First beaver born on Exmoor for 400 years

The mother beaver, nicknamed Grylls, is said to be ‘thriving’ with her first kit

The mother and her six-week-old kit were spotted on camera swimming at night (National Trust/PA)

A baby beaver has been born on Exmoor for the first time in 400 years.

Camera footage shows the baby, known as a kit, swimming with its mother during the night in a river on the National Trust’s Holnicote Estate.

The parents, two Eurasian beavers, were brought to live in the area in January 2020 as part of efforts to reintroduce the once-native semi-aquatic mammals to the Somerset estate.

Beavers are making a return to Britain after being hunted to extinction for their fur, glands and meat in the 16th century.

Now footage captured this month reveals that the pair of beavers had successfully bred, with images from a static camera showing the six-week-old kit swimming with its mother back to the family lodge while she stops to nibble a branch.

Rangers on the estate said they had suspected that Grylls had been pregnant (National Trust/PA)

Jack Siviter, one of the rangers on the Holnicote estate, said: “We first had an inkling that our pair of beavers had mated successfully when the male started being a lot more active building and dragging wood and vegetation around the site in late spring.

“The female also changed her usual habits, and stayed out of sight, leaving the male to work alone.”

He added: “We are particularly pleased for our female, nicknamed Grylls [after television adventurer Bear Grylls] due to her survival instincts, as she didn’t have the easiest start to life, being orphaned at an early age.

“As a first-time mum she seems to be thriving and it’s great to see her with her new kit.”

The family should now stay together for the next two years before the kit will want to go off to create a new territory of its own. It will then be relocated into another enclosure or a wild release site if regulations permit in the near future.

The two beavers at Holnicote are the first to be introduced on National Trust land in the charity’s 125-year history, with another pair released into a large enclosure in the South Downs.

The Trust said they had transformed the habitat on the Exmoor estate. The new wet woodland habitat they have created has more bats to dragonflies, kingfishers and sparrowhawks, while otters are now more regular visitors.

Beavers’ engineering skills help restore wetland habitats through dam-building and felling trees, as well as the slowing, storing and filtering of water in the landscape.

Pools of water created by the dams attracts other wildlife and insects, and reduces flash flooding downstream.

The trust said the 2.7 hectare (6.7 acre) enclosure the beavers have been released in has been transformed from unmanaged woodland to a more open wetland that attracts more wildlife in just 18 months.

The dam built by beavers that were released on to the Holnicote Estate (National Trust/PA)

Ben Eardley, project manager for the National Trust at Holnicote, said: “The beavers are doing a lot of what we want to see in terms of conservation and land management.

“They are letting the light and the water into the site, helping natural processes and providing opportunities for a host of other wildlife.”

A number of organisations and landowners across England are introducing beavers to fenced sites to help boost nature and reduce flooding, while they are now also found wild on a number of rivers in England and Scotland.

A consultation on the approach to beavers in England and managing them in the wild is expected to take place this summer.