“Beaver bombing”, covertly releasing beavers into the countryside, is increasing in England because successive governments have not fulfilled promises to permit some planned wild releases, conservationists are warning.
Beavers now live freely on river systems across swaths of southern England, and conservationists are calling on Labour to allow official releases of free-living beavers and produce a national strategy to maximise the biodiversity and flood alleviation benefits delivered by the industrious mammals.
Eva Bishop, of the Beaver Trust, said: “Beavers are a native species with lots to offer in terms of landscape resilience, boosting biodiversity and climate change adaptation and mitigation. It would be crazy not to look at wild release as a key tool for the government.”
I was at a long-term beaver reintroduction site earlier this year. It is official, well managed and has been going for a couple of decades or more now. This topic came up and I got the impression that they had a pretty good idea who had released some unofficially at at least one other spot in the area.
Although well managed, the fences at this site - as any other - do get damaged from time to time and there are ‘escapes’. But there are a good number of people who have been involved in the project over the years and a lot of them have very different views to the government on how releases should be handled. I think that some of the accidental ‘escapes’ had assistance - and transport.