The once exterminated rodent is spreading happily in Baden-Württemberg. While this is good for biodiversity, it is a major problem for some residents and farmers.
• Only the gnawed trunks of the poplars at the edge of the stream are left. Muddy ruts cut through the ground as if tractors had crossed the garden. Every few days the landowner has to clear the stream of branches and stones by the wheelbarrow. Because he's had enough of the constant flooding. During the last one, just before Christmas, the water was almost half a meter high. The parquet in the company premises is still slightly wavy. All of this is the work of unloved neighbors: the beaver family, who built their castle a few meters downstream from branches and grass, stones and mud. There are not only the needs of the beaver, we humans are also there," says the person concerned.
There are problems especially in the Großer Lautertal in the Swabian Jura: the tourists want a beautiful landscape, so it shouldn't look like Hempel's under the sofa," says the mayor. The fallen and abandoned trees bother him and are also dangerous for road traffic, as well as the flooding caused by the beaver dams.
• The beaver is strictly protected and, after being hunted to extinction, has been deliberately resettled, at least in Bavaria. There, in the mid-1960s, the Bund Naturschutz (Bund Naturschutz) started to release the animals on the Danube, where they multiplied and returned to the river valleys. The beavers didn't care much about borders and soon immigrated to Baden-Württemberg and many other federal states. Around 18,000 are now based in Bavaria and 3,500 in Baden-Württemberg.
The beaver is an indicator of an intact landscape and is therefore desirable in many places, but not everywhere. Bavaria has long had a compensation fund, which is not yet the case in Baden-Württemberg. Farmers or pond keepers receive compensation payments from the pot if they complain about commercial damage. However, there is not a penny for private individuals or municipalities.Where beavers are at work, the landscape becomes a construction site. But what initially looks like a swath of destruction is actually an architectural marvel of nature. We show how master builder beaver designs his environment - and what enormous changes he is capable of.