The River Otter Beaver Project.

Beaver-female-with-kits-by-Mike-Symes

How to live, work - and farm - alongside beavers

The River Otter Beaver Trial is taking place in a highly productive agricultural landscape. And several villages and small towns are found close to the river throughout the catchment area covered by England's first licensed beaver re-introduction project.

Although some beaver re-introductions in recent decades have taken place in remote areas with limited human use of the landscape, there are examples with similar land use patterns to East Devon.

One such is Bavaria, in southern Germany. Beavers were re-introduced there in 1966, a century after their local extinction. There are lessons to be learned from the Bavarians' pragmatic solutions to any conflicts arising from beaver use and human use of the shared landscape.

Jake Chant, DWT Field Officer for the River Otter Beaver Trial recently returned from a research trip to Bavaria. He has posted his findings and images in a blog on the DWT website.

Beavers and dams

Everyone knows that beavers construct dams: a simple structure built across a stream to create a pond.

And research into beaver ecology demonstrates that, by creating more freshwater habitat behind the dam, this activity has beneficial impacts on the amount and diversity of wildlife, on water quality and on mitigating the impact of flooding downstream after heavy rain.

But what happens when the water held back by a dam is being stored in the 'wrong place' from a human point of view?

Getting into deep water

Beavers like deep stable water levels, especially around the entrance to their burrows. This is provided by the River Otter in many areas where the beavers have established territories. Here it is not necessary for the beavers to construct dams, and they simply dig burrows into the banks, deep under water.

When they move into the smaller tributaries or floodplain ditches, they sometimes build dams to create ponds where they can live. In most cases, these dams are small and do not impact on the adjacent land or farming practices.

But sometimes they can have an impact unwanted by the landowner next to the waterway. When this happened on a watercourse flowing into the River Otter between Newton Poppleford and Otterton, Devon Wildlife Trust and our project partners had to find a solution.

Deceiving a beaver with a 'beaver deceiver'

If a beaver has identified a suitable place on a waterway to create a dam, then if a human removes the sticks, mud and vegetation, the beaver is likely to simply create the dam again after dark.

Where unlicensed releases of beavers have occurred elsewhere in Europe without a responsible body in place to manage impacts of beaver dams in 'unsuitable' locations, these conflicts have led to persecution of beavers.

One of the tasks for the River Otter Beaver Trial is to demonstrate how solutions can be found to conflicts between beaver and human uses of the local landscape. And this is where the 'beaver deceiver' comes in.

Where higher water levels conflict with farming practices or threaten infrastructure, a flow device can be installed to reduce water levels by moving water around the dam through a pipe. If the beaver can locate where water is escaping through the dam it will try to fix the leak. So the solution only works if water gets into the pipe a good distance away from the dam - and inside a beaver-proof cage (see photo above, with 'deceiver' in foreground and dam in background) Hence the term ‘beaver deceiver.’

Thanks to a substantial amount of time for DWT staff and project partners spent in waders testing positions for a pipe, this 'dam problem' was solved - with no negative impacts on the beaver or for the landowner.

Although this 'Beaver Deceiver' is in Idaho. The principle is the same: