The brief Y-905 road, the only of Navarino Island, allows access an appreciation to these remote landscapes, intervened by the anthropic footprint of road building.
These are also transit landscapes, providing company to the travellers along the Navarino coast as they once did to the Yagan people, who navigated along the Beagle Channel during their nomadic way of living. Yagan people, though, admired pristine landscapes from their canoes, thick and green forests untouched neither by humans nor by beavers, whose dams are a common landmark of the current panoramic.
Beaver dams have abruptly intervened these landscapes since the introduction of this species in 1946. Their engineering skill is undeniable, as is the peculiar aesthetics that this intervention provides, the cost, however, is massive biodiversity loss.
Georeading
Unlike in their native ecosystem, the forests of North America, beavers find no predator in Patagonia. Austral woods offer no natural population control to the growing number of beavers propagating through the region, who have already invaded thousands of hectares of the delicate and unique native forest.
Beavers follow their instinct to build refugees, admirable constructions that provide shelter and subaquatic access, taking wood from trees that took hundreds of years to grow.
Logs are accumulated to build dams over two meters high, flooding wide areas, drowning native flora, and favouring the growth of invasive vegetation. Native flora and fauna are unable to adapt to such rapid change to their ecosystem, their existence thus endangered.
The spirit of conservation opens a moral dilemma: forced and violent eradication of the beaver population places the responsibility of this environmental disaster to beings that only adapted to a forced, new home. Human error is, once again, not assumed by its perpetrators.