"Nothing has changed, except the thing that changes everything". Adam Nicholson, The Sea Room
I love that quote. He is talking about the wild geese on the Shiant Islands off the west coast of Scotland and how their seasonal presence, or absence, transforms the whole character and atmosphere of the place. The quote was in my mind a few weeks back when I was in the hills beyond Dunkeld. My walk took me out passed Mill Dam, a pretty, tree-fringed loch that I must have visited a hundred times. But this time one thing had changed and that thing changed everything else.
I was en route to a favourite wild camp spot which occupies a lonely place far beyond Mill Dam and the popular trails around Dunkeld. It's a long walk and on this occasion it was an arduous walk with a surface that varied between bog, water, hard snow, melting snow and ice. Also thrown in were some wind-felled trees that needed to be negotiated and a mid winter day that barely seemed to get light.
I was happy to reach my spot in the last of the light and throw up the tent. It's a perfect place with a patch of flat grass nestled among a small cluster of larch trees. The landscape all around was snow-streaked and monochrome, and the frozen loch below my tent glowed ghostly pale in the fading light. When you are camping beside frozen lochs you often hear the creak and groan of the ice as the wind shifts it around but tonight there was barely a breeze and all was quiet.
Lying in the tent, my mind drifted back to Mill Dam. With no wind it had been flat calm with a thin crust of ice further out. Autumn's colours had faded but there was still a purple haze of bare, winter birch trees and splashes of green in the rampant mosses and lichens. The woods climbed above the loch, cloaking the slopes of Deuchary Hill whose top disappeared into the low cloud. I sat on the usual bench on the shore and admired this usual scene.
But then my eye was drawn to a number of felled birch trees lying half in the water, stripped of bark and with teeth marks down the length of the trunk. Then just beside my bench a small tree had gnawing marks a foot up its trunk. As I looked around I saw these signs everywhere. I felt a rising sense of excitement but also couldn't quite believe what I was seeing. This was the work of beavers! At that moment, their presence after hundreds of years of absence immediately changed the atmosphere of this place to something wilder, something more primal.
Beavers are native to Scotland but were hunted to extinction in the 16th century. In 2009, a trial reintroduction took place in Knapdale on the west coast. Around about the same time, beavers appeared on the River Tay on the east coast from an unofficial reintroduction. These Tay beavers are now obviously spreading and if they are in Mill Dam, they must have come up the Tay to Dunkeld and accessed the loch by a tributary.
It's wonderful news because beavers really do change everything. They are known as nature's engineers. The dams that they build create new wetlands, increasing biodiversity by providing habitats for all sorts of insects, amphibians and fish which in turn support the birds and mammals that feed on them such as otters. These new wetlands also act as a natural filtration system, store water and mitigate downriver flooding because they slow the flow of water. As well as these practical benefits, beavers hark us back to a time when Scotland's wildlife was much more rich than today and their reintroduction is an important step in returning our nature to a more healthy state.
As they are nocturnal, I didn't actually see any beavers that day or the next day when I passed by Mill Dam again. But that didn't matter. It was enough just knowing they were out there, changing everything around them.