Beaver Lodge, Holnicote Estate Live Cam

This camera looks across a still beaver pool in wet woodland on the Holnicote Estate, at the edge of Exmoor in west Somerset. A leaning trunk dips into the dark water beside an ivy-covered bank, and heaps of branches rise on the far side.

Eurasian beavers returned to the estate in January 2020, when a pair from Scotland’s River Tay catchment was released into a fenced woodland enclosure beside tributaries of the River Aller. Their dams hold back water in deep pools and ease flash floods downstream. In 2021 the estate recorded the first beaver kit born on Exmoor in around 400 years.

The fixed view takes in a low island of grass tussocks and ferns, the angled trunk and a moss-topped stump in the foreground, with dead branches across the water. The picture turns black and white after dark, when the mostly nocturnal beavers are at their busiest.