Beavers may not be ready for a maskless festival full of unvaccinated children but they still have a few tricks up their furry sleeves. They were clever enough to chew through the Mendenhall beaver cam yesterday, or at least fill it with mud so that it stopped working. No cute beaver sleep for me or you at the moment, sigh.
‘Beavers are just being beavers’: friction grows between Canadians and animals
At first, the theft of wooden fence posts seemed like a crime of opportunity – amid soaring lumber costs, stacks of wood have gone missing from construction sites across North America.
But officers in the Canadian prairie community of Porcupine Plain, Saskatchewan, soon identified the culprit: local beavers had stolen the posts to build their dam.
The semiaquatic rodents were also recently blamed for an internet outage in British Columbia, which left an entire town without access to the web after beavers chewed through a cable. Adding insult to injury, the animals had also pilfered the telecom company’s marking tape to line their dam.
The beaver is often seen as emblematic of Canada, but the two incidents – and a third episode in February when a beaver wandered into a Toronto metro station – expose the growing friction between the country’s humans and its booming population of the animals.
That’s right, first the stolen fence posts, ruined internet and now THIS! A beaver in the subway station. How much can one nation take?
Never you mind that beavers are ALWAYS turning up strange places in February, and the other two complaints are just whiney par for the course. I’m pretty sure it’s not just the Canadians that have to cope with dispersal. This picture is from someones backyard pool in Dallas.
“Beavers just have such a tremendous influence on everything around them,” said Glynnis Hood, a professor of environmental science at the University of Alberta who has long studied beavers and their effects on water systems.
Few animals can have as profound an impact on the natural world as beavers, who excavate thousands of cubic meters of soil each year to mud their lodges, build dams and dig channels.
And for a species often blamed for its destructive tendencies, research continues to show their profound effect on ecosystems. Beaver dams not only help restore valuable wetlands and recharge groundwater, but also filter out sediments, nitrogen and phosphorus from water and create havens for species like fish and frogs.
Hi Glynnis! We knew a bunch of reporters commenting on the glut of beaver stories would come looking for you to comment. Is it like the rain of toads? Is it a sign?
Collectively, communities across the country spend millions annually to offset the impacts of beavers.
While effective mitigation tools like pond levellers are increasingly common, experts say it isn’t always fair to blame beavers.
“There’s too much weight sometimes put on the beavers, but they’re really just reacting to how we change environments,” said Hood. “Where we place our development matters. And how we envision nature interacting with our built structures also has to come into play when we design them.”
I agree Glynnis but I think you missed one line. You should have talked about all the money communities SAVE from their ecosystem services. Maybe mentioned the cost of drought, or what farmers pay to bring in hay for their cattle when there’s no green grass for them to eat. Maybe mentioned this article.
“I think beavers are just being beavers,” said Hood, pointing out that they are, by their nature, burrowing creatures. “And if you have a cable that is only 3ft down in the soil, there’s a chance things like this happen.”
Of course the real problem is that HUMANS are just being HUMANS. And if they have a chance to blame something else for a problem they let happen, we all know that they’re going to do it.
