Lekcia pre triedu · Wildlife · 🇨🇿 Czechia

European Beaver

Nature's most skilled engineer

A European beaver on a riverbank near its dam in a Czech river

Photo · Wikimedia Commons

Čo to je?

The European beaver is a large, chestnut-coloured rodent that lives in rivers and lakes across Czechia. It is famous for its incredible engineering skills - using its strong teeth, it chews down trees and builds dams and lodges that completely change the river around it. Beavers are making a strong comeback in Czech rivers after almost disappearing.

Povedzte mi viac

A beaver's front teeth - called incisors - never stop growing. They are coated in hard orange enamel and are so strong that a beaver can chew through a tree trunk as wide as a human arm in just a few minutes. The chewed wood is used to build dams across streams.

The dams beavers build slow down the flow of water and create ponds. These ponds become home to fish, frogs, dragonflies, kingfishers and many other animals that would not be there without the beaver. Scientists call beavers 'keystone species' because so many other animals depend on what they build.

In the middle of their pond, beavers build a lodge - a mound of sticks, mud and branches with underwater entrances. Inside, safely above the waterline, is a dry chamber where the beaver family lives and raises its young (called kits). Predators cannot easily reach them.

Beavers were hunted to extinction in Czechia in the 1800s. They were reintroduced carefully from populations in other countries, and today hundreds of beavers live in rivers across Czechia. Where they have returned, the rivers have become richer and more full of wildlife.

V triede

Prejdite si to so svojou triedou za 15 minút.

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Námety na diskusiu

  1. 01Why do we call beavers 'ecosystem engineers'? Can you think of any other animals that change the landscape around them?
  2. 02How is a beaver dam different from a dam built by humans? What is the same?
  3. 03Why might bringing back one species (the beaver) help many other species too?
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Aktivita v triede

Design a beaver lodge and dam on paper. Draw a cross-section (as if you cut it in half) showing: the pond, the dam, the lodge mound, the underwater tunnel, and the dry living chamber inside. Label each part and explain what it does.

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