KATE MARTIN: Hello and welcome to the National Trust Podcast.
I'm Kate Martin. Lead Ranger at Formby in Liverpool. And today
I'll be visiting Exmoor in North Devon. The project team at the
Holnicote estate are trailing an experimental and rather
surprising way to tackle climate change.
I'll be checking out their new flood management scheme and
learning why it may have the potential to bring back a
habitat that hasn't been seen in the UK for over 400 years.
Exmoor National Park occupies almost 700 square kilometres of
North Devon's rugged moorland and shingle beaches. To the
north of this area is the Holnicote Estate, a 32 square
kilometre National Trust managed segment of this parkland. Its
coastline, ancient woodland, a network of rivers, make it a
wonderland for the outdoor enthusiast.
The area that I'm walking through at the moment is sort of
a natural bowl where you've got these sort of rolling hills. So
there's a real sort of abundance of natural features here. But
ironically, some of these natural features that contribute
to the climate concerns that have plagued this area for
decades.
NIGEL HESTER: I'm Nigel Hester, and I live within the Holnicote
Estate near Allerford. It’s a tiny hamlet of about six
buildings, lovely cottages, as you can see.
And it's a absolutely perfect place to live.
There are two river catchments here. The Horner rises high on
the moor and the Aller comes down the Vale behind us. And
they both meet.
Today actually they're flowing nice and gently and it's all
very lovely. You get a heavy downfall of rain and the water
just comes off these steep hills. You've just get a torrent
coming down. It's looking to spill out and it spilled out
into the villages, flooding the cottages.
The worst one I remember was back in 2000 when most of the
cottages in Allerford and Bossington got flooded out.
But I remember one cottage, literally, that the sewer burst
and all the effluent came up into the house. Completely
ruined The whole house. It happened at night time, which is
worse somehow because it's quite scary. It's the uncertainty of
not knowing when it's going to happen and then the total
disruption to your life.
KATE MARTIN: I can see a group of stone buildings, which I
assume is the estate office. Hopefully someone there will be
able to put me in the direction of the estates project manager
and the driving force behind the flood management scheme that he
believes will be able to help solve some of the area's water
management issues.
UNKNOWN: Alright?
KATE MARTIN: Hi are you Ben?
UNKNOWN: No, I'm not. Ben. I'll just get him for you.
KATE MARTIN: Oh, Cheers.
UNKNOWN: Ben, there's someone here to see you.
BEN EARDLEY: Hey, is it Kate?
KATE MARTIN: it is.
BEN EARDLEY: Hey, how you doing?
KATE MARTIN: I believe you’ve got some issues with flooding?
BEN EARDLEY: Obviously, with climate change, we're seeing
more frequent and more extreme weather. But some of the issues
are also to do with how the rivers and streams here have
been managed. That in itself has caused and does cause issues as
well. Now we're learning how we can work with nature to benefit
those downstream communities.
KATE MARTIN: It would be good to see some of the work that you
doing so err, any chance we can go and have a look?
BEN EARDLEY: Yeah, it does get a bit muddy up there. So the only
way we're going to get there really is, is in the Gators.
KATE MARTIN: I’m intrigued, what’s a Gator?
BEN EARDLEY: That's the only vehicle that's going to get us
there. Let me pop and get it from the shed for you...
There she is.
KATE MARTIN: So it's a golf buggy with off road tires.
BEN EARDLEY: Yeah, I guess it is a souped up golf buggy. It's
diesel. It's four wheel drive. Got a flatbed in the back, seats
for people. It’s even got a drop top.
KATE MARTIN: It's a convertible. That's what you’re telling me?
BEN EARDLEY: Exactly Yeah.
KATE MARTIN: We gonna go for a spin?
BEN EARDLEY: Yeah. Let's get on up to the site.
KATE MARTIN: This vehicle’s fantastic! Going off road, but
we're going on the road as well.
Seems to do absolutely everything.
It's a great place to appreciate the landscape because it's all
sort of open sided. I can see the villages. You can see
people's houses. Obviously, these are the people who are
affected by the flooding. But there's also a fantastic
landscape and I imagine a real abundance of wildlife. So what
effect do these flooding events have on the wildlife?
BEN EARDLEY: This landscape looks beautiful, but it's
actually suffered significant declines in biodiversity.
So what we'd like to do is to help increase biodiversity,
bring some of that lost wildlife back. Ironically, what we'd like
to see in certain areas of the landscape is more water.
Creating space for water upstream we can help to reduce
flooding downstream.
KATE MARTIN: And I also believe that you are doing something a
little bit special?
BEN EARDLEY: Yeah, we've got our own flood engineers, if you
like. So why don't we drive on a bit further and I'll show you
what I'm talking about.
KATE MARTIN: We've come off the roads now. We're actually going
down quite a bumpy track, we’re just going through a river now.
BEN EARDLEY: I told you it’d get us there!
KATE MARTIN: We're just pulling up.
This is a gorgeous spot.
BEN EARDLEY: Yeah, it's beautiful, isn't it? Whiteman’s
Wood.
KATE MARTIN: I can see sort of woodlands around us and a field,
in front of us.
BEN EARDLEY: If I take you over there, I can talk through some
of those issues that we discussed earlier on.
KATE MARTIN: We're looking out now over the rolling green
fields.
BEN EARDLEY: It's a lovely landscape, but it's not a
natural landscape. Before this was floodplain, so the water
would move through this field. You'd have had wetland, streams
and ponds flowing down into the main floodplain itself. What
we've done to graze these areas is drain that catchment and you
can hear the sound, the sort of flowing water.
You've got that drainage ditch behind you, but that drainage
ditch is there to drain this land so they can be managed in a
certain way. The drawback from that is that that water just
moves through the landscape very, very quickly now. So
rather than it being soaked up by the field, it just shoots
through that drainage channel straight through the catchment
and out into the Bristol Channel.
KATE MARTIN: And thats all moving really quickly through
the land? So that's when you then get those sort of flooding
events in the villages and people's properties.
BEN EARDLEY: Yeah.
KATE MARTIN: So is the flood management scheme that you're
working on at the moment aiming to reverse management that's
happened in the past.
BEN EARDLEY: In certain areas. We are looking to reconnect
those rivers and streams with the surrounding landscape. We've
got some little engineers helping us with that at the
moment on the project. If you come with me, I'll take you over
to the enclosure where we're implementing a big part of our
flood management scheme.
KATE MARTIN: Fascinating!
This is quite a serious fence!
BEN EARDLEY: It looks quite severe, but it does let the
wildlife in and out.
KATE MARTIN: But the workers can’t? They're locked in?
BEN EARDLEY: No, we want them to stay on the job.
KATE MARTIN: That's quite concerning! Oh I’m Intrigued
now, I want to see them.
BEN EARDLEY: Yeah. Okay. Let's pop in.
The easiest way to walk through the site is up through the
stream itself.
That's deeper than it looks, I think. Hang on. No, you're
alright.
KATE MARTIN: There you go.
Oh it’s Glorious. It's like Narnia. There's something
otherworldly about this.
BEN EARDLEY: I think it's been untouched and managed for so
long.
KATE MARTIN: Yeah. If you suddenly came across like a
woodland elf or a nymph, you wouldn't. Be surprised.
BEN EARDLEY: So you can actually hear some of the work that the
guys have been doing up here. Actually.
KATE MARTIN: Yeah, it's definitely getting louder, isn't
it? That water is...
BEN EARDLEY: So that's some of the work. They've been doing.
KATE MARTIN: A Lot of sticks.
BEN EARDLEY: Yeah. And that's where they live over there in
the hole in the bank.
KATE MARTIN: I'm getting the idea these aren't people.
BEN EARDLEY: No, they aren’t people no. This is a beaver
created dam. We've actually got beaver living and working in
here.
CHRYSSA BROWN: Beavers were quite widespread across much of
Europe and also in the UK during the 1600 & 1700s. They were
hunted. There were still concentrations of them in
Germany, France and Norway, but at their lowest we were at the
point of almost losing them.
My name is Chryssa Brown and I am a Ph. D. researcher looking
at how reintroduced beavers affect rivers and streams. We've
seen in the UK this real interest in beaver
reintroduction and how they could assist in natural flood
management.
As a rodent who lives in water for the majority of their life,
they’re interested in creating and extending their territories.
To do that, they create dams.
By doing so, this water then spreads out as soon as you're
able to increase and extend that area of water, you attract all
of these other species and animals that thrive on that
environment Flies, beetles, bugs, fish, amphibians as well.
They create life and through their modifications they
encourage that life to continue to use that environment.
BEN EARDLEY: So this is where they started a dam, this area.
But you see all the boulders, stones, all the woody material,
all the earth, that's all material that they've moved,
They built All that up?
KATE MARTIN: The difference between the sort of stream and
the top is what about four foot? five foot maybe? and how long
has it taken them to build that?
BEN EARDLEY: They've only done this in the last few months.
KATE MARTIN: Really?
BEN EARDLEY: Yeah. So it hasn't taken them very long at all. And
you can see we’re starting to create wet woodland over there
to the right. Before you just have one channel. Now you've got
a variety of different water habitats.
KATE MARTIN: That's absolutely amazing.
BEN EARDLEY: They are incredible creatures. Yeah. I mean, if, if
we walk around there a section, you can get a better view of
their house.
I think we could just track straight through this bit.
KATE MARTIN: Just walked up through this holly bush and I'm
stood in a pond. Around me there are trees that are now
surrounded by water. It's so different from that kind of
rushy tumbly stream that we've just walked past.
BEN EARDLEY: It's not just about them engineering those water
systems. It's as much about the effect they have on the wider
landscape.
KATE MARTIN: The beavers have done this in a relatively short
space of time, only a matter of months. So what are you
expecting this area to look like in a year's time?
BEN EARDLEY: The guys, they will take on bigger trees and they
will affect bigger change. There's somewhere else that I
can take you and show you that’ll really sort of highlight
that for you. It's a very different site to this one, but
more exciting in some ways.
KATE MARTIN: All right, let's go.
BEN EARDLEY: So this is Paddocks Wood, a different site to
Whiteman’s moor.
KATE MARTIN: Wow.
The first enclosure that we went to, they, the beavers had
created a pool that was tens of metres squared across compared
to where we are now. It does look like something that you
would expect to see in, like the Everglades.
This pool stretches hundreds of square metres pretty much as far
as I can see.
BEN EARDLEY: This was all dry before, this woodland. This was
just a small channel. And now essentially you've got a wetland
and you can see, you know, more signs of them felling trees.
It's a habitat we've lost in this country. You know, we've
lost 90% of our wetlands since Roman times. And it's a missing
component of the landscape and a super important one.
KATE MARTIN: Yeah, it's amazing what relatively small animals
can actually do, the changes they can make in their
environment. It really is quite astounding.
BEN EARDLEY: I can show you some more further down in the site if
you want to follow me down. Yeah, that's the original beaver
dam in the site. So that's what's holding back all that
water.
KATE MARTIN: That's unbelievable. So that is a
essentially a pile of sticks holding up a huge pond.
BEN EARDLEY: They literally constructed this over the course
of just a few days. You know, we did a site check one week and
the site was just a couple of spring fed streams and then came
in the next week and did our site checks, And there was a dam
here and a, you know, a big wetland.
KATE MARTIN: You can obviously see the physical changes that
have happened here obviously with the dam and the pond and
then the stream. But what's the sort of environmental impact of
this?
BEN EARDLEY: When we have sort of more extreme weather, Water
is flowing more slowly through this environment, so that
protects communities downstream at drier times when you've got
hotter, drier weather and perhaps the risk of droughts,
you've held more water in the landscape that's released more
slowly. So you've reduced the impact of that drought on the
local area as well.
KATE MARTIN: Obviously introducing animals into a new
area. And I know technically this is an area where they have
been in the past can bring problems. So has there ever been
anywhere where, you know, beavers have been introduced and
it hasn't worked very well.
BEN EARDLEY: People always talk about Tierra del Fuego, where
they had issues on the Woodlands over there.
ROISIN CAMPBELL PALMER: The case of beavers in Argentina is
sometimes brought up as how destructive animals they can be.
My name is Roisin Campbell Palmer. I’m the restoration
manager for the Beaver Trust. The Argentinian government many
decades ago introduced beavers as part of the fur industry.
Quite ancient forests that had been either felled or flooded.
People looking at it can look at quite decimated landscapes. So
beavers in the southern hemisphere can be quite negative
because the tree and plant species have never evolved to
live alongside the beaver. Where in the northern hemisphere
obviously where we are, and where species of beavers have
always been and evolved for many millions of years.
The plant species, they've evolved with and... you know
water loving species when they're cut, they regenerate
very fast. And this is all natural evolution process to
deal with beaver foraging. And that's why beavers in the
northern hemisphere are actually a very good thing.
KATE MARTIN: All the stuff that we've seen so far... We can see
from a environmental point of view and also from a natural
flood management point of view is is fantastic. But I know
myself any sort of change you're trying to do, any sort of
environment for what you're trying to do. There are always
people who are less keen. Have you had a lot of sort of
complaints?
BEN EARDLEY: I'm of the firm opinion that they're easily
managed. It just needs to be a common sense approach. So if a
farmer has land and beaver move in and start building dams, he
knows who to call to come and sort that problem out.
You can put in things called beaver deceivers or you can
relocate the beaver to somewhere else in that catchment. So it
just needs to be sensible and thought through. And I think the
positives far outweigh any of the inconvenience we have to
accept for that species being in the wider landscape.
KATE MARTIN: It's interesting. I think most people would probably
think of beavers as kind of wild animals that we don't really
have any sort of control over. But here, I mean essentially
they're a working animal. I mean, I know they're not quite
the same as a sort of a sheep dog or- oh, you know, cattle or
sheep.
But they are still an animal that we're put into use to to do
something we want. So do you still see them a little bit as a
sort of more of a human connection than you would do?
They have sort of personalities.
BEN EARDLEY: The animals themselves. They've certainly
got personalities. And one animal in particular, we sort of
nicknamed her Grylls, she had sort of quite a hard start in
life. Grylls introduced with her mum beavers cachet food in the
falls in ponds to feed on it during the winter when times are
tough and construct dams.
They’re big animals, when they're fully grown well over 30
kilos, some of the bits of wood that they move will be a
significant branch for me to pick up. But obviously Grylls
wasn't at that stage. She was two or three months old, you
know, a few KGs.
She wasn't going to be carrying out any great feats of
engineering. They pick up a lot of the behaviours that they need
to survive from other family members. But things didn't work
out like that for Grylls.
Unfortunately, her mum passed away within a few weeks of being
introduced to the site. People didn't give Grylls much chance
of surviving the rest of the winter.
Beavers themselves have got no natural predators anymore in
this country, but young Beaver will still be taken by Fox. We
know there are Fox around and about in that habitat and Grylls
was small, so the fear was that she would be eaten by Fox or
that she was simply too small to survive. The harsh weather
conditions in the winter. We spent a lot of time putting
vegetables and fruit into the site to keep her going.
We were just checking the camera traps, checking the site
regularly, fully expecting to find her having passed away. We
were just on tenterhooks.
We've got several camera traps in the site to check on the
beaver. We have to go out to the camera traps, download the
footage from an SD card, take it back to the office and check. We
all sort of hunk around the laptop. When we downloaded the
footage from the enclosure that Grylls is in. We saw something
that surprised us all.
We saw footage of Grylls trying to construct her own little dam.
You know, you'd be stretching it to call them dams. They were
sort of gatherings of twigs and branches, but it was good just
to know that she was trying her best. She had us in fits of
giggles a few times. She was always trying to carry sticks
and branches that were too big for her.
She used to funny little dances and things. She tried to hold
like two or three parsnips in her mouth at once as well as a
branch, and went nose to nose with the fox on the trail cam.
That was quite funny as time went on and she survived sort of
week after week.
And then, you know, more signs of feeding, more signs of other
beaver behaviour, more signs of her looking sort of healthy and
okay on the camera traps. That's why she's called Grylls. It's a
bit of a funny take on Bear Grylls and Born Survivor, but
it's because nobody really gave her a chance. And to everyone's
surprise, she pulled through.
She's the beaver in here now with the male yogi, and they're
doing really well.
KATE MARTIN: Now I do realize they are wild animals is never a
guarantee. But do you think there's any chance we might see
one?
BEN EARDLEY: Well, we can potter along to the lodge. And I've got
a thermal imaging camera. That's a good way. If they are out and
about to spot them.
Right. We're going to walk sort of across the back here and then
along that bank and their lodges at the end. So if we're quiet as
we walk along that we've got more chance.
I'm just going to show you how to use this before we get down
there. So anything bright white is hot.
KATE MARTIN: Okay. Okay. I’ll keep quiet.
BEN EARDLEY: That’s their lodge over there.
KATE MARTIN: Wow that amazing.
BEN EARDLEY: See, You can see just. All that jumble of wood
and stuff. That's their lodge.
So you can see the slides how they get in and there’s a hole
over there. And there’s a...
KATE MARTIN: Is that a fallen tree?
BEN EARDLEY: Yeah a really great pine and they can run out and
they can access underneath the water, out into the pond the
other side as well.
KATE MARTIN: It's a shame we haven't seen them. It's a little
bit early. They're still having a good kip.
BEN EARDLEY: They’re like students. They like to sleep
through the day.
KATE MARTIN: Nothing wrong with that!
BEN EARDLEY: No!
KATE MARTIN: So what's the future do you think for them
here?
BEN EARDLEY: We haven't really seen Grylls very much, so we
think it's probably pretty likely that she's pregnant.
They'll probably have kits in the next few weeks. They'll
probably get even busier with the work that they do once
they've got sort of a family, as in, you know, male, female and
kits that tends to kick start another round of sort of
ecosystem engineering.
So and it'll be interesting to see how that develops. But yeah,
my hope is that in 2 to 3 years that we're in a situation
whereby, you know, beaver, a more commonplace species that we
see in, in our rivers and streams.
KATE MARTIN: That’ll be good wouldn‘t it.
I’m just leaving the beaver enclosure behind me now. And I
have to say I have had a really eye opening day when I first
stepped out of the door this morning, I thought I was going
to see some new amazing technology. It's been 400 years
since beavers have been hunted to extinction, and it's really
nice to see them back.
Now in the UK landscape, obviously they're not the only
solution to flood management, but they are part of a suite of
things that we can look at to sort of use nature, work with
nature to improve not just habitats but also improve
people's lives.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the National Trust
Podcast. If you'd like to learn more about Beaver introduction
at the National Trust, go to nationaltrust.org.uk/NTP96 as a
National Trust podcast Episode 96.
If you've enjoyed this episode, remember the National Trust has
a huge resource of audio programmes which you can find at
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And while you’re there, do leave us a review to let us know what
you think of the show. We'll be back soon with a new episode.
But for now from me, Kate Martin, Goodbye.