How many beavers are in your state?
No one knows because no one counts them anymore. We just know there are ‘enough’ for the population to carry on if we allow trapping, And that’s about as far as the calculations go. And that’s pretty much true for every state.
Think about how crazy it is we don’t count populations.. It’s like a mother saying she doesn’t know how many children she actually has,, but arguing that even if a kidnapper tooka few it would still be more than she wanted. It’s like a bank saying, “We don’t need to count how much money we have. We just know that even if we were robbed we’d still be rich”.
Rhode Island is going to change all that.
URI scientists investigate distribution of muskrats, beavers, otters in R.I.
Traveling via kayak, John Crockett will search for evidence of muskrats, beavers and river otters in waterways of southwestern Rhode Island this winter before expanding his search to other areas of the state in the coming years.
“The main goal of the study is to get a good sense of the distribution of each species across the state,” said Crockett, a native of Fort Collins, Colorado, who is collaborating on the study with URI Assistant Professor Brian Gerber. “To do that, we’re conducting an occupancy analysis, which means we’re going out looking for signs of tracks, scat, chewed sticks, lodges and sightings of the animals.”
All three species have been the target of trappers in Rhode Island for many years — though the state legislature banned the trapping of river otters in the 1970s — and most of what state wildlife officials know about the animals is derived from trapping data. But since trapping has been decreasing in popularity in recent years, less and less data about the animals is being collected.
Hmm. That’s pretty interesting and pretty much a dream job for some recent graduate. No hiding at the bottom of the swimming pool in scuba gear needed for him to avoid the standard “what are you planning to do with your life now” questions.
“We want to make sure we have a good assessment of where these mammals are found,” Gerber said. “It’s been 10 or 15 years since anyone has spent much time looking for them, and we want to see if we find any changes in their distribution since those earlier surveys.”
Beavers are believed to have recovered well after being extirpated from the area due to unregulated trapping and forest clearing in the 1800s.
“Now they are creating conflicts with their dams causing flooding in some places,” Gerber said. “We’d like to be able to identify the habitat features where beavers are doing well and those areas where they are likely to cause conflict. To do that, we need distribution data.”
Crockett expects to conduct his surveys from December through March for the next three years, as well as periodic summer surveys. He eventually hopes to be able to estimate the probability that any of the three species will be found in a given habitat.
Well I can tell you right now that if beavers are in one area the other two will be seen there. Does R.I. Want to hire me now? And every place without beavers will be less likely to have the other two.
Hey it’s almost like trappers should leave beavers on the landscape so there’s more to for them to trap! I guess that’s just considered crazy talk.
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