Baby beavers have been born in urban London for the first time in more than 400 years, a conservation project said.
The family of Eurasian beavers were introduced to a nature reserve in Ealing, west London, in October as part of a project that aims to get the public to engage with nature, to study biodiversity improvements and to monitor flood mitigation effects.
Project leaders said the fact that at least two babies, or kits as they are called, had been born on the Paradise Fields site in Greenford showed the beavers were “happy” with the habitat.
Dr Sean McCormack, one of the volunteers behind the project, said he and the other volunteers were “totally over the moon, thrilled, excited”.
Beavers can be a great help in restoring wetlands. They’re being released in California to help stop wildfires as their ponds are natural firebreaks…unfortunately when they build around humans it doesn’t always work out. They’ve been known to flood neighborhoods and wash out roads.
I saw a documentary a while back where they were washing out roads (in Canada IIRC) by damning up the drains that run under the roads. They just have a built in need to stop flowing water. Instead of killing or re-locating the beavers, the guy being interviewed realized if they laid out a secondary conduit (large hose) in the drain, the beavers could damn up the drain but the water would still flow from one side of the road to the other. If I can find it again I’ll post it