Remco Daalder, Stadse Beesten, Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bas Lubberhuizen, 2005.
Cover showing the Halsbandparkiet (Rose-ringed parakeet) populating Amsterdam's Vondel park
Stadse beesten (City Animals) by city biologist Remco Daalder is an animal history of Amsterdam. It goes as far back as 130.000 years ago tracing the prehistoric existences of forest elephants and hippos roaming the marshlands through to the construction of Ijburg peninsula in 2005.
Around 1000 AD, humans lived among wolves, otters, sea eagles and deer. The animal world of Amsterdam changed radically when people started to besettle the swamp and seriously start building a town. Daalder excavates the histories of city human-animal relations, describing how streets have been shared between people and domesticated animals to the stoney biotope of the urban environment — a paradise for stone loving creatures such as rock pigeons, common swift and countless insects. Daalder charts the consumption of animals and animal products like donkey milk (Ezelinnenmelk) which was sold by the brothers Roding who would sell the milk door to door by milking the donkey outside one’s home. Fish feature prominently as Amsterdam has always been a fishing and fish eating city from the middle-ages when the canals must have been teeming with fish, to the early 1900s when fishermen were fishing sea lion and harbour porpoise or poorer families who would fish for their own carp or bream. In another chapter Daalder describes the waves of invasive species or ‘illegal immigrants’ from human blood-loving parasites piggy-backing the brown rat on ships coming from the east to the Chinese mitten crab explosion populating the Ij today.
See also publisher’s entry on Stadse Beesten [in Dutch]