Hot Dam: Why beavers are Britain’s new climate heroes

0:00I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday Story from Up First. Today, we're headed to London. Please mind the gap between the train and the platform. To a tube station underground. Platform three, the train now approaching is to Epping. Please stand back from the platform edge. This particular tube station is lined with sandbags because for years it had a big problem. Flooding. Whenever it rained, the floor of the ticket office would fill with water. Now the sandbags aren't really needed. The flooding problem has been solved by some newcomers who were determined to halt the water. To do it, they labored at dawn and dusk and even put their children to work.

0:55One day this spring, NPR's Lauren Freyer decided she needed to meet these industrious problem solvers. So she crept up to the family's muddy doorstep. So this is their house? This is their home, yes. With a local named Elliot Newton. So it might just look like a pile of sticks, but this is actually an incredibly complex sort of architectural feature. A pile of sticks, a strange creation, but completely normal for who Lauren had come to see, beavers. You can see the amazing wetland engineering that the beavers have been doing. And I think this is one of the most impressive dams that they've built.

1:36So it starts all the way over there at the back, and then it sort of meanders through this tree, snaking through it, and goes all the way off over to our right. Today on The Sunday Story, Lauren reports on how beavers in Britain are being put to work to stop flooding from climate change and how scientists brought them back from extinction to do just that. We haven't seen this in the UK for 400 years. This is a beaver-created wetland. Stay with us.

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2:55Journey through the heart of Europe on an elegant Viking longship with thoughtful service, destination-focused dining and cultural enrichment on board and on shore. And every Viking voyage is all-inclusive with no children and no casinos. Discover more at Viking.com. We're back with The Sunday Story and NPR's Lauren Frayer talking beavers in Britain. So, Lauren, welcome. Thanks for having me, Aisha. Before we get to all of the beavers and what they're doing in Britain right now, I know this might sound silly, but what exactly is a beaver? I know they got the buck teeth and the tails. That's what I know them for.

3:40Beavers are rodents. Yeah. They are semi-aquatic rodents. Actually, the second largest rodent in the world, if you know your rodents. Second largest after capybaras. I had to look that one up. But you're right. They have big buck teeth, these tiny little hands, webbed back feet, and these big flat tails that they use to swim, splash, and critically build dams. They are pretty cute. Like, I will say. They're adorable. animals. Why did they disappear in the first place? Britain seems like it would be like a really ideal environment for them because they have all that rain and these are water creatures.

4:22Yeah. I mean, the UK is a wet wonderland here for beavers and it's getting wetter with climate change. But humans wanted their waterproof fur, wanted their meat. And trigger warning here, I hope you haven't just had lunch. This might gross you out. Humans hunted beavers for their anal secretions, something called castoreum. So you know how like dogs or other animals leave their scent places? Well, beavers do the same thing. And what they squirt out of their bums was actually used in medieval times in perfumes. It has this sort of vanilla scent. The Romans even ate it as aspirin. They believed it had medicinal properties.

5:02And so by the early 20th century, humans had hunted beavers to extinction here. Only about 1 ,200 beavers were left in Europe and Northern Asia. Okay, wow. That was a lot of news that I did not know.

5:19But from what we're hearing, they're back. Were they reintroduced solely to help with flooding? No, actually. So in 1992, when Britain was still part of the European Union, the EU passed a law requiring member states to investigate which species had gone extinct as a result of human activity and to try to figure out how to bring them back. And the list of options was long. Like once there were a whole lot of animals that used to roam these islands, like lions, hyenas. Beavers, though, were a little bit easier, slightly less controversial to bring back. They still have a habitat here. And so it just so happens that they're also excellent flood control engineers.

6:04But they were brought back because it was the law. So how do you bring British beavers back from extinction? So scientists studied fossils of beavers found in Britain and determined that today's Norwegian beavers are the most genetically similar to the beavers that once lived here centuries ago. And so they went scouting out, looking for Norwegian beavers who were, let's say, open to relocation. OK, well, who did they find? They found Millie and Bjornar. So I suppose we became kind of attached to Millie and Bjornar.

6:44So basically in 2009, wildlife officials relocated these two beavers named Millie and Bjornar from Norway to a temperate rainforest in western Scotland called the Napdale Forest. So why did they put them there? Like, why was that the chosen spot? It's pretty remote. So they could study how beavers adapt to the environment there without a lot of other factors like people, towns, development. There's also lots of water. Like, it kind of looks like the Norwegian fjords, which Millie and Bjornar might have found familiar. I actually went to this forest. I went on a hike through their habitat with a forest ranger named Pete Creech.

7:20and he told me that when Millie and Bjornar arrived, they swam right out of their boxes and got straight to work. So at the same time, they did a big renovation job on the dam. And when you say they did a renovation job, you're talking about the beavers. Yes, yes, I'm not talking about the forestry. And forest ranger Pete showed me all this evidence of their work all around us in the forest. There's the beaver dam. Wow, that is quite a construction job. So, sort of six-foot, pretty thick logs and reinforcements vertically. They've nibbled lots of the tree trunks, felled some of the trees, then floated those logs downstream to build dams.

8:07And on top of their work, they were also breeding. And Millie and Bjornar essentially became like the Adam and Eve of the modern-day British beaver species. Adam and Eve. So they really went forth and multiplied. They did. I mean, not only did they adapt to their new environment, they thrived. The average beaver lives round about 10 years. Millie was two or three when she arrived. Bjornar was a little bit older. That was 2009. So Bjornar is pushing 20. And they've probably had more than a dozen babies. They're called kits, baby beavers. And so to make sure that the gene pool was sound, scientists brought in other beavers, some from Norway, but also farther afield, Germany, Poland, to get to work building new generations of beavers.

8:54Oh my goodness. So just, you know, love abounded and they just all got together. It's like a Disney film, right? Like a Disney film. If only it was that way with humans. They don't have to get on the apps or anything like that. But we started this story in a tube station in London. So how did the beavers get from the Scottish rainforest to the big city? So baby beavers don't stay with their parents very long. Everybody needs their own territory, so they branch out, they spread out. Scientists, as I mentioned, brought back beavers because it was EU law to boost biodiversity. But scientists also started to realize that beavers are little rodent climate warriors.

9:40They are so good at building dams and tamping flooding. This Scottish rainforest, you know, they dammed a river. They created this vast lagoon. Ranger Pete took me on a sunrise hike there, and it was so silent and then just teeming with birdsong and wildlife. This is spectacular. Beavers have created an enormous wetland, basically from a tiny river, and it's possibly one of the bigger wetlands in Scotland now. Amazing. And so scientists realized that these water retention skills could be used elsewhere in Britain and they started relocating batches of beavers from Scotland's south, particularly to places where we're seeing really erratic weather as a result of climate change.

10:27Flooding, but also drought and wildfires. But really, I mean, in this modern day when we have all this high tech and, you know, sophisticated ways to address flooding, are beavers really that effective? Well, in the case of that London tube station, the beavers stopped the flooding within weeks of scientists relocating them into this 20-acre park next door. It used to be a golf course with a creek running through it. It's an urban area. There's a McDonald's nearby. There's a strip mall alongside it. I went on a muddy walk through it with a wildlife conservationist you heard from earlier, Elliot Newton, and a veterinarian named Sean McCormick.

11:11And together they started the Ealing Beaver Project. It makes you feel like a kid. I know, I love it. Just jumping and popping. And they showed me the beavers' work. Yeah, but the beavers have come in and they've actually put this dam in. And that has now created this beaver pond, which is far more complex. It's holding water here. So again, stopping flood risks from further downstream. So the water is held back from flooding the tube station? That's right. The whole area is like a sponge now, soaking up excess water. Now, municipal authorities had budgeted for these big, costly engineering works to prevent flooding.

11:47Absolutely. So it would have been getting in big diggers and earthworks and expensive kind of engineering works to create big reservoirs and hold more water on this site and kind of take the flood water in times of high rainfall. It would have cost hundreds of thousands, if not over a million pounds to do. None of it's happened, no. So we said the beavers can do it probably a fraction of the cost, probably better than we can, certainly more sustainably for the environment and things like that. And Aisha, not only have the beavers managed to stop the flooding here, including at the tube station, they are also what scientists call a keystone species, which means that their return has coaxed back other species with them.

12:24Tiny little white dots just in the cleft between a thorn or a side stem and the main stem. So there's one there. In the elbow. There's one there. Yeah, there's one there. There's one there. I saw the eggs of these rare brown hairstreak butterflies. They lay their eggs on blackthorn branches nibbled by beavers. And Sean told me about other creatures that have returned to the area now. And we did weeks of being here. Downstream of that dam, we saw freshwater shrimp arrive, which are more sensitive to oxygen levels and water quality. And we've seen just not only the diversity of invertebrates boom, but also the abundance, the numbers of them.

12:59And then that supported the food chain of loads of other things. So we've had eight new bird species recorded here since the beavers came, two new bat species. We've gone from four to six bat species. Wow. I mean, that is, I mean, that's really awesome work by these beavers. It's really impressive. It is. But Aisha, not everyone is in love with these rodents. It's one of these things, until you actually have to live with beavers, you don't fully appreciate what it's like to live with them. When we come back, the people who are less than impressed with the beaver's handiwork. Stay with us.

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14:28Are your reasons for staying really just excuses for not leaving? Let a career coach from Strawberry.me help you get unstuck. Discover the benefits of having a dedicated career coach in your corner and get 50 % off your first coaching session at Strawberry.me slash NPR. You're listening to The Sunday Story. So, Laura, the original beaver transplants, Millie and Bjorn are the Adam and Eve of British beavers. They've been in Britain for almost two decades, and there were lots of other beavers brought in, too. How many are there now across the country? There are a few thousand. I mean, single-digit thousands.

15:12They're still considered endangered, though, but they are becoming more common. They're living in the wild in Scotland, and they're living in mostly isolated, often fenced-in nature preserves in other parts of Britain. But as the population grows, there's also a growing controversy over beavers. Well, from what we've heard so far, it sounds like a win-win. They're helping with the flooding, the communities don't have to build these huge mitigation projects. What's the downside? die. Well, some farmers and fishers, particularly in Scotland, do not like the beavers. Some in the fishing industry don't like that the beavers are putting dams on salmon streams.

15:52Scotland has a big salmon industry. And as you heard, beavers dam up rivers. They can also dam up irrigation channels on farms, flood crops. They can collapse riverbanks, exacerbating erosion. I spoke with Kate Maitland, who comes from a long line of farmers in Scotland. She's a regional representative for the National Farmers Union in Scotland. And she says, you know, rather than fighting flooding, sometimes beavers are actually causing flooding by damming up these irrigation channels and flooding crops, food crops. It's quite devastating to see acres and acres of your land sitting underwater.

16:27Beavers are also known to fell trees, sometimes centuries-old trees, maybe a beloved tree planted by your grandparents. The sheer size of trees that beavers could take down in such a short period of time. myself. I was there one day and I was aware of where most of the holes were, but I did fall the full length of my leg while showing a parliamentarian around to appreciate the damage. Oh, wow. So this is the other side of the coin. Is there any recourse for farmers who are in this position? So the Scottish government has set up a fund where farmers or other land managers can apply for money to rebuild riverbanks and, you know, financial assistance to fix beaver damage, but only if the repairs are in the public interest.

17:12And that can sometimes be hard to prove on private land. You know, the costs are all bore by the land managers when it comes to living with beavers. As part of Scotland's rewilding program, the government has also made it illegal to disassemble a beaver dam on private property if it's been there for two weeks or more. And so those laws are making farmers feel like they don't have agency over what happens on their own land. And Kate told me there has just got to be a better way to do this. No, it's just beavers in the right place. You know, we're not totally, massively against beavers, but we do believe that the beavers should be in the correct place.

17:49And there's something else that's making this even more difficult, Aisha, and that is the beaver bombers. Well, beaver bomber. I mean, I've never heard those two words together. So you got to explain that to me. OK, so a beaver bomber is a renegade wildlife enthusiast. And in many cases, these are people who've just want to speed up rewilding. They believe these animals need to be restored to these landscapes. And so they're dropping the animals into areas where they previously didn't exist. In this case, unlicensed beavers into big farming areas in Scotland. And that's exacerbating this conflict.

18:25I tried to get an interview with a beaver bomber. nobody would confirm having done any beaver bombing because it's illegal. And it's making farmers really angry. You know, some farmers have decided to take matters into their own hands and shoot beavers that end up on their land, which is illegal. Yeah, aren't there other options other than killing them? Yeah, farmers can call wildlife officials to trap and relocate the beavers off their land. There's even a waiting list for beavers in some communities. And not only in Britain, these critters have made comebacks in Italy, in Portugal, in the Ukrainian part of the Danube River Delta.

19:01And all these wildfires that you're seeing across the American West, beavers have actually been released into fire damage areas of Washington state. And they found that places that have beavers hold more water and therefore are more resilient to fire. So people are lining up and it's actually like an adoption system. Like wildlife inspectors, go to your land, look at your home to make sure it's good enough to welcome beavers. So have you met anyone who's eager for a beaver? It's hard not to make puns in this story. I have. And he happens to be a Scottish farmer, no less. We are driving across a fairly standard field here.

19:42This was a field that last year had turnips sewn in it for our sheep. and we're heading towards the wetland of our second reintroduced beaver family. Tom Bowser, he's a fifth generation Scottish farmer and he's adopted several beavers. And he took me on a tour of his property where I saw so many felled trees. They've taken all these, these small animals took down all these trees. Yeah, they took down all these trees. So you can see some of these ones where you can tell when it's been really recently browsed because you'll still get a sappy orange color coming out. So it's like a kind of bloody stump where they've been going at them.

20:24But Tom Bowser's figured out a creative way to make money off the beavers. He's actually built a tourism business around them. He takes tourists out on his tractor. 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 because most people have never seen them before. And he delights in showing people animals that they might only know from Disney cartoons or fairy tales. And yet this farmer also really gets why lots of his fellow farmers don't like beavers. And he says it's become a bit of a culture war.

20:59Like the caricature is the urban lefty environmental activists on one side and traditionalist farmers on the other. I think a lot of farmers feel quite marginalized in society. You know, you have distant urban politicians that don't necessarily always understand the issues that they're facing. You know, you're living in a situation where subsidies are changing, tax laws are changing, where costs of producing food are increasing, but the money that you get for it is pretty low. But the way that that comes out, as a book I read recently put it, is that it's easier to shoot an animal than it is to shoot late stage capitalism.

21:48You know, they're just the easy hit, the victim in all of this. So when you saw the beavers, Lauren, was there any indication that they realized that they're the subject of so many strong feelings? Did they seem under stress? Well, actually, trying to spot the beavers caused me a lot of stress because it was a huge challenge to find them. They take care to disguise themselves underwater. Just to give you a picture of what I was trying to spot, here's Sean McCormick, the vet who took me around London's Ealing Beaver Project. Here's how he describes the beavers. Yeah, they're quite crocodilian. So if you look at a beaver's skull or look at their head, you know, their nose, their eye and their ear is all in a line above the waterline.

22:33So you'll just see this head and slightly bit of the back of the neck just gliding across. And you see the kind of V-shaped wake behind them. So they're hard to spot. And beavers are also crepuscular, which means they work at dawn and dusk. In Scotland, I set my alarm for 4am, went out with a forest ranger looking for Millian Bjornar. So we're looking for a little wake in the water where we might see. All I can guess is that if they are still out and about somewhere, we might see them come back to the lodge. If they're already in bed, then I'm afraid we've missed it. And we did miss them that day.

23:10And that had the forest ranger Pete Creech really concerned because Millie and Bjornar are quite elderly. We stopped seeing Bjornar around about just before Christmas from late autumn. but Millie and their last offspring, who is now five or six years old, he, and we think it's a he, is still with her. Scientists have set up hidden cameras to capture the beaver's movements at night and here's what some of that footage sounds like.

23:43It sounds like little babies. Those are beaver babies, kids. lots of squeaking they sound a bit like demented guinea pigs really high-pitched noise but in the end i went to four different beaver locations and eventually finally i laid eyes on a beaver it was a mama beaver named willow down in eeling west london or it may have been her partner the male who doesn't have a name we couldn't really tell through the trees but here's the moment when I spotted it. Where is he? Where is he?

24:26Oh my gosh! Oh my god, it's huge! That's his tail! Wow! I was expecting a little thing! That's like as big as a dog! That sounds amazing. I might have gotten a little carried away about the beavers here. But it sounds like you've learned a lot about beavers this year. Oh, my gosh. Way too much. I've loved it. I've loved every minute of it. In fact, I was wondering if we could play a little beaver trivia game. Sure. I mean, I've been known to do a puzzle here or there. So let's I'm down. Okay, okay. So question number one. Remember that book, The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe? It's part of the Narnia Chronicles by C.S.

25:22Lewis. Did you ever read that in school? I do. I do remember. I saw the movie, definitely. Okay. And I probably read part of the book. My question is, in that book, what meal do Mr. and Mrs. Beaver serve the children? Tea and crumpets with honey. Wrong, but that sounds good. Very British. They serve them fried fish, which is the reason beaver experts hate that book, because beavers are herbivores. They don't eat fish. And that book has led to all this confusion in Scotland over whether the beavers will eat the Scottish salmon. They won't. They only eat plants. They only eat plants. Okay, that's good to know.

26:02That's good to know. Okay, question number two. What is the relationship between Millie and Bjornar? They're a loving couple. They've been together a long time. They're a love story. Okay. Here's a little intrigue. That's right. But they're also father and daughter. Okay. You done changed this too much. I thought this was a love story. So, and this discovery of incest threatened this project from the beginning because it is not great for the beaver gene pool, right? So scientists had to rush in all these other beavers from other countries to make sure the genetic pool was diverse enough. And it was.

26:40Their offspring are fine, thankfully. and Adam and Eve, you know, long chain of beavers. But it was touch and go there. Yeah. Okay. I thought this was a sweet love story. No, it's a soap opera. No meaning to it. It's a total soap opera. Final beaver trivia question. Why do beavers build dams? So I know that this is like their natural instinct. I think they do it because it makes it easier for them to get plants or it helps with their teeth. Okay, I'm going to give you half credit. Okay. Kind of. They want to raise the water levels so they can hide under the water from predators. From wolves, bears.