Beaver friend Brock Dolman is getting ready for an address to the Wild Farm Alliance, and he wants to include information about how truly useful beavers can be to water and soil management, so he went surfing through the annals of history and look what he found!
That’s right, straight from the USDA a recommendation to start beaver farms along the Canadian border. That’s the father of APHIS who eliminated about 30, 000 beavers last year from California alone, not to mention all the ducks they shot at airports and woodpeckers they kidnapped from Rossmoor. Why on earth, you ask, would they recommend beaver farms? Let’s let the once-evident knowledge of USDA answer that question for us.
Ahhh the former wisdom of the ages. Sniff. How we miss you. Don’t worry. It gets better worse. Nice to know they weren’t THAT smart about beavers….otherwise I’d get all depressed and wistful. Let’s let them keep talking. I’m sure we’ll get to something familiar eventually.
Beavers, the Survey has found, can be kept readily in a fully controlled if not a fully domesticated state. Because the animals are comparatively clumsy and slow walkers, they rarely go more than 20 or 30 rods from their home stream.To confine them to a narrow strip along a certain stream, therefore, it is only necessary to fence across the stream a short distance above and below their colony, running the fences at right angles to the stream about 30 rods on each side.
Now that I recognize! Expedient ignorance posing as research to reinforce the already foregone conclusion! Some things never change! “Don’t worry potential farmers! Beavers never wander! There’s no wind in the desert and we have pages of science to prove it.” I have to wonder what the a fore mentioned “survey” consisted of. Do you suppose it involved a researcher with a clipboard?
“On a scale of 1-5 how likely are you to walk overland away from your home stream? Choose 1 for Very Likely, 2 for Moderately likely, 3 Not Sure, 4 Moderately Unlikely and 5 Very Unlikely.”
Whoa. I’m having a Test Construction flashback. Give me a minute until the Likert dust resettles. Whew, that was close. Okay, let’s leave the cobwebbed shelves of graduate school and visit the halls of beaver research. First of all what’s a rod anyway? It’s an archaic measurement of distance that equals 16.5 feet. So 20-30 Rods would be about 300-400 feet. Hmm. That’s not very far. I thought beavers could go farther than that. What do beaver experts say?
or beaver can cross watersheds by overland travel of up to several kilometers. In a study of 46 dispersing beaver in New York, 74% initiated dispersal downstream, 35% moved to neighboring colonies, and females moved farther than males (Sun et al. 2000).
Baker, B. W., and E. P. Hill. 2003. Beaver (Castor canadensis). Pages 288-310 in G. A. Feldhamer,B. C. Thompson, and J. A. Chapman, editors. Wild Mammals of North America: Biology, Management,and Conservation. Second Edition. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.Several kilometers, a bit imprecise but lets say that means between 5-7. That translates to about 4 miles. Or 21,120 feet. As opposed to 350 feet. Which makes USDA wrong by a power of 60.
That seems about right.
Anyway thanks for the delightful read, Brock and good luck taming the wild farmers! And btw if you’re having a hard time choosing that special gift for the beaver lover on your list, check out these adorable pillows. The knitted snugglers sold on Etsy in 2009 but there must be more out there.
