In this short film, Discover Animals’ Geoff Moore visits the National Trust’s Holnicote Estate on Exmoor in Somerset, to discover more about how beavers have been re-introduced.
He speaks to Ben Eardley, Project Manager for the National Trust at Holnicote, about how the release of beavers into the riverways here in January 2020 aimed to restore natural processes to the landscape, bringing back wetland areas to help mitigate against climate change and improve biodiversity.
In two years, one beaver family has helped to create a network of ponds that did not exist before on this three-hectare site, providing more food for wildlife and a green oasis even in the heart of summer. The beavers really are great eco-engineers and they love parsnips as a treat!
Mum Grylls and Dad Yogi now have three kits including a juvenile named Rashford, named to celebrate England reaching the final of the men’s football Euros, with the other two kits, who are twins, called Russo and Toone following the Lionesses success in the women’s football World Cup last summer.
The National Trust has launched a virtual tour – accessed on the charity’s website www.nationaltrust.org.uk/virtual-beaver-tour – which uses cutting edge technology to provide users with virtual access to the enclosure.
The footage was captured using professional, high resolution 360° video equipment, for the first tour of its kind in the UK. The immersive experience features trail camera footage of the beavers’ everyday lives, and drone footage of the enclosure and wider estate with links to other National Trust projects and a ‘question and answer’ session with Ben.
Other wildlife captured on the 360° video and trail cameras include kingfishers, stoat, roe deer and bull finch. The tour will add additional footage as the site develops, capturing this dynamic changing waterscape and its wildlife as it moves through the seasons. Clips of the growing kits and their parents also feature on the tour.
The beavers are one important part of the Trust’s habitat restoration work at Holnicote. Other work includes the first application in the UK of the innovative ‘Stage 0’ approach to river restoration, where a tributary of the River Aller has now been allowed to find its own course, creating a wetland habitat which has again attracted wildlife including peregrine falcons, grasshoppers, dragonflies, bees and wagtails.
Holnicote is one of the Trust’s Riverlands projects and is co-funded by the Interreg 2 Seas Co-Adapt programme, Frugi, Environment Agency, Green Recovery Challenge Fund 2 and the Somerset Rivers Authority.
For more information visit www.nationaltrust.org.uk/holnicote-beavers.
Main image credit:Â National Trust Images Nick Upton
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