When Merlin Hanbury-Tenison strode out to inspect his beavers last summer, the former Army major wasn’t in the slightest bit surprised to find they’d gone AWOL.
It was in fact the sixth time since their arrival in late 2019 that the amphibious rodents had escaped their enclosure on Merlin’s 300-acre family farm in Cornwall.
What did come as a surprise, however, was that not only had the fugitive animals – a family of five – travelled more than two miles to an entirely distinct part of windswept Bodmin Moor, but the owner of the land they now occupied was denying him access to recover them.
‘My neighbour has kidnapped my beavers’, declared the incensed Hanbury-Tenison in an article for The Spectator magazine last month, in which he expressed the very real concern he could now face prosecution for failing to keep the creatures within their mandated enclosure.
But today, in a major twist, I can reveal the other side to this extraordinary story. For the man who stands accused of depriving the beavers of their liberty, one Thomas Thrussell, claims that he is merely ‘upholding their right to choose where they live’.
Furthermore, he tells the Daily Mail, he refuses, in spite of extraordinary pressure, to be bullied by ‘a man used to getting his own way’.
From Helen of Troy to John Paul Getty III, kidnappings have long stirred the public imagination. But just what is it about the alleged abduction of a pair of beavers and their trio of kits that has so riled the passions of two jolly landowners in an otherwise sleepy corner of the West Country?
The stand-off between 39-year-old Hanbury-Tenison and Thrussell, two years his junior, has now entered its eighth month with seemingly no prospect of resolution. Both men are firmly digging their heels into the soft boggy ground of Bodmin Moor.
The story begins back in early 2018 when Merlin – son of the famous explorer and former chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, Robin Hanbury-Tenison OBE – put in an application to keep beavers on his farm, on which he also runs the Cabilla Cornwall yoga and wellness retreat with his wife, Lizzie.
Merlin, who served three tours of Afghanistan in the Light Dragoons and suffered PTSD after an IED explosion, hoped beavers would improve biodiversity on his land, which boasts one of the few remaining seams of Atlantic temperate forest in Britain.
Once widespread in Britain, the Eurasian beaver, with a body up to three feet long, and a flat tail measuring a further foot, was hunted to extinction here for its fur and meat some 400 years ago.
Over the past two decades, efforts have been made to reintroduce the species, with experts arguing their dams – which pool, deepen and slow water flows – prevent flooding and create attractive habitats for other wildlife.
Beaver enthusiasts were left fuming last month when it was reported that Downing Street was axeing the scheme to continue the reintroduction of the creatures, providing no other reason except that the policy was a ‘Tory legacy’ – even though it had been approved by Labour’s environment secretary Steve Reed.
However, Defra has denied this, telling the Mail: ‘This story is categorically untrue. The Government is working with Natural England to review options on species reintroduction, including beavers.’
The existing process to apply to home these water-loving do-gooders, as Hanbury-Tenison discovered, is an arduous one.
It took ‘two years of exhaustive inspections, stakeholder meetings, electrofish surveys [assessing what species live in the river by using electricity to attract them], small mammal surveys and endless phone calls and meetings with anyone who decided they wanted to have a say,’ Hanbury-Tenison told The Spectator, before Natural England at last granted him the needed licences.
To contain the creatures – who seem to be temperamentally hellbent on escape – he had to erect a five-acre perimeter fence with overhangs and electric wire, which also went a foot underground, as well as a system of complex grilles in the river.
Then the farmer welcomed the first of his residents: formidable matriarch Sigourney Beaver. She was joined shortly afterwards by a male called Jean Claude Van Dam.
And then, much to the delight of Merlin, Lizzie and their two children, Sigourney gave birth to a pair of twins affectionately christened Beavie Nicks and Beavie Wonder. A year later a third kit arrived: Chewbarka.
It seemed like a glorious success story. A family of beavers living happily on an idyllic Cornish moor as they would have done for countless centuries before.
But then began the first of their many bids for freedom.
Hanbury-Tenison soon became proficient in the art of ‘capturing and returning errant beavers and patching up any obvious breach points in their fence line’.
Yet the enclosure the one-time cavalry officer had built was evidently no Alcatraz. Merlin became accustomed to ‘the inevitable phone call telling me that a chewed willow twig or the beginnings of a dam had been spotted on another section of one of Bodmin Moor’s many rivers’.
When the beavers escaped for the sixth time last summer, however, things were different.
‘I was phoned by a neighbour who I didn’t know as well as the others,’ recalled Merlin, ominously. ‘He said he thought there might be some beaver evidence on his pond and asked if I could come and have a look.’
However – like a scene from a Spaghetti Western – when Merlin drove through a storm to the neighbour’s address a few days later, he found the silhouette of a man beside a cattlegrid blocking his path.
It was none other than Thomas Thrussell.
Merlin was used to being welcomed in for tea and a convivial chat before heading off to recapture his errant charges. This time, however, it was nothing of the sort.
The two men stared each other down from either side of the cattlegrid like soldiers on the Korean border. Eventually, they spoke. The Mail understands the conversation was tense and terse – the peace fragile, the fate of five beavers on a knife edge.
At its conclusion, Thrussell denied Merlin access to his land and announced he had no intention of moving the animals on.
Retrieving the elusive and occasionally aggressive creatures requires patience and a series of sly cage traps. Hanbury-Tenison was unwilling to go behind enemy lines to launch an extraction mission.
He had no choice but to return home beaver-less.
Almost eight months and three further meetings between the pair later, Thrussell still refuses to let his neighbour on his land.
When the Mail spoke to him this week, Thrussell said: ‘Recollections may well vary.’
So what exactly is his side of the story?
He recalls realising that something was up last summer when he noticed the water level rising in the pond at the bottom of his garden.
‘At first I thought it could be a dead sheep in the ditch,’ he told me as we squelched our way through the peat bog.
‘Then I realised there was a dam being built out of twigs and branches. Then I saw that trees had been nibbled and chopped away. Well, there’s only one thing it could be: beavers.’
According to Thrussell – whose family have lived on this land for more than a quarter of a century – he rang Hanbury-Tenison to ask if he was missing any beavers, but was shocked by what happened next.
‘He didn’t turn up for several days. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry. I thought that if you’d lost your beavers you’d be searching up every tributary in the area.’
‘It appears,’ continued Thrussell, ‘he hadn’t told anyone they’d escaped again. He didn’t want people knowing.’
Indeed, Thrussell told the Mail that the beavers had previously ended up in a local fishery, causing chaos to the small business.
But why did Thrussell then refuse Merlin access to his land, prompting the wild accusations of kidnapping and hostage taking?
‘I did my research and spoke with experts,’ Thrussell continued, as we surveyed the astonishing tooth marks left in a coppiced tree. ‘And I was told, as it was summer, to leave the beavers alone as it was kitting season and they could be having babies.’
Furthermore, Thrussell – who is glad of the beavers’ positive impact on his land – argues that Merlin has no proof the animals are even his.
Despite Merlin’s beavers being microchipped, their identity can only be verified if the beavers are caught, which Thrussell will simply not allow while they lodge on his land.
Is Thrussell concerned, I suggest, that a desperate Merlin may now attempt to recover his beavers – if indeed they are his – by stealth?
‘I am worried, yes,’ Thrussell replied, grimacing. ‘But I’ve got CCTV down there – trap cameras. So if he does come, I’ll have evidence.’
‘Ultimately,’ concluded Thrussell, ‘if the beavers have escaped his enclosure six times, then it’s pretty clear to me that they don’t want to be there. They’ve found us, they’ve set up home, built dams. You can’t own wildlife. The fact he’s named the beavers shows he doesn’t understand that.’
Yet Merlin’s license with Natural England includes a clause stating he must retrieve the beavers if they ever go missing. As it appears he is unable to keep to the terms of the agreement, will he now be prosecuted?
‘We cannot comment on individual cases,’ Natural England told the Mail in a statement. ‘The Eurasian beaver is a protected species, so a landowner with a licence to release one into an enclosure must meet strict standards, including having secure fencing and monitoring.
‘However, we would always act reasonably if there were external factors outside of the someone’s control that led to a possible breach.’
It appears then that Mr Hanbury-Tenison will be spared his day in court, at least for now.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from this ongoing saga is that beavers – once the great sculptors of the English countryside – are now in high demand.
In 2021, then Prime Minister Boris Johnson pledged to ‘build back beaver’. In 2020 he had bought his father Stanley beavers for his 80th birthday and helped him with the paperwork to reintroduce the animal on his Exmoor estate.
Still, there are currently thought to be just 500 beavers in England, with a further 1,000 in Scotland.
‘Nature is on its knees and beavers can help. The scientific evidence is piling up,’ says Cheryl Marriott, Director of Nature and People at Cornwall Wildlife Trust.
‘We need these animals back in our countryside. Yes it is a bold and ambitious thing to do, but we can’t expect to reverse the decline in nature by doing the same old thing.’
But she urges caution: ‘The escapes from enclosures and haphazard illegal releases that we are seeing at the moment is not the way to do it.’
For now, Sigourney Beaver, Jean Claude Van Dam and their three offspring remain lodged on Thomas Thrussell’s land.
And, as Merlin Hanbury-Tenison has discovered, you can have all the paperwork in the world, but when it comes to returning errant beavers, there’s no such thing as a magic wand.