If you are like me at sometime some member of your family has donated to The Nature Conservancy and you still receive those calendars in the mail every year in their annual chum for more donations. Maybe you even looked up at the quiet swamp photo of prairie photo and thought “Gosh they never have beaver pond photos. I wonder why that is?” And you went about your day.
Wikipedia says Nature Conservancy has over one million members globally as of 2021, and has protected more than 119,000,000 acres (48,000,000 ha) of land and thousands of miles of rivers worldwide.[when?][where?] As of 2014, it is the largest environmental non-profit organization by assets and revenue in the Americas.
Did you read that? It is the LARGEST NON PROFIT IN THE COUNTRY.
And yet it writes things like this.
Can a scientist follow the beaver’s blueprint?
Okay that’s nice to start. It’s talking about installing BDA’s to mimic beaver dams doing all the good things they do for the landscape. That seems nice. What’s the problem? Well the author asks why do we need BDA’s? Why not just move in beavers? And that’s where the chaos begins.
So either the science writer of this article does not know that beavers do not eat fish, or the PHD candidate installing BDAs in the article does not know that beaver do not eat fish or their was a massive communication error in the interview. I suppose it’s possible.
(Once my sister asked my father how squirrels could walk on power likes without their feet being electrocuted and he answered like the good PGE man he was “Because they’re insulated” and my sister grew up thinking that squirrel feet were insulated.) So it happens.
But my GOD that means the author Jenny Rogers didn’t catch it and the editor didn’t catch it and the copy editor didn’t catch it. All the time they spent making sketches for this article they still couldn’t be bothered to learn beavers are vegetarians.
Just like they’re most of their donors. There are millions of them I hear.
