Nature's Architect: The Beaver's Return to Our Wild Landscapes

Praise for Jim Crumley’s previous nature books

Shortlisted for a Saltire Society Literary Award, 2014

for The Eagle’s Way

Crumley conveys the wonder of the natural world at its wildest…with honesty and passion and, yes, poetry.

Susan Mansfield,

Scottish Review of Books

Scotland’s pre-eminent nature writer.

Jim Perrin

Jim Crumley soars with eagles and we watch with our mouths open, not just because the presence of the eagle fills us with awe but the virtuoso writing does, too.

Paul Evans

, BBC Countryfile Magazine

Crumley’s distinctive voice carries you with him on his dawn forays and sunset vigils.

John Lister-Kaye,

Herald

The best nature writer working in Britain today.

David Craig

, Los Angeles Times

Enthralling and often strident. Observer

Compulsively descriptive and infectious in its enthusiasm. Scotland on Sunday

Glowing and compelling. Countryman

Every well-chosen word is destined to find its way into our hearts and into our minds and into our imaginations.

Ian Smith,

The Scots Magazine

Well-written… elegant. Crumley speaks revealingly of ‘theatre-in-the-wild’. Times Literary Supplement

Also by Jim Crumley

Nature writing

The Eagle’s Way

Encounters in the Wild: Barn Owl

Encounters in the Wild: Fox

The Great Wood

The Last Wolf

The Winter Whale

Brother Nature

Something Out There

A High and Lonely Place

The Company of Swans

Gulfs of Blue Air (A Highland Journey)

The Heart of the Cairngorms

The Heart of Mull

The Heart of Skye

Among Mountains

Among Islands

Badgers on the Highland Edge

Waters of the Wild Swan

The Pentland Hills

Shetland – Land of the Ocean

Glencoe – Monarch of Glens

West Highland Landscape

St Kilda

Fiction

The Mountain of Light

The Goalie

Memoir

The Road and the Miles

Urban landscape

Portraits of Edinburgh

The Royal Mile

Nature’s Architect

The beaver’s return to

our wild landscapes

JIM CRUMLEY

Contents

Praise for Jim Crumley’s previous nature books

Also by Jim Crumley

Nature’s Architect

Liquid Architecture

Footprints on a Riverbank

The River Diaries: i

The Bute Experiment

Castor fiber: An Unnatural History

The River Diaries: ii

Beaver and Swan

Aigas: Floating Islands and Why Beavers Climb Trees

The River Diaries: iii

Bamff: Footprints in the Snow

New Hampshire: The swampwalker

The River Diaries: iv

Return to Lochan Buidhe

Let Wildlife Manage Wildlife

Acknowledgements

Plates

About the Author

Copyright

To the beaver pioneers

John Lister-Kaye

and Paul Ramsay

and to

Don MacCaskill

for daring to dream

If no exaggerations had ever appeared in connection with the beaver, except those referring to its performances in felling trees, the stock of these alone would have been sufficient to damage the reputation of Natural History writers.

– Horace T. Martin, Castorologia

(W. Drysdale, Montreal, 1892)

Chapter 1

Liquid Architecture

The mother art is architecture.

– Frank Lloyd Wright

Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.

– Frank Lloyd Wright

The beaver was the original inventor of reinforced concrete. He has used it for a million years, in the form of mud mixed with sticks and stones…

– Ernest Thompson Seton

Liquid architecture. It’s like jazz – you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something…

– Frank Gehry

IT OCCURS TO ME from time to time that there are three things I might have become: a nature writer, a jazz guitarist, or an architect. Of these three, nature writing has been my day job (and often my night job too) for nearer thirty years than twenty now; my jazz guitar playing is something of a well-kept secret, a handful of gigs a year where the first criterion to satisfy is that the audience outnumbers the band; and I have more chance of walking on water or flying unaided somewhere over the rainbow than becoming an architect because (a) I can’t draw, and (b) having to think in three dimensions is usually at least one too many for me and sometimes two. Then I discovered beavers, for which architecture, inspired improvisation, and reworking nature into dazzling essays, are simply the stuff of life itself. In other words, all three of my preferred lifestyle alternatives co-exist within any one member of the beaver tribe in more or less equal parts. Working with nature can be a humbling experience for a mere mortal.

I love that phrase of Frank Gehry’s – liquid architecture. It might have been invented for a book about beavers. Beavers build landscapes from scratch and from water that flows and timber that grows in the wrong place. All life is improvised liquid architecture, to which end water must be taught not to flow and timber not to grow, at least not there, but rather where the one can be purposefully redirected and the other artfully felled, reposed and metamorphosed into dam, lodge, bridge, larder, fridge; and water must not flow there but rather use this new canal, these new plunge pools, those channels one-beaver-wide for fast returns to deep water from the woods whenever danger manifests itself.

Frank Gehry is a bit of a hero of mine. Some of his buildings haunt me. In a good way. I admire original voices in all artforms, people who have studied the tradition of their art but then they take it to places it has never been before. Frank Gehry’s architecture does that to the extent that some of his buildings look impossible to me. Yet still their landscapes adopt them, claim them, embrace them, so that soon you cannot imagine those landscapes without those buildings.

I read a newspaper article about his Fondation Louis Vuitton art museum in Paris that opened in October 2014. The article quotes the architect about the building’s design:

You have to keep that sketch quality. Anything overtly finished is static to me. It’s not living… We made the building ephemeral like a big sculpture. It’s floating and changing. It looks like it’s growing. No matter what you do with a normal building, it’s a static building. This one isn’t.

The author of the article, Jay Merrick of The Independent, observed:

Each structural element of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, and every piece of glass, is a one-off… Frank Gehry has produced a building that comes together as if it’s also just about to fall apart…

And then I asked myself an interesting question: Do you suppose Frank Gehry ever watched beavers?

***

The top of the bank is thirty feet above the river. The bank is well wooded with oak, sycamore, willow, ash, birch, but especially oak. The densely mixed understorey is much corrupted by copious stands of Japanese knotweed, except that here and there it looks as if it has been trampled underfoot by a passing posse of buffalo, but this being Perthshire and the edge of the Highlands of Scotland, there has to be another explanation. There is.

There is a clue fifty yards away on the opposite bank. It is a long, low barrier of apparently randomly collected sticks, but with a flattish top and regularly sloping sides; imagine that someone had scraped the top off a bar of Toblerone. It seals off a narrow pool of still water from the mainstream. And the downstream end of the barrier is bedecked with a giant bouquet of knotweed leaves and a handful of late purplish-pink blooms. It is late October and the leaves are yellow and pale green and almost orange. They catch the sun and the breeze and my eye, and they make a fine show. But there is no knotweed growing on the far shore. That exuberant bouquet has been gathered from over here, carted down the bank (too steep and sodden and fankled by standing and leaning and fallen trees to be comfortably negotiated by me, but then I don’t have four legs and a low centre of gravity), and ferried across the river through the boisterous, throaty, midstream current, which begins to gather momentum here for a series of rapids through a right-angle bend 200 yards away. It takes a seriously accomplished swimmer to cross that current, not to mention that such a swimmer must have had its hands and arms and possibly its mouth full of knotweed stems and abundant foliage at the time.

The dam-building, knotweed-toting swimmer has also been busy on this side of the river. The view of the bottom of the bank from the top looks like – well, it is – a building site. What you see amid such quantities of chaotically strewn raw building materials is a Gehry-esque sketch from which you may or may not get the gist of what he has seen in his head, but from which architecture will flow nevertheless. Liquid architecture. It’s like jazz, you know.

The riverbank has newly acquired a small bay, perhaps twenty yards across at the mouth and tapering to half that towards the foot of the steep bank. There had been land there, but it has been wantonly drowned. A single orangey, bluntly pointed face stares up at me from this new water, the surfacing head of a river serpent whose long, skinny body is still submerged. Closer inspection reveals that the head is the lower end of a felled tree trunk, and its face was chiselled by a beaver, every square inch of the surface not just denuded of bark but also decorated by roughly oblong bite marks, all of it effected in the process of the felling. The rest of the tree is clearly visible underwater. It has been manoeuvred from where it was felled on the original bank, and deposited in the new bay where it awaits its new purpose, always assuming the beavers remember it’s there. Beavers don’t always remember such things.

The riverbank has also acquired a canal that runs parallel to the river, rather like a mill lade. The beavers made this by opening up a weakness in the bank’s defences fifty yards upstream, and it is this canal that supplies water for the new bay. A stretch of the original bank still divides canal from river, but it has become a long, thin island with trees, though not as many trees as it used to have. What the beavers are doing now is extending the downstream end of that island with the beginnings of a dam. Several tall, slim trees stripped of twigs and vegetation and quite a lot of bark sprawl across the outer reaches of the bay. The canal water’s natural tendency to flow through the bay and rejoin the mainstream is slowly being stifled. There is now a gap only a couple of yards wide and it is slowly being closed from both sides. Soon there will be a horseshoe-shaped dam between the land and the end of that outer bank; soon the water will have nowhere to go but the new bay, which will simply deepen and spread and become a bigger pool; soon the landscape will transform and the beaver will have a new sanctuary and its buildings will look impossible to me, yet this landscape will adopt them, claim them, until I cannot imagine the landscape without them. And yes, they are producing a building that comes together as if it’s also just about to come apart.

All that assumes that beavers will finish what they have started building. Beavers don’t always finish such things. But if they do, and for as long as they work on it, what they are building is liquid architecture.

You have to keep that sketch quality, you see, because anything overtly finished is static. It’s not living. And this beaver architecture lives. It is ephemeral like a sculpture. It’s floating and changing. It looks like it’s growing. No, it is growing. Every day it grows. Every day it hosts a changing exhibition of improvised wood sculpture. Take that sea serpent head: tomorrow it may have drowned or been forgotten completely, or its parent tree may have been rendered down into bite-size chunks and transported to the new lodge, or across the river to that whatever-it-is that waves its knotweed banner at me. The banner will be gone tomorrow, of course, because the beavers will have eaten it or stashed it in their larder. That’s what it’s for.

***

Nature’s architect, then, is back in my native landscape. A Scottish Government-sponsored trial reintroduction of Norwegian beavers under strictly controlled conditions has been carried out in Argyll by the unwieldy coalition of the Scottish Wildlife Trust (SWT) and the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS, but also more popularly known as Edinburgh Zoo), the Forestry Commision which owns the land, and all of it monitored by the Scottish Government advisors at Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH). That coalition has already consumed six years and a widely reported £2million. The beaver reintroduction project has, however, been supplemented (not to say discomfited) by an accidental population in Perthshire and Angus, the catchment area of the Tay, which just happens to be the biggest catchment area of any British river, a network of waterways, lochs, lochans, woodlands and bogs that looks as if it might have been designed specifically to facilitate the dissemination of beavers and beaver architecture over the widest possible area in the shortest possible time. And lo, it has come to pass. As I write this, the official trial in Argyll has been completed for a year, and a report on its findings has been presented to the Scottish Government, whose ministers will have the final say.

As for the Tayside population, it flourishes, it travels far and wide in strictly uncontrolled conditions, building and relandscaping as it breaks new ground untrodden by beavers for the better part of 400 years. SNH staff have referred to them as the illegal beavers and (wait for it) the wrong kind of beavers, apparently because the original accidental escapees may have been sourced in Germany rather than Norway. They are, nevertheless, the prolifically successful fruits of a handful of escapees from a captive colony perhaps a decade or more ago, and quite possibly augmented by the kind of qualm-free individuals on the outer reaches of the conservation movement who have trouble keeping in check their frustrations at the plodding gait of bureaucracy, and who know where to get what they are looking for. That’s the illegal part, but nature doesn’t give a damn. Nature is doing the legal beaver coalition’s job for it, and essentially fulfilling the ambitions of the official trial. Almost inevitably, there have been dark mutterings in high places about a cull, but given the farcical badger cull in south-west England that began in 2013 and its attendant public relations disaster for the Westminster Government, I cherish the hope that Scotland will rise to the occasion, accept that the Tayside population has been a happy accident, and enshrine in law the freedom of all Scotland’s beavers and their right to roam where they will, and to practise liquid architecture.

And speaking of architecture, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, arguably Scotland’s most innovative and original architect, gave a paper to the Glasgow Architectural Association in 1891. Its subject was Scottish Baronial Architecture but I have appropriated its message to do my bidding:

This is a subject dear to my heart and entwined among my inmost thoughts and affections… the architecture of our own country, just as much Scotch as we are ourselves, as indigenous to our country as our wild flowers… From some recent buildings which have been erected it is evident that the style is coming back to life again, and I only hope that it will not be strangled in its infancy by indiscriminate and unsympathetic people…

And then I asked myself another interesting question: Do you suppose Charles Rennie Mackintosh ever watched beavers?

Chapter 2

Footprints on a Riverbank

THE TELEPHONE RANG at an oddly early hour of the day. I answered through a mouthful of porridge, honey and banana, which is good for me but not for telephone communication. A furtive male voice as odd as the hour said:

It’s about the beavers.

What beavers? I asked.

"The beavers in The Courier…"

***

I have a column every Tuesday in The Courier, the Dundee-based morning newspaper that serves east central Scotland, and the newspaper that started me off on a lifetime of working with words in one way or another at the age of sixteen. The morning of the telephone call was a Tuesday. My column that day was about beavers. The caller had been up very early to have read his Courier by breakfast time, but by now I had learned that beaver nuts are accustomed to keeping unorthodox hours, because they keep beaver hours.

Before my column appeared there had been news stories about an unknown number of beavers that had mysteriously turned up on the pond of a trout hatchery in Perthshire. One of the theories – the most plausible of many – was that they had escaped from a wildlife park. A few days before the phone call, the Scottish Government advisors, SNH, had issued a confident statement to the effect that all but one of the beavers had