Kit Hayden is a blogger and journalist for the Republican Journal in Maine. He just saw some beaver felled trees in the boundary waters and decided to use what looked like pointless beaver activity as a metaphor for the political fallacies in his state. He writes:
The incident caused me to wonder what useful purpose the beaver serves in nature’s order. Unfortunately I haven’t found out, because all the sources I read refer only to the beaver/Homo sapiens interaction, and in this the beaver is pretty much a nuisance. The pelts were once profitable, but animal fur exploitation has been out of fashion for some time. The Eskimos used dried beaver testicles to relieve pain, but now we’ve got Ibuprofen and the like. We can eat the beast, but the meat’s said to be tasteless. Generally, the beaver makes a mess of our riparian environment, and so we’ve reduced his population in North America from about 90 to 10 million. Small wonder the boys on the island are picking on me in retaliation.
Yeah, if only beavers could quit ruining our riparian environment and let us get back to covering it with concrete and sheetpile, everything would be fine! It’s funny that we didn’t see a big increase in our forests, fish populations, and steam flow when America killed of 60, 000,000 beavers. You’d think there’d be this huge rebound and yet it was almost like all those things got worse…I wonder why that was?
When a beaver family in an urban area becomes noisome the beaver huggers will generally insist on a relocation effort instead of the more efficient murder. According to Wikipedia, the relocation cost is $4,000+ per animal, and the beaver or his cousins always return. Maybe with the government shutdown we can save on this sort of expense in Minnesota.
Beaver huggers! I guess he means us. You know us whacky people that irrationally care about the health of our watershed, fish populations & wildlife. Go figure. I assume this means he won’t be coming to the beaver festival this year? Or the State of the Beaver Conference next year? If he did that he might end up running into some actual facts about beavers, and that would just clutter up their blogging metaphor services.
Beavers use anal scent glands to mark off their positions. I believe this shows them to be more highly evolved than our politicians. I have no idea how the latter come to their opinions, but I’m thinking that it’s not with their anal scent glands. Not infrequently I read that a hippo has been elected mayor of some town. Why not a beaver? Maybe a beaver will run in the next election where I can vote for him. I confess to a grudging admiration at least for their chewing efficiency in gnawing down the birches. Makes my teeth hurt to think of it. Anyway, I guess I’ll break out the chainsaw and make firewood of those trees, for it’s an ill wind etc.
I know our beavers would have won in this town if they ran for city council, but I always assumed that was just because of the competition.
Nice article, but I have a very hard time believing that you looked all over and couldn’t find anything explaining the “point of beavers”. Never mind, I’m happy to help. Unlike politicians beavers are a keystone species. The dams they create maintain a network of wetlands that support dense, diverse populations of fish, birds & wildlife. They raise the water table and cool the stream though hyporheic exchange along the banks. They actually increase the riparian border and species diversity. Their dams trap silt and nutrients in the soil and old beaver sites become rich meadows and farm land. Their chewing of trees becomes a kind of natural “coppicing” which is a forestry term for hardcutting a tree so it grows back denser and more bushy. This provides excellent nesting habitat for migratory and song birds. There is even research that beavers are essential in providing habitat for juvenile salmon and trout.
For the record, I agree with you that relocation is a short term solution — so is trapping. Because beavers are territorial with their use of castoreum to mark their boundaries, the beavers you have are warding off others. When you get rid of them new ones always move in. A better solution for flooding/damming problems is to install an inexpensive flow device, which you can also read about on wikipedia.
My low lying town found ourselves with a colony of beavers 4 years ago who built a dam in our urban creek. There were fears it would cause flooding and the beavers were going to be exterminated. Literally hundreds of people protested and forced the city to find another way to control the problem. We ended up hiring Skip Lisle from Vermont who came out and installed a flow device at the dam, which allowed it to be maintained at a safe height with no problems since.
I am fond of saying that any city smarter than a beaver can keep a beaver, and folks who care about clean water & wildlife, hunting or fishing, know why they should bother.
Please let me know if you would like any of the countless research that substantiates these claims. I will give you only one excellent read which is the last chapter of “In Beaver World” by father of the Rockies National Park, Enos Mills. It was written 100 years ago, when America was just beginning to notice what was happening to all our rivers and streams after we trapped our 60,000,000 beavers. A more modern article is here but I believe he answers your question better than anyone else ever could.
Heidi Perryman, Ph.D.
President & Founder
Worth A Dam
www.martinezbeavers.org/wordpress
