SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The Swiss canton of Zurich has established a hotline to deal with an unruly neighbor - the beaver. Beloved trees have been gnawed down, gardens destroyed, floods unleashed as the web-footed engineers build their dams. The mammals enjoy special protection under the law, perhaps along with BJ Leiderman, who does our theme music. But as their population booms, residents say that they're having more and more beaver problems. Caroline Nienhuis is a biologist working for the Zurich Beaver Advisory Center. She's a first responder on the local beaver hotline. Thanks so much for being with us.
CAROLINE NIENHUIS: My pleasure. Thanks for your interest in our work.
SIMON: So how do the beavers dial the hotline with their little claws?
NIENHUIS: So basically, it's not the beavers, but it's all the people who have...
SIMON: Oh, I'm sorry.
NIENHUIS: ...A problem (laughter).
SIMON: Yes, I understand. So it's people who have a problem with beavers, right?
NIENHUIS: Yeah, right. Yeah.
SIMON: Like what?
NIENHUIS: So basically, trees ignored and felled in the gardens of people. Beavers build dams that causes flooding of agricultural areas. They eat agricultural crops. They can cause problems in levees, high-water risk, damages. So there's many different things.
SIMON: Why are they being protected if they're, you know, not exactly easy to live with? Let's put it that way.
NIENHUIS: Well, basically, the beaver was eradicated a few hundred years ago. Then in the '50s, Switzerland decided to reintroduce the beaver because they realized the beaver is a really keystone species for waterways, for ecosystem. And at the time, that worked quite well, and now they are expanding into areas where they are causing more conflicts.
SIMON: What can you do?
NIENHUIS: So basically, in - what we do is we - people call. They explain the problem, and sometimes we can say - like, give help over the phone. Then, for example, if, like, drainage systems from farmers to drain - take the water away from their agricultural crops are set under water by beaver dams, then we have to go out and kind of look at the beaver dam with the people who have a problem and then decide outside what the measures can be.
SIMON: Beavers are doing pretty well in Switzerland, I gather, now.
NIENHUIS: Yeah. We have a rising increase of beavers. So the big streams, rivers and lakes are nearly fully occupied, and now they're expanding into little waterways that are within villages, within agricultural landscapes. Switzerland is very densely populated. So there are lots of infrastructures in these waterways, and that's why we have conflicts.
SIMON: So you - you're trying to make it possible for beavers and humans to live together more amicably.
NIENHUIS: Yes, basically. Because we know from many studies in the U.S., Canada and Europe, that's where beavers come back. There's an explosion of biodiversity.
SIMON: Yeah.
NIENHUIS: Because through building dams and burrowing into the river banks, they create new habitats for many different species. It's just amazing. If you walk into a beaver territory, you can hear the biodiversity, and you can see it. It's really mind-boggling how that happens when a beaver comes back.
SIMON: Well, if I were a beaver, it seems to me I'd at least want to take a trip there.
NIENHUIS: To Switzerland (laughter).
SIMON: Yes.
NIENHUIS: Yeah. In certain areas, definitely (laughter). We have got certain areas where the beavers can do what they need to do, and that's amazing because Switzerland doesn't have enough - a lot of space for wilderness to develop. So the beaver is kind of bringing back, on a small scale, hotspots of biodiversity and wilderness, which is great.
SIMON: Caroline Nienhuis is a biologist at the Zurich Beaver Advisory Center. Thank you so much for being with us. Good luck to you.
NIENHUIS: My pleasure. Thanks.
(SOUNDBITE OF ALABAMA SHAKES' SONG, "SOUND & COLOR") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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