For the upcoming year we are excited to start training beaver specialists. Our goal is to train 100 professionals in 5 years to promote coexistence with beavers across North America. Beaver Institute course graduates will embrace the critical role that beavers play in creating vital and vibrant ecosystems and learn the technical skills needed to nonlethally resolve beaver conflicts. For more training course info go to: https://www.beaverinstitute.org/education/get-training/.
In recognition of both our one year anniversary and the launching of our training program, we are announcing a Matching Fund Drive for student scholarships. Your support can help a worthy student learn and implement nonlethal solutions to beaver issues.
Imagine a world with 100 new beaver specialists! If Mike gets his wish,2023 just might turn out to be the year of the beaver! Mike is looking for funding help to match scholarships. Dig deep into the couch cushions, because the heating planet thinks this is worth supporting!
If you act now, your donation will be matched, dollar for dollar (up to a total of $5,000), by one of our kind supporters. Please generously contribute to our efforts to train progressive beaver professionals via PayPal.
Donate now to double your donation, and imagine the satisfaction of learning which grateful student received your assistance and how many beavers and ecosystems they will preserve! Thank you.
Mike Settell and the Watershed guardians are doing the hero’s work of trying to teach about beaver benefits in Idaho. There are easier places to change hearts and minds, believe me. Our friends in Idaho have been pulling this off long enough to be very impressed. But this year the event has been pushed back to September. I assume for all the usual reasons that might require a change of plans.
POCATELLO — The date of the fifth annual Beaver Dam Jam, a music event to support beaver conservation that will host an open jam competition, raffles and demonstrations, has been moved to Sept. 15.
The event was originally scheduled for July 28. It will now run from 4 to 10:30 p.m. Sept. 15 at the Mink Creek Pavilion.
The event includes food, a silent auction, raffles, a singer-songwriter contest and more. Headliners will be the Eclectics and Shawn and the Marauders. Watershed Guardians provides shuttle transportation to and from the event. On-site camping is available.
Think for a moment about the coordination needed to put this together every year. Shuttle? Campground? Ticket Sales? Publicity? Silent Auction? That’s some serious logistics involved in making this all happen.
Our beaver festival lasts exactly 5 hours once a year and I cannot imagine making it a millisecond longer. It’s a lot to take on.
Meanwhile I’ve been working to restore the ‘sightings page’ of the website. Even though our beavers aren’t visible at the moment, it’s a wealth of data that I wanted back. When you think about it, its a documentary of wildlife sightings, beaver behavior and observations over a decade. So I thought that was worth keeping. You can always access it through the ‘About us’ drop down menu, or go here.
There’s lots to love and hate about the new computer. My beaver decade saw three different cameras taking footage in three different formats, so it was a bit of a scramble to find everything. But I did find some very special footage I thought was lost early on. I had transferred it to my new mac at the time because I thought it would be safer, which turned out not to be true. I thought it was gone. But apparently it was just lurking.
Listen to our voices while I’m filming and you can see how early in our beaver career this happened. July 28, 2007. We practically know nothing. I even comment that some of the kits are ‘older’ than the others.
And Jon agrees with me! I’m not putting it on youtube because I don’t want to compress it. But click on the ‘four” to see it on this site. And turn your sound up to enjoy our beaver innocence!
Look at your calendar. Guess what today is? For 10 years of my life today was the day of the beaver festival! First Saturday in August. I can barely believe it. I’m so relieved we’re in the new park and everything worked out with the transition. But let’s just take a moment to remember the old park and everything those years gave us.
Okay, we took one and we’re done. Long live the new park!
And hurray for Utah where there’s a very nice homage to beavers today on Utah Public Radio. It’s not very long. You should listen. Remember it’s Utah so they do not mention Ben’s book at all. Because they don’t need to be prompted to know better.
Nice job Ron, although you’re wrong to say beavers just make things better in natural areas. Beavers in cities make a huge difference too if folks are smart enough to let them. Just ask us!
Speaking of smart folks who want to let beavers make a difference, I heard from our friend Carmen in Texas yesterday. The beavers on her lake are still hanging around despite the efforts her neighbors are making to trap them. Carmen is trying to lure them to a spring near her property and away from danger. Looks like it’s working. This was a photo of a favorite tree of hers,
Beavers certainly come with their own set of challenges, that’s for sure. But Carmen is up to the task and got help wrapping all the trees on her land yesterday. The chewing doesn’t go all the way around, so she is hopeful by some miracle that tree will make it.
When I see chewing on a tree that big, I think yearling. I’m sure the adults know better than to take on something that crazy. That beavers eyes are bigger than his stomach er teeth!
Oh and just so we don’t totally forget Ben’s book today, I have two little presents for him. The first is that I added a library link to some of the best reviews he’s had so far. And the second is this adorable photo new member
Lynita Shimizu posted on the beaver managment Facebook page. I agree that Eager makes a great summer read!
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.
Dylan Thomas
Yesterday a neighbor sent the sad news that there was a dead beaver in the creek near Starbucks. Jon went down and found it was truly horribly our newest kit, first filmed in late June, whose dam had been destroyed by someone impatient with the water. Jon retrieved the little body and checked it out for injuries but there was no obvious sign of trauma. There is no way to know whether this death was the result of the water loss leading to an exposed home,, some disease unique to him or whatever affected our 2015 kits. But we have a few things we can rule out, It wasn’t salt water because of how far upstream they were. It wasn’t human feeding or poison because so few people knew about it. And we had one kit survive since then and grow up fine, so I assume its unrelated.
I have to guess for now there was some illness in the kit. I did think it a little odd that Moses filmed it with its parent so late in the year. Usually by late June our kits were swimming on their own and had the run of the creek. Maybe this one was weaker or need more care? We will never know. We can only observe and do our best to understand.
I know, its not enough.
But however dangerous our creek is to beavers, we have to remind ourselves that it is much, much safer than most creeks where most beavers find themselves. Rest now, little one.
There’s good news too, because life is like that – terrible and joyful mixed together. Ben’s book was reviewed in Audubon magazine yesterday and beaver benefits extolled for the world to see. Let’s hope everyone takes a moment to realize that beavers help birds.
Leave it to beavers . . . to fix the environment for us.
For millennia, Castor canadensis have shaped landscapes with their dams, turning scrub into meadows and flood waters into wetlands. But the rodent’s role has long gone unappreciated. So unappreciated that in the late 1800s, beavers nearly went extinct in the United States and Canada due to decades of fur trapping and extermination. The European species faced a similar plight, dropping to just 1,200 individuals around the same time.
Beavers bring order to the chaos by pooling water into wetlands, producing benefits for wildlife and humans alike. For example, ponds created by the four-foot-long rodents in Rocky Mountain National Park have cached an estimated 2.7 million megagrams of carbon. Photo: Enrique R. Aguirre Aves/Alamy
And then there are the beaver-loving birds. Trumpeter Swans, which have faced their own up and downs across North America, like to stack their 11-foot nests on top of the rodents’ fortresses. Farther west, Greater Sage-Grouse sip at beaver meadows, and Yellow-billed Cuckoos seek shade in cottonwoods, watered by their fat-tailed friends. In total, beavers are credited for enhancing bird diversity on three different continents. Without them, the forests would be less musical, and birding would be way more frustrating.
Appreciation is the key to keeping beavers—and everything they’ve built—around in the landscape. When we don’t understand our most common creatures, our world becomes smaller; we lose sight of nature’s complexity and all that’s irreplaceable. “While organisms have evolved to fill niches provided by nature, neither beavers nor people are content to leave it as that,” Goldfarb writes. “Instead we’re proactive, relentlessly driven to rearrange our environments to maximize its provision of food and shelter. We aren’tjust the evolutionary products of our habitat: We are its producers.” These are the words of a beaver believer.
What an excellent review from Purbita Saha, I’m always so happy when Audubon picks up the beaver baton. They have a lot of voices all across our nation and know how to pack a room. As a rule they are more friendly than feisty but if we can convince them that ripping out a beaver dam means kill a host of bird species as well, that should help.
I’ll remember to bring this up when I present to our own Audubon chapter this March. Reminding folks to be good to beavers is a great way to help all kinds of wildlife.
Thus far the reviews of Ben’s book have been mostly glowing and filled with praise, for the author (if not for the subject). Other than the Science blog’s Canada comment there hasn’t been much to make fun of or ardently mock. I confess, I’m out of practice. I suppose we should be grateful for this bright exception from Mr. Steve Donoghue in the Christian Science Monitor. The learned reviewer is very respected and publishes columns all over. He has come to take himself seriously enough that this is the image on his website.
But if you ask me, all I see in this review is a man who lives in Massachusetts.
Even their fans will have to admit that beavers aren’t exactly the most charismatic of critters. They aren’t inquisitive or adaptable, like raccoons. They aren’t chatty and quarrelsome, like squirrels. They aren’t patient and friendly, like porcupines. They aren’t tolerant and affectionate, like skunks. And they aren’t awe-inspiringly terrifying, like bears.
One of my favorite political podcasts likes to play a game called “Okay, STOP!”. Where they roll some important clip from the weeks news that has plenty of BS in it and the panelists can call out OKAY STOP at any moment to halt the tape and comment on why it’s ridiculous, wrong or just plain stupid.
Um…OKAY STOP!
First of all beavers are charismatic. They are considered a charismatic species. That’s why they are all over children’s story books and cartoons. Second of all – NOT ADAPTABLE? Are you kidding me? They’re so adaptable they were one of the first species back after Mt. St. Helen’s erupted, and one of the first to colonize Chernobyl after the nuclear explosion. Beavers adapt. That’s what they do.
And not awe inspiring? Pul-eeze. I defy you to stand at a beaver dam some morning and watch them working for half an hour and tell me again they are not inspiring. Here’s just a glimpse.
Beaver building dam with two rocks:
Beaver Buildling Dam with two Rocks. Rusty Cohn
It isn’t much to inspire deep-seated affection, but there are exceptions to every rule, and environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb is perhaps the world’s foremost exception when it comes to beavers. His entirely captivating new book, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why It Matters, is surely the most passionate, most detailed, and most readable love-note these dour furry little workaholics will ever get.
OKAY STOP!
Look, Esteban. The book isn’t a love note to the beavers, you sardonic festering librarian. It wasn’t written for the beavers in the sense of being “To the beavers”. Despite being patently inquisitive and truly awe-inspiring, they don’t, in fact, actually read and Ben knows that.
It was written for YOU. To YOU and all the unbelieving curmudgeons of the world. (Although in retrospect, why you merit a love-letter I cannot imagine.)
Although Goldfarb cautions against excessive optimism when it comes to beaver conservation, the animals have enjoyed not only a rebound in numbers but a change in widespread attitude among some segments of the population regarding animals that have for so long been considered troublesome vermin.
And through it all, Goldfarb maintains a level of fandom that’s downright charming. “Eager” is a fascinating snapshot of the beaver’s current conservational moment, and it’s a thought-provoking exploration of the benefits beavers bring to the land.
But it’s also very much a protracted love-letter to Castor canadensis. “Just as irradiated, elephant-sized cockroaches will someday scuttle through the ruins of downtown Los Angeles, so are we living in the world that beavers created,” Goldfarb writes, in the full swing of his spiel. “Christening a new era probably won’t win me any friends among geologists, who can’t even agree on when the Anthropocene began, but what the heck: Welcome to the Castrocene.”
I understand. You live in Boston and everyone you have ever met hates beavers and thinks they are ruining things. People in your state love to blame those crazy-bleeding-heart-voters that outlawed body gripping traps in 96 (even though the law continues to allow using them in NINE exceptional circumstances) You all like to think that beavers do nothing but cause problems and if the voters hadn’t ruined things you’d be rid of them by now.
I can see why Ben’s book is so confusing for you. Steve. It’s hard to learn new things when you’ve been set in your ways for so very long. Don’t worry, the beaver revolution will be gentle with folks like you.
We wouldn’t expect you to learn anything new at this late stage in the game.
In honor of their first year Mike Callahan is offering his first ever professional training program for future beaver managers everywhere!
For the upcoming year we are excited to start training beaver specialists. Our goal is to train 100 professionals in 5 years to promote coexistence with beavers across North America. Beaver Institute course graduates will embrace the critical role that beavers play in creating vital and vibrant ecosystems and learn the technical skills needed to nonlethally resolve beaver conflicts. For more training course info go to: https://www.beaverinstitute.org/education/get-training/.
In recognition of both our one year anniversary and the launching of our training program, we are announcing a Matching Fund Drive for student scholarships. Your support can help a worthy student learn and implement nonlethal solutions to beaver issues.
Our friends in Idaho have been pulling this off long enough to be very impressed. But this year the event has been pushed back to September. I assume for all the usual reasons that might require a change of plans.
Beavers certainly come with their own set of challenges, that’s for sure. But Carmen is up to the task and got help wrapping all the trees on her land yesterday. The chewing doesn’t go all the way around, so she is hopeful by some miracle that tree will make it.
