As beaver dams disappeared, pond and wetland habitats disappeared and heavy stream erosion occurred. Many species that depended on these aquatic habitats were affected.
Earth Justice has created these lovely postcards to explain how Wolves keep the balance in Yellowstone. (No word yet on when they will be doing a BEAVERS KEEP THE BALANCE. PERIOD set), but we should be thankful anyway. Earth Justice tends to like sexy, photogenic animals that will look noble for the camera and set the co-eds pulses fluttering, BUT beavers are the lumpy underdog heroes of so many ecological stories – I say they deserve more respect!
Wolves are the apex predator in Yellowstone. When they were exterminated from the park, the ecosystem suffered from the ripple effects.
Without natural predators like wolves, elk populations grew to unsustainable levels. Much of the trees and vegetation were overgrazed, leaving beavers with nothing to build dams out of.
After wolves were reintroduced in 1995, the elk populations have dropped, leaving beavers more wood to build their dams. Insects, fish, and songbirds that depend on the wetlands and ponds created by the beaver dams are now thriving.
Did you ever have a partner that in elementary school with whom you were supposed to be working on that oral book report – and they flashed a big toothy smile and everyone loved them because they were cute and great at kickball but all they did was bring lifesavers for the entire class during your presentation, while you read the book, wrote the speech, drew the posters, carried it all to class and made everything happen? And the teacher gave you BOTH an A?
Yesterday’s cold weather made me grateful that our beavers at least don’t have to worry about their pitiful pond freezing solid. Beavers in colder climates rely on the deeper water to stay unfrozen so they can get access to the lodge and reach their food caches. Once the surface water freezes solid they can’t get out until it thaws! Ours practically live on easy street – er, creek. This is a nice explanation of what those beavers do to get through the winter from the University of Wyoming.
Not much beaver news today but yesterday I was at work in the salt mines and saw that my name had been dropped on facebook – turns out Michael Howie of Fur-bearer Defenders radio was looking for someone to talk beavers and ecology for 10 minutes and someone I barely know said “Heidi Perryman is the obvious choice!”. Ha. (Only 10 minutes?)
I don’t know if we connected fast enough for his timeline, but its nice to be mentioned!
And just so you know I’m not the only crazy one in the family, this is what my nieces are up to in San Mateo where they received a contract to Yarn Bomb the city. Here are some pictures from from the Mercury News, and this is the explanation on the city’s website. Isn’t that awesome?
Fiber artist Lorna Watt attaches a hand knit sweater around a tree on 3rd Avenue in San Mateo, Calif., on Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2013. The Downtown Art Project paired vlolunteers from sponsor United American Bank with local artists to install the sweaters on 35 trees and saftey pylons …
This sure makes me think the mom beaver memorial might need a sweater….
A week away from turkey and pumpkin pie, there’s plenty of good news on the horizon. Let’s start this morning with a fieldtrip for the fishermen in Spey Scotland. It was lead by our friend Duncan Halley who grew up in Scotland but works as a scientist for the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, where a chief topic is Beavers. An angler wrote about the field trip here on the Spey Fishery board website.
Yesterday a group of fishery board and trust staff were taken on a beaver fact finding trip to Dunkeld by the Cairngorm National Park Authority. As many will know there is a rapidly expanding beaver population in the Tay catchment with beavers now present at Loch of the Lowes reserve near Dunkeld. A single male beaver turned up there in Dec 2012 followed soon after by a female. The pair setup home in the Lunan Burn, a tributary of the Lowes.
Duncan Halley a Scottish/Norwegian beaver ecologist was on hand to provide information and answer questions (Google him for more info). He reported that 99% of beaver activity occurred within 20m of water; a predator avoidance strategy as wolves prey on them where present. The lodge entrance was underwater with a food cache immediately outside. They dislike traveling through shallow water and a short distance upstream of the lodge there was a very small dam, about 6″ in height. This innocuous looking dam was built by the beavers to increase the depth of the water upstream so that they could swim underwater rather than being exposed.
Local lad Sean Dugan of the Beaver Salmonid Working Group explains the ins and outs of beaver ecology.
Following the trip to see the beaver site we were given a few presentations in the afternoon. Some interesting statistics: the mean width of streams at dam sites = 2.5m and the maximum width dammed = 6m. The maximum gradient of streams at dam site was 2%. So all the main Spey salmon spawning tributaries should remain dam free but there is still likely to be a large overlap in the potential range of beaver and salmonid habitat within the Spey catchment.
It’s nice to have boots on the ground teaching beavers at the front lines. Duncan is someone who really understands the research and knows how to explain beaver benefits. And as a native Scot he is better prepared than most to get his point across. Still, I worry that living in Norway where people are allegedly reasonable he hasn’t been exposed to enough “IRRATIONAL FEAR” to know his way around it. Fishermen are afraid of beavers. Period. Science won’t change that for the most part. Any more than terrible tornadoes will convince republicans in Illinois that climate change is real or a rising teen pregancy rate in the southern states will convince people that abstinence education doesn’t work.
Check out this from the comment section for instance
This must be a real worry, how can creating more dams/obstacles in a river system be anything other than detrimental to migratory fish stocks? As if the salmon/sea trout don’t have enough problems as it is.
We all would like to get back to nature but some times i think we do it wrong (soon i may have to apply for firearms certificate to include wolf and bears
No easy walk to beavers, apparently. But good luck with that Duncan and friends. You’ll probably need to do the exact same thing a million more times every November for the rest of the millennium, but you made a very heroic start!
And now because you’ve all been very patient I will share with you the GREATEST. BEAVER. STORY. EVER. Call your family members to the screen side and enjoy this with someone you love. Because we shall not look upon its likeness ever again.
Nathan Baron was relaxing over the weekend, sitting in a chair in the woods and tracking a doe with his Remington rifle when, suddenly, nature called. The Maine high school student left the gun resting against the chair, ran back home to do his business, and arrived just in time to see something he didn’t expect to see: a beaver stealing the rifle. “There was a stream … about 100 feet away from me,” he told Bangor Daily News. “I look and there’s a beaver hauling that gun into the water. There was nothing I could do … the beaver went under. That was it.”
I love this story with the white-hot heat of a thousand suns and cannot imagine a better end to a hunter’s tale than a beaver diving underwater with a loaded firearm. Do I think it’s true? Probably not. Do I think it needs animating and should be shown every single Christmas? You bet your dam life.
I love this video which is from the science classroom on PBS. I love the little girl who explains that they have to work “real hard” and the one who notices that the water gets through the cracks, and especially love the kid who says that he’s using mud like glue because that’s “what beavers do”. I read that Massachusetts Audubon lets kids build a beaver dam on their beaver field trips and I wrote their project coordinator for information about how it works. She says they love to use a tiny natural stream, small enough to hop over, but if one isn’t available they will just pour a bucket of water on the experiment and see how it holds up! Unfortunately the video wouldn’t let me embed it so I’m risking the long arm of the law and posting it on youtube to share. Which means you should DEFINITELY watch it before PBS throws me in the pokey for copyright infringement. Let’s puzzle together to think how this might be replicated at the festival okay?
Yesterday was a busy day for beaver supporters in Martinez. We carpooled to the Oakland zoo for their continuing education brown-bag series, where about 75 zoo keepers and volunteers gathered for the brown bag series – this time featuring beavers! It was a lovely hall with a great setup and many familiar faces dotted through the crowd. They were the kind of cheerful intelligent animal champions that laughed at every joke, oohed in all the right places and audibly gasped at Moses’ footage of mom beaver walking on her hind legs to work on the dam.
Although it was working perfectly when I set it up at first, the AV equipment developed an imperfect relationship with my mac, which the techs solved by telling the computer that it was projecting the image onto another computer to my right. This weirdly meant I couldn’t see the screen and some of the images that projected were blurry, but I forged bravely onward and it turned out alright anyway. Afterwards the woman in charge of the series told me this was one of the best presentations they ever had!
Here’s what enthusiastic zoo volunteer Cindy Margulis posted on facebook later:
Congratulations, Heidi! you did an AWESOME presentation today at the Oakland Zoo about those truly famous Martinez beavers! Zookeepers, docents, volunteers, intern and other zoo staff all enjoyed your delightful and insightful presentation. You have won a whole new cadre of beaver fans … and inspired everyone!
Gosh, could she have picked a better compliment? Thanks Cindy. I LOVE the idea that there is this army of beaver believers waiting by their creeks all over Alameda County with torches and pitchforks ready to defend the first brave disperser that shows up!
After the talk another woman told me that I did a delightful presentation and was “So Charming!” which made me laugh all day because obviously I’m sure that’s exactly how the mayor and a certain creek-side property owner think of me too.
Congratulations, Heidi! you did an AWESOME presentation today at the Oakland Zoo about those truly famous Martinez beavers! Zookeepers, docents, volunteers, intern and other zoo staff all enjoyed your delightful and insightful presentation. You have won a whole new cadre of beaver fans … and inspired everyone!
