Environmental security

Fears grow as ravenous tree-eaters as big as collie dogs return to an English river - Are beavers about to chew up Britain?

Bewhiskered and buck-toothed, the beaver stares straight back at me. Then he turns, sinks carefully into the river like an elderly man lowering himself into a swimming pool, and heads slowly away.

I have to remind myself I am not in the wilds of Canada, Scandinavia or Eastern Europe, but in Britain. And that the animal I have been watching is one of the first of its kind to be at large here for almost 500 years — perhaps since the era of Henry VIII.