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"Urban rewilding" Introducing beavers....are they mad?


Rob85
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/02/beavers-set-to-be-released-london-urban-rewilding

Just come across this article and they guy suggesting that every river system in Britain should have beavers as they will prevent flooding and drought. I must pose the question, was his head screwed on with a left hand thread? I'm part of a countryside Facebook group and there's  trapper on there who has to try and deal with the damage these animals wreak on areas. Some of the photos he puts up are beyond belief.

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I'm all for urban and city rewilding  Wolves , lynx and brown bear in Hyde Park would be great along with all other green places. Plenty of fat food there for them to chew on.

Beavers are fine out in very large areas of forest where they can do what they do...destroy trees and block up streams and rivers.  Re introducing them to any UK river/stream is totally crazy and these folk live in lah lah land.

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3 hours ago, Rob85 said:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/02/beavers-set-to-be-released-london-urban-rewilding

Just come across this article and they guy suggesting that every river system in Britain should have beavers as they will prevent flooding and drought. I must pose the question, was his head screwed on with a left hand thread? I'm part of a countryside Facebook group and there's  trapper on there who has to try and deal with the damage these animals wreak on areas. Some of the photos he puts up are beyond belief.

I've seen a few posts from Scotland and you just think wow, look at the size of that tree they have taken down, and then it takes a JCB to remove a damn built in the wrong place.

2 hours ago, Walker570 said:

Beavers are fine out in very large areas of forest where they can do what they do...destroy trees and block up streams and rivers.  Re introducing them to any UK river/stream is totally crazy and these folk live in lah lah land.

Like Canada. 

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1 minute ago, Mice! said:

I've seen a few posts from Scotland and you just think wow, look at the size of that tree they have taken down, and then it takes a JCB to remove a damn built in the wrong place.

Like Canada. 

Like in the article the fella suggests they "coppice" willow..... he's mistaken, they have an insatiable instinct to gnaw down trees and dam rivers and will do it until no trees remain. They will also breed out of control over here as they will have no predators apart from cars and lorries of they go near a road. But then I guess keepers and farmers will get the blame for that anyway 

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28 minutes ago, Rob85 said:

Like in the article the fella suggests they "coppice" willow..... he's mistaken, they have an insatiable instinct to gnaw down trees and dam rivers and will do it until no trees remain. They will also breed out of control over here as they will have no predators apart from cars and lorries of they go near a road. But then I guess keepers and farmers will get the blame for that anyway 

The pictures I've seen were mature trees, probably 1ft-2ft diameter trunks, and they weren't being coppiced just felled

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Here in Bavaria we have a nice valley near my village with no houses at all just nature where I stalk, they put in beaver there and they multiplied and have now taken all the waterside trees away, there were millions of Euros spent on a gravel track along the side of the valley for walker/joggers mountain bikers which is now too dangerous to use because the beavers are thinning the base of the trees along the path, its just asking for one of them to fall on a walker.

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I was talking to a well meaning lady who trying to tell me that beavers are the solution to the flooding problem in the UK ,saying they build dams to hold back water and by building with saplings and mud draged to streams ,when I told her that I have seen mature waterside trees such has Alder & willow some at least 50 to 80 yrs old toppled into rivers and doing nothing to stop floods she took the I know im right atitude ! I then her told how river beds used to be dredged in stages in the past and the spoil piled on the banks to raise them , but it was stoped by well meaning people in Brussles because the spoil could be contaminated ,she then said that she was organising a project  to dredge parts of the Chesterfield  Canal and the spoil was being used to make mounds and planted with trees and wild flowers , sounds  good! but the canal has been filled by the river Rother that had been nothing more than an open sewer for the NCC carboniseation plant for 60yrs till it was closed down and it still stinks when the rain washes the chemicals from the reclaimed land the plant stood on !

Edited by derbyduck
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Rewilding can undoubtedly work but, and it is a big 'but', only if you remove the human population and all other invasive, non-native, species from a large enough area to make it viable. All other schemes are simply there to make humans feel better about doing something to right the terrible wrongs humans are doing to our world in general. A harsh opinion I grant you but formed from seeing the parallel between the damage an unchecked deer population does to an area and the damage an unchecked human population is doing to the world.

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i think in some areas they will be of benifit...............im sick and tired of seeing all my childhood streams drying up in the summer because all the water baliffs have been sacked and the water authorities are too greedy to increase the size of resevoirs or build more...at least if the beavers in certain areas can hold up water to allow the water to feed old aquifers.....it might be for the good...........

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48 minutes ago, twenty said:

A pair of Beavers were introduced to a 6 Hectare (15 acre), enclosure in the Forest of Dean in 2018.

See Beavers at Greathough Brook, online, for story.

Plenty of positives [that i saw] It seems that beavers create a more varied habitat by felling trees, helping water voles and others, however I do wonder how this sits with the desperate to plant trees re-wilders !

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Beavers in Canada. They can easily become an out of control  pest. Pelts are worth almost nothing so trappers don’t bother with them. Some regions pay a twenty dollar bounty for a tail. They will take down every tree within a qtr mile of the water. A few are fine but not a lot. The tree lined streams and rivers I saw in England would be bare in several years.

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Some strange misgivings about Beaver here, I lived until recently in an area where there was a large colony and yes there were large trees felled but the majority of there food was bankside vegetation and small willow that was coppiced. No damming, the Tay is too large and the Almond although it seems ideal has none along the two mile stretch that they are living along.

Undercutting the banks is however a problem, again the Tay seems to be ok but there are bits of collapsed banking and their trails in and out of the water on the Almond. I am sure I posted pictures of damage on the forum somewhere.

Here it is

Edited by henry d
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13 hours ago, ditchman said:

i think in some areas they will be of benifit...............im sick and tired of seeing all my childhood streams drying up in the summer because all the water baliffs have been sacked and the water authorities are too greedy to increase the size of resevoirs or build more...at least if the beavers in certain areas can hold up water to allow the water to feed old aquifers.....it might be for the good...........

Hello, I know what you mean Simon, knew a little chalk stream in West Sussex where I grew up, all dried up due to extraction except in realy wet winters, flooded Chichester twice before they rerouted using large pipes, use to have wild brown trout and lots of wildlife,

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