It was approximately two months ago while out upon my morning walk that I casually looked over at the creek that ran under the second bridge I cross along my usual path and was struck at how the water seemed unnaturally still. Stopping and peering a bit farther over the bridge rail, I discovered the reason: some local beavers had constructed a dam across the flow just before it reached the bridge.
Needless to say, as one who relishes living in close proximity to wildlife, I was delighted that these beavers had seen fit to build a dam where I would have the pleasure of seeing it, and perhaps them as well, each morning. However I was not overly surprised that they built a dam in the area; beavers are a not uncommon sight around our county. Indeed, the university our daughter attends uses the beaver as a mascot, as does the state in which we live – it’s even on the state flag.
Britain, on the other hand, has no such abundance of these semi-aquatic rodents. Hunted and trapped to extinction in the wild in by the sixteenth century, the Eurasian Beaver (Castor fiber, a cousin to my local American Beavers, Castor Canadensis) has only recently – and not entirely officially – be reintroduced to the UK. Not surprisingly, the return of a three foot rodent capable of diverting waterways has not been universally welcomed across that isle. Some people, in fact, are dead set against their once again inhabiting the nation’s waterways. Derek Gow, it should be noted, is not one of the anti-Castor club.
Indeed, Mr. Gow, whom his publisher terms a “farmer-turned ecologist,” is so ardently pro-beaver that he was an early partisan on the front lines of the covert struggle to bring the Eurasian Beaver back to Great Britain as a cornerstone of the larger rewinding effort. He’s even now written a book about his activities, Bringing Back the Beaver; The Story of One Man’s Quest to Rewild Britain’s Waterways. Mark takes it up in his Sunday Book Review this week, noting “This is a book that needed to be written and it now needs to be read widely, and its author was just the right person to provide this entertaining but important book.” I encourage you to read his entire review for yourself and see what else he had to say about it.
Links to Mark Avery’s Sunday book reviews appear in The Well-read Naturalist by special arrangement. You can find all of Mark’s past reviews as well as a wide-ranging collection of his other writings on his Standing Up for Nature website. Mark’s opinions regarding the books he reviews are his own.
