Alan McDonnell
This is my eighth year with Trees for Life. How did that happen? For me, if there is one thing that captures how far we’ve come in that time it’s the return of the beaver. A year after I started, I remember sitting with the Trees for Life team at Dundreggan, talking about our aims for rewilding in the Highlands. I suggested beaver reintroduction, but I remember how unlikely that felt then. Even with all of the benefits beavers bring, their history in Scotland - deeply political in parts of lower Tayside - made it seem too audacious, fanciful even, to ever come about.
How things have changed. We are now at the head of a pathway for the beaver to truly come back to the Highlands. Following a legal action that Trees for Life took to the Court of Session, translocating beavers away from sensitive land use interests is now preferred to shooting this protected ecosystem engineer. It is now government policy to actively expand the beaver population to suitable habitats across Scotland. These changes created the potential for beavers to bring their fundamental benefits for nature - such as feeding streams with nutrients for insects, creating shelter for fish, stimulating riverwoods, and reducing flooding - across the country.
Beavers have already been released to new sites within their current range, at Argaty Farm in Perthshire and RSPB Loch Lomond. The Cairngorms National Park’s process to move beavers into the Spey this autumn will also be a major step forward. Forestry and Land Scotland seem on track to move beavers up to Glen Affric early in 2024, with practical support from a Trees for Life Beaver Management Officer. This policy change and the progress made since is certainly worth celebrating, but only because it allows the hard work to start.
Beavers bring varying levels of change to rivers and can have potentially negative effects on land uses like farming. We need to work with people on the ground. While it’s true that land managers and beavers are coexisting successfully across Europe, it is understandable that some people are anxious about whether their livelihoods will be affected.
Our experiences with beaver reintroduction over the past eight years have told us that understanding and tangibly addressing people’s concerns is the key to the return of the beaver, and to other wildlife comeback stories. We need empathic, collaborative relationships to ensure that practical support for land use interests is effective on the ground - words alone are not enough. We also need to find ways of ensuring that the benefits and opportunities beavers offer are realised in practice, especially for those who need to adapt to living alongside them.
Working with landowners and farmers on coexisting with beavers is challenging new ground and a learning process for everyone, not least ourselves. After all the progress with beavers to date, it is a task rich in opportunity for all involved, and one we are very much looking forward to.
Thank you to the Fred Foundation for supporting our beaver project in Glen Affric.