2023-12-01 21:00:00
I also wrote about this here in 2016 Castor fiber, the largest rodent in our country. About how the last beaver was clubbed to death along the IJssel near Zalk in the early nineteenth century and how it was reintroduced in 1988 from a beaver population in the then still existing East Germany. Already in 2016 you could sense that a problem was coming.
I wrote at the time: ‘Things are going uphill quickly, so quickly in fact that I was recently predicted that beavers will be allowed to be hunted again in a number of years due to alleged nuisance. (…) You can prevent a lot of damage with a piece of chicken wire strategically placed around the tree trunk. And sure enough: such a piece of gauze was placed in the RTL News shown by a Prorail employee.
Beavers had transformed a railway embankment into holey cheese and now the embankment was made beaver-proof with mesh over a length of four hundred meters. There are animal species that do not simply stay quietly and problem-free in their habitat, but that shape, transform, renovate and adapt the entire habitat to their will. Such species do not make a simple nest or hole, but build complete and often complicated structures in which to live.
Ecosystem engineers
They are sometimes called ecosystem engineers. Ants and termites are examples; they build colossal anthills and termite mounds with endless tunnel systems that provide a living environment for all kinds of other organisms. Humans are also such an animal; We also create structures (from huts and houses to complete cities of millions) that give the original environment a different appearance and at the same time provide a habitat for other species, from house mice to dust mites.
The beaver is also an ecosystem engineer. He regulates the water level in streams and rivers with dams, he floods areas of land and inadvertently provides a living environment for other animal and plant species. As he works, he gnaws down trees to build dams and beaver lodges. To eat it collects juicy branches and twigs, preferably from willows, but it also likes the thick nutrient-rich rhizomes of water lilies.
And to live in it needs a den, preferably with an entrance below the water level (hence the dam construction) and with or without a structure in the form of a castle made of branches. The easiest way to make a cave is in a sloping wall, a bank, an embankment, or a dike. The fact that the dike happens to be used to keep our land dry or to allow a train to pass over it is of course not something the beaver can take into account. Blame him.
And so, as RTL pointed out, the beaver not only gnaws down trees but also the budgets of Prorail and the water boards. Because the beaver is a protected native species, it is not allowed to simply be shot.
Does the beaver have no natural enemies? Of course! But a large part of the Dutch electorate would rather see it go than come: the wolf. And so we find ourselves in an interesting vicious policy cycle. A kind of ecological stalemate. Away with the beaver? Long live the wolf!
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#beaver #controls #entire #habitat