It’s 6pm on a freezing evening in the south of England, and the remote, muddy track I am on is forbiddingly dark and quiet. Local farmers have ceased their ploughing for the day. The kingfishers that dart the nearby waters are in their nests. And there are no dog walkers out for a late stroll.
But there is a different, more furtive kind of activity about to take place. Soon, a dark Ford Transit pulls up and its driver – a man in his fifties dressed in thick coat and scarf – rolls down the window and greets me with a hesitant “evening”. He is not alone. In the back of his van, cocooned in a metal crate and somewhat grumpy from four hours of confinement, is the illicit cargo of a large beaver.
Transported that very same day from Cornwall, the industrious mammal is being released into this water catchment as part of a campaign known as “beaver bombing” – where the animals are covertly distributed throughout the country in a bid to boost the species’ numbers in the wild.
What worries me about these reintroductions.
Is how little they discuss why the originals went extinct in the UK.
Most assume it was mankind. And that was def an important part.
But the more direct reason was the removal of dogger bank. IE the land link to Europe. This left many species isolated. And over time, the lack of genetic diversity lead some creatures to die out.
We still have mankind. More to the point, we are now much more likely to effect these animals’ ability to travel between communities and mix genetics.
Reintroducing these animals is pointless unless we also ensure the population is monitored and new ones reintroduced as needed.