The Beavers of Greathough Brook, Lydbrook - Forestry England - video Dailymotion

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A film on the progress of reintroduction of beavers at Greathough Brook, Lydbrook, in the Forest of Dean from 2021. Courtesy of Forestry England.

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00:00 Beavers were once, throughout Europe, they were very, very common species.

00:09 They were hunted to extinction.

00:12 In Britain, the last beavers, I think, were in about the 15th, 16th century.

00:16 So they were hunted because of their very heavy, warm fur and for their castoreum, which

00:22 was used as like a painkiller.

00:26 Now in these more enlightened times, we're realising that actually beavers have huge

00:33 value as living, breathing animals.

00:35 And we need to get a lot better at working with nature in terms of helping to solve some

00:40 of our man-made issues.

00:45 The last major floods in Midbrook were in 2012.

00:49 Ten properties and businesses flooded with huge amounts of damage.

00:53 So we were always being asked, what can we do?

00:56 This Forestry England is a landowner here to help solve that problem of flooding.

01:01 Before the beavers came to this site, this was basically a highly modified stream within

01:06 the Forest of Dean.

01:07 It had been channelled, it had been influenced by man due to all the industries down in Midbrook.

01:13 So the water effectively landed in the brook, rushed down.

01:16 It wasn't particularly rich in biodiversity.

01:18 It wasn't doing much in terms of holding up the water.

01:22 Beavers do not like the sound of running water.

01:25 They have this innate behaviour to build dams.

01:28 I tend to come down on a weekly basis, either early in the morning or later on in the evening

01:33 when it's really quiet.

01:35 It's a really dynamic, interesting, surprising site.

01:38 You never quite know what you're going to find.

01:40 The beavers are pretty much active from about ten o'clock at night through to early mornings.

01:47 All day they'll be tucked up in their burrows, safe from predators.

01:51 And at night time they come out, they feed, they fell trees, they create these dams.

01:57 Here we can see where the beavers have basically created these trails.

02:02 And we've got a trail camera here.

02:04 We've got a lot of these situated all around the site.

02:07 And they're brilliant for just giving us a little bit of an insight into the lives of

02:10 the beavers.

02:11 The footage is really interesting because every five, ten minutes or so you'll get another

02:16 image of one of the beavers dragging various vegetation, dock leaves and brambles and nettles,

02:23 busily creating their habitat.

02:27 They're trying to create really deep water so they can burrow into the banks on the side

02:32 of the stream, somewhere safe to breed effectively.

02:37 They'll use sticks and twigs and fell trees to create these really complicated dams.

02:41 They'll pack them with mud, which holds up most of the water, but as you can hear if

02:46 they're allowing water to very gently flow through the site.

02:49 And that's fantastic because in really dry periods such as this, they're conserving water,

02:53 they're holding it up, slowing the flow, preventing that very sudden force of water going down

02:59 into communities such as Lydbrook and actually flooding it.

03:03 The beavers have felled this willow tree here.

03:06 They felled it at the base.

03:08 They normally fell over the water, but you can see here how they haven't actually killed

03:12 the tree.

03:13 They want them to stay alive, they want them to regenerate.

03:16 You can see here all this new growth and that is exactly what the beavers need because they

03:21 want to set up home here.

03:22 They want this to provide them with the resources they need through the winter.

03:27 You're getting this lovely complex mosaic of habitats where you've got some deadwood,

03:35 some felled wood, some wood that will be submerged in the water and all of this creates space

03:40 for birds to nest and for invertebrates to feed.

03:45 They are selfish animals like we all are, creating their nice living space.

03:49 By doing that, they are unwittingly creating habitat for a huge variety of other species.

03:55 So the burrows will be used by otters when they're not used anymore.

03:58 We've got footage of multiple bird species and mice and small mammals feeding on the

04:02 invertebrates in the dams.

04:05 Everything they do creates space for other wildlife to live in this sort of messy, dynamic,

04:11 interesting, complex habitat which we don't see very much now.

04:15 We're all too tidy.

04:18 And this is something that we try to emulate.

04:20 We work with contractors and we work with teams of volunteers to do exactly this sort

04:25 of work, to fell trees, to create open conditions to increase the biodiversity of the Forest

04:32 of Dean.

04:33 But here we've got two animals doing it for free.

04:36 (water flowing)

04:43 (water flowing)

04:51 (water flowing)

04:58 (water flowing)

05:06 (water flowing)

The Beavers of Greathough Brook, Lydbrook - Forestry England

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