Why now is the right time to bring beavers back to Normandy

For most people in Normandy, beavers feel like an animal from somewhere else. Perhaps from the Loire, eastern France, or one of the growing number of rewilding projects in Britain.

But the European beaver, Castor fiber, is a native Norman animal.

It lived in our rivers until the 18th century, when intensive hunting for its fur, meat and castoreum finally eliminated it from the region. It survived in only a few refuges elsewhere in Europe and, by the beginning of the 20th century, had almost disappeared from France too.

That makes the beaver's absence from Normandy relatively recent. Our rivers have been without one of their most important inhabitants for only a few hundred years.

Perhaps it is time to bring it back?

A French conservation success story

By the early 20th century, the French beaver population had been reduced to a tiny remnant in the Rhône valley. Protection and reintroduction programmes followed during the second half of the century.

The result has been remarkable.

Today the Office français de la biodiversité estimates that at least 20,000 European beavers occupy more than 18,000 km of French waterways. Populations are established across much of the Loire, Rhône, Rhine and Moselle systems and are still expanding. The species is now considered to be in a favourable conservation state nationally. 

This matters because bringing beavers back to Normandy would not be an experiment with an exotic animal. It would be another chapter in a restoration programme that has already worked across large parts of France.

Normandy is simply one of the conspicuous gaps left on the map.

What would beavers actually do?

Beavers are described as "ecosystem engineers". In their case the phrase is unusually literal.

A beaver does not simply occupy a river. It changes it.

It cuts small trees and branches. It opens patches in dense riverside vegetation. On suitable smaller streams it may build dams, raising water levels and spreading water into the surrounding landscape. New ponds appear. Old channels reconnect. Sediment accumulates. Areas of dry woodland can become wet woodland. Open water gradually becomes marsh and meadow and, sometimes, back again.

The result is not a neat landscape. It is a constantly changing one. 

Research reviewed by the Office Français de la Biodiversité (OFB) shows that beaver activity can increase water storage, slow flows, create more complex aquatic habitats and support greater biodiversity. Beaver-created wetlands provide habitat for amphibians, insects, fish, birds, bats and other mammals.

This is particularly interesting at a time when we are spending considerable amounts of money trying to restore more natural rivers.

For centuries we have straightened streams, drained wetlands, cleared fallen wood, dredged channels and tried to move water downstream as efficiently as possible. Increasingly, river restoration is trying to reverse some of that: slowing water down, reconnecting floodplains and putting complexity back into waterways.

The beaver has been doing exactly this for millions of years.

A useful animal in a changing climate

There is another reason the conversation feels different today. Normandy still receives plenty of rain, but increasingly that rain does not necessarily arrive when we want it. Longer dry periods, intense rainfall and summer drought all make the ability of landscapes to hold water more important.

Beavers are not a magic solution to either drought or flooding. A beaver dam will not protect a town from a major flood, and claims that beavers can simply "climate-proof" landscapes go too far.

But at the scale of small streams and valleys, the evidence that beaver wetlands can retain water and moderate flows is increasingly strong. One study cited by the OFB found that Eurasian beaver activity increased water storage and reduced peak flows on intensively managed grassland streams. Other work has found similar effects across multiple sites.

Keeping water in the landscape for longer also means more wetland habitat during dry periods. This is something Normandy will value more, not less, in the decades ahead.

And now, there are already beavers in Normandy

In September 2024 something remarkable happened. Two European beavers were discovered on the Charentonne in the Eure.

Genetic analysis subsequently showed that they belonged to a central European lineage rather than the French population expanding north from the Loire. The Conseil scientifique régional du patrimoine naturel (CSRPN) therefore concluded that they had almost certainly been released illegally. That is not a model anyone should follow. Protected animals should not be captured, transported or released outside a properly authorised scientific programme. 

However, when the CSRPN examined the site, it concluded that the Charentonne habitat was entirely suitable for the development of a beaver population, with appropriate food and little disturbance. It later described the river as already providing ideal conditions for their establishment. The council recommended monitoring the animals rather than attempting to remove them.

We no longer need to ask the purely theoretical question: could a beaver live in modern Normandy?

The answer is yes. Normandy still contains rivers capable of supporting them.

Of course there will be problems

It would be easy to write an enthusiastic article about beavers and leave this part out.

Beavers cut trees. They sometimes flood agricultural land. A dam in the wrong place can interfere with a drainage ditch, road culvert or other infrastructure. Their engineering priorities will not always coincide with ours.

The OFB already deals with exactly these conflicts in parts of France where beavers have returned. Coexistence measures can include protecting individual trees, adapting culverts and managing particularly problematic dams where regulations allow it. Human-beaver coexistence is now one of the major themes of France's national work on the species.

Any Normandy reintroduction would therefore need to involve farmers, fishing organisations, river managers, local authorities and landowners from the beginning.

And that is another reason to favour a planned reintroduction over waiting for animals to appear unpredictably.

A proper project can choose suitable catchments, identify likely conflict areas beforehand, establish monitoring, create a rapid-response system for problems and ensure that people living alongside the river understand what is happening.

The Charentonne animals arrived without any of that preparation.

Why now?

Several things have come together.

• We know beavers were native to Normandy.

• Reintroduction has succeeded in France, while countries such as the UK are now moving from enclosed trials to licensed wild releases.

• We know that many Norman rivers still provide suitable habitat.

• We understand much more about both the ecological benefits and the practical problems associated with living alongside beavers.

And, thanks to the Charentonne animals, we now have contemporary evidence from Normandy itself that suitable habitat remains.

There is also a policy opportunity. The French government has begun preparing a Plan national d'action for the beaver, expected to become operational in 2027. The OFB and its partners are simultaneously developing a national strategy centred not simply on protecting beavers, but on integrating them into ecosystem restoration and improving coexistence with people. France is not starting from scratch here: the OFB has coordinated its Réseau Castor since 1987, advising landowners and authorities on damage and mitigation

This seems an unusually good moment for Normandy to join that discussion.

Reintroduction does not mean opening a cage tomorrow

There is an important distinction between saying Normandy should bring back the beaver and saying someone should release some beavers.

Potential river systems would need to be surveyed for habitat, food availability, barriers, roads, farms and infrastructure. The consequences for fisheries and agriculture would need to be examined. Source populations and genetics would matter. The number and composition of founding animals would matter too: the CSRPN notes that past French releases involving very small numbers of animals far from existing populations have had little chance of establishing viable populations. 

There would need to be consultation, authorisation and long-term monitoring.

In other words, the immediate question is not where should we release beavers next spring?

It is: Which rivers in Normandy would be suitable for a properly planned restoration of the European beaver?

France brought a species back from the edge of extinction. Much of the country now once again has beavers shaping its rivers, creating wetlands and doing the ecological work that beavers have always done.

Humans are the reason why Normandy has been without them for around three centuries. There is increasingly little reason why this absence should be permanent.