British beavers back from extinction to fight floods

0:00This message comes from NPR sponsor Raymond James, a firm where wealth management, banking, and capital markets solutions start with the connections between people. That's the power of personal. Disclosures at RaymondJames.com. Today on State of the World, fighting the effects of climate change in Britain with beavers. You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. I'm Greg Dixon. Britain is famous for drizzle, But climate change is making rainfall heavier and more erratic. That's causing more flooding.

0:41So an unlikely creature has been brought back from extinction to help. From London, NPR's Lauren Freyer tells us more. They provide us with a few different maps. Dan Jed shows me maps of flood zones in West London. Church, a primary school, a dental practice. So this is your high risk, more than 3.3 % chance of a flood each year. He's a realtor trying to figure out where climate change could hurt property values most. The darker the blue, the more risk there is of flooding. Just down the street from his office, the Greenford Tube Station. Central line, platform three, the train now approaching.

1:18Used to flood often. Please mind the gap between the train and the platform. Until a new family moved in nearby determined to do something. I crept up to this family's rather muddy doorstep. So this is their house here? This is their home, yes. It might just look like a pile of sticks. Their home is made of sticks because these new neighbors are beavers. Two and a half years ago, Elliot Newton helped bring a family of five beavers to what used to be a golf course with a creek running through it. So if I'm a beaver, I can feel the water moving past my whiskers, so I want to try and block that up.

1:55Newton works for a conservation group that uses beavers as anti-flood engineers. The beavers have come in and they've actually put this dam in and that has now created this beaver pond which is holding water here, stopping flood risks from further downstream. Beavers build dams in part to hide underwater from predators. This one has turned a city park into a wetland, which acts like a 20-acre sponge in the middle of the British capital.

2:23How cool is this, right? McDonald's, retail park, busy road with sirens and then here We have a family of beavers thriving, and they're doing amazing things. Joggers and teenagers stop by to watch them in action. Is that a tree it's just felt? A reddish-brown adult is hard at work. He's massive. This one's the size of a fat golden retriever. He's kind of climbing up in and out of the water onto this felt willow tree. Sean McCormick is a local veterinarian who started this project. The city was planning to build a levee here. Big diggers and earthworks and expensive engineering works to create big reservoirs and hold more water on this site and take the flood water in times of high rainfall.

3:05It would have cost hundreds of thousands. McCormick convinced authorities to try something different. So we said the beavers can do it probably a fraction of the cost, certainly more sustainably for the environment. Not only has the nearby tube station stopped flooding. Freshwater shrimp have appeared in the creek. plus eight new species of birds, two types of bats, and rare brown hairstreak butterflies who lay their eggs on blackthorn bark nibbled by beavers. There's one there. This is a rare butterfly. They've just boosted one of Britain's rarest native butterflies. Part of what makes this surprising is that British beavers were hunted to extinction more than 400 years ago and then revived in Scotland.

3:50In 2009, beavers were released onto the loch we've just been walking past. Forest ranger Pete Creech takes me on a dawn hike through a temperate rainforest in western Scotland, where a pair of Norwegian beavers, Millie and Bjornar, were introduced. I suppose we became kind of attached to Millie and Bjornar. They're like the Adam and Eve of the modern-day British species. Creech set up hidden cameras to capture their crepuscular, that means dawn and dusk, movements. Here's what baby beavers sound like. Lots of squeaking. They sound a bit like demented guinea pigs, really high-pitched. Squeaking rodent climate warriors.

4:32While the United Kingdom is overall getting wetter, some areas, including parts of Scotland, are getting drier, even seeing wildfires. Beavers ensure this rainforest stays wet and abundant at a time when others have been drained for development. Wetlands are one of the most biodiverse habitats in the world. The UK has lost over 95 % of its wetlands. And now we're frantically trying to put them back. Not everyone thinks rodents are the answer, though. There's an ongoing conflict. Especially not in Scotland, where beavers are not enclosed in urban parks and have instead gone forth and multiplied and spread into private land.

5:09Their numbers have been boosted by beaver bombers, renegade wildlife enthusiasts who've released beavers into unlicensed areas. So as the beaver population has expanded, we have seen more and more members getting concerned. Kate Maitland is a Scottish regional rep for the National Union of Farmers. I'm a farmer's daughter and I've been with the union now for 24 years. It's quite devastating to see acres and acres of your land sitting underwater. Beavers dam up irrigation channels. They flood crops, collapse river banks, and sometimes fell beloved centuries-old trees. Wow, these small animals took down all these trees.

5:50Yeah, they took down all these trees. Tom Bowser is a fifth-generation Scottish farmer whose landscape is littered with tree trunks whittled into hourglass shapes about to fall. But he finds it all fascinating. That's a tooth mark, so if you feel on the wee ridge there, Lauren, You can see the beavers have been gnawing. That's the gap between the teeth. Bowser has protected certain trees from beaver damage by wrapping their trunks in chicken wire. You can also paint them with sand, which gets stuck in beaver's teeth and they tend to move on. Some farmers have resorted to shooting beavers. Bowser encourages them to call wildlife officials instead, who will trap and relocate them to him.

6:32They've diverted floodwaters from his driveway and attract tourists to his farm. Yeah, I mean, to be honest, nobody came to this pond before, and now we run beaver-watching tours through the spring and summer months, and they're really popular. Especially with school kids who previously only knew beavers from fairy tales, cartoons. The beaver buzz is catching among land managers across Britain, especially short-staffed ones. Willow, pawthorn, an oak there. South of London, Ian Glover manages a 125-acre nature reserve all by himself. It's very densely vegetated. There isn't a huge amount of species diversity.

7:12He's applied to bring beavers here and has a long list of chores for them. Thin-out undergrowth, bringing more light and hopefully more species. The peak bird count here, 177 species, goes back to 1935. They've been in decline since then. And Glaver wants to reverse that by expanding this wetland. The beavers, he says... They're more interested in retaining water on the site so that they can avoid wolves. Wolves? Yeah, sorry. Wolves, bears, lynx, that kind of thing. Most of their predators have gone extinct here. Obviously they haven't got the memo that there's no wolves in the UK. But nobody's telling these beavers who have just been so useful.

7:52Lauren Fryer, NPR News, London.

8:00That's State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening. new shows new music new movies keeping up with pop culture sometimes feels like a full-time job thankfully over at pop culture happy hour it's literally our job we break down what's actually worth watching listening to and pretending you already knew about so the next time someone says did you see that you can say yeah obviously follow npr's pop culture happy hour wherever you get your podcasts