The River Otter

Hi everyone, sorry that there hasn't been a post for a good while. Hopefully my next few posts will make up for the recent lack of them. I have four (including this one) coming soon so stay tuned for them. Anway, lets get into today's post.

Last week I was in Devon and there was one animal in particular that I wanted to see: wild beavers. About half an hour from where we were staying was the river otter, a UK hotspot for wild beavers. Beavers are very rare in the UK so we had to try our luck at spotting them there. The beavers here were reintroduced (they went extinct a few hundred years ago due to hunting) illegally in 2008 before more were legally introduced in 2015 in a government approved trial. The phrase 'beaver bombing' refers to the illegal release of beavers which has seen small numbers pop up all over the UK. Until this year due to new laws, it was extremely hard for legal releases of beavers to take place; most projects (such as the ones I've seen at Trentham) are ones that are released into large scale enclosures where they are techinichallly not wild but they live wild lives. Anyway, enough about the beavers for now as we saw lots of wildlife on the estuary before we made it onto the main stretch of the river otter. These next photos include some of the bird life we saw including egrets, cormorants, oystercatchers and others:

While we were sat behind a screen looking over a reedbed with more little egrets than I think I've ever seen before, something exciting happened. It wasn't beavers - two whimberels (a rare bird related to a curlew that I had never seen before) flew in and landed in amongst the reeds. I didn't get any great photos, but it was still great to tick a new bird off. 

After that we made it off the estuary and up the river. We walked up and down it for a good hour or so in the evening (beavers come out at dawn and dusk) but were pretty unsuccessful. We decided to sit and wait looking over a gap where you could see through the trees onto the river. This didn't work for the beavers, but we did get a glimpse of a kingfisher that landed on a post a good way away and I managed to finally get the shot I've been trying so hard to get for ages:

I was so happy to get this photo and seeing as it looked like we weren't going to see any beavers it still made the journey worthwhile. It was getting late and my mum started to walk back while I went a little bit further upstream for one last go at seeing something. However, after about five minutes my mum phoned me to say that she had found one, and I ran back all the way to where she was (I slowed down at the end so I didn't scare it). But by the time I had got there it had gone. And it didn't look like it was going to come out again. That was until it reappeared further upstream and I finally managed to see it! You could even hear it chomping on a twig. Here are the photos I got:

This is my favourite shot:

Here's another good one:

Seeing the beaver has been my favourite spot since the red squirrels in Scotland. It was great to see such a rare animal. That is all for today's post. Thanks for reading!