Greening the Desert - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 79

its heavy snout into the rushes. The other one followed it into the
pond, cutting a new path through the weed, occasionally displaying
its fat rump as it dived, smooth and round as a dolphin.
This, as far as I can discover, was the first concrete step taken in
Wales towards reintroducing an extinct mammal. Here, at Blaenein-
ion, at the source of the stream which runs through the stunning Cwm
Einion into the Dyfi estuary, a group of volunteers had enclosed three
acres of land around an old carp pond. People had been talking about
returning the beaver to Wales for years. Now, at last, something was
happening.
It is not clear when beavers last lived in Britain, but they might have
persisted until the mid-eighteenth century. 12 They were hunted to
extinction for their beautiful warm fur and for castoreum, the secre-
tion from the scent sacs close to the tail, which was used for making
perfume and medicines. They once lived throughout our river systems, as
much a part of our native ecosystem as they are in Canada today. Bev-
erley in Yorkshire, Beverston in Gloucestershire, Barbon in Cumbria
and Beverley Brook, which enters the River Thames at Battersea, are
among the places named after them. 13 They are mild, plant-eating ani-
mals, popular with the people of the United Kingdom: an opinion poll
found that 86 per cent were in favour of the beaver's reintroduction. 14
But listening to the small but powerful group of landowners fighting
to prevent their reinstatement in this country, you could mistake the
species in question for a sabre-toothed cat or velociraptor.
The body in charge of conservation in Scotland, Scottish Natural
Heritage, started to investigate the idea of reintroducing beavers in
1994. 15 Landowners responded furiously. After ten years in which half
a million pounds was spent assessing every possible danger the beavers
might present, the Scottish government gave up and cancelled the pro-
ject. An ecologist who was involved in this fiasco told me that, during a
meeting which took place after six years of negotiations, one of the men
who own the fishing rights on Scotland's rivers exclaimed: 'I hear what
you say, and I can understand why some people like these animals, but
I will not have them coming into my river and eating my fish.'
There was a deathly silence as the biologists realized that, through
all those years of diplomacy and explanation, he still had not accepted
that beavers are herbivorous.