For most people in Normandy, beavers feel like an animal from somewhere else. Perhaps from the Loire, eastern France, or one of the growing number of rewilding projects in Britain. But the European beaver, Castor fiber, is a native Norman animal. It lived in our rivers until the 18th century, when intensive hunting for its fur, meat and castoreum finally eliminated it from the region. It survived in only a few refuges elsewhere in Europe and, by the beginning of the 20th cent