Верунуть бобра и восстановить потоки воды
Bulat Yessekin
От: Alpha Lo from Climate Water Project <climatewa...@substack.com>
Date: сб, 7 мар. 2026 г. в 03:50
Subject: Rewilding, beavers, and water restoration : Derek Gow
To: <bulat.y...@gmail.com>
The idea of bringing back the beaver to the UK was an idea that was scoffed as too eccentric, even by environmentalists. But Derek Gow, against a lot of opposition, has pioneered bringing the beaver back, so that they are now once again part of the UK landscape, restoring the wetlands and rivers. Born in Dundee in 1965, Gow left school at seventeen and spent his early years in agriculture. He was inspired by the writing of Gerald Durrell, and jumped at the chance to manage a European wildlife park in central Scotland before moving on to develop two nature centres in England. That early immersion in wildlife conservation set him on a path that would eventually make him, in the words of George Monbiot the person who has done more to restore Britain's missing fauna than anyone else in the country (words written in the blurb for Gow’s memoir). Gow was the first to import and quarantine beavers for projects in the UK, sourcing animals from Poland, Bavaria, and Norway. It was the opening salvo in what would become a long and often maddening battle against institutional resistance. Since the early 1990s, in the face of outright opposition from government, landowning elites, and even some conservation professionals, Gow imported, quarantined, and assisted the reestablishment of beavers in waterways across England and Scotland, while responding to the opposition with characteristic bluntness, charm, and what his supporters describe as an almost reckless willingness to keep pushing when anyone else would have given up. Beavers were once common throughout England, Wales, and Scotland but became extinct in the sixteenth century, hunted for their fur, meat, and castoreum - a secretion used in perfumes, food, and medicine. Their disappearance was the removal of a keystone engineer from the landscape. Beaver dams create wetlands, slow water flows, filter pollutants, and provide habitat for an extraordinary range of species. Through gnawing on stems and coppicing trees, beavers stimulate regrowth that provides homes for more insects and birds, while also enabling more constant water flows and better water retention during droughts. In 2015, several families of beavers were reintroduced in Devon, in the UK, as part of the River Otter Beaver Trial - the first legally sanctioned reintroduction of an extinct native mammal in the country. Over the following five years, the two original breeding pairs expanded to at least eight, and researchers found 28 dams built across the catchment, impounding water across nearly two kilometres of watercourse. Findings from the trial showed that beavers reduced flood flows by up to 60%, even during very wet weather, by holding back water in newly created wetlands and allowing it to trickle out slowly rather than surge downstream. In the flood-prone village of East Budleigh, a family of beavers constructed six dams upstream, with the measurable result that peak flood flows through the village were significantly reduced. The animals were also found to clean water supplies, removing large quantities of soil, manure, slurry, and fertilisers from rivers and streams. Beavers have been steadily increasing their numbers over the years. There are now over 2000 in Scotland, and around 500 in England. Wildlife trusts are looking to release more this year. Today, Gow farms a 300-acre property on the Devon-Cornwall border that he is transforming into a rewilding haven, while continuing to be influential in the reintroduction of the Eurasian beaver, the water vole, and the white stork in England. He has written about the whole extraordinary saga in his book Bringing Back the Beaver.
Here is an edited, abridged section of our interview Alpha: This whole field of water restoration and rewilding - how did you get into it? Derek: I started working with water voles which are a very small animal in Britain. Water voles are one of the characters in Kenneth Graham’s book The Wind in the Willows. The character of Ratty, sculling up and down the idyllic English River with his friends, used to represent a very common animal. They were incredibly common in British waterways from the beginning of the twentieth century, and writers at the time referred to their overwhelming presence. Around 100 years ago water voles prospered. But by the 1960s and 70s, canalization of rivers, concrete banks, pollution, and the introduction of North American mink from fur farms caused massive declines. The animals once lived in chains of colonies along waterways. When those chains break and populations fragment, they can’t find unrelated mates and they disappear. Today the species has lost around 97% of its British range. The remarkable thing is that they are extremely robust. If you reintroduce them correctly with the right gene base and numbers, they recover easily. Their decline shows how harshly we’ve treated the Earth. I began working on water vole reintroductions about thirty years ago. We’ve learned a lot, though we haven’t saved them entirely. Early in that work, digging ponds and cutting trees to create wetlands, we began to realize something else must once have been doing this before us. And somebody eventually asked: do you understand what beavers do? At the time, I really didn’t. So in the early 1990s I went to Poland and spent a month visiting wetlands where beavers had been reintroduced in the 1960s. Wading through these incredible ponds with floating islands of vegetation, orchids flowering, frogs jumping away, dragonflies landing on your head—you reach the great beaver lodges in the middle of this living world. You quickly realize the animal that created habitat for water voles and many other species is the beaver. People call them a keystone species, but beavers are bigger than that. They are a function of nature itself. Apart from humans and elephants, they may be the third most impactful species on the planet in terms of habitat creation. That was my first journey into understanding beavers. Alpha: So you were a farmer when you started introducing the voles? Derek: Yes, on and off. I was also working on conservation projects. And water voles and beavers became central to those. When I started talking about bringing beavers back to Britain in the mid-1990s, people laughed. Most conservationists thought it was ridiculous. Yet when I traveled to Poland, Germany, Russia, and the United States where beavers had been reintroduced, I realized it was perfectly feasible. Much of Britain still has the trees beavers need. The problem wasn’t ecology—it was misunderstanding and inertia. Historically beavers were heavily hunted for fur and for a substance called castoreum in their scent glands, which contains salicylic acid, related to pain relief compounds. Because of hunting, their populations collapsed. By the early twentieth century only about two thousand remained in Eurasia. Governments eventually protected them, and slowly populations began recovering. Alpha: And there are two species of beavers, right? The North American and the European? Derek: Yes. When Europeans arrived in North America there may have been about 100 million beavers. The fur trade reduced them to around 2.5 million. In Eurasia the collapse happened over a longer period but was just as catastrophic. Ecologists studying North America have been able to track the environmental impact of removing beavers. Rivers eroded, floods increased, soils washed away, chemicals flowed into waterways, and ecosystems collapsed. Our pursuit of beavers was ruthless. Yet ancient cultures understood their importance. Leaders of the Zoroastrian religion in Iran over two thousand years ago forbade killing the “water dogs,” warning that deserts would advance if they were destroyed. Alpha: Wow. They figured that out that long ago? Derek: Yes. But modern societies largely forgot. Alpha: So when beavers build dams, how does that affect rivers and floodplains? Derek: Beavers are lazy animals. When they first arrive in a landscape with wetlands, they live easily—floating around eating reeds and plants. But they are territorial. As populations grow, younger animals move upstream into smaller creeks where they build dams. These dams create wetlands that act like giant sponges. During heavy rainfall the wetlands absorb water and slow its movement. Water can take ten times longer to pass through the system than it otherwise would. That breaks flood peaks for communities downstream. A great example is the Bridge Creek project on the John Day River in Oregon. Conservationists built structures to help beavers rebuild dams. The beavers reinforced them, slowing water flow and reducing flood damage dramatically. Beavers can have enormous effects, but only if we allow them enough space. Alpha: So many rivers today are straightened and engineered, but naturally they would be braided and slow-moving? Derek: Exactly. Nature never produced anything that flows in a straight line. Humans did that. For centuries we drained wetlands, built pumps, and tried to enslave water. Now climate change brings heavier rainfall and the water pushes back into places where we built our towns. We call that a disaster. But really it’s nature reclaiming what was always hers. The sooner we reshape landscapes to work with water again, the sooner we’ll realize the beaver may be one of our best allies. Alpha: So how is the rewilding effort going in the UK and Europe? Derek: So the rewilding movement in the UK… There’s a huge amount of talk about rewilding. The most famous rewilding project in the UK is a place called Knepp Castle in Sussex, and that is the home of a couple called Charlie Burrell and Izzy Tree. They have effectively rewilded their estate over the last quarter century for nature, and the results of what they’ve done, the cessation of farming, the use of big old breeds of domestic animals as proxies for extinct animals, has just been remarkable. The response of all the other wild species that live there is incredible. Bird numbers have risen with much greater diversity and abundance, and it really shows that if you approach even meat production in a different way — lower densities of animals, feeding them no extra supplements — you can create a landscape that is very rich in other life while still keeping some cattle. Elsewhere in Britain you’ve got other people talking about rewilding. There are all sorts of shapes and forms that it takes, from managed landscapes with very low densities of domestic animals to places where perhaps some wild ungulates are present — though there are very few of those left in Britain. Maybe a few wild boar and a few red deer. Different organizations and individuals are doing this for different reasons, so it is slowly growing in Britain as a way of approaching land use. But our government is incredibly hesitant about it, and our nature conservation authorities can be very difficult when it comes to moving this process forward quickly. To be brutally frank, things like the beavers, the reintroduction of the beaver , has been a thirty-year battle with all sorts of obstacles. The nature conservation organizations really did not help much at all until about the last five years. Even now, when it comes to government organizations, the bureaucracy involved with removing a few beavers into a new river system — it would be easier to move nuclear missiles and point them at the Irish than it would be to move the beavers. Europe is much more advanced. There’s been a huge degree of liberal thinking and action there, again for possibly about thirty years. One of the best parts of Europe to visit if you want to look at initial rewilding is the Netherlands. There have been large projects like the Oostvaardersplassen above Amsterdam where they’ve taken six thousand hectares of what was going to be industrial land reclaimed from the bed of the North Sea and allowed wild herds of large herbivores to live there and regulate themselves. This allowed the plant landscapes to develop and drew much other wildlife to it. Now all the way through Europe you see different projects of different sorts, with different species and habitats forming, and it is incredibly encouraging. When you look at responses to wolf reintroduction — for example in places like Yellowstone and Colorado in the United States — and then compare it with the Netherlands, which people imagine as windmills and tulips, the wolves are right the way through that landscape now. They are in people’s back gardens eating pygmy goats. People encounter them on walks while Nordic walking or walking their dogs. In the main everybody regards their presence quite rationally. A few weeks ago a wolf attacked and bit a child and it was shot, but nobody is jumping up and down about it or making a huge fuss that the wolf is back. If you look at that over time, we do evolve as a species in our relationship with nature. If wolves had returned to the Netherlands fifty years ago the main response would have been to kill them all. Now the vast majority of people are prepared to tolerate them. Alpha: Do you want to say a bit about your efforts to reintroduce the beaver — where you introduce them and what you had to fight through?
Derek: My efforts to reintroduce the beaver… well, now we’re reintroducing them into habitats that are suitable. In the last few weeks the first licenses have come through to put more beavers out in England, and to reach the point where we had that official permission has taken nearly a quarter of a century. When the beavers first came, I imported them for areas where landowners were putting up large fences and keeping them in enclosed areas. But sooner or later beavers — which are basically made by God with bolt cutters on their faces — got through the fences and out into the surrounding wetlands and simply started living there. So there have been illegal colonies of beavers living free in England without licenses for maybe twenty years or more. My role was importing these animals and giving them to people. Nobody broke the law initially; some of the beavers simply escaped. Now we hold beavers for projects that are going to release them into wetlands. We have big buildings on the farm designed for this. Beaver families come here and stay for a couple of weeks where we feed and look after them before they move on to their final destination. It’s like a beaver hotel. Initially there was a lot of advocacy — film work, media, talking to organizations about beavers. I don’t do much of that anymore. I think no human being can do that for their entire life and remain balanced. You have to move on to other interests. My interests now are restoring other species that depend on beavers, such as water voles, or species that benefit from beaver wetlands like white storks. Because not many people are working on those creatures, that’s where I focus now. The whole thing has changed greatly from being a lonely guerrilla war to something where many organizations and individuals are involved with restoring beavers. I have beavers living free on my farm, and in the summer evenings my greatest pleasure is to get a bottle of cider, sit outside with binoculars, and watch them doing whatever they’re doing and watch all the other life that revolves around them. I don’t want to fill in any more forms on their behalf or fight any more political battles. Those days are done. Alpha: Thank you so much for getting the whole movement going. Do you want to say a bit about the white storks and what you’re doing with them? Derek: When the beaver disappeared and we destroyed the wetlands, we also destroyed everything that lived in them — fish, waterfowl, cranes, white storks, black storks, bitterns, everything. White storks were once recorded nesting in Britain in the 1400s and again after the Second World War. From the time of the ancient Greeks and Aesop they were seen as symbols of joy, recovery, hope, and rebirth. But in Britain when they sat on the roofs of people’s houses we simply thought: there’s lunch. So we killed them. As the species recovered in Europe they sometimes passed over Britain, but they would not breed here because birds have to be born somewhere to think of it as home. If no young storks are born in Britain, none will return here to nest. So our project began with a feasibility study in 2017. With funding from Knepp Estate we imported orphaned storks from a wildlife hospital in Warsaw Zoo. Some could fly and some could not. The ones that could fly eventually left, but over time birds in the enclosures and the free-flying birds started breeding. They built nests high in oak trees around Knepp. Last year there were around forty-seven nests and the numbers grow every year. The aim is to restore the stork as a breeding bird in Britain. Britain is a very conservative country, and some conservationists argue there are not enough historical records to prove they belong here. You can spend years arguing with people about that. But when ordinary people see these great birds spiraling into the sky or landing on their chimneys, they realize how spectacular nature can be. In a time when Britain is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, we need symbols of hope. The white stork has become one of those symbols. Alpha: So nature itself can regenerate quite fast if we get it started again? Derek: Nature can regenerate if we help it. We’re very good at cultivating animals we want to eat — billions of chickens, millions of cattle. But if we decide to help other creatures as well, there can be a different future for us as a species. We don’t have to be the plague we’ve become; we can be something benevolent. Around the world there are remarkable people who devote their lives to the creatures they love. Governments rarely save species. Often governments initially support industries destroying them. But small groups of committed people can change everything. When North American bison were reduced to fewer than a thousand animals, a handful of people protected small herds. Those herds became the foundation for the hundreds of thousands of bison that exist today.
Alpha: On your farm you’ve turned it into a sanctuary for wildlife. Can you say a bit about that? Derek: I originally accumulated about four hundred acres of land near Dartmoor. I used to farm here. Now there are a few cows, but they are here as lawnmowers and to provide dung and hair for insects and birds. They are not here for meat or milk. The grasses and herbs grow tall like hayfields. Voles live beneath them, insects burrow into the roots, dung beetles roll the manure into balls and take it underground. We have opened perhaps a hundred ponds. The beavers create more wetlands every year. Birds like skylarks that once were absent are now breeding here. Soon white storks will fly here and build nests on the farm buildings. We’ve reintroduced wild geese, water voles, water frogs, and many other species. Tomorrow we’re even moving ants to restore anthills that were plowed away decades ago. We’re not saving the planet, but we are creating a place where people can see what is possible and be inspired. Alpha: Do you have any advice for people who want to get into rewilding? Derek: My advice is simple — bloody do it. This is not a rehearsal. It’s easy to sit in an armchair and assume someone else will take responsibility. If something truly matters to you, look at what you can do and do it. If you wait too long, age will catch up and the opportunity will pass. Do it quickly and enjoy the rewards and the fun and satisfaction that come from helping life prosper. You're currently a free subscriber to Climate Water Project. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
© 2026 Alpha Lo
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