Beavers are helping us to make a splash

By Fran Southgate, Nature Recovery Manager

Or It’s too dam hot out there, surely there’s somewhere I can lodge a complaint? 

As Sussex sizzles, wildfires threaten and hosepipe bans start to bite, Sussex Wildlife Trust is turning its attention to Beavers. We and the Government are convinced that these once extinct native mammals are one of the best ways we can tackle our current and future water crises in Sussex.

Water retention is the Beaver's raison d'être (their life's purpose, and their mission, some would say mission impossible at the moment). Beavers are large and furry, and they do not enjoy walking long distances across hot land; they much prefer to float. So they create fantastic watery wonderlands.

Creating beavery wetlands is thirsty work, but Beavers are happy to just beaver away without recompense. And herein lies the key. These ecosystem engineering creatures behave naturally, and for free, in a way which not only creates vast amounts of flood storage, saving towns such as Ealing from flooding, but also gives us resilience to drought. Beavers help us to slow, store and hold on to precious water resources which are otherwise drained out to sea before we can use them.

We found out this week from the Environment Agency that the South Downs and Solent region had 1% of their Long Term Average rainfall in July. There wasn't a huge amount of rain in May, June, or the first half of August either. We are in the midst of one of the most severe droughts in history, and it is going to happen much more often as we move into climate change. Every plant, crop and animal we know needs water to survive, and so do we.

The image below shows the Beaver pen at Knepp Wildlands on the River Adur in Sussex. It shows parched grasslands next to a lush green area, with pools of water.

We are working with a whole range of people to see if it is viable to restore free-living Beavers to the whole of the catchment. Working to manage the recovery of Beavers in Sussex gives me hope, hope that we can find solutions to crises like these, and that we can work with nature at a huge scale to restore the life-giving resources that we all need. Watch this space for beavery updates coming soon.