The monster of pondness
At first we couldn’t understand exactly what was in our pond and happily munching all our water plants. Until one afternoon we discovered the wonderful monster. We were absolutely spellbound and I happened to have the camera with me.
Where did the creature come from, where does it want to go and what is it doing here?
At first the guess was muskrat or beaver, the tail was neither flattened nor flat enough for that. That day Anton’s mother happened to be here and we sat by the pond. Otherwise we wouldn’t have known what we were seeing.
His mother immediately recognized that it was a nutria. We really enjoyed this little magical moment and then started researching it on the internet.
The nutria reaches a body length of up to 65 cm and weighs approx. 8 to 10 kg when fully grown. Their round, scale-covered, little hairy tail is about 30-45 cm long. The animals are therefore smaller than beavers.
The original home of the nutria, which lives in lakes, rivers, ponds and swamps, is subtropical South America. There the little creatures were on the verge of extinction. The fur farming industry actually paved the way for you to Europe at the end of the 1920s. After a painful imprisonment in German fur farms, many individuals managed to escape and this is how stocks have formed in Germany.
