Reintroductions of beavers into the wild in several parts of England
wildlifetrusts.org
wildlifetrusts.org
We have a family of beavers on some property in the US. It is fascinating to watch their effect on the landscape over time. Ours cycle between an upstream and downstream habitat every few years. They allow one to regrow while they harvest the other. The area they manage is a favorite spot for many other animals including deer, various birds, coyotes, foxes, etc.
In general, we messed up the ecosystem - the most complex system on this planet and we insist on messing it further by one-sided protection of the "cute" speciess.
Don't get me wrong, I admire beavers: hard workers, creative, imaginative, resilient, with strong families. All in all, a role model for humanity.
I just wish we would look at the big system and strive to fix that as a whole.
What would that entail? The whole of the UK has been a human managed ecosystem for centuries. Deforestation was completed about 400 years ago and the larges stand of contiguous trees is under 300 sq. mi. So many of the species that would have made up the old ecosystem are gone.
This takes time and you can't score quick rewards. That's why it doesn't look good on an agenda.
The only long term fix is to move all humans off earth to space/mars/moon/elsewhere, and keep the whole of earth for nature and observation only.
Everything else won't work.
The question is do we all collectively care about the environment enough to all lose our home planet? I suspect no.
https://beavertrust.org/historic-first-official-wild-beaver-... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwygxvzpkevo
I don't understand what a stakeholder is in this context. Also, why are licenses involved? What does this even mean?
It's the UK.
(Sorry, had to.)
The impact on downstream water is almost entirely positive, the leaky dams they build filter sediment and excess nutrients (often from fertiliser run off).
They also smooth out peak water flow to help alleviate downstream flooding. Obviously this comes at the cost of flooding areas behind their dams, but this can also be positive, because in the increasingly dry summers, the ponds they create help keep the land upstream cooler and wetter.
The beaver site in Ealing, London was mostly funded because it was a cheaper solution to help with downstream flooding than equivalent hard infrastructure and a significant cost of that project was the fence to keep them in.
Even fish which need to navigate upstream, can leap these dams because they have co-evolved with the beaver, and also beavers are vegetarian so don't predate the fish.
Obviously the main problem, is because in the UK we wiped them out, we've not co-evolved with them, hence the problems of them flooding land that would regularly have flooded, but we have decided to use for other purposes.
I highly recommend anyone who's interested in ecosystems go visit an established beaver site, the mosaic of habitats they create can support large amounts of biodiversity.
The licences are necessary because with such a sensitive issue, it must be ensured that only responsible and well-resourced organizations can release beavers into the wild. Otherwise, beavers may be introduced into areas that are unsuitable for them, or into areas where they will cause disproportionate damage to farming operations, and either eventuality would harm the perception of beavers. If that happened, the beavers might become so unpopular that it becomes politically impossible to continue with the reintroduction, so it's in everyone's best interests to be careful. Beavers are wonderful animals and can be very beneficial to their local environment, but you can't just dump them on a housing estate or something and expect good results.
I don't know what the exact criteria is, but the winding, damp brooks of the area where I live have been among the successful trial areas for beaver reintroduction. An abundance of willow trees is one factor that makes for an ideal beaver environment, for instance.
How do you prevent them from spreading to these locations once they are reintroduced?
Then other bodies started felling trees into their river to create habitat for juvenile fish.
As an angler you might forgive me for thinking one of those bodies was in the wrong. Either way their conservation efforts have not mitigated the collapsing stocks of salmon over the two decades of their management.
I for one am happy for the beavers to have a go instead
They definitely shouldn’t have removed dead trees. Worst case scenario if they were ugly and someone politically powerful wanted them gone they should have been broken up or ground into large mulch.
I always felt that varied habitat was better.
REALLY good book and made me think very differently about beavers. Highly recommend it!
Edit: The section of the book dedicated to European beavers is much smaller than the American counterpart, in case that matters. I do think the coverage was good on both sides though.
it was a heck of a trip though. I had a couple of up and down days but generally, it was a good one. It was my first hike, and it was a multi-day hike. So, in some ways I bit off more than I should've lol
Actually, I'd really recommend first just looking at all the pictures in the "pocket guide" version of the book. [2]
He doesn’t really hate the beavers, just doesn’t want them going after his pair tree, though he found a way to defend it. They’re fascinating animals.
We have some beavers that dam up parts of our property every few years which stops water from flowing to certain areas we need water in. We just throw smoke in them to make sure they abandon it and then stick some Tannerite in their dams and blow em up. Honestly, it's a pretty fun way to deal with it.
Also worth a watch
Actually, you are not allowed to have pet European hedgehogs in the UK. Why not???
They're protected species in much of Europe, so the law is to prevent people from grabbing them out of their backyard.
You can have African Pygmy Hedgehogs! My girlfriend and I owned 3, and they're adorable little menaces.
Kind of sad that people don't hitch anymore. You come across all sorts of stuff and people. My little brother was in a garage band and wrote a song called "Stick Out Your Thumb And Have Some Fun", which I liked.
There's something about looking personable, well-groomed and attentive, and still being ignored by a succession of mostly empty vehicles that takes a toll on one's ego :(
Good on you for rescuing the hedgehog though!
I know, it was a bit soul destroying. In my experience, the thing to do was not to try too hard (a bit of Zen here, perhaps). I remember being dropped at a roundabout outside Doncaster UK where there were already a couple of other guys, which is usually the kiss of death for all concerned. So I went up the road's embankment, laid down and slept for an hour or so - it was a sunny day. When I woke the other guys had got lifts and I stuck out my thumb and got one too.
The thing about hitching is that you want a little money in your pocket so that if you really do get stuck somewhere you can maybe get a bus to somewhere better, and you don't feel too powerless and miserable. Also, hitch with a pretty woman - me and my ex-wife hitched Edinburgh-Yorkshire-Wales and back, doing camping. The last bit back to Edinburgh was in a Rolls Royce!
Re. public transport, indeed the occasion when I tried hitchhiking was after missing the one of the two twice-a-day buses on a recent journey of mine from a remote village. However, I eventually caught a succession of unlikely connections further on; I ended up arriving earlier than expected even without successfully hitchhiking, so all's well that ends well!
Baiting is obviously horrible though. And we in the UK also have vile "sports" such as hare-coursing. But we have more or less got rid of fox hunting.
(Half)joking aside, I do understand that Lincolnshire has a much worse problem than my native Welsh border country. Our smaller fields and undulating ground make coursing much more difficult. We also don't have the density of hares.
Whilst baiting is a persistent sub culture, it is extremely niche. I live in a country area, and my life puts me in contact with the shooting and farming communities. I heard of baiting once ever. It is much more niche than other countryside crimes like stealing GPS units off tractors, sheep rustling, poaching etc. None of which attract attention from the public.
I don't want to see animals killed, but the UK is a highly managed landscape. The badgers success has been a disaster for ground nesting birds (especially lapwings, or peewits as we call them locally) , and hedgehogs. This makes me sad.
Then there is the issue of TB. Because the populace, as you put it, are so fond of badgers there has been this appalling censorship of the debate about this issue. In fact for years we had all kinds of groups pretending that there was no link between TB in badgers and TB in cows. Lets have some facts. If a dairy cow catches TB from a badger then it will be killed by the government. The herd will get constant checks and animals will keep getting killed for having antibodies present in their bloodstream. This is because the spread of TB must be stopped at all costs! That makes me sad. If a badger gets TB, it will likely infect its whole sett. It is likely to die of the disease. You can't kill them though, because badgers must be protected at all costs. I spy a logical inconsistency in those two positions.
https://www.yellowstone.org/wolf-project/, https://rewilding.academy/how-wolves-change-rivers/
Of course, that's Yellowstone which is a lot bigger and not populated by people. Wolves are returning (or, being allowed to return) to the Netherlands as well where they end up decimating sheep populations for the fun of it, much to the chagrin of farmers.
My parents' neighbours have a huge number of goats in their property. It really is in the middle of nowhere Northern Portugal and for decades everyone always said "oh the wolves are gone, they used to be such a menace to our animals but not anymore. Barely any need for guard dogs".
However, there is a small (200~300) population of wolves and since Covid it seems they got less scared of people, or more brave and desperate because the intense forest fires have ravaged their turf. Last year they attacked the goats and killed dozens of them. It was, according to my dad, one of the goriest things he ever saw.
Guess what, the guard dogs are back, nobody says it's all a thing in the past. On one hand it's great news that wolves are making a comeback but there's always the other side.
The neighbours have a big piece of land and electrifying the fences would be quite expensive, the guard dogs seem to be doing their jobs quite well, no attacks since then.
The real issue here seems to be the forest fires that disturbed the wolves’ equilibrium.
Wolves ? You have to get guardian dogs (a requirement to get compensated for attacks), accept that a part of your herd will be killed each year (disrupting the dynamic of the herd I've been told) and getting a small compensation. Guardian dogs cause problems with hikers. Someone I know had her dog killed, and I hate having 3 or 4 of them barking around me until I get far from a herd. They aren't that many incidents but it's always a stressful situation.
No wolves? You rely on hunters to regulate the population of some species (chamois, alpine ibex, etc.)
People against the reintroduction of wolves seem to see proponents as city dwellers with no experience of the real world, and proponents seem to see people against it as retrograde.
This worked well in 1950s Britain because they had exterminated all large predators! Let's be real about that. For most of human history, nature was deadly.
1. Humans have spent centuries exterminating wolves anywhere humans regularly go.
2. Humans adapt their behavior to minimize the risk of attack by wild predators.
This is like saying "relatively few people get mugged wandering around alone in the tenderloin at 3am". It's because everyone knows it's a terrible idea and avoids doing so. That doesn't make the area safe.
I wouldn't tell a toddler to go play in the woods, you are correct about that, but the rest of us freely wander nature without fretting too much over it. I also just checked and there have been zero wolf attacks on humans in my state. Ever. We just aren't their preferred targets.
From what i've read, lethal wolf attacks in premodern Europe, even up to the late 18th century, were extremely common and claimed hundreds of human lives per year. Predators are predators. They stop attacking easy prey only if they're forcefully habituated into not doing so, not because they've become more warm, fuzzy and calm.
Beavers used to come up from the nearby park, and dam up the lake. They'd chew down the decorative cherry trees (boo), and Bradford Pear trees (yay).
I was reading (maybe here), that beavers basically obviated a multimillion-dollar dam project, somewhere out West.
This was the story: https://www.voxnews.al/english/kosovabota/qeveria-po-e-plani...
https://boingboing.net/2025/02/05/while-government-officials...
Now, if we could just train beavers to build affordable housing...
Contractors' quotes 5x higher than for private buildings? Send a brown bear to talk to 'em.
Limited government funding? Send a wild boar to budget meetings.
Restrictive zoning laws? Put a mountain lion in the room at the next zoning review.
NIMBYs don't want affordable housing? Wolves roam their neighborhood until NIMBYs agree to allow new housing.
Lengthy approval process? A honey badger asks for approval.
Economic disparity between rising housing costs and stagnant wages? Moose roams around in businesses until wages raise.
800+ kg of stubborn disagreement.
Now, with modern permits, etc, these projects take 5-10 years, $10M’s and have significant environmental impact.
As a direct result, every few years, people around here burn to death or lose their homes or whatever.
So, everyone is less safe, and the environment suffers.
Also, I make jokes about beavers, because it’s better than crying.
That could potentially lead to some downsides.
In the human population though the natural selection (i.e. whose children are going to be more successful?) seems in the current environment to favor the strategy of hoarding resources to yourself and denying them to the others.
What a bunch of dissimulating bullshit. If they actually wanted to support landowners, they wouldn't be re-introducing this destructive species.
It kind of does! :-)
There is a stream behind our yard and one year beavers built a dam. They were hard to spot in the daytime but we caught them at night with trailcams. They are very cute but surprisingly big and round. Of course they caused a ton of damage to trees around the trail, though whether that's good or bad depends on whether you were attached to those trees or not. We enjoyed the process of watching the nature unfold.
If we are in agreement then please accept my humble high five.
I've encountered relatively few people who were concerned about the damage to trees. The typical concern is over damage to land. Any animal than engineers their environment, including both beavers and humans, has a disproportionate ability to alter land use. That includes humancentric development and natural ecosystems.
I am not going to claim that beavers are either good or bad. I am going to point out that humans are as much a part of nature as beavers, so preserving natural ecosystems is almost always in our favour. Yet there are circumstances where managing is likely a better approach than preserving, simply because nature can throw nasty things our way too. (We are, for example, not to eager to let rats thrive in our cities.)
England is a nation of floodplains. Its also overcrowded.
Another STUPID green fallacy.