© Per Harald Olsen A European Beaver
A man who was bitten by a beaver at a bus stop in Tyresö, south of Stockholm, has been describing the snappy attack
Pentti Savola, 58, was among a group of early morning commuters
waiting to get a bus to work when the animal came up to him and bit his leg last week.
"It was lightning fast. I never thought that an animal that looks so clumsy could be so crafty," he told Swedish news site mitti.se.
He said that he may have stressed the animal out when he tried to take a photo of it with his mobile.
But after his own stressful experience, he said he wanted to tell his story to warn children that they should not pet beavers without knowing more about the animals.
Savola was not hurt in the attack.
The beaver was hunted to extinction in Sweden by the end of the nineteenth century but was reintroduced during the 1920s and 1930s after eighty of the furry animals were imported from Norway, in what is often cited as one of the most successful animal conservation efforts in history.
The wood-loving, sharp-toothed, primarily nocturnal, semi-aquatic animals are the second largest rodents on the planet (after the capybara) and are most prevalent in North America.
Comment: There's been many cases of strange bird behavior in the last decade. One wonders what unseen changes are going on in the environment to cause them.