Dean Green Team

The beavers have been hard at work and this is one of our untagged beavers posing beautifully for the camera. The later one was taken near to the first gate that you come to on the main track. They have been fairly busy in here, with new dams in this upstream area.

Perry Hay Beaver Valley - June 2025

The team are assembled as we needed to check inside the beaver enclosure on the hottest day this year so far (29 degrees!). All the inflowing little streams (about 10) plus the main Perry Hay Brook were as dry as a bone so we checked that the beaver ponds behind their dams had sufficent water - which they did!

We also checked the willow sticks which we had planted over the last few years and we were very pleased to see many of them had started to branch out. We did plant hundreds of them!

There are many small dams now all the way along the brook and they are doing a good job holding back the water.

There is water at the outflow of Perry Hay Brook although it was not flowing. The beavers have built a small dam to hold the water back.

We decided to keep our ranger prisoner in there!

Greathough Beaver Valley - March 2025

Our beavers have been very busy this winter felling trees and creating and maintaining the dams and so enlarging the wetland there. With the vegetation low, these trees are clearly visible from the top path. It won't be long until they are felled .

Arboretum tree planting - February 2025

We planted 45 trees which is an impressive amount! All the trees are numbered which is effectively their passport number as there is all sorts of information stored in the background on the plant and records are kept. The list of trees goes to 624 but there are actually only 499 trees listed. This is because of those now gone and we do not reuse the same number. However, when you add up all the trees as part of groups that have one number there are 858 trees on the ground.

Two of the trees we planted are very rare. They are the 'No Parking' Whitebeam (Karpatiosorbus admonitor) grown at Westonbirt Arboretum since 2022. The name 'No Parking' was added originally due to a 'no parking' sign in front of a tree when it was first found but it was then unidentifiable. It is a species of whitebeam tree found in Devon, United Kingdom. It is known only from the Watersmeet Valley at Lynton, with two stray plants growing on the coast above Sillery Sands, Countisbury.

These are some of the trees we planted with their tree guards and weed suppressant mats which will eventually rot away.

'Whale' our beaver at Greathough Brook - January 2025

A photo of Whale, our male beaver still showing his uncut ear tag so we know it is him. He was doing a bit of maintenance to the original big lodge. At the moment, with the vegetation being so low, you can get a good view from the path of the newer lodge. It is the big pile of sticks and mud beside what was once the edge of the stream, just downstream of the culvert stream. The big question is, with 2 lodges being maintained close to each other, who is living in which lodge?!