Bit of an unusual sighting this week. I live opposite a farm, we are only divided from the farm fields by a small river. We have around half an acre of garden and have recently invested in a robotic lawn mower, the grass is constantly short now and starting to green up. On Monday they cut the sweet hay on the field the other side of the river as they do three or four times every year, Tuesday threshed it’s and yesterday bailed.
The river brings a wide variety of wild life, everything from ducks to king fisher, we have a resident swan who is always on the water and chaises the geese away for our entertainment. We feed the ducks seed every evening so on Tuesday when I was cleaning up the threshed grass that had blown onto our lawn some of the ducks landed with a large splash into the water as they often do, my wife was by the river and all of the ducks started making a real commotion, not uncommon but normally it is short lived. This time however they wouldn’t settle and the adults flew away leaving their chicks to hide in long vegetation on the opposite bank. Mr swan was very interested in them this time and started to hiss and flap, my wife assumed he was attacking the chicks and clapped her hands at him and attempted to shoe him away from them, a few seconds later she shouted me, “quick come and look, I think it’s an otter’. I’m no expert and I got there just in time to see less than a second of it go around the corner and disappear. We watched for a minute and it came back our way, head up and looking fine. It went into the vegetation again and the swan was riled up big time, then a large head popped up by the swan, went back down and started swimming in our direction underwater. As it got by us it surfaced about 1 meter from our feet and looked us straight in the eyes one after the next before swimming off again. It did a few lengths of our garden and left us for the evening. What a fabulous sighting I thought. We could hear it calling from up river and a reply from down river so we assume there was a pair of them but we only sighted one.
Later in the evening I searched online to find out how common they are and look up a few pictures, otter tails look like a Labrador’s tho, but the one we saw had a large flat tail, like I said I’m no expert. I searched pictures of beaver and sure enough that’s what it was. I managed to run and get my phone out of the house just before it swam away earlier and take one photo of said animal, yep it was definitely a beaver. It seems there could be as few as 200 in the UK so I feel quite lucky, I am curious to see if anyone else has seen one in the wild or can share any information about them etc, I tried to contact the uk beaver trust but they have no email address on their website and annoyingly no way to refuse cookies! I am keen to protect them in the wild it was great to see. I also hope their presence could be a way to prevent and future development of local green belt etc, it’s a small village and the locals all fight back new housing because we want to remain a village, win win.