BRITAIN'S anglers have stepped up their campaign against controversial proposals to return beavers to Scotland, amid growing fears that the initiative could severely damage fish stocks and threaten a leisure industry worth £100 million a year to the Scottish economy.
Seventeen beavers, captured in Norway, are due to be released in Knapdale Forest in Argyll later this summer in a trial project spearheaded by the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland and the Scottish Wildlife Trust.
The leaders of the Scottish b
eaver trial project have insisted that a wealth of research, experience and knowledge gathered over the past 50 years suggests the introduction of the mammals will not have a detrimental impact on salmon stocks or their migration.
But the Salmon and Trout Association (STA), Britain's leading gamefish conservation body, yesterday said that a recent survey on the "catastrophic" impact of beavers on Atlantic salmon stocks in rivers in eastern Canada served to highlight the potential threat posed by the Scottish beaver experiment.
The report by the Atlantic Salmon Federation, North America's main salmon conservation organisation, concludes that, unless beavers are removed or culled on an ongoing basis, the result will be "the demise of salmon runs" in at least three rivers and will put salmon runs in jeopardy in a further seven.
Paul Knight, the executive director of the STA, said: "This report is unequivocal in its conclusions and it should be required reading for those who have granted the Knapdale beaver licence."
He added: "While the American beaver is a different species to its European cousin, both species share a propensity for dam-building whenever the available habitat is not to their liking. Beaver dams are, of course, the problem, and on either side of the Atlantic they can amount to insurmountable obstacles to migrating salmon, sea trout and brown trout, particularly when, as is normally the case, there is little depth of water below the dam.
"Surely this must cause alarm bells to ring within Scottish Government. It is vital that proper scientific research is now commissioned into the likely impact of burgeoning beaver numbers on migratory fish populations in Scotland and, indeed, the rest of Britain. Furthermore, there needs to be absolute clarity on what will happen to the Knapdale beavers once the trial period is concluded."
Nick Yonge, the director of the Tweed Foundation, said: "The report underlines how stupid it would be to introduce beavers. Introducing animals that make major changes to our countryside is only acceptable where those changes can be contained effectively to specific areas.
"The evidence from countries where beavers have been introduced is that they cannot be contained and that they would cause harm to our native fish stocks by building dams."
The organisers of the Scottish Beaver Trial insist that there are no migratory fish in the trial site and that there are no plans to reintroduce beavers in other sites in Scotland.
