A wild beaver has been found in Norfolk for the first time since beavers were hunted to extinction in England at the beginning of the 16th century.
It is filled with dragging logs and establishing a home in a “Perfect Beaver Hadat” in the stream of the River Pennorpe, a nature reserve near Fkoham in Norfolk.
This is the first time a free-living beaver has been recorded in the county since the species began to reproduce itself in the English countryside in 2015, when a litter of wild kits was born in Devon.
“This animal just showed up in our reserve. No one knows where it came from, but it found what I consider to be a perfect beaver habitat,” said the Reserve’s Spowage, Richard Spowage. He estimated that the beaver lived in a remote and almost inaccessible area of the reserve for about a month.
“This is a section of the creek that we have left to tremble,” he added. “There was a lot of tree cover and we thought it would be possible to travel to the nearby marshes, hunting for food.”
Beaver – a nocturnal vegegarian – is collecting willow trees at night and building a lander of leather storage at home. “It did and it did what a beaver does, cutting down trees and gathering food for the winter.
He first had a rust living in the reserve after a volunteer noticed a strange tree shape “cut like a stick finger”.
At first he wondered if “some little boy with an ax had somehow found his way into the woods”. But after inserting the “Classic Beaver Chips” into the trunk of another tree, he set the camera traps, capturing a solitary beaver walking through the forest at night.
“It’s really bad,” Spowage said. “It’s a special moment to see it there, living its life, after 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 issuing licenses to projects that seek to restore beavers in the wild. In August, the government received 39 expressions of interest, 20 of which came from wildlife trusts in the Federation.
However, only one population of beavers has been legally released into the wild in England – four sleeping beavers have historically been caged in crates in Purberck lakes.
The Cornwall Wildlife Trust is still waiting for approval to introduce beavers into the Helman Tor reserve, although it is home to a wild population.
Since 2021, the Scottish government has formally authorized the movement and released the beavers and the population is set at 1,500.
It is unclear whether the Penstorpe beaver, whose sex and age are unknown, was illegally released into the reserve by activists using a practice known as Beaver Bombing. It is possible that it has strayed by its own accord to Wensun – an Aquifer-Fed Chalk Subas whose name is derived from the old English adjective for “Wandering”.
“There could be a natural dispersal of beavers,” said Emily Bowen, a spokeswoman for the beaver trust, a charity that seeks to restore beavers. “There are actually 10 individual wild populations in England at the moment.”
Wild beavers were also targeted in Kent, Hampshire, Somerset, Wiltshire and Hereford, he said. Norfolk has a few captive beavers but none have been reported missing.
Spowage doubts if a wild beaver can reach Norfolk on its own. “It may not have been born wild, or if it was wild, there may have been some kind of human influence that moved it,” he said, adding that the beaver would live peacefully in Penthorpe. “From our perspective, this is a wild animal and it has earned the right to be here.”