The beaver: An ecological superstar we should bring to this country

In other words, they do an amazing job of making ecosystems far more resilient, and all such factors will become ever more important as climate breakdown worsens. They even help prevent climate breakdown, due to the fact that the wetlands they create, full of silt and native vegetation, absorb enormous quantities of carbon from the atmosphere.

To Beaver Conditions Suite A Species Native Extremely Can Beavers Thrive A Dynamic Create Of Dam: Help For The Vast

But beyond the environmental benefits beavers bring, they’re also simply gorgeous creatures, and their presence invariably provides a fantastic boost to local economies by attracting increased numbers of tourists and other visitors. People love to see them working on their dams, busily swimming about or gnawing on nearby trees, or going about their business in other ways. 

The rich, watery ecosystems they help create, full of a great diversity and abundance of life, are just so much more stimulating than what you might otherwise find without them. Beavers live in the lodges they make together with dams out of tree branches, rocks, mud and other matter, with access solely through underwater entrances to protect against predators. 

They are monogamous creatures (meaning that they only have one partner), but family groups can consist of 10 or more individuals, requiring several lodges. Family relationships are close, and involve a lot of play, often making the observation of beavers a pure delight. 

This is even truer of their young, which are called kits and only begin to venture outside a month or two after birth. They communicate with each other using a vocabulary of grunts, whines, squeaks, mews and other noises.

WHAT IS...

Sustainability

A broad definition of sustainability is: being able to meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.

Environmental sustainability is a key component, but there are economic, and social aspects also.

In business, sustainability is often spoken about in terms of its ESG (environmental, social, and governance) components, and is often linked to concepts around equality, diversity, and inclusion.

The UN created 17 sustainable development goals to “achieve a better and more sustainable future for all”.

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The animal has already been returned to many parts of Britain after 400 years of extinction there, and many people who feel deeply worried about the desperate — and rapidly worsening — state of Irish nature have watched the process unfold with great envy. 

Though there has been some kick-back from landowners and authorities in Britain, and controversial culling has taken place, beavers are beginning to transform many of the river habitats of our neighbouring island, just as they evolved to do, and have been doing in continental Europe from time immemorial.

But there has been virtually no consideration of the introduction of beavers into Ireland. Why not? 

Well to begin with, a major impediment is the fact that they’re not generally considered a native species here. Their natural distribution includes almost the entire northern hemisphere, but not, as far as we yet know, Holocene Ireland. (Worth bearing in mind here, though, is the old adage that 'absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence'.) 

How we define a native Irish species is, at present, terribly simplistic: if something was here after the last Ice Age ended, or else made it unassisted by people afterwards, then it’s considered native. If none of that applies, then it’s not. (Though all this is often relaxed where introductions by humans took place a very long time ago.) 

This interpretation of Ireland’s biogeography (the natural distribution of species) is far too narrow and needs revisiting. Why so?

Because it completely ignores the uncontested fact that humans — our ancestors — were driving species into extinction and causing other forms of ecological devastation on a massive scale for tens, even hundreds, of thousands of years before species were able to begin migrating north from their Ice Age refuges in southern Europe into what is now Ireland. This island’s extremely restricted assemblage of species in the Holocene cannot be considered in isolation, as if none of that ever happened, or was somehow irrelevant.

Across the globe, biodiversity and ecological health are collapsing at a rapid and accelerating speed. But it may surprise many readers to learn that Ireland is one of the very worst-off counties in the world in that regard. In international comparison tables, we consistently rank very close to the bottom, coming, for example, thirteenth from last out of 240 nations in a Biodiversity Intactness Index carried out by the British Natural History Museum. 

A terrible 63% of our remaining bird species are of either high or medium conservation concern, while 90% of protected habitats are in bad — and worsening — condition. The collapse of Irish nature should cause all of us deep concern and, indeed, shame.

But here’s the thing: it can be turned around, if we act quickly and decisively. As I have seen in my own place on the Beara Peninsula, nature can come flooding back if we just let it by removing some of the artificial obstacles we place in its way, like unnaturally high densities of grazing animals, whether livestock or wild. 

But I strongly believe that to truly allow our trashed ecosystems to reach their full and natural potential and give them the best chance of remaining resilient in the face of climate breakdown and other looming threats, we need to be far more imaginative, and start considering what species might have been here without the human impacts of not just the last few centuries, but many thousands of years. 

In that way, we might embrace the beaver as a native Irish animal that very likely should have been here, but our distant ancestors somehow prevented from returning.

• An Irish Atlantic Rainforest, Eoghan Daltun's book about his experiences rewilding a West Cork farm, is available at bookshops and online.