Category: beavers and wolves

WOLVES MAKE WAY FOR BEAV-DI-VERSITY

You will LITERALLY never guess what article dropped in my inbox yesterday. All thru the day friends sent it my way and this morning Science Daily and a host of companion sites are featuring it. It is based on a newly published article by a host of authors including the former head of Fish and Wildlife. Now can you guess?

More wolves, beavers needed as part of improving western United States habitats, scientists say

In a paper published today in BioScience, “Rewilding the American West,” co-lead author William Ripple and 19 other authors suggest using portions of federal lands in 11 states to establish a network based on potential habitat for the gray wolf—an apex predator able to trigger powerful, widespread ecological effects.

In those states the authors identified areas, each at least 5,000 square kilometers, of contiguous, federally managed lands containing prime wolf habitat. The states in the proposed Western Rewilding Network, which would cover nearly 500,000 square kilometers, are Oregon, Washington, California, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.

“It’s an ambitious idea, but the American West is going through an unprecedented period of converging crises including extended drought and water scarcity, extreme heat waves, massive fires and loss of biodiversity,” said Ripple, distinguished professor of ecology in the OSU College of Forestry.

Beaver populations, once robust across the West, declined roughly 90% after settler colonialism and are now nonexistent in many streams, meaning ecosystem services are going unprovided, the authors say.

By felling trees and shrubs and constructing dams, beavers enrich fish habitat, increase water and sediment retention, maintain water flows during drought, improve water quality, increase carbon

sequestration and generally improve habitat for riparian plant and animal species.

“Beaver restoration is a cost-effective way to repair degraded riparian areas,” said co-author Robert Beschta, professor emeritus in the OSU College of Forestry. “Riparian areas occupy less than 2% of the land in the West but provide habitat for up to 70% of wildlife species.”

No really. And sure there’s a lot of stuff about wolves in the article too but BEAVERS. America needs beavers to get back it’s biodiversity. BEAVER VERSITY!

Similarly, wolf restoration offers significant ecological benefits by helping to naturally control native ungulates such as elk, according to the authors. They say wolves facilitate regrowth of vegetation species such as aspen, which supports diverse plant and animal communities and is declining in the West.

Shh just between us but we know that the BIG thing wolves do is eat out all the things that eat aspen and willow so that MORE BEAVERS can come. They are basically beaver handmaidens. Let’s be honest.

The paper includes a catalogue of 92 threatened and endangered plant and animal species that have at least 10% of their ranges within the proposed Western Rewilding Network; for each species, threats from human activity were analyzed.

The authors determined the most common threat was livestock grazing, which they say can cause stream and wetland degradation, affect fire regimes and make it harder for woody species, especially willow, to regenerate.

Nationally, about 2% of meat production results from federal grazing permits, the paper notes.

“We suggest the removal of grazing on federal allotments from approximately 285,000 square kilometers within the rewilding network, representing 29% of the total 985,000 square kilometers of federal lands in the 11 western states that are annually grazed,” Beschta said. “That means we need an economically and socially just federal compensation program for those who give up their grazing permits. Rewilding will be most effective when participation concerns for all stakeholders are considered, including Indigenous people and their governments.”

Just imagine what it would be like to drive though these federal lands and instead of seeing cows everywhere you saw beaver dams or canals or chewed trees or wolves and actual beavers.

The paper also included authors from the University of Washington, the University of Colorado, the Ohio State University, Virginia Tech, Michigan Technological University, the University of Victoria, the Turner Endangered Species Fund, the National Parks and Conservation Association, RESOLVE, the Florida Institute for Conservation Science, Public Lands Media and Wild Heritage.

Read the paper yourself here: Rewilding the American West

And then send this article to Everyone you know. We might just be walking OUT of the forest, people.

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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“IMPACT” CAN ALSO BE A NEGATIVE THING

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beavers, beavers and wolves October 21, 2021

Well that’s a relief. Yesterday I felt like I was wayyy out on a limb dissing wolves for eating beaver snacks and thinking that the show was hardly worth the entrance fee. Now Ben Goldfarb is writing about the new research for Science magazine. I’m happy to hand him the mic.

Wolf attacks on beavers are altering the very landscape of a national park

The alpha male of the Cranberry Bay wolf pack, dubbed V083 by researchers, is a canine with a singular specialty: killing beavers. V083 roams Voyageurs National Park in northern Minnesota, and in the spring and summer, he and his packmates prey heavily on busy rodents, ambushing them along foraging trails and waterways. This year alone, V083 devoured 36 beavers, the equivalent of seven colonies.

Such kills have an outsize impact, according to a new study. By influencing where beavers live and build dams, the wolves shape Voyageurs’s vast wetlands—an ecological chain reaction that alters the contours of the land itself. “Looking at it over time,” says Tom Gable, a biologist at the Voyageurs Wolf Project and lead author of the study published today in Science Advances, “you start to see how interconnected wolves are to wetland creation.”

Or rather the end of wetland creation. Sometimes referred to as DESTRUCTION.

In many cases, the victims were beavers—ecosystem engineers that transform their surroundings by building dams and creating ponds. They’re especially prolific in Voyageurs, where their ponds cover 13% of the park’s total area.

Although the tracked wolves ate plenty of beavers—some packs killed 40% of the rodents in their territories each year—they didn’t have a major impact on long-term beaver numbers, the researchers found. But the wolves did influence where their prey lived. In particular, Gable and his colleagues learned that wolves frequently ate “dispersing” beavers—nomads that had left their home lodges to colonize new areas. These beavers were especially vulnerable because they had to repeatedly venture onto land to harvest sticks for their nascent dams. After wolves killed these colonists, the researchers found their partial ponds remained unoccupied for the rest of the year. So the predators prevented forests from fully transitioning to ponds and wetlands—forestalling dramatic environmental change.

Compared with Yellowstone’s complex and contested wolf dynamic, Voyageurs offers a clear example of what scientists call a trophic cascade: When wolves eat beavers, beavers can’t construct ponds. “There’s been a lot of interest in trying to understand how large carnivores are connected to riparian ecosystems and wetlands,” Gable says. “Our work has presented this simple mechanism that you could explain to a 5-year-old.”

Hey I can think of another large carnivore that impacts wetlands. Can you? Well maybe you will think of it tonight at dinner.

Still, the scale of the Voyageurs cascade isn’t clear. Every year, the region’s wolves alter about 88 beaver ponds—hardly an overwhelming transformation on such a vast landscape. “Ponds are coming and going in various places over time, but the numbers suggest it’s just a small part of what’s going on in the landscape out there,” says Robert Beschta, a hydrologist at Oregon State University, Corvallis, who has studied the effects of wolf predation in Yellowstone.

Gable notes wolf impacts add up with time. Over 10 years, he estimates, Voyageurs’s wolf packs may affect one pond for every 2.1 square kilometers of land. And the phenomenon may not be isolated to northern Minnesota. “Given the fact that wolves and beavers co-occur across a substantial portion of the Northern Hemisphere,” Gable says, “this mechanism is likely occurring everywhere wolves are preying on beavers.”

Translation: “The mechanism is likely occurring everywhere WE are killing beavers.”

Okay, I’m off to the Colorado Beaver Summit which I expect to be very very interesting after some familiar zoom challenges. I saw Jay Wilde, Emily Fairfax and Joe Wheaton yesterday at the tech check, so I know it’s going to be good. I’ll leave you with my first slide just to get you in the mood.

KILLING BEAVERS IMPACTS WETLANDS

heidi08 Beavers, beavers and wolves October 20, 2021

Killing beavers impacts wetlands. Who knew? Can someone please do their dissertation on that? It’s especially dire when there aren’t very many of them I would think. Wouldn’t you? The research out of voyageurs national park always centers on how delicious beavers are to wolves. Little appetizers with tails. Apparently some wolves like them more than others.

Wolves impact wetlands, have unique hunting abilities, researcher tells Nature Club

MANITOULIN – The Manitoulin Nature Club was established in 1979 to increase knowledge of nature for its members and to support the preservation of elements of natural history, many of which are unique to Manitoulin. Members meet monthly to share observations and host guest speakers on topics of interest and recently had a look into the secret lives of wolves with a presentation by Thomas Gable, project lead on the Voyageurs Wolf Project. The project addresses the question, “what do wolves do during the summer in a forested ecosystem?”

Mr. Gable recently completed his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota. He’s been studying wolves in the greater Voyageurs ecosystem since 2014, when he started his masters at Northern Michigan University. He’s particularly interested in wolf-beaver interactions and his graduate work was focused on trying to understand this predator-prey dynamic. Much of his early interest in wolves stemmed from encountering wolves, wolf tracks and occasional kills while exploring the wilds of places around his family’s McGregor Bay cabin. His research includes things not currently known about wolf hunting behaviour, wolf diet and how wolves impact larger ecosystems in the northern woods of Minnesota.

Those beavers are so delicious. A wolf can’t eat just one. But it’s the funniest thing. When a wolf cleans out a beaver pond all the wildlife that depended on that pond disappears too! It’s like the opposite of a keystone species. Gee do you think that when humans trap beaver that happens too?

During the summer, wolves are focused on two main things: having and raising pups and hunting and killing prey so they can feed themselves and provision their pups. To have a really detailed understanding of wolf ecology in the summertime, there needs to be a really detailed understanding of both of these facets of wolves, he explained. The VWP uses remote trail cameras and GPS collars to track the wolves.

One thing that makes the park unique is the abundance of beavers there. “It likely has the highest beaver densities in the lower 48 states and probably rivals even the highest densities in parts of Canada,” said Mr. Gable. One survey last winter identified 1,100 beaver lodges. “Compared to a place like McGregor Bay or Manitoulin Island, those would have substantially fewer beavers than we have here by a significant margin. Voyageurs National Park has a lot of mixed forest habitats and interspersed amongst those are a lot of wetlands and beaver ponds.”

Before VWP started there were no estimates in scientific literature on how many fawns and beavers a typical wolf kills in the summertime, despite hundreds of thousands of hours of wolf research in places like Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ontario, Quebec and Manitoba. “Because we don’t know really how many fawns and beavers a wolf is killing, we don’t understand what effect wolves are having on prey populations during these periods. It’s really hard to know how wolves might be impacting the beaver population if you don’t know how many beavers,” he said.

Sure but they’re just rodents right? No matter how many you eat they’ll always make more?

They’ve found that the typical wolf in the project area is killing between 13 and 15 deer fawns and 12 to 14 beavers in the summertime but there’s a wide range. “We’ve had one that killed only one beaver and last year we had a wolf that was sort of a beaver specialist and killed 42 beavers. To put 42 beavers into perspective, a typical beaver colony in our area has five beavers so that means that one wolf by itself killed eight-and-one-half colonies of beavers which is quite astounding.”

One of their most significant documented findings is how wolves actually alter wetland ecosystems. “Wolves impact wetland creation through a very simple, straightforward process. Wolves prey on beavers. Beavers create wetlands. By default, wolves impact wetlands by preying on beavers,” he said.

They found that wolves are impacting the creation of 88 ponds or wetlands in the Voyageurs area. “That is really just a drop in the bucket when you look at the ecosystem but when you look at this over multiple years then the impact becomes more substantial. If in year one wolves impact the creation of 88 ponds then the next year 88 ponds then the next and the next, then all of a sudden wolves are responsible for impacting the creation of over 400 ponds or wetlands,” Mr. Gable continued.

CAN WE PLEASE SAY THIS AGAIN only not about wolves? Can we say it’s what happens when HUMANS trap beavers? I mean the effect is EVEN MORE DEVASTATING when you are in a habitat that is surrounded by other beavers and other ponds. Wiping out one beaver family might wipe out the entire ecosystem for miles around.

“Another way to think about it is when a beaver creates a single pond in a localized area it radically transforms that area from forests or meadow into a thriving wetland that’s doing all sorts of things like nutrient cycling, carbon storage, water storage, and providing habitats. Wolves that prevent that habitat from forming are then connected to all of these wonderful ecological processes that beaver ponds are responsible for. What we’ve been able to document is that wolves are very connected to wetlands, streams and riparian habitats. It’s such a simple process; all they have to do is kill a young beaver.”

By the very same extension, Mr. Gable, human trappers whether for fur or sport or depredation do EXACTLY THE SAME THING and impact wetlands the very same way. Will someone one please do a dissertation on that?

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?