DUSTING FOR TAILPRINTS?

heidi08 Beavers February 17, 2024

Like thumbs. all alike
:Like thumbprints. all different

Jean Kerr

I remember it was Christmas season after the big meeting on November 7 but before Skip had installed the flow device, There was no W0rth A Dam. and not even the thought of one yet. Moses wanted to come over and show some exciting new footage. I barely knew him back then, but he brought a girlfriend that was someone I did know, one of the superior court clerks for a family law judge I had worked with before. She said she had noticed something about one of the beavers tails.

We weren’t very tech savvy back in those days and it took forever to hook the video up to the TV but when we finally did we saw he had footage of mom and dad beaver mating and that mom had a distinct marking in her tail

It was a very very big discovery. Because it meant we could tell them apart. and that everyone could recognize who was who. (Plus it meant we were having Kits again).

Anyway it was JOYFUL. Understanding tail differences has always been joyful to me. So maybe that explains how happy I was to see this:

AI tells beavers apart by the ‘fingerprint’ patterns on their tails

Computer identification of individuals could help researchers study recovery of the species without stressing the animals

Beavers rely on their leathery tails to steer while swimming and to loudly smack the water as an alarm call. A covering of lizardlike scales makes these tails so handy. It also provides a way to tell the animals apart. According to a study published this week in Ecology and Evolution, a computer algorithm can accurately identify individual beavers by the pattern of scales on their tails, a bit like human fingerprints.

The advance could be good news for the Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber), which was nearly hunted to extinction in the 19th century. As the species recovers, researchers have been estimating the size of populations using ear tags and radio collars. But capturing beavers can stress them, so scientists trained a pattern-learning type of artificial intelligence on images of tails from 100 Eurasian beavers that had been hunted in Norway. The program was 96% accurate at telling the animals apart.

Did you hear that? Finally some good news about AI! Since beavers can tell eachother apart with 100% accuracy and no computer they are still better than us but this could come in handy.

The scientists analyzed photographs taken in a laboratory under good lighting, but the approach should be feasible with images from the wild, they say. In another study, published in the European Journal of Wildlife Research last year, the same team showed that adding a small plastic lens to automatic cameras in the field provided a fourfold boost in high-quality photos—good enough to help computers identify some of nature’s most famously industrious animals.

This is fantastic news because beavers are the wrong shape for radio collars and tail transmitters are famous for ripping our and leaving horrible scars,

Of course you know there are sadistic scientists at CDFW really bummed that they won’t need to put bolts thru beavers to tell them apart. anymore.

Too bad.

BEAVERS MITIGATE DROUGHT

heidi08 Beavers February 16, 2024

I’m so old I can remember when 9 out of 10 beaver articles were about how they were flooding Dan Smith’s property or washing out Mabel

s road. Now the phrase “spoiled for choice” rings in my mind as we consider what treasure to write about next.

Beavers can mitigate drought threat: analyst

Beaver activity can help preserve wetlands, and experts say research has shown that a wetland is like the tip of an iceberg; the surface is a fraction of the total water storage volume. | File photo

MEDICINE HAT — An Alberta conservation group is promoting beaver habitat as a way to keep water on the land amid rising drought concerns in the province.

“Beavers can provide benefits and always have provided benefits from an environmental perspective but also from an ecosystem goods and services perspective with drought and flood mitigation,” said Holly Kinas, Miistakis Institute conservation analyst.

The institute and riparian management organization Cows and Fish are promoting their Working with Beavers website as a tool to assist landowners in introducing beavers and help them understand the technical and regulatory requirements.

Kinas said her organization has been promoting beavers for a decade and Cows and Fish has done it for twice that long. The result is a significant shift in landowners seeing beavers as assets rather than pests, she added.

“We’re finding there is this growing trend and interest in co-existing with beavers instead of undertaking the traditional approach which is, of course, shooting or trapping them,” said Kinas. “A lot of that has been expedited by our changing climate.”

Beavers and their dams mitigate the damaging effects of flooding and maintain a source of water for livestock, said Kinas, and they also help mitigate wildfire impacts.

Isn’t it nice when smart folks are saying the right things about beavers and we don’t even have to correct anything?

Beaver ponds create a huge refuge for wildlife and plant species. Fire can come through, wipe everything else out, burn it to the ground, but there is still this lush, green area surrounding those wetlands created by beavers.”

Resiliency built into the land by beavers is especially key for ranchers who face drought conditions.

“We’ve had ranchers say to us in dry years, they only had one place to water and that was behind the beaver pond,” Kinas said. “Some landowners have said even their well would have run dry if it weren’t for the fact beavers are there and had created this beautiful wetland complex close to their home.”

But beavers can pose problems by flooding fields or roads. The main thrust of the beaver co-existence management tools is to provide technical advice on how to install infrastructure such as pond levellers.

“Maybe you do compromise and give up a bit of your cropland to allow that natural wetland complex but, in return, you are going to have water on your landscape much longer,” said Kinas.

Research has shown that a wetland is like the tip of an iceberg; the surface is a fraction of the total water storage volume, she added.

That’s right. If you give some of your pay check to uncle sam you can give some of your landscape to beavers. I promise it will all be worth it.

eavers are often thought of as woodland creatures, but Kinas said that’s more a result of historical trapping practices that saw a 90 percent reduction in populations. In fact, beavers can thrive on grasslands, though habitat loss has reduced numbers in that ecosystem.

“I have seen an all-cattail dam before, so that does happen sometimes,” said Kinas, though beavers do prefer more wood-based material for building as well as diet.

“They are engineers. They will figure out a way but you do have to have populations nearby or at least enough habitat for them that they could start building dams and have protection from predators.”

Beavers work for a living. Just be glad a lot of that work benefits us.

RETURN OF THE ENGINEER

heidi08 Beavers February 15, 2024

Perfect timing! the San Pedro Valley talk I did last weekend just appeared online. It’s ,mostly ok except for when I listened to it yesterday I realized I mixed up the Russian ships info. Obviously they ca,e down the coast from Siberia, not around the tip of South America! Sheesh!

BEAVER AND FRESHWATER CLIMATE RESILIENCE

heidi08 Beavers February 14, 2024

There’s a smart new article in the Reflector about landowners coexisting with beavers. Which is worth focusing on but I’m more interested in the resource it casually sites which says it was published last year but certainly can’t be more than a month on the market. Check it out.

Do I have your interest now? How about when you read the ES?

Executive Summary

Stream and riparian ecosystems provide critical resources and services for the residents of Washington state but are increasingly threatened by climate change. Climate change is projected to increase stream temperatures, reduce summer streamflows, and increase wet-season flood events. These changes are expected to have negative consequences for many species, including protected species of salmon, trout, and amphibians.

Beavers were once abundant in North America. Though they were hunted nearly to extinction in the 18th and 19th centuries, populations have since recovered in many areas. Beaver-related restoration, which includes beaver reintroduction and the construction of structures that mimic beaver dams, seeks to facilitate the ongoing recovery of beavers and harness (or mimic) their engineering capabilities to restore and improve freshwater systems. Beaver-related restoration has gained popularity in recent years as a nature-based approach to facilitating climate resilience in stream and riparian ecosystems.

Both beaver reintroduction and the construction of beaver dam analogues are increasing in Washington State. However, there is a paucity of scientific information on the impacts of these forms of beaver-related restoration. This report synthesizes available scientific information on beaver-related restoration and climate resilience for streams in Washington state, summarizing the state of the science, highlighting knowledge gaps, and identifying challenges.

There is substantial evidence that beaver-related restoration, via beaver translocation and the construction of beaver dam analogues, has the potential to increase the climate resiliency of Washington’s stream and riparian ecosystems (summarized in Table 1). By reducing summer water temperatures, increasing summer flows, and enhancing floodplain habitat, beavers and beaver-related restoration can benefit species of conservation concern, including trout, salmon, and amphibians. In addition, beaver-related restoration can ameliorate the negative impacts of high-flow events, create fire-resistant habitat patches in fire-prone landscapes, and foster heterogeneous mosaics of habitat that enhance the watershed-level biodiversity of aquatic and riparian ecosystems. However, these benefits are only likely to accrue under certain conditions, and there is a gap between our understanding of the aspirational potential of beaver-related restoration (what it can accomplish) and the realized benefits of restoration actions (what it does accomplish).

While the scientific literature on beaver-related restoration is developing rapidly, there are important limitations in our understanding. For example, most studies of beaver-related restoration are still relatively limited in spatial and temporal scope. In addition, key aspects of restoration practice are not well understood — many translocated beavers do not establish; beaver dam analogs must be colonized by beavers or maintained by humans to persist, but it is not clear how frequently this happens. Finally, key drivers of variation in the effects of beavers and beaver-related restoration are poorly understood, including regional gradients in climate and land use.

The table of contents makes me literally tremble with anticipation. You can download the whole thing yourself on this page or you can peruse it here:

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DETESTED WATER SAVERS

heidi08 Beavers February 13, 2024

Every once in a while an article drops that is so alarming it earns all of my attention for a full 24 hours. Like this one did,

Wildlife and ag: ‘Pheasants and beavers and deer, oh my!’

Columnist Jonathan Knutson expounds on the variety of wildlife that frequent farmlands and the reactions they get by different property owners.

Ambivalence means having mixed views or feelings on a given issue or topic. It’s the perfect word to describe how many upper Midwest agriculturalists feel about wildlife.

As a general rule, most of us enjoy having some wildlife, or at least some species of wildlife, in and above our fields, pasture and farmsteads. It’s a connection to nature that can enrich and satisfy. I think of the first time I saw a bald eagle, its habitat greatly expanded, flying majestically above my family’s farmland. (The image lost a little luster when I realized the eagle was swooping down to eat the guts of a deer we’d just shot and gutted, though the sight of the eagle was pretty cool nonetheless.)

But the enjoyability of having wildlife around can vary greatly depending on both the type of animal and the individual priorities and personality of an agriculturalist. Some types of wildlife are just more likeable, for lack of a better word, and some agriculturalists just enjoy wildlife more than their neighbors.

At the risk of overgeneralization, I think most wildlife, from an ag perspective, falls into three main categories: the really likeable, the really unlikeable and ones that are simultaneously both. There will be disagreement about which types of wildlife belong in the differing categories, but the basic concept seems sound to me.

Guess what species of wildlife he finds intolerable? Go ahead, guess.

Beavers are the “bad” type of wildlife that I personally detest the most. They’ve destroyed countless trees in and near the portion of North Dakota’s Sheyenne River Valley where I grew up and subsequently have spent big chunks of my life. I’ve driven literally thousands of times past beautiful trees, especially oak, that they’ve ruined. Yeah, I’m a tree guy and probably overvalue those ruined trees, but to me, they’re far more important than the so-called “nature’s engineers.” And I’m not the only person who feels that way.

Did you guess right? See he likes pheasants cuz hunters like to shoot them and deer for the same reasons but beavers are just a pain in the oak tree. You know its true.

Most controversial are types of wildlife that bring obvious enjoyment and obvious damage. Deer, it seems to me, are easily the most outstanding example. Hunting them (which I’ve done for 50 years) can be a lot of fun. So is spying a big-antlered buck or watching a doe and her tiny fawn. On the other hand, the damage done by deer to growing crops and haystacks is aggravating and financially painful.

I don’t know what’s the right and proper role of wildlife in ag. Nobody else does, either. Opinions and priorities vary so greatly that a one-size-fits-all answer is impossible. But there’s one thing I am sure of: I could do with a lot fewer blackbirds, coyotes and especially those accursed beavers.

I‘m sure you know that those oak trees weren’t the beavers first or even second choice for supper. They would have preferred all that scrub brush that you ripped off the landscape months ago, You know the willows. they’ll eat oak if they have to but it’s not tasty. Next time try leaving some undergrowth for them to browse and wrapping the trees you love with welded wire. Make sure the wire goes higher than the snowline.

Then maybe you’ll have some free time to read the articles about nitrogen removal and beaver dams offering flood and fire protection. Or maybe the article that says beaver dams retain nine times more water than equivalent area without beaver even during drought. I’m pretty sure that AG needs water.

Then we can chat,