Triumph tragedy, crime, and government bureaucracy:  beaver reintroduction in England 

In February, two pairs of beavers were released into a river in Cornwall. For conservationists this was a monumental achievement, a culmination of a campaign set in motion in 2014, to make the reintroduction of wild beavers in England legal. Maybe this didn’t register on your oversaturated news radar, or maybe you’re not sure why it is important. Perhaps you’ll be surprised to learn that this was not a simple story, but like all good stories it’s full of tragedy, crime, and a heavy dose of government bureaucracy.   

Beavers existed happily alongside people in England for almost 10,000 years, but in the last 1,000 years things started to go wrong. Beavers became a sought-after commodity for their fur, meat and castoreum (a substance made in their castor glands that apparently smells like vanilla and was used to make perfume for a long time). Records are scant but there is evidence that people were still paid for delivering beaver heads as late as 1789. At any rate the Eurasian beaver species were extinct in England and very nearly extinct globally by the start of the 20^th century.   

Credit: Juliet Maxted, 2026.

The idea to reintroduce beavers did not pop-up out of the blue in 2014; people had been suggesting it for quite some time. According to reintroduction expert Derek Gow, Lord Onslow, a British politician, was the first person recorded suggesting bringing beavers in 1939. In 1977, the British Wildlife Magazine even suggested reintroducing beavers as a present for Queen Elizabeth II’s silver jubilee. Clearly, she wasn’t keen. However, as successive plans failed in England, 24 countries in Europe had already reintroduced beavers back into their old stomping grounds.   

Although legal beaver reintroductions had failed, an illegal resistance was forming. Known in conservation circles as ‘beaver bombing’, some, including expert Derek Gow, say that people had been covertly releasing captive beavers into the wild. Gow claims that the beaver bombers had grown frustrated by the lack of action on beaver reintroduction in England, despite success stories in mainland Europe, and were taking matters into their own hands. 

Over time this turned into an underground network of beaver liberators. The first known illegal beaver release happed in Scotland in 2001 and in England, a population of beavers with ‘unknown origins’ was discovered in the River Otter in 2008. These illegal beavers remained unknown to most of us until 2014 when the first video footage of wild River Otter beavers in England was captured. These beavers immediately made national headlines so, while the government may have preferred to keep this issue firmly under the rug, they had to respond.  

At the time beavers were legally classed as non-native species. So, when the River Otter beavers were discovered found in the wild, they were treated like an invasive species. The government considered them a threat to British wildlife and planned to capture and relocate them. But the local community and several environmental organised launched counter campaigns demanding that the government reconsider and, in 2015, they did. Defra granted a licence permitting a five-year trial to monitor how the beavers impacted the local environment and community. Once this trial was up, they would decide if the beavers could stay in the wild.    

Perhaps surprisingly, when the beaver trial in Devon finished in 2020, then Prime Minister Boris Johnson was pro-beaver, famously promising to “build back beaver” at the 2021 Conservative party conference. The government made the landmark decision to reclassify beavers as native species, which meant the river otter beavers could stay put. They also ruled that beavers could reintroduced, but only into fenced areas. Conservationists were hopeful that this would be extended to wild releases of beavers but then, progress stalled.    

The revolving door of prime ministers meant that it was difficult to keep track of where the government landed on this beaver debate. Nothing happened for a few years until, in January 2025, the Guardian reported that the new Labour Government had blocked wild beaver reintroductions because it was a “Tory legacy” (Horton, 2025). Just when things seemed hopeless, miraculously wild beaver reintroductions were made legal in February 2025. To this day, no one knows if this rumour was true.   

Credit: Juliet Maxted, 2026.

Now this bureaucratic battle has been resolved, one question remains, why did we do it? Plenty of people would consider the fact that we hunted beavers to extinction sufficient justification for bringing them back. But karmic justice was not the only thing fuelling beaver advocates.    

In the beavers’ absence a lot has changed in the way we manage our rivers and wetlands. Rivers have been diverted and wetlands drained to make room for infrastructure and agriculture, and during the industrial revolution straight canals were created to transport goods to major cities. The taming of our water ways has caused a significant problem which is getting worse because of climate change driven extreme weather events because, when wet weather threatens flooding, water in diverted rivers and canals has nowhere to safely overflow. As you can imagine, changing this would be a headache, but beaver presence would do it without much human supervision.   

Beavers are called ‘ecosystem engineers’ for their famous dam building skills. Beavers are compulsive dam builders because they hate the sound of running water and are compelled to block up streams to create deep ponds where they can shelter. By blocking up running waters beavers can create undulating wetland habitats that are full of life. Studies have shown that wetlands like these can help to prevent flooding downstream and provide a barrier for wildfires that regular rivers can’t match up to.   

Beavers also create habitats that are beneficial to other wildlife. This is what prompted vet and conservationist Sean McCormack to release a pair of beavers in Ealing in 2023. He dreamed of reintroducing a species, not beavers but water voles, into canals in London, but they were simply not wild enough, the banks were so sparse there were not enough food sources or cover from predators to make this dream possible. Restoring these banks this by hand could take decades but beavers could do it in a fraction of the time. Three years later and the Ealing beavers are thriving, but they’re still confined to an enclosure. 

British beaver preparing to do some ecosystem engineering. Credit: Holly Maughan, 2026.

So why, if wild beaver reintroductions became legal a year ago, is it taking so long for them to be released into the wild? The reality is that the legal process is complicated. Anyone who wants to release a beaver needs to source healthy beavers. They also need apply for a licence to release the beavers, proving they have access to beaver-friendly habitats and that the benefits outweigh the risks of releasing said beavers. And they would need to apply for funding. This is by no means an easy thing to do, but this doesn’t mean people have lost interest. Plenty of environmental organisations are putting together applications to release beavers, but it will take time for us to see the fruits of their labour. 

So what’s the point? Maybe it will be decades before beavers are happily roaming throughout England. Maybe another government will be anti-beaver and add even more impassable red tape. Sometimes conservation news seems this bleak. We are told that humans are responsible for the destruction of wildlife, that our presence is only negative. But this story shows that this is not the whole truth. People rallied behind beavers and proved that we can create a positive change for nature. We accomplished the impossible of reviving an extinct species. Now is the time to step into our role as custodians of our local environments. Who knows what we can bring back next? 

By Juliet Maxted, April 9, 2026.

Edited by Jack Hopper.