A week away from turkey and pumpkin pie, there’s plenty of good news on the horizon. Let’s start this morning with a fieldtrip for the fishermen in Spey Scotland. It was lead by our friend Duncan Halley who  grew up in Scotland but works as a scientist for the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, where a chief topic is Beavers. An angler wrote about the field trip here on the Spey Fishery board website.

Beavers: the pros and cons

Yesterday a group of fishery board and trust staff were taken on a beaver fact finding trip to Dunkeld by the Cairngorm National Park Authority. As many will know there is a rapidly expanding beaver population in the Tay catchment with beavers now present at Loch of the Lowes reserve near Dunkeld. A single male beaver turned up there in Dec 2012 followed soon after by a female. The pair setup home in the Lunan Burn, a tributary of the Lowes.

Duncan Halley a Scottish/Norwegian beaver ecologist was on hand to provide information and answer questions (Google him for more info). He reported that 99% of beaver activity occurred within 20m of water; a predator avoidance strategy as wolves prey on them where present. The lodge entrance was underwater with a food cache immediately outside. They dislike traveling through shallow water and a short distance upstream of the lodge there was a very small dam, about 6″ in height. This innocuous looking dam was built by the beavers to increase the depth of the water upstream so that they could swim underwater rather than being exposed.

Following the trip to see the beaver site we were given a few presentations in the afternoon. Some interesting statistics: the mean width of streams at dam sites = 2.5m and the maximum width dammed = 6m. The maximum gradient of streams at dam site was 2%. So all the main Spey salmon spawning tributaries should remain dam free but there is still likely to be a large overlap in the potential range of beaver and salmonid habitat within the Spey catchment.

It’s nice to have boots on the ground teaching beavers at the front lines. Duncan is someone who really understands the research and knows how to explain beaver benefits. And as a native Scot he is better prepared than most to get his point across. Still, I worry that living in Norway where people are allegedly reasonable he hasn’t been exposed to enough “IRRATIONAL FEAR” to know his way around it. Fishermen are afraid of beavers. Period. Science won’t change that for the most part. Any more than terrible tornadoes will convince republicans in Illinois that climate change is real or a rising teen pregancy rate in the southern states will convince people that abstinence education doesn’t work.

Check out this from the comment section for instance

This must be a real worry, how can creating more dams/obstacles in a river system be anything other than detrimental to migratory fish stocks? As if the salmon/sea trout don’t have enough problems as it is.

We all would like to get back to nature but some times i think we do it wrong (soon i may have to apply for firearms certificate to include wolf and bears

No easy walk to beavers, apparently. But  good luck with that Duncan and friends. You’ll probably need to do the exact same thing a million more times every November for the rest of the millennium, but you made a very heroic start!

And now because you’ve all been very patient I will share with you the GREATEST. BEAVER. STORY. EVER. Call your family members to the screen side and enjoy this with someone you love. Because we shall not look upon its likeness ever again.

 Beaver saves doe from certain death by stealing hunter’s gun

Nathan Baron was relaxing over the weekend, sitting in a chair in the woods and tracking a doe with his Remington rifle when, suddenly, nature called. The Maine high school student left the gun resting against the chair, ran back home to do his business, and arrived just in time to see something he didn’t expect to see: a beaver stealing the rifle. “There was a stream … about 100 feet away from me,” he told Bangor Daily News. “I look and there’s a beaver hauling that gun into the water. There was nothing I could do … the beaver went under. That was it.”

I love this story with the white-hot heat of a thousand suns and cannot imagine a better end to a hunter’s tale than a beaver diving underwater with a loaded firearm. Do I think it’s true? Probably not. Do I think it needs animating and should be shown every single Christmas? You bet your dam life.