BEAVERS are making a comeback in Ile-de-France with traces found in Essonne and Seine-et-Marne.
The Office National de la Chasse et de la Faune Sauvage said the Eurasian beaver, Europe’s biggest rodent, had not been seen in the Paris area since the 19th century. River protection officers had spotted several trees that had been chopped down by beavers which had left the characteristic ‘pencil’ point stump.
The ONCFS said in August that a survey last year had showed that beavers were present in 51 departments in France, mostly in the east and centre, and the new discovery brings the total to 53.
Paul Hurel, the regional officer in charge of the ONCFS survey, said there were about 20,000 across the country and they would be following up the new finds.
Well, can I just say its about dam time! I can’t think of anything more romantic than watching a beaver couple swim down the seine. Beavers deserve a little culture and fine grape vines as much as anyone.
Beavers and sea otters lack the thick layer of blubber that insulates walruses and whales. And yet these small, semiaquatic mammals can keep warm and even dry while diving, by trapping warm pockets of air in dense layers of fur.
Inspired by these fuzzy swimmers, MIT engineers have now fabricated fur-like, rubbery pelts and used them to identify a mechanism by which air is trapped between individual hairs when the pelts are plunged into liquid.
The results, published in the journal Physical Review Fluids, provide a detailed mechanical understanding for how mammals such as beavers insulate themselves while diving underwater. The findings may also serve as a guide for designing bioinspired materials — most notably, warm, furry wetsuits for surfers.
Or people installing flow devices in cold temperatures, right? I know Mike Callahan would be happy to test out one of these beaver-inspired wet suits. Do you need volunteers? And do you think these air pockets help the animals in warmer water too? I’m always curious about the comfort of our California beavers.
Michael Pollock (yes, that Michael Pollock) wrote last night that there are still a few spaces in the Portland beaver restoration course and you should sign up. It really is a fairly rare opportunity.
Hi all, We still have a few open slots for our upcoming beaver restoration field course in eastern Oregon, which is being run through the Environmental Professional Program at Portland State University (see attachment for course details). It is a unique opportunity to gain expert instruction and the hands on experience of live trapping beaver, constructing beaver dam analogues and learning how to analyze watersheds and stream reaches for beaver restoration potential. Please pass this message and attached flyer along to others who may be interested. It is coming right up. Hope to see you there.
You can register here: or Google “Portland state using beaver to restore streams EPP726” and that should get you there.
Michael M. Pollock, Ph.D. Ecosystems Analyst NOAA Fisheries-Northwest Fisheries Science Center Fish Ecology Division, Watershed Program
We’re an equal opportunity employer here at beaver central. Yesterday I wrote about Mike Callahan of Massachusetts and today I’m writing about Skip Lisle of Vermont. There was a nice article about the current drought with him (and beavers) featured.
Scenes from the West’s five-year drought are striking – the cracked mud at the bottom of a dry reservoir, forests in flames. Wonder what a drought would look like in the Northern Forest? Just look out the window.
This is the first time that any part of New Hampshire has been in an “extreme drought” since the federal government began publishing a drought index in 2000, said Mary Lemcke-Stampone, the state’s climatologist. “Using state records, you have to go back to the early ‘80s to get the extreme dryness we’ve been seeing in southeastern New Hampshire.”
Other parts of the region have been abnormally dry for some time. New York State has issued a drought warning for the Southern Tier and Western New York, which is an extreme drought, while the Adirondacks remain “abnormally dry” according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
Skip Lisle of Beaver Deceiver International, a beaver-control company that uses non-lethal means, said that beavers have droughts covered. “All those little dams and reservoirs keep water on the landscape,” he said. They have floods covered, too, as those same dams and reservoirs release peak flows slowly.
Intact ecosystems, Lisle said, have a way of coping. “Droughts are good. Floods are good. Dynamism is good. It’s been going on forever.”
Yes beavers are good for drought and Skip is good for beavers! Keep doing what you do saving the water-savers and we’ll do our best to write about it here. I’m curious about our own beavers at the moment. Will the arrival of autumn prompt them into starting an actual dam? They have no yearlings to help them so it much be a harder job. Although I guess all beavers everywhere have started thus at some point in their furry lives.
I hope I’m not jinxing anything by making them a video but I think we have to behave like Martinez has beavers because last time I checked it does. And it rained all day yesterday so what’s a girl to do?
Mike Callahan of Beaver Solutions just got back from Washington where he worked with the Methow Project and highway workers training folks to use flow devices. I think its pretty wonderful to have Kent and his merry band interested in solutions that allow pesky, trouble-making beavers to stay put instead of just whisking them away. I thought you’d want to see and hear about it. So these are Mike’s own words.
I was recently privileged to travel to north central WA State to train Okanogan County Highway personnel how to coexist with beavers. My thanks go to the Methow Beaver Project’s (MBP) Kent Woodruff and Julie Nelson for working to arrange it. We installed trapezoidal culvert fences at a couple of sites the County had been battling beavers at for some time.
Kent, Julie and Josh Thomson (County Highway Engineer) were instrumental in the planning and execution of these two projects. I was very impressed with the County Highway workers and of course the MBP personnel who jumped right in the water to help construct these flow devices.
That part of the country is so beautiful! I also got to see the Methow Beaver Project in person as they relocated beavers to their new habitats saving them from being killed. Their program is awesome and I have many great memories, such as Kent open flame grilling some fantastic Steelhead Trout!
Thanks for sharing your skills and letting us watch Mike! If you want to stay abreast of Mike’s work you should join the FB group “Beaver Management Forum” which always has interesting things.
Now for me, we’re still on vacation. And while it was uncomfortably warm on Saturday, I awake to rainstorms in the morning. So of course I did the only reasonable thing a person could do in the rain at the ocean. I played with my toys.
It isn’t very often that a beaver news story makes me literally laugh aloud. I mean a snicker or snort – yes – but a rolling laugh where you can’t catch your breath and your eyes start to tear – that’s RARE. Maybe the delicate souls of the world will not share my black humor here but stop and remember how many times this message has NOT been a typo.
A Russian charity group is learning how costly a typo can be, after it paid 375,000 rubles ($6,000) for pamphlets that were meant to read “Do good!” but instead say “Exterminate beavers!” thanks to a printing error, according to the Lenta.ru website.
Caption reads: “Exterminate beavers! Text the word ‘vremya’ and the amount of your donation to the SMS number 7715. Example: Vremya 300.”
Thanks to subtleties of the Russian language, a typographical error left the “Mercy Capital” charitable foundation with 1 million leaflets encouraging genocide against beavers.
That’s right, not only do beavers need to contend with depredtion and water shortage, housing crises, traffic and angry farmers, they also face christmas charities asking you to text a message for their genocide.
Are we really surprised about this typo? Doesn’t it make perfect sense that Dmitry at Kremlin printing would slip in a little of his own messaging while running the flyer? And think about all the times beaver genocide has been on the table without a typo. The Fur Trade, the entire sierras, Martinez, Mountain House, heck its on the table NOW in Scotland.
This is probably the best typo ever. I wish they were all typos.
I really couldn’t resist.
I thought you would enjoy the little visitor we received on our driveway yesterday. We wondered why so many quail were running past us. Here’s the reason. It’s a beautiful gray fox.
nal de la Chasse et de la Faune Sauvage said the Eurasian beaver, Europe’s biggest rodent, had not been seen in the Paris area since the 19th century. River protection officers had spotted several trees that had been chopped down by beavers which had left the characteristic ‘pencil’ point stump. 
