30 | New Scientist | 12 September 2020
Book
Bringing Back the Beaver:
The story of one man’s
quest to rewild Britain’s
waterways
Derek Gow
Chelsea Green Publishing CompanyLAST month, the UK government
made a long-anticipated ruling on
the future of a colony of beavers
that has been living freely on the
River Otter in Devon since at least- Against expectations, it
decided they could stay – the first
time an extinct native mammal
has been legally reintroduced into
the wild in England. Scotland’s
government made a similar call
in 2016, and in 2019 declared the
beaver to be a protected species.
As Derek Gow says in his
charmingly irascible little book
Bringing Back the Beaver: “In
England, Wales and Scotland,
beavers are returning. Slowly.”
Gow, a farmer-turned-zookeeper-
turned-ecologist, has done as
much as anyone to make it
happen, though he makes it clear
that it would have happened much
more quickly were it not for the
implacable hostility of a handful
of powerful interest groups.
Gow cut his conservation teeth
reintroducing endangered water
voles, and he helped to establish
the UK’s first enclosed beaver trial
at Ham Fen nature reserve, near
Sandwich in Kent.
He has been fighting tirelessly
to reintroduce beavers ever
since, often against entrenched
opposition. His “war” stories make
up most of the book and they are
a great, though maddening, read.
At every turn, he and his fellow
Return of the beaver
One man’s battle to reintroduce the beaver to England makes amusing but
infuriating reading for all who appreciate the animals, finds Graham Lawtonconservationists are stymied
by pettifogging bureaucrats,
ignorant politicians, grumpy
farmers, greedy landowners
and the hunting, shooting and
fishing lobby. All of these Gow
regards as fools – whom he doesn’t
suffer gladly. His portrayal of
them is brutal, and the times
when he outwits them are
recounted with relish.
On one occasion, a “small man
in a brown serge suit” left his
briefcase in Gow’s office. Gow
promptly photocopied the
contents and discovered that even
though the UK’s Department for
Environment, Food and Rural
Affairs (Defra) claimed to have
legal authority over enclosed
beaver trials, it did not. Needless
to say, Gow squirrelled that
information away and used it later
to his considerable advantage,Views Culture
GUY^ EDWAR
DES/NATURE
PL
.COMa fantastic cast of characters to
work with. The world of beaver
reintroductions attracts more
than its fair share of eccentrics,
misfits and mischief-makers – in
short, people very much like Gow
who love nothing more than to
stick a finger up at authority.
One such colourful character
is the Belgian activist Olivier
Rubbers. He got so fed up with
the way his country’s government
constantly thwarted the
reintroduction of beavers that
he went to Bavaria, bought
100 beavers from a farm, drove
back to Belgium and simply
released them into the wild.
He fought a five-year legal battle,
outmanoeuvred the authorities
and escaped with a nominal fine.
Incidentally, nobody knows (or
will admit) where the River Otter
beavers came from. The official
version is that they escaped from
a local wildlife centre. But with
rogues like Rubbers around,
you can’t help wondering.
As a nature writer, Gow is less
compelling. I just wanted him
to keep doing what he does best,
which is skewering his foes and
sometimes also his friends
with his barbed wit. But one
description of a beaver-engineered
landscape struck me as beautiful:
it was, he wrote, “a complex wet,
woody Venice”.
I am fortunate enough to have
visited two enclosed beaver trials,
one in Devon (not the River Otter)
and the other in North Yorkshire,
where I saw one of the resident
beavers. Gow’s description of
the landscape they create is spot
on; it is unlike any other you
will see in the nature-denuded
British countryside.
We need more beaver
reintroductions, and thanks in no
small part to the bull-headed and
tireless work of Gow, it looks like
we are finally going to get them. ❚deliciously wrong-footing Defra
in the process.
Even so, progress was glacial.
Compared with continental
Europe, where beaver
reintroductions have been under
way since the 1960s, Britain has
been slow to follow suit (as far as
anyone knows, there have never
been beavers on the island of
Ireland). Attempts have been
endlessly blighted by unscientific
beliefs that beavers will destroy
farmland, fell big trees, harm fish
or spread disease.
Gow is a great and funny
storyteller and acute observer
of people. Admittedly, he hasReintroducing the beaver
has been glacially slow in
English waters“ Nobody knows (or
will admit) where the
beavers on the River
Otter came from”