Monday beaver friends Sharon Brown of Beavers: Wetlands & Wildlife and Mike Callahan of Beaver Solutions will be trotting down to their local public television stations to record an interview for Canadian Broadcasting about the beaver situation in Brandenburg Germany. Click the video for a nice summary of the situation. Officials are concerned that (wait for it) burrowing into banks could cause a collapse of the levee that protects the town. (Gosh sounds familiar…) Apparently there are still a few level heads in the country who have suggested that digging produces irrational fears in humans and people are panicking unnecessarily. I made sure they had Skip’s digging report and wished them well.
UPDATE: Beaver friend and WORTH A DAM foreign correspondent Alex Hiller sends these remarks:
What is being reported in the article is a long lasting problem depending on poor dam protection at the Polish side of river Oder. The border between Poland and Gerrnany goes along the middle of the river. On German side all dams were improved after the so called century flooding of 2001.
On the Polish side of river Oder nothing was done – except for repeated complaints. I learned about that situation from local German beaver defenders of that region when I was exploring beaver sites over there in autumn of 2005. It was supposed the complaints were meant to receive money from European Union funds, getting flood protection sponsored.
The big dams along the riverside are set back into the flat land at least fifty yards or more. I haven`t seen a beaver lodge being build on dry land with a tunnel of fifty yards to get access to the water.
What was in discussion and is still highly recommended are emergency hills to be built artificially between the riverbank and the flood protection dams that would offer refuge to all kind of wildlife. I learned about people that had stepped onto dams in the century flooding of 2001 after their villages had been flooded due to broken stretches of the same dams and started clubbing beaver families that climbed up onto the same dams because the people were afraid the beavers might dig into those dams and destroy them.
Beavers are being strongly protected by nature protection law in western European Countries ending at the eastern boarder of Germany, exactly in the middle of river Oder. In all eastern European countries, starting with Poland just across river Oder beaver affairs are being covered by hunting law. Complaining about the beaver means increasing the numbers of beavers for shooting ( they do not set traps in eastern European countries but shoot ). The Riga beaver conflict of Latvia was about hunting by shooting in town which is prohibited,
In Germany we have two cities named Frankfurt: Frankfurt at (river) Oder, a big town at the German-Polish boarder about an hours drive east of German capital Berlin vs. Frankfurt at (river) Main where I live just in the middle of Germany and about five hours drive southeast of Berlin.
Alex
Thanks SO much Alex! Of course remember all too well our own sheet-pile-palooza.
(A little aside. For some reason the German video was only possible to embed in – uh – German so I downloaded it in English, converted it and put it back up since I discovered that my personal Youtube account has been ‘upgraded’ to hold longer files. Hmmm. Who knew? Documentary?)
