I’ll be dammed: Italy’s ‘beaver believers’ reintroduce species by stealth
Alessio Bariviera kneels at the base of a fallen tree, its trunk bearing the tell-tale incision marks of powerful teeth belonging to a new arrival in the woods and wetlands of Tuscany: the beaver.
Five hundred years after the species was driven to extinction in Italy by hunting, it is back. All along a stretch of the Tiber river in this part of the central Italian region, tree trunks have been gnawed and felled.
“They can take down even bigger trees than this,” said Mr Bariviera, a conservationist and fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. “They are truly engineers of the ecosystem. They love this kind of riparian [wetland] forest and slow-flowing water.”
The beavers’ reintroduction is not the culmination of scientific assessments and public consultations. Instead, they have been released illegally. Mystery surrounds who is behind the covert campaign to re-establish the animals, which has been nicknamed “guerrilla rewilding”.
Whoever they are, they have gone to considerable trouble: acquiring beavers from abroad, perhaps in Germany, Austria or Scandinavia, transporting them hundreds of miles to Italy and releasing them into rivers, streams and swamps, all the while being careful not to be caught. Similar covert releases of beavers have taken place in Britain, Spain and Belgium.
“We call them ‘beaver believers’,” said Mr Bariviera, who works as a photographer and film producer. He is making a film about what he calls “the beaver squad” and its guerrilla rewilding operations. “They are returning beavers to their former range. They feel they have the right to do it, for the greater good,” he added.
The beaver believers are reluctant to be identified and declined to be interviewed. But in a brief statement they said they were attempting to “right the wrongs of the past and bring life back to our ravaged and depleted waterways using the best natural processes available to us”.
It is thought the first beavers were introduced to two sites in central Italy in 2020. Since then, they have spread rapidly to several other regions, from Lombardy in the north to Campania, Molise and Abruzzo to the south.
A battle of the beavers has now broken out between the activists and government officials and scientists. Proponents of reintroduction say the Eurasian beaver is native to Italy and has every right to be there.
It was common in Italy until pushed to extinction by hunting for its fur and castoreum, a musky secretion from the animal’s scent glands that was used in perfume and for its supposed medicinal properties.
Conservationists say beavers bring huge benefits for the ecosystem. By building lodges and dams, they regulate the flow of waterways and reduce the risk of flooding during heavy rain. Their dams act as a filter, cleaning river water as it passes through, and their engineering efforts create ponds that provide habitat for fish, insects and other mammals.
But government scientists and regional authorities take a different view. They say the guerrilla reintroduction of beavers could set a dangerous precedent – encouraging other activists to release other species.
Experts have advised the authorities that the beavers should be removed from the wild as soon as possible. It is now up to regional governments to decide how to intervene.
Beaver champions are trying to fight the plan. In September, a coalition of conservationists wrote to the director of biodiversity at the European Commission, arguing that the beavers should stay. “Eurasian beavers have always been a part of Italian ecology, history, and heritage, and are by definition a native species,” they wrote.
The conservation organisations argued that the proposed eradication of the beavers would be “an infringement not only of national legislation, but also of obligations deriving from EU law”. The letter was signed by Edward Cutler, a British conservationist who has a small farm in Tuscany and is president of the Tuscany Environment Foundation, an environmental NGO.
He said: “There’s not a single biologist or ecologist I have met who laments the return of the beaver in any river system in Europe. They have a hugely positive impact on the environment. Their ability to store water by building dams is particularly important in a Mediterranean country like Italy where water is going to become more and more precious.”
He said that while he respects the stringent controls normally required to reintroduce a species, now beavers are back, they should be valued.
Mr Bariviera is sceptical that the authorities will get their act together to eliminate the rodents in the wild.
“Regional and national authorities in Italy are not very good at collaborating. The likelihood of getting rid of the beavers? Zero,” he said.
To make the challenge for the authorities greater, he suspects the beaver believers are planning new reintroductions in other parts of Italy.