If there's something strange in your neighborhood, who ya gonna call: Beavers!

Those living around West London's Greenford Tube station knew who to call when heavy rain caused it to close.

The flooding was due to a nearby creek overflowing, making the ticket office unusable.

In an effort to solve the problem, authorities turned in 2023 to a natural solution, a family of beavers.

Five were released into the area through the Ealing Beaver Project.

Quickly, the beavers went to work, creating a dam that caused the creek to pool into a pond.

The plucky beavers also created a number of new tributaries through which water flowed, releasing pressure on the creek.

To date, the beavers have built seven dams and greatly expanded the area's biodiversity.

New to the creek are freshwater shrimp, bats, a rare brown hairstreak butterfly species and eight new species of birds.

This is more remarkable given it is close to an urban area, just 100 meters behind a McDonald's.

Beavers were once abundant in the area, but had been hunted to extinction in England and Wales more than 400 years ago.

The beaver was a popular source of meat, fur for coats and castoreum.

Castoreum is a substance secreted by beavers is used to enhance perfumes and flavour food.

There are a number of projects to introduce the beavers back into the British countryside, of which the Ealing Beaver Project is just one.

This started in Scotland, which introduced Norwegian beavers, as these were determined by scientists to be the most genetically similar to the extinct UK beaver population.

The beavers in this part of London have proved very popular with local residents, with "beaver safaris" to see the creatures at work in person.

Experts say that the beavers are helping humans turn back the effects of climate change and more should be done with the species to turn around the fortunes of similar areas.

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