The return of the beaver

When I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, wild beavers in England were unthinkable. They were exotic creatures, the stuff of North American storybooks. However, unbeknownst to me and most British schoolchildren, the Eurasian beaver hadn’t gone extinct — though, it very nearly had. At the end of the nineteenth century, just 200 remained in Germany and a smattering across Eastern Europe and Russia. Slightly bigger than the North American beaver (yes America, our beaver is bigger than your beaver), it was too easy to hunt, with large, easy-to-spot riverside lodges. Its pelt was fashionable, its glands used for castor oil, its tail a popular meal. 

It’s only when I started working on my book The Last Drop, that I learned that the British beaver was back. And this February, 2025, as a guest of Graf UK, I watched in awe as I saw them for the very first time, on the day of their release into the Wildlife Trust's Nene Wetlands in Northamptonshire, next to the busy Rushden Lakes shopping centre. But before I tell that story – how did they come to return at all? And why is it relevant for Water Matters?

Reintroduction programmes to save the Eurasian beaver began in Sweden as early as the 1920s, and in France and Switzerland from the 1950s. But never in Britain. The last beaver in Scotland is mentioned in the 1526 Chronicles of Scotland. The last in England in York, in 1789. However, in 2007, a licence application submitted by the Scottish Wildlife Trust and Royal Zoological Society of Scotland to undertake a trial reintroduction of beavers at Knapdale, Argyll, was approved. In 2009, the splash of beavers was heard on the lochs for the first time in 500 years.

There has since been a determined drive to return beavers throughout Scotland and England (and hopefully, soon, Wales). In 2019, the Beaver Trust was founded with a vision of “thriving waterways vibrant with life, where beavers are embraced as a vital part of our biodiverse landscape”. Almost 30 licenced reintroduction sites have now appeared from London to Loch Lomond.

But there is one important difference between these returning beavers and their ancestors of old. They are fenced in. The conditions of a reintroduction licence require the entire site to be enclosed with robust metal fencing, sunk into the ground and standing at least 1.2 m above the surface, through which the beavers can’t escape.

Defra launched a public consultation in 2021 to change the classification of Eurasian beavers from ‘Animals no longer normally present’ to ‘Native animals’. It was approved. But almost four years on, the UK Government has failed to put in place the steps needed for their return beyond fenced enclosures. The issuing of licences for beavers to be returned to the wild, and the publishing of plans to enable beavers to be set free, remain mothballed.

In August 2024, The UK Wildlife Trusts had enough of waiting, and released their document ‘Beaver Vision’. In it, they state that “now is the time to be granting licences to reintroduce more beavers into the wild in preference to fenced enclosures. This would enable beavers to become part of our native ecology, providing our beleaguered wetlands with the most powerful natural restoration tool, and a host of benefits to society.” Beavers create dynamic wetland habitats that benefit nature, but also our own water supply. They reconnect rivers with their floodplains, reduce flooding, and increase groundwater levels in times of drought. Beaver dams and wetlands also act as natural water filters removing excess nutrients and pollutants.

When I spoke to a director of Affinity Water for my book The Last Drop, he told me, only half-jokingly, “We need to hire a load of beavers... we’re talking about funding a study to look at the impact of beavers on slowing flow and making rivers more resilient in low flow conditions… [beaver dams] stop floods when there’s really high water. And, in low water, they’re storing a lot of water within them.” 

On the beaver release day in Northamptonshire, whilst we waited excitedly for the beavers arrival on their motorway journey down from their capture (and quarantine) site in Scotland, I asked Katie King-Hurst, Northants Communities and Wildlife Manager at The Wildlife Trust BCN, about the benefits they were hoping the beavers would bring to the Nene Wetlands site: “they are a keystone species, so they're here to work for us”, she told me. “Really, we're hoping they're going to be doing some of the jobs that our conservation team currently have to do with chainsaws.” The laborious reed clearing and willow thinning will now be done naturally, by just one furry family of eight. Plus, “with climate change, flooding is becoming increasingly common. It's really hard for us some years to get in there and do any management. So that’s what the beavers will do.”

Matt Jackson, Conservation Director for the Wildlife Trust BCN, explained that “these larger mammals are the bit that's missing from our countryside. We've been pretty ruthless in the UK in terms of getting rid of particularly our larger wildlife, and some of these animals are the things that drive the way the countryside works.” Studies of earlier reintroductions in the 2010s are already showing remarkable results, says Jackson: “beavers slow the way water moves through the countryside… they dig pools, make small dams, create small wetland areas, and that's such a key component of keeping water in the countryside, letting it percolate slowly through [to groundwater]… and help take the peak off flood flows”.

Farmers, however, aren’t so keen. In response to the Defra consultation, the National Farmers Union (NFU) said, “beaver reintroductions can have negative impacts — potentially undermining riverbanks, damaging trees, impeding farmland drainage and causing low-lying fields to flood.” The NFU did, however, proffer an easy solution: “Where there is a financial impact on a farm business, adequate compensation must be made”. Defra’s environmental land-management services (Elms) payments offer a mechanism to do exactly that, designed to “recognize the value of existing natural assets . . . protecting and enhancing these assets to achieve good environmental and climate outcomes” — it would be very easy to add ‘land lost to beaver flooding’ to the list.

This isn’t merely a UK-centric story, either. While the beaver remains common in North America, prior to the arrival of European colonists, beavers inhabited creeks and wetlands from the Arctic tundra down to the deserts of northern Mexico. Alice Outwater’s 1996 book Water: A Natural History notes that an estimated “two hundred million beavers once lived in the continental United States, their dams making meadows out of forests, their wetlands slowly capturing silt”. Today, just 10% of that number are left. Conservation groups today, including The Arizona Watershed Management Group’s “Release the Beavers” campaign, are now calling for beaver reintroduction to restore creeks and rivers as a natural solution for a desperately dry regions.

On the beaver release day, the time finally comes – the beavers arrive. A small group of invited guests – including Wildlife Trust staff and volunteers who have worked towards this day for the past four years – and me, watch silently as six heavy cages are carried down to the waters edge. One by one, the grates are lifted. Each beaver – two adults, two yearlings (teenagers, in human terms) and four kits (toddlers) step slowly forward, take to the water, and glide shyly away. We are the first people to see this in this part of the English midlands for over 400 years. The awe and privilege hit me as I see their scruffy fur, dry from the car journey, sleek down with the water. They will bring great benefits to this fenced-in wetland. But I hope that very soon Defra will allow the fences to be raised, and we can start to see the benefits brought nation-wide. Our water system sorely needs it.

To watch the trail camera footage of the beavers at the Wildlife Trust's Nene Wetlands, courtesy of Graf UK, click here.