Andy Ford: The Lynx Effect - Conservation, Rewidling and Land Reform by Stealth

Voices of the Countryside

The latest plan to help Scotland get back in touch with its true wild self is to reintroduce lynx, a big cat and apex predator, to control deer numbers. But can Scotland follow Switzerland's lead? Or is this all just land reform by stealth?

Tales of the riverbank with a difference - the story of the beaver, the big cat and the eagle.

Sounds like the kind of story that would be written by Kenneth Grahame, with illustrations to match by Ernest H.Shepherd. To add to the romance of it, I’ve just been chatting online to a Scottish farmer who is about to start putting out carrots to feed the beaver on his land. All is furry and very lovely.

The flip side is perhaps less rosy. Official reports from NatureScot reveal that a total of 63 nuisance beavers were killed under licence in 2022. That’s down from the 87 killed in 2021. One sympathises with the beaver, who must have thought life was on the up when he and a few relatives were introduced to the Knapdale Forest in 2009. It’s all in the name of re-wilding Scotland.

Let me explain what this is all about. It seems this process is happening against a rather confusing backdrop.

First came the white-tailed sea eagle - now regarded as Britain’s largest and most magnificent bird of prey. That happened in 1975 - and today there are estimated to be 152 mating pairs of them in the skies. Doubtless those positively invested regularly ‘high five’.

Then the beaver. Extinct in Scotland 400 years ago, they were re-introduced to help manage wetlands and provide what many describe as a ‘golden opportunity for tourism’. From a handful of these tree-munching, dam building engineers first released into the wild, it’s estimated there were a thousand of them by 2021 - and there will be 10,000 by 2030. That is a lot of beaver - and they’ll need an awful lot of carrots. (Official figures from https://www.nature.scot/plants-animals-and-fungi/mammals/land-mammals/eurasian-beaver)

But there are clues that all is not well in beaver world…..