Bieber

Late afternoon, and I'm ambling around the city walls of Augsburg (the third oldest city in Germany, founded by the Roman Emperor Augustus, one of those pretty, historical German towns that does good cake...), chatting.

 

Passing by one of the city's many bridges (there are 500+ bridges in Augusburg, apparently, more than Venice... so the tour guides tell you!), I noticed a rather severely coppiced tree just by the river. Oddly, only half of the tree seemed to have been coppiced, with some of the cut stems lying in the river. Actually, aren't those tooth marks rather than saw marks...

Shifting my focus slightly, I suddenly realised that a large lump of earth a little bit to the right wasn't a lump at all, but Europe's largest rodent, busy chomping his way through some vegetation!  Now when I moved to Bavaria, five months ago, I set myself just one goal... to see a European Beaver in the wild. And rather than having to visit some remote wetland reserve, there was one quite happily nibbling his way through someone's garden in the centre of the third largest city in the state. Cool!

(PS, you'll have to excuse the photos: it was almost dark, and I only had my phone... but you can tell what it is! I'll be back in the summer!)