22nd May 2026

It hasn’t taken long for these creatures, introduced, escaped, released – the legends are endless – to have made themselves at home along the banks of the Somerset River Frome and while spending the past eight years walking the river banks surveying for Otter signs on behalf of the Somerset Otter Group, we have marked the excitement of the first trail camera sighting by our local co-ordinator Tony House, until now when they are snapped in the centre of the town by members of the public.

We had to be trained by a member of the Group from the headquarters in Glastonbury to carry out the surveys for Otters as they were rarely seen in those days so we learned to recognise their spraint, anal jelly, crayfish remains, both skeletal and gastroliths, whereas Beaver are rather more public with their arrival at a new site and difficult to miss….

The build a lodge, start a family, cruise the local area for food and tuck in. Willow is their favourite snack but from our observation they are willing to try just about any tree trunk they can get their teeth into and it’s not diffiicult to see where they have passed by.

Some of the gnawed trees begin to take on the weird shapes of a tyro Y.B.A. and the temptation to enter one or several of their creations for the Turner Prize is often hard to resist.

For those of us who grew up reading “Grey Owl and the Beavers” where an English adventurer made his home in America, dressing and for a period passing himself off as an American Indian and writing books about living among Beaver, we ponder whether the genuine indigenous people, noticing how easy Beaver carved certain tree trunks, created their magnificently carved totem poles from the same tree trunks.

They appear to be creatures of habit, once they have found a convenient way into a wood or copse of trees, they soon create a distinctive path from the river. Interestngly when they have stripped a trunk clean, the path is abandoned and instead of travelling overland, sometimes not more than 50 feet away, they will create a new path from the river.

It is said that the willow trees which have been used up and abandoned by the Beaver, regrow, almost like pollarded trees, and we were interested to see that the first spring growth of a totally demolished tree only last year has already sprouted good healthy signs of growth and we wonder how long it will before the Beaver return to this little copse of trees to begin the whole sequence all over again!!