Beavers: The original engineers of Britain's fresh waters

Beavers are agents of change. In modern-day Britain, it feels somewhat surreal to encounter a landscape profoundly altered by something other than humans, yet this would once have been the norm across much of the Northern Hemisphere. The loss of megafauna, and the biota and ecologi­cal processes that depend on their activities, is something that we now recognise as a hallmark of the Anthropocene.