It begins with driving through the remnants of the old pine plantation. Rows on rows of tall dry trees, neatly spaced, of uniform height, springy beds of brown needles lying between them, and very little else. There is an eerie beauty to it, despite feeling that I shouldn’t admit it to myself, knowing how little can live here. The darkness, the smell of the resin, the deep red-brown and green.
Annie leads us to Moor Barton’s event space where the pines meet the edge of the rewilding land, and we settle around a couple of picnic benches as she explains their belief that humans are a keystone species, unavoidably transforming their environment, and that it is our responsibility to ensure we are playing this role with as much wisdom as possible. Here, they work to create a diverse mosaic of habitats using techniques such as planting broadleaf native trees, grazing cattle and ponies cyclically, maintaining rides and clearings, coppicing and hedge laying, and the carefully considered reintroduction of certain locally extinct native species, most notably the European beaver.
Twin to this belief is the conviction that people cannot and should not live apart from nature. Fruit and nut trees are planted among the broadleafs to increase the edible yield of the land, ancient land-based skills are valued and utilised, and volunteers and visitors are welcomed with open arms.
There is joy and grief both in me as I hear this. So often we talk about ourselves as a blight on nature, an outside force capable of nothing but harm, and it’s a relief to hear that I might be valued, however metaphorically, by the rest of the living world. But I’m also aware that a beaver doesn’t have to think so carefully about how it impacts its environment. A beaver does what a beaver does, and that’s all it needs to and knows how to do, and there is no inner battle, no great debate, no choice to make. There’s a feeling of injustice to it, pointless and directionless. Anyway.
After walking through a forest of native broadleafs, rowans and oaks and hazels, with the conifers looming in the middle distance, we arrive at the metal gate of the beaver enclosure. We shuffle in one by one, and Annie takes us into the unfamiliar jungle.
There’s a building momentum to it. The first dam we come to is fairly small, about a foot high, mud and branches and leaf litter built into a fortress wall. The water held behind it is so clear. A couple of ducks float in the reeds in the centre of it, and damselflies dance about over the surface. The gentle sound of water is everywhere.
We wade on through the deep grass. The excitement heightens when we find the thick stub of a gnawed off branch, rodent tooth marks shaving it to a neat point. The mud is dark like coffee or chocolate, something delicious, and carpets of black tendrils of fungus coat the patches of bare soil. The smells of the drifts of water mint and rotting leaf litter are heady, life and death combined. The next dam is huge. The water extends on through the willows, which have been pitched sideways by the beaver’s business but grow on the same, sending up branches from their newly horizontal trunk. Their resilience is remarkable – trunks that look almost completely severed are shaded by clouds of green, healthy leaves. It is a thick, messy, complex, fascinating playground, and we clamber through the moss and sucking mud quite giddy with it.
There is always something magical if you stop to look for it. Demoiselles pose by a stream running from a dam wall that’s almost my height. There are dozens of froglets that scatter like grasshoppers as I walk. I decide to find a beaver-gnawed woodchip to take as a souvenir, and find one on a sideways willow trunk, nestled at the base of a branch; I pick it up and turn it over to find a huge spider, two pairs of legs stretched in front of it and two behind, asleep in a notch in the wood. I try and place the woodchip just as it was before on the trunk and stop looking for a souvenir.
Later, after we’ve eaten, just before dusk, we come back to the enclosure. This time we’re in silence, every rustle of a waterproof jacket fought against, any necessary speech mouthed to each other in the fading light. Simon places pairs of us against backdrops of vegetation facing the water, along the stretch of the dams. Carmen and I are at the first pond, the one with the ducks, a bank of bracken behind us, the water ahead, the jungle of willows above it, and the wall of conifers behind. We settle in as comfortable a position as possible on foam rectangles in the damp grass and begin the wait.
The world narrows in, expands out. Every sound is registered and inspected. It is far from silent – a gang of long-tailed tits crash into a rowan, chatting excitedly to each other, and zip off again. Robins begin their evening alarm calls – Simon told us earlier that he always thinks of them as letting the other birds know it’s time for bed, and I think of all the other beings beside us that must be listening to them now. A wren positions itself on top of a patch of brambles to our right and sings its strident song. A buzzard wheels over the conifers, behind them, then above again, and we watch it as long as we can, thinking of the goshawks that Annie told us nest in those tall trees.
A fair bit of my attention becomes focussed on changing sitting positions as slowly and quietly as possible. I put one knee up, then the other, then crouch on my feet, then extend both legs in front of me. As the rain comes and the evening begins to darken, I spend what must be about five minutes zipping up my jacket. We try and time any movement with the breeze, hoping to be masked by the sound of the moving trees.
We hear a splash to our left, where we’ve been told the beaver lodge probably is, their cosy waterside nest with doorways under the surface, accessible only to them. Carmen touches my shoulder. We freeze in place and look at the mess of reeds where the sound came from. We spend maybe twenty minutes like that. The rain stops. Nothing else comes from the reeds.
The wind picks up, and the rain is shaken from the trees and falls in heavy drops into the pond, and every time, the sound tricks me. I look at a corridor of water stretching away under a branch of willow and picture a dark, fuzzy head gliding towards us. I see something swimming – but it’s too small. A rat or a grass snake.
The evening darkens more, and the rain and wind come and go, and the birds become quiet, and the beavers do not come. I’m sure they’re out there, just beyond the ability of our eyes, waiting patiently for us to go, but it doesn’t feel like a disappointment. It feels like a glimpse into a fairytale.
I think again of their purpose, and of ours, and of the struggle to find it. I think of how it was people who robbed this land of beavers, and it is people who will bring them back. Maybe part of what defines us is our ability to change course, to reassess and redesign and rediscover, to learn so deeply from ourselves and from each other, to think of what has come before and wonder what might come next. It’s a burden and a privilege to have to continually remake your place in the world, but it is ours, undeniably.
✍ Wenna Trevenna, Summer of Nature Recovery 2024 trainee
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