Busy beavers called a threat to Yukon salmon
A first nation in Yukon is looking to help one species by undoing the work of another. The Ta’an Kwach’an Council hopes it can help boost numbers of Chinook salmon.
The Whitehorse area First Nation has received environmental approval for a month-long project to remove abandoned beaver dams on Fox Creek.
Thank goodness, because everyone knows those salmon need wide open expanses of un-dammed creek to grow up where they are exposed to exciting challenges of predation and drought. Keeps them agile! Certainly there are mountains of hard scientific studies proving that beaver dams help salmonids, but none of them look specifically at ABANDONED beaver dams. They’re obviously special.
Gosh, I wonder why those dams were abandoned? Did something maybe happen to those beavers?
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that somewhere a low-level city biologist is feeding this tribe misinformation to trick them into thinking that if they just kill enough beavers their salmon population will recover. (Never mind the pollution and the concrete channels.) They are using the tribe as the ‘cow pusher’ on the front of the train to get the protesters off the tracks, because no one will express outrage by what a native tribe does! And after they talk the tribe into doing it first, and the policy gets noticed, the city can do it, and say “What? We learned this from the Whitehorse!”
This article has been up for a couple days now. The CBC article on the same topic had a dozen comments that were pro-beaver (including mine) which are all gone now. Hmm.
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Flooding has devastated much of southern Alberta, killing three people and prompting authorities to evacuate the western Canadian city of Calgary’s entire downtown — an estimated 75,000 people. But at least one resident of Calgary has stayed behind. Cameras caught a beaver swimming through strong flood waters up the Bow River.
Sorry for Alberta and the flooding but it’s nice to remember what strong swimmers beavers are. I know it has reassured me on more than one occasion!
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Great photos from Cheryl last night, you won’t want to miss. Great kingfisher too, who has been clatteringly noisily around the dams and making herself known!
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Yesterday I sent Ian’s raptor blues film to Tom Knudson of the Sacramento Bee and today he has tweeted it. I let Ian know and he sent me this amazing article. If you’ve been at all following this incredible young man you really should go read it for yourself.
ACHIEVER | St. X grad wins awards in animation competition
Since he was 11, Ian Timothy has enjoyed making stop-motion animation films. Now 18 and a recent St. Xavier High School graduate, he’s won two major awards for his approximately two-minute film “Day Shift.”
“Day Shift” won a Gold Medal in the student film category of the New York Festivals International TV and Film Awards Competition, one of only two student films to win the Gold Medal, the highest award.
For that film he also received a Silver Telly Award in Animation, the highest award given in that professional — not student — competition.
Ian will attend CalArts — the California Institute of The Arts in Valencia, Calif. — in the Experimental Animation program. The competitive program accepts 15 students per year and has trained “greats” such as Tim Burton and John Lasseter, Ian said.
Ian believes he was accepted because, “They want to see somebody has a voice as an artist. Not only that they are good, technically, but they know where they want to be and what they want to be.”
Okay THIS article is definitely going in the copy of the DVD he will be donating for the festival. You better save it because it will be a collector’s item one day. We disagree about one thing. Ian says his newest film is about the liberating effect of creativity. I say its about the creative influence of nature.
Maybe for Ian they are actually the same thing.
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Oh and as you can definitely discern: I have a new keyboard and a functioning “d”! Delicious Delight and Darwinism! All I can say is thank goodness it wasn’t the “B”.
