{"id":173199,"date":"2025-12-08T01:18:06","date_gmt":"2025-12-08T01:18:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/173199\/"},"modified":"2025-12-08T01:18:06","modified_gmt":"2025-12-08T01:18:06","slug":"no-one-knows-where-it-came-from-first-wild-beaver-spotted-in-norfolk-in-500-years-wildlife","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/173199\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018No one knows where it came from\u2019: first wild beaver spotted in Norfolk in 500 years | Wildlife"},"content":{"rendered":"

A wild beaver has been spotted in Norfolk for the first time since beavers were hunted to extinction in England<\/a> at the beginning of the 16th century.<\/p>\n

It was filmed dragging logs and establishing a lodge in a \u201cperfect beaver habitat\u201d on the River Wensum at Pensthorpe, a nature reserve near Fakenham in Norfolk<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It is the first time a free-living beaver has been recorded in the county since the species began to re-establish itself in the English countryside in 2015, when a litter of wild kits<\/a> was born in Devon.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis animal just appeared in our reserve. No one knows where it\u2019s come from, but it\u2019s found what I consider a perfect beaver habitat,\u201d said the reserve\u2019s manager, Richard Spowage. He estimates the beaver has been living in an isolated and almost impenetrable area of the reserve for about a month.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a section of the river that we\u2019ve left to go wild,\u201d he added. \u201cThere\u2019s plenty of tree cover and we think it might be travelling into the adjacent marshes, hunting for food.\u201d<\/p>\n

Telltale chips of wood gave away the lone beaver\u2019s presence at Pensthorpe nature reserve<\/p>\n

The beaver \u2013 a nocturnal herbivore \u2013 is collecting willow trees at night and building a larder of bark to store near its home. \u201cIt\u2019s turned up and it\u2019s just doing what a beaver does, which is cutting down trees and gathering food for the winter. That way, once it gets too cold, or if there\u2019s too much flooding, it can just stay in its little lodge and keep warm,\u201d Spowage said.<\/p>\n

He first had an inkling a beaver was living on the reserve after a volunteer noticed an oddly shaped tree stump that was \u201ccut almost like a pointed stick\u201d.<\/p>\n

At first he wondered whether \u201csome small boy with an axe had somehow found his way into the woodland\u201d. But after spotting \u201cclassic beaver chips\u201d at the base of another tree, he set camera traps, which captured a lone beaver walking through the forest at night.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very elusive,\u201d Spowage said. \u201cIt was such a special moment to see it out there, living its life, after not being seen in Norfolk for hundreds of years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Natural England, which advises the government on the natural environment, announced in March that it would begin issuing licences to projects that aimed to reintroduce beavers into the wild. By August, the government had received 39 expressions of interest, 20 of which are from the Wildlife<\/a> Trusts federation.<\/p>\n

Beaver location map<\/a><\/p>\n

However, only one population of beavers has been legally released into the wild so far in England<\/a> \u2013 four sleepy beavers made history by crawling from their crates into the ponds of the Purbeck Heaths in Dorset.<\/p>\n

Cornwall Wildlife Trust is still waiting for approval to introduce beavers to its Helman Tor reserve, even though it is already home to a wild population.<\/p>\n

Since 2021, the Scottish government has formally allowed the movement and release of beavers and the population there is put at 1,500<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It is not clear whether the Pensthorpe beaver, whose sex and age is unknown, was illegally released into the reserve by activists using a practice known as beaver bombing. It is possible it wandered of its own accord into the Wensum \u2013 an aquifer-fed chalk river whose name is derived from the Old English adjective for \u201cwandering\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt could be a naturally dispersing wild beaver,\u201d said Emily Bowen, a spokesperson for the Beaver Trust, a charity that aims to restore beavers to regenerate landscapes. \u201cThere are actually 10 individual wild populations in England at the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wild beavers have also been spotted in Kent, Hampshire, Somerset, Wiltshire and Hereford, she said. Norfolk has some captive beavers but none have been reported missing.<\/p>\n

Spowage doubts whether a wild beaver could have reached Norfolk by itself. \u201cIt\u2019s unlikely it\u2019s been born wild, or if it was wild, potentially there was some sort of human influence to move it,\u201d he said, adding that the beaver would be welcome to live at Pensthorpe. \u201cFrom our point of view, it\u2019s a wild animal and it\u2019s got the right to be here.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A wild beaver has been spotted in Norfolk for the first time since beavers were hunted to extinction…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":173200,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[85,46,141,386],"class_list":{"0":"post-173199","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173199\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/173200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}