Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Coypu: unexpected guest
Visitors to the Broads are sometimes amazed to see enormous rat-like
creatures with reddish-brown fur and orange-coloured front teeth. They
look rather like giant hamsters and are called coypus.
(Althea 1975:15)
The coypu has a rather different presence in the landscape. A native of South
America, this 'Great South American Marsh Rat', as Day (1967:181) termed it, was
brought to the UK from Argentina in 1929 for fur farming. Several farms were
established in the Yare and Wensum valleys, one by Alan Savory at Brundall. Most
closed by 1939, but by this time some coypu had escaped, most notably in 1937
from a farm at East Carleton during a heavy rainstorm, from where the animals
moved down a tributary stream into the Yare. The coypu thrived out of captivity,
and established itself throughout the Broads by 1948. Some trapping was carried
out by the War Agricultural Committee, and the population was further checked by
the harsh winter of 1946/7 and local trapping for skins, but numbers continued to
increase. The market for pelts collapsed in 1958 (Ellis 1960; Norris 1963), and the
late 1950s saw a dramatic increase in the population to a maximum of around 200,
000 (Fitter 1959:103-104; George 1992: 231-234; Gosling and Baker 1989; for a
related study, see Sheail 1988). A lack of adequate food supply led animals to forage
more widely in farmers' fields, and in 1960 the government authorised rabbit-
clearance societies to kill coypus, with 50 per cent of the costs covered by the
Ministry of Agriculture (Ellis 1960). The coypu was added to the list of animals
proscribed under the 1932 Destructive Imported Animals Act in 1962, and at the
same time the Ministry established the Coypu Research Laboratory (CRL) in
Norwich. A combination of severe winter weather in 1962-3, when 90 per cent of
the population perished, and a centrally organised cull from 1962 using cage
trapping and shooting reduced numbers dramatically. Cage trapping would
sometimes catch, although not harm, other species: hares, otters, pheasants, lambs,
even bitterns (Norris 1967). The cull was scaled down in 1965, but the animal
survived to increase again with a run of mild winters in the early 1970s. A further
eradication campaign in 1981, guided by CRL biologists, was deemed to have been
successful by January 1989, and terminated by MAFF (Gosling and Baker 1989).
Like the bittern, then, the coypu has persisted in unpredictably variable numbers
over decades, alhough preyed upon rather than preserved by humans. In considering
why the coypu has been killed in various ways at various times, it is important here
not to assume a story of alien victimisation. As we shall see below, many welcomed
the coypu, but even those engaged in its trapping or shooting have not tended to
present this as the pursuit of an animal because it is out of place. There are a range of
concerns regarding the damage done by coypus: burrowing in banks which might
lead to flooding of adjacent land; destruction of reed beds which might threaten the
local thatching industry; erosion of bird habitat; destruction of plant species;
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