Leave it to Beavers
By Tom Douglas
An area south of Prague in the Czech Republic that had previously been used for military training was repurposed as the Brdy Protected Landscape Area, which was to feature a restored wetland. Plans for construction of a dam to make this possible were drafted back in 2018, but negotiations between landowners, regulatory agencies, and the military had languished for seven years. Then, in 2025, it was discovered that a family of beavers had moved in and quickly completed the job at no cost – a savings of around 30 million Czech koruna (1.2 million US dollars). The flooded area created by the beaver dam was about 5 acres – roughly twice what the human engineers had planned. The larger area had been proposed by environmentalists, but it hadn’t made it into the official plan. Jaroslav Obermajer, head of the Central Bohemian office of the Czech Nature and Landscape Protection Agency commented that “Beavers always know best. The places where they build dams are always chosen just right — better than when we design it on paper.”
You can read more about this in stories by Radio Prague International and Agence France-Presse.