CAN THEY DIG IT? YES THEY CAN!

heidi08 Beaver Digging January 21, 2023

There are so many rehab beaver videos out there lately I lose track, but I thought this one was really valuable. It shows a closeup look at a behavior I’ve never been fortunate enough to see in person,

At first I thought they were practicing making scent mounds but when you watch for a little you will see that what they’re actually doing is excavacing the pond to make it deeper and more pond like. They are truly tireless and father a full day’s work of this excavation you can imaging how different things will look,

, I can suddenly see how all this canals radiating out around ponds take shape. Bob Arnebeck told me once that he thought to a beaver watching another beaver work was infectious. Impossible to resist joining in. The ultimate peer pressure or for the ethologists out there Fixed Action Pattern.

Watching this I can see what he meant,,,

BEAVER FESTIVAL FRANCHISE?

Visions of beaver festivals have been percolating across the land. I am eager to see beavers celebrated in every place that has a zip code. We are already very excited about what’s coming in San Luis Obisbo on April 7th, and yesterday I had a nice chat with Nicole Fox of Durango, Colorado who wants to throw their first ever beaver festival this year.

Nicole spoke with me a few years back about wanting to start her own nonprofit for beavers, being inspired by our work and wanting to call it “Give A Dam” was that okay? And of course saving beavers is the point and I thought it was fine, (not as good as WORTH of course...) now she is wanting to put on her own festival.

So Nicole has been working to do class room educational activities about beavers and provide tours for local wildlife groups like the Sierra Club. She’s full of energy and eager to make a difference for beavers and the wildlife they support. She described one outdoor activity she does with long bolts of cloth where she has children recreate the streams that used to be here before all the beavers were trapped…this appealed to my medieval sensibilities because I could easily see it happening…then she described how she asks everyone wearing yellow to be the dragonflies, and everyone wearing blue to be the salmon, and everyone wearing green to be the herons, and everyone wearing brown to be the otters…Can’t you see how dynamic that would be on stage at our beaver festival for example?

Hmm stay tuned,,,

BEAVERS ARE ‘ANTIFA’?

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beavers January 19, 2023

There has been a lot of Boogey man preaching about “Antifa”, which has been blamed for January 6 riots and violence and all manners of ills. No one is ever too quick to explain who they are exactly or what antifa means other than “doing things we don’t like.” Well this new article from the UK finally lays it out in the open.

I guess it makes sense.

We should all aspire to be more like these anti-fascist, eco-conscious little rodents

Hot dam! Why beavers are in for 2023

If 2022 was the year of the capybara, 2023 is set to be the year of the beaver. The ongoing beavernaissance has its roots back in 2017, when these precious semi-aquatic rodents were reintroduced to the UK in an operation known as “The Cornwall Beaver Project” (they originally went extinct in the UK in the 16th century after they were hunted for their fur, glands and meat – RIP). And since their reintroduction to the UK six years ago, beavers have well and truly come into their own.

As a result of their reintroduction, biodiversity in Cornwall has massively improved, with 13 new bird and mammal species spotted in the surrounding area. Researchers and wildlife recorders have said that this is largely thanks to the beavers slowing the river flow and creating a more hospitable habitat for other native animals, including dragonflies, amphibians, birds and fish. Testament to their indispensability, in 2022, they were given legal protection in England, making it illegal to kill or harm them. Most recently, following the success of the Cornwall project, two beavers named Chompy and Hazel were released onto Ewhurst Park in Hampshire.

FINALLY the mystery has being explained! Antifa means generating biodiversity and saving water! Fixing things that need fixing! Cooperating as a family! That makes perfect sense!

In ecology, beavers are known as a “keystone species”, which means they’re incredibly valuable to the ecosystem. “Reintroducing beavers is like throwing petrol onto the bonfire when it comes to nature recovery – it really speeds things up,” Chris Jones, farmer and communities director of the Beaver Trust, told the Guardian last year. They basically do the opposite of gentrification: instead of driving up house prices and catalysing the creation of yet another small plates restaurant, they actually contribute something – dams and canals – which will benefit the whole community and the area’s preexisting, long-term inhabitants.

Jokes aside, all their hard work really does help the climate. “They engineer the landscape in a way that reduces flooding, helps store water for drought, and boosts wildlife – and wetlands are great carbon sinks,” Jones told the Guardian. And before anyone suggests that they can’t be great climate activists if they’re always destroying trees… in the words of Insulate Britain activist and carpenter, Cameron Ford: “wood is regenerative, you can grow trees”. Duh!

Petrel on the bonfire, that’s antifa for you! Going around creating something from nothing until you have a whole friggin ecosystem on your hands! No wonder farmers hate them!

Beavers even working hard to help Ukraine bolster its defences against Putin – anti-fascist queens! Apparently, they’re building dams at the Belarus border which keep the terrain ‘marshy and impassable’, making it nearly impossible for Russian forces to invade the Ukrainian region of Volyn. A spokesperson for the Volyn territorial defence, Serhiy Khominskyi, praised the beavers in an interview with Reuters. “When they build their dams normally people destroy them, but they didn’t this year because of the war, so now there is water everywhere,” he said.

Well sure. Wreaking havoc on tanks is what antifa does best! Are we surprised by this?

In the face of war and irreversible climate breakdown, this is admittedly a less important argument in praise of beavers, but I also think it’s worth reintroducing beavers across the rest of the country simply because they are sweet. Isn’t that reason enough? Just imagine walking by a river and seeing a beaver in the flesh, with its chubby little cheeks and rubbery little tail. I would cry with joy.

Beavers are sweet? First you tell us their antifa and then you expect us to believe they are sweet? Just what kind of game are you pulling here? Do you really think I’m that gullible?

MIKE DIGOUT: ANOTHER BEAVER RECRUIT

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver Art January 18, 2023

Our good friend Mike Digout of beaver fame in Saskatchewan was the subject of a fun podcast following urban wildlife. I’m sure you’ll want to listen in. He’s unbelievably good=natured and amiable. I can see why he and beavers get along.

The Beavers Who Live Downtown

Jason Allen

The Environmental Urbanist

It’s funny, Mike makes me think of a more wholesome version of our own Moses Silva who was himself an innocent bystander unintentionally hooked into filming our beavers in every conceivable circumstance for well over a decade. I’m told Moses was a pipefitter for Shell who knew nothing about beavers but just thought the tightly woven dam was fascinating and wanted to watch it unfold more closely. I believe early on he found his way to buying a used video camera from some local news reporter he met downtown. Like Mike the man has mountains and miles of footage stored away in some garage of file cabinet that we will never, ever see see. Long before the famous November 7th meeting he was taking that footage to senior centers and sharing it with county workers and around the community.

It turns out you don’t have to be a photographer or an environmentalist to have a huge impact, Beavers just have a way of recruiting their champions. Good work, Mike.

WHEN BEAVERS ARE GREETED WITH OPEN ARMS

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver Chewing, Beaver ecological impact January 17, 2023

In the 15-year history of this website I have written very few stories of Pennsylvania. Maybe a couple here and there,with beavers being trapped for chewing trees or causing flooding but this is the first WELCOME BEAVER! article I’ve read that I can recall. It’s not brimming with accurate information but we are soo darn happy it’s there at all I won’t complain. Say hello to Frick park.

What Frick Park’s resident beaver means for the health of the restored Nine Mile Run

Frick Park’s newest resident is causing quite a stir. Wildlife fans and hikers have come to the park in the weeks since park rangers first spotted a beaver in late December, with hopes of stealing a glance.

But like many others who came before, resident Jane Bernstein returned to the parking lot just off the Nine Mile Run trail unsuccessful. Since the flat-tailed mammal is nocturnal, Bernstein got to the park before 8 a.m. on a snowy Friday this January.

This wasn’t the first time she had gone to look for him, either.

“I went on a beaver walk with somebody from Nine Mile Run — a group — and that was great,” Bernstein said. “We learned a lot about how excited they are about the beaver, despite the fact that the beavers do gnaw down trees.”

Excited about the beaver! Imagine! Frick park is in an oasis of wooded steep trails in the middle of the city of Pittsburgh. It was a large estate bequeathed for a park in the early 1900’s by Henry Clay Frick an early founder of the Coke industry which was a treatment for coal that fueled iron smelting.

So I guess it’s kind of nice a fossil fuel’s founders tax write-off is happy to see beavers?

While elusive, the beaver, aptly nicknamed Castor — the North American beaver’s scientific name is Castor canadensis — leaves a pretty clear trail of pointed, jagged little sticks behind him.

“You can see he’s been out munching around,” park ranger Erica Heide points out as she walks down a path parallel to the stream.

Castor is the second beaver to be spotted in the park in recent years, according to Heide. The first one appeared in Nine Mile Run in 2019, likely having migrated up from the Monongahela River, the waterway that sits at the mouth of the stream.

Heide said that the beaver stayed in the area for about a year, but no mates or kits (the term for baby beavers) were spotted with him.

“He moved on, we assume, for mating season,” Heide said.

So far, Castor has appeared alone at Nine Mile Run, too. Heide said while beavers are friendly within their family units, they’re territorial creatures, with just one family inhabiting a single section of a waterway at a time.

In any number, though, Heide said the presence of beavers is a sign of a healthy ecosystem where sewage and industrial waste once dominated.

“They are known as nature’s engineers,” she said enthusiastically. “They’re the only one of the only species that can change their environment and alter the hydrology.”

I would say the hardy beaver is a BRINGER of a healthy ecosystem – not exactly a sign of one. I mean there are beavers in Chernobyl and I’m pretty sure that’s not healthy. But still I get your point. They can do good things for the hydrology.

This years-long effort to detoxify the stream, led by the City of Pittsburgh and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, included rerouting the stream channel by adding curves and ripple rocks to slow down the water and the rate of flooding.

A decade and a half later, fish and beavers have continued the work of improving the surrounding wetland environment. For instance, beavers’ chomping habits can be useful in shaping a climate-resilient landscape.

“See how clustered and how tight they are,” Heide said pointing to a group of streamside willow branches. “That’s actually really bad. They’re even starting to uproot themselves because of how heavy they are.”

But beavers love to eat willows, which grow back once cut down.

“It will cut those down and then they can regenerate into like a healthier cluster,” she explained.

Doing so helps protect the stream bank from erosion. Heide said the parks plan to plant more willows this spring and will hold several willow staking events where residents can get involved.

To protect the trees they want Castor to stay away from, park rangers and conservation groups put protective cages around nearby trunks, prioritizing those that are young and native to the northeast, like oaks, aspens and maples.

Well I would rather have a team of beavers working on that stream than the army core of engineers, but honestly, I’m not sure about your statement that FISH helped the stream, That’s like saying cars help roads?

Heide said it’s unlikely beavers will ever build a successful dam on Nine Mile Run. During storm surges, the area is susceptible to intense flooding that dams would likely not withstand.

Still, if Castor or any other beaver in the park was able to complete a dam, Heide said it would be another step toward successful environmental restoration. For one thing, it can cause flooding that brings up nutrients and seeds from the water into the soil, sparking a surge in vegetation for wildlife to eat.

At the same time, dams can further reduce the rate of flooding by slowing down floodwaters while filtering out pollutants that travel downstream.

Well that’s no more than the truth. I think I like having a beaver welcoming committee strew their path with good news. And hey the name can’t hurt. “Heide” (Hmm even if she spells it wrong…)

Hiller said the organization hopes to continue that work to protect the health of habitats throughout the watershed and restore other parts of the park, like the Fern Hollow Valley.

The presence of a beaver, he added, is a sign that they are headed in the right direction. For those who want to see the beaver, Heide advises people not to get their hopes up.

“He’ll probably become more and more elusive as we get into the colder and colder weather,” she said. “Just like us, we don’t want to be out in the cold. Neither does he.”

In the event he is spotted, Heide stresses that people give him space, and keep any dogs in the park on leash.

“That will ensure that this beaver is safe for future years to hopefully come back.”

Gosh. I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop. But I guess it’s darn cool that a industry giant’s park can be somewhere that is happy to have beavers. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t always the case.