Dan PuplettEurasian Beaver

The Eurasian Beaver is an amazing rodent which has a huge positive impact on biodiversity. When we hunted it to extinction centuries ago, it was a great loss for many species, including us.

The Beaver is known as a keystone species, meaning its presence leads to all sorts of opportunities for other life to thrive. By creating wetlands, deadwood habitats and more, we see a huge surge in the numbers of amphibians, dragonflies, fish, woodpeckers, bats … the list goes on. And if this wasn’t enough they also help to reduce flooding downstream, filter sediments from water and just make a place more wild, diverse, interesting and beautiful.

Thankfully this important mammal has been restored to Scotland, which is great news. But currently its numbers are still so low that it is on the Red List. We need a lot more beavers in the landscape!

I stand beside the Eurasian Beaver because not only is it an amazing animal in its own right, but just by going about its business, it unwittingly stands for the lives of so many other species that are in trouble, such as the Water Vole and the Great Crested Newt.

I will continue to advocate for the Beaver in my environmental education work, by supporting rewilding initiatives and especially when I’m teaching wildlife tracking. Tracking is a great way to understand the lives of animals around us by reading the clues they leave behind. The tracks and signs of beavers are very distinctive and present themselves on so many scales, from a dropping a couple of centimetres long to significant changes in the landscape!