It’s been a weird week. I’m been racing at a great rate trying to remember all the details about how to possibly throw a beaver festival and terrified there is never enough time or energy to get it done. Then I wake up to the same predictable article we have read from the north for the past few months. And was shocked to one particular difference.
See if you can spot the addition.
Experts sound alarm as thousands of beavers migrate north
Concerned researchers held their first meeting this month to discuss a catastrophic group arriving in the North: beavers.
The Arctic Beaver Observation Network, an Alaskan group, seeks to coordinate research and observation of the emerging threat to permafrost and ecosystems in Alaska, Canada, Europe and Russia.
At a two-day virtual conference, scientists, Indigenous leaders, land managers and local observers heard speakers discuss the proliferation of big and small beaver dams from Nunavik to Inuvik.
Ya ya ya, You read this novel already right? Beavers are moving in, causing global warming and killing all the salmon. Tell me something I don’t already know.
Ayles said at-risk species like the Dolly Varden char will be especially affected.
“The Dolly Varden char really depend on certain individual streams. They feed in the summer in the Beaufort Sea but in the winter, it’s too cold for them and they need to return to the Babbage River,” he said.
“If even one beaver dam blocked them from returning over the winter, it could in a very short time completely destroy this unique fish population.”
Yeah those dam beavers, ruining things for fish. You know how they are. Of course the article mentions more incentives for trapping!!!
And then they surprising mention this:
Heidi Perryman, founder of beaver advocacy group Worth a Dam and organizer of an annual beaver festival in California, published an open letter in response to an interview given by Helen Wheeler on US public radio network NPR.
Wheeler, a wildlife ecologist based in the UK, gave a presentation at the Arctic Beaver Observation Network’s March conference and is planning to conduct her next study in the NWT.
For the past 20 years, Perryman wrote, NOAA Fisheries – the US agency responsible for fisheries – has been “researching and reporting that beaver dams are in fact crucial to salmonids and provide deep, unfrozen pools where juveniles can grow and fatten.”
Her letter continued: “Obviously, as the planet warms, many species are extending their range looking for suitable forage or habitat. The newly beaver-created ponds will help sustain an ecosystem that we have forced to become nomadic with our failure to stop burning fossil fuels.
“What remains stunning to me is how eager NPR and others are to blame beavers for extending the effects of a warming climate. I’m assuming that there will be similar reports blaming glaciers when the oceans rise?”
You know how it is. You trod along doing the same thing every day since time was invented and arguing the same points to the same people over and over and you think “Does it really matter? Does any of this really matter? Am I making even the faintest appearance of a dent in the teflon surface of beaver ignorance that manages most of this planet?
And then something happens. And it’s all a little big different. I’m not saying the war has been won but we’ve definitely changed the battlefield. I know readers of this website will remember that Placer County in California kills the most beavers of anywhere in the state. I’ve talked to them, railed at them, met with their CDFW and presented to their fish and game commission.
This morning this site went active on FB. Go like it fast before the universe catches up to us.
