Do you remember those story books of “the borrowers” when you were a kid where tiny people lived in the house and made use of scraps and odds and ends to decorate and purpose their little lives? They used buttons as umbrellas or safety pins as cranes. Well, I’m beginning to feel like beaver websites have borrowers too, because I can never tell where one of our graphics is going to show up next! Take this for example, from the massive Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 
whose more than 1 billion dollar budget was trimmed by 10% in 2012. This image was on the CBC docs facebook page yesterday. Look familiar?
Now I’ll share my last egg salad sandwich with a stranger who asks for it, but I’m never happy when people don’t bother to ASK. Especially a tycoon of a stranger with departments full of graphic designers and photographers who can afford make their own dam graphic. Just to follow the history of those images, the three kits on the bottom were photos from Cheryl Reynolds which I painstakingly selected for our graphic designer friend Libby Corliss to turn into silhouettes when momma beaver died in 2010, and the shadow adult at the top was drawn by the designer Kiriko Moth who made our logo. Silhouettes aren’t impossibly hard to generate from photos, but it takes some doing and the right photos have to be selected with clean edges and everything visible. Certainly a billion dollar corporation with a team of graphic designers and photographers can make their own dam silhouettes?
So of course I marched off to the producer of the Beaver Whisperers Documentary who has become a good friend and would never want her honor besmirched with stolen graphics and she promptly made sure they pulled the graphic and will be on the phone today making things right.
Hmm…Can you guess who I think should be getting some “Fabulous Swag” for their beaver festival?
Now on to more somber tasks because Popular Mechanics decided to write about beavers sequestering carbon and the pro-beaver article got a huge amount of pushback from educated environmentalists like this man.
The Odd Way Beavers Impact Climate Change
This suggests that beavers play an important role in keeping the ecosystem resilient against climate change, drought and wildfire, the study notes. Wohl found that the abandoned beaver dams she studied made up around 8 percent of the carbon storage in the landscape, and that if beavers were still actively maintaining those dams, the number would be closer to 23 percent. As such, wiping out most of the continent’s beaver population during pre-Colonial times probably had quite an impact on the climate.
What? Beavers are good for something? The bemused article drew this response:
As a retired Department of Environmental Quality Employee and an owner of timber land, this is a stupid article on environmentalism gone crazy in past history. The beaver is a destructive animal that needs to be hunted or exterminated. A single beaver can and will build a dam that will flood and create a pond anywhere from 2 to 10 acres. All vegetation (trees, brush, plants) are killed in this pond area created. Wildlife/insects in this newly created pond area move or die from drowning.
As far as the “release of carbon dioxide” with the European/Colonial settlement of North America and the beaver trapping that occurred from the 1500’s to the 1800’s – give me a break. Beavers continue to cut down trees and brush AFTER their dam and ponds are built – yes, the destruction exceeds the pond area. Beaver teeth grow through out their life like most rodents and they must alway chew/grind on something. Why doesn’t the author try to calculate how much forest was saved (carbon dioxide sequestered) by trapping the beavers?
Thanks Mr. Brown for the reminder of what we are up against. If we are getting attitude like this from the Department of Environmental Quality, you can certainly understand why we are having trouble with Cal Trans or Public Works.
