Today’s beaver news is brought to you by “RELOCATION” because for some crazy reason people think letting beavers make their own decisions usually doesn’t work out. We’ll start with relocation for the Tulalip tribe.
To fix salmon streams, leave it to beavers
The Tulalip Tribes came up with a a plan to relocate aquatic troublemakers to rivers in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. Now, these brilliant ecosystem engineers are doing more than just finding a new home: They’re mitigating some of the impacts of climate change for Washington’s threatened salmon. Relocated beavers dam up natural streams with such efficiency that they create the deep, cool pools salmon need to thrive.
Join us to watch how scientists trap, rehabilitate and relocate beavers from suburban pond to mountain stream — and discover the strange technique used to tell a male beaver from a female.
Now if you’ve been here before you’ve probably heard my usual riff about moving beavers – while it’s dimly better than killing them it still fails to recognize the basic challenge which is we need to change the humans, not the animals. Especially since new beavers will just move back soon anyway and do the whole thing all over again.
But still, its a step in the right direction to say that beavers have some good points and are worth keeping around for those reasons. And its a nice film.
It’s good to see folks working hard to fix what we’re breaking at a great rate. Speaking of breaking things, Ben pointed out something really astonishing yesterday. We all heard something about the horrific climate change report released Friday, but since he’s a real journalist and scholar he actually read it. Which lead to his finding something very, very interesting in the section 6 on forests.
The upshot of the report is that we’re fucked, and your children, (if you were fool-hardy enough to have them) are really, really fucked. The report does a good job of stressing how expensive the changes already are to the economy – showing how changes causing drought, the pine beetle epidemic, a smaller snow pack and terrible hotter fires, And I guess when things are already ruined and hopeless they are ready to try any crazy scheme to fix the problem. Ergo this:
Well, well, well. Will you look at that, The stone which has been rejected shall become the corner stone indeed!
I always knew that when beavers benefits finally got a voice in the federal government it would come from the Forest Service. Of course I had assumed it would have happened years ago, or be a full five pages in the chapter not a few lines in a random inset, but still. Still. Some how, some way, the right people got the right message. Baby steps? I guess we just had to be so screwed that folks were ready to try even the craziest idea they could think of and then they’d finally believe it!
Yay?
Which is a lovely video about relocation, and mighty inspiring. I was surprised when I hunted for it on you tube to find this one. I don’t even remember making it. And I obviously didn’t even know yet that the offer was to move TWO family members only and kill the rest. You can see why I was never a fan.
