Guess who’s whose stop motion made it on the Verge?
‘Dam good’ video shows how beavers could fight fires
An adorable video that shows how beavers can fight wildfires is making the rounds on Twitter, and it’s everything science communication should be: short, compelling, clear, and about beavers.
The stop-motion video is the work of Emily Fairfax, a graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder. It shows a beaver building a dam and transforming the forest upstream into a marshy wetland filled with splotches of vegetation in shades of green. When a fire rages through the forest, the ponds of water and healthy plants protect the area above the beaver dam from the flames. That includes the beaver, which holds up a little flag that says “I’m okay!”
So far, the video has more than 180,000 292000 views on Twitter, and it’s getting the delighted reactions it deserves. Conservation experts, teachers, and beaver advocates have all asked Fairfax for her permission to share the video. Others want to know how she made it, and, as it turns out, it’s pretty low-tech: Fairfax set up a beaver dam in her kitchen, snapped photos on her iPhone, and used an app to turn them into a stop-motion video.
Ohhh it makes me so happy that Emily gets a fitting rollout for her efforts! Think of ALL those people delightfully forced to make the connection between beavers and fire prevention! Think of how powerful broadcast this is while you’re basically looking for a job, to do a little wonderful thing that makes headlines in a field your ground-breaking research pretty much invented!
The whole thing started because Fairfax is wrapping up her PhD and is studying the ways that beavers can help their habitat withstand hazards like fire and drought. Now that she’s applying to jobs, she’s spending a lot of time trying to explain her research, and she realized she kept reaching for a visual aid. “I’m trying to talk with my hands, and I want to pull up all these pictures on my phone,” she tells The Verge. So she made a video instead.
She set the scene on a cork board at her kitchen table with construction paper, rocks from her garden, and leftover fake plants from her wedding. She made the stream, beaver dam, pond, wetland, vegetation, and the fire out of felt. The beaver was the easy part. “I already had a bunch of little beaver toys because people give me beaver stuff for the holidays every year,” she says.
HAHAHAHAHA when Jon and I read that article aloud we laughed and laughed. Ohh little phd beaver girl just starting out, there’s such a decorated road ahead of you! I still resent a little Ben’s description of our home in the book Eager, but it’s a fair cop. See what your house looks after doing this work for a decade,
To my knowledge, the world’s largest collection of beaver-themed tchotchkes, knickknacks, and memorabilia is housed in an oak-shaded street in Martinez, California. To enter, you must pass beneath the mural that hangs over the front porch — a reddish beaver, stick grasped in forepaws, tail raised in salutation. The dim interior has the feel of a shrine. Beaver magnets cling to the refrigerator; plush beavers perch atop the bureaus; a gallery’s worth of beaver paintings, prints, and posters stare down from every wall. Gnawed stumps rest next to the fireplace. Embroidered beaver napkins hang in the kitchen. In the backyard, a clay beaver crouches in the birdbath. If I’d come during Christmas, I would have seen a cardboard beaver cut-out, roughly the size of a black bear, strung with lights on the front lawn.
Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The surprising secret lives of beavers and why they Matter.
Don’t feel bad, Emily. You’re off to an AWESOME start! I just know that someday soon National Geographic will describe you too as “Colorful”!
It took her a few tries to snap about 300 photos on her phone, which she stitched together with the Stop Motion Pro app. Then she added sound effects in iMovie — including a banjo soundtrack. The music is a nod to documentaries about beavers, Fairfax told The Verge. “There’s always banjo music playing when they’re building, and I don’t know why,” she says. “I can’t break tradition!”
She tweeted the video on Sunday, not expecting it to have much reach beyond what Fairfax calls her “beaver people” — a small community of people interested in beaver science. She went on a hike, and when she came back, the tweet had blown up. “I’m getting comments from K-12 educators, I’m getting comments from land managers,” she says. “Ultimately that’s the goal of something like this, to make people interested who wouldn’t otherwise read my papers, or come to my conference presentations.”
I love being called “beaver people”. In fact I love it with a fiery passion. Thank you Emily for naming the fantastic club I worked so hard to join.
Fairfax thinks part of the video’s appeal is its brevity. “Scientists have great tendency to ramble on — myself included — when we’re talking about things we really like,” she says. This video, by contrast, is less than a minute long. And the best part is that it doesn’t use any of the jargon that can make science so impenetrable because it doesn’t have any words.
Ahh what a sweet way to graduate into beaver life. Emily I an SO happy for you and all the exciting beaver places you’re going to go and all the exciting beaver people you’re going to meet and inspire. In the meantime I’m going to believe that that some cousin or college roomate of some kind of lower aid to Gavin Newsome is going to see this and the conversation about California’s monster fire season is being helped by beavers is going to come up!
Maybe as soon as tomorrow. What a perfect way to start beaver conference week. Even though we can’t be there we get to celebrate your wonderful addition to the conversation. Congratulations Emily!
