Talking Point with Vicky Turrell: 'Beavers - there are reasons for and against'

“To beaver or not to b…” Brian in the Archers is against beavers and says that they are an absolute menace. He has a friend who had a damaged fence caused by beavers. They are smart and strong, and tunnel into riverbanks and fields can get waterlogged, he emphasised that it is lunacy to introduce them.

Did you know that beavers are native and were here 400 years ago and can create an environment where wildlife can survive? Are they natures engineers who can manage water or are they a menace?

Shropshire Council and Shropshire Wildlife Trust have made their decision and released two beavers from Scotland to an enclosure in the riverbed in Shrewsbury, hopefully to control the scrub growing rapidly there. I would love to see a beaver, but I do not think that will happen because they do not come out when we want them to, we have no control of that.

“You should have seen me twenty years ago,” said a woman in a wheelchair when I was having a coffee with friends. She held out her hand to hold mine and told me that she was always the one pushing the chair and now, she has no choice, her daughter had to do it for her. Both were smiling and seemed to accept their situation now. But when I was in the hospital for a check-up recently, I met someone who could not understand what was happening and tried to reverse her situation.

“I keep on getting shorter,” she said, “but nothing I do seems to make any difference”. She was about my age and my height, but she wanted to go back to her original height. She wore high heels to remedy the situation (but it did not). And she stood very upright and held her head high but of course her height was still the same. Some of us shrink as we get older and it is not something that we can do anything about.

It seems that AI is with us now and there is nothing we can do about that either. Sometimes when I write an email and get a reply from a company, the reply is always perfect and deals with the issues, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it is not from a real person. Could it also be that sometimes when we ring, we are not speaking to a real person?

One thing that is real is the wildlife here. The woodpecker is on the peanuts and the goldfinch is eating the niger seeds. No robot can do that, can it?