‘No one knows where it came from’: first wild beaver spotted in Norfolk for 400 years

A wild beaver has been spotted in Norfolk for the first time since beavers were hunted to extinction in England at the beginning of the 16th century.

It was filmed dragging logs and establishing a lodge in a “perfect beaver habitat” on the River Wensum at Pensthorpe, a nature reserve near Fakenham in Norfolk.

It is the first time a free-living beaver has been recorded in the county since the species began to re-establish itself in the English countryside in 2015, when a litter of wild kits was born in Devon.

“This animal just appeared in our reserve. No one knows where it’s come from, but it’s found what I consider a perfect beaver habitat,” said the reserve’s manager, Richard Spowage. He estimates the beaver has been living in an isolated and almost impenetrable area of the reserve for about a month.

“It’s a section of the river that we’ve left to go wild,” he added. “There’s plenty of tree cover and we think it might be travelling into the adjacent marshes, hunting for food.”

The beaver – a nocturnal vegetarian – is collecting willow trees at night and building a larder of bark to store near its home. “It’s turned up and it’s just doing what a beaver does, which is cutting down trees and gathering food for the winter. That way, once it gets too cold, or if there’s too much flooding, it can just stay in its little lodge and keep warm,” Spowage said.

He first had an inkling a beaver was living on the reserve after a volunteer noticed an oddly shaped tree stump that was “cut almost like a pointed stick”.

At first he wondered whether “some small boy with an axe had somehow found his way into the woodland”. But after spotting “classic beaver chips” at the base of another tree, he set camera traps, which captured a lone beaver walking through the forest at night.

“It’s very elusive,” Spowage said. “It was such a special moment to see it out there, living its life, after not being seen in Norfolk for hundreds of years.”

Natural England, which advises the government on the natural environment, announced in March that it would begin issuing licences to projects that aimed to reintroduce beavers into the wild. By August, the government had received 39 expressions of interest, 20 of which are from the Wildlife Trusts federation.

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However, only one population of beavers has been legally released into the wild so far in England – four sleepy beavers made history by crawling from their crates into the ponds of the Purbeck Heaths in Dorset.

Cornwall Wildlife Trust is still waiting for approval to introduce beavers to its Helman Tor reserve, even though it is already home to a wild population.

Since 2021, the Scottish government has formally allowed the movement and release of beavers and the population there is put at 1,500.

It is not clear whether the Pensthorpe beaver, whose sex and age is unknown, was illegally released into the reserve by activists using a practice known as beaver bombing. It is possible it wandered of its own accord into the Wensum – an aquifer-fed chalk river whose name is derived from the Old English adjective for “wandering”.

“It could be a naturally dispersing wild beaver,” said Emily Bowen, a spokesperson for the Beaver Trust, a charity that aims to restore beavers to regenerate landscapes. “There are actually 10 individual wild populations in England at the moment.”

Wild beavers have also been spotted in Kent, Hampshire, Somerset, Wiltshire and Hereford, she said. Norfolk has some captive beavers but none have been reported missing.

Spowage doubts whether a wild beaver could have reached Norfolk by itself. “It’s unlikely it’s been born wild, or if it was wild, potentially there was some sort of human influence to move it,” he said, adding that the beaver would be welcome to live at Pensthorpe. “From our point of view, it’s a wild animal and it’s got the right to be here.”