The Reno Gazette-Journal is reporting that the hardworking volunteer group that cleans the Truckee River and wraps chicken wire around trees is running out of funding and needs another grant. If something isn’t done soon, they say, the non-native beavers will destroy the trees and ruin the creek. No, I’m not kidding.
On Wednesday morning, Aaron Keller, a state wildlife educator, pointed out the damage from the night before at Oxbow Nature Study area. Along a section of riverbank restored last fall, beavers had eaten one cottonwood sapling and chewed off the bottom half of another sapling, leaving the top half dangling in the air. Bark chips still floated on the water inside the chicken wire cage. With the river running fast and scouring away dirt from the bank, the beavers swam under the cage to grab a bite. Vetter said the trouble is beavers have no natural enemies and breed too fast. A female can produce two litters a year and some of the kits can become pregnant before leaving the lodge, Keller said.
Of course I wrote everyone involved that indeed if they have truly discovered the beavers of Truckee breeding twice a year they most certainly should get a grant, since this contradicts generations of beaver research on three continents. (Four if you count Tierra del Fuego.) In fact, with a gestation period of 107 days, and the kits we know about born in May-June, that means the mysterious second delivery would be planted in August, gestated in the fall, and delivered sometime in the middle of winter when the truckee is sometimes frozen and covered with snow. Gosh, I wonder how they found out about this ground breaking discovery?
Allow me to add a little science to this slumber party chat about beaver sluts.
Beaver – Natural history of a wetlands Engineer: Dietland Muller-Swarze & Lixing Sun
That’s 12-24 hours ONCE A YEAR. They get a few more chances if they don’t get fertilized. It’s why beavers mate for life because from a purely practical standpoing 12-24 hours of fertility doesn’t give you much time to find Mr. Right or even Mr. Right Now. I guess this information is pretty esoteric, I mean Aaron is a wildlife educator and all and his paycheck is based on him telling adults and children information about actual wildlife, but he’d have to look in a book to find this out. Let’s assume that book was checked out that week or that he confused beavers with nutrias and not blame him for this error. But no natural predators? These men live in Washoe County and they don’t think beavers have NATURAL predators? At the risk of paraphrasing Scrooge, are there no mountain lions, bears, coyotes, or wolverines in all of Nevada?. Not even one VERY FAMOUS ONE who gets a whole division to research it? I hear beaver is its favorite food!
When Mr. Vetter wrote back and explained who told him they mated twice a year, he helpfully clarified that beavers weren’t NATIVE TO the Truckee River and were introduced in the 1930’s. They don’t belong in the region and that’s why they are so destructive to it.
Sigh.
Here’s what no one has ever explained to me. I know that Tappe’s 1942 paper claimed that Fish & Game introduced beavers all over, including the Sierras and even though he had specifically heard rumors about beavers on the Truckee (read the footnotes) he really, really believed that they were never there before hand. I get that. Help me understand, though, why an animal that survives from Anchorage to the Rio Grand, crossed the Rockies and the Tetons, and lives happily on both sides of the grand canyon, why this hardy animal would suddenly glance at the Sierras and say, “No, that’s it! I just can’t take one more step”? Shouldn’t the burden of proof be on the people who say they were never there to tell us why they’re so sure?
Here’s what Rick Lanman, MD of the Historical Ecology center wrote to a regional biologist on this topic:
Here I will argue that the burden of proof should be on those that are skeptical of beaver’s historic range. I apologize in advance for being long-winded. Peter Skene Ogden was complaining about Americans on the lower Humboldt in 1829 – 80 Americans to his 28 man fur brigade. Those early American trappers were likely not literature diary-keepers, instead they were lugging around beaver traps, pelts and guns. I think Americans were tramping all about the eastern Sierra and not writing any notes or records. Stephen Meek was on the Truckee, Carson and Walker Rivers in 1833 and setting traps. He does not tell his story until he is an old man. His brother Joe Meek gave his story to a newspaper in 1837, corroborating his brother’s later story. Ogden with the HBC regarded the Humboldt as the richest beaver river ANYWHERE. From these locations, the Mono Basin is a hop-skip and a jump for beaver who can travel dozens of miles overland in a day.
Beaver were ubiquitous from the arctic to northern Mexico, from Atlantic to Pacific, in every mountain range. Until Grinnell wrote in 1937 that there never were beaver in the Sierra Nevada, no other mountain range in the US or Canada had proved to be impassable to beaver. Grinnell relied on contemporary trappers’ accounts, despite him being an esteemed naturalist. His argument has never made sense, why would an animal as ubiquitous as the beaver find the Sierra so impenetrable? Versus the Rockies? Versus the Santa Catalina Mountains in southern Arizona (the San Pedro River used to be called the Beaver River)? So my simplest argument is, what kind of fiendish natural barrier would have kept them out of the Mono Basin? It makes sense they would not have lived in Mono Lake as they do not build lodges in saltwater (although they do in brackish Puget Sound in the Skagit River Delta).
With beaver so nearby historically in the Carson (which of course connects to the Humboldt River in wet years) as supported by trapper oral histories, Powers account of beaver fur strips in the hair of the Paiute, and a pre-European word for beaver in Washo, it is difficult to believe that an animal that can move dozens of miles in a day overland would not have found Lee Vining Creek. The beavers arriving there now likely found it the same way the historic beavers did, moving in from watersheds north or west in the Sierra, into the Mono Basin. Unless we think someone recently plopped them into Lee Vining Creek, isn’t the most parsimonious explanation simply that beaver have naturally RETURNED to their historic territory, as no real physical barrier was ever there to stop them?
Suitable habitat, ethnographic records, oral histories, trapper records, and the known ability of beaver to move from one watershed to the next, in my mind shifts the burden of proof to those that argue that beaver were never there. The argument that a lack of archaeological or historical records proves that beaver were not there historically is not a proof, it is just conjecture. For example, a look at FaunMap would lead you to conclude that there were never sea otter in Central Coastal California.
The presence of flat meadows with deeply incised, eroded channels suggests that some agent constructed the meadows. Repairing these with earth moving equipment doing pond and plug or major road building in meadows has lead to the recent discoveries of remnant beaver dam wood in the high Sierra. If similar efforts dig up some wood in the Mono Basin then, I agree, let’s get it to UN-Reno’s dendrochronology lab or radiocarbon date it!
And like every email Rick sends, its signature reads
“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom.”
– Thomas Paine
The Truckee River folks are very committed to their eroding belief that beavers don’t belong in their neck of the woods. Even after we convince them that their dams can be humanely controlled, that culverts can be protected, that deeper pools cool streams and increase fish population, that a raised water table will improve their treeline and coppicing will increase bird count, even that beavers won’t eat their pets – they still object. After every argument we give they erect the rickety nativity scaffolding, cling to it and hope we’ll just go away. Of course, for many it will be the same when the first paper is published documenting their historical range. And the second. It takes a long, long, time to change minds this cemented.
Mark your calendars, though, because yesterday was a start.
