Animals news

• ‘A beaver blind date’: animals given freedom to repopulate Cornish rivers

  09-02-2026 20:00 via theguardian.com
  Release into Helman Tor reserve marks historical first for keystone species hunted to extinction in UK 400 years agoShivering and rain-drenched at the side of a pond in Cornwall, a huddle of people watched in hushed silence as a beaver took its first tentative steps into its new habitat. As it dived into the water with a determined “plop” and began swimming laps, the suspense broke and everyone looked around, grinning.The soggy but momentous occasion marks the first time in English h
  
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• The pet I’ll never forget: Mishka, the surly but beloved raccoon

  09-02-2026 12:00 via theguardian.com
  She hated water, attacked our Christmas tree, destroyed our wallpaper – but everyone who met her was won overMishka was about eight weeks old when we got her. It was 2004, we were living in Dibden, New Forest, and I was looking to buy some guinea pigs. I saw an ad for a raccoon on the secondhand site Preloved. My husband, Graham, and I lived in Florida in the 90s and had a raccoon that would come into the yard. It had a bad leg, and we nurtured it, so I was very interested in raccoons.I me
  
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• Country diary 1926: Is the keeper wise to destroy weasels and stoats?

  09-02-2026 07:00 via theguardian.com
  12 February 1926: Everyone who knows anything about game-rearing admits that the brown rat is the worst enemy to contend withWe have improved on the “good old days” when we hung transgressors against the law on gibbets by the wayside, awful examples or timely warnings. But the gamekeeper does it still when he gets one of his real or supposed enemies, though I notice that he never gibbets a poaching dog, nor, as a rule, a cat; even the cat may be counted as property. Among some very d
  
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