Happy Father’s Day to all the dads and grandads out there. I thought I would celebrate by honoring our beaver father. This is footage taken by Moses Silva that shows him bringing his full powers to bear. Dad’s do a lot for us. Where they’re human or not.
He was an excellent willow=winner for his family. but also a great teacher and support. This other footage I was lucky enough to see and film.
It’s never too early to start learning how to be a beaver with dad around.
So I was minding my own business scanning headlines yesterday when THIS caught my eye,
The 1986 Chernobyl disaster left a huge area of Ukraine uninhabitable, but wildlife still found a way to thrive. However, they were not left untouched by the effects of radiation. Chernobyl’s beaver population has taken to building its lodges in trees as a result of radioactive waterways.
Of c0urse that immediately got my attention. Because there’s one thing beavers can’t do with their big bottom heavy bodies and that’s nest in trees.
Although similar sightings were unofficially recorded by Richard Astley as early as 1987, this bizarre behaviour was only recently confirmed by scientists. On a research exhibition to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in January, members of the Forest Office of Lviv observed beavers nesting in the canopies of hardwood trees.
You might wonder how beavers of Chernobyl have adapted to an arboreal lifestyle – how the even get up to the forest canopy. In fact, they use their teeth and, as they are rodents, they regrow. This has the added benefit of gnawing them down.
The idea that beavers climb trees with their TEETH was even funnier to me. I became more attentive. I had to see when this was published and by whom. That’s when I saw the article was published two months earlier.
HMM two months. Now what was happening two months ago? May, April.
OH RIGHT! the article was published on April 1st. But since it’s basically read by a few Peta liberal types no one even objected. In the comments one hardy “Scientist” says that the photo shows a “Beaver Rat” not a true beaver, and that’s why he’s in a tree.
Scientists are fascinated by this discovery; however, they are not pleased. At the moment beavers are still building dams as they don’t spend all their time in trees. But there are worries that in the future, beavers will spend less time building dams on the ground and areas will flood the riverbanks, potentially spreading the contaminated water to other areas.
“This new discovery has changed the way we think about beavers, from their general behaviour to their environmental effects as ecosystem engineers. Is this to be a reoccurring pattern in other areas, then ecosystems will fundamentally change – we could soon start seeing ducks nesting in tree holes. Not every species will be able to adapt to the higher levels of radiation in water however; some species simply cannot change their ecology this rapidly. Real consequences of human pollution are what is observed here, not some funny animal joking around.”
Just look at the name of the researcher they quoted,
Pauline Y’Oleg.
Really excited about how this came together. Amelia’s artwork lives on with Terre Dunivant’s fantastic graphic design. This will be a folded design so you’re seeing front and back on the first page and the inside pages on the second page. You should be able to zoom in and look around. Hurray!
MartinezBeaver Festival22 brochure-2I thought they were going to live on the “Farm”. No one told me they were going to be killed!
CUMBERLAND, R.I. — A town plan to trap “nuisance” beavers to reduce the flooding they cause has been halted after a town official learned the captured animals would be killed.
Mayor Jeff Mutter said the town stopped trapping beavers after a news article on the plan was published May 19, and he became aware the beavers would be killed and not relocated.
“We suspended the activity the very next day,” Mutter said. He explained that at the time of approving the action, he didn’t realize state law required trapped beavers be killed unless they were released back into the same area.
“I should have been aware,” he said. When the article was published, two individuals reached out to him about the lethal action, and the trapping was immediately paused, he said.
Yes. You really should have. What did you think? That they’d all be taken to some kind of ‘retraining compound”? What irritates me is that in the time between approving the trapper and the release of this article several beavers are already likely dead. Which means you get everything you want. Dead beavers and the appearance of not wanting dead beavers.
Mutter said the town will explore other techniques before resorting to killing the beavers again.
“We want to coexist,” he said. “We want to do everything that we could do to not go to those measures. And then to go to those measures if we were left with no other option.”
Mutter said beavers have caused issues on private property and on town-owned land for a while. Rhode Island’s beaver population has steadily grown since the 1970s, and the increase in animals in urbanized areas has caused flooding for years.
To legally trap and kill beavers outside of the Nov. 1 to Feb. 28 hunting season, Cumberland had to apply for a nuisance permit through the state.
The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management often gives out off-season permits to transportation companies and the Department of Transportation when beavers are clogging culverts or damming waterways and causing roadway flooding and creating a safety hazard, according to David Kalb, DEM supervising wildlife biologist.
“Human safety is our No. 1 concern” when issuing these types of permits, Kalb said, and in the case of Cumberland, he said the flooding impacts individual property and water wells in addition to roadways.
Though relocating the beavers might seem like the best solution, Kalb said it can be “costly” and “dangerous,” calling it a “poor practice.” Beavers who are placed in new habitats could bring diseases to previously healthy groups of animals or cause conflict by encroaching on their new neighbors’ space. And their attempts to return to their original home can cause problems when they try to cross roadways, he said.
“Beavers, probably greater than almost any other species in North America, have the ability to make dramatic changes to large, broad areas,” Kalb said. “Nobody wants to see a beaver flood out 500 homes that are upstream of it.”
Call me a cynic but I think you want to “Coexist” about as much as uvalde police want to step in the line of fire. I think you’ve made a plan to dress up in coexistence camo so that you could slip more easily through the bunny hugging crowd. You do actually live in RI I assume. You know what you’re dealing with. It’s not like you grew up in Washington State.
“We have to look at each case, and say, ‘What’s the greater good here?’” he added.
Still, killing the animals is a last resort, and DEM usually encourages other courses of action to prevent damming before trapping.
Parts of the town are already using non-lethal methods to deal with the beavers’ engineering. The Cumberland Land Trust does not allow trapping on its property and instead has installed fences around culverts and other measures, which have decreased some of the flooding and allowed humans to coexist with the beavers, the trust’s secretary Joe Pailthorpe said.
However, sometimes those practices aren’t enough, Kalb said. “‘Busy as a beaver’ is a thing for a very good reason,” he said. “The work that it takes several human beings to destroy overnight or over the course of a day, beavers can fix that back and make more progress on it overnight.”
On average DEM approves about 20 of the nuisance trapping applications annually and on the high end, about five beavers are killed per permit, Kalb estimated.
It is not clear how many beavers were captured in Cumberland while the town was still allowing the practice. Cumberland will have 30 days after its license expires to report its kills, according to Kalb.
I guess even if the mayor is lying it’s still the right kind of lie. The kind that you can use to hold his feet to the fire down the line. I’m not likely to give anyone who orders beavers to be trapped the benefit of the doubt, but I’ll stay tuned. You know me.
The very best thing to do with beavers is to do nothing and let them choose where they want to be. The very second best thing might be this.
A partnership between governmental agencies and university researchers has modern-day trappers searching Utah for beavers. But they aren’t after pelts. Instead they’re using the large rodent to lessen the effects of drought. From KZMU in Moab, Justin Higginbottom has more.
Sandbach is one a number of modern-day trappers searching the state for beavers in a partnership between governmental agencies and university researchers. But they aren’t after pelts. Instead, they’re using the semi-aquatic animal to lessen effects of drought in the region.
In Sandbach’s time trapping she’s gotten to know quite a few of the large rodents.
“It’s interesting, they really do have different behaviors. We just released our last one… He was super aggressive like the whole time. He was a big male. He was kind of scary. He would hiss and lunge at us,” says Sandbach.
But the beaver today is calm with her back turned. Sandbach named her Ice Baby after finding her in the cold waters of a high-elevation canyon. Ice Baby had contributed to an impressive complex which the land’s owner thought was getting out of control.
Although Ice Baby now finds herself some 60 miles south of her home waters, she’s actually lucky.
“Before this project, usually the solution would be lethal removal,” says Sandbach.
Now the hope is that Ice Baby will go to work for the state. Prolonged drought is drying up sections of this river and threatening its fish, including three endangered species. Sandbach and others think beavers can help.
It’s a nice story with a fun little audio clip that I can’t figure out to embed. Click on the headline to go listen for yourself.
Although Ice Baby now finds herself some 60 miles south of her home waters, she’s actually lucky.
“Before this project, usually the solution would be lethal removal,” says Sandbach.
Now the hope is that Ice Baby will go to work for the state. Prolonged drought is drying up sections of this river and threatening its fish, including three endangered species. Sandbach and others think beavers can help.
