How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [80]
For me, the problem with reintroducing beavers to Scotland, where they haven’t lived for 400 years, is that pretty soon the Highlands will be a broken and desolate place full of nothing but poisoned oxbow lakes, dead deer and grouse moors that look like the UAE’s empty quarter.
To understand the problem, we need to go back to the nineteenth century and the creation of Yellowstone, the world’s first national park. Obviously man knew best, so to make sure it was as diverse as possible, bears and wolves were not encouraged with quite the same fervour as various deery things. Which meant that pretty soon the whole place was awash with elk. Lovely. Unfortunately, elk absolutely love aspen trees, which meant that soon enough they were all gone. And that was a problem for Johnny beaver, because without the aspens he couldn’t dam the rivers and streams. So he moved out. And without the dams, the water meadows dried hard in the summer months, meaning there was no grass for the deery things to eat. So they started to move out as well.
Unwilling to accept they’d made a mess, the authorities blamed the migration on carnivores and started a cull of wolves and bears. Which meant their numbers started to fall, too. Until in the 1950s pretty much all any visitor could see on a trip to Yellowstone was about a million bored elk wondering if the fender from Wilbur and Myrtle’s Oldsmobile would keep them going till the aspen trees came back.
And then came the clincher. Unlike the Indians, who had regularly burnt the region, the whitey eco-ists had steadfastly waged war against all forest fires. This meant the ground was littered with tinder-dry fallen twigs and branches. So when the lightning struck in 1988 and the fire started, it burnt close to the ground rather than in the trees. This meant it burnt hot and could not be extinguished and the result of that was simple. The soil in the entire park – all 2m acres of it – was rendered sterile and useless.
That’s what will happen to Scotland. Oh, they may say the beavers will be monitored and they’ll be good for the tourist industry. But that’s what Dickie Attenborough said about Jurassic Park just before the T-rex ate his children.
I’m not suggesting that the beavers will eat people who go to see them, although if they are ramblers that would be no bad thing. But who’s to say the trees they chew don’t contain some unknown bacterium that stops sheep becoming man-eaters? Who’s to say the floods their dams create won’t swamp Glasgow? Who’s to say the Loch Ness Monster isn’t an ancient beaver experiment that got out of hand? Of course, the beaver enthusiasts will dismiss all this as nonsense and point to the red kites that were successfully reintroduced in the Chilterns a few years ago. Absolutely. I love to see these majestic birds soaring over the cut on the M40 as I drive to London. They lift my spirits. But did anyone notice the RSPB findings last week? The sudden and dramatic decline in the number of lapwings, wood warblers and fieldfares? Could this have anything to do with the sudden re-emergence of the airborne raptor? Then we have foxy woxy. Now that the hunt is not allowed to (legally) kill them, everyone’s chicken run is full of nothing but feathers and feet. Mine looks like a voodoo preacher’s wet dream. And that means we have to buy our eggs from the supermarket, which means we’ll all catch salmonella and die in great pain.
I have this advice for Scotland’s eco-ists. Don’t try to manage nature. Embrace it. Make it a part of you. Eat it. Forget the beavers, which, while cute and clever compared with, say, a rock or an apple, are expensive and mostly invisible. If it’s tourists you’re after, look at the giraffe. Children would love to see them on the glens, they won’t hurt Sir Botham’s salmon, they carry no unpleasant diseases, they are cheap and no one will steal their eggs.
Sunday 31 May 2009
Say cheese,