Category: Beavers and Ice

From Valley of the Beavers to Methow Valley Beavers

Bob Kobres Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver ecological impact, Beaver News, Beaver ponds, Beavers, Beavers and Bobcats, Beavers and Ice, History March 10, 2023

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

SPECULATION BY SATELLITE STUDY

heidi08 Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Ice July 1, 2020

We all know beavers are blamed for everything. For floods and droughts and giardiasis and crop failure. Well if you have even one friend who knows you like beavers you received a panicked copy of some version of this article yesterday. Because apparently they cause climate change too.

The Newest Threat to a Warming Alaskan Arctic: Beavers

The large rodents are creating lakes that accelerate the thawing of frozen soils and potentially increase greenhouse gas emissions, a study finds.

Alaskan beavers are carving out a growing web of channels, dams and ponds in the frozen Arctic tundra of northwestern Alaska, helping to turn it into a soggy sponge that intensifies global warming.

On the Baldwin Peninsula, near Kotzebue, for example, the big rodents have been so busy that they’re hastening the regional thawing of the permafrost, raising new concerns about how fast those organic frozen soils will melt and release long-trapped greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, said scientists who are studying the beavers’ activity.

The number of new beaver dams and lakes continues to grow exponentially, suggesting that “beavers are a greater influence than climate on surface water extent,” said University of Alaska, Fairbanks scientist Ken Tape, a co-author of a new beaver and permafrost study published today in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

Those rotten beavers. Always going where they’re not wanted. If they weren’t there the permafrost would be melting much slower and we could keep right on pretending climate change wasn’t real!

The bigger and deeper the pools made by the beavers, the warmer the water. The larger pools hold heat longer, which delays refreezing in autumn. Tape said Arctic vegetation, permafrost, hydrology and wildlife are all linked. Even against the backdrop of other recent Arctic global warming extremes, like raging wildfires, record heat waves and dwindling glaciers and sea ice, the impact of beavers stands out, he said.

“It’s not gradual change,” he said. “It’s like hitting the landscape with a hammer.”

“And it’s a continual change that the Arctic is just not used to,” he added.

Ooof! Hitting the artic landscape with a hammer! Good lord what a vivid image. Don’t you just hate those rotten beavers. What happens to the ruined landscape after they work their nasty will? Does it just sit there with those ponds festering?

No it does not.

Another way to see them is as “agents of Arctic adaptation,” said Ben Goldfarb, author of a recent natural history book that shows how beavers could help many other species, including humans, survive the era of rapid, human-caused climate change.

“Beavers create fantastic habitat for all kinds of species, like songbirds and moose,” Goldfarb said. “All of those species are moving northward because of climate change, and beavers are preparing the way.” As a habitat-creating keystone species, beavers are also important food for wolves, and recent research shows that beaver ponds are good at keeping carbon locked up, he added.

Beavers may even hold the key to survival for some salmon species that are losing their streams to global warming and other changes farther south.

“We’re losing salmon in other places. If they’re going to shift their climate envelope, they’re probably going to need beavers to help them,” Goldfarb said.

Thank god for Ben. What would we ever do without him? I just want to fire him at these articles like a water canon and hope he puts the stupid out. He won’t of course. You know that someone somewhere is going to propose we just KILL all the beavers and problem solved, no more CLIMATE CHANGE!

If beavers are the primary drivers of permafrost degradation on the Baldwin Peninsula, that has wider implications for tracking surface area changes across similar parts of the Arctic where beavers may advance, he said.

In lowland Arctic regions, the basins favored by beavers can account for 50 to 80 percent of the landscape. Currently, more than 10,000 beaver dams have been mapped across northwestern Alaska and that data is being used in models to pinpoint the impacts of the new water bodies on permafrost and the carbon cycle.

Permafrost researcher Merrit Turetsky, director of the University of Colorado, Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, said it’s not yet clear how beaver impacts may affect regional-scale carbon cycles, but that it’s ” important to pay attention to all ecosystem-engineers such as the beaver.”

Yeah yeah yeah. Those darn carbon based beavers. WIth their greenhouses gasses ruining everything. Here’s what Emily Fairfax had to say about this research.

Really frustrated to read this CNN article and the study that it is based on. Seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what beaver ponds are and are not. They are not the same as big arctic lakes. The study includes no actual measurements of permafrost degradation.

It’s 100% possible, and likely, that large beaver ponds that are not freezing thru in winter are accelerating permafrost degradation. I’m not arguing w/ that. Degradation happens when water bodies don’t freeze thru in winter & keep relatively warm water on the land surface. 2/n

But the study doesn’t measure pond depth. Or dam height. Or actual changes in permafrost structure/hydrology. They just measure number of beaver dams and pond surface area over time. They accurately showed that beavers are moving into the arctic. 3/n

But it doesn’t show how many of those ponds are staying unfrozen year round. Primary dams tend to be taller than secondary dams, and time to freeze thru depends on water depth. Beavers don’t want their primary pond freezing, but are less concerned with secondary ponds. 4/n

In a typical landscape, 80-85% of dams are going to be secondary dams. Shorter dams. Shallower ponds. These will probably freeze thru in the high arctic! There are simple 1D models for lake ice thickness to see how long it takes to freeze to a given depth for a given climate.

Of course there are no measurements. This entire study is speculation by satellite. They don’t want to get their boots all mucky. But here’s one final parting thought from Emily.

Know what releases a huge amount of greenhouse gasses? Wildfire in the arctic. Maybe the beavers are helping by keeping the ground wet even during summer. Maybe not. We don’t know without collecting the relevant data.

Sure humans are causing climate change and ruining the permafrost. But beavers are making it faster! Now the BP trucks can’t even drive across the tundra three months of the year! How can they keep making money hand over fist? I ask you.

SNOWY SNOWY BEAVERS

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and Ice November 12, 2019

I’ve reviewed a handful of articles bemoaning the return of the beavers to the Tundra that worry they will destroy all the melting permafrost. Mostly people are worried about the WRONG thing, as we’ve noted many times. So it was a delight to finally read something positive about the change-makers.

‘Tundra be dammed’: Beavers head north, leaving their mark on the Arctic

Animals the size of Labrador retrievers are changing the face of Alaska, creating new ponds visible from space.

“These guys leave a mark,” UAF ecologist Ken Tape said of North America‘s largest rodents, beavers. He has observed the recent work of beavers north of Arctic Circle using satellite images. He and a group of Arctic researchers have found the creatures have somehow colonized the tundra of northwestern Alaska, damming more than 50 streams there since 1999.

Beavers live in every province of Canada, every U.S. state and into northern Mexico. Range maps now need to be redrawn to include areas north of treeline in Alaska and Canada

It’s nice when people get a whole host of beaver facts correct. Not common, but nice.

With their dams and new lakes that hold warmish water, beavers of the tundra ecosystem are thawing permafrost soils through their actions. Beavers could be “priming arctic streams for the establishment of salmon runs” that now don‘t exist, maybe because extreme northern waters are too cold for egg development.

Tape and co-authors Ben Jones, Chris Arp, Ingmar Nitze, Guido Grosse and Christian Zimmerman are writing about those changes in a paper with the working title, “Tundra be dammed: Beaver colonization of the Arctic.”

They used Landsat satellite images from 1999 to 2014 to show a good deal of beaver activity in the basins of the lower Noatak River and the Wulik and Kivalina rivers in Northwest Alaska. Because there was little or no beaver activity visible in the 1999 images, they conclude that beavers have migrated into those areas since then. They wrote that beavers there are moving in at an average rate of about 5 miles each year.

That’s right. Beavers could be clearing a path for salmon! They could make an uninhabitable area habitable just like they did in Cherynobyl and on Mt, Saint Helens. And you’re welcome!

“We do not know how beavers reached the Beaufort Coastal Plain, but they would have had to cross a mountain range or swim in the sea,” wrote Yukon biologist Tom Jung, who recently saw a beaver dam and winter store of food just 15 miles south of the Arctic Ocean in northern Yukon Territory.

Beavers are not great walkers, and their feet may not be adapted to cold. Beavers do not avoid winter by hibernating. To survive, they need a store of willow branches for food and water a few feet deep that doesn‘t freeze. They mate in deepest winter, January or February. The females have two to four kits from late April to June.

Seriously Beavers are not great walkers in the cold? Seriously? Do you really think castor fiber of siberia has such magic different feet? You might want to check out the data on how beavers normally live and walk where its very very cold.

Their presence north of arctic treeline since the late 1990s may be a population rebound from the late 1800s, Tape said, when the Hudson Bay Co. sold almost 3 million far-north beaver pelts to English buyers. But he wonders if beavers were ever present on arctic tundra landscapes. The northern expansion of the American beaver might be a phenomenon people have not yet seen.

At least he wonders. No one else even wonders. They just say Eek! beavers bad! And reporters write it down. I’m curious whether this means good things for salmon. And I’m curious what your research will find. Look at some historical trapping journals will ya?

BEAVERS IN THE SNOW

heidi08 Beavers and Ice February 5, 2019

Yesterday a reporter from Pennsylvania emailed me urban beaver questions so I assume whatever he’s working on is on its way. Why are all these beaver showing up in cities anyway? Today there’s a link to a beaver quiz on Ontario’s park blog website that I thought you’d enjoy. it’s mostly accurate although the ecology section at the end is pretty weak tea if you ask me.

The beaver in winter

Pop quiz: do beavers hibernate? Today’s post — from Natural Heritage Education Specialist Dave Sproule — answers common questions about beavers.

Beavers are active throughout the colder seasons – no long winter’s nap for them!

In summer, we often see signs of the beaver, such as gnawed trees or bark-bare sticks floating in the water, known as “beaver chew.” More obvious evidence is the beaver dam, found along streams and at the edges of ponds, wetlands and lakes.

In winter, the signs become trickier to spot because of the snow and frozen lakes and ponds, but some beavers still have a need to chew.

Yes yes beavers need to eat even when it’s cold. Isn’t that amazing? Just because their names share some letters they’re not like bears.

3. Isn’t the water too cold?

No, beavers are well-adapted to their environment, including a waterproof coat. A layer of coarse hairs guard the surface, while underneath, a thick layer of fine hairs have tiny hooks on them that mesh together tightly to keep water out.

This coat gets much thicker in winter, and in colder climates. The further north a beaver lives, the thicker its fur.

Yes, that’s why we used to only kill them in the winter, Timmy, because their dense fur was more valuable. For 200 hears It supported some of Canada’s biggest industries. Things are very different now. Don’t worry.

Now we kill them all year long.

4. Where do they live?

Beavers live in a lodge, a structure made from mud, sticks and logs, with an underwater entrance. Lodges are often built in the middle of shallow ponds, but can be found along riverbanks and lakeshores where the water is too deep to be away from shore.

They choose a good location, usually not too close to shore, so wolves can’t dig through the top of the lodge. In winter, the mud, sticks and logs freeze together, so digging through is difficult for predators.

The water should be deep enough to support the lodge, but shallow enough that the wood

pile breaks the surface of the water.

Once the wood is piled, the beavers chew an entrance from underwater into the dry part of the wood pile, making a chamber.

I’ve always liked the idea of beavers piling the sticks and chewing their way out, but since there’s actual footage of beavers walking up onto the lodge and dropping sticks on it, it can’t be the complete explanation. Maybe they chew/dig some and carry to reinforce?

6. Why are beavers important to the ecology of the forest and waterways?

Beavers can change landscapes with their dam-building, one of the few animals able to alter their own environment.

By changing water courses, flooding forests and creating wetlands, beavers create diverse habitats that benefit many plants and animals. For instance, increasing the water’s edge provides habitat for a variety of birds, plants and insects.

In winter, a beaver pond may shelter frogs and turtles in its muddy bottom, as well as dragonfly larvae, and brook trout. Beaver lodges have even been known to become homes for muskrat, living in their own private “apartment” (but, of course, not paying rent!).

That’s it? Beavers change the water course? Bulldozers change the watercourse. . No mention of shifting mud, increasing invertebrates, or filtering toxins? No mention of more fish eating those more bugs and more wildlife and birds eating those ‘more’ fish. Sheesh. I expect more from a park ranger.

So next time you pass a frozen wetland or pond, keep your eyes peeled for gnawed trees or rising steam, and tip your toque to one of Ontario’s coolest creatures!

Which leaves me with just two questions. Why don’t education specialist park rangers,responsible for protecting and interpreting the land for the public, know more about beaver benefits and just what the hell is toque?

THE MAINE PROBLEM

heidi08 Beaver Anatomy, Beavers and Ice January 26, 2019

Beavers are so difficult. Everywhere they go they cause problems, selfishly thinking of their own needs when others’ comfort is at stake. Just look at the nuisance they’re causing in Maine?

Beavers wreaking havoc with a Maine ski area’s snow guns

CAMDEN, Maine (BDN) — The sub-zero temperatures that swept across Maine last winter can be a hindrance to the snowmaking process for ski areas. But on top of the freezing conditions, snowmakers at the Camden Snow Bowl had to deal with another complicating factor: beavers.

The water used for making snow at the Snow Bowl — midcoast Maine’s only ski mountain — comes from Hosmer Pond, located at the base of Ragged Mountain. The beavers that call the pond home have taken to damming up the intake pipe that brings water to the ski area’s snowmaking guns, delaying the process until the pipe can be cleared.

Now isn’t that just like a beaver! Damming up the pond where you like to drain water to make snow! What are they thinking? I guess selfishly trying not to let their family freeze solid in a shallow pond. How selfish! The nerve of some rodents!

This season, the Snow Bowl has enlisted a diver to remove the beavers’ handiwork every time the snowmaking process is about to start. While Ward said the beavers are still trying their best to clog the pipe, preempting the delay in the process by hiring a diver has made for much smoother snowmaking.’

A diver has been digging out the pipe? In sub-freezing temperatures? More than one time? It’s Maine I guess, so people might as well dive into a hole in the snowy waters. They are hardy up there, digging out their cars and unfreezing their toilet seats. But still. Brrrrr….

So I’ve been working on some beavers and birds images for an upcoming talk at Mt Diablo Audubon. I wanted a nice graphic to get me started, and I’ve always wanted to have really short ready-made beaver ‘comercials’that any one could use to tell the story. Of course I have zero artistic skill so this could only be made by stealing the artwork of others and adjusting, resizing and editing it down to make it just so. What do you think?

i had to hunt a long time for just the right tree and sky. I like the colors of this all together so i think it works for now.

And speaking of wild things folks are willing to do in extreme weather. You need to watch this. Don’t ask me how I know. You just do. Turn your sound up.

You’re welcome.