The Government has announced that it will allow wild beavers to be introduced back into the rivers of England – prompting renewed debates about whether the industrious creatures will boost flood protection and the environment or cause issues for farmers.
But in one corner of the West Country, the debate in Westminster, in the national media’s reporting of the news, and around the country, seems strange and uninformed and the green light that means beavers can now be ‘re-introduced’ was met with something of a shrug.
For on the rivers and streams of the catchment of the Bristol Avon, beavers are already well-established, numerous and thriving, long before Government ministers and Natural England thought they needed reintroducing.
And any landowners and farmers entering the debate about whether beavers might end up causing more harm than good could cast their eye towards the rivers of Bristol, Bath, North East Somerset and Wiltshire – where it is reckoned at least 50 beavers have been living, without anyone noticing at all.
The first anyone knew that beavers were already out and about in this part of the West Country only really came about because of the Covid lockdown of 2020. A year earlier, in 2019, people walking their dogs along the river banks started noticing the famous signs of beavers – bits of trees and branches gnawed off to look like pencils, just like in the cartoons.
The reports began flooding in during the Covid spring and summer of 2020, with more people getting their daily exercise by going out and about in areas they perhaps hadn’t before. So the Avon Wildlife Trust began to realise the reports couldn’t be a coincidence, and started to properly investigate.
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The reports were a surprise for two reasons. Firstly, beavers had been extinct in Britain for around 500 years, since the last one was hunted to extinction for its fur. And secondly, because although there were beavers in West Country rivers – in enclosures in Devon that were carefully monitored and there was a pilot release more than 100 miles away – the Government had been resolute that beavers must not be released anywhere else, and no one thought they had been.
At the Avon Wildlife Trust, a team led by Amy Coulthard, began investigating. They were helped by a man born for the job – Bevis Watts – the chief executive officers of the Bristol-based sustainable bank Triodos. He took a Covid-inspired sabbatical in 2021 and instead of working in the city centre, spent his days silently paddling a kayak up and down the River Avon and all its many little streams, brooks and tributaries, looking for any signs of beavers.
He found them, and the Wildlife Trust went about capturing firm evidence, in the form of hidden cameras, which captured images of a family of beavers living perfectly happily. They’d been there a while, it seemed, with young born in previous years.
And after the big announcement was eventually made at the end of September 2021, and the news broken by Bristol Live, there were more questions. Were these the only beavers? Was this family a one-off? Or were there more? And if so, how many?
After Avon Wildlife Trust showed that there were at least one family of beavers living on the River Avon catchment, Natural England stepped in, and embarked on a much bigger survey, sending experts and volunteers out into the waterways of Bristol, Bath, North East Somerset, South Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, to look.
They discovered that the debate about whether or not beavers should be released into the rivers of England – in the West Country, at least – was meaningless and redundant. They were already there.
No fewer than 771 signs of beaver activity were recorded, including 13 ‘lodges’, the above ground nests beavers build for themselves, four burrows and 20 dams. And the Natural England surveyors, in a bombshell report eventually published in March 2023, said they thought the 771 separate signs of beaver activity, was an under-estimation, because beavers are famously secretive and hide their tracks, and there were large stretches of the river network the people searching couldn’t access.
All told, the 2023 Natural England report said that, while the rest of the country might be debating if beavers should be released in England, there were already at least 50 beavers living in just a few of the tributaries of the Bristol Avon, and the Avon itself. No one knows exactly where they came from, but it is suspected a few were released illegally some years back, and they have quietly thrived and spread.
Last weekend, the BBC reported that ‘first wild release of beavers in England is now expected to take place in the next few days’. On the River Frome and the River Avon and its streams and brooks in North East Somerset, Wiltshire and South Gloucestershire, the Beaver Trust probably don’t need to bother.
And the presence of beavers, if numbers continue to grow and the animals spread into all parts of the River Avon catchment area, is good news for the environment and for humans, but there needs to be a management plan in place to monitor where they are and what impact they have.
Last year, Rob Stoneman, the director of landscape recovery at The Wildlife Trusts, said: “The benefits of beavers are widely acknowledged and well-evidenced. Numerous scientific studies have shown that beavers improve water quality, stabilise water flows during times of drought and flood, and give a huge boost to habitats and to other wildlife. Given the climate and nature crises, we need beavers back in the wild to give us a hand to resolve these challenges.”
Avon Wildlife Trust helped form a group back in February 2021 called the Bristol Avon and Somerset Frome Beaver Management Group, when it became apparent that there were beavers living in the area.
It published a ‘Strategy Framework’ which aims to ‘maximise the benefits of beaver reintroduction while also assessing the legitimate concerns of some stakeholders’.