This photo is obviously not taken with my iPhone 🙂 but by Jean Michel with his 300 mm x 2 lens. We don’t know enough about castors and coypus to know what this one is.
Evidemment cette photo n’a pas Ă©tĂ© prise avec mon iPhone 🙂 mais par Jean Michel avec son objectif 300 mm x 2. Nous ne connaissons pas suffisamment en castors et ragondins pour savoir lequel c’est.
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12 replies on “Castor or Coypu – Castor ou ragondin”
Not sure. If you’d heard a slap on the water, that would be a dead giveaway for a beaver, slapping its tail on the water.
Coypus is a new one to me.
Unfortunately, this one was only swimming!
Ooh! We photographed a couple of these sitting on the grass at Marie Antoinette’s gameplay at Versailles last October. It took ages to find out what they were when we got home. They didn’t seem particularly bothered by the visitors.
I rather like the “gameplay”!!! No, they are very tame and people feed them, like ducks and swans.
Not gameplay! Hameau!
https://animal.cheloniophilie.com/Fiches/Ragondin.php
Merci ! Nous avons trouvĂ© une site web qui nous disait qu’il Ă©tait difficile de les distinguer dans l’eau mais on pensait que c’Ă©tait plutĂ´t un ragondin. Il semble que c’est le museau blanc (voir rĂ©ponse de Susan).
Sadly, coypu. The white muzzle gives it away. I reckon their numbers are building again, after dropping noticeably in the last couple of years. Mind you, this is the time of year they are most visible, and all it tells you is that they had a good breeding season. Not all will survive the winter.
Ah ha! The white muzzle – I’ll remember.
The Coypu has been eradicated in the East Anglian region of the UK because of the damage they did. France appears to live more happily with them.
I shall look up Castor, it sounds more like a forename for an animal.
Yes, it’s a beaver of course :). I don’t know if they are trying to eradicate the coypu here. Maybe Susan knows?
They certainly are trying to eradicate the little blighters. A concentrated campaign over the last couple of years is I assume responsible for the recent drop in numbers. I doubt they’ll ever manage to eradicate them though, especially in the Loire Valley. They are classified as nuisibles and are not native. They do a lot of damage to Ă©tang banks.
Beavers on the other hand, went locally extinct and have been very successfully reintroduced.
If you see a large aquatic rodent here it will almost always be a coypu. Although mainly nocturnal they are much more active during the day than beavers, which are almost exclusively nocturnal.