After a 500 year absence from Lancashire, two European beavers, a male and a female, have settled in to their residence at Martin Mere along with their baby beaver, Wizzy
Beavers, the world's second largest rodent, are one of nature's engineers excavating canals and building dams and lodges of branch and earth. The display at Martin Mere will be the only attraction in the North West where visitors can see a beavers natural habitat.
Entirely vegetarian, the beavers are members of the Vegetarian Society and the wardens have tried them on numerous fruits and vegetables: carrots, apples, sweetcorn, pumpkin, turnip, sweet potato and parsnip. They really like carrots, apples and sweetcorn but didn't touch the parsnip and turnip. They also get willow branches put into the enclosure every night.
Check the Beaver diary to find out what they have been up to.
Baby beaver: Wizzy
The first ever baby beaver to be hand reared in the UK has been nursed back to health by wardens at WWT Martin Mere in Lancashire. Visitors to Martin Mere will be able to meet Wizzy from Monday 17 August when he will be going into his exercise enclosure between 12pm and 2pm everyday.
Baby beaver has been called Wizzy after the late Pat Wisniewski who first brought beavers to Martin Mere in 2007.
Follow the link: www.wwt.org.uk/babybeaver to also see footage of baby beaver and photographs.
Twiggy and Woody: The parents
As the adult pair, Twiggy and Woody (named via the Champion newspaper) have successfully bred again in 2008 producing the first hand reared baby beaver in the UK. They do breed every year but couldn't last year due to being in quarantine. This is a credit to the wardens at Martin Mere for producing an enclosure so similar to their natural environment that they bred within 8 months of being at the Centre.
Beavers are pregnant for four to five months and they will look after their young, named kitts, until they are two years old, potentially having three generations living together at Martin Mere in 2009.
What have the beavers been up to since their release?
When the beavers were released on Wednesday 11 July 
2007 they immediately built an underground burrow home in the first night. This included several chambers for sleeping, eating (larder) plus drying off. They now have two (at least) living burrows, one on the front pond and one on the back pond. Also an extensive tunnel system from back pond going out into pen. The picture on the right shows what the enclosure looked like upon their release, and the picture below is illustrating the amount of work they have done.
The original pen contained two separate ponds. They have connected the two ponds together by building a canal which is now 4 to 5 foot long and about 2 foot deep.
They have felled most of the trees in the enclosure. They use the branches for food, building dams, storage on back pond and repair work, such as when they burrowed into the bank on the left of the back pond, it collapsed and they used branches and lots of mud to repair the damage.
The beavers also continue to block up the beaver deceiver every night. The beaver deceiver is a cage around an outflow pipe and it is the animals natural instinct to stop flowing water by creating dams.