"It is a wonderful gift at the start of the year!" "Says Cédric Beaudoin, wildlife studies officer at the Ornithological and naturalist group of Nord-Pas-de-Calais. Hunted for its fur and by urbanization, the small flat-tailed mammal again colonizes its original habitat after 150 years of absence. Very discreet, the European beaver has not yet been seen, but it leaves behind distinctive marks, like these trees pruned in pencil.
"We call him the ecological engineer," explains Cédric Beaudoin. If the water levels are too low, he will build small dams to increase them so that the gallery where he lives is partly flooded, thus preventing predators from reaching it. The increase in these levels will play on an entire ecosystem: it can cause other species of fish and amphibians to reappear and it re-floods certain lands that were no longer so, which recreates a biotope favorable to other species . "
Hair traps to identify it
To be certain that it was not his much more common Canadian cousin, it was necessary to install hair traps. Nothing aggressive, just pieces of rough wood placed in its path on which the beaver rubs. Now identified, this little engineer will now need to be protected: "Our fear is that it will be confused with nutria, whose trapping is authorized," says the specialist. We will not be able to teach the European beaver to avoid these traps, so it is the trappers themselves who start training to best preserve this friendly aquatic rodent.
