Month: July 2020

BEAVER APPRECIATION MONDAY

heidi08 Beavers July 6, 2020

Good lord what a weekend. Martinez made national news again this time not for beavers. But for racism! Imagine that. I’m horrified just thinking about it but if you’re curious just google the word Martinez and you will know the whole story. And to think we used to be famous for good things!

This morning I was sent a photo by Rusty Cohn of a beaver lodge out by the Napa Airport. It was shared on facebook briefly by Kathi Zoe Llorna Anderson, and is a nice thing to see. When I was a child my parents VERY SPECIAL NIGHT was a steak at Jonseys at the Napa airport right below sheey creek where this was taken. There are beavers at every level of my past. And future I hope.

Which reminds me very much of the lovely poem sent to me by Chris Jones. the farmer in Cornwall who first allowed beavers on his land. He is now a founding member of The Beaver Trust and a regular poster on the Beaver Forum facebook page.

Beaver

Silent swimmer, slipping through
a silken meniscus of green reflecting
watery light.

Unpaid worker, clearing brambles,
coppicing trees. cleaning water,
inventing ponds.

Generous host, making homes
for plants, insects, newts and fish.
Creator of jobs for otter and heron.

Bold author of reimagined headwaters,
unconscious sequester,
fierce protector, little person.

Please come back to a river near me.

Lovely Chris. Thank you so much for sharing. I asked him to record the audio because it would be so fun to hear read by the poet in his Cornish accent.

I am especially fond of that last line.

GOOD BEAVER THINGS TO COME

heidi08 Beaver Rehabilitation July 5, 2020

If your night last night was anything like ours you need a restful beaver read. Preferably with no explosions and plenty of eye candy. Consider this beaver porn.

Orphaned Okanagan beavers admitted to rehab centre

The tale of two beavers found alone in busy Okanagan neighbourhoods has a happy ending, as they are now safe in the care of the BC Wildlife Park. The fuzzy creatures were discovered in separate locations, but both are very young and thought to be orphaned.

Alder was found walking down a residential road in Vernon about five weeks ago, while Willow arrived from the Kelowna area after she was discovered alone under a bridge about three weeks ago. Both were admitted to the Fawcett Family Wildlife Health Centre, in Kamloops. The centre is a specialized hospital and rehabilitation facility dedicated to providing veterinary services for the resident animals of the BC Wildlife Park.

Awww. Of course they were “orphaned’ in the same way George Floyd’s daughter was ‘orphaned’. Meaning not from parental neglect but from the murderous attention of others. But still.

AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

Meet Alder, and Willow. These two rescued beavers were admitted to the Fawcett Family Wildlife Health Centre 5 and 3 weeks ago respectively. They were found separately and in different locations -Alder arrived first from the Vernon area. He was found walking down a busy road in a residential area. Willow arrived from the Kelowna area and was found alone under a bridge. Our rehabilitation team isn’t sure exactly what happened to orphan these two beavers, but it is thought that the high waters could have separated them from the rest of their family.

Oh I’m sure. But it’s nice you are raising them together and have pledged to keep them until adulthood. In the mean time I’m sure photos like these will raise lots of money for the center. So you can keep doing this work a while longer.

I keep thinking about the fact that these two beavers were found a long ways apart. Which means some lucky staffer got to drive many miles with a baby beaver in her car. Maybe in a dog crate. Maybe on her lap.

AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW.

My audio of in beaver world has reached completion and now I’m just working on the film. We figured out a way to get the most elusive contributor yesterday, and I thought you’d enjoy a sneak peak. Also I discovered my dear friend and partner in crime POWTOON now takes uploaded video and I am over the moon with joy. Wonders await.

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BEAVERS AND FOOD WEBS

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact July 4, 2020

Well sure. They may cause climate change but there are a few good things about beavers. Just ask Phys,org.

More ecosystem engineers create stability, preventing extinctions

Biological builders like beavers, elephants, and shipworms re-engineer their environments. How this affects their ecological network is the subject of new research, which finds that increasing the number of “ecosystem engineers” stabilizes the entire network against extinctions.

Yeakel, an ecologist at the University of California, Merced, and a former Santa Fe Institute Omidyar Fellow is the lead author of a new paper that models the long term impact of ecosystem engineers. Researchers have long considered the role of ecosystem engineers in natural histories, but this study is among the first to quantitatively assess them in an ecological network model.

“We wanted to understand how food webs and interaction networks were established from a mechanistic perspective,” he says. “To do that, you have to include things like engineering because species influence their environment and there’s this feedback between the environment to the species.”

Gee I have an idea of what makes and maintains a food web and sits in the middle of it day in day out making sure it functions according to design. Or if it doesn’t, they just move somewhere else and make a new web.

When we think of engineering in nature, we tend to think of beavers—the tree-felling, dam-building rodents whose machinations can shape the landscape by creating lakes and changing the path of rivers. But beavers are far from the only organisms to reshape their environment. A squirrel who inadvertently plants oak trees is also an “ecosystem engineer“—roughly speaking, any organism whose impact on the environment outlasts its own lifetime. The coolest of these biological builders, according to Justin Yeakel, might be the shipworm, which eats through rocks in streams, creating cozy abodes for future invertebrate inhabitants.

In particular, the model uses simple rules to show how food webs can be assembled, how species interactions can change over time, and when species go extinct. One striking result: Few ecosystem engineers led to many extinctions and instability while many ecosystem engineers led to stability and few extinctions.

“As you increase the number of engineers, that also increases the redundancy of the engineers and this tends to stabilize the system,” Yeakel says.

Well sure. If you have a healthy beaver habitat and one gets killed, the others can carry on the family trade, so to speak. Beaver make food webs. In addition to everything else they do.

Elephants don’t purify water.

LUCKY FOR BEAVERS

heidi08 Beavers, Festival, Friends of Martinez Beavers July 3, 2020

I may have said before that when I am asked if I’ve been lucky in life I often reply that I have neither good luck nor bad luck but ANCIENT GREEK LUCK. What I mean by this of course is that either it’s staggeringly bad news like your ancestors left you a plague dowry that will kill all your grandchildren when they marry OR it’s amazing fortunate luck like the bastard son you gave up at birth has inherited the acropolis and now rules the kingdom. It’s all good or all bad, And sometimes its both.

I was reminded of this over the weekend when we observed the beaver festival that never came and felt sad for all the moments that would never be. And then, just as we were wistfuling all over ourselves a new beaver mural suddenly appeared in Martinez (just down the street from where I used to live) and a huge beaver box arrived on our doorstep.

Allow me to explain.

Since Ben Goldfarb has published his amazing book I have been getting contacts from folks across the nation that support beavers or like our story and want to visit or support beavers in their area. This is very nice, take the woman from New York said she liked the book so much she was planning on coming to the festival!

But one such contact was from a chiropracter in DC who had been collected beavers toys all his life and when he read the book wanted to donate them to us, I told him that we would love to use them as prizes at the festival if he was willing for them to go to good homes over the years and he shipped them out.

It was such a long time coming I had nearly forgotten. But they arrived Monday after the festival that never came. And we got to spend the day doing this. Items from Canada and Japan. Antiques, dog toys and adorable knock-offs. My favorite is a beaver with a giant tail that doubles as a coin purse with a zipper.

Because I have “GREEK LUCK”.

So we’ll go through and pick out what gets given first…and what kind of beaver quiz or challenge folks will earn them with…There were two folkmanis and we snatched them away for the regular stash.

Oh and that same weekend? Emily Fairfax was doing this. And no matter how smart you think you are about beavers, you really should listen all the way through.

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Have a safe and glorious fourth of July, by the way. And in case you need it, here’s an amazingly patriotic reminder.

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THANK HEAVENS FOR EMILY

heidi08 Beavers and climate change July 2, 2020

The world isn’t done blaming beavers for climate change, so there are a few more science articles bemoaning the dam beavers and permafrost. But at least one of them talked to Emily Fairfax yesterday so we’re mighty happy about that. This is from Popular Science.

Beavers might be making the Arctic melt even faster

Carbon pollution is causing all sorts of weird effects on the planet, including dramatic weather shifts and reshuffling ecosystems. Every day brings a new surprise driven by the cascading impacts of warming the Earth. Now, a new study in Environmental Research Letters shows that a warming climate may have unleashed beavers upon the tundra in the Alaskan Arctic—and their activities could be accelerating the loss of permafrost.

In Alaska and Canada, beavers have mostly made their homes in forests. But things are changing. Summers are longer, seasonal winter ice is thinner, and shrubs are increasingly sprouting up, making the tundra an increasingly appealing place for the rodents. In recent years, researchers have documented beavers setting up their dams in these treeless landscapes, and more lakes are now pocketing the tundra.

Okay this part we know. Where’s the inspiring new Emily part?

However, it’s important to note that the research team did not directly link increased permafrost thawing to beaver ponds. More watery surface area across the tundra is known to chip away at permafrost—that’s not in dispute. But Emily Fairfax, an ecohydrologist at California State University Channel Islands, says that you can’t apply that same relationship to beaver ponds. Instead, most beaver-created water bodies tend to be shallow, and thus are more likely to completely freeze over during winter, which would prevent a significant loss of permafrost. In a calculation based on typical beaver dam heights and winter temperatures in the study region, Fairfax argues that the majority of beaver ponds in the study area probably freeze through in winter and “are behaving more like shallow wetlands that go through freeze-thaw cycles just like the active layer of permafrost does.” Adds Fairfax, “The scale of impact the authors imply is overstated.”

Even if beavers are causing some extra melting, it’s hard to say how that would ultimately factor into how much soil carbon is stored or lost. As Fairfax points out, beaver ponds can retain water from thawed permafrost that would otherwise drain away. Dried permafrost soils, meanwhile, are highly flammable—and, if ignited, can release lots of carbon into the atmosphere.

And no scientist is saying we should be mad at beavers, which are known to provide many benefits to their native ecosystems.