See these little sawdust balls? They are beaver droppings. Their woody diet leaves little waste behind, and what it does leave looks like something from the mill. You have probably noticed how little you’ve noticed them at the beaver dam. That’s because they aren’t very obvious, or very permanent. In case you’re wondering there are exactly two photos of them on the entire internet – neither of them ours because worth a dam, in all our vast beaver obsession, has never even seen one.
Well a new article from Mother Jones Magazine blog cites new Alaskan Native Health studies that blame them for poisoning the water in an entire village. The theory is that global warming increases the growing cycle, so there’s more vegetation and the community gets more beavers who thoughtlessly fill the stream with feces and now the town is sick with beaver fever!
(Add this to the “it must be true because it rhymes” file.)
Worse, warmer temperatures have meant longer growing seasons, triggering a spike in the number of wood-chewing beavers, which are suspected of contaminating local riverways with solid waste and elevating the risk of giardia, a stomach infection commonly known as “beaver feaver.”
“In general, people could drink from [the creeks and rivers] freely,” Michael Brubaker, director of the health consortium’s Center for Climate and Health, told the Arctic Sounder. “Now they have beavers defecating into the river.”
Say no more! I’m sure it’s not like any other animals defecate in the water besides those dam-building rodents. Or that the tribe ever had to deal with beavers historically. Or that human waste has compromised the water in any way.
In 2004, Kivalina had to close its washateria (places where people can get clean water to bathe or wash clothes) after the belated freeze-up damaged its leach field system for the winter; during the shut down, the village reported a rise in respiratory and skin diseases.
Oh. I guess a leaking leach field could cause problems for the water system. But it must be mostly the beavers fault. Mother Jones is a respected news source. They wouldn’t just write down things that weren’t true. Isn’t there tons of research showing that beavers cause giardia?
Sigh. As some of you may remember, I just returned from the State of the Beaver Conference in Oregon, where famed international researcher Dunan Halley had something very profound to say about this false attribution. He noted that it is not discussed in the literature anywhere in Norway, and he speculated that is because the words “beaver” and “fever” do not rhyme in Norwegian.
Is it just me, or do you expect a liberal magazine like Mother friggin’ Jones to write things that are, you know, actually liberal? Including things about beavers? This is a set of old wives tales, fears and rumors that might as well be from the furthest reaches of John McCain’s closet. I suppose they made it into print because they contained the catch phrase ‘climate change’ but honestly!
