Beavering

News this morning that beaver releases will be allowed. Whoohoo!

I emailed T*rmac and told them I’d like to release beavers on their land. They replied in 15 minutes.

At the same time I went for a walk over the meadows.

The Myrobalan tree was not quite in full bloom. Something to look forward to!

Beyond the tree I could hear Teal and Water Rail, and many more birds besides. This field is flooded now. 4 Roe deer ran across it as I walked along the railway line.

Soon this field will be dry and the water birds will move on. If it dries out a bit too late it’s a bit of a disaster. The water birds might fail to breed if it dries out after they’ve nested. At the same time the birds that like the drier scrubby areas to nest in will have already found somewhere. So the whole field might have no nesting birds that year. Beavers would make it stable, birds would thrive.

You can see the height difference between the brook and the meadow. That would limit a beaver’s range.

This field will soon dry out. The farmer of this bit has grazed it in summer. It’s their livelihood. If they put it into a wetland scheme they could be paid. The beavers then manage the habitat.

Humans could do similar. By making this path continuous they could stop the water flowing over it and drying out.

At the moment the water in this field is draining away. Imagine it like this all the time.

The big sprawling tree in the back ground is a Crack Willow. They are the naturally occurring tree here. We could easily plant hundreds of them by pushing fresh twigs into the ground.

It’s one way Willow naturally spreads, it’s one way of helping them spread, especially now the cows have gone.

The beavers could harvest them. The willows will grow back and they’ll root where the beavers use them for their dams.

If somehow several hundred twigs got pushed into the ground one day they’d grow into trees and screen this eyesore. Beavers won’t ever cut them all down at the same time, and there are a few places that would benefit from screening with local guerrilla planting projects.

These culverts could easily be blocked by guerrilla beavers. I think some already have been. They’re there to get the fields as dry as possible as fast as possible. For the grazing. The cows have gone now.

And the houses on the other side of the brook are well above river level and the fields are all below it. So there’s no flooding risk to them.

So there could be a 250 acre beaver wetland. 10 times bigger than the area where beavers were born last year in London.