YouTube Video
Our featured beaver documentary of the week, embedded from YouTube.
Four hundred years later, Britain has wild beavers again
Hunted out of Britain in the 16th century, beavers have spent the last two decades being quietly, legally, and sometimes controversially reinstated.
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Beaver facts
- Beavers were driven to extinction in Britain by around the 16th century, hunted for fur, meat and castoreum.
- The Scottish Beaver Trial began in 2009 at Knapdale Forest in Argyll — the first formal licensed reintroduction of a mammal in UK history.
- The River Otter Beaver Trial in Devon, which began in 2015, was the first licensed wild beaver population in England and was allowed to stay permanently in 2020.
- Beavers became a European Protected Species in Scotland in 2019, and gained legal protection in England in October 2022.
- The Cornwall Beaver Project measured a beaver-built wetland holding back flood water from the village downstream — free flood defence, paid in willow.
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Google Maps
Where the world's largest beaver dam sits, in Wood Buffalo National Park, Alberta.
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