A film on the progress of reintroduction of beavers at Greathough Brook, Lydbrook, in the Forest of Dean from 2021. Courtesy of Forestry England.
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00:00 Beavers were once, throughout Europe, they were very, very common species.
00:09 They were hunted to extinction.
00:12 In Britain, the last beavers, I think, were in about the 15th, 16th century.
00:16 So they were hunted because of their very heavy, warm fur and for their castoreum, which
00:22 was used as like a painkiller.
00:26 Now in these more enlightened times, we're realising that actually beavers have huge
00:33 value as living, breathing animals.
00:35 And we need to get a lot better at working with nature in terms of helping to solve some
00:40 of our man-made issues.
00:45 The last major floods in Midbrook were in 2012.
00:49 Ten properties and businesses flooded with huge amounts of damage.
00:53 So we were always being asked, what can we do?
00:56 This Forestry England is a landowner here to help solve that problem of flooding.
01:01 Before the beavers came to this site, this was basically a highly modified stream within
01:06 the Forest of Dean.
01:07 It had been channelled, it had been influenced by man due to all the industries down in Midbrook.
01:13 So the water effectively landed in the brook, rushed down.
01:16 It wasn't particularly rich in biodiversity.
01:18 It wasn't doing much in terms of holding up the water.
01:22 Beavers do not like the sound of running water.
01:25 They have this innate behaviour to build dams.
01:28 I tend to come down on a weekly basis, either early in the morning or later on in the evening
01:33 when it's really quiet.
01:35 It's a really dynamic, interesting, surprising site.
01:38 You never quite know what you're going to find.
01:40 The beavers are pretty much active from about ten o'clock at night through to early mornings.
01:47 All day they'll be tucked up in their burrows, safe from predators.
01:51 And at night time they come out, they feed, they fell trees, they create these dams.
01:57 Here we can see where the beavers have basically created these trails.
02:02 And we've got a trail camera here.
02:04 We've got a lot of these situated all around the site.
02:07 And they're brilliant for just giving us a little bit of an insight into the lives of
02:10 the beavers.
02:11 The footage is really interesting because every five, ten minutes or so you'll get another
02:16 image of one of the beavers dragging various vegetation, dock leaves and brambles and nettles,
02:23 busily creating their habitat.
02:27 They're trying to create really deep water so they can burrow into the banks on the side
02:32 of the stream, somewhere safe to breed effectively.
02:37 They'll use sticks and twigs and fell trees to create these really complicated dams.
02:41 They'll pack them with mud, which holds up most of the water, but as you can hear if
02:46 they're allowing water to very gently flow through the site.
02:49 And that's fantastic because in really dry periods such as this, they're conserving water,
02:53 they're holding it up, slowing the flow, preventing that very sudden force of water going down
02:59 into communities such as Lydbrook and actually flooding it.
03:03 The beavers have felled this willow tree here.
03:06 They felled it at the base.
03:08 They normally fell over the water, but you can see here how they haven't actually killed
03:12 the tree.
03:13 They want them to stay alive, they want them to regenerate.
03:16 You can see here all this new growth and that is exactly what the beavers need because they
03:21 want to set up home here.
03:22 They want this to provide them with the resources they need through the winter.
03:27 You're getting this lovely complex mosaic of habitats where you've got some deadwood,
03:35 some felled wood, some wood that will be submerged in the water and all of this creates space
03:40 for birds to nest and for invertebrates to feed.
03:45 They are selfish animals like we all are, creating their nice living space.
03:49 By doing that, they are unwittingly creating habitat for a huge variety of other species.
03:55 So the burrows will be used by otters when they're not used anymore.
03:58 We've got footage of multiple bird species and mice and small mammals feeding on the
04:02 invertebrates in the dams.
04:05 Everything they do creates space for other wildlife to live in this sort of messy, dynamic,
04:11 interesting, complex habitat which we don't see very much now.
04:15 We're all too tidy.
04:18 And this is something that we try to emulate.
04:20 We work with contractors and we work with teams of volunteers to do exactly this sort
04:25 of work, to fell trees, to create open conditions to increase the biodiversity of the Forest
04:32 of Dean.
04:33 But here we've got two animals doing it for free.
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