This is November’s issue of Cricket, a darling publication for preschoolers. Do you think it’s cute enough?
Beaver bicycle wizard Robert Rust spotted it for me and suggested I go look up the article. I did what I always do and beg friends to find it for me. Robin of Napa found the inside.
Which means preschoolers everywhere will already be smarter than the New York Times! Because this year it reported that beavers live INSIDE the dam.
And because the word SNUG and the pictures are so cuddly I have a new phrase to go with it. Bear with me. “Coorie Doon“ is a scottish saying which means to snuggle down in the covers and get cozy. It’s what mom’s would tell their babies in the cradle for centuries. And it’s ironically also what coal miners had to do in the low mines where they worked to navigate the shafts Songwriter Matt McGinn combineed the two in the 60’s with a song that has melted my heart all week. Please let it melt yours.
You know sometimes the science site phys.org prints articles are obviously about beavers without saying anything about the beavers themselves? You know they’ll be some headline like “coppicing trees makes more habitat for songbirds” or “Dense woody material piled at intervals in streams creates a better invertebrate population which leads to fatter fish“. It’s kind of become a running joke around here. But this is the most egregious example I believe I’ve ever seen.
Adding multiple smaller wetlands to the landscape can make large reservoirs more effective at flood control, according to a new study from Tulane University published in Environmental Research Letters.
Using the Brazos River basin in Texas as a case study, researchers modeled more than 140 wetland scenarios and compared performance against existing dams. They found a series of decentralized wetlands provide significant cumulative flood reduction and additional storage.
“Our analysis provides science on how to plan nature-based solutions to improve efficiency of built infrastructure,” said lead investigator Reepal Shah, a research scientist at Tulane University’s Bywater Institute. “Properly sited wetland portfolios can provide comparable flood mitigation on a per-storage basis.”
You are kidding me! Multiple small wetlands are better than one big one? Well how the heck are we supposed to find funding for that? It’s not like we can just magically make them appear or that money grows on willow trees!
Key findings of the study include:
Multiple small wetlands offer greater cumulative benefit than a single large wetland of the same total area, highlighting the value of distributed natural infrastructure.
Wetlands ranked by flood storage capacity and sequentially added to portfolios provide diminishing returns after approximately 30 sites, indicating not all wetlands perform equally.
The top 18 wetlands could expand the basin’s flood pool by 10% of the largest reservoir’s capacity, showcasing wetlands’ potential as complementary storage.
An index comparing impact per unit storage found well-designed wetlands efficacy is comparable to existing dams in flood control efficacy.
“This suggests wetland construction may relieve pressure on aging reservoir systems if done strategically,” said John Sabo, co-author and director of the Bywater Institute. “The findings can help practitioners identify robust wetland portfolios to sequence implementation and maximize gains.”
The modeling framework couples established land surface and hydrodynamic models to assess flood mitigation outcomes under different wetland scenarios. The researchers plan to further refine the approach and engage stakeholders on utilizing natural infrastructure to improve basin flood resilience.
The findings have important implications for flood management strategies globally. By incorporating strategically placed wetlands into existing infrastructure, communities can enhance their resilience to flooding events. This approach not only provides additional floodstorage capacity but also promotes the preservation and restoration of natural ecosystems.
You are pulling my leg! You mean that dotting wetlands around in areas can reduce the impacts of flooding caused by climate change? Gosh!
If only there were some free way to create wetlands without paying for them…you know like some kind of thing that could make them and maintain them and fix them for free….
Here’s Mike Callahan’s talk at state of the beaver “the last 25 years”. It’s a fun look back at how far we’ve come, Its not quite chronological but I have been keeping a daily record for most of that time so I’m a little picky with dates. It leaves out things and people I would have mentioned like Sherri Tippie and Mary Obrien and the PBS documentary and includes stuff I might not have, but every historian puts their own spin on things, don’t they?
The beavers at Northwestern are some of the most famous in the world. They’ve been showing up on an off for 20 years now fairly predictable reactions from the student body and the administrators. coming of the heels of the midwestern beaver summit this time might just be different.
Beavers appear to have returned to Northwestern University’s lagoon, longtime Evanston resident Geri Joy discovered recently during one of her morning walks.
Joy spotted one on Nov. 12 by the bridge that runs over the lagoon and connects the campus to the lakefront. She captured the moment on her phone and even had the presence of mind to shoot a short video, which she later posted on Facebook.
“He did that little somersault for me,” she said, talking about the beaver sighting later. “He was quite the performer.”
Joy’s was the first documented sighting of a beaver in the lagoon since three beavers were found dead in that body of water on July 17, 2021.
At the time, community members told the RoundTable they were heartbroken over the deaths, with some saying the university should have worked with the county more rapidly to get a necropsy (autopsy for animals), which might have determined the cause.
As a woman who drove several dead bodies of beaver in her subaru to the animal necropsy facility at UC Davis allow me to say I understand the inclination but I’d start my search with a FOIA request and look backwards from there.
The most likely cause of beaver death is human in nature.
Joy said she was walking her dog, Bella, when she reached the Northwestern lagoon bridge, where she typically looks to both sides.
“I saw this long brown thing that I thought was a log until I watched it and realized it was the beaver,” she said.
Joy, retired from the Allstate Insurance Company and a resident of Evanston since 1972, had her phone with her.
“I take pictures every morning when I walk, but I don’t usually see beavers,” she said.
“I’m not quite sure where it came from,” she said of the beaver. “It’s probably two and a half miles there from the canal.”
Two and a half whole miles! A beaver would have to have webbed feet and waterproof fur to swim that far. Oh wait. It does!
She remembered seeing beavers in the area 20 years ago, and Northwestern putting up a metal mesh around all their trees after the animals had gnawed a very mature willow tree to a stump.
Beavers might take one of a number of paths that end up at the lagoon, said Chris Anchor, wildlife specialist for Cook County. Anchor said he had offered to help arrange the necropsy after the dead beavers were discovered in 2021, but the bodies had not been preserved in ice and were too degraded for the procedure.
He said recent research has shown the role they play in increasing climate resilience, improving water quality, increasing biodiversity and creating floodwater storage capacity.
Both Goldfarb and Philip were presenters in September in a virtual summit presented by the Illinois Beaver Alliance that drew more than 700 people.
“The summit is a first step toward putting together a network of Midwestern stakeholders to spread the word about the incredible ecological importance of beavers and the modern tools for managing human-beaver conflicts nonlethally,” said Margaret Frisbie, executive director of the Friends of the Chicago River, which co-hosted the summit. “Beavers deserve our support, protection, attention and respect, which are all the more important today in the face of the climate crisis and biodiversity loss.”
Whooo hoo hoo. You just can’t put that genie back in the bottle. Once the beaver summit comes to town there are just too many people who care about the things beavers do to slide things past them. People like Rachel.
“Beavers are the original nature-based solution,” said Northwestern University graduate Rachel Schick Siegel, who formed a nonprofit group called the Illinois Beaver Alliance, which advocates for beavers and educates the public about the ecosystem they represent. “They purify water and they cull out the phosphorus and nitrogen, which, of course, in our agricultural state is a big deal.”
She and other neighbors formed a Glenview Beavers Fan Club a few years ago after beavers found living in a retention pond were threatened. She said steps can be taken to protect specimen trees in areas where beavers lodge by planting willow and dogwood trees in the area, “so that you give them a decoy.”
“Beavers are really incredible,” she said. “They are so adaptable. They don’t have to migrate seasonally to find food because they store their own food cache. … In Colorado, the beavers were cleaning mine runoff out of an abandoned mine.”
I’m curious how this chapter will play out. Her cell video which I can’t embed shows a fairly youngish beaver. I doubt very much that he’s on his own.
They’ve got to get it right eventually. Maybe this time…
As you well know I tend to spend fall flipping thru the internet(s) looking for pretty things so I can ask people politely to please donate to the beaver festival. My rule on asking tends to be not until February when the sting of the holidays has started to wear off but yesterday I saw this and everything changed.
The image is on a ceramic coaster created by an artist named Karolina in Poland. There four in all but I think this is the most lovely. Of course I wrote her right away and told her that was the loveliest beaver image I have ever seen and about the festival. I also posted her creation around the beaver world and know it made an impression. How could it not?She has other designs too and plans to offer more. Go check them out, Karolina says that she lives right near a forest in Poland and that when she saw beavers herself they were magical. Which makes perfect sense because what that design is.
