No one knows where they came from or how they ended up in Norfolk. But one thing is certain: now, there are two of them.
Until last week, experts believed there was only one wild beaver living in Pensthorpe nature reserve, about 20 miles outside Norwich. But just in time for Valentine’s Day, two were caught on camera going for a late-night swim together and grooming each other by the riverbank.
The couple are the first wild pair to settle in Norfolk since the early 16th century. “We won’t know for sure whether they’re a breeding pair until the camera shows they have kits, but they’re quite well bonded and they’re living together and behaving as a family unit,” said the reserve’s manager, Richard Spowage. “They are clearly wild animals. They’re not interacting with us at all, they’re avoiding us completely.”
Footage of a lone beaver establishing a lodge on the reserve made headlines in December when the Guardian revealed it was the first free-living beaver recorded in Norfolk in more than 500 years.
Spowage now suspects both beavers built the “family-size” lodge but only one had been captured on camera. “Beavers are very hard to catch on camera, especially as a pair.”
Norfolk beavers
The native species has been re-establishing itself in the English countryside since 2015, when a litter of wild kits was born in Devon, but how a pair of beavers managed to get all the way to Norfolk remains a mystery.
It has been almost a year since the government decided to grant licences for wild beaver releases, but only two pairs and a family have been legally released so far, in Cornwall and in Somerset earlier this month.
Spowage suspects that the beavers were illegally released last year, a practice known as “beaver bombing”, which the reserve does not support. “We don’t condone it, but our view is that now we have these animals here, playing a role in the ecosystem that was missing from our river, it’s our responsibility to protect them.”
He said he was relieved to discover there was a second beaver, whose age and sex is still unknown. “Beavers live in family groups. They’re not brought up to be lone animals.”
In just three months, the animals had cleared debris from the river without affecting water levels, Spowage said, adding: “You can now see a lovely riverbed, with sand and gravel starting to reappear at the base, which is really amazing. They’re opening up little glades along the river edge, where they’ve taken down willows and birches. That will let sun into the river, encouraging vegetation and invertebrates to grow and fisheries to improve.”
Prof George Holmes, who sits on a government advisory group for species reintroduction, said there was a “lot of frustration” among people who wanted to release beavers, because they perceived the licensing application process as unnecessarily costly and time-consuming.
Beavers’ dams could cause flooding and their burrows could undermine the banks of rivers and watercourses, he said, and once a beaver was released into the wild, it was classed as an ordinarily resident species in the UK, with protected status. “Introducing a species isn’t straightforward and it can go badly wrong.”
But he added: “In a nature reserve, it [the beaver] won’t be causing too many problems.”
Spowage would like to see other beavers legally introduced into the River Wensum. “Genetically, you can’t have just one pair of beavers on the river,” he said. “This is our opportunity to return an animal to our river system which has been missing for 500 years.”
Natural England, the government advisory body, said it was investigating the reports of beavers at Pensthorpe and “working closely” with the reserve on the matter.
As well as Cornwall, Somerset, Devon and Kent, wild beavers could also be found in England in Hampshire, Wiltshire and Herefordshire, according to the Beaver Trust, a charity that aims to restore beavers to regenerate landscapes. A Guardian reader also reported seeing one in his garden in Berkshire.
Since 2021, the Scottish government has formally allowed the movement and release of beavers and the population there is estimated at 1,500. A wild beaver has also been spotted on the River Dyfi near Machynlleth in Wales.