Month: January 2021

BEAVERS AND DISHABITUATION

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver Chewing, Beavers, Video January 21, 2021

Yesterday was so delightful I slept in an extra hour! If this keeps up you may start getting an afternoon beaver post! It also gave me free time to think about what I – the child retired psychologist – want most to say about Mike Dugout’s outstanding newest film.

I want to teach you about “Dishabituation”.

Psychologists want to learn things about children and infants but sometimes they can’t tell us everything we want to know and we have to find other ways to get the data. For example, we’d like very much to know about what babies LEARN and what they REMEMBER of what they learned. But we can’t ask them of course.

One way around this is to observe when babies are “surprised”. Because this allows us to inter that they had already learned to expect the world to be a certain way and were startled to find out when it wasn’t. This is called “Dishabituation” for obvious reasons. And researchers do all kinds of clever experiments designed to show when it happens and thus prove infant learning has previously occurred.

(If you thought that babies weren’t learning about the world think back to that day when you’re kid dropped his bottle 43 times on the kitchen floor and you had to bend and pick it up every single time. S/he was discovering gravity that day. Because at a certain point babies have discovered that things usually fall DOWN when you drop them. If you rigged up a study so that bottles could float away when a baby dropped them you would find out whether dishabituation occurred. And depending on the age of the baby I’m willing to bet it would.)

Which brings us to one of the things I love BEST about beavers. They are entirely unflappable. They very rarely act surprised. All the researchers with all the clipboards in all the world waiting to spot dishabtuation behind the two way glass would be waiting for hours without success. Because it almost never happens. I watched beavers at close range for a decade and I saw one beaver once react with surprise. And that was a kit. Mostly they just roll with whatever comes. And its not because they haven’t learned about the world. Because they have.

Mike from Saskatchewan shared the PERFECT film to see what beavers know about the world. And if ever there was going to be a chance for observing beaver dishabituation this is it. And I invite you to notice how entirely UNFLAPPABLE the beaver is instead.

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Isn’t that wonderful? That beaver obviously KNOWS that chopping down a tree should make it fall. So it understands gravity as well as your infant with the bottle. But that tree clearly isn’t falling. And the beaver tries a little more. But exhibits no surprise, And then nibbles a little something. Tries again. Gives up again. Tries a different way. And then quits altogether.

It’s almost like you can hear his inner monologue saying, huh, Some fuckers don’t fall. Oh well.

When you think about the life of a beaver and its dependence on water it makes sense. A beaver needs to know about hydrology and physics. But it also needs to understand the most important concept in fluvial geomorphology that humans fail to learn.

Things don’t always do what you expect them to.

I asked Mike to check back on the tree the next night and he confirmed that it had eventually been hauled away. Because physics or no, beavers are persistent.

IOWA FARMERS, CAN YOU BELIEVE IT?

heidi08 Beavers and Nitrogen removal January 20, 2021

It’s here! It’s HERE! The real president’s day! If you missed the memorial last night you should really watch, and assuming anyone has time amid all the champagne corks popping, there’s some excellent beaver news for us to follow.

Beaver dams: Nuisance or conservation practice?

The beaver is often thought of as an industrious construction expert with instinctive engineering skills that creates dams capable of holding back the flow of water in Iowa’s creeks and streams.

For some, this skill is not as welcome as you may think. When a beaver’s dam backs water into a row crop field during a weather event or wet season, farmers are not their biggest fans. In addition, beavers have a voracious appetite for almost anything that grows, including corn. The combined nuisance of crop pilferage and field flooding creates a negative perception of beavers among most farmers.

However, beavers do play an important role in creating habitat for other wetlands creatures through the creation of natural ponds. And the slowing of water flow is one potential remedy for erosion and downstream nutrient transport issues facing Iowa. An additional upside of beaver dams is there is no construction or implementation cost for the farmer.

Finding a balance between these potential conservation benefits while paying attention to farming interests may be a daunting task, but as with most complex challenges, the first step is gathering data for analysis.

Oh don’t you just love it when farmers scratch their heads and say “Gosh that tarnation beaver dam might just be savin’ the water I need!” I have to admit I’m a big fan of these moments where the pest becomes popular. Aren’t you?

In Iowa, beaver dams are protected from destruction or demolition, unless it is done to protect the owner’s property. During a 2018 Iowa Learning Farms conservation listening session with farmers participating in watershed improvement projects, one farmer related a story about how they had handled a beaver dam issue on his farm.

He remarked that after the beavers were forcefully encouraged to move a dam downstream to reduce field flooding, he participated in nitrate testing above and below their newly constructed dam. To his amazement, the nitrate levels in the water were measured to be some 90% lower below the dam than above.

“Practices which help to move water off cropland as quickly as possible have helped farmers increase yields and put more acres into production, but in many cases at the cost of topsoil and nutrient loss to our waterways,” Beck says.

“There has been tremendous effort invested in research and practice aimed at conserving soil, and slowing or preventing nutrients from degrading water quality,” he says. “One area that hasn’t had a lot of critical study in Iowa is the potential efficacy of beaver dams as a conservation practice or structure that could naturally contribute to the recovery of compromised waterways.”

Get the hell out! You mean the report that beaver dams remove 41% of nitrates is actually true! Who cam believe it?

“We hope to be able to quantify the impacts to water quality provided by beaver dams,” Beck says. “We do understand that these creatures don’t always put their dams in the most beneficial sites from a farmer’s perspective. Finding measurable factors that can be analyzed from a cost-benefit angle may influence how farmers view and interact with beavers in their area.”

The likelihood of finding the perfect location for every beaver dam — one which maximizes benefits to all — is relatively low. However, reaching a better understanding of how these natural structures fit into a multifaceted approach to water quality improvement and conservation may contribute to overall progress toward statewide nutrient reduction goals.

Well that sounds like an EXCELLENT research project. I can’t wait for you to reconfirm the results they found in every other state and Canada. Now I have an inauguration to go watch.

I can’t believe how much I need this.

BEAVERS FOR HOPE AND CHANGE

heidi08 Beaver Conference, Beaver ecological impact January 19, 2021

1 day more! Hmmm somebody needs to reshoot that les miz scene as Biden & Harris getting ready to move in, Ivanka bring left alone in the dark, Trump grimly anticipating his arrest and the national guard getting ready for an easy battle. Get right on that internet, okay?

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In the mean time hakai magazine has some good environmental news for a change. It’s a nice read for these trying times. Of course I’ll share the best bits.

An Antidote for Environmental Despair

We are living amid a planetary crisis. “I am hopeless,” a student in an environmental study graduate program recently told me. “I’ve seen the science. I am hopeless because the state of the planet is hopeless.”

It’s not surprising she feels so depressingly fatalistic. In his speech at the start of a two-week international conference in Madrid, Spain, in December 2019, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, “The point of no return is no longer over the horizon. It is in sight and hurtling toward us.”

The environmental crisis is also a crisis of hope.

I believe the way to spread hope is to collectively challenge the tired narrative of environmental doom and gloom that reproduces a hopeless status quo, and replace it with an evidence-based argument that improves our capacity to engage with the real and overwhelming issues we face.

Hmm now what on earth could make a person feel HOPEFUL about the environment right now? When we’re destroying ecosystems at such a great rate. Surely there’s nothing that creates them as fast?

Natural climate solutions occur when we conserve and restore ecosystems—and improve land management. It’s thrilling to see how quickly life returns when given the opportunity. In the largest dam-removal project in the history of the United States, the Elwha River now runs freely from a snowfield in the mountains of Washington’s Olympic National Park to the Pacific Ocean. Salmon started to return to their natal waters upstream almost immediately after the dams were removed in 2014. Reservoir beds that looked like moonscapes now host vibrant young forests and wetlands where elk graze. The return of beavers to the Elwha watershed is a boon for salmon. Beavers drag branches, making shallow water channels where juvenile salmon can safely travel, and beaver dams create slower water habitats where the insects that salmon feed upon thrive.

And Washington gets out of the way and lets them do it. Sometimes you don’t need to swoop in and make things better. You just need to move out of the way and letter beavers do their job.

There are plenty of other wonderful examples of environmental recovery in the article that will soothe your savaged spirit. It ends with these wise words.

The vast scale, complexity, urgency, and destructive power of biodiversity loss, climate change, and countless other issues are real. Yet assuming a fatalistic perspective and positioning hopelessness as a foregone conclusion is not reality. It is a mindset, and it’s a widespread and debilitating one. It not only undermines positive change, it squashes the belief that anything good could possibly happen.

True that. Good things do happen and are indeed possible. I’m so old I remember when there had never been a statewide beaver discussion on the pacific coast and now the first EVER California Beaver Summit is going to be a reality.

I’m off this morning to chat with Eva Bishop of the Cornwall Beaver Trust about getting kids engaged and excited about beavers an using activities to educate. I guess she thinks we have some experience in that area.

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EMILY EDUCATES CALIFORNIA

heidi08 Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Fire Prevention, Beavers and water January 18, 2021

Happy last Trump-Monday! The very air hums with anticipation. Or maybe that’s the virus, just waiting for us to get on with it already. Today is a particularly good day to be thankful that there are still a few humans in Southern California that aren’t infected, and this one we are very very happy about.

UC California Online Naturalist Series

Dr. Emily Fairfax, Assistant Professor, California State University Channel Islands. Dr. Fairfax leads the BEAVS Research Group: Beavers, Ecohydrology, and Visual Storytelling.

Her current research focuses on the ecohydrology of riparian areas, particularly those that have been impacted by beaver damming. Dr. Fairfax uses a combination of remote sensing, modeling, and field to work understand how beaver damming changes these landscapes and on what timescales those changes operate. In addition to learning about beavers and Dr. Fairfax’s research, participants in this CONES will have an opportunity to practice finding signs of beaver in both on ground photos and in satellite images.

So Emily”s online course goes active tomorrow at noon, and she teaches naturalists across California why beavers matter. If you want to register you can still sign up here:

CONES January 19: Beavers and Healthy Ecosystems

Jan 19, 2021 12:00 PM in Pacific Time (US and Canada)

Here’s something else to look forward to as we remember what can help California make its way in a drying world.

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Our much beloved festival artist Amelia Hunter sent her rough sketch of what she’s thinking of for the summit logo. I’m practically panting in anticipation.

THE MISSING PIECE WE DIDN’T KNOW WE NEEDED

heidi08 Beaver Book January 18, 2021

R. Grace Morgan authored the most important beaver dissertation of the last 40 years at a time when no one was caring much about the relationship between beavers and water, Now she has a book. And we all need to read it.

Book looks at cultural connection to bison, horses and beavers

A recently released book delves into the traditional importance of three well known animals; the beaver, the bison, and the horse.

The book, not surprisingly titled Beaver, Bison, Horse: The Traditional Knowledge and Ecology of the Northern Great Plains by the late R. Grace Morgan endeavours to be “the seminal, anthropological account of Indigenous peoples’ relationship with essential fauna of the Plains region in Canada and the US., according to the release from the University of Regina Press, with the book centering on “traditional knowledge and ecology from an age before colonial settler invasions.”

Every beaver advocate everywhere (and I mean you too) owes Grace a debt of gratitude and their first years allowance. They might not even know it. I didn’t come across it until an article about the pipeline protests. And beaver champions like Michael Pollock were stunned to read the abstract. Ben referred to it in his book so it is better known to all of us now. Her dramatic writing about the cultural importance of beaver to drought ridden Blackfeet tribe gave researchers the motivation for studying the question in person. I am so glad to see this book hitting the shelves.

The book “features deep analyses of beaver, bison and horse agriculture and habitat manipulation, which sustained Plains inhabitants for thousands of years,” noted the release. With the author passed Yorkton This Week was able to arrange an interview with Brian Morgan and Kim Morgan regarding the book, beginning with some insight into the woman behind the book.

Dr. R. Grace Morgan “was an anthropologist, archaeologist, and a scientist, deeply connected to the prairies and passionate about its ecological complexity and the sustainable practices that early Indigenous inhabitants had with the land and its animal occupants,” began Brian.

Grace passed away in February 2016 from Ovarian cancer after many years of determined resistance. Grace Morgan [née Hrytzak] was born in Rosthern, Saskatchewan and raised in the small town of Yellow Creek, where her father worked as a schoolteacher and principal, where cultural life revolved around the local Ukrainian community.

The world lost a great light and part of its soul when we lost Dr, Morgan, But I am so happy the book will keep her wisdom informing scholars for years to come

“Grace always felt that her work on ancient environmental practices would be relevant to contemporary problems of climate change, global warming, and drought, which was especially relevant environmental problems in Saskatchewan,” said Kim Morgam. “She deeply respected Indigenous stewardship of the natural habitat, recognizing that this environmental wisdom was not recognized nor taught in white settler schools and society in general.

I am so happy she was able to breathe this book into life before she passed. The world needs to remember everything that Grace and her ancestors once knew about beavers. I never got to even hear her lecture, but this might give us a little taste of what its like to apply tribal knowledge to modern problems.
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