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Sometimes I read a murky article about beavers from someplace like Washington or Utah and I’m frustrated because they, of all places, should know better. And sometimes I see an article like this from MISSISSIPPI and am over the moon.

Because we’re grading on a beaver curve.

Are they a nuisance or key to our health? Coast scientist supports misunderstood species

During a torrential rainstorm in April, Stormy Rose was washed through Biloxi’s storm drainage. Eventually, she wandered under the shining lights of the Beau Rivage. A casino employee spotted her red fur coat and wide, dark tail and called Woodside Wildlife Rescue.

Soon after, Stormy arrived at the home of Holley Muraco, a marine mammal scientist and research professor at Mississippi State University. The beaver was in bad shape – her spine rose out of her fur in a sign of malnutrition.

“There was nothing specifically wrong with her that I could find from a veterinary perspective, but by studying her over time, I realized she actually had this incredibly rare, weird, protozoa parasite that she should not have had,” Muraco said. “… She got this parasite, because it’s in our environment, and most likely, was spread through wild hogs.

Muraco’s research takes a “One Health” approach, a relatively new scientific perspective that recognizes that the health of humans and animals is connected through our shared environment. Once Muraco confirms the presence of the parasite, she will publish papers asserting that beavers could be “sentinels” for human health. Essentially, if beavers are sick, it could act as a warning for similar diseases in people.

Now that’s interesting. I’m not sure beavers are a great indicator species for humans because they tolerate way more than we ever could. But they also, as we know in Martinez, are sensitive in ways we are not.

Across the past few months, Muraco has constructed a special needs enclosure for young and recovering beavers, complete with personal pools. When they are mature and strong enough, future beavers will be released into a fenced, three-acre area, where Muraco can encourage the development of healthy, wild behaviors. Muraco said beaver rehabilitation takes about two years.

“While I have them in my care, I’m learning about growth and development. I’m learning about diseases, parasites, and then once we are ready to release, and I’m going to look at how they change the environment, and then behavior. There’s a lot we still don’t know about behavior,” Muraco said. “I’ve been recording her vocalizations; they vocalize underwater too.”

Muraco said that Gulf Coast beavers are seemingly unique from beavers found elsewhere in North America. They are typically smaller and have been observed in saltwater environments, which is uncommon for beavers. Muraco said Stormy is a particularly unique beaver.

“Her coat is super short; she has red fur – she just has a very different appearance than the northern beavers. I’m going to do some DNA testing and see if we actually have a genetic subspecies on our hands on the Coast,” Muraco said. “No one has ever really looked at Coastal beavers. It’s low-hanging fruit; we’re gonna have so many cool opportunities.”

Okay. There’s a lot to unpack here. First of all I love how she’s really thinking about and observing the beavers in her care. And I always assumed they verbalized underwater but haven’t generated much interest in proving it. Even Bernie Krause told me that it probably didn’t happen because sounds travel so differently in water. But good for you. Keep going.

And second of all some beavers have red coats.Or black coats. Or even blonde coats. Before we killed them all there were as many colors of beaver fur as you can imagine. Even today I know of a piebald beaver. It happens

Third of all. coastal beavers aren’t a different subspecies. And they have been studied and written about extensively. Even in Martinez our beavers lived in brackish water. Check out this article about salt water.

Michael Niemeyer of Wildlife Solutions, Inc. has worked as a trapper in southern Alabama and Mississippi for 16 years. He works with beavers almost daily and said most conflicts he sees with beavers surround roads, where beavers clog drainage systems, or at levees, where beavers burrow holes to drain lakes and ponds. He sees more beaver activity today than he did 16 years ago.

Niemeyer said relocating live beavers is usually impossible. It is illegal to relocate beavers onto public land in Mississippi without permission, and few private landowners would willingly allow the relocation of a nuisance species onto their property. He said that, even if beavers were relocated to an area where beavers are already established, the resulting battle for territory would likely mean death for relocated beavers.

That’s because it is better to SOLVE a problem than MOVE a problem.

Neimeyer said that, in his experience, nonlethal mitigation efforts to control beaver damage are expensive and ineffective in the long term. He said that almost all landowners choose lethal mitigation methods and that if they continue to be significantly less expensive and more effective than non-lethal methods, Mississippi landowners are unlikely to change practices.

Gee that’s super surprising. There must not be ANY properly installed flow devices in the entire southern south. Hmm maybe we can change that.

“And that’s where my approach with the beavers is; I just want to try to understand. I want to understand, once I start releasing these animals into my environment, exactly what is the carrying capacity of our property, and if beavers are going to exceed that carrying capacity. For example, I think people believe if you see one beaver, you’re going to have 500 beavers, but they’re not like rats or rodents. They only have the number that fits the environment that they’re in, and I want to show that. I’m going to show it with statistics and studies and say, ‘Alright, I have a breeding population of beavers in this pond, they’re only maintaining this number and they’re not going beyond what their resources are,’ Muraco said.

“By just using science, I’m hoping that then I can share that with our state and with our regulators and say, ‘Let’s put a little bit of effort into non-lethal mitigation techniques for landowners who would like to keep beavers around,’ instead of just having them labeled: kill them on sight. Maybe, just maybe, we can give them a chance – once we know a little bit more information,” Muraco said.

Your instincts are SPOT on. You just need to have access to all the great work that’s already been done and exists about beaver populations. Maybe taking a look at Ben’s book will at least introduce you to a host of scientists doing this work and you can follow up with the resources he has gathered together to start.

You are well on your way. Let me know when you are ready to plan a beaver festival in Mississippi.

Back in August of 2021 I wrote am ambitious little post called “Incent-a-beaver” saying that beavers were so important to the golden state it behooved the powers that be to pay landowners to keep them on their land. The idea was based on the incentives farmers are given to keep their fields wet during the flyway season.

Well I thought it made sense anyway and it must have been a little interesting because afterwards I got an email from Dan Ackerstein who worked with the sustainability team at Google and he said they were interested in how Google mapping technology could help beavers and could we talk.

I was about as excited as I could possibly have been to think that a big power like google could turn their skills to beavers but I was sworn to secrecy and could say nothing. (Which I’m sure as you can imagine was hard for me.) In the end I gave hm some other names and a photo of a beaver that had been taken on the Google Campus a few years back but helping eavers wasn’t the direction they wanted to go in. I thought that was it, an interesting blip on the radar and nothing else.

Until I saw this:

For the first time in four centuries, it’s good to be a beaver. Long persecuted for their pelts and reviled as pests, the dam-building rodents are today hailed by scientists as ecological saviors. Their ponds and wetlands store water in the face of drought, filter out pollutants, furnish habitat for endangered species, and fight wildfires. In California, Castor canadensis is so prized that the state recently committed millions to its restoration.

While beavers’ benefits are indisputable, however, our knowledge remains riddled with gaps. We don’t know how many are out there, or which direction their populations are trending, or which watersheds most desperately need a beaver infusion. Few states have systematically surveyed them; moreover, many beaver ponds are tucked into remote streams far from human settlements, where they’re near-impossible to count. “There’s so much we don’t understand about beavers, in part because we don’t have a baseline of where they are,” says Emily Fairfax, a beaver researcher at the University of Minnesota.

But that’s starting to change. Over the past several years, a team of beaver scientists and Google engineers have been teaching an algorithm to spot the rodents’ infrastructure on satellite images. Their creation has the potential to transform our understanding of these paddle-tailed engineers—and help climate-stressed states like California aid their comeback. And while the model hasn’t yet gone public, researchers are already salivating over its potential. “All of our efforts in the state should be taking advantage of this powerful mapping tool,” says Kristen Wilson, the lead forest scientist at the conservation organization the Nature Conservancy. “It’s really exciting.”

You got all that? Beavers are so important we need to know where they are and how many there are. And we can make a computer formula that tells us the answer.s, Oh and just for extra credit notice that the author of this article is Ben Goldfarb.

The beaver-mapping model is the brainchild of Eddie Corwin, a former member of Google’s real-estate sustainability group. Around 2018, Corwin began to contemplate how his company might become a better steward of water, particularly the many coastal creeks that run past its Bay Area offices. In the course of his research, Corwin read Water: A Natural History, by an author aptly named Alice Outwater. One chapter dealt with beavers, whose bountiful wetlands, Outwater wrote, “can hold millions of gallons of water” and “reduce flooding and erosion downstream.” Corwin, captivated, devoured other beaver books and articles, and soon started proselytizing to his friend Dan Ackerstein, a sustainability consultant who works with Google. “We both fell in love with beavers,” Corwin says.

Corwin’s beaver obsession met a receptive corporate culture. Google’s employees are famously encouraged to devote time to passion projects, the policy that produced Gmail; Corwin decided his passion was beavers. But how best to assist the buck-toothed architects? Corwin knew that beaver infrastructure—their sinuous dams, sprawling ponds, and spidery canals—is often so epic it can be seen from space. In 2010, a Canadian researcher discovered the world’s longest beaver dam, a stick-and-mud bulwark that stretches more than a half-mile across an Alberta park, by perusing Google Earth. Corwin and Ackerstein began to wonder whether they could contribute to beaver research by training a machine-learning algorithm to automatically detect beaver dams and ponds on satellite imagery—not one by one, but thousands at a time, across the surface of an entire state.

…So there it is. laid out and clear for us all. The origin story and the key players. So what happened? What is going to happen next?

After discussing the concept with Google’s engineers and programmers, Corwin and Ackerstein decided it was technically feasible. They reached out next to Fairfax, who’d gained renown for a landmark 2020 study showing that beaver ponds provide damp, fire-proof refuges in which other species can shelter during wildfires. In some cases, Fairfax found, beaver wetlands even stopped blazes in their tracks. The critters were such talented firefighters that she’d half-jokingly proposed that the US Forest Service change its mammal mascot—farewell, Smoky Bear, and hello, Smoky Beaver.

Fairfax was enthusiastic about the pond-mapping idea. She and her students already used Google Earth to find beaver dams to study within burned areas. But it was a laborious process, one that demanded endless hours of tracing alpine streams across screens in search of the bulbous signature of a beaver pond. An automated beaver-finding tool, she says, could “increase the number of fires I can analyze by an order of magnitude.”

With Fairfax’s blessing, Corwin, Ackerstein, and a team of programmers set about creating their model. The task, they decided, was best suited to a convolutional neural network, a type of algorithm that essentially tries to figure out whether a given chunk of geospatial data includes a particular object—whether a stretch of mountain stream contains a beaver dam, say. Fairfax and some obliging beaverologists from Utah State University submitted thousands of coordinates for confirmed dams, ponds, and canals, which the Googlers matched up with their own high-resolution images to teach the model to recognize the distinctive appearance of beaverworks. The team also fed the algorithm negative data—images of beaverless streams and wetlands—so that it would know what it wasn’t looking for. They dubbed their model the Earth Engine Automated Geospatial Elements Recognition, or EEAGER—yes, as in “eager beaver.”

Wow that’s a lot of work to come around to the acronym EEAGER but okay. I get it. Now for the icing on the cake.

It’s only appropriate, then, that California is where EEAGER is going to get its first major test. The Nature Conservancy and Google plan to run the model across the state sometime in 2024, a comprehensive search for every last beaver dam and pond. That should give the state’s wildlife department a good sense of where its beavers are living, roughly how many it has, and where it could use more. The model will also provide California with solid baseline data against which it can compare future populations, to see whether its new policies are helping beavers recover. “When you have imagery that’s repeated frequently, that gives you the opportunity to understand change through time,” says the Conservancy’s Kristen Wilson.

GOT THAT? California is first and sometime this year we are going to finally know how many beavers the are in the state. And not just be able to infer from depredation permits. This is big news. The biggest.

When beavers count you figure out how to count beavers.

Because the beaver isn't just an animal; it's an ecosystem!

Category: Beaver Rehabilitation

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