A COUPLE caught a garden vandal on camera — and were shocked to find it was a beaver.
They put up a £100 night-vision gizmo after their trees suffered machete-like damage.
They found the beaver was spending up to six hours at a time swimming in their pond and hauling off branches to a lodge it was building under decking.
They said: “We couldn’t believe it.”
Nicknamed Anthony by the family - after military historian Antony Beevor - the herbivore has become as 'fat as a pig' spending as much as six hours a night chewing tree trunks and dragging branches around.
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The pair, who do not wish to be named, live in rural Pembrokeshire.
They believe the beaver, now nicknamed Anthony but whose sex is unknown, may have been released by over-zealous rewilding enthusiasts.
That would make it the first wild beaver in Wales for 400 years and only the fourth one found living wild in Britain.
The closest colony is 50 miles away in the Dyfi estuary and no escapes have been reported.
Other wild populations were discovered in Scotland’s Tay-Forth catchment area, in East Devon’s River Otter and on the Avon near Bristol.