Life of a Chalkstream: Is Boris bonkers about beavers?

Greeting

When I opened up my Twitter feed one day last month, I had something of a shock. The announcement by Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) that it was launching a consultation into the wider release of beavers into enclosures and the wild seemed to have been hacked by one of the pro-beaver groups for it included a one minute promo video for beavers.

Beautifully filmed. Lovingly edited. Cuddly shots. Endless captions extolling the ecological benefits of beavers. Fair enough. If you believe in beavers you are going to believe all that stuff. But it soon became apparent that Twitter had not been hacked. This was the official DEFRA video (watch it here) to launch the consultation that closes 17 November.

I tell you this by way of context. Not only have DEFRA drunk the beaver Kool Aid but so has our Prime Minster. I was delighted when he mentioned otters in his speech to the Conservative Party Conference on Wednesday; it is one of the few British nature success stories of the past 60 years.

Here is the extract from his speech,

“Otters are returning to rivers from which they have been absent for decades. Beavers that have not been seen on some rivers since Tudor times, massacred for their pelts, are now back – and if that isn’t Conservatism, my friends, I don’t know what is. Build back beaver!”

But to conflate beavers with otters is well, in a favourite Johnson word, bonkers. The otter revival happened because a dedicated few campaigned for 30 years from the 1950's for the abolition of organophosphates that were slowly driving otters to extinction. It has then taken a further 30 years for the pesticide, widely used in agriculture, to leave the food chain. But beavers? These haven’t revived from a very low base. Do not believe all that guff (another BJ favourite word) about Tudor times. Bar a few that hung on in Wales no beaver had walked the Southern Downs since Boadicea until the illegal releases that begun some 20 years ago which have accelerated exponentially in the past five. A recent study by the Southwest River Association of their 17 rivers found beavers present in 10 of which only 3 were licenced for releases.

Even before the speech it was clear Boris was a signed up member of the Beaver Tendency; the family had bought a beaver for his father Stanley for release at his Devon home. I’m told the arrival of the Johnson beaver is currently delayed due to licencing issues but I’m guessing it is only a matter of time.

I’m afraid I don’t hold out much hope for the consultation changing the direction of travel; in a decade beavers will be in pretty well every river catchment, And in a further decade we’ll probably embark on an expensive culling programme. But, for now, the beaver is the new ecological Messiah who will have the full protection of the law. If a beaver invades your river it will become a criminal offence to interfere with it or the dams it builds. Of course, you will be able to apply to Natural England for a management licence but we know how that goes. It took two decades to convince Natural England that cormorants were a menace. Goodness knows how long they will hold out for the beaver.

Please do consider filling in the consultation form. DEFRA haven’t made it easy and it is one of those ‘consultations' that is trying to guide the outcome to a predetermined point. Unbelievably, the final question asks: “Would you (or an organisation you are involved with) consider preparing an application for wild release, if the approach proposed in this consultation became national policy? If yes, please provide the general location where you might consider applying for such a release.”

You can answer No if you wish but there is no space provided to explain your reasons for such an answer. That said I’m simply going to write my reasons for No in the Yes box.

Here is the DEFRA consultation link. Make a strong cup of tea (or something more potent) before opening.

A cruel, cruel cut

When I bought you news a few weeks ago that the Australian company Macquarie had ‘rescued’ Southern Water I feared the worst for the desalination plant on Southampton Water that had been given the go ahead by the previous management earlier in the year.

Desalination plants are not perfect. It is an industrial process that uses energy but the 75 million litres of drinking water it would have produced daily would have supplied 215,000 homes in Hampshire. In of itself that might not mean much but when you consider that is enough water for over a quarter of the homes in the county, a county almost completely dependent on the aquifers that feed the chalkstreams, the beneficial scale of the Fawley Desalination Plant is apparent.

The local victors

But, true to form, Macquarie announced last week that the desalination pant was not going ahead, a saving, apparently, of some £600m which comes as something of a surprise to many as the original announcement put the cost of the plant at £120m.

The local campaigners against the plant, such as they were and supported to my mind erroneously by the New Forest MP, claimed this as a victory for local activism. I hate to burst their bubble, but this is all about the bottom line and nothing to do with the environment. In fact, the statement from Macquarie is ominous. It reads: "We have written to our regulators [OFWAT] informing them that we’re continuing to explore our proposals for water recycling and water transfer solutions and do not intend to further develop plans for desalination."

Well, I guess we know which dusty OFWAT in-tray that particular letter will be consigned to. But really the meat of the paragraph are the phrases ‘water recycling’ and ‘water transfer’. Firstly, water recycling: if Macquarie have ditched desalination on the grounds of cost then recycling stands no chance of being a significant water provider the processes being many times more expensive. Secondly, if you are wondering what water transfer means in the context of Hampshire this is sucking the water out of one river catchment and piping it to another catchment. It is cheap and easy but does nothing to address the essential problem of water companies depleting a diminishing resource regardless of the impact on something as precious and scarce as the chalkstreams.

As I say desalination is far from perfect but it really did represent a lifeline for the rivers of west Hampshire and the New Forest. For most of the year Southern Water can pump away at the aquifers for as much as they need; from October to June, we have more than enough water to go around. But in those critical months of July-September, abstraction will kill stone dead those headwaters and aquifers which would have been kept flowing had the Fawley Plant survived this cruel, cruel cut.

What odds do you think that other major Southern Water project, the Havant Thicket Reservoir, surviving the red pen of the Macquarie accountants?

When brown trout go bad

We hear a great deal about the endangerment of brown trout. In fact, though you might not know this, the brown trout is the most widely dispersed of all British fish across the British Isles. You will find it happily living in more places than any other of our native fish and that includes what we might sometimes regard as the more common coarse species.

Salmo trutta is incredibly robust. It is a survivor in some truly terrible conditions. And it has that safety valve; sea trout evolved so females, and a few males, might survive when natural catastrophes forced them to flee the rivers. In fact, when you consider that the ancestors of the humble British brown trout now populate rivers on every continent, it gives you some indication as to how robust and adaptable they are. But this is not always a good thing as evidenced by news that our brown trout, an 19^th century import to Indian rivers, is driving out the native snow trout.

Himalayan brown trout

A recent study by the Wildlife Institute for India, that labels the brown trout as ‘exotic’ and ‘invasive’, has found that the snow trout is being increasingly displaced from its natural habitat to the higher reaches of the Himalayan rivers where it is less able to survive and, more importantly, complete its life cycle.

There doesn’t currently appear to be any plan to resolve the situation though the Institute points out that dams and similar upstream projects might well cut off the only remaining route the snow trout currently has for survival.