Beaver Top Guns

Promptly at 9am the County Council Beaver Inspector arrived, as did unexpectedly the parish mayor. My email last night at 7pm  had obviously been read and the mayor informed. No civil servant, especially in a 2,500 inhabitant parish should be checking work emails at that time, or perhaps he was using the new Work from Home policy to enjoy the daytime outside.

'Apologising' profusely that that whole area was no longer a disaster area, they could both see what had happened and knew that the State Forestry official had seen flooding two days ago.

Learnt that simply removing a beaver dam carries a penalty of €50,000 and/or up to 3 years in prison, which had recently been given recently to a serial offending farmer.

The beaver official said if the beaver was not dead & rebuilt the dams, he could organise a pipe system so that the stream level was kept at or below the level that causes us any problems and avoids fields flooding. We got on with the mayor fantastically. Our first ever proper meeting, and he was fascinated by the way we "run" our place, trying to be environmentally friendly. He asked if he could come back when the weather was better for a coffee.

Well, we left it that I would contact the electricity company to get them to fell all the tress endangering our electricity, and they would deal with the illegal beaver dam removal. Reading between the lines, to avoid nasty local row, probably nothing. The beaver official did say that the protection laws have been so successful that we basically now have almost a plague, the beavers themselves not having so many young, as they can sense they are running out of appropriate dam building sites.