On 24th November 2016 Roseanna Cunningham, the Scotland Environment Secretary, announced that the Scottish Government was minded to allow the established populations of reintroduced free-living beavers (Castor fiber) to remain, and to add beavers to the list of European Protected Species (EPS) and hence subject to the strict protection measures afforded by the Habitats Directive. Cue much rejoicing on the part of nature conservation bodies and wildlife enthusiasts. ‘This milestone moment’ said the Scottish Wildlife Trust (SWT). ‘A landmark decision’ said RSPB Scotland.
For myself, though, the feelings were mixed. Not because I do not want to see beavers back as part of the British fauna – I do, I think it’s great, they have much to offer the ecology of this country and I look forward to being able to watch them going about their business here as I have had the pleasure of doing in North America. No, my concern was over the assumption that making them a European Protected Species is desirable or necessary for their protection and management.
Still, it was a milestone moment. Nobody could say that the official approach to beaver reintroduction in Scotland has been rushed. Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) started consultations on the possibility in 1995, but it was not until 2009 that an official trial was set up in Knapdale, a remote part of the West Highlands, chosen because it would not be easy for the beavers to spread naturally from there into the rest of Scotland and thus would allow them to be rounded up again if it was decided not to proceed further.
In the meantime, however, it emerged that persons unknown had been releasing beavers (or allowing them to escape) into the catchment of the mighty Tay, Britain’s largest river system. Apart from occupying a substantial part of Scotland, the Tay system embraces the full spectrum of habitats that Scotland has to offer from treeless mountains and uplands to some of the finest and most extensive and luxuriant woodlands and forests, many lochs, rich agricultural land and two cities (Perth and Dundee) as well as numerous towns and villages. The beaver population was estimated at 146 in 2012 and subsequent studies have shown that it is continuing to grow and expand. Population densities are highest on the Earn and the Isla – tributary rivers with good farmland catchments.
(https://www.nature.scot/sites/default/files/2017-07/A1608732%20-%20Tayside%20Beaver%20Study%20Group%20Final%20Report%202015%232.pdf)
It was on the Tay, at Birnam, that I attended an excellent two-day training course in beaver ecology and management last September run by Roisin Campbell-Palmer. Roisin has been working with reintroduced beavers for years – at Knapdale, on the Tay and elsewhere – and really knows her stuff. During the first part of the course we learned many things about the behaviour and ecology of beavers, including why they build dams (to ensure they always have water to retreat to when accessing their plant food and to ensure they have an underwater entrance to their lodges) and key aspects of their social life (they are devoted to family, intensely territorial, and as violent as mafiosi in defence of these). After lunch we went to look for beaver field signs, but not in the kind of secluded Highland environment I was expecting.
‘We’ll drive down to Perth’, said Roisin, ‘Park outside Marks and Spencer’s and walk from there.’
And so it was beside the cyclepath on the northern edge of Perth, near the confluence of the River Almond with the Tay, that we were familiarised with the main signs of beaver activity – felled tree stumps and bark-stripped twigs and branches. It also brought home to us that beavers are quite happy to move into towns.
Later that day, a damp and gloomy evening, having established that the dog-walkers of Birnam and Dunkeld not infrequently see beavers, I spent some time on the leafy banks of the Tay itself. Birnam is famous for two ancient trees – the Birnam Oak and the Birnam Sycamore – which sit on the edge of the willow thickets that fringe the river. It is thought that the Birnam Oak could be as much as 600 years old, and if so then it is entirely possible that beavers swam past its roots when it was a youngster – and maybe even eyed it up as lodge-construction material. The river backwaters nearby were all bobbing with stark white beaver-stripped twigs, but I think the Oak is big enough now to be safely beyond the reach of even the most ambitious beaver!
On the second day we looked more closely at the management issues beavers pose – which essentially fall into two categories. Firstly, there is the felling of trees we would rather they didn’t in our gardens and orchards – relatively easily mitigated by deterrent fencing and bark treatments – but it can make them unwelcome neighbours for keen suburban gardeners as we saw in the little town of Bridge of Earn. Secondly there is the damming of drains, culverts and ditches. This is a much greater challenge. Yes, holding back and slowing the flow of water and creating new ponds and wetlands can help to alleviate flooding and the run-off of excessive nutrients. But the beavers do not always block the watercourses we would like them to. Our roads, sewers, housing and agriculture only work properly if we can manage water levels and water flows in, around, under or through them, and this does not fit comfortably with the beaver’s agenda of maximising wetness at every opportunity. Like us, they are creatures that modify their environment to suit themselves, and it is going to be a real challenge to accommodate their needs alongside ours in our heavily modified and intensively used land.
Still, this is a challenge we are going to have to rise to, whether we like it or not. It was very gracious of the Scottish Government to announce that beavers could stay – but it was a bit like saying the stable door could now be left open after the horses had all galloped off down the lane. Practically and politically it would be incredibly difficult, maybe even impossible, to round up all the Tay beavers now, and given time they will, inexorably, colonise the whole of Britain.
Given the challenges they pose, what sort of legal underpinning do we really need to ensure that we can manage our burgeoning beaver population effectively and humanely? The Habitats Directive says that member states should consider reintroducing species formerly present in order to further their conservation, and the Scottish Government has concluded that since beavers were formerly present in Britain, and since they are on Annex IV of the Directive (the list of species in need of strict protection), then it is obliged to apply the strict protection provisions of Article 12 of the Directive to them.
However, as I have been saying for many years (e.g. Watson, 2008 & 2013), the problem with Article 12 of the Habitats Directive is that it is couched in terms of protecting individuals rather than populations of a species. This might seem an obvious, indeed essential, thing to do, but in reality, by increasing the cost of avoiding potential disturbance and incidental killing of a few individuals, and by making the hosting of the species on your property a vexatious and sometimes onerous responsibility, it can be counter-productive. For example, in the case of Great Crested Newts (Triturus cristatus) it can lead to the neglect and silting up of their breeding ponds (the biggest threat to their populations but allowing the newts to die out through natural processes is not an offence) and discourage the creation of new ones; and in the case of bats it can discourage the incorporation of roosting features into newer more energy-efficient (i.e. with fewer holes and gaps!) buildings.
In thinking about how best to manage the recolonisation of Britain by beavers it is worth considering some of the species that almost went extinct in Britain, and which have now come back from the brink. In my post on seals (https://hughwatson.net/2018/01/11/of-singing-seals-and-drones/) I noted how the British population of Grey Seals (Halichoerus grypus) was possibly as low as 500 animals in 1914 when the first Grey Seals protection legislation was passed. This did not outlaw the killing of seals entirely, it just set a close season for their killing which in effect protected them at their breeding sites, and banned some of the more barbaric killing methods then in use (e.g. the setting of giant, barbed iron spikes at haul-out sites). That was all that was needed, and a hundred years later the British population is estimated at 150,000 and rising.
Another species that has returned from the brink of extinction without the need for anything other than minimal protective legislation is the Roe Deer (Capreolus capreolus). This very nearly went the way of the Beaver and the Wolf. By the late 1700s, when the deforestation of Britain had left us at the most treeless stage of our current interglacial history, the only place in Britain where these little woodland deer were to be found was in the remoter parts of the Scottish Highlands. Their fortunes only started to revive in the 1800s with the rise of plantation woodlands, first on private estates then, in the 1900s, with the spread of the Forestry Commission’s industrial plantations. If it hadn’t been for these land-use changes, we might well have been sitting around today arguing the merits of reintroducing Roe Deer to Britain. Instead, with expansion of the relict native population from the north and a couple of nineteenth century reintroductions of stock from mainland Europe into southern England (there’s nothing new about reintroductions!), the British population has boomed. It was estimated at 500,000 in 1995 (Harris, 1995) and it will be considerably higher now. This was achieved without any form of protective legislation (indeed roe are regarded as silvicultural and agricultural pests) other than, latterly, the imposition of close seasons for their hunting and the banning of certain methods of killing.
Polecats (Mustela putorius) are the latest species to boom, and are currently spreading rapidly through the English Midlands from their Welsh refuge, again without benefit of strict protection.
To me this is good evidence that strict protection of individuals is generally irrelevant to the prospects of reintroduced and recovering populations of mammals. Not only unnecessary but also a positive hindrance, as can be seen if we look at the management of beaver reintroductions in different European countries. One country that is endeavouring to apply the Article 12 provisions to beavers is Germany, in particular the state of Bavaria. Beavers were reintroduced into Bavaria, which is slightly smaller in area than Scotland, in the 1960s, and by 2012 the population was estimated to be in the range of 12,000 – 15,000 and still growing. Management of beaver issues is undertaken by two full-time beaver consultants and a network of about 200 volunteers. This level of reliance on volunteers brings the cost to the public purse (estimated at about 1 million Euros per year) down enormously. A lot of effort goes into finding ways of accommodating the beavers but there is an acceptance that some have to be removed because of the level of effect they are having on human health, safety and economic wellbeing. In earlier days many of these were live-trapped and relocated, but there are now many more beavers needing to be rehomed than there are places willing to accept them, so increasing numbers are having to be culled (700-800 in 2011). Although the killing of strictly protected species is permissible as a last resort, it has to be justified and reported on, and there is uncertainty over the legality of this management system, and an awareness that an adverse ruling from the European Court of Justice could bring it crashing down.
Scottish Natural Heritage commissioned Aylwin Pillai of Aberdeen University’s Rural Law Research Group to review various approaches to dealing with situations where protected species come into conflict with human activities and she reported in 2012:(http://www.snh.org.uk/pdfs/publications/commissioned_reports/524.pdf).
With regard to the Bavarian beaver management system she said: ‘Although the system has led to a reduction in conflicts and has continued to allow the beaver to thrive it is open to criticism for being expensive and overly bureaucratic’.
Further: ‘Our interviews suggest that this strategy allows for the swift and effective implementation of derogations and results in the death of 5% of the beaver population each year. Although this additional mortality clearly does not affect the level of population growth in Bavaria it does highlight that, once a beaver population establishes itself, the regular use of lethal methods may be needed.’
And, in relation to Norway which is, of course, not a member of the EU: ‘In Norway, where beaver management is not subject to the constraints of the Habitats Directive, problem beavers can be dealt with either by hunting in the open season or by applying for a licence in the closed season. Conflicts between conservationists and land owners or users over beavers appear to exist rarely in Norway. As effective legal management options are available to land owners for the control of beavers on their land this reduces animosity between land owners and government and diminishes the view that outside authorities are imposing restrictive burdens on local communities. It is believed very few beavers are illegally killed in Norway because of the accessibility of legal management options. ……’
She concludes: ‘These case studies suggest that an effective way of managing future problems and conflicts of interest in relation to the Eurasian Beaver may be to involve both landowners and the state in designing an inexpensive and non-bureaucratic, legally compliant programme for dealing with problems as and when they arise.’
I am bound to say that given the Article 12 restrictions this suggestion seems pie in the sky, and I find it difficult to see how the Scottish Beaver Forum, a working group attempting to come up with just such a system, will do any better than the Bavarians.
Given the Brexit vote, and the assumption that all parts of the UK will be leaving the EU in due course, one does wonder if it is entirely necessary to be so punctilious about applying the letter of a law that will probably be open to unilateral revision in a few years’ time anyway. But I don’t want get into the intra-EU and intra-UK politics of the situation. What I would point out is that there may be a way of achieving a Norwegian-type solution while still complying with the Habitats Directive.
There is already at least one EU member state which is doing just that – Sweden. Along with several other countries that already had thriving beaver populations when they first joined the EU, Sweden secured an opt-out from applying Article 12 to its beavers. Instead Sweden agreed that its beavers would be listed on Annex V of the Habitats Directive. Annex V species are ones whose conservation status must be kept under surveillance and whose taking and exploitation may need to be controlled if this is threatened. The framework for these controls is set out in Articles 14 and 15 of the Directive. It is rarely appreciated in the UK that the Habitats Directive recognises this second category of protected species, a situation not helped by the term ‘European Protected Species’ being applied only to the ‘strictly protected’ Annex IV species in the UK’s Habitats Regulations (the legislation which turns the European Habitats Directive into UK law).
I asked Goran Hartman, the authority on the beaver’s recolonisation of Sweden, how well the Swedish management model, based on close seasons for killing and restrictions on the methods used for this, was working in practice.
He replied: ‘I would say that this system works fairly well. I believe that the main reason is because landowners are given tools to handle wildlife damages. Like many other species landowners become aggressive when they are trapped, and I can understand them. In areas with increasing beaver populations but not yet any possibilities to hunt beavers there were loud complaints but as soon as they were given rights to hunt the complaints stopped. It was now up to them to do something about the problems, within the given legal framework. This seldom stopped the beaver population from increasing as beaver hunting is time consuming and other wildlife damage (e.g. moose and wild boar) is more in focus. Farmers and forest owners have many problems and beaver damage is seldom one of the bigger.’
So, for Heaven’s sake, let’s learn from our Scandinavian cousins who are so far ahead of us in beaver conservation. What I suggest our government(s) should be doing if they wish to stay within the Habitats Directive framework is to say to the European Commission that either:
(a) it should move the beaver from Annex IV to Annex V as there are now well over a million of them worldwide and according to IUCN (the International Union for the Conservation of Nature) it is a species of ‘Least Concern’ – ‘If current trends continue, the Eurasian Beaver will be a fairly common mammal in much of Europe within the next few decades’ (http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/4007/0). I imagine there would be considerable support from other EU countries for this. Or alternatively:
(b) since the reintroduction of beavers to Britain is irrelevant to the conservation of the booming global beaver population, the UK should be added to the list of countries in which beaver is included in Annex V rather than Annex IV. If they are on Annex V then the UK would still be required to maintain them at favourable conservation status, but it would allow much greater flexibility in how this could be done, with far less bureaucracy and cost to the taxpayer.
(It is interesting to note that in the 1982 Bern Convention [the Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats], the international agreement which led (often word for word) in 1992 to the Habitats Directive, the beaver is included on the list of ‘protected fauna’ as opposed to the list of ‘strictly protected fauna’. If anyone knows who or what caused this change of approach during that ten year interval I would be very interested to know.)
The Scottish Government has just (6th March) closed its public consultation on its beaver management strategy (https://consult.gov.scot/forestry/beavers-in-scotland/). Much information was provided in the voluminous supporting documents e.g. an in many ways excellent report Beavers in Scotland from SNH, but the SEA (Strategic Environmental Assessment) based on these (also voluminous) is, in my view, an unsatisfactory document that fails to address the wider strategic issues and focusses instead on the impacts in the Knapdale area and the Tay catchment. There is no consideration within it of legal options: the treatment of beavers as a strictly protected species under Article 12 is assumed. I have been endeavouring since October, via formal Freedom of Information requests, to see the legal advice sought and received in respect of this decision, but this has been refused on the grounds that it would be detrimental to the abilities of ministers and their advisers to have candid discussions on the development of beaver policy and would breach the right to confidentiality of communications between legal advisers and their clients. I do not accept this reasoning as valid, and will be appealing to the Scottish Information Commissioner but it is likely to be many months before an adjudication is forthcoming. In the mean time, this post is my way of attempting to open up this aspect of beaver reintroduction to public debate.
Whichever legal route we end up following in order to manage our beavers, the lesson from Bavaria, from Sweden and from Norway is that we are going to have to cull some of them, and therein lies what may be our biggest problem – the psychological one. The island of Great Britain is three times the size of Bavaria. If we assume that our beaver population will boom as theirs has and that we end up with a similar density of beavers and similar management issues, then ultimately we are looking at having to cull perhaps 3000 beavers every year. Are we, the animal-loving British public, ready for that? Or are we just too squeamish to adapt sensibly to life with a thriving beaver population?
References:
Campbell-Palmer, R. et al (2015) The Eurasian Beaver. Exeter: Pelagic Publishing.
Harris, S. et al (1995) A review of British mammals: population estimates and conservation status of British mammals other than cetaceans. JNCC, Peterborough.
Hartman, G. (1994) Long-term population development of a reintroduced beaver (Castor fiber) population in Sweden. Cons. Biol. 8(3): 713-717.
Jones, S. et al (2013) The battle for British beavers. British Wildlife 24(6): 381-392.
Pillai, A. et al (2012) Derogations for protected species in European reintroductions. Scottish Natural Heritage Commissioned Report no. 524.
Scottish Natural Heritage (2015) Beavers in Scotland: a Report to the Scottish Government.
Tayside Beaver Study Group (2015) Final Report.
Watson, H (2008) Great Crested Newts and their conservation: are we getting it all wrong? In Practice – Bulletin of the Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management 60: 25-28.
Watson, H (2013) Better for man and better for beast – Bats, newts and Article 12(4) of the Habitats Directive. In Practice – Bulletin of the Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management 80: 37-38.