If, while enjoying a well-deserved piece of peak-chocolate, we look to the right from the last lookout point of the Dunkelsteinerwald—the Ferdinandswarte—which slopes down toward the Austrian town of Mautern, we can catch a glimpse to the east of the last island in the Wachau, or rather the very first Danube island in the Tullnerfeld, the Hundsheimer Island—briefly introduced in the 2024 Danube Island vote—which came into being barely a century ago by some miracle amid the demographic crisis particularly afflicting the islands of the Austrian section of the Danube, which was subsequently stabilized by the protective human hand, carefully strewn with Alpine rocks, perhaps out of a sense of guilt over the elimination of the many hundreds of nearby islands—which is, of course, surely an exaggeration, but a reasonable and logical conclusion given the conditions visible only on old maps, since the solitary riverbed formation pointing toward the Mautern Bridge emerged around 1930 as a gravel bar above the flat spur near Hundsheim, a village of two hundred inhabitants, at a time when 99% of the islands in the Tullnerfeld had already been eliminated by river regulation, by 1940, a small forest had grown on it, and it has retained its shape and size ever since, although the trees on its upper, western tip have been thoroughly battered by floods.
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