nineveh_uk

Adorable Pallas's cat and kittens webcam. Look at their grumpy little faces.

About a year ago, my dad got a birdsong ID app for his phone. My parents are casual birdwatchers, in that they belong to a U3A group, look at birds when they go down to the shore, and belong to the RSPB whose reserves they occasionally visit. They are absolutely not the kind of birdwatchers who keep lists or can identify anything by its song/call.

Nor am I, so when I finally got a new phone that had room for it, I downloaded the free Merlin app (insert "other bird apps are available"), and I love it. No longer do I walk round the square or the park wondering what is twittering out of sight in the hedgerows, my phone can tell me. Admittedly 80% of the twittering seems to be robins and blackbirds, both of which are ubiquitous and noisy, as well as having a range of song so that you think "Surely that isn't a robin as well?" and are wrong, but the other 20% are more interesting. That is a flock of goldfinches regularly hanging out in the tree at the back even though I almost never see them. I would not have noticed the greenfinches in the silver birch had I not known they were there, but when I did, I stopped to look and there they were. Great tits are surprisingly loud, and I don't think I'd ever noticed a chiffchaff before learning they liked a row of willows in the park. Like all ID apps, it can't be relied on 100%, but reviews suggest it is good for common birds in their usual range and that's what you get in suburban southern England. As I'm not yet able to invest the energy on longer walks, or short ones further afield, it's bringing a very enjoyable new dimension to the routine.

In 2000, no beavers were officially known to be living wild in the UK. Note the "known to be" part, because in 2001, one was reported on the Tay, probably an escapee from a collection, and over the next decade, more and more beavers turned up in the Tay and its environs, and in 2020 they went public and there were estimated to be 50-100, which is quite a lot for an animal that had been extinct in Scotland for 400 years. Cue predictable government agency plans to trap and remove the 'unlicensed' beavers to zoos, objections from wildlife groups, and eventually after a great deal of wrangling the Tay beavers got to stay. Their presence also benefited a trial release population in Knapdale, who might have been doomed to trial status forever, but obviously became a lot harder to claim could not be officially released into the wild when they were doing just fine in larger numbers elsewhere. Scotland is now estimated to have about 950 beavers, both wild and in continuing trials.

Meanwhile in England, a very similar story happened on a smaller scale when a beaver family was found living wild in Devon on the River Otter in 2014, beavers having been extinct in England for about 500 years. Government planned to trap them, eventually forced into a 'trial', beavers eventually acknowledged as healthy native species living in their natural environment and not causing a problem, get to stay. Meanwhile other small-scale trials of releasing beavers in enclosures in England and Scotland continued, with trials discussed for Wales*.

Meanwhile, the beavers got on with what beavers do, which turns out to be not building enormous dams and felling swathes of Forestry Commission trees, but building substantial populations without official notice or assistance. This time they turned up on the River Avon and tributaries around Bristol and Bath. Video evidence was obtain in 2021, and this time beavers were already a protected species again so there was no question of capture. Investigation followed and earlier this year it turned out there are around fifty of them.

Then a couple of weeks ago one turned up in someone's garden in Pembrokeshire. Theories inevitably default to an unofficial release, but personally I'd be checking if there weren't a population of 30+ living happily in the next valley.



Now if we could just do something about the continuing decline of the Scottish wildcat...

*Beavers don't appear to be native to Ireland, but some people consider there is an argument for introduction.

Scotland now has about a thousand wild beavers! Adults weigh 20+kg, which is the point at which I find a suitcase tips from heavy to really, really heavy, so they are quite substantial animals. I don't think I'll be seeing one any time soon, but hopefully at some point they will become a reasonable day trip when I'm in Edinburgh.

There aren't yet so many in England and Wales, where reintroductions started later (plus some just 'turned up'), but they are doing well, with a number of releases and wild colonies in southern England, and a trial project in Wales. Oddly, beavers never seem to have made it to Ireland. Anyway, keep at it, chunky native rodents!