I thought I might cry. But the emotions that threatened to overwhelm turned more euphoric—a silly, wide smile, plastered across my face for hours. As the first beaver padded tentatively but fixedly out of its cage towards the water, I was witnessing history. The first of its kind to return to this part of central England for over 400 years.
Beavers would have been a common sight for our Tudor ancestors—as natural a part of our waterways as otters and swans. But as I watched the return of this surprisingly large, furry mammal and its family at the Wildlife Trust’s Nene Wetlands in Northamptonshire, next door to Rushden Lakes shopping centre, I wasn’t only present for the righting of an historical wrong. I was seeing the future. Because when we eradicated the beaver, we killed off a substantial part of our natural water system—one that is now foundering in sewage, hosepipe bans and bankrupt water companies. The return of the humble beaver, believe it or not, could go a long way towards solving all those problems.
The last record of a British beaver was near York in 1789. A fairly docile animal, the Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber), unlike its brasher North American cousins (Castor canadensis), builds relatively small dams and modest lodges. It was always easy to hunt—its fur, musk and meat all sought after. (Perhaps my favourite tall tale about beavers is that battered fish and chips only became the national dish after the former favourite, beaver tail and chips, became unavailable). But the timing saved it from the ravages of the 19th century. Between 1840 and 1890, the Victorians drained 12m acres of land. Rivers that should be winding, with floodplains, marshlands, ponds and fallen trees, were bent (or straightened) to man’s will. This broadly remained government policy right through to the 1980s Water Board.
Then came population growth, privatisation of water companies, and climate change. Suffice to say, water demand has been on an upward trajectory, while water supply (reservoirs, rivers and groundwater) trends downwards. The moment when these two lines on the graph pass each other, like soon-to-be grounded ships in the night, was memorably described as “the jaws of death” by the former head of the Environment Agency in 2019. The National Audit Office even put a date on it: no later than 2034. That now looks a conservative estimate.
Rewilding rural rivers and reconnecting them with floodplains is the first step for both water and climate resilience. In the Lake District, a re-meandering scheme in the Swindale valley costing just £200,000 returned the river to its original course. The RSPB, one of the project partners, explains: “we began work to ‘rewiggle’ the river in 2016… [and] carved out a new, curvy channel that was 180 metres longer than the poker-straight one we started with”. It’s easy to picture how that would slow, hold and absorb more water. Just months after work was completed, salmon spawned there for the first time in centuries.
The town of Pickering, North Yorkshire, fed up with almost annual flooding, came close to spending £20m on concrete flood defences in the 2010s. Instead, the decision was made to rewild and restore the river upstream, to “slow the flow” of flood water. When flooding hit Yorkshire the following year, Pickering was one of the few towns in the area that came out unscathed. The measures included scattering 354 “leaky dams” made of heather bales and felled trees. This cost £2m—90 per cent less than the concrete wall solution, and far more effective. But there was something waiting in the wings that could do the job for free: beavers.
In 2009, the Scottish government ran the first licensed beaver reintroduction in British waters (albeit illegal rewilding had already occurred on the River Tay). The first update report describes beavers as “ecosystem engineers” and a “keystone species” bringing both ecological and economic benefits. In 2011, a pair were released on private land in Devon. In 2019, The Beaver Trust was founded. And by the 2020s, a beaver boom was underway. The one I attended on a bitterly cold February day was the 28th licenced reinduction, with the 27th having happened just four days earlier in Shrewsbury.
That same week brought breaking beaver news from Czechia. A planned dam across the Klabava River, delayed since 2018 due to planning wrangles, had seen a family of beavers move in and construct a dam in barely a week—saving the government a reported $1.2m. “Beavers always know best,” Jaroslav Obermajer, of the Czech Nature and Landscape Protection Agency, told Radio Prague International. “The places where they build dams are always chosen just right—better than when we design it on paper”. How many wild beavers did it take to finish the job? Just one family of eight—coincidentally the same number as I saw taking to the waters in Northamptonshire.
But, there’s a twist. The Northants Eight are not truly wild. They are, like all English reintroductions to-date, kept captive behind a beaver-proof fence that encircles their lake. This was set to change when Defra officially re-recognised beavers as a native species in England in 2022. However, the next step—to allow licences without fenced enclosures—never materialised. The British beaver remains in legal limbo—a naturalised citizen, but with no right to roam. We will not reap the benefits of their water engineering services until Defra makes the final move.
Professor Alastair Driver, director of Rewilding Britain, has called the release of beavers into the wild “the simplest, most cost-effective and positive nature-based solution that the UK Government can take” and has urged Steve Reed, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to issue “government licenses for wild beaver releases without further delay”. The final sticking point may be the farming lobby. But Defra’s Environmental Land Management (Elms) payments, already used to pay farmers for “rewilding” and “rewetting” projects, are well-placed to compensate farmers for any beaver-related flooding.
Back at the Rushden Lakes shopping centre, the only river island I saw was River Island. But if the beavers were freed from their managed wetland confines and into the neighbouring river Nene, there could be river islands, leaky dams and lodges aplenty, saving downstream Northampton from winter flooding (the last major incident there was as recent as November) and adding water to boreholes of beleaguered local water company Anglian.
A few days later, I asked the Wildlife Trust for an update. The beavers are “doing well and settling into their new home”, Matt Johnson, conservation manager, told me. They spent the first few days exploring, including their human-made beaver lodge, where trail cam footage shows them making a bed of straw. A kit contentedly nibbles at a twig. But reintroduced beavers always eventually move out to make their own lodge. Nature’s engineers, after all, like to build for themselves.
