Moving slowly through the red tape of bureaucracy sometimes pays off, as in the Czech Republic, where officials planned to build a $1.2 million dam to help protect the river habitat of critically endangered crayfish. The project, first proposed in 2018, was long delayed by negotiations over the protected land, formerly used as an army training site, but it turns out that wasn't such a bad thing. The project is now complete without any digging at all. Beavers built their own dam, shielding the Klabava River from sediment and acidic water from two nearby ponds, and creating a wetland covering five acres, reports the New York Times. That's "roughly twice larger than planned," Bohumil Fiser of the Czech Nature Conservation Agency tells AFP.
The beavers almost seemed to be working according to plan at the Brdy Protected Landscape Area south of Prague. After the wetland was formed with pools and canals, they "moved on to a gulley encircling the ponds, in which the conservationists wanted to build little dams to allow overspill that would help flood the area," the Guardian reports. "We were only discussing [those dams] with the water company and the forest company which owns the land," Fišer says. But the rodents went ahead and built four dams in that area, and it looks like they'll build more. "It's full service," says Fiser, noting taxpayers have been saved the $1.2 million fee. He adds the beavers—"dam fine" beavers, as AFP puts it—created the ideal conditions "practically overnight," per the Times. (More Czech Republic stories.)
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