I’ve reviewed a handful of articles bemoaning the return of the beavers to the Tundra that worry they will destroy all the melting permafrost. Mostly people are worried about the WRONG thing, as we’ve noted many times. So it was a delight to finally read something positive about the change-makers.
‘Tundra be dammed’: Beavers head north, leaving their mark on the Arctic
Animals the size of Labrador retrievers are changing the face of Alaska, creating new ponds visible from space.
“These guys leave a mark,” UAF ecologist Ken Tape said of North America‘s largest rodents, beavers. He has observed the recent work of beavers north of Arctic Circle using satellite images. He and a group of Arctic researchers have found the creatures have somehow colonized the tundra of northwestern Alaska, damming more than 50 streams there since 1999.
Beavers live in every province of Canada, every U.S. state and into northern Mexico. Range maps now need to be redrawn to include areas north of treeline in Alaska and Canada
It’s nice when people get a whole host of beaver facts correct. Not common, but nice.
With their dams and new lakes that hold warmish water, beavers of the tundra ecosystem are thawing permafrost soils through their actions. Beavers could be “priming arctic streams for the establishment of salmon runs” that now don‘t exist, maybe because extreme northern waters are too cold for egg development.
Tape and co-authors Ben Jones, Chris Arp, Ingmar Nitze, Guido Grosse and Christian Zimmerman are writing about those changes in a paper with the working title, “Tundra be dammed: Beaver colonization of the Arctic.”
They used Landsat satellite images from 1999 to 2014 to show a good deal of beaver activity in the basins of the lower Noatak River and the Wulik and Kivalina rivers in Northwest Alaska. Because there was little or no beaver activity visible in the 1999 images, they conclude that beavers have migrated into those areas since then. They wrote that beavers there are moving in at an average rate of about 5 miles each year.
That’s right. Beavers could be clearing a path for salmon! They could make an uninhabitable area habitable just like they did in Cherynobyl and on Mt, Saint Helens. And you’re welcome!
“We do not know how beavers reached the Beaufort Coastal Plain, but they would have had to cross a mountain range or swim in the sea,” wrote Yukon biologist Tom Jung, who recently saw a beaver dam and winter store of food just 15 miles south of the Arctic Ocean in northern Yukon Territory.
Beavers are not great walkers, and their feet may not be adapted to cold. Beavers do not avoid winter by hibernating. To survive, they need a store of willow branches for food and water a few feet deep that doesn‘t freeze. They mate in deepest winter, January or February. The females have two to four kits from late April to June.
Seriously Beavers are not great walkers in the cold? Seriously? Do you really think castor fiber of siberia has such magic different feet? You might want to check out the data on how beavers normally live and walk where its very very cold.
Their presence north of arctic treeline since the late 1990s may be a population rebound from the late 1800s, Tape said, when the Hudson Bay Co. sold almost 3 million far-north beaver pelts to English buyers. But he wonders if beavers were ever present on arctic tundra landscapes. The northern expansion of the American beaver might be a phenomenon people have not yet seen.
At least he wonders. No one else even wonders. They just say Eek! beavers bad! And reporters write it down. I’m curious whether this means good things for salmon. And I’m curious what your research will find. Look at some historical trapping journals will ya?
