Feral

by George Monbiot

  The troop of tits caught up with us, moving through the tops of the trees below our heads. They filled the wood with their noise, squeaking and churring like an unoiled wheelbarrow. Where the horses had skidded on the wet grass, scarring the pasture, hedge bedstraw and wood sorrel grew, relics of some ancient woodland edge. We could see the animals on the other side of the little valley, the foals grazing at the heels of the mares.

  The hills on the far side of the estuary were now patched with the small dark shadows of cloudlets, the scouts deployed by the great battalions massed at the offing as a front approached across the sea. A young buzzard soared above the horses then began to mob the kestrel.

  We walked through the pastures around the top of the wood, stumbling across a little waterfall, sudden and surprising in the midst of bracken and gorse. Marsh marigold leaves withered on the banks.

  ‘This,’ Ritchie said, ‘is the end of life as we know it. From here on up there are no trees, except for that one birch.’

  I looked up for a moment at the bare, bleak plateau, the pony paths converging into the distance, the hessian emptiness, then turned away.

  We climbed back over the fence and stood among the trees he had planted at the topmost corner of his old land. Here the soil was thin and poor. He had found little piles of stones–about the size of fists–gathered together, which suggest that it had been cultivated. Ritchie told me that he had once met an old man in the local market who, in the 1940s, was part of a team of contract mowers working with scythes, travelling from farm to farm during the harvest. They had come to this farm to harvest the oats, in fields further down the valley. ‘It was a privilege to meet him. He was the last of his kind, and the harvest here was one of the last he ever cut.’ But this land, high in the watershed, might not have been tilled for many hundreds of years: the piles of stones, Ritchie said, could date back to the Bronze Age, when shifting cultivation was practised. ‘It was probably similar to slash and burn farming in the tropics. It would have exhausted the soil pretty quickly and they would have moved on.’ (The difference, in the tropics, is that the soil and vegetation often recover quickly; the impact of traditional shifting cultivation can be low. In the Cambrian Mountains, probably because nutrients are quickly stripped from the exposed soils by rain, this does not seem to happen.)

  The rowans, on this poor soil, had, in twenty years, grown to only four feet. They were wizened and wind-bitten. The oaks had scarcely grown at all; they had put out a few weak branches just above the soil, which were now dying back. But the pines he had planted were twelve feet high. These are Scots pine but, as Ritchie points out, that is a misnomer: they are widely distributed in Europe, and were once widespread in Britain. As the pollen core suggests, pine seems to be welladapted to the tops of the Welsh hills. Forestry and conservation bodies sometimes claim that, outside Scotland, it does not belong to our native flora. But many of the biggest trees in the Bronze and Iron Age fossil forest exposed on Borth beach, close to Aberystwyth, are pines. Beautifully preserved in an ancient peat bog, they still possess their scaly orange bark. A few bilberries clung to their bushes. I tried some: to my surprise they still tasted good. They must have been hanging there for three months.

  ‘Though this might have been deep forest once, with the depletion of the soil on the worst upland sites that’s not what all of it would revert to immediately today. We’ll get an ecosystem that has never been here before: a mosaic of habitats of different structures and sizes, intricate and diverse. The trees that grow slowly will be grazed more, as they can’t get beyond the reach of the animals. It’ll probably take many years for the leaf litter to make a reasonable soil here again, allowing other species to move in.’

  Two late swallows flickered past, dipping and flexing over the meadows. In the new woods below us I could hear the chatter of siskins. The front now loomed over the valley, casting its shadow on the hills across the estuary, driving the winds before it. I looked over the tops of the trees beneath us and thought what a wonderful thing it must be to leave such a legacy, that the woods Ritchie had planted would stand long after anything I had made or written had vanished from the Earth.

  Even so, something was missing.

  The day had begun so dark and grim that it seemed as if the sun had taken one look, turned over and gone back to sleep. Now, as it struggled to throw off the ragged counterpane of cloud above the mountains, the raw November day began to brighten up.

  The trees had shaken off most of their leaves. A few scraps of russet still clung to the oaks and beeches, but the birch and sallow reclaiming the ground around the pond were now grey smudges against the dead grass. We stood in the mud churned by the raising of the fence–triply secured to reassure local people–waiting. The film cameramen adjusted their tripods and stamped their feet to keep warm. An ecologist uncapped his binoculars. The volunteers–baggy jumpers, torn trousers, dreadlocks and nose rings–smoked roll-ups and spoke in tense whispers. From the larch plantation on the mountain to the west I could hear the distant baying of hounds and the occasional warble of a hunting horn. The still, cold air trickled down my neck.

  A monstrous bull mastiff, all saggy skin and jowls, that had been snuffling round our feet, suddenly leapt into the air, squealed like a piglet, then ran whimpering to its owner: it had touched the electric fence.

  ‘I think we’re ready to go,’ someone said.

  Two young men with blond beards wedged hoardings into the mud on either side of a great box. One of them drew out the pins which secured the panel facing the pond. A moment later there was a flash of chocolate fur between the boards, then another: two large animals blurred past and disappeared into a rough hut of sticks and rushes that had been built at the water’s edge.

  After a few minutes, just as one of the bearded men had promised, the willow branches shutting off the far side of the hut began to shudder. The sticks soon started falling to the ground. The animals, he had told me, had to be allowed to chew their way out: then they would believe that the structure belonged to them. We waited for another minute, then a creature which contrived to look both utterly alien and perfectly matched to this place emerged from the hole it had made. The onlookers cheered. It raised its big blunt head and sniffed the air, peering dimly towards the source of the noise. Then it waddled forward as I would expect an ankylosaur to have moved: hunched and heavy, dragging its belly and tail over the marshy ground.

  It slipped into the pond, pushed its way through the waterweed and, suddenly slick and graceful, began to swim. Its head and back looked almost perfectly flat, emerging just an inch above the water, interrupted only by the little round ears. Half seal, half hippo, it paddled about in a circle. Then one of the cameramen shifted to get a better view and it flipped over, gave the surface of the pond a great crack with its tail and disappeared under the water. It emerged a moment later and began to swim along the bank, sniffing and poking 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 Blaeneinion, 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 secretion 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. Beverley 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 animals, 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 project. 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.

  Though beavers have been introduced, from 1924 onwards, to twenty-four other European countries without mishap,16 and though they live among greater concentrations of salmon and other fish in Canada and Norway than we are blessed with in Britain, the landowners argued that they would stop the salmon migrating up the rivers, destroy their spawning beds and spread disease. At last, when every possible objection had been addressed from every possible angle, in 2009 eleven beavers were experimentally released into the Knapdale Forest in Argyll. The place into which they were reintroduced is unusual for its absence of salmon rivers–and, for that matter, of ideal beaver habitat.

  By then, however, a number of beavers had ‘escaped’ from a wildlife park in Perthshire (it is widely believed that someone assisted their departure) and various other places, and had established themselves in the catchment of the River Tay, a famous and very expensive salmon river. As I write, the beavers (unlike those in the Knapdale Forest) are thriving and breeding freely, and the police and conservation authorities (the same conservation authorities who oversaw their release at Knapdale) are trying to catch them. ‘They are being recaptured because their presence in the wild is illegal and because their welfare may be at risk,’ Scottish Natural Heritage explains.17 The illegal animals do not appear to have caused any harm, or any conflict with fishing interests, however. The accidental release could be seen as a more germane experiment than the official one.

  The Scottish experience appears to have done nothing to reassure landowners in Wales. The Farmers’ Union of Wales angrily denounced the work at Blaeneinion. It described the beavers as a ‘non-native species’, compared them to grey squirrels and claimed that they will spread diseases to their livestock.18

  There is no intention to release these animals. Both are female, so there is no danger of proliferation. The point of the experiment is to establish, for the 162nd time in Europe,*4 that beavers are not the animals mentioned in the Book of Revelations, breathing fire and brimstone and slaying the third part of men. Their impacts on the plant and animal life in the enclosure will be studied, and the results 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, indistinguishable, 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 grumbling. ‘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 themselves 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 excavate, the shallow ditches they create as they forage on the land and their felling of some of the riverside trees transforms their surroundings. They create habitats for water voles, otters, ducks, frogs, fish and insects. In Wyoming, where admittedly the ponds they make are larger than those in Europe, streams where beavers live harbour seventy-five times as many waterbirds as those without.20

  In both Sweden and Poland (where European beavers live), the trout in beaver ponds are on average larger than those in the other parts of the streams: the ponds provide them with habitats and shelter they cannot find elsewhere.21 Young salmon grow faster and are in better condition where beavers make their dams than in other stretches.22 The total weight of all the creatures living in the water may be between two and five times greater in beaver ponds than in the undammed sections.23 In Poland, beavers increase the number of bats hunting around the rivers, both because the population of flying insects increases as a result of their dams and their creation of swampy ground, and because they make gaps among the riverside trees in which the bats can hunt.24 The trees they eat tend to be those which coppice or sucker well, such as aspen, willow and ash. The scrub this creates beside the rivers provides shelter for birds and mammals.

  Our rivers, like the land, have suffered from intensive management. They have been straightened and canalized, dredged and cleared. The results have hurt both wildlife and people: by reducing the amount of time that water takes to flow from the tributaries into the lower reaches, we have ensured that the rivers are more likely to flood.

  These policies often appear to have been informed by the same impulse that has driven some farmers to destroy lone trees and archaeological traces: a desire for tidiness. In the catchment of the River Wye, for example, the authorities spent large amounts of public money until the late 1990s on the pointless task of dragging what they called ‘timber blockages’ out of the tributaries. These great nests of branches took hundreds of years to accumulate. They were the prime habitat for a wide range of species, including the young of the salmon for which the river is renowned. Four hundred logjams were destroyed before someone realized that the policy resulted in nothing but harm.25 The programme is likely to have helped cause the continuing fall in salmon numbers and the continuing rise in the number and intensity of the floods plaguing the towns around the river’s lower course.26

  Now the policy is being reversed. ‘Let sleeping logs lie’, the Wildlife Trusts advise.27 They point out that woody debris in rivers helps to stabilize their banks and beds, that it traps sediments and provides shelter and food for insects and small animals, crayfish, fish, water voles, otters and birds.

  In Yorkshire, where the town of Pickering has been flooded four times since 1999, to the great distress of its people, government agencies are now pulling woody debris back into the streams feeding Pickering Beck, in order to slow their flow.28 This requires a good deal of l
abour and expense. There is a cheaper way of achieving the same result: releasing beavers. They drag branches into the water both to build dams and to create a food supply in the winter. They would keep protecting the town long after the funding for human workers ran out.

  Beavers radically change the behaviour of a river. They slow it down. They reduce scouring and erosion. They trap much of the load it carries,29 ensuring that the water runs more clearly. They create small wetlands and boggy areas. They make it more structurally diverse, providing homes for many other species. Far from spreading disease, as the Farmers’ Union of Wales has claimed,30 they could reduce it, as their dams filter out the sediments containing faecal bacteria.31

  The more we understand about how ecosystems work, the less appropriate certain conservation policies appear. As I have explored the powerful effects that some species exert on animals and plants to which, at first, they have no obvious connection, I have begun to understand the extent to which the farmed and managed systems many conservationists defend are empty shells. They have lost not only their physical structure–the trees, shrubs and dead wood which provide habitats for so many species–but also many of the connections between the species which build an ecosystem. Most of the strands of the web of life in these places have been broken.

  At first I struggled to identify the scientific principles that might inform rewilding. To formulate principles you must know what outcome you are trying to achieve. But rewilding, unlike conservation, has no fixed objective: it is driven not by human management but by natural processes. There is no point at which it can be said to have arrived. Rewilding of the kind that interests me does not seek to control the natural world, to re-create a particular ecosystem or landscape, but–having brought back some of the missing species–to allow it to find its own way.