“There is an animal called the beaver” 

(13th Century Medieval Bestiary, translated by Richard Barber) 

I balance on the water’s edge and check the battery reading: 82% – “That’s fine” – I make sure nothing’s obscuring the motion sensor and click the waterproof lock. But then, as I shoulder my bag, I notice it: a disturbance in the water, moving towards me. A small oblong head soon comes into focus, tailed by a broad wake hinting at the large body below the surface. I remain calm thinking that this typically shy and wary mammal will soon realise it is heading straight towards another equally shy and wary mammal. But it keeps course, and then it begins to dawn on me: it’s heading towards me deliberately. I stay still – dead still – as it swims almost within touching distance, before circling away… 

For the past five months I’ve been observing this beaver (one of two) through trail cameras at one of the many beaver enclosures that now exist across the country. My relationship with these, mostly nocturnal, animals has till now been one typical of the twenty-first century; mediated by lenses, screens, and surveillance technology. Appearing intermittently on grainy black and white videos, they've had an uncanny, spectral reality. This is only heightened by their peculiar traces which, like something from The Blair Witch Project, I stumble across when rigging the cameras: strange accumulations of sticks, neatly arranged piles of wet mud, perfect circles of wood chips. Such a relationship would appear a neat example of John Berger’s theory that, under modernity, “animals are always the observed […] What we know about them is an index of our power”. And yet, unexpectedly eye to eye with this very real beaver, the power dynamic seems suspended: I’ve been caught off guard and all of a sudden I’m the one who is vulnerable, the one observed. I’m meeting this creature on its own terms. It’s an unnerving encounter but also one that’s oddly characteristic of our history with beavers in Britain who we always seem to be in a process of re-imagining. 

“Here, the beaver made a big dam across the river. This made the Great Lakes.”
Algonquian folktale, recorded by Horace Beck in 1947 

There are many such stories from Algonquian peoples in North America which ascribe features in the landscape to the antics of a Great Beaver. It’s thought that these stories might contain a prehistoric memory of Castoroides ohioensis, a Pleistocene giant beaver which weighed between 150-200kg, was a similar size to a black bear, and lived alongside people in America roughly 11,000 years ago. Unfortunately, it seems that Castoroides wasn’t adapted for felling trees, making the possibility of gargantuan prehistoric dams unlikely. Nonetheless, it’s not surprising that beavers find their way into Native American aetiologies (stories of how things came to be). After all, the two (very similar) surviving species of beaver, Castor canadensis in North America and Castor fiber in Eurasia, are perhaps the most dramatic example of allogenic engineers – organisms that actively manipulate and shape their environments. They do this through felling and coppicing trees, building dams which create ponds, and constructing canals to help them access vegetation. 

It's thought that the wetlands created and inhabited by beavers were attractive environments to early hominids in Britain, being areas of abundant resources and havens from water-averse predators. More recently in prehistory, archaeologist Bryony Coles, looking at Neolithic and Mesolithic evidence on the Somerset Levels and at Star Carr in Yorkshire, has found “a close association of human and beaver activity” with humans making use of beaver wood and beaver constructions. Coles moreover has suggested that “at the beginning of the 4th millennium BC, it is arguable that beavers had a greater impact on the landscape of Britain than humans”. 

However, beavers became increasingly rare in Western Europe throughout antiquity as land became more managed and they were exploited for a combination of their meat, fur and castoreum (a unique scent-marking secretion that was prescribed for an array of maladies). As has been noted by Rachel Poliquin, beavers’ relatively low reproductive rate and obvious living quarters make the species particularly vulnerable to overhunting by humans. This decline meant that by the 1180s, Giraldus Cambrensis (‘Gerald of Wales’) thought he was describing “the only river [the Teifi] in Wales, or even in England, which has beavers”, suggesting that beavers had long stopped being commonplace in the landscape. With this loss came a profound cultural amnesia of their ecosystem effects; as Coles puts it in Beavers in Britain’s Past (2006), “the loss of beaver habitat was probably so gradual and imperceptible that few people noticed what was gone, and few realised that coppice, fishpond, water meadow and park were not innovations but replacements”. Amazingly, even up to the 1970s it was doubted that Eurasian beavers were vigorous enough to build dams or have the same environmental impact as their American equivalents. 

“It is said when the beaver is being chased by dogs […] he bites off his testicles, since he knows that this is what he is hunted for” 
Aesop’s Fable, recorded by Phaedrus, 1st Century AD, translated by Laura Gibbs 

With actual beaver encounters becoming a rarity in Western Europe, myth and allegory soon filled the gap. The most infamous is the above Aesopian fable which taught that people ought to follow the beaver’s example and learn to “be deprived of their possessions in order to live lives free from danger”. The factual base of this fable (male beavers don’t have external testicles to bite off, and castoreum is stored in separate internal castor sacs) was challenged as far back as Pliny the Elder in AD 77, but this did not stop it becoming a persistent ‘Woozle’ or urban myth around Europe until at least the seventeenth century. In the medieval period the fable became a Christian allegory which taught that one “should cut off all vices and shameless deeds and throw them in the devil’s face” and was illustrated in all manner of manuscripts, heraldry and carvings. Though medieval depictions of animals are not known for their anatomical accuracy, medieval beavers, often looking more like strangely distorted dogs, stand out in bearing almost no relation to their physical referent; they suggest an animal barely known outside such tales. 

As author Rachel Poliquin writes in her cultural history Beaver (2015), the Eurasian beaver was extinct in Italy by the sixteenth century and “extremely rare in France by the early eighteenth”. Their exact extinction in Britain is contested, with traditional thinking placing the date around 1200 in England and Wales and somewhere between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Scotland. However, recent finds of gnawed wood have pushed the date in England to the fourteenth century, while Coles, looking at parish records of bounties paid for ‘vermin’, has suggested that small populations might have endured in England until the late eighteenth century. Regardless, as farmer and conservationist Derek Gow puts it in Bringing Back the Beaver (2020), by the early 1800s, “the dominion of humans [in Britain] was near-absolute, and the large animals that survived […] only did so at the behest of those who insisted that they remain for the chase”. 

“Lor Par: are they Beavers? They ain’t a bit like your hat” 
Comic from Eccentricities, 1840, found in Beaver (2015) by Rachel Poliquin 

Though it’s easy to judge those who unreflectively pushed such a fascinating animal to extinction in Britain, it’s important to remember that ‘species extinction’ was not a widely accepted concept in Western thought until the nineteenth century. Prior to this, it was commonly held that creatures would always persist somewhere; there was a belief in what Thomas Jefferson described as the “renovating power constantly exercised by nature for the reproduction of all her subjects”. Such a view would have been confirmed by the ‘discovery’ and colonisation of North America where between 60-400 million beavers were found to be residing. It was this new abundance of American beavers who would form the majority of our beaver interactions in Britain between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, not in the name of habitat creation, medicine, or Christian allegory, but in the name of fashion. 

While beaver pelts had been used since prehistory, it was their formation into felted underfur hats, with their superior waterproof and shape-holding qualities, which drove what’s been called a ‘mammalian gold rush’ across North America. Whether it was sugarloafs worn by pilgrims, bicornes donned by Nelson and Napoleon, or the ubiquitous top hat, they all contributed to the giddy swell of commercial demand for beaver pelts which saw millions of beavers eradicated from Canada to New Mexico. 

Despite intimately adorning the heads of the powerful – monarchs, merchants, laughing cavaliers – the mass rendering of beavers into hats represents a low point in their species’ history as they became little more than raw material for capital accumulation. Indeed, beaver felt hats were not simply beaver pelts sewn together, instead, like so many commodities today, they were an ultra-processed product, enmeshed in a web of supply chains and industrial techniques. As Poliquin explains, a typical route at one point began with “traders purchasing pelts from aboriginal trappers” who then “sold them to Dutch middlemen, who shipped the pelts to Russia. Once Russian furriers had combed out the underfur, they sold it back to Dutch merchants, who in turn sold it mostly to French and English hatters”. The end result was a product which, like a proto-plastic, could be dyed and shaped; any sense that there was a thinking, building, secreting rodent in these hats was ultimately lost beneath the style of the time. By the time fashions changed in the nineteenth century, the American beaver population, like their Eurasian cousins before them, was in a decimated, fragmented state. 

“Build Back Beaver I Say” 
Boris Johnson, Conservative conference speech, 2021 

But now the beavers are back thanks to the efforts of campaigners, wildlife trusts, enthusiasts and ‘beaver bombers’ (individuals responsible for guerilla wild releases). The Beaver Trust now estimates that there are over 2,000 Eurasian beavers in Britain: more than are thought to have existed across the whole continent at the species’ low point. We seem, moreover, to have rediscovered the potential benefits of living with beavers and are welcoming them back, not as curiosities, but as keystone species. Such potential benefits include their ability to boost local biodiversity; the role their ‘leaky dams’ can have in flood mitigation; and in the improvements in water quality which can result from their dams and ponds trapping pollutants. 

However, it’s worth being wary of some of the language that is increasingly being used around this return. Rather than being framed as a moral case of their right to life in their natural range, the beaver’s case is often argued in terms like ‘natural capital’, ‘ecosystem services’ and ‘nature-based solutions’. Analysing this discourse in The Probiotic Planet (2020), the environmental geographer Jamie Lorimer finds that beavers are being pitched as an “ideal instrument for austerity environmentalism”, who will “mitigate environmental harms" and “do the types of ecological work currently performed by people at public expense”. At a time where privatised water companies are under intense public scrutiny for their pollution of natural water bodies, it's maybe not surprising that beavers, as potentially ‘free’ sources of restorative labour, have become politically palatable, even to the extent that Boris Johnson was praising their return in his 2021 party conference speech. 

While the interests of beavers and capital currently seem to be aligning in Britain, bringing back this animal based on anthropocentric measures of economic performance opens the door to potentially disturbing futures. After all, beavers are unruly, wild creatures and don’t always build dams in the places that they’re wanted: might we be tempted to start domesticating them so that they more efficiently serve our interests? In such a future, Lorimer writes, “valued beavers – like cattle, horses, and dogs – will be those that are subservient, tractable, reproductive, and resilient”. Or might we learn how to synthesise the beaver’s ecosystem effects – there are already beaver dam analogues (BDAs) in existence – and be able to dispose of the live, messy animals? Or perhaps our ideas of what is ecologically and economically valuable will change altogether. After all, it was though a similar lens of ’economic rationality’ that we saw wetlands as wastelands, classified beavers as vermin, and almost exterminated the genus in the first place. And finally, what could the focus on the economic benefits potentially mean for other nonhumans who aren’t as quantifiable? As geographer Jessica Dempsey writes in Enterprising Nature (2014), “though an economic logic may show the need for greater investment in nonhuman lives, that investment must be efficient and selective; it is not for all”. 

Of course, a biopolitical future of indentured, subservient beavers accumulating capital for private interests is not an inevitability. Though functionalist arguments might be appealed to, they are not what has enabled the beaver’s return in Britain. Whether it’s been the anarchic actions of ‘beaver bombers’ or the groundswell of public support that prevented the beavers on the River Otter originally being removed by DEFRA, as Lorimer writes, “the survival of beavers […] was secured out of a respect for the lives of these animals – and the lives of others that their ecological engineering made possible”. The beaver’s return, then, can ultimately be seen providing a glimpse of a more-than-human ethics at work which can hopefully be taken into the future. Indeed, if there is one final lesson that we can take from beavers, it’s perhaps this idea of interspecies hospitality. As author Carol Gigliotti writes in The Creative Lives of Animals (2022), “many beaver families live happily and peacefully in their lodges with muskrat, mice, water voles and flying insects”. In other words, they’re happy to share their homes – their strange, otherworldly, baroque creations – with other species, without expecting anything in return. 

Back at the pond, the days are getting longer and I’m starting to see the beavers more often (I’m still not sure if they’re greeting me, warding me off, or are just indifferent). I keep meaning to get a good photo of one of them. Yet, every time I see an oblong head emerge from the water, I can’t help but freeze. I can’t help but feel, despite all I’ve read, watched and heard, that I’m seeing this large, podgy, beautiful creature for the first time.