GOOD BEAVER THINGS TO COME

heidi08 Beaver Rehabilitation July 5, 2020

If your night last night was anything like ours you need a restful beaver read. Preferably with no explosions and plenty of eye candy. Consider this beaver porn.

Orphaned Okanagan beavers admitted to rehab centre

The tale of two beavers found alone in busy Okanagan neighbourhoods has a happy ending, as they are now safe in the care of the BC Wildlife Park. The fuzzy creatures were discovered in separate locations, but both are very young and thought to be orphaned.

Alder was found walking down a residential road in Vernon about five weeks ago, while Willow arrived from the Kelowna area after she was discovered alone under a bridge about three weeks ago. Both were admitted to the Fawcett Family Wildlife Health Centre, in Kamloops. The centre is a specialized hospital and rehabilitation facility dedicated to providing veterinary services for the resident animals of the BC Wildlife Park.

Awww. Of course they were “orphaned’ in the same way George Floyd’s daughter was ‘orphaned’. Meaning not from parental neglect but from the murderous attention of others. But still.

AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

Meet Alder, and Willow. These two rescued beavers were admitted to the Fawcett Family Wildlife Health Centre 5 and 3 weeks ago respectively. They were found separately and in different locations -Alder arrived first from the Vernon area. He was found walking down a busy road in a residential area. Willow arrived from the Kelowna area and was found alone under a bridge. Our rehabilitation team isn’t sure exactly what happened to orphan these two beavers, but it is thought that the high waters could have separated them from the rest of their family.

Oh I’m sure. But it’s nice you are raising them together and have pledged to keep them until adulthood. In the mean time I’m sure photos like these will raise lots of money for the center. So you can keep doing this work a while longer.

I keep thinking about the fact that these two beavers were found a long ways apart. Which means some lucky staffer got to drive many miles with a baby beaver in her car. Maybe in a dog crate. Maybe on her lap.

AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW.

My audio of in beaver world has reached completion and now I’m just working on the film. We figured out a way to get the most elusive contributor yesterday, and I thought you’d enjoy a sneak peak. Also I discovered my dear friend and partner in crime POWTOON now takes uploaded video and I am over the moon with joy. Wonders await.

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BEAVERS AND FOOD WEBS

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact July 4, 2020

Well sure. They may cause climate change but there are a few good things about beavers. Just ask Phys,org.

More ecosystem engineers create stability, preventing extinctions

Biological builders like beavers, elephants, and shipworms re-engineer their environments. How this affects their ecological network is the subject of new research, which finds that increasing the number of “ecosystem engineers” stabilizes the entire network against extinctions.

Yeakel, an ecologist at the University of California, Merced, and a former Santa Fe Institute Omidyar Fellow is the lead author of a new paper that models the long term impact of ecosystem engineers. Researchers have long considered the role of ecosystem engineers in natural histories, but this study is among the first to quantitatively assess them in an ecological network model.

“We wanted to understand how food webs and interaction networks were established from a mechanistic perspective,” he says. “To do that, you have to include things like engineering because species influence their environment and there’s this feedback between the environment to the species.”

Gee I have an idea of what makes and maintains a food web and sits in the middle of it day in day out making sure it functions according to design. Or if it doesn’t, they just move somewhere else and make a new web.

When we think of engineering in nature, we tend to think of beavers—the tree-felling, dam-building rodents whose machinations can shape the landscape by creating lakes and changing the path of rivers. But beavers are far from the only organisms to reshape their environment. A squirrel who inadvertently plants oak trees is also an “ecosystem engineer“—roughly speaking, any organism whose impact on the environment outlasts its own lifetime. The coolest of these biological builders, according to Justin Yeakel, might be the shipworm, which eats through rocks in streams, creating cozy abodes for future invertebrate inhabitants.

In particular, the model uses simple rules to show how food webs can be assembled, how species interactions can change over time, and when species go extinct. One striking result: Few ecosystem engineers led to many extinctions and instability while many ecosystem engineers led to stability and few extinctions.

“As you increase the number of engineers, that also increases the redundancy of the engineers and this tends to stabilize the system,” Yeakel says.

Well sure. If you have a healthy beaver habitat and one gets killed, the others can carry on the family trade, so to speak. Beaver make food webs. In addition to everything else they do.

Elephants don’t purify water.

LUCKY FOR BEAVERS

heidi08 Beavers, Festival, Friends of Martinez Beavers July 3, 2020

I may have said before that when I am asked if I’ve been lucky in life I often reply that I have neither good luck nor bad luck but ANCIENT GREEK LUCK. What I mean by this of course is that either it’s staggeringly bad news like your ancestors left you a plague dowry that will kill all your grandchildren when they marry OR it’s amazing fortunate luck like the bastard son you gave up at birth has inherited the acropolis and now rules the kingdom. It’s all good or all bad, And sometimes its both.

I was reminded of this over the weekend when we observed the beaver festival that never came and felt sad for all the moments that would never be. And then, just as we were wistfuling all over ourselves a new beaver mural suddenly appeared in Martinez (just down the street from where I used to live) and a huge beaver box arrived on our doorstep.

Allow me to explain.

Since Ben Goldfarb has published his amazing book I have been getting contacts from folks across the nation that support beavers or like our story and want to visit or support beavers in their area. This is very nice, take the woman from New York said she liked the book so much she was planning on coming to the festival!

But one such contact was from a chiropracter in DC who had been collected beavers toys all his life and when he read the book wanted to donate them to us, I told him that we would love to use them as prizes at the festival if he was willing for them to go to good homes over the years and he shipped them out.

It was such a long time coming I had nearly forgotten. But they arrived Monday after the festival that never came. And we got to spend the day doing this. Items from Canada and Japan. Antiques, dog toys and adorable knock-offs. My favorite is a beaver with a giant tail that doubles as a coin purse with a zipper.

Because I have “GREEK LUCK”.

So we’ll go through and pick out what gets given first…and what kind of beaver quiz or challenge folks will earn them with…There were two folkmanis and we snatched them away for the regular stash.

Oh and that same weekend? Emily Fairfax was doing this. And no matter how smart you think you are about beavers, you really should listen all the way through.

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Have a safe and glorious fourth of July, by the way. And in case you need it, here’s an amazingly patriotic reminder.

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THANK HEAVENS FOR EMILY

heidi08 Beavers and climate change July 2, 2020

The world isn’t done blaming beavers for climate change, so there are a few more science articles bemoaning the dam beavers and permafrost. But at least one of them talked to Emily Fairfax yesterday so we’re mighty happy about that. This is from Popular Science.

Beavers might be making the Arctic melt even faster

Carbon pollution is causing all sorts of weird effects on the planet, including dramatic weather shifts and reshuffling ecosystems. Every day brings a new surprise driven by the cascading impacts of warming the Earth. Now, a new study in Environmental Research Letters shows that a warming climate may have unleashed beavers upon the tundra in the Alaskan Arctic—and their activities could be accelerating the loss of permafrost.

In Alaska and Canada, beavers have mostly made their homes in forests. But things are changing. Summers are longer, seasonal winter ice is thinner, and shrubs are increasingly sprouting up, making the tundra an increasingly appealing place for the rodents. In recent years, researchers have documented beavers setting up their dams in these treeless landscapes, and more lakes are now pocketing the tundra.

Okay this part we know. Where’s the inspiring new Emily part?

However, it’s important to note that the research team did not directly link increased permafrost thawing to beaver ponds. More watery surface area across the tundra is known to chip away at permafrost—that’s not in dispute. But Emily Fairfax, an ecohydrologist at California State University Channel Islands, says that you can’t apply that same relationship to beaver ponds. Instead, most beaver-created water bodies tend to be shallow, and thus are more likely to completely freeze over during winter, which would prevent a significant loss of permafrost. In a calculation based on typical beaver dam heights and winter temperatures in the study region, Fairfax argues that the majority of beaver ponds in the study area probably freeze through in winter and “are behaving more like shallow wetlands that go through freeze-thaw cycles just like the active layer of permafrost does.” Adds Fairfax, “The scale of impact the authors imply is overstated.”

Even if beavers are causing some extra melting, it’s hard to say how that would ultimately factor into how much soil carbon is stored or lost. As Fairfax points out, beaver ponds can retain water from thawed permafrost that would otherwise drain away. Dried permafrost soils, meanwhile, are highly flammable—and, if ignited, can release lots of carbon into the atmosphere.

And no scientist is saying we should be mad at beavers, which are known to provide many benefits to their native ecosystems.

SPECULATION BY SATELLITE STUDY

heidi08 Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Ice July 1, 2020

We all know beavers are blamed for everything. For floods and droughts and giardiasis and crop failure. Well if you have even one friend who knows you like beavers you received a panicked copy of some version of this article yesterday. Because apparently they cause climate change too.

The Newest Threat to a Warming Alaskan Arctic: Beavers

The large rodents are creating lakes that accelerate the thawing of frozen soils and potentially increase greenhouse gas emissions, a study finds.

Alaskan beavers are carving out a growing web of channels, dams and ponds in the frozen Arctic tundra of northwestern Alaska, helping to turn it into a soggy sponge that intensifies global warming.

On the Baldwin Peninsula, near Kotzebue, for example, the big rodents have been so busy that they’re hastening the regional thawing of the permafrost, raising new concerns about how fast those organic frozen soils will melt and release long-trapped greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, said scientists who are studying the beavers’ activity.

The number of new beaver dams and lakes continues to grow exponentially, suggesting that “beavers are a greater influence than climate on surface water extent,” said University of Alaska, Fairbanks scientist Ken Tape, a co-author of a new beaver and permafrost study published today in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

Those rotten beavers. Always going where they’re not wanted. If they weren’t there the permafrost would be melting much slower and we could keep right on pretending climate change wasn’t real!

The bigger and deeper the pools made by the beavers, the warmer the water. The larger pools hold heat longer, which delays refreezing in autumn. Tape said Arctic vegetation, permafrost, hydrology and wildlife are all linked. Even against the backdrop of other recent Arctic global warming extremes, like raging wildfires, record heat waves and dwindling glaciers and sea ice, the impact of beavers stands out, he said.

“It’s not gradual change,” he said. “It’s like hitting the landscape with a hammer.”

“And it’s a continual change that the Arctic is just not used to,” he added.

Ooof! Hitting the artic landscape with a hammer! Good lord what a vivid image. Don’t you just hate those rotten beavers. What happens to the ruined landscape after they work their nasty will? Does it just sit there with those ponds festering?

No it does not.

Another way to see them is as “agents of Arctic adaptation,” said Ben Goldfarb, author of a recent natural history book that shows how beavers could help many other species, including humans, survive the era of rapid, human-caused climate change.

“Beavers create fantastic habitat for all kinds of species, like songbirds and moose,” Goldfarb said. “All of those species are moving northward because of climate change, and beavers are preparing the way.” As a habitat-creating keystone species, beavers are also important food for wolves, and recent research shows that beaver ponds are good at keeping carbon locked up, he added.

Beavers may even hold the key to survival for some salmon species that are losing their streams to global warming and other changes farther south.

“We’re losing salmon in other places. If they’re going to shift their climate envelope, they’re probably going to need beavers to help them,” Goldfarb said.

Thank god for Ben. What would we ever do without him? I just want to fire him at these articles like a water canon and hope he puts the stupid out. He won’t of course. You know that someone somewhere is going to propose we just KILL all the beavers and problem solved, no more CLIMATE CHANGE!

If beavers are the primary drivers of permafrost degradation on the Baldwin Peninsula, that has wider implications for tracking surface area changes across similar parts of the Arctic where beavers may advance, he said.

In lowland Arctic regions, the basins favored by beavers can account for 50 to 80 percent of the landscape. Currently, more than 10,000 beaver dams have been mapped across northwestern Alaska and that data is being used in models to pinpoint the impacts of the new water bodies on permafrost and the carbon cycle.

Permafrost researcher Merrit Turetsky, director of the University of Colorado, Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, said it’s not yet clear how beaver impacts may affect regional-scale carbon cycles, but that it’s ” important to pay attention to all ecosystem-engineers such as the beaver.”

Yeah yeah yeah. Those darn carbon based beavers. WIth their greenhouses gasses ruining everything. Here’s what Emily Fairfax had to say about this research.

Really frustrated to read this CNN article and the study that it is based on. Seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what beaver ponds are and are not. They are not the same as big arctic lakes. The study includes no actual measurements of permafrost degradation.

It’s 100% possible, and likely, that large beaver ponds that are not freezing thru in winter are accelerating permafrost degradation. I’m not arguing w/ that. Degradation happens when water bodies don’t freeze thru in winter & keep relatively warm water on the land surface. 2/n

But the study doesn’t measure pond depth. Or dam height. Or actual changes in permafrost structure/hydrology. They just measure number of beaver dams and pond surface area over time. They accurately showed that beavers are moving into the arctic. 3/n

But it doesn’t show how many of those ponds are staying unfrozen year round. Primary dams tend to be taller than secondary dams, and time to freeze thru depends on water depth. Beavers don’t want their primary pond freezing, but are less concerned with secondary ponds. 4/n

In a typical landscape, 80-85% of dams are going to be secondary dams. Shorter dams. Shallower ponds. These will probably freeze thru in the high arctic! There are simple 1D models for lake ice thickness to see how long it takes to freeze to a given depth for a given climate.

Of course there are no measurements. This entire study is speculation by satellite. They don’t want to get their boots all mucky. But here’s one final parting thought from Emily.

Know what releases a huge amount of greenhouse gasses? Wildfire in the arctic. Maybe the beavers are helping by keeping the ground wet even during summer. Maybe not. We don’t know without collecting the relevant data.

Sure humans are causing climate change and ruining the permafrost. But beavers are making it faster! Now the BP trucks can’t even drive across the tundra three months of the year! How can they keep making money hand over fist? I ask you.