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Beavers Are Back in London — and They’re Thriving
The clues are unmistakable. A muddy embankment is covered in webbed, triangular footprints. A tree’s bark has been gnawed on one side, exposing the pale innards of its trunk. But the real giveaway is the thick dam made of branches that’s blockading a stream.
This site may be in London, a bustling metropolis of nine million people dominated by concrete high-rises and traffic-filled main roads, but it is now under the management of a new, or at least returning, critter on the block: the Castor fiber, or Eurasian beaver.
“The beavers absolutely love it here,” says Nadya Mirochnitchenko, an ecologist and coordinator for Ealing Wildlife Group, a volunteer-run community organization that is leading a scheme to reintroduce them. “In fact, they are getting kinda chubby.”
A dam built by the beavers. Credit: Peter Yeung
Beavers were hunted to extinction in England during the Elizabethan times, in the 16th century. But last October, these stout, furry rodents were reintroduced into London for the first time in 400 years as part of an effort to rewild the city.
The family of five beavers — a breeding pair and three offspring — were transported from Scotland by the Beaver Trust, a UK-based nonprofit, and released in Paradise Fields, a leafy, eight-hectare public park in West London, at an event attended by the mayor of London.
“Beavers are a keystone species,” adds Mirochnitchenko. “That means they have a disproportionately large impact on ecosystems. They alleviate flooding, they boost biodiversity, they keep everything in check. They’re like ecosystem engineers.”
A sign in Paradise Fields. Credit: Peter Yeung
Ecologists say that beavers help biodiversity thrive because they instinctively build dams, dig canals and create deadwood to feel safe, which creates diverse habitats for other wildlife, such as water voles, dragonflies, amphibians, birds, reptiles and fish.
Few animals can modify and shape their surrounding environments to this extent.
But beavers bring a host of other benefits too: Their dams filter water, their instinctive maintenance of trees and shrubbery prevents them from overgrowing, and their reintroduction is a low-cost way of restoring wetland habitats — which store carbon, offer green space for locals, cool the environment and mitigate the increasing risk of flooding as the planet rapidly heats.
In fact, the brook that runs through Paradise Fields often overflows, in turn regularly flooding the nearby road junction and shopping mall. London authorities initially planned to build an expensive flood defense system — until the beavers came in.
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