Beavers and Black Poplars

Fran Southgate

Nature Recovery Manager

In 2019, we were able to announce that Beavers had returned to Sussex after an absence of hundreds of years. A couple of years later, we had the amazing news that there were baby Beavers in Sussex for the first time in centuries too. Those two things alone stand out as some of the best wildlife news I have been able to report in my whole career.

Having these keystone ecosystem engineer animals back in Sussex is showing us the incredible, positive changes that they can make to our landscapes and their resilience for climate, biodiversity and people. Stepping into a beaver wetland is like being transported back in time, to when our countryside was alive with the hum, trickle, splash and sparkle of abundant nature.

One of the most exciting things about the return of Beavers is that we do not know the full scale of the impacts that they will have on the land – and these emergent outcomes can be both predictable and unpredictable. But what happens when you started your career in 2001, helping landowners all over Sussex to plant the rare native tree, the Black Poplar - and then a Beaver comes along and starts nibbling on it?

This has happened already. Beavers are known to have a taste for Poplar trees, and they have already singled one out at Knepp as a meal / building material.

Is this a clash of rare species that needs our intervention? Or shall we stand back and watch to see what happens … as this hasn’t been seen in Sussex for eons?

Personally I am fascinated to watch what happens once this tree is felled. I imagine that initially, some new growth will sprout from the tree stump, and a new tree will begin to grow as a coppice stool.

Next, the felled part of the tree will lay on the land and in the water, and will start taking root – creating another new black poplar treescape and/or some valuable deadwood habitat.

Then the Beavers will cut some branches from the Black Poplar and use them to create dams, and lodges – propagating the tree by ‘planting’ it across their territory.

And finally they will probably eat some – turning the energy from the tree into energy in a Beaver, and thus helping to propagate the rare Beavers as well as the rare trees.

There will be many other benefits to wildlife that we can’t predict for now. For me this is an amazing story, and I can’t wait to see how it unfolds.