Saturday morning, up at dawn. This should be beaver festival day. I should be hardly able to sleep. Not having coffee because there isn’t time. Getting the parking signs into the car to drop off. Instead I am listening to the crazy robin in my backyard who has routinely wakened me since April.
There will be no beaver festival this yearf Vide
Needing distraction I tried out a new toy, the free trial of VideoScribe, a whiteboard animation program from the UK. I think it will not be my new best friend, but it was fun to play with for a day. See for yourself.
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Meanwhile there was excellent news from the National Wildlife Federation Blog. And one of my favorite finds, a beaver imposter in the video. See if you can spot him!
Make Way for Beavers
Enthusiasm for beavers and their role as ecopartners is growing! Why? They are nature’s original engineers, deftly creating new riparian habitat and healthy streams. But sometimes beavers need a little redirection, especially when their dams create flooding where we don’t want water, such as low-lying roadways or bridges.
To capitalize on beavers’ intuitive talents and to guide their good work in Council Grove State Park near Missoula, Montana, we recently collaborated with state wildlife managers and conservation partners to install a customized wire-frame structure to prevent beavers from damming a culvert under an access road. This allowed park managers and neighboring landowners to continue to reap the benefits of beavers who are busy in the area, and at the same time prevent beavers from flooding the park’s main access road.
Watch how we did it:
Excellent work, team beaver! I am SO happy when NWF invests time and energy and column space in beavers. But I’m not above giving them a hard time. Okay beaver detectives! Find that imposter!
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Got it? The first tiny nosed animal swimming back with some hard earned grasses in tow is a muskrat. Those would have to be grass blades from the pleisticine era. And that body is just wayyyyyyyyyyyyy to wiggly, even underwater, for a beaver.
Still credit where credit is due. We are always happy when people go out of their way to save beaver habitat. And lord knows the muskrats and the frogs and the herons are happy too. Great work team Clark Fork!
Thanks to a collaborative partnership between the Clark Fork Coalition, National Wildlife Federation, and Defenders of Wildlife, expert assistance is now available to public and private landowners seeking non-lethal approaches to manage beaver activity.
Together we can build greater tolerance for beavers on our landscape by reducing beaver conflicts and increasing awareness of the many benefits of beaver activity.
Thanks to Britt Faulkner (Defenders of Wildlife) for creating this video for our project team!
Yes thanks Britt for giving us a pleasant diversion on a wistful morning. Let’s try this whole thing again next year. And see if beavers are not pushed off the stage by viruses yet again.
Fingers crossed.
