So yesterday the hardy PhD candidate in ecohydrology, Emily Fairfax, launched an amazing stop-motion video that basically retells her entire dissertation. Emily is at the final stages of her degree, trying to secure the post-graduate job, and already earned a double major in physics and chemistry. This woman is no slouch. And she loves beaver dams. We first talked about the 360 beaver dam project she was working on a few years back. I know that lives are busy and you don’t always have time to watch a video but this is all of 43 seconds long and it will blow your mind. So WATCH this one.

Emily introduced it by saying, “As a scientist I’ve had an “elevator speech” prepared for a few years now. This year I made an “elevator video” & let me tell you: people enjoy seeing my research way more than just hearing about it!”

So what do #beavers have to do with #wildfire? Watch (with sound) & find out!

Isn’t that incredible? Yesterday when Ben sent it to me it had 11 views, so I’ve done what I could to change that. Now I’m just working on getting it seen by our new governor. Something tells me he’d take more than a passing interest. Hmm maybe cities and ranchers with active beaver dams get a fire-buffer-zone tax credit? Sure makes sense to me.

Meanwhile I was contacted last week by a reporter in Philadelphia about the rebounding beaver population and i made sure to explain that it wasn’t nearly as big as it once was. I’m glad to see that the story that follows lacks the customary alarm bells.

Is there a beaver resurgence in Philadelphia?

Witmer said there was almost no beaver activity 20 years ago in the city. But parks employees have seen more signs of beaver activity in the last decade — though it’s unclear just when it started. According to Witmer, the department has put a lot of effort to restore wildlife in this stretch of Haddington Woods. The beaver activity is proof that their efforts are working.

Sharon T. Brown has studied beavers for about 30 years, and she’s one of the founders of Beavers: Wetlands and Wildlife, an educational nonprofit. She said taking a census of beavers is hard, but the highest estimates from experts put their U.S. population at 20 million, a fraction of their population before the fur trade and farming exploded.

“By no way are they surging somehow out of control, if the habitat no longer can support them, you know so many of our cities and towns are built around waterways,” said Brown.

Where does that population estimate even come from? i can’t think that anyone’s counting. That’s like 40,000 a state. Roughly 8000 beaver families. Knowing the numbers of beavers that are killed each year in our state that seems very ambitious. That would mean that a beavers chance of being depredated in California was under one percent? That just can’t be true.

i’m sure it’s got to be more dangerous to be a beaver.