The Ealing Beaver project

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…