For 23 years, one Scottish family traded sheep for beavers, and the results stunned researchers. Their land, once overgrazed and barren, transformed into thriving wetlands that now support a complex web of wildlife.
In early 2002, Paul and Louise Ramsay released a pair of beavers into a drainage ditch on their family estate in northeastern Perthshire, Scotland. The estate had been in the Ramsay family since 1232, when King Alexander II granted the land to an ancestor. The beavers, a species extinct in Britain for nearly 400 years, were released without government permission.The first two animals died within m…
A U.S. rancher let the beavers back and the water did something insane.
In 1990, Maggie Creek was drying up every summer. The water ran fast and shallow, and by August it turned into a dusty gravel bed. It was too warm for trout. The willows were gone.That same year, a young rancher named John Griggs was hired at a cattle ranch covering roughly 200,000 acres. One of his first jobs was to take a box of dynamite to Maggie Creek and blow up a beaver dam. He knew one thin…