Edinburgh's roadworks Wild West can only be tamed by one thing: Super Beavers! – Susan Morrison

Beavers are nature's construction engineers. So can they come give Edinburgh a hand with its roadworks? (Picture: Koca Sulejmanovic/AFP via Getty Images)

No-one seems to be in charge. One construction company seizes North Bridge, whilst another does battle to hold back the traffic on Leith Walk, as a sneaky little raiding party, armed with a mini-digger and a set of temporary traffic lights, creates chaos with a contraflow on Telford Road.

Oh, there’s probably a poor soul in some council office screaming into the void, desperately attempting to create that coherent road repair/tram building/trench digging/new roundabout strategy alone, since of Scotland’s strategic thinkers are currently busy with beavers.

Yes, Scotland has a strategy for beavers. Currently there are about 954 of the little critters about the place, which is apparently A Good Thing, and I don’t doubt that it is.

It must be. More than 50 different organisations were consulted to thrash out this beaver strategy. Seriously big guns chipped in, from NatureScot, the National Farmers Union, the Scottish Wildlife Trust and the Zoo.

The only people missing appear to be the Women’s Institute and the Grenadier Guards. They may rue the day they missed those two off. These are possibly the two most efficient organisations in the UK.

They’ve all come together as the Scottish Beaver Advisory group. Any beavers needing advice now know where to go and who to ask. No idea how they coped before.

The strategy is there to help us get more beavers. Again, a good thing, but does this mean that Scotland’s Beaver Tsar, Lorna Slater, is advising our beavers on how to make more beavers? Surely building baby beavers comes naturally to our furry little friends. Beavers like building things.

In fact, here’s an idea, let's get those beavers out of the lochs and rivers and get them into our city centre.

With a little genetic engineering, we could breed better beavers. Super Beavers, if you like. Then we could turn our road works over to them.

They can’t do much worse, and they’d look a darn sight cuter.