Greening the Desert - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 81

will inform a possible reintroduction elsewhere in Wales. The favoured
spot is currently the River Teifi, where, in the twelfth century, they
were last recorded. But, as the Scottish saga suggests, this will be a
long, slow process.
I watched the resurrected beavers for an hour or so, as they
explored their new home, their lovely dense coats, which had given
them so much trouble in their earlier incarnation, trailing bubbles as
they paddled around the pond. They were much larger than I had
expected. Occasionally they came up from under the water into a
weedbed, and lay, crowned and garlanded with pond plants, indistin-
guishable, had you not seen them move, from mossy logs. One of
them nibbled experimentally at a willow twig. Occasionally they
dragged themselves out of the pond and sat on the bank, gazing
around myopically. Their fur fluffed up immediately as the water
streamed off it.
A man from the local paper turned up late, muttering and grum-
bling. 'Is this where they're releasing the badgers?'
'They're not badgers, they're -'
'Bloody hell, look at the size of that otter!'
Already they looked as if they owned the pond, sculling round it
proprietorially, cutting paths through the weed, familiarizing them-
selves with the grasses and trees on which they would feed. Hard to
see among the weeds and rushes, perfectly adapted to this interleaving
of land and water, they looked as if they had always been here; as if
they had never left.
The beaver is one of several missing animals that have been described
as keystone species. A keystone species is one that has a larger impact
on its environment than its numbers alone would suggest. This impact
creates the conditions which allow other species to live there.
European beavers, unlike the North American species, build only
small dams, but the changes they make to the flow of rivers, the
branches and twigs they drag into the water, the burrows they excav-
ate, the shallow ditches they create as they forage on the land and
their felling of some of the riverside trees transforms their surround-
ings. They create habitats for water voles, otters, ducks, frogs, fish and
insects. In Wyoming, where admittedly the ponds they make are larger