In February 2020, a vet and wildlife conservationist named Sean McCormack met Elliot Newton, co-founder of Citizen Zoo, at a talk on beaver reintroduction.
Beavers had been extinct in Britain for roughly four hundred years. Over the next three years, McCormack, Newton, and a coalition of wildlife groups worked to bring five of them back to Paradise Fields, an old golf course in Ealing, West London, right next to a tube station that flooded every time it rained hard. The Ealing Beaver Project was born.
In October 2023, the beavers arrived, relocated from a wild population in Scotland.
Two and a half years later, Greenford station hasn’t flooded once. The beavers’ dams have turned the site into a wetland that now supports insects, fish, and birds that weren’t there before.
Nobody engineered a drainage solution. They released five rodents and let them do what beavers have always done.
Sometimes the best fix isn’t a new system. It’s restoring the one that used to work before we removed the part that was doing the job. That’s often the case with nature at the very least.
(H/T: The Daily Difference newsletter)
A Learning a Day 