George Hosford on beavers, bureaucracy … and Ronnie, the short sheep who’s now a ram with a reputation

The Stour valley has been busy accommodating excessive rainfall this winter. We had a lovely dry period mid November – a welcome respite from the relentless downfalls of the previous two months. The drier period allowed us to return our animals to the meadows, there still being plenty of grass left to eat before winter. The 91-year-old early warning system lit up one Saturday morning, so Fred and Rosie moved the cattle up onto higher ground behind Knighton House, and Jayne and I rounded up our lambs: they had been free ranging the meadows for many weeks. We then sat and watched with Father as the water rose before our eyes. Over the next two hours the land across which we had just walked the lambs became completely submerged. A bit close for comfort – the animals can’t be trusted not to get themselves marooned on the last bit of dry land, and sheep in particular will not voluntarily put a foot in the water. Sheep floating downstream into Blandford is not a good outcome.
Dorset beavers
Our cluster group was treated to a ‘Beaver special’ a few weeks ago, when Neve Bray from Dorset FWAG (Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group) took us through the history of beaver persecution, followed by extinction in the UK some 400 years ago, and then moved on to explain what beavers can bring to a river catchment.
Beaver fans claim they will slow down the passage of water through a catchment by creating leaky dams and wetland areas, whereas those less convinced fear they will destroy valuable trees and cause unpredictable flooding of settlements and productive land. Both are correct: the skilled bit is in deciding where their work could be beneficial, and then steering the beavers towards it, while possessing the (legal and practical) ability to prevent them doing the wrong thing in the wrong place.
The Dorset Stour enters the sea at Christchurch harbour, having meandered through many miles of built-up area. It has a huge catchment, from Stourhead and Wincanton in the north, and close to Sherborne in the west. With such a huge catchment it doesn’t need very many hours of heavy rain to build a flood risk.
On a river like the Dorset Stour, where the principal passage of the river was deepened and widened by dredging in the past, and many mills and weirs were built, the main body is so far removed from a naturally functioning river habitat that no amount of beaver work is likely to be of much use. Whereas some of the Stour’s tributaries, which still retain their naturally-formed dimensions, might be usefully modified by beaver work to slow down the movement of water during extreme rainfall events: holding it up behind their dams and only slowly releasing it into the river over a period of time, lessening the risk of flooding further downstream.
This is immediately a worry for those farmers of the land alongside these tributaries – they naturally fear their land will spend more time under water, damaging pasture or crops, or permanently reducing the productivity of the soil.
However, it should not be too difficult for government to devise a scheme that would reward land owners for allowing this – likely to be considerably cheaper than building massive flood barriers in the built-up areas.
But how do you prevent the beavers working where they are not wanted? They must be controlled if they wander off and threaten areas where they may do significant damage. Legislation that accompanied their re-introduction, surprisingly rapidly, made them a protected species, so they cannot currently be touched, and their dams cannot be removed without official approval.
What is making life complicated in some areas is where beavers are being introduced without licence, or (surprise surprise), they migrate to areas beyond their original release.
This very quickly causes conflict between the believers who enabled the release and those who see them simply as vermin. Not helpful, and very unlikely to help with flood control or wetland development (which in the right areas is good for birds and other species), it will cause conflict and prolong the pain suffered by people who endure the consequences of flooding, with little hope for improvement.

Look upstream
Sitting in on a meeting of the Stour Delivery Group a few weeks ago, we were given a detailed, polished presentation on the issues of flooding in the lower Stour, from Wimborne towards Christchurch. A great deal of effort has been expended by the Environment Agency in creating a detailed report on flood risk, focussing on a strategy for reducing risk of flooding to households and other property.
But frankly it’s a load of bureaucratic waffle. It fails to address the real problem.
The reason for reporting on this is to point out that nowhere in the report is serious attention given to the quantity of water entering the lower section of the river from higher up in the catchment following periods of heavy rain. When I asked “Where does most of the flooding risk come from – the excessive amount of built-up area on the floodplain, or water arriving from higher in the catchment?” the answer was clear: it was the latter. Yet the report continues to discuss at great length how to reduce flood risk with the construction of earth banks, concrete walls etc, perhaps moving some of the mobile homes. It doesn’t begin to address the issue from a ‘whole-catchment’ perspective at all.
The sense of frustration was acute, the sound of cans being kicked down the road was deafening. Some of the answers are there for the taking, but no-one seems to want to try.
Freda
Our oldest cow, Freda – also known as 2244, her tag number – is 16 years old, a fine age for a cow. She has borne us 14 calves in that time, worth many thousands in sales, and food put on the table. She is the last of the original calves bought from our cousin Will when Dougal started up the suckler beef herd. We have three of her daughters and two granddaughters in the herd today, and this year’s calf (being a heifer and a pretty colour) will also be kept for breeding, continuing her line.
A couple of weeks ago our vet came to examine our cows to see how many are in calf and to give us a rough idea in what order they will produce. Sheep are easy to scan for the presence of lambs: thanks to a handy wool-free zone just in front of the udder, an experienced vet with a hand-held scanner connected to a screen can tell you how many lambs are present within 10 to 15 seconds. Cows are an altogether different task, involving a long glove, a considerable amount of effort, a great deal of manure and a small hand-held scanner connected to a tiny screen embedded in a pair of special glasses. The approximate date of birth can be obtained by matching the size of the embryo to a scale on the screen. The sad news is that Freda is not in calf.

Ron and his ladder
Our sheep have been grazing a newly-established herbal ley (grass and herbs) that was undersown last spring, into a crop of spring barley. The barley was cleared at harvest, and bingo, there is the ley growing among the stubble! The cows grazed it briefly back in October, and now the sheep are nibbling it down to remove the annual weeds and encourage thickening up. This should mean it will be ready for the cows earlier in the spring than if we had sown it after harvest, in August.
Observant walkers on the farm will have noticed clues pointing to fertile behaviour in the sheep field. The yellow raddle mark on the rear of the ewes was the age old method of telling us that young Ronnie, our new ram, has been at work.
Ronnie can be seen in the picture above, standing next to our rather tall wether, Little Bear.
Laughter erupted among the farm team when they first spotted Ronnie, and jokes about step ladders and telephone directories proliferated. Father was even heard to ask why one of the ewes had been left behind with its lamb in the farm paddock, when the rest had been moved to better grass.
Well, the doubters can rest assured that Ronnie, in spite of his Corbett-like stature, has performed as well as we could have hoped. All the ewes have been covered, and none have returned for a second service since the first complete 17 day cycle. With luck, lambing will begin around 1st of May.
See all George’s farm diaries on viewfromthehill.org.uk