Holland through my lens : Searching for beavers in Horsterwold, Flevoland

Last week, I stumbled upon a super fun activity that I didn't know was offered. Staatsbosbeheer (State Forest Management) doesn't only manage the forests, they also have excursions in the parks across the Netherlands.

In Flevoland, our 12th and the newest province of the country and basically a huge polder, it was possible to join a boat tour looking for beavers in the Horsterwold.

To paint a picture. Flevoland only officially exists since 1982. The Horsterwold is a pretty young forest planted in the 1970's-1990's on the clay soil of the polder. The growth of the plants here is massive. Only a part of the forest is "given back to nature" to see what will happen and only minimally managed by Staatsbosbeheer. Interesting things happened here. And I was going to join a tour on a boat in the waters of the Horsterwold.

The weather was perfect and the boat wasn't too full with around a dozen people on board. We had 3 guides (a bit over the top, but a lot of fun). Every one of the guides had their own speciality.

The tour started and we received a bit of an introduction to the area and what animals to expect. It was possible to see kingfishers out here (In dutch called ijsvogel which translates to ice-bird). They didn't expect that they would show up though, because the winter has been so cold...

So why are they called ice-birds again?

I got my brand new zoom-lens out of my bag to do some "serious" bird watching.

BAM! A bird... A white bird! City girl knows nothing here... so I had no clue what kind of bird that was. It was standing up straight in the shallow waters of this area. It was white and it could fly away any second. But it didn't! It must have gotten used to the sounds of these flat boats exploring the area.

Up close, I was able to take a nice photo of this bird, that apparently is the great white egret.

The weird thing about this area is that you never really feel in nature completely. The forest is surrounded by wind turbines and in a few locations, you will see a busy road or power lines. But the animals don't mind, it seems. So I decided not to mind either.

On our way to the area where the beavers were supposed to have built their lodges, we ran into a few other birds.

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The boat moved into the beaver area and everyone was on the lookout. "Just look for a huge square head sticking out of the water". I had no clue what that would look like. They explained that beavers were pretty large. We had been floating around for 30 minutes without seeing anything until someone thought she saw something. And the boat decided to turn around and go look for it.

I honestly thought this wasn't leading to anything. Even if it was a beaver, he would be gone by the time we got to the spot. And how would we even find it again?

But we were dealing with a pretty exhibitionistic beaver. He swam towards the boat to go to the other side of the water and didn't mind us following him. We were able to take so many photos!! And if that wasn't enough, after the swimming session he decided to go to the shore and chew on some reed with us watching. Our guide decided to leave at some point to not be too late. Because I think this beaver would still be posing for us if we didn't leave.

So yeah, I saw a beaver! Woohoo... Impressive animal, impressive swimmer. Not super good looking though. My lens did okay but can do better in smaller aperture. That is to figure out in my next adventure!

Almost dark, time to go home...