‘No one knows where it came from’: first wild beaver spotted in Norfolk for 400 years | Wildlife

A wild beaver has been spotted in Norfolk for the first time since beavers were hunted to extinction in England at the beginning of the 16th century.

It was filmed dragging logs on the River Wensun at Pensthorpe, a nature reserve near Fakenham in Norfolk, and building a lodge in “perfect beaver habitat”.

It is the first time a free-living beaver has been recorded in the county since the species began re-establishing itself in the British countryside in 2015, when feral kittens were born in Devon.

“This animal has just appeared on our reserve. No one knows where it came from but it was found in what I consider perfect beaver habitat,” reserve manager Richard Spowage said. He estimates that the beaver has been living in an isolated and nearly impenetrable area of ​​the reserve for about a month.

“This is a section of the river that we are releasing into the wild,” he added. “There’s a lot of tree cover and we think it might be going into the nearby swamps and hunting for food.”

A nocturnal vegetarian, the beaver collects willow trees at night and builds a cellar of bark for storage near his home. “He’s turned up and doing what a beaver does, chopping down trees and gathering food for the winter. That way, when it gets too cold or there’s a lot of flooding, he can stay in his little lodge and keep warm,” Spowage said.

A volunteer got an idea that a beaver was living in the reserve when he noticed an oddly shaped tree stump “cut almost like a pointed stick”.

At first he wondered if “a little boy with an ax had somehow found his way into the woodland.” But after spotting “classic beaver snippets” at the base of another tree, he set up camera traps that captured a lone beaver walking through the woods at night.

“It’s very elusive,” Spowage said. “It was a very special moment to see him there, living his own life, after not being seen in Norfolk for hundreds of years.”

Natural England, which advises the government on the natural environment, announced in March that it will start licensing projects aimed at reintroducing beavers to nature. As of August, the government had received 39 expressions of interest, 20 of which were from the federation of Wildlife Foundations.

However, only one population of beavers has ever been legally released into the wild in the UK; Four sleepy beavers made history by crawling from their crate into the Purbeck Heaths ponds in Dorset.

Cornwall Wildlife Trust is still awaiting approval to include beavers in the Helman Tor reserve, despite it already hosting a wild population.

The Scottish government has been officially allowing the movement and release of beavers since 2021, and the population there is pegged at 1,500.

It is unclear whether the Pensthorpe beaver, whose sex and age are unknown, was illegally released into the reserve using a practice known by activists as beaver bombing. It is possible that he voluntarily entered the Wensun, an aquifer-fed chalk river whose name derives from the Old English adjective meaning “to wander.”

“It could be a wild beaver that disperses naturally,” said Emily Bowen, a spokeswoman for the Beaver Trust, a charity that aims to reintroduce beavers. “There are actually 10 separate wild populations in the UK at the moment.”

Wild beavers have also been seen in Kent, Hampshire, Somerset, Wiltshire and Hereford, he said. There are some captive beavers in Norfolk, but none have been reported missing.

Spowage doubts whether a wild beaver could have reached Norfolk on its own. “It’s unlikely that it was born wild, or if it was wild, it’s likely that there was some sort of human influence that would move it,” he said, adding that the beaver would be welcomed to live in Pensthorpe. “From our perspective, he is a wild animal and has a right to be here.”