A Sad Sight

Today I walked down to the beaver dam closest to our house, together with a friend of ours, Roger. Unfortunately what we found was that the beaver dam has been dug up by the farmer. So instead of the lovely pool there was a lot of mud and very little water.
A little further up the stream another dam had also been destroyed.
It's tough trying to make a living as a farmer and if the beavers are given free rein then a small percentage of the agricultural land becomes too wet to use. The small bridges needed to take farming equipment across the stream can also be destroyed by the beavers, who either flood enough land that the bridges disappear into a muddy pool, or build their dam in the big pipe that forms the bridge.
So I understand why the farmers destroy the dams every now and again, but that doesn't make it any less of a sad sight when it happens.
Also, in fairness to the farmers, these days the beavers are in no way endangered as a species. There are plenty of them. In fact there are so many beavers that these dams will be replaced in a year or two as new generations of beavers set out exploring to create new territories, and find this perfect spot with no dam and no competition. They'll build a small dam, and it will get bigger year by year and eventually the farmer will get fed up and the whole cycle will start again.
A third dam, 200 metres upstream, was still in place, probably because it is in the middle of a marshy area where the farmer's digger can't go. That dam creates a pool for a beavers' lodge so I guess those ones are OK.
What we saw as we surveyed the area was the huge difference the dams make. Now when we are in something of a drought there is just a very small stream running here, literally a trickle at the bottom of a ditch. Previously there were two long large pools with ducks swimming around and dragon flies flitting about. There were frogs and probably fish in the pools. Big beds of reeds were growing on the edges of the pools and in the marshy ground around.  All that rich nature replaced by a trickle of water in the bottom of a ditch.
I try to be fair to the farmer, I understand why he does what he does, but I think it's clear where my sympathies lie!