Womb-Raiders

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver Rehabilitation, Beavers elsewhere, kits, Who's Killing Beavers Now? May 16, 2013

li-baby-beaver[1] — CBC News Posted: May 15, 2013 3:18 PM CT Last Updated: May 15, 2013 5:35 PM CT This premature beaver kit was brought into the Wildlife Haven Rehabilitation Centre on Tuesday after a trapper removed it from its mother's womb. Three other kits that were also found had died. This premature beaver kit was brought into the Wildlife Haven Rehabilitation Centre on Tuesday after a trapper removed it from its mother's womb. Three other kits that were also found had died. (Wildlife Haven Rehabilitation Centre)

The trapper discovered the four kits after killing the mother beaver, according to the Wildlife Haven Rehabilitation Centre which is caring for the young beaver. “He had trapped a beaver and then he killed it and noticed that its stomach was moving, so he cut it open and took out four baby beavers,” Reesa Atnikov, the centre’s supervisor, told CBC News on Wednesday.

What a humanitarian! St. Francis of the fur trade! So after killing the mother and three of its siblings, the trapper had the kindness of heart to take the trouble to slit open her belly and bring one gasping survivor for rehab. No word yet on whether he donated the sum he received for offing the beaver for the babies care. Gosh, this is such touching story, they should show it every Christmas.

The surviving beaver kit, which is about the size of a large baked potato, is receiving around-the-clock care and its condition is improving, Atnikov said.

No mention of the literally thousands of unborn kits that are killed every year when trappers take care of a ‘nuisance’ mom. The internet is literally strewn with photos of unborn kits because the monsters think its kind of cool to see them all tucked away and fully formed like that. Don’t worry, I know my audience and won’t share any. But trust me they’re out there.

Meanwhile, lets hope the baby does okay, that he doesn’t remember any of this or the butcher that delivered him. Also that the Wildlife Haven Rehabilitation Center has enough funding to pay for his ongoing care. You can help by donating here.

________________________________________________________________________

And speaking of kits, Cheryl was out for our own kit-watch yesterday. She made a discovery that the streetside lodge was being generously mudded. And she snapped this, which should leave very few questions about where mom (and at least 1 newbie) is living at the moment!

mom teats — Mom beaver with teats: Cheryl Reynolds

It’s okay, the first time I looked I wasn’t sure I saw it either. Check between her head and foot on the right. That little brown thing hanging down means she’s got babies, (and not the unborn fileted kind either). that’s two years in a row mom has changed her mind about where to raise her baby. She seems very capricious! But there aren’t five beaver colonies in the world followed more closely than ours. For all we know it could be normal to have the baby one place, get it all messy, and move to a new abode?

At any rate, after two weeks of watching and waiting we can know for sure that it was dumb fool luck that got those first seconds of early footage. And that, for now at least, we should be looking for Junior in the pond by the primary! You can bet we’ll keeping hoping for more foolish luck in the future.

All in the (beaver) family…

heidi08 Beaver Behavior May 15, 2013

Whew! The world is entirely devoid of beaver news today so we can talk. Thank goodness. Come on in and close the door. I wanted to share a theory about beaver behavior and the snippiness we’ve been seeing lately at the beaver ponds. We know a new adult has returned, and clearly that makes a difference to the colony. But this weekend I realized it wasn’t the new adult beaver that’s causing it.

Our beaver born last summer is almost a year old now, and we can still tell him apart by his size most of the time. Junior, we refer to him as for ease of reference. The altercation I got on film made me understand that he was involved. And as I was uploading I had a moment of audio and no video so I actually HEARD it – the unmistakably kit whine. When I saw it again I noticed that Junior goes over to the big beaver to see what he’s eating, and the adult makes a charge for him, and at that moment the whine occurs.

Did you hear it? It’s such terrible audio its hard to discern. But right around 2 seconds a whining sound comes seems to pierce the train sound. We very very rarely hear whining from beavers when they get older. Is seems to be saying “don’t attack, I’m just a kid, remember?”. His whining is maybe intended to deescalate the adult, and it apparently works. I thought when I first saw this that we were viewing two beavers trying to decide hierarchy, but now I think that what’s happening is that Junior is still acting like a baby, asking for food –

but he’s NOT the baby anymore.

Having a younger sibling in the colony changes everyone’s role, but Junior’s most of all. And he might be the last to know. The day is gone when he can come to the table and steal the treat from indulgent parents with impunity. It’s a new world. He is partly ready for this new world, he does mudding every day and almost always carries a stick when he comes from the den, but he hasn’t forgotten his childish ways, always swims towards mom when he sees her, and expects everyone to share.

Alternating between kit and yearling, Junior is in the beaver equivalent of middle school.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

CSI meets Blue’s Clues

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Massachusetts Trapping Law, Who's Killing Beavers Now? May 14, 2013

Batesville Mississipi’s crack investigative police team had one onery mystery on its hands. Oh sure, they’d untangled their share of inexplicable crimes. But this was worse. Something about the terrible finality of those missing trees made it worse. Worse than that time that cookie was missing from Ma Topper’s jar. Worse than the time that kidnapper ran off with the baby Jesus from the manger display.

Who in the hell was chopping the trees on court street?

I won’t comment on the collective IQ of an entire police force that couldn’t hazard a guess what was removing trees a mile from the river. I won’t speculate that the entire state has such an abysmal record on beavers that they wouldn’t know how to wrap a tree if their lives depended on it. I won’t even say that wedged as they are between Alabama and Arkansas there must be a regional shortage of problem solving skills to go around. But thank goodness they had the presence of mind to bring in the trapper.

——————————————————————

Meanwhile in Massachusetts…

Mike Sullivan of Beaver Solutions holds a replica of a beaver skull from 10,000 years ago when the rodents were roughly 8 feet long and likely weighed 200 pounds. Today the average beaver weighs about 30-40 pounds.

Don’t leave it to the beavers

Mike Callahan of Beaver Solutions, a company based out of Southampton, Massachusetts, spoke to Boxford’s BTA/BOLT on May 1 to offer suggestions for outsmarting those pesky rodents who spend their days building dams and lodges throughout the woodlands of the North Shore.

The flooded or dried up areas that result can be managed by clever humans without trapping and killing the beavers, says Callahan who proposes such solutions as pond leveler pipes for dams and special keystone fences for culverts.

Nice! Educating the masses! Now just guess who gave Mike that skull lo these many years ago as a thank you for endless advice when a certain city was set on killing some beavers.

Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Bring in the Calgary?

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions May 13, 2013

Calgary’s Busy Beavers

Armed with incisors that don’t stop growing and a tail that everyone knows for a much different, definitely more delicious reason, the North American Beaver is quite the amazing critter. Using those incredible teeth, the beaver will chew down a tree in only a few hours that took years to grow. The beaver will then use that tree to build a dam, sometimes longer than a kilometer in length. As water pools behind the newly created dam, a pond is created. The water gets deeper and the pond grows larger, giving the beaver better access to the forest and trees beyond. A beaver is safest in the water, once on land it is incredibly vulnerable to predators like coyotes or wolves. So as the pond grows, so does the beaver’s safety net.

Isn’t it nice to read a story about beavers that isn’t about whether or not to kill beavers? And one published with actual photos of actual beavers and not otters or nutria or muskrat? Calgary is about 10 miles north east of Vancouver (everything in Canada is so far apart!) but they’ve clearly benefited from the fur-bearer defenders education. The article even mentions the park system wrapping trees!

With so much force, it’s no wonder that in our parks, such as Carburn, metal fencing has been placed around many of the trees to protect them from the ever-growing teeth of our must powerful rodent. As the family of beavers in Carburn Park eat their way through what trees haven’t been fenced off, it’s only a matter of time before the young kits found there, move on to start their own lives and their own ponds. It takes only the sound of trickling water to trigger the construction of a dam. With more dams, come more ponds and wetlands which benefits so many different animals. As they flock to the new, lush habitat, you have to wonder if they ever say thank you to the mighty beaver.

The article ends with this lovely photo by someone named Brendan Troy, who has clearly been keeping a close eye on these beavers. It makes me remember so fondly our 2008 kits and how much fun it was to watch them wrestle. I sure hope we have two this year, although the new little one hasn’t shown his face again all week! Which makes me realize that those 3 seconds of video were a very, very lucky fluke!

And speaking of our own beavers, they were a hot bed of activity last night. This time of year always makes it so easy to see so many family members! Even though we never saw the new kit, we saw plenty of action, including this. Since the new adult has appeared, we’ve been seeing more conflict moments between the beavers. last night I was finally able to catch one on film. You can see the argument is pretty half-hearted, ownership gets asserted and no one gets hurt.

So close, and yet so far!

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere May 12, 2013

Gnawing at nature in beaver country

FAIRFAX COUNTY, Va. — Northern Virginia’s War of the Beavers pits human sprawl against Castor canadensis in a swampy morsel of fauna and flora surrounded by concrete, cars and money.

The setting is a miniature utopia called Huntley Meadows Park in privileged Fairfax County, half an hour south of the White House. This is a swampy second- and third-growth woodland choked with cattails. It is described, nevertheless, in a brochure available at the Visitor Center, as “a rich, natural island in the suburban sea.”

Meanwhile, those pesky beavers have run amuck — messing with the water levels, felling oaks and hickories, and generally doing what they have been doing since the Middle Pleistocene. “For an adult beaver, the only predator is the car,” Huntley’s director says, addressing a gathering of pro- and anti-beaverites.

I guess the Canadian reporter is on vacation, and drove 1500 miles south east to Virginia to see relatives. He decided to stop off at Huntley meadows where our friends Ann and Malcolm have been keeping an eye on the local beavers. Of course he didn’t actually see any beavers, because he was there in the daytime. He had to rely on their stock photo images. Brace yourselves.

A beaver swims in a pool inside his enclosure at the “ZOOM” Zoo in Gelsenkirchen, western Germany on March 12, 2012. A Photograph by: PATRIK STOLLARZ, AFP/Getty Images

Shouldn’t he be ashamed of himself? He is a grown reporter submitting his travel expenses and writing off lunch to post a stock photo of an OTTER on international news. Correction, I just read from his byline that he’s a Brooklyn-born Canadian reporter who lives in D.C. American as apple pie. Maybe he has no control over the photos they run with his article, but honestly call me next time! I can put you touch with amazing photos of the Huntley Meadows beavers. I’ve seen some egregious cases of mistaken identity in my life time, nutria mislabled as beaver, muskrat, even groundhog. But this – this hands down takes the birthday cake and makes a wish blowing out all the candles.

The director is an amiable expert named Kevin Munroe who knows every rail and redbud in the park. It is his duty to explain to the people of Fairfax County why, after 21 years of bitter contention, a detailed Beaver Behaviour Study, and more than 60 public meetings, the park’s stewards finally have decided to spend $3 million to turn Huntley’s seasonal ponds into a gated community for North America’s largest rodents.

This will involve the installation of a “Clemson Water Leveler System” comprising vinyl sheet pilings sunk three metres into a cordillera of lakeside mounds, sliding doors to keep the swamp in a perpetual state of “hemi-marsh,” and underwater pipes with cages around them to keep the beavers from gnawing through the arteries of their own purported salvation.

I can only hope that when they say “Clemson” they don’t actually mean the archaic pipe and fencing system of the 90’s because there’s plenty of better choices to solve their water problems. But then, since the director is telling everyone that adult beavers have no predators, we can’t be too sure. (no coyotes? mt. lions? bobcats? released pet alligators?) I suppose it’s conceivable you killed them all already but I’m sure there are plenty of big dogs that would be happy to chase a little beaver bait. Those beavers that had rabies last year got it from somewhere, and its fatal right?

Twenty years ago, I would have said ‘Protect, but don’t manage,’ ” Munroe says. “I grew up reading The Lorax. I would have been the one standing across the gate to keep hunters from coming in to shoot the deer. That was a tough decision to make: You’re going into a wildlife sanctuary to blow away Bambi?

“But we’ve seen invasive plants take over the forest and deer herds decimate the woodlands. Before Europeans came here, deer were controlled by wolves, by mountain lions, by Native Americans. How many of those do we have in Fairfax County now?” “Is this the human future?” I ask him. “Tiny fragments of the so-called ‘natural’ world heavily managed?” “The short answer is yes,” he replies. Then he tells us that river otters have been spotted this spring in Huntley Meadows Park. “River otters!” the audience clamours, exultant at the news. “River otters eat baby beavers,” says the naturalist, damming our joy. “It’s OK,” says Kevin Munroe. “Circle of life.”

There is something deeply irritating about this article, and its not just the otter or the furtive reference to Belarus. How many times have I personally written the park mangers at Huntley meadows? Thirty? They should be experts at beavers by now, even if the reporter can’t name three reasons why the keystone species shouldn’t be killed. Here’s a actual picture of the actual beavers at Huntley Meadows.