The entire UK is doing back flips  for beavers these days. Every headline I check has some story about a charity or nonprofit arguing that we need to release more beavers in the countyside. I’m excited for their excitement.

And this is coming soon…

It turns out I was able to find a handful of people that could send me the 1972 paper sighted in the recent climate change paper that referred to the giant beaver building dams.

THE GIANT BEAVER: A PREHISTORIC MEMORY?

by Jane C. Beck Middlebury, Vermont

It’s a fascinating read discussing many tribes and many stories about Gluskap (the creator) regretting his creation and attacking the giant beaver because it built a dam that was so big an important region was flooded. Either he throws something at the beaver monster as it tries to run away that become an important natural feature of the landscape or the beavers bones themselves become the sheer out cropping of rocks that mark the area. Just your ordinary explainer myth with a giant beaver thrown in.

Except in this case the mythical beaver was verified by archeologists.

This was my favorite story, from the Passamaquoddy tribe located in the Maine/Canada region.

“Here we are not told that the giant beaver is particularly destructive, but just that Gluskap dislikes him and is where he shouldn’t be” Typically these tales regarded the giant animals as the “older brothers”  of their smaller descendants that followed. And they were always careful of the feelings of these spiritual “older brothers”when hunting their siblings and gave thanks to them for their providence.

The beaver was sensitive to mention of his death. When the hunter returned from beaver killing he did not tell how many he had taken but silently threw chips of wood, corresponding to the number of animals killed, to his wife or companion to inform of his success (Speck 1940:44).

Imagine if this were true today. You could recognize trappers on sight by their bulging pockets stuffed with chips because they killed so many. I almost like it better than the permitting system currently issued by CDFW.

I also appreciated this:

Among the Montagnais the beaver were believed to possess supernatural powers, enabling them to transform themselves into other animal forms or to disappear “by penetrating the ground, by rising aloft into the air, or by diving into the depths of lake or stream and remaining any length of time desired” (Speck 1935b: 112).

Makes perfect sense to me.

Okay, late start today but I’ve been busy. News is that Emily Fairfax  of Minnesota and Cherie Westbrook of Alberta just teamed up to publish a new article about beaver evolution and climate change. and its a doozy.

The Ecology and Evolution of Beavers: Ecosystem Engineers that Ameliorate Climate Change

Beavers, Castor canadensis in North America and Castor fiber in Eurasia, are widely referred to as nature’s engineers due to their ability to rapidly transform diverse landscapes into dynamic wetland ecosystems. Few other organisms exhibit the same level of control over local geomorphic, hydrologic, and ecological conditions. Though freshwater ecosystems are particularly vulnerable to changing climate, beavers and their wetland homes have persisted throughout the Northern Hemisphere during numerous prior periods of climatic change. Some research suggests that the need to create stable, climate-buffered habitats at high latitudes during the Miocene directly led to the evolution of dam construction. As we follow an unprecedented trajectory of anthropogenic warming, we have the unique opportunity to describe how beaver ecosystem engineering ameliorates climate change today. Here, we review how beavers create and maintain local hydroclimatic stability and influence larger-scale biophysical ecosystem processes in the context of past, present, and future climate change.

Translation: Beavers adapted to the changing climate lots of times before and can help us AGAIN if we let them. I was especially interested in the writing about Castoroides adapting dam building to cope with the great ice age. Which interested me as a theory. In general I’ve always read that the species couldn’t dig build dams = so the fact that Canadensis could meant that the species survived and Castoroides went extinct.