So we shipped off the package of booklets for the conference yesterday. They were heavy so we tried for ‘media mail’ but god knows the criteria is pretty hard to meet. They are clearly educational and not retail, but they do contain a staple and that might be too bound for the cheap seats. We’ll see, In the meantime to co-director of BeaverCon has a nice article with a snappy title. You are registered, aren’t you?
Of bivalves & beavers: Let’s leave our landscapes to these experts
They might seem an odd couple, Crassostrea virginica and Castor canadensis — the Eastern oyster and the North American beaver. But ecologically, for the Chesapeake Bay, the mollusk and the rodent are a lovely pairing, a compelling linkage of water and watershed.
Both were keystone species, the one’s dense reefs and the other’s ubiquitous damming and ponding create habitat and enhance water quality to the benefit of a host of other species.
A restored Chesapeake could use lots more oysters and beavers. Work on the former is well under way, with Maryland and Virginia creating sanctuaries where reef building can once again occur. Watermen, and to a point the Hogan administration, oppose this as a loss of fishing opportunity.
As your eyes and your brain adjust to what McGill has done to the Baltimore County gully, you begin to notice his “mess” is aflutter with butterflies, hopping with frogs and ablaze with the flowering of asters, daisies, Joe Pye weed and the new growth of willows.
I don’t really think of bi-valves as a keystone species. Do you think they get a festival? I bet they do. But one where people eat them, which isn’t nearly as educational. Shhh this is the good part:
McGill is an apostle for how to share the watershed with beavers, using “beaver deceiver” devices such as pipes placed in their dams to control flooding. He is organizing a major conference on beavers (BEAVERCON 2020) near Baltimore this March to spread the good word.
Ho Ho Ho! The conference gets a sliver of press! Let’s hope more follows! Excellent news and an excellent way to think about our natural systems. Often letting nature do its job and getting OUT OF ITS WAY is the most useful thing we can do for the planet.
Take climate change for instance.
Rewilding can help mitigate climate change, researchers highlight after conducting global assessment
A new study has shown that rewilding can help to mitigate climate change, delivering a diverse range of benefits to the environment with varied regional impacts.
Research led by the University of Sussex and published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, provides a global assessment of the potential for trophic rewilding to help mitigate climate change.
Trophic rewilding restores lost species to ecosystems, which can have cascading influences over the whole food web. This typically means reintroducing large herbivores (e.g. elephants) and top predators (e.g. wolves), or species known to engineer more diverse and complex habitats and benefit biodiversity (e.g. beavers).
Dr Chris Sandom , Senior Lecturer in Biology at the University of Sussex, said: “The key thing to remember here is that nature is complex and needs to be complex.
Agreed! A landscape with a single species isn’t a landscape. Lets let nature take her course and help her along to make up for the mistakes we made along the way.
