However, wildlife manager Gerhard Schwab says Polish dams should be better protected from the country’s large population of beavers so locals have no reason to kill them.
Schwab, a Bavarian ecologist known as “Pablo Escobar” or “Godfather” of beavers — an unlikely sobriquet referring to his adamant species re-introduction efforts — made his name restoring the European habitats of the aquatic rodents.
Beavers tend to be culled during periods of flooding, says Schwab, but he insists there are more humane ways of protecting flood barriers.
“Killing beavers on dikes during floods … is done in many countries, because the problem is that if the beavers build burrows in the dikes, the water can get into the burrows, and the dikes can break,” Schwab told POLITICO in a telephone interview.
But the Germans have a better way of protecting the country’s levees, he added approvingly. “You just put mesh wire on the surface of the dike, a little bit of foliage and grass on top, so you can mow the dike and the animals can no longer dig in,” Schwab says.
“On the other hand, if they build a dike from scratch, they can make it out of gravel, preventing the animals from making holes, because as soon as they start digging the gravel comes down and there’s no longer a hole.”