Sometimes it is slow news here at beaver central and sometimes it is fast, thick and icky, but this weekend has been a flurry of delightful stories I can hardly wait to share. First up is a grand new discovery about our friend Castoroides Ohioensis. Remember the very large beaver that was the size of a bear and went extinct at the last ice age? Seems they just ran one through a CTscan (don’t ask why no one thought of this before) and discovered a very long chamber behind his noise that they are speculating was used for resonance. Now every archeologist is busy trying to figure out the giant beaver call that echoed through the forests of paleo-history!
LAS VEGAS – Blessed with a hidden chamber in their over sized skulls, extinct giant beavers may have created a unique Ice Age call of the wild. Detailed CT scans reveal a dead-end passageway leading from the back of the animal’s skull toward its face. That chamber connects via a long, narrow slit to another passage going straight through the beaver’s skull from throat to nose, vertebrate paleontologist Caroline Rinaldi reported November 2 at a meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.
“I don’t know of any other animal that has this,” said Rinaldi, of the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine.
Our second grand story comes from the Oregon town of Five-Rivers (which is incidentally, very near where the State of the Beaver Conference was held this February). Seems they had a meet and greet with the locals, served hot cider and Christmas cookies, and asked landowners to open their heart to beavers. “Do it for the sake of the salmon” they encouraged!
FIVE RIVERS – The sparsely settled Coast Range valleys of Lincoln County’s Five Rivers country ought to be a highly productive breeding ground for coho salmon, but logging, road-building and other human activities have altered the landscape in far-reaching ways, leaving threatened fish runs in a precarious state.
Beaver populations also have declined throughout the basin, in part because of those same human impacts. Now the MidCoast Watersheds Council is working to enlist the aid of area residents in shoring up salmon numbers by reintroducing beaver colonies in some of the places where they’ve disappeared – even if that means some inconvenience for rural property owners.
Don’t even THINK that any of this would be happening without the day-in day-out hard work of Leonard and Lois Houston who have made beaver friends out of more folks than anyone can know. When I spoke to him recently about their good relationship with ODFW (Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife – note that they don’t call just care about GAME in Oregon!) he said that one thing he had learned is that it is easier to get enthusiastic support from the fisheries biologists than from the fur-bearer folks. Hmmm. Now that was a revelation!
“Beaver and coho salmon are just inextricably linked,” said Steve Trask, a fish biologist working with the council. “We’ve noticed over time that as beaver populations have declined, there’s been a real loss of production in coho salmon habitats.”Representatives of the Siuslaw National Forest, the Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife and the Alsea Watershed Council, all potential partners in the restoration effort, also were on hand.
Coho salmon fry emerge from the gravel of their spawning beds in the spring, then spend a year dodging predators and bulking up before venturing out to sea, where they spend another year or two before returning to their native streams to spawn as adults. Beaver ponds, Trask said, provide ideal rearing habitat for young coho and other salmonids, such as cutthroat and steelhead trout. The ponds capture nutrients from falling leaves and rotting wood, forming the base for a thriving food chain.
They also perform a number of other functions, from moderating flash floods to restoring old floodplain connections and re-establishing a more natural, complex channel structure that provides a variety of habitats for aquatic life. Bringing beavers back to Five Rivers, he said, could accomplish a lot of the watershed council’s restoration goals for the basin.
“We’re talking about somehow restoring beaver to the landscape so they can be a tool for salmonid restoration,” Trask said. “If we can get it going, it’s a pretty cheap way to do it.”
Wow. Just wow. Steve, do you happen to have any relatives that work for DFG in California? Just asking. And excellent job by the reporter, Bennett Hall, who clearly gets the whole relationship very well. My guess would be this isn’t his first time reporting on the beaver-salmon relationship. All we can do here in plod-along California is plod along. Sigh. Go read the whole thing.
Which brings us to our THIRD good story, and that’s the announcement that starting NEXT WEEK an interview with a beaver expert will air here every Sunday on a podcast series that I’m calling “Agents of Change”. For the past few months I’ve been trotting about wooing the beaver world and trying to get them to talk to me about why they do what they do and how beavers changed their lives. The first interview will be with Sherri Tippie and the second with Skip Lisle. You won’t want to miss these short, remarkable glimpses into the lives of people who make a difference on behalf of the animals who make a difference.!I think you’ll enjoy it, click for a sample.
*Much thanks to David Bowie and poet Mark Seth Lender for their valued contributions!
And because man does not live by beaver alone, I’m passing along this AMAZING look at the 4 night festival of lights popular winner from Lyon, France. Mind you this just has to be the very best blending of history, pop culture and modern technology that I have ever seen.
