Czech Dam Project Was Stalled by Bureaucracy. Beavers Built Their Own.

Europe|Czech Dam Project Was Stalled by Bureaucracy. Beavers Built Their Own.

For years, officials in the Czech Republic had pushed a dam project to protect a river south of Prague, and the critically endangered species living in it. But the project, hamstrung by land negotiations, stalled.

In the meantime, a group of chisel-toothed mammals — renowned for their engineering skills and work ethic, and unencumbered by bureaucracy — decided to take on the task. The beavers of Prague simply built dams themselves.

The rodents’ fast work saved the local authorities some 1.2 million euros, according to a news release from the Nature Conservation Agency of the Czech Republic, a government agency responsible for conservation across the country. “Nature took its course,” Bohumil Fišer, the head of the Brdy Protected Landscape Area, where the revitalization project was planned, said in the statement. The beavers, he added, had created the ideal environmental conditions “practically overnight.”

The project, on a former army site on the Klabava, a river about 40 miles southwest of Prague, the Czech capital, was drafted in 2018 and had a building permit, but had been delayed for years by negotiations over the land, which had been used as military training grounds, Agence France-Presse reported on Tuesday. Officials had hoped to build a barrier to protect the river and its population of critically endangered crayfish from sediment and acidic water spilling over from two nearby ponds, A.F.P. reported.