FILM SUMMARY

There are wild beavers in the Rhone River, even in the heart of Lyon, France’s third largest city !

In the early 20^th century, the beaver was almost eradicated in Western Europe, and the Rhone River is one of its last refuges. Thanks to conservation measures instituted in 1909, the species has gradually and naturally recolonized the Rhone basin.

The most astonishing example of this recovery is the existence of several families in the middle of Lyon for the past twenty years. Even stranger is the fact that these animals were not introduced here, as they were in the Loire region or in Brittany.

This film studies them on a daily basis, and teaches us how to differentiate them from their rival “cousin”, the American beaver.

Here we follow the tracks of the beaver and the coypu, with comments by some of France’s finest specialists in the field.