WILD PROSPECTS

Lulu Urquhart of Urquhart & Hunt takes a deep dive into the importance of our waterways as well as the work of nature's eco-engineer: the beaver

- LULU URQUHART 

‘GRAYLING, dace, brook lamprey, brown trout, stone loach, chub, minnow, stickleback… they all live here,’ he says.

I nod, approvingly, slightly in awe. But in my head I’m wondering how I only know about half these names. I am somehow missing something significant. I have lived on a Somerset freshwater stream for over 10 years, regularly paddling in it with my boys and exploring all the life within it – my wild-raised boys who can name every species of swimming, flying or crawling creature that occupies our patch. Some of the names – stickleback, minnow – I know well; I can still picture the watercolour paintings of them in books I had as a child. But why don’t I know these other fish? Why haven’t we found these common species in our stream? And then, a slow dawning: is it that our beloved River Brue is all but empty?

I look up into the bright, white, winter sunlight flashing through the bare-stemmed, grey-barked alder and oak trees in a Devon landscape, the silhouette of Richard Brazier ahead of me, his trusty green woolly hat set slightly askew. He turns back, chatting merrily, scruffy, cheeky-faced and in his element. ‘Within a year of these beaver habitats establishing, the fish start arriving. And now, a few years on, we have grayling, dace, brook lamprey…’ and so on.