Beavers are a really important tool in river restoration, and they’re free as well,’ says Dr Alan Law, a freshwater environments expert
A cheap solution to tackle the scourge of Britain’s polluted and degraded rivers? It sounds too good to be true.
But some say the answer lies in beavers, the nifty rodent with a reputation for transforming their local landscape into thriving wetland that boosts the health of waterways without charging a penny. Reintroducing once-extinct beavers is not a silver bullet for restoring all ailing rivers – indeed allowing beavers to roam fills farmers with dread – but experts are confident they are part of the remedy. They are calling on the Government to speed up producing a plan for wild beaver releases so rivers can start to reap the rewards.
“[Beavers] are a really important tool, and, actually, they’re free as well. So, it doesn’t cost millions of pounds to put beavers in, you need the right sort of landowner and understanding people,” says Dr Alan Law, an expert in freshwater environments at the University of Stirling.
“We need to use every possible tool that we have, and not everything’s going to be the winner in every single place. But we need to do something because the rivers aren’t getting any better, they’re getting worse. And actually, we’re standing back when the solutions are right in front of us.”
His colleague Professor Nigel Willby, who also specialises in freshwater sciences, adds: “Having spent centuries de-wilding rivers, straightening and deepening them, isolating their floodplains, removing dead wood and stripping banksides – in other words erasing the very things that make a healthy and biodiverse river – we now have an agent back on the scene that can reverse engineer these impacts for free.”
Beavers’ innate engineering skills mean they can build networks of dams around small and shallow rivers. While shielding them from predators, the dams also turn the landscape into dynamic wetland.Professor Willby says beavers “boost the complexity of river habitats tremendously, benefitting a huge range of biodiversity from water plants and invertebrates to bats, birds and fish”.“Beavers have long been used for stream and floodplain restoration in North America but are increasingly now being put to use in Europe for their dam building, canal digging and wetland creation activities.”
Building dams slows, spreads and stores water in the landscape, turning it into a sort of sponge that improves flood and drought resilience. Dams also act like sieves to filter out sediment and agricultural run-off from rivers, improving overall water quality. Native Eurasian beavers were killed to extinction in Britain in the 16th century, their super soft fur and meat making them a prize for hunters.Over the past two decades though, they have been making a gradual comeback – with Britain home to around 2,000 rodents, both in enclosures and the wild – and in October 2022, England followed Scotland in making beavers a protected species.Now proponents of beavers are waiting for the Government to announce a licensing plan enabling wild releases of beavers in England. Ministers continue to work with Natural England to develop this plan.
Eva Bishop of the Beaver Trust agrees the rodents are a “valuable and low cost” part of the river restoration toolkit. “Beavers are basically improving our freshwater environment for all and helping reverse the loss of freshwater wetlands – we’ve lost 97 per cent of them through systematically draining our land and have historically viewed water as something to remove as quickly as possible.”Ms Bishop adds: “We need the Government to catch up and release the framework for wild release licensing in England. I would say it’s overdue, but appreciate it is complex.”
Source: iNews, Serina Sandhu
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