Month: September 2018

THE SWEETEST THING

heidi08 kits September 30, 2018

Art Wolinsky is a retired science teacher in New Hampshire with all the best audio visual toys. Years ago he worked with Mike Callahan to install some culvert protection on the dam near his condominium. He has watched his beaver family grow and change over the years, and become a regional expert in the field, frequently giving lectures on the topic of coexistence. Yesterday he posted the most adorable beaver video that I have ever seen, and that’s saying truly something – because I’ve seen a lot of adorable beaver videos.

Look closely at the video and feel free to watch it again. That young beaver sees the tree damage, and knows his family has been hard at work. He wants to help. So he does the only thing he knows how.

He tries to dam the tree!

And if this doesn’t completely melt your heart and make you care about beavers forever, you are, in fact, a heartless bastard and I can’t possibly help you. To me this demonstrates a) How beaver building isn’t all instinct. B) How much social modelling is involved in learning for beavers. and C) How beavers truly feel about work.

He wants to help because that’s what beavers do. Even though nobody tells him to or is waiting in the wings with a cookie. No adult is in the frame, he isn’t pleasing anyone.

He just wants to help because work itself is irresistible.

Back when I was a day care teacher (during the punic wars) there was a backyard sand box for kids to play in that needed new sand. The landscape company agreed to give us a truckload of it for free but the told us we’d have to get it into the back ourselves. Not a problem. 60 kids with buckets and pails running up and down the stairs to move the sand into the back and it would happen soon enough.

Half way through the job I noticed that one soulfully quirky young boy had made many trips but seemingly without a pail. I could just feel something wasn’t right and asked what he was using to carry sand. He reached in his pocket and proudly showed a flowered plastic teacup from the practical life section. That five year old had been running back and forth down the stairs through the building and into the backyard with about a tablespoon of sand each time.

I put Art’s precious video on youtube just so you could watch in slow motion. Click on the cog and choose the “speed” option. .5 gives you a nice slow watch of this beavers effort. At slower speed I definitely get the feeling that when he tries to place the materials the second time he realizes something isn’t right.

He kind of just slinks away after that. As I’m sure we all would.

HELP WANTED: WETLAND ENGINEERS

heidi08 Beavers and climate change September 29, 2018

Another secretly-about-beavers article, thanks to Bob Kobres of Georgia for the alert, from our friends at:

Wetlands disappearing three times faster than forests: study

Wetlands, among the world’s most valuable and biodiverse ecosystems, are disappearing at alarming speed amid urbanisation and agriculture shifts, conservationists said Thursday, calling for urgent action to halt the erosion.

“We are in a crisis,” Martha Rojas Urrego, head of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, told reporters in Geneva, warning of the potential devastating impact of wetland loss, including on climate change.

Sounds bad, tell me more.

The convention, adopted in the Iranian city of Ramsar nearly a half-century ago, on Thursday issued its first-ever global report on the state of the world’s wetlands.

The 88-page report found that around 35 percent of wetlands—which include lakes, rivers, marshes and peatlands, as well as coastal and marine areas like lagoons, mangroves and coral reefs—were lost between 1970 and 2015.

“We are losing wetlands three times faster than forests,” Rojas Urrego said, describing the Global Wetland Outlook report as a “red flag”.

That’s really serious. Hey, I know something that might help. Not only do beavers effortlessly make and maintain wetlands, they also can help settle the score between with the forests. Ahem.

Don’t drain the swamp.

Directly or indirectly, they provide almost all of the world’s consumption of freshwater and more than 40 percent of all species live and breed in wetlands.

Animals and plants who call wetlands home are particularly vulnerable, with a quarter at risk of extinction, the report said.

Wetlands also provide a livelihood for more than one billion people, while mitigating floods and protecting coastlines. They are also a vital source of food, raw materials and genetic resources for medicines.

The Ramsar Convention stressed that wetlands are essential to reining in climate change, pointing out that peatlands store twice as much carbon as the world’s forests, even though they cover just three percent of all land surface.

I always think of the great destructions of the continents in phases, the fur-trade which robbed us of our rivers. The lumber trade which robbed us of our forests. And the Fossil fuel trade which robbed us of our climate. But maybe they’re all really the same thing – The effects of devastating greed separated by hundreds of years.

So when wetlands disappear, carbon that has been safely locked in the soil is released into the atmosphere.

The Ramsar Convention has been ratified by most of the world’s nations, including major polluters the United States, China and India, and since coming into force in 1975 has designated more than 2,300 sites of international importance.

But the report stressed the need to do more to develop effective wetland management, including as part of overall national sustainable development plans.

So the US can honor its treaty requirements by restoring wetlands? (Well not that we honor anything much lately, but in theory). What if we could take care of our obligations by restoring 1000 acres of wetlands in every single state? That would be a reasonable start that would produce 50.000 acres of wetlands easily. Maybe some states like Alaska and California could even earn bonus points by doing more.

I’ve got just the tool for the job.

EMILY AND THE 360 VIEW BEAVER POND

heidi08 Beaver Book, Beavers and Fire Prevention February 4, 2024

One of the continually interesting perks about maintaining a beaver website is that fascinating people from around the world seem to filter like manna onto your doorstep. Not too long ago I was contacted by Emily Fairfax, a graduate student in geological sciences at University of Colorado at Boulder who happens have a special interest in beaver dams and the water they hold. She has been following this website and even sent her mother-in-law to check out our beaver festival last year. (!) When she made contact she said

“The vast majority of my work has been on how beaver dams change arid/semi-arid landscapes from a hydrologic perspective.’

Her research website says:

My current research focuses on the ecohydrology of riparian areas, particularly those that have been impacted by beaver damming. I use a combination of remote sensing, modeling, and field to work understand how beaver damming changes these landscapes and on what timescales those changes operate.

She especially was looking for stories or anecdotes about how beaver ponds help in fire situations, so I introduced her to some folks and showed her what I had come up with over the years. Which lead me to pay special attention when a recent discussion came up with Lisa Robertson on the Wyoming Untrapped FB page, which brought me to this amazing photo and story by Jeff Hogan.

Jeff is an extraordinary wildlife cinematographer. If you’ve ever watched a wildlife film by National Geographic or the BBC, you have probably seen his work.

This is the kind of thing he captures every day.

jeffhoganfilmsI’ve been filming beavers for 20 years now illustrating the benefits of an active beaver colony and pond. Live beavers are very important to our wild forest lands and watersheds. Far more important than whatever benefit humans may enjoy from trapping these beavers. I believe that a wildlife management plan that allows trapping of beavers is highly irresponsible and reckless! This image illustrates the benefit of a beaver pond in fighting forest fires. Filmed in 2001. Beaver pond is located in Granite Creek.

Now Jeff just happened to be at the wednesday night reading in Teton Wyoming of Eager with Ben Goldfarb and Wyoming Untrapped’s director Lisa Robertson. So Jeff made sure Ben had this photo and I made sure Emily had it too. You can see that the helicopter is scooping water to fight the fire out of the only place it’s available: a lovely beaver pond. You can even see the lodge in the middle.

Beavers make a difference in firefighting, as they do in so many other ways. I’m excited to see Emily’s finished work so we can document just how much. In case all this feels too much like school, take a moment to enjoy some of Emily’s delightful offerings on her website.

You don’t want to miss this. Follow the link to her amazing 360 view of a beaver pond. Go look, I’m serious. It’s so frickin’ cool.

“Visit” a Beaver Pond!

Think beaver dams are cool? Visit one of my favorite ponds via a 360 degree photo I took. It’s the main beaver pond up at Schwabacher’s Landing in Grand Teton National Park! The link can be viewed on your computer in the web browser, in the Google Street View app on your phone, or in a Google Cardboard virtual reality headset!

Beaver Pond at Schwabacher’s Landing

BEAVER-ELLA AFTER THE BALL

heidi08 Beaver Chewing, pictures September 27, 2018

There are many things to hate about Facebook, but this isn’t one of them: getting to see instant beaver developments from buddies literally around the world. One friend I’m always happy to hear from is exquisite photographer Leopold Kanzler. He is lives in Vienna Austria and often is featured on the website Nature Highlights. This is what was posted today.

*Climb up by Leopold Kanzler Image Details: Date: 2018 09 25 Light: Sunrise Camera: Canon 1dX MKII Lens: EF200/2 Focal Length: 200 mm Exposure: 1/250 Seconds Aperture: 1:2 ISO: 2500*

I’m thinking this photo captured the cinderella of beavers, who kept dancing at the ball well after the clock struck dawn. Look at that foot lifting in defiance of her fairy godmother’s orders!

ANOTHER BEN-TERVIEW FOR BEAVERS

heidi08 Beaver Book September 26, 2018

Raise you hand if you remember “Share and Tell” from preschool. One of our annual benefactors – the Martinez Kiwanis club – has a fine adult variation where you can pay “Bragging bucks” to have the group’s attention for a few moments while you say something about you’re proud of or grateful for – like having lunch with your grand-daughter or taking a trip to see a son get married. Then the money goes into a pool with other fees from the meeting and a winning raffle ticket collects the lot!

That’s a pretty nice way to get people to pay attention.

Last time I was at the lunchtime meeting a older man stood up and used his time to say he was “Thankful for the way I had maintained such a positive attitude in representing the beavers.” He hadn’t started out in favor of them, he was from the east coast and knew a lot about the problems they could cause, but he was happy I persisted and had brought so many people to thinking my way.

I was too embarrassed to think much about it at the time, or ask his name afterwards, but every single person there is an important community leader in town in some way, so I knew it was a big deal. Harriet Burt echoed the sentiment as well, which was very rewarding, since I knew she started out on the “no beavers” side of the argument, and she is a former mayor and on the planning commission.

Which is as good as time as any to repeat the truism I have learned over the years. All the nicest people in Martinez are in Kiwanis. Everyone else is in Rotary.

Anyway, this is all preamble to MY SHARE AND TELL, because I spent Sunday trying out a new tool for editing the website. I thought I’d experiment with Ben’s page because I wanted it to look nice. Go peek at how it turned out. Each image or title should link to the page or interview in question. You can access this in the future through the ‘library’ drop down menu or the book in the sidebar.

Isn’t it lovely? I’m working on a new “Our Story” page as well but its still a work in progress. The tool is Elementor and I’m thinking all of our pages need updating. Too bad our website pit crew of exactly one needs more fingers. Maybe the first page of every menu bar?

In the meantime there’s one more Ben-terview I want to mention, this from Derek Jensen at resistance radio. I’m getting a little jaded as an audience but honestly, I thought these were the BEST question! This of course made Ben think more about his answers. Very curious and respectful about the beavers themselves, which I’m always a sucker for. It’s long but I think there are parts of it that are different from anything else you’ll hear.