Methow Valley beavers are the stars in Wild Kingdom episode

BY MARCY STAMPER

The film crew from Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom visited three sites in the Methow Valley to highlight the role of beavers in restoring a healthy ecosystem. Local beavers — and work by the Methow Beaver Project (MBP) to create a healthy ecosystem — are starring in an upcoming episode of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. The “Eager Beavers” episode on the long-running nature show features three sites in the Methow Valley — a Twisp River side channel and the Bear Creek and Texas Creek watersheds. The program also highlights beaver-restoration work in Oregon and California. Eager Beavers, part of the Protecting the Wild series, premiers this month at WildKingdom.com. The beaver project is hosting a free screening on March 17. The episode showcases the role beavers play in creating a sustainable future across the country and, in particular, in the arid West, MBP Restoration and Outreach Assistant Willie Duguay said. The Wild Kingdom crew went to the Bear Creek watershed where beavers are helping reclaim an area that burned in the 2014 Carlton Complex Fire. The crew also looked at the connections between beavers and salmon habitat. Eager Beavers chronicles changing attitudes toward beavers. After widespread trapping, beavers had been extirpated from the West by the early 19th century. With few beavers on the landscape, people settled along rivers and took advantage of fertile soil in former floodplains, according to MBP.“ Long thought to be a nuisance animal, beavers have been waiting for their time to shine. Now as climate change, drought and other damaging ecological factors severely impact groundwater and wetland habitats, science is finally understanding the importance of these natural engineers for the health of our planet,” Wild Kingdom said.

Also, if you’re in the vicinity of Methow Valley, there will be a free screening:

The Methow Beaver Project is screening “Eager Beavers” on Friday, March 17, at 6 p.m. at the Methow Valley Community Center in Twisp. There will be beaver-themed trivia and a Q&A session. Admission is free. Beverages for adults and children will be available for purchase.
The episode will also be screened that same night at 6 p.m. at the Community Cultural Center in Tonasket.

Eager Beavers can be viewed on WildKingdom.com starting March 19.

Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, one of the earliest TV shows to feature nature and adventure, broadcast its first show 60 years ago. The Protecting the Wild series will be hosted by Peter Gros, co-host of the original series.

Eager Beavers is the sixth episode in the 10-part series.

More at the Methow Valley News.

In the meantime you can travel back in time to the early 1980s when Wild Kingdom aired Valley of the Beavers, which was shot in Canada. Probably due to the difficulty of finding healthy beaver habitat in the US at that time.

Valley of the Beavers, Part I

Valley of the Beavers, Part II

They’re each around twenty minutes long with some very good photography. Single mom raising her kits story.

Bob

WILDLIFE WILL CROSS THAT BEAVER DAM WHEN THEY COME TO IT

heidi08 Beavers and Bobcats, beavers and wolves February 3, 2022

The very best part of Voyageurs national park – I mean completely aside from all their “Wolves think beavers are tasty” research and the occasional “Wolves think beavers are so tasty they lure them away to eat them” research, the best part of voyageurs other than that is that it gives us a glimpse of the wild dammed and wildly dammed world we once had.

Last night they released a fantastic film of the use that wildlife finds for beaver dams.

Vignettes from a Northwoods beaver dam! We have said it before and will say it again: beaver dams are nice natural bridges that wildlife like to use to cross wetlands, swamps, and bogs. pic.twitter.com/nJUB2qWAx2

— Voyageurs Wolf Project (@VoyaWolfProject) February 2, 2022

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ANOTHER DAMN BEAVER DAM CAM

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver ecological impact, Beavers and Bears, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and Bobcats, beavers and wolves August 4, 2021

I’ll be completely honest. I don’t love all the footage and studies from Voyageurs about wolves stalking beavers or doing everything they can to eat beaver mcnuggets. But they do some amazing trailcam work. And this is one of the best I’ve seen.

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A Beaver Dam: Fall to Winter

Here it is, the sequel to “A Beaver Dam: Summer to Fall.” It features more footage from a trail camera on a beaver dam at Kabetogama Peninsula in Voyageurs National Park.

The purpose of the camera was to confirm the area was a border for the territories of two wolf packs — the Nashata Pack and the Shoepack Lake Pack. The Nashata Pack is seen most frequently in this video. The pack has a distinctive breeding female who is seen bedding down in front of the camera toward the end of the video. She can also be seen “slipping” on the ice in another clip.

The Voyageurs Wolf Project, focused on understanding the summer ecology of wolves in the park, notes that there was a “very cold stretch last fall for several weeks in October during which all the ponds and lake edges froze,” so “some of the ‘wintry’ scenes in the video are actually from October and November.”

Kabetogama Peninsula is about 115 miles northwest of Duluth.

The interesting part is that with the exception of the wolves and the bobcat we got the exact same images from a beaver dam in downtown Martinez. But you knew that, didn’t you?

BOBCATS AND BEAVERS

heidi08 Beavers and Bobcats May 17, 2020

Time for another episode of that loved Sunday morning show “Beavers and any other species. Ever” This morning we’re featuring the bobcat, which enjoys visiting beaver ponds to hunt. Of course there’s lots to eat around a beaver pond – or in it. Enos Mills wrote about a fight between a bobcat and a beaver where the beaver actually WON. So its good not to set your sights too high.

The beaver is peaceful. Although the males occasionally fight among themselves, the beaver avoids fighting, and plans his life so as to escape without it. Now and then in the water one closes with an otter in a desperate struggle, and when cornered on land one will sometimes turn upon a preying foe with such ferocity and skill that his assailant is glad to retreat. On two occasions I have known a beaver to kill a bobcat.

Well Bobcats may need beavers, but the feeling isn’t mutual. Here’s a nice look at how beavers matter to their short tailed neighbors from camera trap expert and FB friend Janet Pesaturo.

Bobcats and Beaver Ponds

The bobcat (Lynx rufus) is the most successful of North America’s wild felines, and one reason for its success is its diet. Like its cousin the Canada lynx, the bobcat relishes a meal of rabbit or hare, but takes a wide variety of prey and can even thrive where rabbits and hares are scarce. In New England, bobcats seem especially common at beaver ponds.

That’s no surprise, given that beaver wetlands are hot spots for a wide variety of animals, including ducks, geese, frogs, snakes, fish, muskrats, voles, raccoons, mink, otter, deer, moose, and bears. Bobcats hunt the adults, young, and/or eggs of many of these species, and the vegetation around beaver ponds facilitates the feline hunting style. When beavers cut trees around the pond, more sunlight reaches the forest floor. This stimulates growth of stump sprouts, saplings and shrubs, which create the low cover that bobcats need for stalk and ambush hunting.

Color me not at all surprised! The beaver pond is the grocery story where other animals go to shop. Or be shopped. And you don’t need to wear a mask either. (Although the raccoon does).

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Bobcats may hunt anywhere around the pond, so there’s a good chance of getting one with a trail camera facing down the pond edge. However, to significantly increase the likelihood, target the beaver dam, for bobcats (like many other animals) regularly use them as bridges to cross the water. To further increase the odds, find a beaver dam near the type of cover bobcats prefer for resting and denning. Dense thickets or cliff refugia fit the bill.

One of the many benefits to the landscape of having beavers. Truly beavers are the job creators of the animal kingdom. Watching a beaver pond means never knowing what you’ll see next. Bobcats are wild neighbors, even in Martinez. Keeping an eye out for them is well worth your time. Although it’s not every day you’ll see something like his:

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