Ealing Beaver Project needs your help!

Hi, I'm Dr Sean McCormack, a vet and conservationist, and Chair of Ealing Wildlife Group (EWG) who are one of the project partners in the very exciting Ealing Beaver Project. It's a joint project between EWG, Citizen Zoo, Friends of Horsenden Hill and Ealing Council supported by Beaver Trust and Mayor of London.

Although we've received significant funding so far, there are a few funding gaps that we are hoping to fill ahead of the Beavers being released this Autumn at Paradise Fields in Greenford, Ealing, hopefully in Mid October! We hope to show that Beavers can live in urban landscapes, they can improve biodiversity and mitigate flood risk in urban river catchments, and we can learn to live alongside them again with a few management practices ready and in place. We also want to demonstrate that living alongside nature is really important especially in diverse, urban communities where access to nature may be more difficult.

So now we've reached the point we are asking for your help, to dig deep and allow us to deliver the best pioneering urban London Beaver reintroduction project we can!

We are fundraising for a few key elements of the project, that will encourage and allow us to facilitate excellent public engagement over the coming years:

1) A community mural project which will showcase the biodiversity and complexity of a Beaver wetland. We would like to have one mural in the underpass leading to Paradise Fields from Westway Cross Retail Park, and another on the canal towpath passing under the Greenford Road bridge.

2) Interpretive signage across the site to include interactive learning opportunities, fixed point photography stations so the public can document changes to the site over time and dynamic information points using QR codes. It turns out this type of infrastructure is far more expensive than anticipated, but its benefits are enormous in engaging site users with the value of Beavers and nature based solutions to man-made urban problems.

3) A secure lock up storage facility on site for us to store educational and ecological equipment, tools and clothing for volunteers to allow us to more easily run activities and tours on site for the duration of the project.

I hope you can agree the value of this part of the project, and can donate what you can to help us get over the line on our current funding gaps.

More information on the project here:

https://ealingwildlifegroup.com/conservation-projects/bringing-beavers-back-to-london/