Abuse of beaver information apparently knows no bounds. It happens in city meetings and in classroom settings. Here’s a charming kiddie cartoon about some birds who try to stop destructive ‘beaver boy’ from chewing down all the trees. He’s driven to continue not by starvation, but by his quest for real beaver identification and the fact that his “teeth get bored.”
Get? Inconvenient TOOTH? Mocking Climate Change AND beavers at the same time. Something tells me I can guess how this producer votes. No word yet on exactly how a DUCK eats ACORNS.
WGBH has a better beaver offering for children K-5. I can’t embed it but click on the photo to see a smart look at how beavers building dams help other wildlife. This is especially remarkable because WGBH is in Boston Massachusetts, where beaver are hated and lied about every day. Consider this a voice in the wilderness.
The beaver is often referred to as nature’s own engineer. This video segment focuses on the beaver’s ability to transform its environment to suit itself. The beaver does so with an innate ability to construct dams — a feat no creature, save humans, is able to achieve. This video is available in both English and Spanish audio, along with corresponding closed captions.
NPR’s Scott Simon was kind enough to provide the audio, so I added my own finishing touches. I especially like the first slide and the fifth slide. But it’s all fun, and will only steal 65 seconds of your valuable monday morning, so enjoy!
I LOVED making the flying beavers. I could do that all day. That’s worth every second of labor it took to put together. Onward and upward. This morning there’s some assorted beaver news, with beaver bemoaning, beaver barometers and beaver benefits.
An industrious beaver has been wreaking havoc at Yellowknife’s Northern Frontier Visitor Centre lately. “This beaver has totally changed the appearance of our landscape, having removed an entire area of trees,” says Tyler Dempsey, a staff member at the centre.
The beaver started building his (or her) lodge in Frame Lake, in downtown Yellowknife, about a week ago, using vegetation from the property of the visitor centre to do so. The underwater lodge is about three metres from the lakefront building.
Dempsey says while visitors, and even staff members, have enjoyed watching the busy beaver at work from such a close proximity, they couldn’t ignore the amount of damage it was doing to the property.
“An entire area has almost entirely been cleared out resulting from the beaver’s behaviour,” says Dempsey. “The rapid pace and productivity he’s been able to do this with — we would see massive changes, even overnight.” Chicken wire around tree
When enough was enough, visitor centre staff wrapped their remaining trees in chicken wire to prevent the beaver from using them as lumber.
Dempsey says that seemed to help, but admitted that he and other staff at the visitor centre probably wouldn’t be that sad if the beaver chose another locale altogether.
“If he did go for greener pastures, I think we would probably welcome that move.”
(I know what you’re thinking. Yellowknife has a visitor’s center?)
Even though it’s 2500 miles away in the remote Yukon, I would remind readers that ‘reluctantly wrapping trees’ is pretty massive progress for YK where a trapper as recently as 2012 reported in the paper that beavers could “Bounce from their tails and leap to attack you.” (That got a letter from me which was published locally). I’m going to count small blessings and be happy that people in this remote Yukon province are enjoying watching the beavers work at all, even if they are using the wrong materials to protect trees. Maybe this bit of beaver instruction will teach itself.
Onto the beaver as barometer article from Nova Scotia.
Want to know what’s in store this winter? Chest-high snowbanks or rivers of rain? Joe Googoo of Wagmatcook First Nation in Cape Breton thinks he knows. Googoo was taught by his father and grandfather to read clues in the natural world.
Googoo said he has noticed beavers building their dams in lakes instead of streams.
“Yes, the beaver are the best indication right now,” he said. “I went to around 20 or 30 streams. There were beaver in there last winter. There’s nothing there now. They all went down [last winter] because the streams are so shallow, they’re easy to flood.”
Googoo predicts the water will be high in streams next spring, indicating a lot of precipitation over the winter.
Um, okay.
I guess its not worth considering any other variables that might be at play regarding beavers building in streams versus lakes. Food, predators, or trapping for instance. I remember as a child pointing at woolly worms and exclaiming that it was going to be a cold winter. And we celebrate groundhog day on a national level.
I guess if we’re going to believe a man whose last name is literally baby noises we might deserve what we get?
This last bit of beaver chivalry is generous even by beaver standards.
Thank beavers for a cleaner Catawba River, Charlotte’s water and sewer utility says. Charlotte Water initially reported that 3,660 gallons of sewage overflowed into the Catawba in northwest Charlotte on Wednesday night.
Thursday, the utility corrected the report: “The spill last night did reach a Catawba River tributary but did not reach the Catawba River. A beaver dam strategically located contained the spill.”
Pumping is underway to suck the spill from the tributary. No word on the health of the beavers.
From a city that kills so many beavers it has been regularly featured on this website, I’m going to say that it’s mighty kind of beavers to save your asses when you’ve been trapping them for years and years. No word on the health of the beavers? Do you really need word to imagine their fate after living and working every in your filth?
Just watch, after Charlotte lets the beaver soak up their sewage spill they will say they need to be eliminated because they spread Giardisis.
That exciting beaver news must have excited EVERYONE EVERYWHERE because today it’s on the BBC, the Washington Post and National Geographic. Sadly, this means it has completely squeezed all other beaver stories out of the news, because no self-respecting paper can run TWO beaver stories on the same day, (heaven forbid).
That’s okay though because the Smithsonian one has nice details that are worth sharing.
Though small, the mammal is an exciting find, the researchers said. It belongs to a group of rodentlike mammals called multituberculates, named for the numerous cusps, or tubercles, found on their teeth. Multituberculates lived alongside dinosaurs, but managed to survive the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period. They lived for another 30 million years before they, too, went extinct, the researchers said.
So THAT”S what multituberculates means, many cusps! I don’t think any other source explained that fact, This is the part I especially loved.
Spectacular teeth Researchers named the newfound species Kimbetopsalis simmonsae, in honor of the area in which they found it, Kimbeto Wash, New Mexico. The Greek word “psalis” means “cutting shears,” a reference to the creature’s magnificent teeth, and the species name, “simmonsae,” is a nod to Nancy Simmons, a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History renowned for her work on multituberculates.
Magnificent Sheers! That sure sounds like a beaver to me. I had to go look up Nancy Simmons and her famous work on the cuspadors. She’s home grown and graduated from UCB. Here’s what else I found:
Dr. Nancy Simmons
Faculty and researcher at the American Museum of Natural history, Dr. Simmons specializes in the morphology and evolutionary biology of bats (Chiroptera). She works with both living and fossil species, and is interested in patterns of speciesdiversification, biogeography, the evolution of dietary habits, higher-level bat relationships, early Tertiary fossil bats, and the evolution of flight and echolocation. A morphologist by training, she works with data gained from museum specimens and high-resolution CT scans, combining these with DNA sequence data generated by collaborators to build and test phylogenetic and evolutionary hypotheses. In addition to her work on bats, Dr. Simmons is part of team working on further development of tools for managing large-scale morphological projects (e.g., build the Tree of Life).
Another example of what bats and beavers have in common! Corky would be so proud.
Imagine getting a species of beaver named after you…I admit, I’m kind of jealous. Do you think they’ll ever be a city dwelling beaver named after us?
Fun video. Makes me genuinely curious about what they’d find. Hey, how much would we have to donate to have Bennie at a beaver festival? Looks like they’re having troubles raising the funds. I bet this website can help them a little. I’m not a fan of beavers in zoos but since he’s there already we might as well harmlessly learn what we can from him right? I mean since beavers are a big mishmash genetically because of US we should help fix what we can, right?
This article from New York tells us little that is new, but it’s a pleasant read anyway.
Looks like: The Beaver is a large, unmistakable rodent that can reach up to 26-65 pounds and features a broad, flattened tail that can reach 9-10-inches long and 6-inches wide. Beavers have yellow-brown to almost black fur, webbed feet and prominent orange teeth.
Niche: Beavers are herbivores, eating tree and water plant parts. As winter approaches, they will collect and cache food underwater near the entrance of their lodge in a “feedpile” to use during winter. Beavers can be prey for coyote, fisher, bear and bobcat when they leave the pond in search of food. Kits can also be prey for mink, otter, fox and great-horned owl.s tale
Not nearly enough about how this keystone species builds wetlands that safe fish, frogs, birds and otter. But it’s nice to see anyway. I am impatient for the day when the people who decide to print “interesting facts about the beaver” have things to say that are REALLY interesting.
I don’t know how your blood pressure is this morning, but I’m heading out on vacation tomorrow so mine’s looking pretty good. I’ll try to reach over the mai tai’s and coconuts and manage to post something, especially Wednesday because it will be the auspicious occasion of our 3000th post. Wow. I’ll make sure to tell you a really closely guarded beaver secret that day to make it worth your while.
In the mean time, your blood pressure can take a vacation by watching this, from our Norwegian friend of the Scottish beavers, Sylvia Mueller. She took this on holiday in Germany.
Yay for the Beaver Festival! The annual festival will feature live music, children’s activities, beaver tours and more than 40 ecological booths. Beavers in down town Martinez? Of course. Martinez has something for everyone.
According to my friend Wikipedia, “Now protected, the beaver have transformed Alhambra Creek from a trickle into multiple dams and beaver ponds, which in turn, led to the return of steelhead and North American river otter in 2008 and mink in 2009. The Martinez beavers probably originated from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta which once held the largest concentration of beaver in North America.”
Jeff and I enjoyed the Beaver Festival last year. There were lots of wildlife informational booths, many activities for children, and guided tours of the beaver habitat. It was a joyful place to be.
So do something out of the ordinary. Come to the 8th annual Beaver Festival on Saturday, Aug. 1, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., at Beaver Park (corner of Marina Vista and Castro streets). First 150 children attending will be able to collect 19 wildlife pins designed by Oakland artist Mark Poulin. The charms were purchased with a grant from the CCC Wildlife Commission. According to the Worth a Dam website (MartinezBeavers.org) “The activity will highlight the new wildlife seen in Alhambra Creek since the beavers arrived, and emphasize their role as a Keystone Species.”
To be honest, nothing makes me happier than when folks use Wikipedia to write about our beavers. Since our great friend Rickipedia is the one who wrote it, and he tells the story the exact same way I would. It’s a long column about cool things to do in Martinez and of course the peddler’s fair gets top billing, but never mind. It’s been a GRAND media week.
This morning I got an inquiry from the Martinez Tribune. Tribune? Apparently they saw a beaver near a wooden palate at Ward Street and wonder if we gave it to them to eat. (!) (Obviously they’re going to be another prescient media source in the metropolis.) Here’s the Tribune’s fun photo which is on their Facebook page this morning.
Finally a big article in the National Wildlife Federation this week about the science involved in beaver chewing trees. This has caused a little debate in the beaver world and I was waiting until there were clearer answers from the author. But in the meantime, you might as well enjoy the icing on the cake of a beaverly week.
How do beavers fell trees in a preferred direction? A 10-year study reveals the answer.
For the past 10 years, I have come here every summer with my research team from the University of Arizona to study the beaver’s most iconic yet poorly understood behavior: tree felling. Studies have shown that more than 70 percent of all large felled trees crash in the direction of the water where a beaver’s lodge is located, which is to the animal’s advantage. But the question I hoped to answer was: How do beavers make the complex calculations required for such accuracy? After a decade of study, hundreds of tree measurements and thousands of hours of direct observations and camera recordings, we now know the answer.
In beavers’ work, just as in human logging, the directionality of a tree fall is produced by the “hinge”—uneven cuts on opposite sides of the trunk. A tree with a cut on just one side, no matter how wide, can collapse in any direction. But an additional small cut on the opposite side will make the fall strongly directional, with the direction depending on whether the second cut is above or below the initial cut. If it’s above the first cut, the tree will fall in the direction of the initial cut; if below, the tree will fall the opposite way.
Making that second cut uneven in height to produce the hinge depends on changes in the beaver’s posture (sitting or standing) and the slope on which the tree is growing. On a tree that grows uphill from the water, for example, if a beaver starts cutting on the uphill side then simply circles the tree without changing its posture, it will produce a second cut below the first one—and a directional fall of the tree towards the water. Likewise, if the beaver starts its work on the downhill side of the tree and maintains its posture as it circles the tree, the tree will also fall toward the water.
We discovered that nearly all large trees in the area, especially those farther from water, had circular cuts of uneven heights and depths or directional hinges. In flat areas, beavers typically started their work on the side closest to water, gradually widening the cut over consecutive nights. Notably, as they circled the tree, they would rise on their hind legs, producing a second cut on the opposite side that was higher than the initial one. In just a few days, such trees would crash directly towards the water.
So beavers use directional cutting like loggers. Which surprises us not at all. But sparked a debate on whether trees fall towards the water naturally because they lean towards the open light. It seems to me that some trees don’t lean at all, and the research takes that into account in noting that they had directional cutting. Also that trees on the slope did NOT have it, because they didn’t need it to fall towards the water. It’s an interesting article, you should go read the whole thing.
And if you want to JOIN the National Wildlife Federation and maybe sign up for a subscription to Ranger Rick, you can do that tomorrow because Beth Pratt of the California chapter will be exhibiting there.
Someday our educational video will air in classrooms everywhere. Mark my words.
