I received another email yesterday concerning what I’m going to call the luckiest beavers in the entire state of North Carolina. This time it was from a professor who was making those lucky beavers a website to share photos and information about them.
The email was asking me about a document found in some dusty corner of the website describing the bogus reasons cities say they have to kill beavers. Honestly, if you held a gun to my head I wouldn’t recognize it or remember writing it, but it had my name boldly on the cover so at one pint I must have – I made sure he had some more relevant resources and offered our support.
I’m very impressed with the way the site uses the photographs of supporters to document how the beaver habitat creates a vital ecosystem. I’m also happy that it names the creek where they live instead of just referring to it as property of the Home Owners Association of Briar Chapel. This might be my favorite photo. It’s a cardinal sitting on the beaver dam, which I have never seen before.
The website has the latest news about the beavers and a call for volunteers and donations. It also has a relevant links page (on which we’re number one) and a collection of videos and information.
Now one of those videos I hadn’t seen before and was produced at Cornell University for their 4H naturalist program. It is engaging and well done with a glowing review of beavers. There were just a few minor problems.
Can you guess the first one?
Okay, woodchucks aside, the other giant problem around 5:45 where it describes the dams beavers build to manage water. They go on to say that this is packed with mud to make a wall – so far so good – which the beaver then tunnels into to make a home!!!
Et tu brute? Cornell University is advertising that beavers live INSIDE the dam? Complete with graphics? Cornell University got a grant from USDA to say that? You know the smartest person from my entire high school got a scholarship to Cornell and it has always been kind of a hallowed place in my eyes. I remember how admiringl I received his letters from Ithaca College. How could they be wrong? Heck, maybe there’s new research I don’t know about and I’m the one whose wrong. Maybe the fact that our beavers didn’t live in the dam was just a fluke. And all the others do.
Okay, well I wrote Linda last night with the polite question about where she got that interesting point. (She’s a professor of Ent0mology by the way.) And mentioned to the website creator that he might want to switch videos to one that was more accurate. He obviously decided not to because who are you going to listen to, some crazy woman who saves beavers or CORNELL university for gods sake.
Here’s the entire video if you want to investigate for yourself.
