Category: Beaver Chewing

AS IF WASHINGTON DC DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH PROBLEMS ALREADY

heidi08 Beaver Chewing February 28, 2021

Beavers nibble on cherry tree at Tidal Basin

A cherry tree became a meal for a local beaver along the Tidal Basin in D.C.
The National Park Service said staff found a Yoshino cherry tree that had been chewed on in October, and quickly narrowed down the list of suspects to a North American Beaver.

Beavers are active in the Potomac year-round, but are most often spotted in the area in the spring and fall. “Sometimes beavers chew on branches and trees to get material for building a dam, but most of the time, they’re just eating wood and bark; the majority of their diet,” the National Park Service said on Friday.

To prevent another tree from getting chowed down, park staff made the area “as uninviting as possible to beavers.”

The National Park Service put up fencing around the base of the healthy trees and around the nearby sea wall on the Tidal Basin that not only stops debris from washing ashore, but deters beavers from getting up on the bank.

Well I was happy to see that last paragraph anyway. Apparently they have some idea how to handles these things besides trapping.

The park service natural resource team and arborists decided to leave the tall stump in place as habitat for woodpeckers, sapsuckers and other wildlife.They removed the top of the tree and the branches so the tree wouldn’t be a falling hazard.

Okay then,

Out friend Virginia of Fairfield is keeping watch over her beavers there and posted this fun video on FB a couple days ago. Apparently the beaver is startled by something, It looks like a cobra but maybe is a frog with a shadow. What do you think?

Isn’t that a hoot? Here is the thing that made me feel even better.

377 total enrolled
42 USDA
36 CDFW
10 RCD
6 DOT
5 BLM
3 NOAA
3 FWS
3 NPS+Ca state parks

Total Agency 109

Total California 181

3 AK
4 AL
2 AZ
10 CO
1 FL
1 ID
2 MA
1 MD
1 MN
1 NC
2 NV
1 NY
10 OR
1 PA
1 TX
2 Utah
1 VA
5 WA
1 WY

1 Spain
6 UK
2 Canada

Never say we’re hiding our light under a bushel!

PSST…BEAVERS MATTER. PASS IT ON!

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver Chewing, Tree-Wrap Rap February 25, 2021

Oh lets read an article about someone who enjoins seeing beavers coming back to their city for a change. Anyone?

Natural Selections: News flash: Beavers in Roxborough!

One of the feel-good stories on the environmental scene is the rewilding of large cities like Philadelphia, where suddenly peregrine falcons nest in church steeples and on Delaware River bridges, bald eagles pull large fish out of the Schuylkill River, and coyotes amble down Domino Lane.

In that vein, members of the Roxborough-Manayunk Conservancy were somewhat startled to discover that the restoration plantings they’ve doggedly placed along the Schuylkill River have been devoured by… beavers! Wait, beavers in Roxborough?

Once extirpated– a fancy word meaning locally extinct – across Pennsylvania, hunted because their fur was remarkably valuable and because we did not appreciate their ability to rearrange landscapes to their own ends. But beavers have been returning to our state over the last century, and have been seen along Tacony and Pennypack Creeks since about 2008. And now they have taken up residence in the Schuylkill River and Manayunk Canal around Flat Rock Dam.

Now that’s what I’m talking about. Beaver perserverance and recovery where nobody would have suspected.And here they are, washing up on the Schuylkill River. Just in case you didn’t know lots of East Coast river names end in ‘kill’ because Kille is middle dutch for river. Got that?

“I first noticed beavers and their lodge in the winter of 2018,” observed Suzanne Hagner, Roxborough resident and member of the Roxborough-Manayunk Conservancy, “as I rode out the Schuylkill River Trail towards Shawmont. I could see where they had worn down a path into the woods on the far side of the trail and I guessed that was where they were going for food.” The lodge was near Flat Rock Dam, and they have been spotted– and photographed – as far down as Lock Street and as far up as past Shawmont Avenue, both in the canal and along the river.

Suzanne has become a regular reader and poster on this very blog. She recently met up with our other PA beaver friend to learn about protecting those trees the group is replanting. Because all roads lead to Rome.

They famously cut down saplings and trees with their chisel-like teeth, building dams and lodges with the branches, chewing the inner bark of trees as their favored food source. That tree-cutting, of course, can sometimes interfere with our own good work.

“Beavers have good taste in trees,” Tom added, tongue in cheek. “They ate over 60 trees we planted along the canal last year. But we adjusted. Last spring, we painted the uneaten trees with latex paint mixed with a lot of sand,” the grit distasteful to the large rodents. “Many of the damaged trees grew out again this summer,” he continued. “We wrapped those trees in cages this fall. We installed 130 cages along the canal near both sides of Fountain Street.”

Yup. That’s what happens. Someone who cares about the trees plants trees and someone who tends the creek eats them. It’s the way of the world.

The Conservancy recently hosted a walk-through of the area with a self-described “beaver believer” they brought in from central PA, and their takeaway was similar. “The other approach which I believe we will have to do,” continued Kay, “is to rethink our plantings. We need to put in more herbaceous plants on the impacted banks and see if we can add things like willows to the upper wetland areas to keep them in that area, which is better suited for them and for us.”

Yes please. Bring in willow. Because they are used to regrowing after beaver nibbles. And have done so for centuries.

Suzanne Hagner has been reading up on beaver, passing books along to Conservancy members. “They are amazingly skilled at creating waterways and irrigation systems that lead to ecological health,” she said. “Our consultant offered that the return of the beavers was a very good sign in our area, as the beaver is an ecological system in itself. I had lived in Washington state, and had heard that beavers were being reintroduced in eastern Washington to help curb the arid areas that are prone to wildfires.”

Anything else you’re reading, ahem, Suzanne? That helps you learn why beavers matter? I’m happy that there are more believers in Mayayunk and am looking forward to the people they persuade and educate in tern.

Pass it on.

MUSKRATS DROOL AND BEAVERS RULE ON MARS?

heidi08 Beaver Chewing, Beaver ecological impact February 19, 2021

The Muskrat Council was upset by my post yesterday suggesting that the little rodents don’t engineer their environment as much as some might think. There was even objection on the beaver management facebook group where one muskrat believer posted a host of research arguing that muskrat alter the invertebrates of the watershed and provoke changes.

Okay. I’m willing to attest that muskrat varied diet results in muskrat droppings that contain fertilizers that change rivers. And I admit that sometimes swans nest on their little reed huts to lay their eggs in safety. Will that suffice? Yesterday the muskrat appreciation lobby was feeling so threatened by my post that they released this report:

Chewing underwater and the many feats of the magnificent muskrat

Can you close your lips behind your teeth? No, you can’t. Because you’re not a muskrat. Bet you can’t close your ears when you dive underwater either. There’s a lot more to the magnificent muskrat than meets the beady little eye. So much so that this is part one of a two-part series wherein Martha Foley and Dr. Curt Stager talk about muskrats.

Timing is everything. Let me know the name of your publicist, muskrats. Because we could use someone like you on our side.

In the meantime I’m just going to carry on appreciating the creatures we believe are worth a dam and post this lovely video by Sheri Harstein documenting her work with the sierra beavers.Turn the sound up and make sure you watch full screen. It’s that lovely.

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Did you watch the Mars landing yesterday? It was must see TV. And no finally we might get some answers to the question posed in this 1930 issue of popular science.

THE BEAVER IN WINTER

heidi08 Beaver Chewing February 16, 2021

Last night I watched the news about the cold snap hitting much of the country. All of Texas and parts of Louisiana and Mississippi are under a snow warning. Which has never happened. Many parts of the country are experiencing temperatures FIFTY degrees colder than usual. Stunning.

Which because I have a one track mind made me think about beavers.

That means of course that places where the stream never freezes will freeze and beavers that have never needed to cache their food will find themselves without a way to eat. And for how long? I mean places that are usually frozen in winter will be colder, I get it. And beavers can manage. But what about the places like Dallas and Santa Fe?

What happens to those beavers?

Let’s hope they either have lots of stored fat OR lots of rhisomes and roots to eat under the icein the meantime. And while we’re worrying about the beavers we should stop to worry about the humans too because that’s not anything they expected or signed on for. Frozen pipes and snowy roads are just not something you plan for in Corpus Christi.

For those beavers that can forage in the normal ways their are other obstacles to contend with. The Miistakis institute just launched a study to figure out the value of abraisive painting in keep a beaver from chewing trees.

I’m curious about what they will find, aren’t you?

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BEAVERS AND DISHABITUATION

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver Chewing, Beavers, Video January 21, 2021

Yesterday was so delightful I slept in an extra hour! If this keeps up you may start getting an afternoon beaver post! It also gave me free time to think about what I – the child retired psychologist – want most to say about Mike Dugout’s outstanding newest film.

I want to teach you about “Dishabituation”.

Psychologists want to learn things about children and infants but sometimes they can’t tell us everything we want to know and we have to find other ways to get the data. For example, we’d like very much to know about what babies LEARN and what they REMEMBER of what they learned. But we can’t ask them of course.

One way around this is to observe when babies are “surprised”. Because this allows us to inter that they had already learned to expect the world to be a certain way and were startled to find out when it wasn’t. This is called “Dishabituation” for obvious reasons. And researchers do all kinds of clever experiments designed to show when it happens and thus prove infant learning has previously occurred.

(If you thought that babies weren’t learning about the world think back to that day when you’re kid dropped his bottle 43 times on the kitchen floor and you had to bend and pick it up every single time. S/he was discovering gravity that day. Because at a certain point babies have discovered that things usually fall DOWN when you drop them. If you rigged up a study so that bottles could float away when a baby dropped them you would find out whether dishabituation occurred. And depending on the age of the baby I’m willing to bet it would.)

Which brings us to one of the things I love BEST about beavers. They are entirely unflappable. They very rarely act surprised. All the researchers with all the clipboards in all the world waiting to spot dishabtuation behind the two way glass would be waiting for hours without success. Because it almost never happens. I watched beavers at close range for a decade and I saw one beaver once react with surprise. And that was a kit. Mostly they just roll with whatever comes. And its not because they haven’t learned about the world. Because they have.

Mike from Saskatchewan shared the PERFECT film to see what beavers know about the world. And if ever there was going to be a chance for observing beaver dishabituation this is it. And I invite you to notice how entirely UNFLAPPABLE the beaver is instead.

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Isn’t that wonderful? That beaver obviously KNOWS that chopping down a tree should make it fall. So it understands gravity as well as your infant with the bottle. But that tree clearly isn’t falling. And the beaver tries a little more. But exhibits no surprise, And then nibbles a little something. Tries again. Gives up again. Tries a different way. And then quits altogether.

It’s almost like you can hear his inner monologue saying, huh, Some fuckers don’t fall. Oh well.

When you think about the life of a beaver and its dependence on water it makes sense. A beaver needs to know about hydrology and physics. But it also needs to understand the most important concept in fluvial geomorphology that humans fail to learn.

Things don’t always do what you expect them to.

I asked Mike to check back on the tree the next night and he confirmed that it had eventually been hauled away. Because physics or no, beavers are persistent.