Category: Beaver Behavior

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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THIS JUST IN: RESEARCH CONFIRMS WHAT YOU ALREADY KNEW

heidi08 Beaver Behavior February 11, 2021

More research from the beaver-eating National Park. Apparently they just can’t get enough information about how wolves stalk and hunt beavers. It’s soooooooooooooooo fascinating. Recently they were started lo find out what any single human who has watched beavers in person for more than three nights figured out all on their ownsome.

Beavers can’t see very well! They mostly spot you by scent and hearing! Wow that’s surprising to everyone that isn’t us!

First Proper Analysis Of Wolf Ambush Behavior Reveals Beavers Are Really Quite Blind

New research published in the journal Behavioral Ecology has carried out the first-ever systematic analysis of wolf ambushing behavior, and the results have revealed new insights into these intelligent predators and the total lack of hazard perception skills among beavers. As part of a growing body of work from the Voyageurs Wolf Project, this new study continues to overturn long-held ideas as to how wolves hunt, showing that they’ve got more tricks in their arsenal than simply outrunning and exhausting their prey.

While pack hunting for large animals like moose and bison is common in winter, wolves in the dense boreal forests in North America and Eurasia capitalize on food availability in summer by hunting beavers on their own. As the video below demonstrates, beavers don’t have the best eyesight when it comes to spotting wolves-in-waiting, but an animal that spends so little time on land is still not an easy kill. So, how do the wolves do it?

Gee don’t tell me. Do wait up wind and get really really quiet? Even children visiting the beaver pond figured that one out.

Over 15,000 hours of field research and 962 attempted predation events later, the team had their answer. Of the total number of successful beaver hunts (214), 89-94 percent of the ambushing sites were downwind meaning the beavers had a very slim chance of picking up the wolf’s scent. What beavers lack in vision they make up for with their noses and ears, and previous studies have shown they use scent to keep a (figurative) eye out for predators. While most of the observations didn’t put beavers on the menu, this isn’t to say that most wolves were terrible at hunting them.

“We suspect that at most of these ambushing attempts, wolves never even encountered a beaver,” said lead author on the paper Dr Thomas Gable in an email to IFLScience. “Predicting where beavers will be on land at any given time is challenging and we suspect that wolves often waited in areas and never had a beaver come near.”

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Well now that’s a kind of sweet video actually, I suspect the reason they didn’t leave the ‘decoy wolves’ out longer was that beavers would have hauled them away and used them it to stuff a hole in their dam.

“Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.

Hamlet

When hunting beavers, it seems that the wolves appreciated that patience is a virtue as many would lay in wait for anywhere from four to 12 hours for a beaver to appear, with one determined wolf waiting for an incredible 30 hours. But when it comes to this particular breed of prey, success isn’t as simple as the element of surprise.

“While beavers might seem like easy prey to catch and kill, that is far from the truth,” Gable said. “Killing a beaver once it is on land is no easy feat. Beavers are basically football-shaped hunks of muscle with an incredibly powerful bite and sharp teeth. Not to mention, beavers rarely go far from water. All beavers need to do to evade a wolf is reach the water.” This, Gable explained, is a likely second contributor to the large number of failed ambush attempts.

Yeah well, you don’t bring down a TREE with a week jaw. Sheesh.

COMPETENCE REARS ITS LEVEL HEAD

heidi08 BDA's, beavers and wolves January 23, 2021

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I’m sure you feel it too. That lightness and sense of freedom. The feeling that you get when after a long climb you just eased the sweaty backpack off your shoulders and suddenly feel like you might float directly upwards. The dreadful suspense of the last four years where at any moment you would read that hibernating bears could be shot in their caves with their young. or that wolves could be shot from helicopters, or that coal mine tailings could be dumped into drinking water is all suddenly gone. And replaced by responsibility an competence.

And stories like these. Posted the day Biden was inaugurated.

Human-made beaver dams likely save natural wetland from extinction

A natural wetland in southeast Oregon was likely saved from extinction thanks to four years of collaboration and some human-made beaver dams.

In the Oregon high desert, about seven miles northeast of the town of Crane, Alder Creek bubbles to the surface surrounded by sagebrush and juniper trees.

“It’s really the only source of water out in a long way,” he said.

“Really it was 99 percent about preventing the loss of the wetland,” said Lindsay Davies, the BLM fisheries biologist who helped manage the project.

You know what I’m thinking right? If the new head of the Bureau of Land Management understands that human made beaver dams save essential wetlands then they know that beav

“It’s amazing how green everything is and how much wetland – it’s a bigger wetland than we had originally anticipated,” said Davies.

BLM wildlife biologist Travis Miller thinks beavers will have a better chance of escaping predation in the deeper water and have the potential for long-term habitat.

“It would be really good to see those populations rebound and establish in these systems,” said Miller.

Full list of project partners: Malheur County Watershed Council; Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board; Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation; Grant County Soil & Water Conservation District; U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Headquarters; Burns Paiute Tribe; The Nature Conservancy; Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife; adjacent private landowners; and grazing allotment permittees.

Whoo hoo! We’re still operating under an “acting director” but it’s wayyyy better than it used to be. And it’s not just BLM. The same thing is going on at FWS too.

Former FWP Director Appointed To U.S. Fish And Wildlife Service

Former Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Director Martha Williams was appointed on Wednesday as second-in-command at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the Biden Administration. William’s replacement within Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte’s cabinet was also named today.

As principal deputy director of FWS, Williams will oversee a federal agency tasked with managing wildlife and habitat across the country, and in charge of more than 150 million acres of land in the National Wildlife Refuge System. The agency also administers the Endangered Species Act.

Here’s the inside scoup from Sarah Bates at NWF

Named this week as Biden’s choice for principal deputy director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, Williams is serving as temporary FWS director under a secretarial order (E&E News PM, Jan. 21

Martha Williams, the Biden administration’s current head of the Fish and Wildlife Service, knows the Endangered Species Act both as a law school scholar and as a courtroom combatant who once fought environmentalists over the gray wolf.

Now the former director of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks is getting a bigger bite at the ESA, including the law’s application to the long-litigated gray wolf.

Named this week as Biden’s choice for principal deputy director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, Williams is serving as temporary FWS director under a secretarial order (E&E News PM, Jan. 21)

She also recommended we be more interested in species recovery than simple “Delisting” and appears to believe that habitat is crucial in this effort. So I’m feeling hopeful that she will be interested in beavers. Aren’t you?

And of course it falls under this exciting umbrella appointment of Native American hero and congresswoman Deb Haaland as the secretary of the Interior. Just as soon as the GOP stops sitting on its hands and appoints her.

If you want to play an exciting American version of power rangers, go look at the line up of his cabinet. Every single choice is game changing.

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.