I think we should start our day with a little beaver listen from Yale. Can’t embed it but this is close.
Don’t you feel 90 seconds smarter? I sure do. Today is the day that Kevin Swift of OAEC will be installing a flow device in that beaver habitat behind the stream in Sonoma we talked about a while ago. Yeah for flow device! Not quite a yeah for the timing, as it is smack dab in the middle of kit bearing. I gave my usual alarm bell but others were less concerned. Fingers crossed the beavers won’t be either.
Meanwhile there’s more beaver and climate new from our favorite science friend 
Dramatic loss of food plants for insects
“Over the past 100 years, there has been a general decline in food plants for all kinds of insects in the canton of Zurich,” says Dr. Stefan Abrahamczyk from the Nees Institute for Biodiversity of Plants at the University of Bonn. The homogenization of the originally diverse landscape has resulted in the disappearance of many habitats, especially the wetlands, which have shrunk by around 90 percent. Human settlements have spread more and more at the expense of cultivated land, and the general intensification of pasture and arable farming has led to a widespread depletion of meadows and arable habitats. The researchers compared the abundance of food plants of different insect groups, based on current mapping for the years 2012 to 2017, with data-based estimates from the years 1900 to 1930 in the canton of Zurich (Switzerland).
The food plants of specialized groups of flower visitors are particularly affected by the decline. For instance, the Greater Knapweed (Centaurea scabiosa) is pollinated by bumblebees, bees and butterflies, as their tongues are long enough to reach the nectar. The decline is particularly dramatic for plant species that can only be pollinated by a single group of insects. In the case of Aconite (Aconitum napellus), for example, this can only be done by bumblebees because the plant’s toxin evidently does not affect them.
Gosh those darn disappearing wetlands! If only there were some kind of cheap and easy way to make wetlands all over Europe and North America so that the essential insect population could be saved.
