Germany (Lonely Planet, 6th Edition) - Andrea Schulte-Peevers [65]
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For information on Germany’s 101 nature parks, see www.naturparke.de.
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WILDLIFE
Like most Western European countries, Germany has few large animals still living in the wild. Of the 102 German mammals studied for the 2009 IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) ‘Red List’ of endangered or extinct species, seven are in danger of dying out: the fin whale, North Atlantic right whale, wild horse, Bavarian pine vole, European mink, European ground squirrel and brown bear.
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Animals
Snow hares, marmots and wild goats are found throughout the Alps (the marmot below the tree line, the goat and snow hare above it). The chamois is also fairly common in this neck of the woods, as well as in pockets of the Black Forest, the Swabian Alps and Saxon Switzerland (Sächsische Schweiz), south of Dresden.
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In 2009 Dresden was deleted from Unesco’s list of World Heritage Sites due to the building of a four-lane bridge in the middle of a cultural area. Read more about Unesco’s list at www.unesco.org.
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A rare but wonderful Alpine treat for patient birdwatchers is the sighting of a golden eagle; Berchtesgaden National Park staff might be able to help you find one. The jay, with its darting flight patterns and calls imitating other species, is easy to spot in the Alpine foothills. Look for the flashes of blue on its wings.
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SETTING FREE THE BEAR?
Although the bear is the symbol of Berlin, the wild animal hasn’t lived on German soil since 1835. That changed briefly in 2006, when a brown bear wandered into Bavaria. However, the short life of ‘Bruno’, as he was christened by tabloid newspapers like Bild, was a rather sad footnote in history.
Bruno (officially code named JJ1) was part of a program to reintroduce bears to the Italian Alps when he ambled into Germany and became the first wild bear there for more than 170 years. Spotted by local photographers, he became a media celebrity.
Animal-rights activists began a strenuous campaign to protect the bear, hoping to capture him alive and move him. Farmers, however, started blaming Bruno for killing livestock and, because of a perceived risk to humans, the Bavarian government gave the go-ahead to shoot him…which hunters eventually did.
Even after his death, the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) hopes it can leverage the public affection Bruno engendered to establish a sensible bear repopulation program in Germany. But for some Germans the story of Bruno is an unedifying episode they’d rather just forget.
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Pesky but sociable racoons, a common non-native species, scoot about eastern Germany, and soon let hikers know if they have been disturbed with a shrill whistle-like sound. Beavers can be found in wetlands near the Elbe River. Seals are common on the North Sea and Baltic Sea coasts.
The north coast also lures migratory birds. From March to May, and August to October, they stop over in Schleswig-Holstein’s Wadden Sea (Wattenmeer) National Park and the Vorpommersche Boddenlandschaft National Park while going to and from southerly regions. Forests everywhere provide a habitat for a wide variety of songbirds, as well as woodpeckers.
Some animals are staging a comeback. Sea eagles, practically extinct in western Germany, are becoming more plentiful in the east, as are falcons, white storks and cranes. The east also sees wolves, which regularly cross the Oder River from Poland, and European moose, which occasionally appear on moors and in mixed forests.
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The highly unlikely title Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust by Klaus P Fischer and Boria Sax looks at the treatment of animals under Hitler’s Third Reich and Nazism’s symbolic use of nature for its own means.
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The wild cat has returned to the Harz Mountains and other forested regions, but you shouldn’t expect to see the related lynx. Having died out here in the 19th century, lynxes were reintroduced in the 1980s, only to be illegally