Funny thing happened on the way to the forum. There were so many fixes and workarounds on the website in the fast few days a number or the links on the main menu bar no longer work. Or rather they WOULD work if the address was tweaked just a little. That means a whole lot of tweaking has to be undertaken. Or someone has to move a big lever at the helm but I can’t be the one to do it and I’ve grown scared to ask because god knows what else would break after that. I guess I will just march in and do 10 a day or something for the rest of time or until I die whichever comes first.
Fall is a great time to head back to Milwakee and check on how the beaver recovery is coming along. Here and now Producer Chris Bentley recently gave a nice report on WBUR. Unfortunately it’s featured with an otter photo from Getty images which they say was sleeping “on a branch” which is the greatest possible fail. But we hope more beaver sightings will straighten them out eventually. It’s a nice 5 minute listen, enjoy.
The American beaver was once a fixture of this area, at the confluence of three rivers by the shores of Lake Michigan. Then the region’s first European residents made Milwaukee one of their main fur trading posts. They hunted and trapped beavers for their pelts, and the population plummeted.
But a few years ago, people started noticing trees along the riverbanks in the heart of downtown Milwaukee that had been gnawed down to a point — a telltale sign of a beaver.
There’s even a quick mention of our buddy Bob Boucher’s study about flooding, but then it’s back to worshiping at the trout rumors.
That’s another reason ecologists are happy to see beavers returning to urban areas. Last year, researchers at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee found beavers could substantially reduce flooding in some of the county’s most flood-prone areas.
Trout fisherman, however, worry too many beaver dams could muck up their fishing streams. But in urban Milwaukee, there’s still room for people to share the rivers with a few more beavers.
The sun eventually set on our canoe ride and we got back on shore while bats snapped up bugs over our heads.
You know how beavers are. Always ruining streams for trout. The oddest thing is that they only seem to do that in WISCONSIN. In every other state they are GOOD for trout.
OMG I’m fixed I’m fixed! Said no cat ever! But dam it’s good to be back. This was an interesting post this morning from a blog in New Mexico that caught my attention, Someone exclaiming that they just got their first beaver photo because “beavers are so hard to photograph”.
Um…
Beavers are hard to photograph in the exact same way as it’s hard to see your mail delivered every day. It just seems to show up in your mailbox when you get home from work mysteriously! But if you learn your mailman’s routine, and wait with a camera when they are likely to show up, you will almost always get a photo. Mystery solved.
There are many, many animals in the Bosque. Most people, even those who spend a lot of time there do not see a fraction of what is possible. Despite years of looking, this is the first picture I have gotten of a Beaver. The far more visible muskrat is smaller and has a thin tail. While beavers are famous as engineers and keystones in their ecosystem, they can often do things wrong. This youngster is trying to build a lodge, but has chosen a section of the ditch that is being dredged right now.
Well he’s right about the muskrat tail. And he’s right about this being a youngster. But that’s as far as it goes. Beavers rarely do things ‘wrong’. Do you mean wrong for humans? Or for what a human being wants any particular moment? I’m assuming that beaver isn’t building a ‘lodge’ but rather a dam that is what prompted the dredging you speak of.
Hmm those look like lodges in the drained stream. Those lodges are horrible and I can’t even imagine that they withstand such a draining. That looks like a major crisis – 5 alarm fire for beavers. No water in sight. Maybe that’s why you finally saw one. Things are critical. The story is that the stream gets too full of cattails so they have to dredge them of all the silt they collect or it will use up all the water and muck up the streams.
Um. Okay. That seems kind of crazy to me. And it’s very bad for beavers, whom NM needs like life support. But what do I know. He is wrong about photographing beavers though. I’m sure about that.
Yearling grooming 2010 Famous photo by Cheryl ReynoldsYearling with branch Photo Cheryl Reynoldsyearling on dam Photo Cheryl ReynoldsDad and kit Photo Heidi Perryman
The universe is playing a little trick on me at the moment. I waded for hours in tech-swamp trying to get my sidebar restored and I got it back but lost the actual writing part. See below,
Oh and all our photographs and images. So it’s about priorities. And I am still working.
