Under EU regulations member countries are under an obligation to look into restoring some of our lost beasts to the countryside. Darlington naturalist Ian Bond asks if it’s a good idea

IF you had a time machine, what would you go back for? If it ever gets to my turn, I would go back a good 10,000 years or more, before people were literate, but when we were already very much the people we are now. But it's not the people I would want to go back for; it’s the amazing array of animals that our ancestors shared their world with. We missed cave bears; sabre-toothed cats and an ark-full of other legendary yet perfectly real creatures by an evolutionary blink to a world that hadn’t got as far as writing it down, let alone conserving it for future generations.

On my living room wall there hangs a picture entitled “The Last Wolf”. It depicts the last wolf in England, supposedly at Humphrey Head in Cumbria in 1390, although wolves were just north of the Tweed half a century later and one of them probably roamed a little south to earn itself the title. The wolf looks back as it heads across a desolate beach, as wild as the wolf is; its passing marking, to me at least, a symbolic juncture in our island's history when we were no longer wild. Much as modern conservation is slowing down the continued loss of nature, and occasionally gaining a bit of ground, the wolf was gone forever.

Or so you would think. However, there is a growing movement, known as Re-wilding, which seeks to recreate areas of Britain where nature is left to its own devices and even where the lost beasts of Britain are restored. On the face of it, it seems something of an impossible ask; we are becoming more crowded, more built-up and less wild each year, but there is at least a legal requirement to look into it. Under the EU Habitats and Species Directive there is responsibility for member states to study the desirability of reintroductions of extinct native species. There is also the moral argument that we expect other countries to conserve their lions and tigers and bears when we have got rid of everything with sharp teeth that’s bigger than a badger.

But being obliged to consider re-introductions isn’t the same as it being a good idea or even possible. Wolves are perhaps the most iconic species, but the potential cast list includes such other impressive animals as lynx, beaver, moose and brown bear. And, of course, you need more than one of each, or two by two for that matter; Noah’s Ark would have had as many problems with genetic viability as it would naval logistics. For lynx, the actual number that would be needed to kick-start a new population with a high degree of probability has been calculated. It's somewhere between 12 and 32. Ultimately, should they be successful, there is room in Britain for a few hundred lynx and to give it a North-East slant, but also to give an idea of how much room would be needed, Kielder Forest would have room for about eight. In many ways, lynx aren’t that much of a problem; they’re too small to do us any harm and they’d put a bit of a brake on the growing deer population. Admittedly they’d also kill a few sheep but, as lynx are woodland animals and sheep generally aren’t, probably not that many as you might think and their penchant for killing foxes means that they could count on both sides of the farming equation. Bears are a different proposition. You don’t need me to tell you that we haven’t got room for hundreds of bears; we might do well to fit in 12. And, of course, when it says Britain, it usually means Scotland. Tempting though it might be for Westminster to unleash bears on the Scots, it probably isn’t going to happen.

What they really need to do is start small and if you don’t count the root vole (and, as far as I am aware, no-one does), the smallest of our lost species is the beaver. The whole Re-wilding movement is therefore waiting with bated breath for the announcement by the Scottish Government as to whether or not beavers can officially be re-introduced.

This will be no snap decision. Scottish Natural Heritage have been running a trial since 2009 whereby a small number of re-introduced beavers have been studied to see what effects they would have on such as hydrology, fisheries, trees and tourism. One important benefit that beavers have been found to provide in other studies in Europe is increasing water storage thereby reducing flood peaks. The tourism benefits in Knapdale are thought to be significant as well with more than 80 per cent of survey respondents in the region believing that beavers would benefit local economy.

I can understand that. We had a week’s holiday around Knapdale a few years before the beavers were released. It’s a beautiful place and if I need to chill one of the places I go to in my head is sitting by the harbour in Tarbert. The tourist attractions on the other hand were less impressive, my recollection being that the options were a stone circle and an arboretum. The presence of beavers has already generated around half a million pounds from tourists coming to see them and that’s before they start with the sales of fluffy toys and car stickers declaring: “I’ve had a beaver in Inverary.”

So maybe beavers will be back to stay and who knows, maybe other animals will be back to join them. We’re probably never going to have a time machine; Stephen Hawking says it’s impossible so it must be. But if this idea of Re-wilding does take root, then maybe in a small way we might all be able to travel back to the future.