Month: January 2023

“WILL NO ONE RID ME OF THIS MEDDLESOME BEAVER?”

How about a mystery to puzzle through this weekend? I heard about this a couple days ago and apparently it still hasn’t been unraveled. I have my primary suspect list involving the phrase “plausible deniability” of course, but the city denies involvement so I’m curious what you think.

Beaver Dam Destroyed In Shelton, Officials Investigating Why

SHELTON, CT — Shelton officials are asking for the public’s help determining why a beaver dam at Boehm Pond was destroyed.

According to Teresa Gallagher, the city’s natural resource manager, the relatively new beaver dam was likely constructed around 2019 off Winthrop Woods Road and was a favorite sight for hikers in the area.

“Some people, especially hikers, loved seeing the pond and the dead trees, viewing it as a normal cycle of nature,” Gallagher said in an email to Patch. “It was a favorite spot for people to take pictures.”

In mid-December, Gallagher announced on the Shelton Trails Committee blog someone brought heavy equipment into the area and ripped the dam apart.

Well now I’ve surely known public works crews to do their really unpopular dirty work right before a holiday break so that no one will have to answer the phones until everything dies down. But maybe I’m hardened and too suspicious.

“Nevertheless, someone dismantled the guardrail on Winthrop Woods Road and brought in heavy equipment to rip apart the beaver dam, take out trees and move large rocks along the shore,” Gallagher said in the blog post. “People in the neighborhood assumed city crews had done the work, but no one at the city authorized or knows of any crews having done this.”

Will no one rid me of this meddlesome beaver? The misquote comes from Henry II who wanted someone to get rid of the archbishop of Canturbury Thomas Beckett without appearing to be directing folks get rid of Beckett. Four henchmen heard his cry and promptly dispatched the man of their “own” accord. Cities often function like little kingdoms. How many mayors have muttered under their breath for the problems to be “dealt with” so that someone could do in an unauthorized act what they themselves couldn’t be seen to do?

Gallagher said no further information about the beaver pond’s destruction has been received as of Thursday morning and the reason for it being torn up is still unknown.

“It was referred to the [city’s] Inland Wetlands Department since they have regulatory authority and can impose penalties,” Gallagher said.

The larger shallow pond created by a beaver also benefits nearby wildlife, including fish, herons, ducks, turtles, frogs and otters. The dead trees are also used by breeding birds, including wood ducks and woodpeckers, and filled with insects as they rot that are eaten by woodpeckers and other wildlife, Gallagher said.

It’s such a shame someone would take all that away, The selectman’s just sick about it. Doesn’t this sound like some hardy buck passing to you?

Though hikers in the area and others have enjoyed viewing and taking pictures of the beaver pond and the wildlife it attracted, Gallagher noted some people in the neighborhood, conversely, thought the dead trees were an eyesore.

“It’s important to understand that the best wildlife habitat often looks messy,” Gallagher said. “Dead wood has high ecological value. Conservation lands are typically meant to be left untouched, and that means they will not look tidy or manicured. This summer, the dead trees will allow light to reach the ground and a rich layer of plants to grow, providing food and habitat for species such as deer and rabbits.”

The willingness to pass blame along to anonymous nosy neighbors is pretty much TEXTBOOK in my experience when it comes to mayor’s getting rig of problems without appearing to.

Case in point: A life time ago there was an incident when I expressed concern that with all the public attention at the dam a young teen was “fishing” right near the beaver kits and a kit actually darted toward his line in curiosity. I had visions of kits with hooks in their mouth or tangled in fishing line.

The mayor appeared to be concerned saying over the phone “That’s too bad, I fear the beavers may become victims of their own popularity” and to this day I’d swear I could hear him rubbing his hands together wistfully at the thought.

Anyone with information about what happened to the beaver dam is encouraged to email conservation@cityofshelton.org.

I’ve got a theory. Do you think I should email them?

COMPUTERS LOOKING FOR BEAVERS

Alright. We’ve sufficiently mocked the beaver wildfire article and now we can get down to the good stuff. Just so you know in the background our tech-wizard Bruce Mushrush is busily migrating the beaver summit site to ours so that we won’t have to pay for both. If things are busy or weird for a moment just come back in a few minutes and all will be well. Because there are GOOD THINGS TO DISCUSS!!!

Scientists EEAGER-ly Track Beavers Across Western United States

Beavers are among the world’s most effective engineers. Members of this keystone species build dams and canals and, in so doing, create entire, multilayered wetland ecosystems. Beginning in the 1600s, however, the fur trade decimated North American beaver populations.

The species began rebounding in the early 20th century but sometimes came into conflict with the agricultural landscape, as by the 1940s and 1950s, people were aggressively modifying streams to maximize yield. Returning to their former haunts meant persecution as beavers flooded crops and felled orchards, explained Alexa Whipple, program director for the Methow Beaver Project (part of a nonprofit called the Methow Salmon Recovery Foundation).

Now, humans are starting to recognize that beavers, though still considered pests by some, benefit landscapes in myriad ways. For instance, beaver activity can reduce erosion, create habitat for other species, and maintain wetlands.

I’m liking where this is going. Surely we are going to enjoy todays read more than hitting the ecosystem over the head with a hammer.

In fact, we often want beavers to move back into landscapes to do the engineering for us, said Emily Fairfax, an assistant professor at California State University, Channel Islands. “But how are we going to know if they are doing that,” she asked, “if we don’t even know where they are?” The answer lies in remote sensing imagery, which can help scientists identify the landscape-scale features created by beaver families.

Through a combination of fieldwork and remote sensing, Fairfax tracks where beavers reside across the western United States. To make the process more efficient, she’s working with Google Earth Engine to develop the Earth Engine Automated Geospatial Element Recognition model—aptly called EEAGER—which uses machine learning to rapidly identify beaver dams in satellite and aerial imagery.

In work presented at AGU’s Fall Meeting 2022, Fairfax found that EEAGER decreased the time needed to map beaver dams by about 80%. By rapidly finding beaver ponds and comparing their changing distribution over time, scientists like Fairfax can track beaver populations to quantify the effects of their environmental engineering.

This years ago I got a call from an environmentalist working on the google sustainability team and he mentioned the tech giant was interested in adapting their “space laser technology” to id beaver habitat from space. And I was very impressed but daunted as to how it would work or where to offer such a skill. It is wonderful to see it find a home with Dr. Fairfax and the AGU.

The amount of existing and incoming imagery isn’t an impediment for sky-based beaver surveillance. Beaver dams remain in place for 5 to 7 years on average, said Fairfax; very high resolution data that are publicly available come out at least every couple of years and sometimes more often when fires and droughts strike (which is becoming more common). Lower-resolution data sets can provide helpful imagery about once per week, filling in any gaps.

However, tracing beaver dams in such imagery is incredibly time-consuming, often taking weeks to months. With large quantities of imagery, which Fairfax noted is a pleasant problem to have, the process can become a nightmarish sea of external hard drives holding terabytes of data.

Fairfax and her colleagues at Google who specialize in neural networks, machine learning, and artificial intelligence trained the EEAGER model with 8,000 of Fairfax’s manually identified beaver dams and another 5,000 from other coauthors. Because the model was convinced that cul-de-sacs were also beaver dams, they had to train the model on “not dams” as well.

All those little engineers being watched over by all those other little engineers! It’s fun to imagine, isn’t it? My nephew works for google. Do you think he’s part of the team?

EEAGER can now sort through massive amounts of satellite and aerial imagery and identify pixels that contain evidence of beaver activity. With Google Earth Engine, the data querying and processing happen in the cloud, Fairfax explained, so she doesn’t need to add more hard drives to her already impressive stash.

Fairfax noted that the model wouldn’t work as well as it does without extensive field mapping of beaver dams (and not beaver dams), which involves wading through muck and dense vegetation. But although pond-specific beaver studies are important, looking at how beavers affect entire watersheds can now be efficiently accomplished in beaver-based research.

For regions still needing ground truthing, drones now expedite this process. However, because Fairfax’s research has been focused on the western United States, EEAGER may be biased. “We actually don’t know how good it would do in places like Canada or Minnesota,” she said, “because it hasn’t been trained there.”

Computers trained to be on the lookout for beavers! Now if only we could train HUMANS to be on the lookout for beavers in the sense of welcoming them when they arrive.

After the results from EEAGER go through quality control, calculations can address whatever the science question at hand may be. For instance, in research currently under review, Fairfax looked at whether beaver dams became fire refuges during three Rocky Mountain megafires in 2020. In some watersheds, beavers had dammed every single stream from start to end, she said. These sinuous stretches of hydrologic connectivity resulted in fire-resistant habitats. “In these beaver complexes, everything stays wet,” said Fairfax, which means fires cannot easily burn these ponds.

“I’ve gone to [wildfire] sites where I fully expected the beavers to be dead,” she recalled, but “the evening rolls around and the beavers come swimming out.”

Channel modifications, such as straightening bends to transport logs and barges, result in water being whisked rapidly downstream, said Chris Jordan, a research fisheries biologist with NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service who was not involved with the study. Beavers’ networks of dams, canals, and felled trees do the opposite, slowing water down, which—like magic (except that it’s physics)—restores river systems, he said.

Given time and opportunity, beavers will engineer an entire valley floor, which could be more than a kilometer wide, said Fairfax. That seemingly magical engineering lets water seep into the soil, allowing streams to reconnect to their floodplains. Simple or degraded ecosystems can transform into riverscapes with healthy food chains.

You know how they do, hitting the ecosystem over the head with a hammer and all. Looks like Emily can tell the difference between a beaver effect and a wildfire.Maybe she should sit down with Ken Tape.

For example, because endangered salmon and similar fish species are born and die in fresh water, they depend on healthy river conditions to complete their life cycle, Jordan said. Growing more fish requires ants, earthworms, and other floodplain-dwelling invertebrates to become fish fodder. But for that part of the food chain to exist, landscapes around rivers need to be wet at least some of the time. Beavers create the necessary wetland environments that then become biodiversity hot spots.

Regular snapshots of beaver ponds from space, combined with algorithms doing the tedious work of examining millions of kilometers of streams, means new ways to quantify the impact beavers are having on the landscape, Jordan said.

Yes. You just keep algorithm-ing away and beavers will keep beavering away and maybe some day humans will finally understand why they should appreciate them.

I for one can hardly wait.

“LIKE HITTING THE ECOSYSTEM OVER THE HEAD WITH A HAMMER”

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beavers, Beavers and climate change January 4, 2023

There’s a wonderful news story about our friend that I wanted to share this morning, but once again it will have to wait for me to comment on the massive castor-catastropshizing that’s going on EVERYWHERE under our noses. Literally people I haven’t spoke to in a decade are writing me in a panic asking whether this could possibly be true.

Imagine the worst headline you could possibly write, have a contest with all your friends and then sit down with the writers of White Lotus and a thesaurus to make it significantly worse, then double it, and you might come close.

Photos from space show 11,000 beavers are wreaking havoc on the Alaskan tundra as savagely as wildfire

Just stop. All by itself that’s enough for now. Beavers wreaking havoc AS SAVAGELY AS WILDFIRE. Could anything be more terrifying to a country that has grown terrified of fires? I can barely force myself to go on. But I must.

Beavers are taking over the Alaskan tundra, completely transforming its waterways, and accelerating climate change in the Arctic.

The changes are so sudden and drastic that they’re clearly visible from space.

As the Arctic tundra warms, woody plants are growing along its rivers and streams, creating perfect habitats for beavers.

As the furry rodents move into these waterways, they make themselves at home by doing what they do best: chewing and carrying wood to build dams, and clogging rapid rivers and streams to make lush ponds.

Those dam lush beavers with their lush beaver pond ways. They just swim in like they own the place and without so much as a “by-your-leave” start making things better for all these other species we didn’t invite.

Yes that’s EXACTLY like wildfire.

Tape and his colleagues assessed aerial photos from the early 1950s and found no signs of beaver presence in Alaska’s Arctic tundra. The first signs of beavers appeared in 1980 imagery. In satellite imagery from the 2000s and 2010s, the beaver ponds doubled.

Can I just pause and point out that after the devastation of the fur trade started to wear off EVERYONE noticed an increase in the beaver population. And it took from about 1840-1970 for beavers to start showing up in the rest of the world. Too bad you don;t have any aerial photos back from 1600. Oh right, there were no satellites or cameras or air travel them. Never mind. I’m sure you’re right and it looked the same as in the 1950’s..

“All of western Alaska is now really densely populated with beaver ponds,” Tape said.

That’s consistent with what Indigenous people in the area have observed. It’s especially obvious on the ground in towns like Kotzebue, where there were no beavers 20 years ago, and now they’re everywhere, Tape said.

So he was floored when he saw beaver-engineering projects completely transforming landscapes across Alaska.

“It was like hitting the ecosystem over the head with a hammer,” he said.

The severity and speed of beavers’ footprint on the landscape, as seen from space, is more akin to wildfire, Tape said.

HITTING THE ECOSYSTEM OVER THE HEAD WITH A HAMMER!!!!!!!!! and MORE AKIN TO WILDFIRE!!!!!!!!!

Ken Tape HIMSELF is responsible for that headline. Here I was trying to be charitable and blaming the copy girl. But no. He really made those words with his own mouth.

The US Department of Metaphor just released an alert reading that Ken is at large and was himself a failed candidate in their “comparative retraining” program. As an undergrad he was known to storm through their lecture halls reading essays about how his “Christmas dinner was as tasty as a box of nails” and how his “wife’s face was more beautiful than a lethal spider in the grass.”

I suppose a beaver’s effect on the ecosystem is kind of like being hit with a hammer. A magical hammer that makes everything you broke yesterday form suddenly back together as if it never happened.

Like I wish I could use on this article for instance.

“If you like the Arctic the way it was, the old Arctic, then beavers are bad for that. Whereas if you kind of embrace the new Arctic, well, then beavers are one of your champions,” Tape said.

If you like the arctic the way it was TOO BAD BECAUSE WE HAVE BEEN RELEASING CARBON FOR 100 YEARS and didn’t do anything to stop or slow down even when we could have and now its screwed so there. Gosh I wish there was something that could help make it more livable.

As temperatures rise, the permafrost thaws and releases the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.

That’s the one beaver impact that Tape’s team is sure of: Beaver ponds are thawing the surrounding permafrost, exacerbating the climate crisis. Just how much, is not yet clear.

More and more beavers will likely spread through the tundra in the future, continuing to move north as the Arctic warms.

“All they have to do is swim downstream,” Tape said. “If they find the habitat there — in other words, if it’s warm enough, if the shrubs are tall enough, if there’s enough unfrozen water in winter — then they’re going to forever change that place.”

Ben Goldfarb agrees this is the worst headline he has ever read but says he has talked at length with Ken and knows he is no beaver hater. He thinks maybe he means “Hammer” in a good way. Like nothing ever gets built without them.

Hmm. I’m doubtful the average reader will take it that way. And so I’m going to end by offering a visual comparison to show how despite everything they’ve read to the contrary, the effect of beavers and the effect of a a wildfire are actually quite different.

It’s really pretty subtle. Let me know if can spot it.

MORE SPEED BUMPS NEEDED

heidi08 Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Flooding, Beavers and groundwater January 3, 2023

It appears we have devolved such that a single year’s rainfall decides to come in a matter of days. You look out the window at another wet day, you start to think, “GEE that’s a lot of clean water falling from the sky that will go down the streets and gutters and storm drains right out to the bay”.

And you want that water out of your way, of course, and off your driveway and lawns and schoolyards so you’re grateful for the drains and the pavement. But you also have in the back of your head this nagging sensation that “I bet we’re going to miss that water in July when we the entire Bay Area is looking like dehydrated fruit” Or maybe “Burning up entirely.”

Then one suddenly has a thought “Hey wouldn’t it be cool if there was some way to keep that water in the communities where it’s needed before it disappears out to sea? Like some kind of natural little water holding structures that slowed things down and helped the water seep into the soil and soak into the ground where it can stay cool til we need it later?“.

I know it sounds crazy, but I’ve read that we used to have lots and lots of these things that made little ponds all along our streams. Like some kind of natural champagne fountain constantly trickling down all the stacked glasses so that no cup ever went dry even when it was far, far away from the original bottle.

We used to have this:

THE MISSING KRISTIN LINK REVEALED

heidi08 Beaver Art January 2, 2023

Well it’s officially an old new year now. And very little beaver news to report other than more outlets carrying the fake story about beavers living in the dam and destroying wildlife populations. I thought I would introduce you to a new (to me) talent in the illustration world and show you the remarkable work by Kristin Link.

*Wetland illustration for Chena River Interpretive Signs: Kristen Link*

Kristin Link is a fine artist and science illustrator inspired by the natural world. Her drawings, paintings, and mixed media works connect people to nature while inspiring curiosity and learning.

You can encounter Kristin’s work on interpretive signs on the side of the Glenn Highway, inside National Park visitor centers, inside schools, and in books and magazines that teach about Alaskan natural history. Kristin has exhibited her field sketches and fine art at the Alaska State Museum as well as other locations around the state and she has received grants from the Rasmuson Foundation and the Alaska State Council on the Arts. Kristin has always been inspired by spending time in the backcountry. In the past, she has worked as a backcountry guide, caretaker, and trail maintainer.

Kristin received a graduate certificate in science illustration from California State University Monterey Bay and a BA in Conservation Biology and Studio Art from Middlebury College. She was born in Brussels, Belgium, and grew up in the more urban areas near New York City and London, but now lives in an off-the-grid cabin near McCarthy, Alaska on the edge of the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park & Preserve, which is Ahtna Athabaskan land.

I love just about everything I’ve seen of Kristen’s work. She reminds me of an American version of Lizzie Harper. I imagine the two with with very similar backpacks full of feathers, seed pods and a few little rodent skulls leftover from their last sketching exercise.

I like the beavers in her wetlands illustration but I want to see more of them. I’m thinking she might need some encouragement? Maybe from some kinds of beaver nonprofit stateside…hmm.