Hunting on Land @museum.de

F: Question: What do foxes, squirrels, moles, snakes, badgers, pine martens and pole cats have in common?

M: Won’t find them on Föhr!

F: Due to the island location, local wildlife has some unusual features. First and foremost is the absence of some animal species.

M: And many of the animals living here now haven’t been on the island for long: pheasants were released locally in the 1920s, deer in the 1930s, rabbits at some point in the 1940s.

F: Nevertheless – or precisely because of that fact – they are hunted on the island today. The deer, for example, have no natural enemies. When the Reich Office for Hunting under Hermann Göring released them on the island in 1939, the idea was to study how the population would develop in a closed habitat. The result is: very nicely.

M: Hares are already highly endangered in some parts of Germany. On Föhr, where they were first mentioned in the records during the Middle Ages, we still have large numbers. They’re hunted in winter on driven hunts and sold primarily on the mainland by game dealers. Many traditional hunting methods have long since been banned because of excessive cruelty to the animals.