The Department of Everything is meeting with Alison this morning to discuss release of her orb weavers. The “expert spider” relocator their report assured had said they needed to go now called me last night to talk about the bogus decision and she is really worried about those spiders. What’s more the entomologist (arachnologist?) who treated the spiders and supposedly said they were ready to be released wrote me as well, saying he never actually said that. (If you have no idea what on earth I’m talking about go read sunday’s post, and if you still have no idea try replacing the words ‘chemical weapons’ with the word ‘diesel’ and see if that helps.)
For their part, the beaver fates weighed on the entire travesty with this lovely video released yesterday in the New York Times blog to show how responsible rehabilitation works when its allowed to run its course. Enjoy.
Click for Video
Here’s a sweet little piece of animal news: a sickly beaver found three weeks ago along the East River was nursed back to health and released Sunday in the city by a animal-rescue group based on Long Island.
The beaver, an adult female dubbed Justine, had a large intestinal blockage and was severely dehydrated, said Cathy Horvath of Wildlife in Need of Rescue and Rehabilitation, also known as Winorr. But after medication, two weeks at the vet and a week of rehab that included practice laps in a kiddie pool, Justine had recovered completely, Ms. Horvath said.
Here’s a thought. If an unknown beaver rescued from an unimportant stream makes it into the New York Times, what will happen for the family of six famous beavers who were written about in every state, Canada and Europe, and whose dam heroically stopped a toxic spill and saved an entire water system? Gosh, what would it look like if officials made sure expert opinion was ignored or misrepresented in nearly every case to steal the beavers from needed treatment and release them to their almost certain deaths?
Once upon a time, in a land of windswept vistas, colored rocks and sun-swallowing canyons, there was a very wealthy arms dealer who sold chemical weapons to everyone who needed them. Toxins and poisons, airborne and waterborne, they managed to transport these agents of death to all those that needed the power to kill – they didn’t take sides. Like most arms dealers they were far too necessary to get in trouble for making them available in the first place.
One day the arms dealers piled up a delivery on the doorstep of a paying client, and went out to lunch with some business contacts a few doors down. While they were enjoying a few brews and a hardy tapenade, the chemical weapons started to leak down the doorstep, into the canyon and through the ravine to the river below. The toxins soaked the stream. They would have spread through the gills of every fish and waterways of the entire state if it hadn’t been for the work of the orb weavers, who for purposes of their own, had constructed a silken dam across the river to catch dragonflies. As it happened, the web caught the majority of the toxins, saving the fish and wildlife and people from its destructive powers.
The hardworking spiders didn’t understand chemical weapons, or weapons of any kind actually. They didn’t recognize the danger that their work had averted, and continued to tend their creation as they had every morning since the beginning of their world. An orb spider spins silk from its most precious internal resources and it will often re-ingest the material when removing and repairing damaged work so as not to waste what’s needed. That’s what these spiders did when their web was coated in chemical weapons, swallowing the poisons, rubbing themselves in poison, coating themselves inside and out in the toxins that were meant to kill.
Not surprisingly the spiders became very ill. The began to drop off the web and didn’t have the energy to make repairs. That’s when Alison Cuthbert found them. She was looking for insects for her third grade science project when she came across the sickened spiders. Concerned, she placed them in a separate jar to look at later. She talked to her father who was an entomologist, to her grandmother the veterinarian, and to the zookeepers in the city but no one knew the right way to heal orb weavers who had digested chemical weapons. She did her very best to treat them with the right medicines. And some of the spiders got better. And some of them didn’t.
Meanwhile, the story of this important web, preventing chemical weapons from spreading into the water system, made it into the news cycle. People started to appreciate orb spiders in their gardens, and talk over coffee about why chemical weapons were allowed in their community at all. News story after news story showed pictures of the healing spiders, and the spoiled web that had saved humanity. Maybe it was a bad idea to sell and make chemical weapons in the first place?
At first the arms dealer was grateful for the eight-legged media heroes, and the cute photos that dominated the news of recovering spiders in towels. At first they donated to Alison’s remarkable recovery efforts, making sure she had all the dead flies and eye droppers she needed. Then the arms dealers began to get a little bit uncomfortable. The story had stayed in the news longer than expected. What if these spiders made everyone keep talking about how dangerous chemical weapons were? What if they made the people write their congressmen and demand that chemical weapons not be delivered over public roads any more? Or worse, what if they demanded they never be made at all?
Fortunately the arms dealer knew just what to do. He had taken no classes at all on avoiding problems, but he had a solid background on keeping problems out of the public eye. Just look at how well dispersants had fixed things in the Gulf? He demanded that the Department of Everything force Alison to stop treating the spiders and that authorities release them into an unknown location, where no one would know if they died. He didn’t need any cameras following the bugs into another stream and catching their probable deaths on film. Trapped between a bad idea and a forceful politician who needed weapon money, the department of Everything called Alison and said they would come for the spiders in two days.
“They aren’t ready!” She exclaimed. “They’re spinners are still healing. There unable to make silk, and without a web they’ll starve!” She said anxiously.
The DOE had learned long ago not to argue with the arms dealer, so even though they knew better they tossed their heads. “Spiders don’t need webs to survive! You’ve compromised these arachnids by keeping them in a jar too long already. If you don’t give them to us in two days time, we’ll come and take them now. We know best. We’re the Department of Everything.”
Alison knew the spiders couldn’t live if they were taken away now. She was only 8 years old but she knew orb spiders needed webs to survive. She guessed that the arms dealer was putting pressure on the DOE to make a bad situation easier. But I cannot tell you what happens next because the ending of this parable is getting written at this very moment and the way the winds blow on this issue will affect the way the spiders survive, the way the DOE is seen and the web that supports the fragile network of wildlife in general.
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave changed the way people thought about reality for thousands of years to come. Lets hope we can change these six bad decisions.
In my extended learning beaver-immersion campus, there still important things I do not know. Beaver mysteries, if you will. I know what beavers eat, where they live, and how they wrestle. I’ve seen their socialization, their mutual grooming and their child-rearing. I know where beavers defecate, how they mate and how long they live. I even know about the whiskers above their eyes. But I didn’t, however, until this very April morning, know how they drink.
Duncan Haley of Norway just sent the newly finished report on managing European beavers in captivity, and I couldn’t resist pouring through the pages. Remember this is castor fiber – not castor canadensis like we have, but still there is much food for thought. I especially appreciated the notion that their diet is so cellulose- based that beavers only digest about 33% of what they eat! (So they need to eat a lot!) There is even an illustration of their most (ahem) intimate moment!
Figure 27. Copulation in water, replicated from Ruth Pollitts’ illustration (in Kitchener 2001).
Call me crazy, I was weirdly more impressed by the cleverly named ‘burrito technique’ which can prevent a beaver under anesthesia from losing their body heat.
Figure 68. The "burrito technique"; aluminium tin Figure 69. It foil is used to cover the extremities and minimise heat loss under anaesthesia.
But this was one thing I’ve ALWAYS especially wondered:
4.8 Drinking
Beavers need access to fresh water daily. Beavers cannot make licking motions and so do not lap water or lick fur. To drink, they hold their noses horizontally, whilst submerging their mouths and making chewing motions with their lower jaws to take in water (Wilsson 1971).
Now that makes sense! Come to think of it, I think I’ve even seen that behavior. Hmm, maybe every time folks wonder ‘where beavers do something’ they’ve never observed, the smart answer is “In the water”. Of course Mr. Willson is the same researcher who so definitively observed that “beavers never stretch”.
Do you remember Teage O’connor? He was a faculty member of the University of Vermont who was interested in some local beavers and involving his students in studying their impact on the trees and pond. He installed some night cameras, corresponded with Worth A Dam, looked at information about flow devices. The Campus is located about 2 hours from Skip Lisle so I thought for sure things were going in the right direction. Then in December we read about kill traps being installed in the pond. And now this.
The UVM physical plant decided to take matters into their own hands by setting lethal traps that resulted in the death of one beaver. The problem?
Physical plant employees did not realize that one of these furry little creatures had a name, Melvin, and was being studied by an environmental class on campus.
Of course they did it during winter break when the risk of student outcry would be at a minimum. Of course they chose to use kill traps rather than actually solve the problem. What boggles my mind is that Teage and his students did everything right.
After the death of Melvin, Green Mountain Animal Defenders (GMAD) stepped in to give the University proper mitigation strategies and the traps were quickly removed by the hired trapper. A meeting took place between UVM, GMAD and John Aberth, a licensed wildlife rehabilitator. They discussed future plans of the retention pond. Lori Keppler of GMAD proposed a water flow control device, better known as a “beaver deceiver.”
Traps have an 84 percent failure rate, while these beaver deceivers have a 97 percent success rate, Keppler said. The beavers will work until the water stops running, they do not like the noise of running water. The resolution determined by the group was to let the beavers stay in the pond and see what they do come spring.
Well maybe this is a case of the wheels of justice turning more slowly than the wheels of bad decision. Teage just wrote and assures me that the University has arranged for a flow device to be installed in the spring. That the remaining beavers are fine and that no more will be killed. Okay then, I would advise you to believe it when you see it, but I can see you have some finely suspicious minds already working for your team. Go beavers!
Looks like a third beaver was found in the diesel soaked pond in Utah. You know there are more. I’m not hopeful for their chances at this point but they should definitely keep looking.
The beaver was found Wednesday evening. It was transported to the rehab center Thursday, where it is being treated for prolonged exposure to the leaked fuel, which coated its body. The beaver’s skin was irritated, Erickson-Marthaler said, but responded well to a bath.
Keep looking for beavers, because grooming every night when you’re covered in Diesel is a death sentence, and I don’t mind saying it if nobody else will:
Finally some lies from Alaska that I just HAD to include because the constant forehead slapping this story provoked is giving me a headache. Can it possibly be true that the Alaska department of fish and game really isn’t familiar with Michael Pollocks findings on beavers and salmon? Really? He did his internship and began his research in Alaska!
Pat Shields, area management biologist for ADF&G, disputes Knowles’ claim that while also targeting the commercial fisheries, listed high-seas bycatch and environmental issues, growing population in the Mat-Su and associated habitat issues, major flooding and invasive species like northern pike, although it did not mention problems with beaver dams restricting out-migration of smolt, which has been a persistent problem in the Susitna drainage, according to Shields.
“I’m not saying it’s all pike, we’re (ADF&G) not willing to only blame pike,” Shields said. “There are some habitat concerns, there are beaver dams. They’ve always been around, and of course we need to be concerned about harvest levels,” he noted.
Restricting out-migration? Really? I’ve heard the old yarn about salmon not being able to jump UP the dams, but do you honestly not know that rains and snow melt top dams and make it easy as pie for smolt to wash over the top? Let me get this straight: the ADF&Gs position is that it can’t be massive, money- raking, inexpensive drift nets exploiting all the salmon, it has to be those pesky beaver dams that make it hard for smolt to swim downstream.
You know what they say, Once is an accident. Twice is a coincidence. And three times is a trend.
This year has the mysterious fortune of beginning on a grisly note where beaver carcasses are being featured on the front page from Alberta to Idaho. If 2012 was the year of the rabid beaver, 2013 seems to be the year of the mangled beaver. Hopefully this is a fad that has had its 15 minutes, but we may see more of this before the year is through.
It started last month with the Calgary Herald’s article about nailing frozen beaver to a tree in the hopes of attracting the elusive wolverine. I remarked at the time that what if Wolverines were attracted to puppies? Would they still run a photo of a skinned one nailed to a tree on the front page?
Mirjam hammered two large nails into the [beaver] carcass, tied a string around it to haul it up the tree and climbed up the tree to start pounding it in place. Then she jumped down, handed the hammer to me and asked me to finish the task.
So that’s how I came to nail a frozen, skinned beaver to a tree. Ah, the glamorous life of a journalist.
A few weeks later a story ran about a traumatized cycler in British Columbia who had ridden upon a dead beaver whose tail had been cut off. Mind you, there are plenty of places in the world where they pay a bounty for beaver tails, so maybe it was an act of free enterprise. Because all news must be reported a photo of that beaver also ran on the front page.
Bonita Carey and Megan Keene were riding their bikes on Errington Road Friday afternoon when they saw a sight that changed the tone of their whole day.
In the ditch at the side of the road lay a dead, mature beaver — with its tail hacked off.
The pair were horrified by what they saw.
“This is absolutely sickening, Carey said. “The fact that they butchered its tail off just makes me cringe. It’s atrocious. What if a family rode by?”
Or what if someone opened their newspaper? Maybe you can explain to me why if something is too horrible for people to see they would put it in the paper so that more people could be horrified by it?
Lynx have been documented as residents of the Purcells. Researchers can confirm individuals returning to an area through the year by fur markings captured in the photos and DNA snagged by brass gun-cleaning brushes fixed to the trees below the beaver bait.
An Oregon trapper provides the neatly skinned and cut beaver carcasses as a byproduct of his legal trapping operation, Lucid said. “We get a few at a time and stockpile
One has to feel that this wave of species insensitivity is tricking down from the northern climes like snowmelt and will reach California any minute. I recognize that reporting on this trend will leave folks asking why I would show such upsetting things on a beloved beaver website, but I realize that in all the world, in all the animal rights groups, and in all the assembled earth defenders, this is the only place that will notice that there have been three beaver carcass stories in the past 30 days. If we don’t notice, who will?
The last story is slightly less awful, and the photo less grisly, but why on earth don’t these articles run photos like this instead?
Looks like a third beaver was found in the diesel soaked pond in Utah. You know there are more. I’m not hopeful for their chances at this point but they should definitely keep looking.
