like Ian Ivory, I have no intention of allowing a cull on my land, with any luck they have moved on and the problem with it. Your article is slightly misguided in the facts that it is not one tree , but several, and there is a lot more damage upstream. The burrowing is of more worry to me than being 'outraged ' at having to clear up debris--I do this every year even BB --before beavers!I have grave doubts that the large burrows will fill up themselves--I hope I am proved wrong--. I totally understand your need to get the law in place to give power to relocate them to places more suitable and more acceptable--and in that I wish you luck. ps--I do not allow cattle to graze my banks, I use sheep which firm up the banks--perhaps that's why I have only had one breech in 30 years. There may well be a place for the beaver in Scotland, which is acceptable to the surrounding area, I do not think it is with me! I wish you and Louise well, and I am sure the powers that be will come up with some sort of compromise--that's the way of politics! Regards, George

So, here is a view of the bank of the River Isla on the Aberbothrie side. It is grazed by sheep, as George says,

but is still prone to collapse, which might be avoided if the bank was protected with riparian woodland. It has to be admitted, however, that the establishment of riparian woodland, where flooding is common, is an expensive and difficult business.

The willows in this photograph, taken on the south bank of the Isla are trapping sediment, which would otherwise be washed downstream, eventually to be deposited and clog up gravels where salmon might breed.

Late Winter at the Bamff Ponds

2011-03-06T16:58:00.000Z

March is late winter and, on a grey misty day, doubly so. I took a walk round the two ponds.

A surprising number of pairs of mallard took off at intervals as I walked along. The wild boar stampeded out of a muddy wallow, bellowing indignantly. This mass of dead willow looked like an ossuary, its neglected bones scattered around.

You can see that there is still a skin of ice on the pond in the picture. Weeks of freeze by night, followed by thaw by day have left an enduring crust.

I was nearing this lodge when there was some turmoil on the water and a small beaver swam off down the canal that separates the two ponds.

Perhaps it would return? I changed my camera lens to the 70/300 mm and waited. I became impatient after some minutes and took this photograph of the detritus in the canal. Masses of barked bits of birch and willow branch about six inches long (16cm).

I stood up and moved on quietly. About one hundred metres on, at the next drain outlet into the pond, there was a commotion of the water. There was the beaver, one of last year's kits. It was inattentive enough to allow me to get to within about ten metres of it and I took the following photographs as well as several others. I was surprised it did not seem to mind the clunk of my camera's shutter. Perhaps its desperation to feed made it lose its caution?

It was good to see this young animal so clearly and to watch it grasp the sticks of birch with forefeet.

Above all I was surprised at how small the beaver was. Kits weight around 450 grammes at birth and then put on a lot of weight through the summer, first on their mother's milk and then on vegetation, but it must be the case that they do not grow during the winter, particularly a hard winter. Spring finds them at much the same weight as they were the previous autumn.

Where is my copy of Müller-Schwarze and Lixing Sun's 'The Beaver: Natural History of a Wetlands' Engineer'? There is information about this sort of thing there.

Floodplains and their anxious Owners

2011-02-24T21:55:00.000Z

These photographs are of a stretch of the River Isla a little to the south of Alyth. This bit of the Isla is occupied by a family of beavers. Much of this length of the river is bare of riparian woodland. The beavers have settled on the south bank, where there is some patchy willow scrub.

On the left of the photograph is the south bank. The tree on the north bank is one of the rather few on that bank and may even be one of those felled by the beavers this winter.

The photographs below were taken last week, when the weather was mild and wet.

This photograph was taken from the north bank of the Isla on Grange of Aberbothrie, a farm belonging to George Fleming. Beavers have cut down one of the few trees on his side of the river and provoked outrage. George claimed that this tree would be carried down river and finish up, lodged against a bridge, which might collapse in the event of other large woody debris forming up against it as well.

Unfortunately, I didn't take any photographs of the opposite bank. There are a couple of places where the flood waters blew out the burrows that beavers had been using. The Fleming view was that these breaks in the bank would render the whole flood bank on that side of the river liable to collapse and then the inundation of hundreds of acres of farmland. Others have suggested that these burrows are filling up with sediment already and that the flood banks themselves have a core of stone that is unlikely to be broken through so easily.

This simple controversy brings up so many questions. From the point of view of present day agriculture the soils of the flood plain are excellent silty loams in many cases and have to be protected from floods. From another point of view these bits of flood plain should be turned over to nutrient farming and the reinstatement of wetland with all that that means for the restoration of wildlife and wilderness.

I asked George if he had thought of planting this ground next the river with willows. He keeps this area of river in permanent pasture, recognising that the annual intrusion of flood water makes it too difficult to crop. Unfortunately, the grazing of cattle erodes the river bank and there are places where it is collapsing into the river. Having said that this stretch of eroding river bank is no worse than a great many stretches of river bank throughout Scotland. Nonetheless, it is symptomatic of the degradation of so much of our riparian habitat. The memory of my visit to Oregon reminds me that what they lost in 150 years, starting in the 19th Century, our ancestors had achieved around 1000 years ago. A reading of Professor Callum Roberts's 'The Unnatural History of the Sea' - Chapter 2 (Gaia Thinking 2007) is instructive.

In the 1990s the WWF set up its Wild Rivers' Project with its intention of restoring Scotland's degraded rivers to some of their wild state. I wonder what became of the project. And what became of SNH's plan to encourage riparian planting around the year 2000?

The present SRDP has as a priority in its environmental section the planting of riparian woodland. I wonder how much success this is having. I should find out.

This was a burrow that had been flooded and abandoned by the beavers.

Here is some really amazing debris from the floods earlier this winter. What quantities of plastic bottle and cans!

Three Killings and the Importance of Gravel

2011-02-19T18:35:00.000Z

The news that three beavers have been killed somewhere upstream of roughly Meigle is upsetting, but not surprising, given Allan Bantick's advice to his audience in Forfar a year or two back that landowners might shoot what they saw as errant beavers. Ian Ivory was given similar advice by Scottish Natural Heritage, though I am told that he has not followed that advice so far. For which, Ian, grateful thanks, should you read this blog.

It is sad that the Scottish Wildlife Trust, through Chairman Bantick, and SNH should behave in this way. Can it be that they are jealous of the success of the accidental return of the beavers to Tayside? They seem to think that the free beavers of the Tay are a threat to the success of their project.

So far as local tourism is concerned our beavers at Bamff have been a draw for the Cateran Trail and those that live along the Isla are bringing interested walkers to visit the banks of that river.

Here is the dam that Ronald Campbell of the Tweed Foundation claimed would be impassable to salmon, but which John Thorpe stated would be passable. I asked another fish scientist if the name of Professor Thorpe, uttered in the presence of Ronald Campbell, would be enough to cause him to vanish in a puff of smoke. This person assured me that it would.

Anyhow, here is that dam again: it would be a very weak salmon that could not make it up to the pool above.

My recent visit to Oregon and the Joe Hall Creek reminded me of the importance of gravel for salmon redds. As I look at the fast flowing waters below the dams here I see signs of development of the kind shown me by Stan Petrowski.

These two photographs might have been better if I had thought of taking a polaroid lens with me.

I like the effect, even if you cannot make out the gravels very well.

A point that Louise makes from time to time in the discussion of whether the Burnieshed Burn is a suitable place for salmon to breed in is that this was an agricultural ditch until 2007 when the beavers built the Ronald Campbell High Dam and the two other big dams downstream. The ditch is undergoing a process of rewilding with all that means for the return of complexity and enriched biodiversity.

Water tumbling through a spill way in one of the dams.

A real beaver swamp

Canyonville and Tiller

2011-02-15T14:22:00.000Z

The Alhambra Creek is the name of the river that runs through Martinez in California. Heidi Perryman's excellent web site is to be found at http://www.martinezbeavers.org/wordpress/.

Stanley Petrowski's article there is a must read because it describes so much of the background to the present socio-economic situation in Oregon and the rest of the Pacific North-West.

Not only is Stan's piece excellent, but Heidi has written a really good summary of the conference, which makes it unnecessary for me to say any more about the presentations.

I will, however, say something about my visit to Stanley Petrowski's ranch, Singing Falls, at Tiller.

Before I left Canyonville, I dropped in to the local general store where, a couple of days before, I had photographed the stuffed cougars, mounted high on the wall.

Here is one of the cougars

This mat lay at the entrance to the store.

Later, I saw this T-shirt in the airport at Portland.

Twenty years ago timber was the main industry through much of the Pacific North-West: communities such as Canyonville were heavily dependent on it. Unfortunately, the lumber industry had no notion of the meaning of sustainability, limited understanding of the environmental value of old growth forest, and so the plundering of the forests sped on fed by the notion that the forests of the West were inexhaustible.

The timber industry is still very important in the area, as I noticed from the number of trucks driving loads of first class timber along Interstate 5 up to Portland.

Conservationists were disturbed by the destruction of the ancient forests and ornithologists noted that numbers of the Northern Spotted Owl, which had been declared an endangered species and which is dependent on old growth forests, were declining. There followed litigation, which went right up to the US Supreme Court. As a result the timber companies were forced to restrict the amount of timber they might cut.

Coinciding with the period of extreme cutting, and subsequently, the timber companies had been mechanising and automating their sawmills. The result was that the '90s saw a radical reduction in the number of people employed in the timber industry.

The unemployment that followed caused enormous bitterness, some of which was focussed against environmentalists.

The clear cutting of the forests of the Pacific North-West, along with a variety of other causes (including runoff from roads, pesticide use) had a devastating effect on the salmon fisheries. Rivers and creeks that had run with salmon early in the 20th century had lost their abundance by the 1990s, even reaching the point of local extinction by 2000.

The recognition that communities must recover from the depression that resulted from the loss of employment in the timber business led to the formation of groups and associations of people who had come to recognise the links between community and land. The South Umpqua Rural Community Partnership is one of these.

The South Umpqua Rural Community Partnership organised the conference at the Seven Feathers Casino Resort. The motto of this group is 'Build Community - Restore Watersheds - Sustainable Stewardship'

The restoration of rivers is one of their main projects and the recognition of the part played by beavers in the management of healthy river systems came to them early.

Duncan Halley told me of the remarkable work of restoration that was being carried out along the Joe Hall Creek.

I had some warning of what to expect when Leonard Houston gave his talk on the last day of the conference. He showed a photograph of a Chinook helicopter that was used to lift timber up to the creek and lower it into a precise position. I took a photo of this photo:

Here are some photos of the Large Woody debris that was placed in the course of this project.

The recognition of the importance of Large Woody Debris and Coarse Woody Debris has come about relatively recently. Stan told us that it was as recently as twenty years ago that fishery managers were still keen to remove fallen trees, branches and other woody debris from water courses in the supposition that they would make obstacles for migrating fish.

Much of the damage to the river system had been caused by the timber industry's practice of splash damming. This involved storing felled logs in a pool in the river that had been dammed and breaching the dam when enough timber had been gathered there, and in a time of high water. The timber would be washed downstream to some point where it could be gathered up and stored before being loaded onto ships and exported. The scouring caused by this method of transport eroded the river bed down to the bare rock in many places with the resulting loss of gravel beds where the salmon redds used to be. No redds = no salmon.

The figure 5 that you see in this picture refers to the weight of the log i.e. 5 tons.

Stanley pointed out that, after only a couple of years since the placing of the Large Woody Debris, gravels and sands were settling out into the recreated bed of the creek.

The Joe Hall Creek is a tributary of the Elk Creek, itself a tributary of the South Umpqua River. Leonard Houston had described the return of beavers to Elk Creek in his talk about the restoration project for that river.

Where the scouring timber reduced the rivers it rushed through to simplicity, the return of the timber and the beavers is bringing back complexity. In the Pacific North-West before the advent of industrial forestry and other European forms of land use this provided the niches that enabled the six native species of salmon to evolve in their waters.

Oregon Spring, Perthshire Winter

2011-02-09T18:52:00.000Z

'The beaver is the state animal of the state of Oregon', said the immigration official. I was glad to learn this and, thanking the official for his benevolent attention, gathered my bags and set off to find my hired car.

The next day I drove south along Interstate 5 from Portland to Canyonville and its Seven Feathers Conference Center, Hotel and Casino, the place of our meeting, 'The State of the Beaver, 2011'.

The podium of the hall where we met was flagged with the Stars and Stripes, the Oregon flag and a flag for the Seven Feathers' Center. My immigration official's assertion that the beaver was the state animal of Oregon was borne out by the beautiful, golden beaver that adorned one side of the flag. The other side depicted a covered wagon to represent the arrival of European colonists in the 1840s (or so) and the date of the establishment of the State.

Duncan Halley held the flag and gave me a short account of the establishment of the State of Oregon.

Where to begin?

The Seven Feathers Hotel and Convention Centre and Casino is the property of the Cow Creek Band of the Umqua Indians, one of the many tribal groups native to the North-West of America. The Cow Creek Band recovered some of their land and were recognised by the government of the United States as having sovereign rights in their territory. Among the activities of the Cow Creek Indians has been the building and management of the Seven Feathers complex.

After welcomes from Stanley Petrowski, President of the Partnership for the Umpqua Rivers and Amy Amoroso, a representative of the tribe, Louis LaChance performed a ceremony.

Then, the presentations began and they were formidable in their style and content. Dennis Martinez of the Indigenous Peoples' Restoration Network (http://www.ser.org/iprn/default.asp) spoke eloquently about traditional ecological knowledge, the title of his talk being 'Climate Disruption, Beavers, Fire and Traditional Indian Land Practices.'

He was followed by Donald Hey, Senior Vice-President, of the Chicago based Wetlands' Institute, whose presentation was entitled 'Nutrient Farming, The Business of Environmental Management.'

His talk was based on http://www.wetlands-initiative.org/images/pdfs_pubs/EcoEngCorrect.pdf.

Duncan Halley of NINA, the Norwegian Conservation Agency, gave a decisive rebuttal of the Scottish salmon fisheries' opposition to the return of the beaver to Scotland and concluded that the controversy over the return of salmon to Scotland had little to do with the ecological realities and a lot to do with sociology.

Michael Pollock, who was to have spoken about 'Beaver and Salmon, a Keystone Relationship' was most unfortunately unable to come to the conference.

Such was the first day of the meeting.

The following day, Thursday, 3rd February, Glynnis Hood gave a talk entitled 'Not too dry for beavers: Unexpected outcomes during unprecedented drought'. Glynnis's presentation included some fascinating aerial photographs that showed the increase in wetlands in an area of Alberta between 1940s and 2000, despite severe drought thanks to the return of beavers to the area.

Sherri Tippie, of Wildlife 2000, doyenne of the live trapper, translocators of the US gave a powerful and emotional account of her career as a humane relocator of beavers.

She had built some beautiful models of various devices that can keep culverts unblocked by beavers and so make it unnecessary to trap and move the animals.

The photo below shows a beaver deceiver of the kind that has been developed by Skip Lyle.

And these photographs show something like the Clemson Leveller.

Next to speak was Heidi Perryman. She described her highly successful campaign in Martinez, California (home of John Muir), to prevent the trapping and removal of a family of beavers that had moved into the river....that runs through the town.

The rest of the photographs are illustrations of the river restoration project that I visited at Tiller on Saturday 5th February, but I am going to write about this in my next post.

Stanley and Alexandra Petrowski

Doug Roberts and Leonard Houston

The Boat of Bardmony to Balbrogie

2011-01-30T10:44:00.000Z

Bardmony is a farm on the banks of the River Isla. The Ordnance Survey's map shows the crossing place under the name 'Boat of Bardmony', which indicates that a ferry took travellers across at least into the Middle of the nineteenth century, and possibly up to a century later. Louise and I left our car near the bridge and took the path along the flood defence (or levée?) that runs south of the river.

The floods have long since subsided and left behind a mixed detritus of coarse woody debris and an amazing jetsam of plastic bottles, balls, containers of mineral licks for farm stock.

Raising our eyes from the rubbish, we looked downstream, along this bank, bare of undergrowth in the winter, with groups of willow that are supplying the beavers with sustenance.

When we walked along this bank before Christmas there was a lodge here. The floods have washed the superstructure of branches away and the beavers have not returned.

Balbrogie was a grange of the nearby abbey of Coupar Angus. The Cistercian abbey was founded by King Malcolm IV in 1164 and has left its imprint on the history of the surrounding countryside.

The name Balbrogie comes from the Gaelic Baile Brogain: 'Brogan's township'.

This island, just south of the confluence of the Rivers Ericht and Isla was the subject of an extraordinarily misleading news item on BBC Radio Scotland a couple of days ago.

A fishing ghillie, John Muller, described the destructive activities of the beavers and how they had killed the willows on the island. Where there were many willows, there were now only a few, he declared.

Looking at the island from all sides it was hard for us to see the justification for Mr Muller's claims. There were signs of fresh activity, but nothing dramatic. Any cutting will be more than made good by the pulse of new shoots when the spring comes. The bare, exposed banks of the Isla have resulted more from grazing by livestock over the centuries than any recent cutting by beavers.

This is the north end of the little island by Balbrogie, looking up the Ericht. The Isla flows away to the east. You can make out a recent blow out of the bank that must have resulted from the recent floods.

We walked back up the path, marvelling at the imaginative capacities of the ghillie. What could he have been talking about? His description of the beaver he had seen, with its fierce orange teeth, would have done Little Red Ridinghood proud!

By this time the silver light of the overcast day had given way to brilliant sunshine.

A management plan for the riparian Isla should be prepared. Litter should be removed and a programme of planting of willow arranged. Interestingly the farm leases of the Abbey of Coupar Angus nearly always included the requirement for the tenant to plant willow (as well as to drain the land).

Some years ago the WWF ran a Wild Rivers' project to restore Scotland's canalised rivers. There should be a revival of this project.

Winter Walks

2011-01-25T09:50:00.000Z

Scottish Natural Heritage's project to trap all the free beavers in the catchment of the Tay means that we must be discreet about geography - or were these photographs taken in Bavaria?

The back entrance to a burrow in the same burn. The soil was very sandy and some of the bank was collapsing into the stream. I noticed that the farmer had given up cultivating as close to the stream bank as he used to. I guess that the weight of modern farm machinery was enough to destabilise the steep bank.

The sound of rushing water alerted me to the existence of this dam.

Floods and Thaws

2011-01-16T20:35:00.000Z

Once again Morgan has reminded me, as if he needed to, that there had been no post on this blog for more than a week.

What more can I say, except that we are going through a welcome thaw, thought the ice is exchanged for flooding. Here are some photographs of the dams in the Burnieshed burn at Bamff.

The lowest of the Big Three. An overspill to the left of the picture is carrying a lot of water and contributing greatly to the reconfiguring of this rewilding stream.

Here is that long middle dam. This, more than the others, has been draped with rhododendron.

This is the first of the Big Three, looking at its northern end. The old fence straining post is more exposed than it was, but the dam has maintained its integrity, despite the volume of water behind it.

This photo shows the lowest of the Big Three from the path.

Felicity Martin asked how flooding affected beavers. The answer is that floods can affect beavers a lot. If the flood comes with enough warning they will make arrangements, move to higher burrows or shelters. The adults escort the young to places of safety.

In a sudden flood they may get caught and drowned inside their burrows, or washed away by the current. With any luck the animals will get out through a back entrance to the lodge or burrow and find some other shelter, or even build over the existing lodge. In places where floods are frequent, beavers may know of places that are safe in a time of flood.

The beaver that appeared in the Morton Lochs at Tentsmuir in Fife was probably washed down when the Tay was in flood. It was lucky in that it was able to find its way to shore and thus to Tentsmuir, though not so lucky in that it was trapped by the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, taken to Edinburgh and then sent on to a wildlife centre in England, whence it escaped and is now thought to be living in the Thames.

Dusk around the Big Pond at Bamff

2011-01-05T18:29:00.001Z

This afternoon I took a walk around the Big Pond enclosure here at Bamff. You can see the foot marks of beavers and the gnawed trunk of a fallen tree. It is as though a beaver had passed by and taken time off for a few bites at the bark.

I had not been to look at this lodge for a while, but it seems to have grown a good deal since the autumn when I was last around here.

While waiting and photographing the lodge, I noticed gentle ripples in the open water in the photograph above. A moment later I caught a glimpse of a juvenile beaver, swimming away round the corner.

The importance of beavers in keeping waterways open for other animals can hardly be exaggerated.

Please ring the Zoo in Edinburgh (0131 - 334 9171 http://www.edinburghzoo.org.uk/ )and ask about Eric (or is she Erica?)

PS I forgot to wish you all a Happy New Year, please accept my belated greetings.

The Thaw, day 2 or may be 3

2010-12-30T22:20:00.000Z

The upper end of the Ditch/Burnieshed Burn is still iced over. Yesterday afternoon I took a walk along it. The place is a highway. Here are beaver tracks, but there are plenty of roe deer and fox tracks.

This is a bit of a path that leads from a canal to a clump of willow. You may make out a beaver's front foot near my left boot and plenty of other foot marks as well. Besides these there are fox tracks. On the right you can make out the mark of a branch that has been dragged to the canal.

This is the same track that you saw in the last photograph, but looking further away towards the willows.

Dusk: I was surprised that my camera - an iPhone, could take such photos in the increasing dark. In the foreground is the path that beavers take over the dam and down into the stream.

A Happy New Year to my visitors!

Take a look at this: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/News/Releases/2005/09/01131458

A Thaw

2010-12-28T20:08:00.001Z

A thaw at last! The beavers are out and about again. It seems to me that below about 5ºC they stay at home in their burrows and lodges but, once the temperature rises above freezing, they are out again on the quest for food. This beaver had been snipping a couple of small branches from a recumbent oak tree.

Here is that middle dam along the Burnieshed Burn, below the drive.

Footmarks, including my left boot to give some idea of scale. We are all familiar with the enormous dog pads in a thaw that lead people to believe that they are looking at the spoor of a wolf. These beaver tracks looked enormous.

More tracks: a beaver's spoor with a fox's running diagonally into the ice covered pool.

It looks as though the fox had been going to the open water for a drink. People often forget that a time of deep frost is also a time of drought. One of the services that beavers perform for other animals is to keep ponds and pools open for longer than would otherwise be the case, enabling these other creatures to find water to drink. In the case of wildfowl open water means a measure of security from predators such as foxes.

Another Press Release from Scottish Natural Heritage

2010-12-22T15:05:00.000Z

This is the latest press release from Scottish Natural Heritage with comments from Louise Ramsay in red. The comments in blue are from me (Paul Ramsay)

Tayside beaver recapture

20-DEC-2010

We have produced this statement to clarify matters regarding our involvement in trapping feral beavers in Tayside.

A number beavers have either escaped or been deliberately released into the wild in Tayside. Unlicensed release of animals in an area where they would not ordinarily be found is an offence under the Wildlife and Countryside Act, which is why the police are involved.

The position of SNH and the Scottish Government is questionable. The equivalent body in England to SNH is Natural England. In 2009 they published a document:

NECR002 - The feasibility and acceptability of reintroducing the European beaver to England.

This may be found at http://naturalengland.etraderstores.com/naturalenglandshop/product.aspx?ProductID=0228d212-15d7-41bf-8152-047585ec0941.

The chapter on the legal position of the beaver is particularly illuminating.

Responsibility for the current situation, and the future fate of the feral beavers, lies entirely with those who failed to keep them in captivity and who have now failed to come forward and take responsibility for them.

This happened nearly ten years ago. Why all the fuss now? It would seem that the SRPBA has put its foot down. (They claim this as their victory on their website.) Do they run wildlife policy in this country then?

The national Species Reintroduction Forum agreed therefore that the most appropriate and responsible thing to do would be to recapture the Tayside feral beavers.

Membership of this forum includes conservationists, public agencies and wildlife charities, as well as farming, fishing, forestry and landowning interests (see full list at the end of this note).

Who are the national Species Reintroduction Forum? Many of the bodies on this forum are opposed to beavers. No specialists in reintroductions or beavers were invited, other than the SWT who have now distanced themselves from this decision.

(See the following email from Simon Milne).

From: Simon Milne <smilne@swt.org.uk>
Date: 20 December 2010 12:50:24 GMT
To: Louise Ramsay <louise@bamff.co.uk>
Subject: Unlicensed Beavers

Louise

Just left a message on your answer-phone, and will try to call you later. The issue of the feral beavers is indeed taxing. Things have moved on from the initial discussions at the Reintroductions Forum and SWT’s Council agreed line is:

1.    The Scottish Wildlife Trust (SWT) believes that the European beaver should be re-established in the wild in Scotland.

2.    SWT opposes the unlicensed release (intentional or accidental) of beavers into the Scottish countryside because it is illegal to release to the wild any animal which is not normally resident in Great Britain.

3.    SWT recognises that given the presence of beavers living free in parts of the Scottish countryside, it is the responsibility of the Scottish Government to decide what, if anything, is to be done about this.

Simon

The reasons for supporting recapture are:

there was no consultation with local people;

The Scottish people were polled in the late 90s and 59% were in favour. Informally, there was local consultation. Many local people visited the beavers at Bamff whose dams lie along the Cateran trial: many attended talks and guided tours.

Furthermore, there has been no consultation about the removal of the beavers to which many local people have become very attached.

there was no licence issued for their release;

It was an escape. But yes, it's true it wasn’t licensed.

there is no monitoring of their welfare, ecology or effects;

there is nothing to stop SNH monitoring them now.

there is no monitoring of animal or public health;

What?

there is no plan or system of management in place; and

One could be made if it were thought necessary.

there is no certainty that they are the appropriate species or type of beaver for Scotland.

Species can be tested without trapping. (SNH know very well that it they are very unlikely to be the wrong species).

You all know the” type” issue.

SASA (Science and Advice for Scottish Agriculture) and Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH), in collaboration with the police and local landowners, are now trapping the beavers.

What? During this cold weather? I thought we had been told they weren’t.

We admire and respect the enthusiasm of people who are keen to see reintroductions of native animals to Scotland. We understand the strong ecological arguments in favour.

That's nice! Are SNH the 'wrong kind' of conservationists?

Like it or not, however, there are legal considerations that govern how this can be done, put in place by Parliaments to achieve the correct balance.

See NECR002.

We would also question whether public support for beaver reintroduction includes support for illegal and secret releases of animals to the wild.

This is a separate matter from the legal status of the beavers.

There is a licensed and carefully managed trial reintroduction of beavers underway at Knapdale in Argyll. This trial is being carried out by the Scottish Wildlife Trust and the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland, in accordance with international guidelines. SNH is coordinating the independent monitoring of the trial in partnership with a number of other bodies.

Some might say that the 'careful management' was one of gross over interference with the animals and may have contributed to the high mortality.

The European beaver is not listed as a protected species under domestic legislation because they are not ordinarily resident in Britain. We expect this would be reviewed if they were to be reintroduced permanently to Scotland.

It is quite possible that Scotland is breaking European law by not putting them on the “ordinarily resident” list now that they are breeding. ( See NECR002)

Origin of the beavers

The beavers that would once have inhabited Scotland were 'western form' European beavers. This is the specific form being used in the licensed reintroduction project currently underway in Argyll. They have come from Norway.

(And are inbred.)

If European beaver reintroduction is ever approved by the Scottish Government in the future, there could be the opportunity for Scotland to become a refuge for the western form of European beaver.

This is surely a most bizarre notion! There are 160,000 Eurasian beavers in Norway and Sweden, all descended from the may be 200 survivors in Telemark. Why would the United Kingdom be necessary as a refuge for the western form of the European beaver?

There are Bavarian beavers in the Thames and the Tamar as well, that have escaped from zoos and enclosures.

Perhaps SNH's plan is to restore the beaver to England by stealth, as those caught in the Tay escape from captivity in those licensed zoos?

The origin of the Tayside beavers is uncertain. Most are believed to be from Bavaria. This means they are most likely 'eastern form' European, or a blend of eastern and western form.

The group knows this issue pretty well. Duncan Halley’s paper in Mammal Review is the last word on this subject. The Kitchener Paper that SNH is going on is based on three skulls in the archaeological record.

Bavarian beavers can be carriers of a parasite tapeworm which is potentially harmful to human health and up until now has not been found in Great Britain. If any of the Tayside feral beavers are carrying this parasite, it could become established in the Scottish wildlife.

We are looking into this just now, but suspect that this is a storm in a teacup. I will post more on this later.

Is SNH clutching at straws?

The parasite does not occur in Norway, and so Norwegian beavers are not known to be carriers.

Since nobody has admitted responsibility for the Tay beavers, there is also a chance that the North American beaver could be present. There are increasing numbers of records of these occurring in Europe.

We’ve seen this before. As before, it is vanishingly unlikely, but could be checked by genetically testing hairs. One sample from each colony would settle the subject.

Although it is unlikely that North American animals are present, we are not keen to take the risk.

These are all very valid reasons why the beavers in Tayside could not become part of the licensed reintroduction trial, and why they should be recaptured.

None of them is valid.

Also, at the end of the trial period the Scottish Government will decide whether it is appropriate and/or desirable to have beavers in Scotland. If they do they will extend the reintroduction beyond the trial phase. Alternatively, they may decide it's not appropriate and to abandon the reintroduction altogether.

If the Argyll trial is deemed a failure, (and no doubt this is what the SRPBA would like), then the Tayside beavers may turn out to be the only chance of a reintroduction this side of 2050. Scotland would look like a very unfriendly place to wildlife compared to all its European neighbours. I don’t get the impression that this would draw a true picture of attitudes in Scotland.

The recapture of the Tayside beavers would by then be a much more expensive and onerous task than it is at present.

As for the scale of the task, we will learn more about this as the trapping exercise progresses. Evidence suggests there are between seven and 20 beavers loose in Tayside. Bait testing indicates that trapping them is feasible.

Welfare is a key consideration. The area being trapped initially has been used by three beavers; two kits and their mother. The kits are about 18 months old and welfare advice tells us they are capable of survival without their mother.

If welfare of the beavers really was a consideration SNH would leave them alone.

The beaver hunting season in Norway runs from October to April, confirming that this is the most appropriate time to trap them. We want to avoid trapping after dependent baby kits' might appear around mid-spring.

Trapped beavers will be handed over to the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland for holding and re-housing. As part of this RZSS will be wildlife parks and zoos around the UK that have suitable enclosures to house beavers.

Capturing beavers is not something we ever thought we would have to be involved in, nor is it something we would want to be spending resources on, particularly in such times as these.

However to take no action, and allow the feral beavers to remain in the wild, would be to ignore well established wildlife legislation and international species reintroduction guidelines. It would also set a very dangerous precedent; and possibly even encourage other illegal animal releases.

I don’t think the Belgians worried about this when they welcomed and protected their illegally introduced beavers.

That is not something that SNH, or any government organisation, can do.

In that case, are they trapping and removing all the grey squirrels, mink,, etc. and removing Japanese knotweed, Chinese balsam etc etc. And if not why not? These and other non native species cost the British people around 1.7 billion every year.

Ends.

NOTES

Scottish Natural Heritage is the Government's adviser on all aspects of nature and landscape across Scotland. Our role is to help everyone understand, value and enjoy Scotland's nature now and in the future. For further information on SNH, please visit our website at www.snh.gov.uk

The national Species Reintroduction Forum had its first meeting in May 2009. It is chaired by SNH and has a membership representing a range of stakeholders from land use, conservation and science sectors. The overall role of the Forum is to contribute to broad scale, strategic issues relating to species reintroductions in Scotland. Current membership includes: Association of Scottish Fishery Boards; Scottish Government; British Association for Shooting and Conservation; National Farmers Union Scotland; Scottish Gamekeepers Association; Scottish Rural Property and Business Association; British Waterways; Royal Society for the Protection of Birds; Scottish Environment Protection Agency; Scottish Water; Royal Zoological Society of Scotland; Scottish Natural Heritage (Chair); Scottish Wildlife Trust; Forestry Commission Scotland.

Most of these bodies know nothing about beavers. Some are hostile, others indifferent. SRPBA claim this as their victory. (See their website). SWT, one of only two conservation bodies on the forum has pulled back to a fence sitting position.

For further information: Calum Macfarlane, SNH Inverness, 01463 725020

Some wintery observations

2010-12-17T21:15:00.001Z

Beaver tracks leaving a pond at Bamff. The beaver has walked back and forth, dragging a stick on the return journey to the water.

Here, on the banks of the Ericht, someone has cut the willow trees: no doubt those diligent fishermen. The coppice stools have sprouted young shoots, as you can see.

And here, on the River Isla not far from the Ericht, a beaver has done what the fishermen did in the previous photograph. What is the difference? The fishermen have cut the willows very low, leaving the new sprouts from the stool vulnerable to rabbits.

The fishermen have removed the bits of tree they cut, depriving the riparian environment of a habitat for fungi, liverworts and invertebrates of various kinds. The habitat has been impoverished.

The beaver usually leaves more of the stem of the tree it has cut. This means that the longer coppice stool has more chance of surviving the predations of rabbits. Apart from this the untidy beaver carries off some bits of tree to strip, and then consumes the bark. The stripped stick may bee incorporated into a lodge, or be left to decay - another way of saying that the stick is being recycled by fungi, insects et al.

Our campaign to save the free beavers of the Tay continues.

It was astonishing to learn that the Scottish Wildlife Trust supported the SNH's creature, the Scottish Reintroductions' Forum, in its demand that the free beavers should be trapped and, if necessary, shot.

We are relieved to have learned that the minister, Roseanna Cunningham ( rcmp.perth@snp.org), has said that the captured beavers are not to be shot, but the report of the meeting of the Scottish Reintroductions' Forum confirms the belief that there is no space in zoos or wildlife centres in the British Isles for any but a few beavers. It would be good if anyone who reads this blog wrote to Roseanna Cunningham to express their dismay at SNH's proposals for the free beavers of the Tay.

I guess that Christmas and the New Year will put a stop to trapping for the meantime, but we must prepare in all senses for a renewal of our campaign in 2011.

To the confluence of the Ericht and the River Isla

2010-12-12T18:59:00.003Z

The Blairgowrie sewage works are on the south bank of the Ericht, a little way out of the town, off the Welton Road. The habitat for beavers looks pretty good with plenty of willows along the banks and mixed broad leaved woodland on the slopes immediately above the riparian zone.

The river is fished by the members of the Blairgowrie and Rattray and District Anglers Association, who are fairly assiduous in cutting back bankside vegetation. What they do is improvement of the facilities, but where the beavers carry out similar work it is described as damage (http://www.brdaa.co.uk/photo1.html. However, it would be worth speaking to those who run the BRDAA because I detect a sense of excitement in the exclamation mark that punctuates the announcement in their web site of the presence of beavers in the rivers they fish..

We walked some way beyond the sewage works, but decided to move on to see the confluence of the Ericht with the Isla.

Here is the Isla, not far downstream of the confluence. Coupar Angus is in the distance on the slope to the left of the middle ground of the picture. The absence of riparian woodland shows that stretch to be of little interest to beavers.

Dusk was settling when we reached this point: the confluence of the Ericht and the Isla.

There are some backwaters and bits of old oxbow in the Ericht just before the confluence, but the main features in the landscape are the extensive flood protection banks.

A flock of goldeneye lifted off from the river and I watched them fly into the darkness.

There were no signs of beaver along the bits of river that we looked at, but the negative helps define the places where we should pay attention next.

2010-12-12T18:55:00.000Z

Louise and I drove out of Blairgowrie and parked by the road end to the farm of Millhorn, whose tenant in the 1540s was required by his landlords, the Abbey of Coupar Angus, to provide them with cranes, herons and other wildfowl, including dotterel for the table. The photograph below shows the River Ericht in the middle ground with the hills above Alyth in the background. The path at that point is approaching Kitty Swanson's bridge. The lady, after whom the bridge was named, was the boat woman who rowed people who wished to cross the Ericht between Rattray and Blairgowrie, or so I have always thought.

This photograph shows the river, looking downstream from Kitty Swanson's bridge. The trees on the river's edge are mostly alder and the banks of the river are grassy, showing a history of grazing: not great habitat for beavers, but I did see a freshly barked stick that had probably been washed down from further upstream.

We walked upstream from Kitty Swanson's Bridge for a little. The fishermen of the Blairgowrie and Rattray Fishing Association had been very active in cutting back the bankside vegetation.

Dusk along the Ericht

2010-12-11T13:25:00.000Z

A walk just before dusk along the Ericht just south of Blairgowrie. Word had reached me that a trap had been set for the beavers there. The river was in full spate with the thaw.

Floes of greenish ice raced past on the current. I saw no sign of any trap: it must be lower down nearer the confluence with the Isla.

The habitat along this stretch of the Ericht should be good for beavers with a lot of willow along the banks.

I took this photograph just by the sewage pipe that crosses the river on its way to the sewage plant.

Here is a web site that I discovered recently.

http://www.wildlifeextra.com/do/ecco.py/view_item?listid=1&listcatid=1&listitemid=7448&live=0

Well worth a look, I think.

In the land of the ice king?

2010-12-09T19:17:00.000Z

Now here is a link that should be read.

http://www.commentonline.co.uk/wildlife/GoodBeaversandBadBeavers.htm

and here is an announcement:

http://www.surcp.org/beavers/conference.html

I did think of writing more, but words escape me for the moment.

Jean-Pierre Choisy's Suggestion

2010-12-09T19:14:00.001Z

Here is an email from Jean-Pierre Choisy. He sent me this on 1st December and I should have posted before now.

I think that we should think very closely about this useful suggestion.

Cher Paul,

Si cela est utile, vous pouvez diffuser le texte que je vous ai envoyé, éventuellement après corrections si difficile à comprendre

Cette destructions serait pertinente s'il s'agissait d'un exotique (Castor canadensis).
Mais si c'est Castor fiber !
Rappelez-moi quelles sont les raisons ? Ou...les prétextes ?Et quelle est la situation juridique (espèce protégée ou non) aux échelles de l'Ecosse, de l'UK et de l'Union Européenne ?

Scandale analogue de ce genre sur l'Ebro, en Espagne : une trentaine d'individus issus d'une réintroduction clandestine.
L'Espagne demande une dérogation à l'Union Européenne pour détruire cette espèce protégée.
Motivation : pour le principe, pas de lâchers clandestins !
Alors que l'Espagne est pleine d'exotiques (chasseur, pêcheurs, animaux et végétaux d'agrément), on envisage cette destruction, sans même étudier l'impact positif sur la biodiversité, surtout dans des régions à étés très secs.
Deux poids, deux mesures !

Seuls les Belges auront été sensés pragmatiques, objectifs comme modalités : devant l'inertie des pouvoirs publics, réintroduction illégale, ensuite acceptée, avec grand succès...y compris touristique.

.
Je propose que nous fassions un scandale européen sur Internet
.

Le plus vite possible, en ajoutant les compléments d'information récent sur l'Espagne et, a contrario, sur la Belgique.
On devra mettre en évidence le rôle positif pour la biodiversité ainsi que la complaisance pour les lâchers par chasseurs et pêcheurs d'exotiques nuisant à la biodiversité : DEUX POIDS, DEUX MESURES !Reste à décider dans quel cadre associatif on le ferait.
.

Cordialement.

J.-P. Choisy

Ponds and Food Caches

2010-12-05T22:56:00.001Z

Out for a walk yesterday evening and the evening before that, Louise saw a couple of beavers out swimming in the pool east of the drive. It was half past four in the afternoon and dusk was gathering.

The campaign for the free beavers in the Tay rolls on. It would be extraordinary if they were to be captured and removed to face imprisonment or death at the hands of legalistic authorities. The last beaver to be caught in Scotland, so far as I know, was the creature that landed at Tentsmuir Point and went to live in the Morton Lochs. Its presence there upset the neighbouring landowner, Johnnie Foster, and was captured in due course. After a stay in Edinburgh Zoo this beaver was taken to a wildlife centre in England whence it escaped and is said to be living in the Thames. Good luck, beaver! Perhaps you will be joined by others in due course.

Last winter it seemed to me that beavers stayed at home once the temperature fell below -6ºC. I saw fewer signs of tracks and other activity once the temperature dropped that low.

Now, here is a blog that is full of interesting information. The post on this blog is about Canadian beavers (Castor canadensis), but most of what is said applies to the Eurasian species.

The Eurasian species tends to build bank lodges or burrows, while the North American tends to build lodges in ponds, as described in the post (http://mtkass.blogspot.com/2007/07/canadian-beaver-pest-or-benefactor.html)

The recently felled trees, and it is hard to tell which they are in this picture as some were felled in past years, represent the beavers' larder for the winter. A friend asked if the beavers were well prepared for this hard weather. It is difficult to tell but, on the basis of what they have been felling through the autumn, I should say so.

Guidelines

2010-11-30T21:35:00.000Z

Guideline - the word has been on my mind for some time. I consulted Wikipedia and found this useful sentence 'By definition, following a guideline is never mandatory (protocol would be a better term for a mandatory procedure).

So what is it with SNH that they should complain that the free beavers of the river Tay in Scotland have not followed the IUCN guidelines? They are, after all, only guidelines, not protocols.

Now, here is a sight that mystified me. I think that an otter has played around. By the time that I saw this the temperature was rising and the ice was turning to slush.

In the meantime we learn that a 'volunteer' has been appointed to trap the beavers in the Tay. It seems that a particular lodge has been marked for the trapper's attention and SNH's spies have ascertained that it is occupied by one adult and two yearlings. The lodge is said to be near Blairgowrie which, I suppose, means that the lodge is on the river Ericht, a tributary of the Isla, itself a tributary of the Tay.

Here is that same pool a couple of days later.

Here is an email from my excellent friend, Jean-Pierre Choisy, ecologist for the Parc Regional of the Vercors.

Now (XXI° century) in France, in Germany, even in a country with a tremendous human density as the Netherlands are, the Eurasian Beaver is not only accepted but welcome too, for itself and as biodiversity restorer, in spite in some place of problems easy to solve, absolute not to compare with Red Deer or Wild Boar.

Now, Beaver settle again remote places in the Alps, with a human density of some per square kilometer and, as well, the center of towns as Valence, Grenoble, Lyons.

Do I actually understand ?
Scotland would not be able to accept Biodiversity's restoration nor of the Beaver neither by the Beaver ?
I hope not ! I hope I mis understood because of mypoor english
Since tens of years, for me the UK is (was?) the first for commitment for Biodiversity's conservation and restoration in Europe.
But if understood right, I should habe to endure a major and very desillusing change of my perception of the country...

Please, more information and...better I though.

Best regards !

Jean-Pierre Choisy

SNH's Programme for the Welfare of the Free Beavers in the Tay

2010-11-25T14:50:00.000Z

The word is that SNH/SASA have hired a man to do their trapping and have acquired six traps. This person will concentrate on cleansing the Blairgowrie area to start with. SNH's public relations' person is alleged to have said that the trapping of the beaver was for welfare reasons.

A skin of ice covers the big pond here. Luckily for the ducks the beavers are keeping a passage open so that they can forage for pond weed.

This old birch has come to the attention of the beavers. According to a study quoted in Dietland Müller-Schwarze and Lixing Sun's 'The Beaver - Natural History of a Wetlands Engineer' a beaver in Michigan will harvest 1400kg of woody biomass per hectare per year.

Time for a walk!