https://www.codastory.com/waronscience/rewilding-beavers-conservation/
"It was 1998. Olivier Rubbers, then 29 years old, came up with the idea of
returning beavers to his local rivers. “My level of knowledge about nature was
extremely poor,” he now confesses. But he’d read a magazine article about how
the beaver was indigenous to Belgium, though it had long been nearly extinct.
Bringing beavers back, he thought, “would be a great project.”
“Beaver bombing” or “beaver black ops” — as it’s become known in conservation
circles — is the practice of illegally releasing the humble beaver into a
waterway and leaving it to do what it does best: fell trees, build dams and
construct lodges. Beavers are known as “ecosystem engineers,” or a “keystone
species,” because they create an ideal habitat for all kinds of other wildlife.
Rubbers borrowed his father’s car and drove to Germany to pick up the beavers,
then crossed the border back into Belgium and dropped them in a river.
Throughout 1999 and 2000, Rubbers repeated the feat with 97 more beavers,
bringing them from Bavaria to Belgium in a van kitted out with homemade beaver
crates. “We wanted them all,” he said.
Rubbers and his accomplices soon learned that the best time to beaver-bomb was
not at night but in the middle of the afternoon, preferably on a Sunday, when
everyone was having lunch."
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-malaria-belize-crime-mexico-city-bison-montana/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
