Argyll News: Argyll,Scottish Beaver Trial,Knapdale,dark sky parks: Argyll's beaver re-introduction project gets a new £1 million grant - what about a Dark Sky Park at Knapdale?

Argyll’s beaver re-introduction project gets a new £1 million grant - what about a Dark Sky Park at Knapdale?

The beaver re-introduction trial at Knapdale in Argyll - seeing the native species back in the country after being hunted to extinction 400 years ago, has just been given a new grant of £1 miliion.

Biffaward, a national environmental body which uses landfill tax credits to fund projects, sees the project as ‘truly ground-breaking’, according to Programme Manager, Gillian French.

The four beaver families destined for Knapdale are from Telemark in Norway. As For Argyll reported, they recently flew into a VIP reception at Heathrow before going into quarantine in preparation for their release in Knapdale in the Spring of 2009.

Simon Jones, Project Manager for the Scottish Beaver Trial, run by the Scottish Wildlife Trust, in partnership with Edinburgh Zoological Society, says: ‘The beaver holds the potential to create new wetland habitats which in turn can increase the number of native species’.

The powerful landowning lobby which opposed the trial and blocked it for many years is led by local landowner Robin Malcolm, farming 1,000 acres in Knapdale. He is quoted as saying he remains baffled by organisations ‘dedicated to a project which can only damage the Scottish countryside’. The beaver has been successfully reintroduced in twenty four European countries whose countrysides seem to have survived the experience.

There is no doubt that the project will strengthen Argyll’s biodiversity, already the richest in the UK and add to its resources for developing the wildlife tourism so important in the local economies of Mull and Islay.

VisitScotland recently announced a genuinely imaginative initiative to create ‘dark sky parks’ to support astronomers, exploiting Scotland’s envied swathes of remote territory with no light pollution.

For Argyll suggested that Argyll should get in there fast and make a strong bid for one of the first of the Dark Sky Parks, taking advantage of its lack of light pollution and its proximity to Glasgow airport, with onward flights to Kintyre, Islay and Tiree. At some point the missing air transport link between Glasgow and Oban will inevitably be services, opening up Argyll’s wildlife resources