Why it’s boom time for beavers in England
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The first time I saw a beaver was a few years ago. It was June, it was at dusk, so it must have been about 9pm. For 400 years in Britain, it would have been impossible to witness the scene Guardian environment reporter Helena Horton was being treated to on a warm summer evening. We had to be very, very quiet and we tiptoed down to the beaver enclosure and stood there in silence and it was a very, very still pool.

The sunset was kind of reflected, it was so beautiful. Helena was on the farm of Derek Gow, the man credited with bringing beavers back to Britain. A 30-year endeavour. Suddenly I see some ripples coming out near the lodge.

and then plop, a head of a beaver comes out of the water and it starts swimming along like doing doggy paddle type swimming. It's a little kit, a baby beaver doing laps of the pool almost like we would do and collecting willow branches in its mouth and carrying them back and forth.

Until last week, beavers like the one Helena had gone to see had to be in enclosures. It was illegal to release them into the wild. It climbs onto the bank of the pond and starts chomping away at a branch of willow which they eat, making these almost cartoon-like sounds of chomping, which is also very cute to hear. It was like peeking into a secret world.

But now, beavers are back. On Friday, the government announced it would be allowing the release of one of nature's best architects into English waterways. So today, what could these long-lost rodents do for the environment? Why has their return taken so long? And when might you be able to witness the magic of a baby beaver paddling in a pond? MUSIC

From The Guardian, I'm Madeleine Finlay and this is Science Weekly. They were hunted for their pelts and their oil, so if you managed to kill a beaver you'd be able to make quite a lot of money because its pelts and oil were considered very valuable. Having been pushed to extinction more than four centuries ago, beaver numbers have recently risen in Britain. Helena has been covering their graduated return. Licences were granted for beavers to be kept in enclosures,

Although some inevitably have escaped, others were illegally set free. But now the government is licensing beaver releases into the wild. This means it will be legal for people to release beavers into waterways to clean them up if they get permission from the government first and submit a beaver management plan.

And Helena, many people want beavers back because they're truly water system engineers and they could provide important services to the environment. Yes, they basically dig into the riverbank and widen the wetland and they make the whole area very wet.

So over the past few centuries, we have engineered our rivers in this country for things like canals and made them very straight. Actually, rivers used to be a lot more complicated than that. They used to be winding. They used to kind of spill out into floodplains every so often and be surrounded by little pools. So rivers

If you think about a channel that's dug long and straight and you pour water into it, it goes down very, very quickly. But if you make it wiggly and windy and have some kind of pools spreading out from it, the water stays in some of the pools and it goes down the system a bit more slowly. So if you have a river that's going down into a town or village...

and you have beavers upstream digging away and creating a wetland, that means that the water stays upstream and doesn't immediately go down into the village or town when it rains. So they have reduced flooding. Equally, drought can be averted in the areas where they dig because rather than going straight into the sea, the water is kept in the land. That means if you have a long period without rain, you have water that the beavers have kept in the system.

So beavers are restoring rivers and wetlands to how they used to look, which helps with both flooding and drought. And Helena, you recently went to visit a beef farmer, Chris Jones, who set up a beaver enclosure on his farm back in 2017. What does his land look like today? So farms are often quite tidy because they're so managed and, you know, farmers account for every single part of their land and they make sure it's all productive. And so they're

Chris's farm is very different. So it's a beautiful beef farm in Cornwall and you walk out into his fields and you start feeling a bit of squelching at your feet and you look down and you can see a frog spawn. It's like a meadow pasture kind of thing. And then you walk through that into his beaver area.

and it gets wetter and wetter, and you can hear the steady trickle of water. You can see pools that have been dug, you can see river streams of different speeds flowing past, which incidentally are very good for fish because they like to spawn in these very shallow streams that have got gravel at the bottom, which the beavers actually create. And all of these different waterways converge into a big pond right at the end, and that's where the beavers live. So this pond existed before the beavers were introduced by Chris.

But they've expanded it by two thirds by digging at the sides of it. And they have two lodges. They dig a burrow and they cover it in sticks where they can keep dry and quite cosy. And they have two of those on the pond that they can kind of choose between where they want to go that night. So very spectacular. The way that you've described the land, it sounds like it has a lot of diversity within the small ecosystems that are created by these beavers. I assume that also means that a lot of

other wildlife is coming back. Studies have found that fish end up being larger in size when they're in beaver areas because they're able to get to maturity and stay healthy for longer. It's partly because of the pollution reduction that beavers can do by filtering out nasties. So they kind of build these leaky dams lined by vegetation. This filters out sediment and other pollution. Also, you get invertebrate life because shallow still water is good for them.

and they create kind of hiding places for other small rodents. They also have found that otters do better in beaver managed areas. They're known as keystone species because when you have beavers you tend to have myriad other species that kind of grow out of the beaver area. So pretty much every creature great and small that you can think of in the British countryside benefits, even birds because the invertebrate life that they manage to create or sustain obviously is food for the birds.

And it's interesting that you mentioned pollution there, something that we're not particularly good at when it comes to our waterways. I mean, how significant can it be when beavers move in and are able to do their kind of architecture? So Chris, the farmer I saw earlier,

He has had scientists be very interested in his farm because it's one of the few farms in the country where the farmer really works alongside beavers. He's completely organic, but you still sometimes get nitrates, which is the nutrients from cow dung, leach into the waterways. And scientists from the University of Cambridge surveyed the water from before it flowed into the beaver wetland.

and then after and they found an 80% reduction in nitrates and nitrates are the pollutant that if you have too many of them in the water they boost algal growth and other plant growth and this chokes out the fish and invertebrate life because they can't get the light filtering down into the water so yes in his example they're making a big difference and

Obviously, they can't completely be the solution on their own. We need to reduce the amount of pollutants that go into the water, whether that's through sewage or whether it's through fertiliser on farms. But beavers can really be a huge help. So we've got benefits to biodiversity. We've got benefits from water management, pollution improvement.

It's quite a wide range of things. And Chris has also told you that he thinks they benefit the local economy as well. Yes, for sure. So maybe it'll become less pronounced when you have more beavers all over the country. But at the moment, he gets so many people going to see him. He reckons he's had 10,000 people come since 2017 when he released his beavers. And these 10,000 people, it's quite a small village. They have to go somewhere to stay. So the local pubs that have got rooms benefit.

have to eat and drink somewhere, again the pubs, but also his neighbours have seen increased business and tourism. There's a horse riding stables nearby where people go on horse rides to try and see the beaver wetland. So people go and they spend money and it revitalises the local economy. Helena, you've described this extraordinary animal as

Why hasn't this change happened before now? It's been such a long time in the making. Who's opposed to beaver releases and why would they be opposed to it? It really has been a long and quite frustrating story. So the first beavers were brought to the UK in a trial 30 years ago that was in Scotland. But there are some farmers and large landowners who are concerned about beavers felling trees or flooding part of their land. But

But, I mean, these worries are so minor compared to other issues that they're facing. And also beavers can actually help their land. But they have been really lobbying against it. They're quite powerful voices, particularly in the last Conservative Party. Even Labour had some problems getting it through because they've already upset farmers with an inheritance tax they've put in.

And number 10 were concerned this would further antagonise them. But as I've said, Chris Jones, the farmer, obviously he actively wanted beavers. The guy who brought beavers to this country, Derek Gow, he used to be a sheep farmer himself and still farms. So it's simplistic to say that all farmers are against it. It's just some very loud and influential voices who've been against it. And for those farmers who may have...

legitimate concerns if beavers moved onto their land, whether it's from trees being felled or maybe productive land being flooded. Are there ways to kind of mitigate that, to manage that? Yes. Even in the plan the government put out on Friday, they say that any beaver plan has to include mitigations for people who might be impacted nearby, whether that could be infrastructure projects or farms.

There's a programme they do in Germany and other Central European countries that have beavers where the government comes and removes beavers from the places where they shouldn't be, like a carrot or potato farm, which you wouldn't want flooded, and transport them into a more appropriate area. Also, I think the fact in the UK you have to get permission to release them only in appropriate areas. So...

It can be mitigated. And also people get upset because beavers take down trees. But Chris Jones, the farmer, showed me what he does. He puts chicken wire around the boughs of trees and they don't like biting that. So all you have to do to save your favourite trees from beavers is to wrap them in chicken wire. Very cheap and very effective. You've described this long fight to reach this point.

With the climate crisis, you can see why. There's a growing argument for these beavers, whether it's combating floods or droughts. But why do you think the beavers have won out in the end?

Change of government. I think the Tories tried for so long to release them. I've been covering this story for eight years and it's been going on before that. I mean, even Boris Johnson, former prime minister, stood up on stage at a Conservative conference and said he wanted to build back Beaver, which meant release them. Even Liz Truss was relatively pro-Beaver. Unfortunately, they were blocked by their party.

So it's been something that people have wanted to do for a long time. So I think that Labour kind of wanted to go, the Tories failed to do this and we have now managed it. So I think that's partly why. But also people care more about saving wildlife now it is so obviously in decline. We've signed up to international nature targets to protect 30% of our water and land by 2030, which we're really falling behind on. Beavers can really help with that. It's a no brainer.

They're magical, beautiful creatures that we've lost from our landscape that rightfully belong here and now they're back. It's thrilling the idea that we may get to see beavers in the wild. When can we look forward to the first beavers being released and how's that going to work? The timing of this is kept under wraps but I can tell you it's in coming days. It's going to be in Purbeck Heath in Dorset which is a National Trust property.

They will get a beaver from an undisclosed location and probably some kits, I'd say, some young beavers. And they'll bring them down in a crate and then they'll just open the crate and let them out into the wetland at Purbeck Heath and they can roam free. They can go where they like. Well, Helena, after reporting on it for so long, I'm sure it's going to be really exciting to see that release. Enjoy that and thank you so much. Thanks. Thanks.

A big thanks to Helena Horton. You can find all her reporting on beavers, including the first wild release coming up in the next couple of days, on theguardian.com. And that's it for today. This episode was produced by me, Madeline Finlay. It was sound designed by Joel Cox and the executive producer is Ellie Burey. We'll be back, much like the beavers, on Thursday. See you then.

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