Eager for beavers: the case for their reintroduction

Conservationists are frequently criticised for focusing on glamorous species at the expense of others equally important but unluckily uglier — pandas rather than pangolins, birds rather than bats, and monkeys rather than mole-rats. Europe’s frankly lumpy largest rodent, the European beaver, Castor fiber, is therefore fortunate to have found an ardent advocate in Derek Gow.

Beavers have always attracted attention, generally of the wrong kind. Not only do they have lustrous pelts, and flesh edible even in times of fasting (because conveniently classified as ‘fish’) but castoreum, exuded from sacs near their anal glands, which they use to scent mark territory, was thought to have medico-mystical properties. Medieval apiarists believed it made bees more productive, it was the original castor in castor oil (it can contain salicylic acid, aspirin’s main ingredient), and it is still used to add ‘leather’ notes to perfumes.

In Britain’s relatively small riparian spaces, the beaver seems to have become rare in England as early as Anglo-Saxon times. But Beverley in Yorkshire derives from ‘beaver-clearing’ (named c. 710), and other poignant place names attest to old presence, like the ghost pains felt by amputees — although beaver is also a verb, associated with fermenting woad. The animals feature in the legend of St Felix of Burgundy, rescued from drowning by beavers in Norfolk.

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They have also made it to blazons, like Newark-on-Trent’s arms, granted in 1561 — although it is unlikely Elizabethans saw them, unless fur-trapping in opening-up New England, whence pelts were sent back by shiploads, to the disgust of moralists. William Harrison’s 1577 Description of England, however, contains a realistic account of handling beavers, and Gow has unearthed a 1789 Yorkshire church warden’s account of twopence being paid for a ‘bever head’.