It’s not clear yet whether this is one beaver who escaped from elsewhere or a pair who were released by rewilders, but it sounds like a good dam move to me!
A couple whose garden was being vandalised in the night has uncovered a surprising culprit in Wales’ first wild beaver for 400 years.
The dam-building rodent was discovered by a husband and wife who noticed trees going missing and machete-like damage in a field next to their house in Pembrokeshire, west Wales.
Curious about the cause of the damage, the homeowners bought a ‘stealth camera’ which captured footage of the creature swimming in their pond and felling their trees.
The origins of the beaver are unexplained, but the landowners believe it may have come from an unsanctioned release by rewilding enthusiasts.
The rodent has been found living near a rural property where it has started to build itself a lodge under the family’s pond deck.
Nicknamed Anthony by the family – after military historian Antony Beevor – the herbivore has become as ‘fat as a pig’ spending as much as six hours a night chewing tree trunks and dragging branches around.
The discovery is only the fourth time a beaver has been found living wild in Britain.
Beavers – which can grow to be the size of a large spaniel – were hunted to extinction in Britain 400 years ago, but have been slowly reintroduced in recent years.
The landowners, who wished to remain anonymous to protect the location of the animal, were ‘astonished’ to discover the herbivore was living behind their house.
They said: ‘Some of our trees began to go missing overnight and others were simply being mauled. It looked like someone was hitting them with a machete.
‘There are no deer in Pembrokeshire, so we couldn’t work out what was causing the damage.
‘The only clue were some teeth marks left in the bark.’
Two weeks after first noticing the damage, the couple decided to buy a £100 stealth camera and leave it out overnight to try and catch the vandal in action.
When they reviewed the footage a week later, they spotted the creature.
‘To our astonishment, the camera showed a beaver swimming around our pond and eating our trees. We couldn’t believe it.
‘Since then, it has cleared quite a few trees and branches.
‘There is nothing subtle about a beaver. They are very easy to spot.’
The closest official colony of beavers to Pembrokeshire is in the Dyfi Estuary over 50 miles away in Mid Wales, where no escapes have been reported.
‘It’s much more likely the beaver has been released in Pembrokeshire by a determined rewilder’, the landowners added.
Since their reintroduction to the country in Argyll in 2009, beaver numbers have been increasing across the UK through enclosed colonies set up by various wildlife trusts.
But this is only the fourth time a beaver has been found living wild in Britain.
Other wild populations were discovered in Scotland’s Tay-Forth catchment area, in East Devon’s River Otter and on the Avon near Bristol.
A similar beaver discovery was made in East Devon in 2014, despite there being no reintroduction trials in the area.
Initially, DEFRA planned to remove the beavers, but the Devon Wildlife Trust persuaded them to allow England’s first wild beaver trial.
The trial was successful and in 2020 DEFRA announced the beavers could stay. In October 2022, beavers were protected by law in England.
But in Wales, where environmental law-making is devolved, no such protection exists, and the discovery of a wild beaver could now force the Welsh Government to legislate on the issue.
The Pembrokeshire landowners continued: ‘It looks like the Welsh Government need to legislate or they’ll be in danger of trying to close the stable door after the horse has bolted.
‘With so many enclosed beavers around Britain, you wonder how long it will be before there are more escapees.’
The animals, which can live for as long as ten years and weigh up to 30kg, are not universally popular.
In Scotland, where beavers have been so successful many farmers feel their livelihoods are being threatened because beaver dams can flood valuable farmland.
The Scottish Government has even begun issuing licenses to cull them.
But rewilders call this ‘ecosystem engineering’ and highlight the positive effects of wetland creation, providing habitat for animals like otters, water voles, toads, frogs and wildfowl.
This is what makes beavers a ‘keystone species’, in other words, they are the glue that holds a habitat together.
One of Kelowna’s urban beavers is back splish-splashing after being rescued with an injured tail.
The beaver was captured from the Rotary Park Marsh on April 5, after a pedestrian noticed the sick-looking critter and contacted the Interior Wildlife Rehabilitation Society (IWRS).
The volunteers jumped into action and took the beaver to a vet to have the abscess drained. While waking up from the sedation, the beaver was given carrots and sweet potato, but she is now back on her regular diet of ‘browse’ such as twigs and other high-growing vegetation, said Eva Hartmann, founder of IWRS and registered veterinarian technician.
Everyday volunteers head out to the bush and pick twigs for the beaver to snack on.
Beavers munch on the tissue layer found just under the bark. Hartmann said the downtown girl in the IWRS’ care only likes to snack on poplar trees. The beaver spat out the Saskatoon berry bush and pine tree twigs that were collected for her. Hartmann laughed and said that she knew beavers preferred poplar and willow trees, but didn’t realize how picky they could be.
A new video was released from the Beaver Institute that is fantastic but they are going to tweak it and re-release it at a later date for now. Just know good things are afoot. Sneak preview my favorite line is that your local beaver pond is your rainforest, and your coral reef. How smart is that? This is a special edit from heidi who came home yesterday and is trying to figure things out.
The humble beaver could become one of America’s hardest working allies in the race to adapt to climate change.
Beavers are natural engineers. They instinctively build dams and canals of water to keep themselves safe because they’re clumsy on land. And capturing that water creates ecosystems for other animals to survive, earning beavers the moniker of a “keystone species.”
A growing movement of nonprofits, experts and government agencies see a potential to take a lesson from beavers’ natural engineering prowess to capture more of that water for the places that desperately need it.
“Beavers benefit a lot of things in the context of climate change,” Emily Fairfax, assistant professor of environmental science and resource management at California State University Channel Islands, told ABC News.
“The ones that are most directly sort of in our eyesight right now is the beavers’ ability to protect ecosystems during droughts, during floods, during wildfires, during extreme disturbances. And in those patches of habitat that they’re protecting, there’s a huge amount of biodiversity”
This heat wave, and the threat of wildfires, makes me appreciate #beaver engineered fire refugia even more. This complex is on Little Last Chance Creek up in N. California – in some ways these ponds were a "little last chance" for all the critters during the fire here last year. pic.twitter.com/badIjn55Kx
In addition to storing water, Fairfax’s research has shown that areas with beaver dams are more resilient to wildfires because the plants and trees are so wet they don’t burn. And she said they could help capture water from extreme rain events like the atmospheric rivers in California to be accessed by those water systems later.
“Beavers sort of figured this out instinctually over 7 million years of evolution that their dams and their canals work because they take the whole hydrologic cycle and they just make it more stable, more consistent,” she said.
Beavers haven’t always been recognized for their benefits. Fur trapping dramatically reduced the population starting in the 1700s and even today beavers are sometimes seen as a nuisance and killed. The animals are sometimes relocated away from urban areas where their dams could cause disruptions and flooding, which experts like Fairfax said can sometimes be appropriate but is not always the right approach.
Instead of treating them like pests, groups like the National Forest Foundation are looking to take a lesson from beavers’ work to find a nature-based approach to adapt to impacts of climate change like worsening drought conditions.
“There’s a lot of streams and headwaters to the Colorado River that used to run perennially, year-round, that we now see have stopped. And so we might be able to, as we do enough of these, turn some of those stream flows back on on an annual basis. And seeing those regular additions throughout the year could have huge benefits to the system as a whole,” said Marcus Selig, chief conservation officer with the National Forest Foundation.
Photos show an area near the headwaters of the Colorado River before and after the installation of beaver dam analogs by the National Forest Foundation.
The National Forest Foundation is a nonprofit created by Congress to support national forests. Selig said their work building man-made “beaver dam analogs” can help capture more water in the Colorado River, which has been struggling with historically low water levels after more than two decades of drought.
The analogs are a manmade version of what beavers would instinctively build, using sticks and mud to create a natural barrier to slow water down and create a wetland area that feeds into the river.
“The work we do with beaver dam analogs and low-tech process-based restoration is holding that water in the higher elevations as the snow melts and so that it can be released slowly throughout the year, giving more continuous, dependable flows to downstream users,” Selig said, adding that it can help communities downstream receive water more consistently.
“Our big dream is that we can restore every headwater, every watershed that feeds into the Colorado River on national forest lands. And so we’re working on creating that pipeline of projects right now,” he added.
Selig said this kind of work hasn’t been scaled up enough to identify how much of a larger impact it could have and they still need more funding to do so, but said the foundation is working with the U.S. Forest Service to add projects in 14 different national forests around the Colorado River.
Fairfax said river systems like the Colorado have lost a lot of the wetlands that would have existed 200 years ago so replicating them either by creating man-made beaver dams or relocating beavers to streams in the area can help make the river more resilient to the impacts of climate change.
“Bringing back beavers and restoring the wetlands, it’s not like we’re introducing something new to save the Colorado River Basin. We’re just trying to get it back to the state it was in when it was stable and when it was healthier,” she said.
Similar projects are growing around the country, some with support from states or the federal government. California has dedicated $1.6 million to hire staff to start similar projects in the state.
A key legislative committee has approved new limits on killing beavers in Oregon, which will now be considered by the full House. A last-minute amendment allows beavers to be killed without a permit during emergencies, but the Oregon Farm Bureau remains opposed to the bill.
A proposal to strengthen Oregon’s beaver protections is headed for a House floor vote after a last-minute amendment secured its unanimous approval by a key committee.
Beavers would no longer be considered predatory animals under House Bill 3464, allowing state wildlife officials to manage the species on private lands instead of farm regulators.
Supporters of the bill argue that as “nature’s engineers,” beavers make improvements to waterways that are particularly valuable as the state faces increasing droughts and wildfires.
“Despite these clear benefits, Oregon law currently allows unlimited beaver killing year-round, including during breeding and rearing season, without a permit — even if the beaver is not causing any damage,” said Rep. Pam Marsh, D-Ashland.
Under the original version of HB 3464, the changed designation meant landowners would need to obtain permits to kill beavers. Such permits aren’t required for predatory animals, including feral swine, coyotes and rodents.
While the bill would ensure “lethal removal is still an option,” permits would allow beaver populations to be managed and tracked by the state’s Department of Fish and Wildlife similarly to fur-bearing animals, Marsh said.
“This is just another species that will be added to the list,” she said.
Though the bill’s proponents claim these permits can be obtained over email free-of-charge within about 30 minutes, the new requirement didn’t sit well with critics who said they’d impose a time-consuming barrier during pending disasters.
If an irrigation canal is failing, for example, urgent repairs may require taking the life of a beaver to prevent flooding that endangers people and property, said Gene Souza, executive director of the Klamath Irrigation District.
“There are emergency situations that occur at two in the morning, sometimes on Sundays, sometimes on Saturdays,” Souza said.
The bill’s supporters acknowledged that beavers can be damaging but said their usefulness justified regulating their lethal removal more strictly.
Beaver dams reconnect creeks and streams with their floodplains, buffering against drought effects and creating “refugia” that shelter wildlife, livestock and habitat from wildfires, according to proponents.
Unlike human efforts to restore impaired waterways, which can take significant investments over decades, beavers can perform the work within years without charging a single dollar, said Emily Fairfax, an assistant professor of environmental science at California State University.
It will be an improvement but sheesh -lethal removal?- we’re not really that difficult to move to where we’re wanted! Read or listen the whole report.
Dr. Rick Lanman stands in Adobe Creek in Palo Alto on March 31, 2023. Photo by Magali Gauthier.
When Dr. Richard Lanman purchased his Los Altos home in the 1980s, Adobe Creek, which snaked behind his backyard, was at best a rivulet of trickling water in the summer. In good winters, a rushing torrent carried logs, leaves, silt and debris out to San Francisco Bay.
But his neighborhood’s old-timers remembered Adobe Creek as a year-round fly-fishing paradise until the 1950s. His 80-year-old neighbor Herb Bickell told Lanman in 1987 that he’d caught fish from his backyard.
“So too, did Sen. Alan Cranston, who lived just a little bit upstream from us,” Lanman said.
But now Adobe Creek is dry for half the year, and there are no fish. Bickell wondered why the creek had undergone such a drastic change.
“Maybe there were beavers,” said Lanman, a Los Altos-based physician scientist, historical ecologist and president of the Institute of Historical Ecology. “One of my theories is there were beaver ponds or percolation ponds that raised the water table so that in our dry season, when the water table is high enough, it recharges the creek.”
Lanman’s urge to answer that question became an additional career in ecological history, leading to research into the Midpeninsula’s and south San Francisco Bay’s missing links. Now he and his colleagues have published groundbreaking findings confirming the past existence of local populations of Chinook salmon, American beavers and Tule elk.
They’ve also suggested possible ways to bring the species back.
Little is understood about California’s historical ecology prior to the arrival of the Europeans, whose actions wiped out animal populations, he said.
“A lot of the species are already gone by the time the U.S. takes California from Mexico, who had just taken over from Spain,” Lanman said.
Zoological records from the time were also not plentiful.
. . .
Hunting for beavers
A beaver swims in a creek in Palo Alto on Sept. 16, 2022. Courtesy Bill Leikam.
Another species that has intrigued Lanman are beavers.
Scientists traditionally dismissed the beaver as a nonnative to the Bay Area, he said. This stance was largely influenced by the 1937 book “Fur-bearing Mammals of California,” written by Joseph Grinnell. Grinnell was the University of California, Berkeley’s first director of its Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and one of the most well-known figures in American natural history in the early half of the 20th century. Grinnell maintained beavers never lived in the Coast Range and Sierra Nevada watersheds, Lanman said.
“And then I met an archaeologist who found a buried beaver dam in the Sierra Nevada. And that was my first historical ecology publication in 2012. It was a buried beaver dam about 12 feet down, and (we) radiocarbon dated the sticks and it showed this dam had been there for hundreds of years and was rebuilt probably by successive generations of beavers,” Lanman said.
“But it ends around 1850 by radiocarbon dating. Of course, 1850 is the gold rush right? And that’s when all these Anglo Americans hunted everything out,” he said.
By the time Grinnell wrote his book in 1937, the beavers were gone.
“He’s suffering from what we call ‘shifting baseline syndrome,’ where you think the way things look when you were born is the way things always were,” Lanman said.
Lanman searched literature, historical accounts and archaeological evidence for the beaver’s historical presence in local waterways. He didn’t find any beaver specimens in early California museum records.
“But if you look in the Smithsonian, it turns out there’s a beaver skull collected on Saratoga Creek around 1855. So that was the first physical evidence of beaver in the Bay Area in a tributary of the south bay,” he said.
Lanman and colleagues published the findings in the fall 2013 California Fish and Game journal. They studied museum specimens, zooarchaeology specimens, place names, documents and words for “beaver” in local California Native languages for evidence of beavers throughout western California from the California-Oregon border to San Diego and to the southern Sierra Nevada.
The researchers found evidence all over the state. In the Bay Area alone, they found 24 records from Healdsburg to Saratoga and from Bodega Bay to Fremont. These included a zooarchaeological specimen from the Emeryville Shellmound, which included a 1,500- to 1,700-year-old beaver tooth, a more than 2,000-year-old beaver incisor and three beaver bones, dating between 700 and 2,600 years old.
Historical literature also abounds with references to beaver hunts and acquisitions from Native Americans. A 1776 account of the second De Anza Expedition noted that Native Californians wore capes of beaver pelts and pelican feathers.
The famed frontiersman Kit Carson held rights in the 1840s to trap them in the east bay. In Santa Clara County, a 1962 study found historical evidence of beavers “in small numbers at least” in Coyote Creek in Santa Clara County among other places, Lanman and his colleagues noted.
How those beavers might have traveled around the bay and up tributaries in Santa Clara County and perhaps San Mateo County is beginning to be understood due to the presence and growing population of reintroduced beavers.
The semi-aquatic rodents were introduced in the early 1980s to upper Los Gatos Creek near Lexington Reservoir and have been slowly making their way northward. The beavers have expanded their territory by swimming up San Francisco Bay to Coyote Creek to the east; the San Tomas Aquino Creek where it reaches the Sunnyvale Water Pollution Control Ponds; Moffett Gate; and Charleston Slough, just east of the Adobe Creek levee, according to Lanman.
Nine years after the beavers research was published, Palo Alto resident Bill Leikam, co-founder and board president of the Urban Wildlife Research Project and native gray-fox expert, documented the first modern evidence of beavers in a remote section of Palo Alto’s Matadero Creek, where he found two beavers in April 2022. If they are a compatible pair, they could begin colonizing the creek and perhaps slowly lead to a population that would move on to other local creeks, Lanman and Leikam said in November.
Lanman is eager to see how beavers might help revive locally collapsing fish populations. Flood control efforts have altered natural channels, such as San Francisquito Creek, which is dammed by Searsville, the Guadalupe River in San Jose and Palo Alto’s Adobe Creek. Lanman wondered how changes to those habitats have affected fish species such as Chinook and steelhead — and whether nature could reverse the damage.
“Beavers are the one thing we haven’t tried. They have these important ecosystem benefits, not just for our trout and salmon, but for all kinds of critters: red-legged frogs that are federally endangered; birds that are federally endangered that depend on the hunt over water and bats that hunt over water,” he said during a November interview.
Join us in JULY for two days of knowledge sharing, highlighting some of the great work within the field of beaver coexistence in Alberta and surrounding regions. Topics to be covered include: ecological and watershed benefits, coexistence solutions, beneficial management practices, beaver-mediated restoration, and more!
July 13 – all-day, indoor event with presentations, panels, and plenty of time for question-and-answer period and networking (8:00am – 6:00pm)
July 14 – field trip to view nearby coexistence tool installations (8:00am – 2:00pm)
Food included with ticket:
Day 1: Continental breakfast, lunch, snacks, tea/coffee, evening appetizers for networking event
Day 2: Bagged lunch with snacks and water
Please note this is an in-person event. We are unfortunately not able to offer virtual attendance, however, PowerPoint presentation slide decks will be posted on our website following the symposium
*Detailed agenda is coming soon*
A block of standard rooms have been set aside at the hotel venue for $109.49 + taxes per room, per night. If you are interested, these can be booked by using the booking link. The hotel provides a complimentary shuttle to / from Edmonton International Airport as well as complimentary high speed wireless throughout entire hotel.
Beavers from Space launched April 4th on the Zooniverse. The citizens science project uses satellite imagery to uncover beaver habitat in Canada. Read on below to learn more about how you can help out.
Become a dam detective by searching satellite imagery for signs of beavers on the landscape!
Despite the cultural and ecological importance of ksisskstaki (beaver) little is known about their presence in Alberta’s streams and rivers. By searching through satellite imagery for beaver dams and lodges in the waterways of the Kainai Nation (Blood Tribe) in southern Alberta, Beavers from Space seeks to determine where beavers are present on the landscape and where they are not. Volunteers will search through imagery of over 7,000 kilometres (4,300 miles) of streams within the study area, a task that would be overwhelming and expensive to undertake with field work alone. This information, in combination with field work data, will inform riparian (river ecosystem) restoration locations, which may include the installation of beaver dam analogues. Beaver dam analogues are a proven riparian restoration technique that improves watershed health and function by mimicking the work of beavers.
Our study area is focused on the 3 watersheds (outlined in black below) that the Kainai Nation (Blood Tribe) reservation and timber limit are located in (outlined in red below). Generally, this area stretches west from Lethbridge, Alberta, to the British Columbia border, and includes Waterton Lakes National Park. The study area is just north of the Canadian-American border in the State of Montana.
By reviewing satellite imagery for beaver dams, you can help us understand where beavers are present in our watershed or where beaver-mediated restoration could occur where beavers are absent. We anticipate a relatively low density of beavers on this landscape, which is why we need your help to search every stream in the study area.
Dam neat project if you ask me! Click this link for a lot more information.
There was a bit of news from The First Annual SLO County Beaver Festival. It went well with around a thousand attendees over the day. A good time was had by all and especially the kids who got to build dams out of mud and sticks! There is also a fun video of Cooper Lienhart joining The Loving Mosh to sing Go Little Beaver Go at the Festival on April 1st, 2023.
Oh! One more thing. The Cambridge Filmworks people got rid of the darn nutria photo that I told them about! They found an image of a handsome European cousin to head the article like I hoped they would. Yeah!
Beavers have returned to the waters of Somerset and Wiltshire, hundreds of years after being wiped out.
Escapes from enclosures and unlicensed introductions are suspected to be behind the rodent’s return.
As many as 50 beavers could be living in the West Country, Natural England has revealed.
The government’s nature advisor had been investigating the possibility of beavers in the region following reports of the rodents in and around the Rivers Frome and Avon. The resulting report, published earlier this month, found a wealth of evidence that beavers were thriving in the areas, including dams, gnawn trees and burrows.
In total, it is estimated there could be anywhere from 36 to 62 adult beavers in sections of the rivers near Bath, Chippenham and Trowbridge, living in 13 families. If baby beavers, known as kits, and family units living in areas of the river which couldn’t be surveyed are included, then this figure could be even higher.
A spokesperson for the Avon Wildlife Trust previously described the presence of beavers in the area as ‘extremely significant’, adding that ‘the presence of this beaver population will support other wildlife and help us to tackle the ecological emergency.’
Where have the West Country’s beavers come from?
Eurasian beavers are rapidly being reintroduced across the UK, having been driven to extinction in the country over 400 years ago through hunting for the fur, meat and perfume trade. The mammals are now present across the country, from Scotland all the way south to Devon and London.
Officially, beavers can only be reintroduced into enclosures with a license from the government. However, many beavers are living wild following escapes from these sites, as well as unofficial introductions.
For instance, one of the UK’s largest populations of beavers can be found in Tayside, Scotland, is thought to be the result of a mixture of accidental and illegal releases.
While beavers are now considered a native species in England, Wales and Scotland, it is still a crime to release them without a license, which can result in up to two years in prison as well as an unlimited fine.
Many of the beavers in the West Country are thought to have been released unofficially, with the report estimating that these have probably taken place since 2016. Others, meanwhile, may be the descendants of animals which escaped from a private collection in the 2000s.
The beavers have now spread widely, with the majority of the families found in the River Frome, a tributary of the River Avon. Four families are found in the Avon itself, while another is found on the By Brook.
Though there had been reports of beavers in the River Brue and Kennet and Avon Canal, the latest report didn’t find enough evidence to verify their presence.
In total, the beavers may occupy as much as 11% of the available riverbanks in the areas of Wiltshire and Somerset where they live. Each family is estimated to have a bankside territory as long as eight kilometres, which is above average for England’s beavers.
While they may cover a relatively large area, the beavers are not thought to be having a major impact on their ecosystem at the moment. Though some families have started building dams and felling trees, the majority are still getting established in their new home.
With beavers having been made a protected species in England in October 2022, it’s thought that their populations will only grow if left undisturbed. While the report notes their activities could eventually pose a risk to transport, this is not likely in the near future.
Instead, it recommends further research to promote co-existence with these beavers. Assessing their genetic health, and coming up with management plans, can help to ensure these rodents can keep beavering away in the West Country.
The signs are instantly recognizable: partially chewed trees, pointy stumps and sprawling collections of sticks and logs in the middle of waterways. These all signal the presence of beavers, the plump, semi-aquatic critters that were once nearly hunted to extinction.
Established wildlife laws and reintroduction brought their numbers to stable levels, but they still remain a fraction of what they once were. Further recovery of beaver populations is crucial.
Because they significantly alter, manage and even improve the areas around them, beavers have earned the title of “ecosystem engineers.” Their work enhances the surrounding landscape and ecosystems, making these critters some of the most important, not to mention adorable, stewards of nature. Here are five ways beavers help the environment.
Beavers help control water flow.
You might assume that since beaver dams block water, they must cause floods, but that’s far from the case. Dams are penetrable structures that slow water flow, resulting in less erosion and flooding than undammed, fast flowing water. Dams physically store water on land where it soaks into the soil and initiates plant growth, able to turn bone-dry areas into bountiful wetlands. If you repeatedly visit beaver habitat in different seasons, you can see the transformations that take place thanks to their dams. A landscape often looks completely different from even just a few months prior.
Beavers improve water quality.
Rainwater runoff from artificial surfaces washes toxins into waterways, threatening aquatic ecosystems. Wetlands surrounding beaver dams act like kidneys by removing pollutants from water, effectively cleaning it. As dams decrease water flow, nutrient-rich sediment usually swept away by the current instead sinks and collects on the bottom. This abundance of minerals filters and breaks down harmful materials like pesticides and leaves areas downstream of dams healthier and less polluted than upstream.
Beaver activity creates more habitat for other wildlife.
Since beaver dams slow water flow, the original path is altered as the water meanders over additional ground, creating more wetlands where other species thrive. Important plants that feed animals and provide for people see their numbers increase over 33% in beaver wetlands, while birds nest on riverbanks, fish swim about and mammals forage for food in these natural havens. In fact, 25% of species living in these wetlands fully depend on beaver activity for survival.
Beavers stop wildfires.
Increasing wildfires destroy nature and emit greenhouse gasses, but beaver activity can hold the devastating flames at bay. Wetlands made by beaver dams concentrate water and moisturize the landscape, making it harder for fires to spread as potential fuel becomes harder to burn. Wildlife can shelter in these wet sanctuaries, safe from an encroaching blaze. Beavers might not drive red trucks or slide down poles, but they make an excellent fire department nonetheless.
Beavers help us fight climate change.
The primary driver behind climate change is the massive amount of carbon human activity pumps into the atmosphere. The more we emit, the more it builds up, but beavers help reduce its accumulation as their wetlands absorb and store the greenhouse gas. Globally, beaver wetlands hold 470,000 tons of carbon each year and perform carbon-capture work worth tens of millions of dollars. Restoring beavers to their natural habitats and widespread numbers can lead to further carbon absorption as the animals proliferate, construct dams and establish more wetlands. More beavers mean more wetlands, which mean less atmospheric carbon, a win-win-win scenario.
The incredible feats beavers perform should not be understated, whether it’s their beneficial environmental work or ability to transform landscapes. As the world’s foremost natural ecosystem engineers, they play crucial roles in managing nature unlike any other animal. You can celebrate these incredible critters on International Beaver Day every April 7. The next time you’re hiking and come across those telltale bites on trees or piles of sticks, be sure to thank a beaver for all they do in supporting the natural world by just being their busy little selves.
A Eurasian beaver family will be getting new neighbours to help protect an additional stretch of Finchingfield Brook. The Essex project is to build two, new, 50-acre enclosures in preparation for more beaver families. The new arrivals will extend the amazing work of their cousins, introduced to the Estate in 2019, who have already transformed a woodland into a thriving wetland. The unprecedented £350,000 scale-up is jointly supported by Anglian Water, the Environment Agency, the Anglian Eastern Regional Flood and Coastal Committee (RFCC), Essex County Council and Essex and Suffolk Water in an innovative partnership funding approach.
The two new enclosures, along the Finchingfield Brook, will measure 1.9km long cover 40 hectares (100 acres), 10 times the size of the original enclosure, which was built in 2019. Preparations for the project are already underway with two new beaver families expected to be re-introduced in Spring 2023.
Archie Ruggles-Brise, Spains Hall Estate manager said:
“The chance to bring more natural engineering skills to the estate is beyond exciting. Since 2019 we’ve seen what beavers can do to reduce flood risk, increase drought resilience, clean water and create year-round habitat for wildlife. Now, thanks to the incredible support of our partners, we can supersize these benefits.
“With a massive new area to work in the beavers will help make the Finchingfield area more able to weather the changes climate change will bring, and all the while providing inspiration and experience that others can use elsewhere. For the estate this means we can keep pushing the boundaries of what can be done on private land, if you are willing to be open about working with others and offer a compelling vision.”
Acting as nature’s engineers, the beavers have helped to completely transform the landscape around them. The dams have played a crucial role in reducing flood risk in the area by slowing down the river flow and channelling it through new channels and wetlands.
Throughout this year’s drought, the dams also helped the river flows by slowly releasing retained water, helping to protect local wildlife. We hope these new beavers settle in and breed as successfully as the original pair, who produced three sets of kits.”
Environment Agency lead on the project Matt Butcher said:
“It’s great to see this project go from strength to strength providing real benefits to the local environment and community.
“The beavers have shown what effective flood engineers they are in the past few years and it’ll be great to extend this to a wider area.”
Dr Robin Price, Director of Quality and Environment for Anglian Water said:
“The effects of climate change including the risk of drought and flooding are felt more keenly in the East of England more than anywhere else in the UK. We need to find new and better ways of dealing with the challenges they bring while continuing to protect homes and businesses– and what better way to approach the problem of flooding here in Finchingfield than this wonderful, nature-based solution.
“Restoring natural habitat in such a purposeful way is also at the heart of Anglian Water’s Get River Positive commitment and we are proud to be supporting the next stage of Archie’s vision for Spains Hall Estate.”
Cllr Peter Schwier, Climate Czar at Essex County Council said:
“Essex County Council has been involved in the Essex Beaver project from the very beginning, providing administrative assistance and advice on water courses, so we are very pleased this project is proving so successful.
“Our work with all partners involved in this project means we are improving space and habitat for wildlife, while at the same time the work of the beavers is mitigating flooding, two of the key priorities contained in the Everyone’s Essex Green Infrastructure Strategy.
“Beavers are productive and useful and an honour to have in the beautiful Essex countryside.”
Richard Powell, Chair of the Regional Flood and Coastal Committee said:
“We are once again delighted to be part of the estate’s work, using flood risk funding to deliver nature based solutions is in all our interests. This project will deliver so much more than reduced flooding, creating invaluable wetland habitat as an oasis in the East Anglian landscape.”
Tom Harris, Catchment Advisor at Essex & Suffolk Water said:
“We’re delighted to be able to support the next phase of this exciting project, expanding significantly on the good work that the beavers have already carried out, turning their areas of the Estate into wild wetlands – providing huge benefits for biodiversity as well as slowing the flow in the catchment.
“Having the Spain’s Hall estate situated in one of our key raw water catchments has given us a fantastic opportunity to develop our ongoing work with catchment landowners, bringing multiple benefits for water quality, the local environment and their businesses. We are truly looking forward to the continuation of our partnership with the fantastic team at Spains Hall.”
To find out more about this fantastic project, please visit: Anglian Water
It’s not clear yet whether this is one beaver who escaped from elsewhere or a pair who were released by rewilders, but it sounds like a good dam move to me!
