Nordschwarzwald National Park to become hunting-free

From autumn onwards, red deer in the Nordschwarzwald National Park will no longer be shot across around 2,000 hectares.

Editorial Team Wild beim Wild — 2 September 2015

Recreational hunting in the national park must not be allowed – that is the opinion of almost all visitors to Baden-Württemberg’s first national park, the Black Forest, reports Thomas Waldenspuhl, one of the two directors.

Many visitors apparently hold the ideal vision that nature should be free to develop without interference in a large protected area, and that therefore no shooting should take place.

In reality, however, process protection is the guiding principle. Humans step back and let nature take its course. This is what distinguishes a national park from other nature reserves, where targeted management measures are used to preserve specific species or habitats. This ideal vision of untamed nature frequently reaches the limits of public acceptance when it becomes clear that nature can also be destructive – when storms or fires rage, bark beetles strip spruce trees bare, or deer and roe deer cause serious damage to trees, writes the Stuttgarter Zeitung.

In a national park, however, one does not speak of damage – in process protection, everything belongs to the ecosystem, whether plants, fungi, insects, or animals – on an equal footing and without value judgement. «Regardless of whether people like it or not,» emphasises park director Thomas Waldenspuhl.

His task is to manage developments in the 10’000-hectare area in such a way that no damage occurs in the surrounding commercial forests. This is possible because the final stage of development – untouched nature in the core zone covering 75 percent of the area, with a management and care zone on the remaining 25 percent – does not need to be reached for another 30 years.

Forestry expert Friedrich Burghardt reports that elevated hunting blinds, which stand at nearly every meadow, are still being dismantled: “Red deer love to graze on grass, but the moment they step out onto any wildlife meadow, shots ring out.” This practice will now come to an end. However, it may take eight to ten years before the animals graze again during daylight hours, as their natural behavior dictates: “With the current generation of mother animals, we won’t be able to achieve that anymore.”

Sufficient grazing areas for wildlife are to be created within the national park. The Grinden — those characteristic open, forest-free areas in the Northern Black Forest that emerged through historical grazing — offer themselves for this purpose. These belong to the management zones within the national park, where sheep and cattle graze. By enlarging the Grinden areas and creating disturbance-free zones, red deer could, in the long term, be observed there during the day as well — as is already the case in the Eifel National Park. After all, deer are “open-landscape dwellers” and naturally active during the day, says Burghardt.

Recreational hunting of ungulates is being discontinued on a total area of 2,000 hectares within the national park. The park director insists this carries “no risk whatsoever for neighbouring residents.” This is because in those areas — at higher elevations and on the Grinden — female ungulates have been spared for nearly 40 years. During driven hunts, the focus was on trophies, namely the antlers of male animals.

Satellite monitoring of red deer in the Southern Black Forest has yielded interesting insights, reports Burghardt. He observed 18 stags there over a number of years and witnessed how recreational hunting affects the animals’ behavior. Today, deer can once again be seen standing at the forest edge near Schluchsee. Achieving the same in the Northern Black Forest will take several years and require a concept that also involves the national park’s neighbouring communities.

Wild beim Wild recommends, where necessary, immunocontraception, so that hunting is also discontinued in the areas adjoining the national park.

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