Don’t go swimming off the coasts of southern Africa! Or Jacksonville, FL, this week.

This is an odd article about the introduction of large herbivores to Germany to try to achieve a different balance of plant life. Or I found its optimism odd.

With its tiny houses nestled along the main road and its red-brick church, Töpchin — just 25 miles outside of Berlin — is a traditional-looking Brandenburg village. But heading east through the marshland that borders the village, a visitor encounters the unexpected: five huge Asian water buffaloes.

The species was native to Europe until 10,000 years ago, when hunting shrunk its range to the continent’s far southeast. So Germans know these beasts only from pictures of them in fields and rice paddies in Asia. “Some people are really confused when they see the water buffaloes,” says Holger Rössling, the man who set the animals free in Töpchin in the summer of 2011. But the black creatures with massive horns and an impressively muscular build appear to be very much at ease in their new home. And they are meant to stay.

Rössling is a project manager with the Brandenburg Nature Conservation Fund, a government agency in the federal state surrounding Berlin. The group brought in the water buffaloes from a special breeder in France so they would graze threatened tracts of fens and remnant inland salt marshes, as German cows have long since lost their affinity for grazing in such wet or nutrient-poor environments.

I guess that water buffalo are hardly white tail deer – they won’t soon proliferate in such numbers to become a nuisance to Brandenburgers – but the experiment seems like one big unintended consequence. The article also discusses the introduction of Przhevalsky horses (Mongolian, originally) and various other large herbivores.