Beavers After Work

The Animal

The Eurasian beaver is Europe’s largest rodent, up to around thirty kilos, and the only one that reshapes its own habitat: felling trees, damming side channels and digging burrows into the banks. Where beavers settle, kingfishers, dragonflies and amphibians follow.

They were hunted to extinction in Switzerland by the early nineteenth century, for fur, meat and castoreum. Between 1956 and 1977 a reintroduction programme released animals in several river systems, and they have spread slowly ever since. Today there are several thousand in the country, and the rivers and backwaters around Lucerne hold some of the most approachable.

The Evening

Beavers are creatures of dusk. We meet in the late afternoon, walk in quietly and settle at a spot where the animals have been active, downwind and low. The first ones usually appear as the sun drops behind the hills, and the next hour is the best of it: swimming, feeding on the bank, sometimes a youngster following a parent.

We stay until the light is gone. In spring and autumn the whole session fits between the end of work and dinner.

The Photography

This is low-light work, and good practice for it. We cover shutter speeds for a swimming animal, holding focus on a dark shape against reflections, using high ISO without fear, and composing with the water: ripples, reflections of the evening sky, the wake behind a head.

A fast lens helps. A 300mm or 400mm at f/4 or f/5.6 is ideal; a 70–200mm f/2.8 is often enough, because the animals come close.

How We Work Around Them

No flash, ever. We keep back from lodges and burrows, we do not block the bank the animals are using, and we leave the moment a beaver slaps its tail in alarm. Sitting still is the whole technique.