Beavers are back on the Tay after a gap of a few hundred years and very welcome they are too as far as I’m concerned. Although I’ve heard lots about them being around Aberfeldy I’ve yet to see any sign of them so I was glad to have the chance to go to Bamff estate near Alyth where there are beavers aplenty. Paul and Louise Ramsay brought European beavers onto the estate about ten years ago and have let them do their thing ever since. They now have two families of beavers thriving in two separate areas on the estate. We didn’t see beavers, they’re nocturnal and we were there in the middle of a very bright sunny day, but there was plenty of evidence that they were around. They’re impressively ambitious, gnawing at a huge old beech tree and making a dam 100 metres long and digging canals to swim down from the further reaches of their territory. All their activity has transformed a rather dull bit of woodland (part of which I helped plant 20 years ago) into an intricate, thriving wetland, a rare thing in our increasingly drained and tidied countryside. There’s been a fair bit of controversy about these beavers. The Tay beavers are not officially sanctioned, despite the official beaver reintroduction project currently running in Argyll. These easterners are all escapees, not from Bamff Paul and Louise were very quick to point out, despite much speculation to the contrary. I suspect most of the objection to them is that they’re rather untidy by our increasingly obsessive tidy standards and they did it in their own way with a bit of help from knowledgeable enthusiasts without the involvement of officialdom. Good luck to them I say.
