Bowyers Wood
“Five came down from the Scottish hills, not asking permission, just doing what a beaver does.”
The story behind the song
The Eurasian beaver was hunted to extinction in Britain around 400 years ago, for its fur, meat and castoreum. Licensed reintroductions began with the Scottish Beaver Trial at Knapdale in 2009, and beavers were also found to have re-established themselves independently on the River Otter in Devon around the same time. A change in government policy allowed wild releases in England and Scotland from 2025, and reintroductions have followed at a growing number of sites since.
Bowyers Wood, near Uckfield in East Sussex, is one of them. A family group of five beavers, a mother and four kits, was translocated from Scotland and released into the 250-acre rewilding site under licence, part of a project run by Ecotalk in partnership with the Green Britain Foundation. Chris Packham, Ecotalk's chief ecologist, has described the aim as bringing back the “richness of wildlife” that follows when beavers are allowed to do what they do naturally: fell timber, build dams, and slow and spread water across a landscape.
Beavers are widely described as a keystone species, and specifically as ecosystem engineers, because the wetland habitat their dams create tends to benefit a wide range of other species, from woodland birds and bats to amphibians and aquatic invertebrates, while also helping to reduce flood peaks downstream and improve water quality.
- Ecosystem engineer
- A species that substantially modifies its physical environment in ways that create or maintain habitat for other species. Beavers are one of the clearest examples: their dams turn flowing streams into ponds and wetland mosaics.
- Keystone species
- A species whose presence has an outsized effect on the structure of its ecosystem relative to its abundance, such that its removal or return produces disproportionate change.
Sources
Forestry and Land Scotland. (n.d.). Beavers released in Glen Affric 400 years after extinction in Scotland. forestryandland.gov.scot
AOL/PA Media. (2026, April 22). Five beavers transform their new Sussex ‘paradise’. AOL News.
Scottish Wildlife Trust. (n.d.). Scottish Beavers: beaver reintroduction. scottishwildlifetrust.org.uk