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

To a tube station underground.

To a tube station underground. This particular tube station is lined with sandbags because for years it had a big problem. Floody. Whenever it rains, the floor of the ticket office would feel 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. One day, the spring and PR's Lauren Frayer decided she needed to meet these industrious problem solvers. So, she prepped up to the family's muddy doorstep. So, this is their house? Yes, this is their home, yes. With a local named Elliott Newton.

So, it might just look 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. Bevers.

You can see their amazing wetland engineering that they've been doing.

This is one of the most impressive dams that they've built. So, 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 all right. Today, on the Sunday Story, Lauren reports on how Bevers and 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-Creative Women. Stay with us.

“A lot of us are short on time, but is our time really going where we want it to?”

They say when your schedule begins to align with your values is when we begin to feel that in our peace. How to take a time audit and other timely advice on the LifeKit podcast. Listen to LifeKit on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. OK, so you're driving to work or you're on a walk or you're at the gym or whatever, and you just need to clear your head. That's the perfect time to hit the play button on NPR's all songs considered.

It's not the news, it's not work or whatever else is weighing you down. It's just a good time with good friends and great tunes. Listen to all songs considered every Tuesday in the NPR Music podcast. We're back with a 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 book teeth and the tails, is that that's what I know them for.”

Beavers are rodents.

Yeah, they are semi-aquatic rodents, actually the second largest rodent in the world.

If you know your rodents, second largest after copyrights, to look at that one up. But you're right, they have big buck teeth, these tiny little hands, a 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. You're adorable animals. Why did they disappear in the first place?

It Britain seems like it would be like a really ideal environment for them, because they have all that rain, and these are water creatures. Yeah, 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 microsew out.

Humans hunted beavers for their anal secretions, something called castorium.

“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 bombs 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. And 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.

But from what we're here in, they're back where they reintroduce like 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 little bit easier, slightly less controversial to bring back. They still have a habitat here. And so, it just so happens that there are also excellent flood control engineers. But 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. Okay, well, who did they find? They found Millie and Bjornar. So, as suppose, we became quite kind of attached to Millie and Bjornar.

So, basically, in 2009, wildlife officials relocated these two beavers named Millie and Bjornar from Norway

to a temperate rainforest in Western Scotland called the Napedale Forest. So, 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 Creach.

And 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 forest tree. So, 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 sick 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. And on top of their work, they were also breeding. And Millie and Bjornar essentially became like the adamant Eve of the modern day British beaver species. Adam and Eve, so they really went for an emote plant.

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 kit-spavy beavers. And sort of make sure that the gene pool was sound, scientists brought in other beavers. Some from Norway, but also farther, field germany, Poland,

to get to work building new generations of beavers. Oh my goodness, so just, you know, love-abounded, and they just saw. That's like a-- It's like a Disney film. If only it was that way with humans, they don't have to get on this.

Absolutely, anything like that. But we started this story in a tool 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 E.U. law to boost biodiversity. But scientists also started to realize that beavers are

little, rodent climate warriors. They are so good at building dams and tamping flooding. This Scottish rainforest, you know, they damned 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 from the base of it from a tiny river. And it's possibly one of the bigger wetlands in Scotland now. Amazing.

And they started relocating batches of beavers from Scotland south.

Particularly to places where we're seeing really erratic weather as a result of climate change. They're not flooding, 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 in 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 the veterinarian named Sean McCormick. And together, they started the Ealing Beaver project. Makes you feel like a kid.

I don't love it. It's jumping in poverty. And they showed me the beavers work. Yeah, and what the beavers are coming, and they've actually put this down in.

“And that has now created this beaver pond, which is far more complex.”

It's holding water here. So again, stopping flood risk 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. Absolutely. We'd 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 to the over a million pounds to do.

None of it's happened to know. So we said the beavers can do it probably fraction of the cost probably better than we can. Certainly more sustainably for the environment and things like that. And are you sure not only of 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. I need little white dots just in the cleft between a thorn or a side stem and the main stem. So there's one there. There's one there. Yeah, there's one there.

There's one there. I saw the eggs of these rare brown hair streak butterflies. They lay their eggs on black thorn 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, you know, send more sensitive to oxygen levels and water quality. And we've seen just not only the diversity of invertebrates boom, but also the abundance and numbers of them. And 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 bats species.

We've gone from four to six bats species. Wow, I mean, that is, I mean, that's really awesome work. But these beavers of it's really impressive.

“It is, but are you sure not everyone is in love with these rodents?”

It's one of these things until you actually have to live with the virus. You don't truly appreciate what it's like to live with them. When we come back, the people who are less than impressed with the beavers handy work. Stay with us. From the light bulb to the internet.

Human history has been driven by innovation. And shortwave is exploring how the technology of tomorrow will transform our future. Would you write in a flying taxi? Will AI models fight wars? Hear about the technological frontier every Monday on tech camp.

The new series from shortwave. Listen on the Empire app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Big news stories don't always break on your schedule.

But with the Empire app, news culture and podcasts are ready to come out. Those culture and podcasts are ready when you want them in your pocket. Download the Empire app today. You're listening to the Sunday story. Solora, 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?

It's single digit thousands.

“They'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? 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,

stream, Scotland as 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 river banks, 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 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 under sitting under water.

Beavers are also known to fell trees. Sometimes centuries or trees, maybe a beloved tree planted by your grandparents. The sheer size of trees that beavers can take down as such a sharp period of time. Myself, I was there one day and I was aware of where most of us were, but I did fall a full length of my leg and post 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 river banks and financial assistance to fix beaver damage. But only if the repairs are in the public interest and that can sometimes be hard to prove on private land. You know, the costs are all borne 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 is just gotta 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.

And there's something else that's making this even more difficult, Aisha. And that is the beaver bombers. Beaver bomber.

I mean, I've never heard those two words together.

So you gotta explain that to me. Okay, so a beaver bomber is a renegade wildlife enthusiast. And in many cases, these are people who 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. I 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, I mean, 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 and Portugal in the Ukrainian part of the Danube River Delta. And 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've found that places that have beavers hold more water. And therefore 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 the start. I have. And he happens to be a Scottish farmer, no less. We are driving across a fairly standard field here.

This was a field that last year had turned up soon for our ship.

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 field trees. They take in all these small animals to down all these trees. Yeah, they take down all these trees.

Browse because you'll still get a sappy orange colour coming out. So it's like a bloody stump where they've been going out of them. But 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 some 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. Like the caricature is the urban, lefty environmental activism, one side. And traditionalist farmers on the other.

“I think a lot of farmers feel quite marginalized in society.”

You have distant urban politicians that don't necessarily always understand the issues that they're facing. You know, you're living 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 booker read recently put it is that it's easier to shoot an animal than it is to shoot late stage capitalism.

You 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 realize that they're the subject of so many strong feelings that 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 under water. 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, there knows their eye and their ear is all in a line above the waterline.”

So you'll just see this head and slightly bit at 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 preposcular, which means they work at Don and Dusk in Scotland. I sat my alarm for 4 a.m. when at the forest ranger looking for a million peornar.

So we're looking for a little wake in the water where we might see. What 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'd miss it. And we did miss them that day. And that had the forest ranger peach really concerned.

Because Million Bjornar are quite elderly. We stopped seeing Bjornar around about just before Christmas and 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 beavers' movements at night.

And here's what some of that footage sounds like.

This sounds like little babies. Those are beaver babies, kids. That's a squeaking. They sound a bit like Dementic guinea pigs, really high pitch 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 Ealing, West London, or it may have been her partner the mail. It 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?

Oh my gosh! Oh my god, it's huge! That's stale. Wow! I was expecting a little thing.

That's like his biggest dog. That sounds amazing! I've got some of the way. Little carried away about the beavers here, yeah. 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. Ah, sure! I've been up. I've been known to a puzzle here or there.

Okay, okay. So question number one.

“Remember that book, The Lion Witch in the Wardrobe?”

It's part of the Narnia Chronicles by CS Lewis.

Do you ever read that in school? I do. I do remember I saw it a movie definitely. Okay. And I probably read it part of the book. Question is, in that book, what meal do Mr. and Mrs. Beaver serve the children?

Uh, tea and crumpets. We're 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 is led to all this confusion in Scotland over whether the beavers will eat the Scottish salmon. They won't.

Oh. They only eat fish. They only plant. Okay, that's good to know. That's good to know.

Okay. Question number two.

What is the relationship between Million Bjornar?

Beard. They're loving couple. They've been together a long time. They've their love story. Okay.

Here's a little intrigue. That's right. But they're also father and daughter. Okay, you don't change just too much. I thought this was a love story.

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.

They're offspring are fine, thankfully.

And Adam and Eve, you know, long chain of beavers. But it was touching go there. Yeah. Okay. I thought this was a sweet love story.

No, it's a soap opera. Let me do 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. It kind of, they want to raise the water levels so they can hide under the water from predators. From wolves, bears.

But here's the thing. All those predators have gone extinct in Britain. But the beavers don't know that. They don't know that. Yeah.

Well, Lauren, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for joining us and giving us all this useful information. You're welcome. Thank you for having me. Come on over for a beavers safari in Britain.

This episode of the Sunday Story was produced by Rini's Furnowski. Jenny Schmidt edited it this episode. The Sunday Story team includes Andrew Mombo, Justine Nyan, and Leanna Samstrom. Quasilee mastered this episode.

Our executive producer is Irene Negucci.

“I'm Aisha Roscoe, up firsts his back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week.”

Until then, have a great rest of your weekend. History is intriguing. But unlike the present, it can feel far off. On NPR's through line, we bring it back to life. And put you in the middle of it.

Go inside the stories from men that shape the world we live in now. Find NPR's through line wherever you get your podcasts. How will a historically unpopular president navigate a midterm election season that may leave him with a lot less power? Stay caught up with the latest news with Trump's term, the podcast,

where we curate NPR's coverage of President Trump, and short episodes focused on a single story. Follow Trump's terms on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.