“LIKE HITTING THE ECOSYSTEM OVER THE HEAD WITH A HAMMER”

There’s a wonderful news story about our friend that I wanted to share this morning, but once again it will have to wait for me to comment on the massive castor-catastropshizing that’s going on EVERYWHERE under our noses. Literally people I haven’t spoke to in a decade are writing me in a panic asking whether this could possibly be true.

Imagine the worst headline you could possibly write, have a contest with all your friends and then sit down with the writers of White Lotus and a thesaurus to make it significantly worse, then double it, and you might come close.

Photos from space show 11,000 beavers are wreaking havoc on the Alaskan tundra as savagely as wildfire

Just stop. All by itself that’s enough for now. Beavers wreaking havoc AS SAVAGELY AS WILDFIRE. Could anything be more terrifying to a country that has grown terrified of fires? I can barely force myself to go on. But I must.

Beavers are taking over the Alaskan tundra, completely transforming its waterways, and accelerating climate change in the Arctic.

The changes are so sudden and drastic that they’re clearly visible from space.

As the Arctic tundra warms, woody plants are growing along its rivers and streams, creating perfect habitats for beavers.

As the furry rodents move into these waterways, they make themselves at home by doing what they do best: chewing and carrying wood to build dams, and clogging rapid rivers and streams to make lush ponds.

Those dam lush beavers with their lush beaver pond ways. They just swim in like they own the place and without so much as a “by-your-leave” start making things better for all these other species we didn’t invite.

Yes that’s EXACTLY like wildfire.

Tape and his colleagues assessed aerial photos from the early 1950s and found no signs of beaver presence in Alaska’s Arctic tundra. The first signs of beavers appeared in 1980 imagery. In satellite imagery from the 2000s and 2010s, the beaver ponds doubled.

Can I just pause and point out that after the devastation of the fur trade started to wear off EVERYONE noticed an increase in the beaver population. And it took from about 1840-1970 for beavers to start showing up in the rest of the world. Too bad you don;t have any aerial photos back from 1600. Oh right, there were no satellites or cameras or air travel them. Never mind. I’m sure you’re right and it looked the same as in the 1950’s..

“All of western Alaska is now really densely populated with beaver ponds,” Tape said.

That’s consistent with what Indigenous people in the area have observed. It’s especially obvious on the ground in towns like Kotzebue, where there were no beavers 20 years ago, and now they’re everywhere, Tape said.

So he was floored when he saw beaver-engineering projects completely transforming landscapes across Alaska.

“It was like hitting the ecosystem over the head with a hammer,” he said.

The severity and speed of beavers’ footprint on the landscape, as seen from space, is more akin to wildfire, Tape said.

HITTING THE ECOSYSTEM OVER THE HEAD WITH A HAMMER!!!!!!!!! and MORE AKIN TO WILDFIRE!!!!!!!!!

Ken Tape HIMSELF is responsible for that headline. Here I was trying to be charitable and blaming the copy girl. But no. He really made those words with his own mouth.

The US Department of Metaphor just released an alert reading that Ken is at large and was himself a failed candidate in their “comparative retraining” program. As an undergrad he was known to storm through their lecture halls reading essays about how his “Christmas dinner was as tasty as a box of nails” and how his “wife’s face was more beautiful than a lethal spider in the grass.”

I suppose a beaver’s effect on the ecosystem is kind of like being hit with a hammer. A magical hammer that makes everything you broke yesterday form suddenly back together as if it never happened.

Like I wish I could use on this article for instance.

“If you like the Arctic the way it was, the old Arctic, then beavers are bad for that. Whereas if you kind of embrace the new Arctic, well, then beavers are one of your champions,” Tape said.

If you like the arctic the way it was TOO BAD BECAUSE WE HAVE BEEN RELEASING CARBON FOR 100 YEARS and didn’t do anything to stop or slow down even when we could have and now its screwed so there. Gosh I wish there was something that could help make it more livable.

As temperatures rise, the permafrost thaws and releases the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere.

That’s the one beaver impact that Tape’s team is sure of: Beaver ponds are thawing the surrounding permafrost, exacerbating the climate crisis. Just how much, is not yet clear.

More and more beavers will likely spread through the tundra in the future, continuing to move north as the Arctic warms.

“All they have to do is swim downstream,” Tape said. “If they find the habitat there — in other words, if it’s warm enough, if the shrubs are tall enough, if there’s enough unfrozen water in winter — then they’re going to forever change that place.”

Ben Goldfarb agrees this is the worst headline he has ever read but says he has talked at length with Ken and knows he is no beaver hater. He thinks maybe he means “Hammer” in a good way. Like nothing ever gets built without them.

Hmm. I’m doubtful the average reader will take it that way. And so I’m going to end by offering a visual comparison to show how despite everything they’ve read to the contrary, the effect of beavers and the effect of a a wildfire are actually quite different.

It’s really pretty subtle. Let me know if can spot it.

WHOM SHALL WE BLAME? YOU KNOW WHOM

heidi08 Beavers and salmon, Beavers and saltwater May 9, 2020

When a huge crisis of our own making escalates to the point that we can ignore it no longer, there is only one thing to do that will allow us to avoid responsibility and resist changing our own destructive behavior. You know what it is. You must.

Blame the beaver.

There’s a massive beaver boom in Northwest Alaska, and scientists and locals have dam concerns

This is the craziest part. Not only do beavers hasten global warming but they natives are worrying they’ll block all the salmon. Because you know how beavers do that.

Henry Horner is the president of the Tribal Council for the village of Kobuk. He’s lived in the village since the 50s, and says that he remembers beavers popping up in the region periodically, but there are considerably more now. And they can be a nuisance.

“Where we subsist for fish and stuff like that, they’ll be blocking the creeks and stuff like that,” Horner said.

“Farther up [the Kobuk] river, I see where they’ve built dams, and the salmon have to start spawning elsewhere,” Horner said.

Horner says some locals think that eliminating the beavers is a viable solution to their concerns, though he doesn’t see it as very practical.

“Some of our elders would say, ‘kill the beaver,’ and they might get the beaver,” Horner said. “But while they think they’ve got it, another one arrives.”

Really? Your elders would say that? Gee do you think its possible that tribal knowledge might have LEAP-FROGGED a generation or two? I mean I’m willing to assume your tribe has learned something about salmon the past few centuries, but maybe, if new streams are welcoming new spaces that don’t freeze its a fairly new acquaintance. Because otherwise you’d know that baby salmon need DEEP POOLS that don’t freeze so they grow up fat and happy to swim to sea and become BIG salmon. And that means beaver ponds where there’s lots of real estate and plenty to eat.

And the more babies you have the more adults you’ll be able to catch later.

But sure. The elders probably know best. Beavers are probably causing climate change. Better kill ’em all

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

Well let’s leave that annoying story behind us and talk about this amazing footage which was sent yesterday to Ben Goldfarb from some friends in Lithuania. He had this to say about it.

That beavers use saltwater to disperse between river mouths, and even build dams in tidal estuaries, is something that biologists have long recognized. Veterinarians in western Washigton have treated multiple beavers for salt toxicity due to prolonged exposure to Puget Sound. I even wrote a story about this quirk of beaver behavior:

https://www.hakaimagazine.com/…/the-gnawing-question-of-sa…/

Still, it’s one thing to know that beavers turn to the ocean, and quite another to *see it.* Here’s an amazing video I received from Žavinta from Lithuania, who recently captured this delightful footage of a beaver slipping into the Baltic Sea. (Yes, I get a lot of beaver videos from strangers.) Bon voyage, my good mariner!

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BEAVER SCHOOL BEGINS PROMPTLY IN JANUARY

heidi08 Beavers and climate change January 19, 2018

You could go to college, sit thru boring classes, study for exams, earn a degree and owe millions of dollars afterwards OR you could just read this website for free every day and be a genius! Since I already did the first one, I’m committed now to the second. This arrived yesterday from USFS hydrologist Dr. Suzanne Fouty who let me know she will actually be retiring in March. (The forest service will be lost without her, but I’m selfishly hoping that all that free time means she will come to the beaver festival!)

Anyway, she sent a presentation that was given at a conference last year in Washington that I know will interest you folks. The author is Konrad Halen of Utah State. Click here for full text of the paper or here for a link to his slides.

“To What Extent Might Beaver Dam Building Buffer Water Storage Losses Associated with a Declining Snowpack?”

Konrad worked with Joe Wheaton to study this issue. .The question addressed was whether an increase in beaver dams could make up for the effects of climate change on the receeding snow pack. The author looked at the number of dams and calculated the volume of water behind each. Then he did the same with the volume of the snow pack in a prior year.

The results are kind of depressing in that they indicate that climate change is going to kick the snot out of our water supply and beavers can only help a little bit.

What he found is that beaver dam amount for a small fraction of overall snowpack water, but that they do indeed contribute. I guess the moral of the story is “Don’t screw up your climate!” And if it so happens that you are so stupid you do mess up your climate, then the moral is “You better have a LOT of beavers around to do what they can.”

Beavers can’t hit the undo button for us, but they CAN HELP if we let them. That should be foremost on our minds when we think about what to do when they block a culvert or flood a basement.

The next educational moment of the day is from Eli Asarian of River Bend Sciences who let me know about an upcoming discussion of the surprise beavers in the artic that we might be able to attend for free.

It’s an upcoming Webinar entitled

Tundra Be Dammed! The Beaver Colonization of the Artic

The next Northern Region, Alaska Section, AWRA Monthly Brown Bag Presentation will be given by Dr. Ken Tape, University of Alaska Fairbanks – Water and Environmental Research Center, on “Tundra Be Dammed: Beaver Colonization of the Arctic”. We will also have this presentation available for Free over the web (using Webex). Please see the following URL for more information. The role of beavers on the hydrologic landscape has always been significant in North America. Ken’s presentation on changes in the Arctic has relevence to potential changes across North America. Please join us next week and enjoy an informative presentation on Alaska.

The American Water Resource Association does monthly brown bags in Fairbanks and allows for remote participation through its webinars. To participate contract them here. I’m pretty curious about what gets said about these permafrost-ruining beavers in the Tundra, so maybe I’ll see you there!