Today is arrival day at the 5th annual beaver symposium held this year in Lithuania. The focus is on the European beaver (Castor Fiber) its biology and best management practices. Tomorrow the conference begins in earnest with scientific presentations, but today it’s arrival, hotel accomodations and maybe drinks in the lobby. We have two friends attending this years conference. Skip Lisle who will be presenting with the Scottish Beaver Trial group on tuesday, and Alex, our beaver fan in Frankfurt who will be attending as our “foreign correspondent”. Expect great reports on the days adventures, but maybe not until wednesday.
Wednesday, by the way, is fieldtrip day. Check out the description of the “Excursion”.
for Wednesday, September 23rd . This tour will occur in the vicinity of the conference center. Hilly moraine is the characteristic landscape in the area, and mean density of beavers reaches 4.5 colonies/1000 ha.
A ha, surprisingly enough, stands for hectare and is equal to about 2.5 acres. A Moraine is the scruffy debris covered plain that was once the carved path of a glacier. And that sentence right there is a keen reminder why scientific writing can be mind-numbingly boring.
Which, reminds me of a fun website I found recently, allowing researchers from all disciplines to submit their dissertation in the form of a Haiku. The simple theory is that dissertations are long and boring, you spend years of your life you will never get back, and mostly no one reads them or gets them. But of course everybody gets Haiku’s!
It takes a long time to get a Ph.D. Maybe five or six years, four if you’re fast. Seven if you’re me. At the end, you’ve written a big fat document which all of your committee members will read if you’re lucky. How can you gain a wider audience for the major product of ten-or-so percent of your time on Earth? Why, rewrite it as a haiku, that’s how. Everybody likes haiku!
In case you need a reminder, the Haiku is a short poem with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second line, and five in the third line. In case you forgot what a syllable is put your hand under your chin and say the word syllable to count how many times it moves. Unless your mouth is full of crackers you probably counted three.
I submitted my Haiku, but of course we need a few beaver ones too. Check out the titles of the presentations and let me know if you have any suggestions. Here’s Skips presentation and a helpful Heidi-Haiku.
Solutions to beaver-human conflicts that are long-lasting, reliable, and preserve precious wetlands: an update of successful flow device techniques in North America and Europe
Lisle S., Czech A.
Nice and scientific sounding, but you can’t dance to it. How about this instead?
Save Beaver Wetlands!
Solve the trials without traps.
Here’s how I do it:
