To celebrate, here's a piece of beaver-related trivia:
The Cistercians often chose places between landscape features, e.g. where a river comes out of a wooded forest. Since they often started communities in the bottoms of valleys they had to drain excess water and reclaim land for agriculture. They often accepted donations of land deemed unusable because of drainage problems, since they were expert in the construction of waterworks. With the new bodies of water they developed fishing activity. For this reason they were dubbed the "human beavers of Europe."
Tracy Young advising startup founders to be like beavers (extolling its virtues) is one of the best presentations I've seen: https://youtu.be/-pKR212H5vQ
I thought the same, and tried it in Bing, and even with safe search "off", and it is all beavers of the aquatic mammal type[1]. Not sure if that is because the slang is not as common these days or if there really are so many wildlife cameras out there documenting the lives of beavers that it swamps out the long tail of results.
The magazine "Canada's History" used to be named "The Beaver" in honor of how beaver trapping played a major role both in lives of the indigenous peoples of Canada as well as in colonial history well into the 19th century. It was eventually changed in the 21st century. No exact reason has been given, but one imagines there were a lot of web searches landing on their home page from people not necessarily interested in the animal nor Canada's history.
"Ian Barnes, Enfield Council's deputy leader, said it was "quite emotional" when the pair - who have been temporarily nicknamed Justin Beaver and Sigourney Beaver - were released into the wild."
A terraforming animal meets a terraforming animal, to find out while its ancestors extincted the terraforming aninmal previously.
Beavers will build dams and lodges into the infrastructure, will undermine the whole river bank and start damning up canals. Its easy to cheer this on from a nature in the abstract loving position.
But in the real world, this results in the need for constant repairs and downgarded performance.
If the headline was "German bombers drop smart anti-infrastructure water-bombletts into thames \ blitz getting more expensive by the day \ pratchett fans cheer for modern Ankh Morpork" it would describe a similar situation, without the disney googles and nobody would celebrate it.
Here around Bratislava the beavers are doing their stuff last ~10 years after a long absence. A few people are scandalised by the felled trees. Otherwise no issues. They are not causing problems for massive concrete dams we have on the Danube. For smaller rivers, the changes seem to be positive.
In my country there were some locations where they have added bevers population on purpose. This was in the rural areas. And there was a lot of floods and damages on crops, orchards, etc.
We often assume our ancestors to be idiots. Would they have done it if beavers were found to be generally beneficial? (I mean probably, because capitalists are going to sell their last breath of air if the price is right; still worth asking)
Here in the US midwest beavers are shot and their dams dynamited wherever they are found.
The majority of the US used to be endless chains of mosquito-infested beaver ponds, the entire length of every stream and river. Nearly uninhabitable by people.
The extinction of the beaver is what made the US agriculturally useful. There's not a single landowner I know, who wants a random pond flooding their field, road or house.
For better or worse, the age of the beaver is definitely over. At least in the US.
Not sure if this is interesting to anyone but, I grew up in Spain, in a relatively wild area near the coast, and then spent my remaining couple decades in England in different places.
When I went to Atlanta and the surrounding suburbs, I was completely flabbergasted to come across a tree which had been felled by a beaver.
Not because they exist, I know quite a bit about them, but perhaps specifically because there no signs, no souvenir items in the nearby park shop, no jokes, no real mention, of the fact the forests around atlanta were so diverse they had large mammals. It was just an after thought. Oh that tree? Yes a big beaver did that randomly no biggie.
I then drove to the swamps in Florida and saw the alligators. But I was expecting the wildlife - as its an attraction and known about.
Small things like seeing a flock of large birds on a telephone line, in the city of miami, yet a flock of such a size, with such large birds, is something I had not seen in my life in any city or place in Europe - and I doubt anyone walking passed would stop to notice it.
I really do think the bio diversity in the US is taken for granted! I know about the special parks and often spoken about animals and habitats, but its the small moments you realise just dont exist anywhere else that I am unsure the locals even realise.
I had a similar experience moving from the UK to US - 'indoor cats' were an alien concept to me, but a friend explained they couldn't let theirs outside because 'they'd be eaten by coyotes'
It was bonkers to me there were beavers and turtles in the lake down the street, not to mention big snakes and humming birds...and the first time you see a possum is kind of crazy
When I was growing up the British garden centre nearby sold chipmunks as pets, which amuses Americans when I tell them
What is a "non-wild" raccoon? I'm pretty sure it's wild ones that chew through the bottom of my plastic trash can to lick meat juice off the styrofoam trays.
I think that the observation about raccoons in Germany is made because they aren't native to Europe. Probably the correct word is feral
My mother (who lives in the UK) recently visited me (in the US). While walking we saw a bald eagle fishing. She was blown away. Here that's commonplace
Seeing eagles fishing is now commonplace, but it wasn't even a few decades ago, as the Bald Eagle was nearly extirpated in the contiguous 48 US states by DDT pollution. Thankfully they've made a big comeback.
Raccoons were introduced in Europe by humans, but badgers are native to Europe and they are equally interesting mammals. Although your chances of spotting a badger in the wild, at least in Poland, are much lower than for the racoons in the US.
Here I am in Ontario wishing I could come up with the magic formula to get a colony of bats to set up shop in the woods near my vineyard, so they can dine on the japanese beetles that decimate it every year.
We used to have a colony of bats at our house (rural eastern Ontario) but the P. destructans infection ("white nose syndrome") has wiped them out completely in most of eastern North America. Like wolves, bats are now extinct in this region with all the entailing ecological changes.
Thank you for sharing your perspective. It never occurred to me that seeing things like deer, foxes, bear, eagles etc would be a similar experience in rural Europe. I’ve never seen such things when I’ve been there, but I figured it was just my bad luck or bad timing. Makes me appreciate more my surroundings. Thanks!
Growing up in the middle of Chicago, it wasn't terribly uncommon to be walking down a major four lane road and see a coyote running down to the road to the nearby cemetery.
Or the time I saw the fattest coyote I'd ever seen casually walk right past me on the sidewalk.
A coyote out during the day, alone, and not afraid of humans is something to stay away from for sure. Where I live there are few animals that have no restricted season to hunt and no limits. Coyotes are one of them.
Here in Ontario coyotes seem worse in urban areas than rural. We live on 6 acres just outside town and we hear them at night, see their droppings and the remnants of their rabbit-dinners, but have seen them only a couple times in our 10 years. They're dreadfully shy.
In town, though, they're brazen and walk right by people and sometimes will snatch their pets from their backyards as a snack.
They’ve adapted remarkably well to urban environments it seems. In Chicago they regularly use train lines and greenways along the both branches of the Chicago river to get around. And there’s loads of parks, cemeteries, and other green spaces. Deer seem to do well in the city too. The cemetery I used to live by (Rosehill on the Northside) hosted many deer. This is a cemetery with dense urban residential areas on all four sides, but it must have been large enough for them and there’s lots of quiet neighborhood side streets around.
In Alberta, which has the cities of Edmonton and Calgary which are >1M in population, it's not that unusual for moose and bears to make their way into the cities' neighborhoods.
It's usually just the outer suburbs, but both cities have undeveloped river valley greenspace that the animals use to find unobstructed paths almost to the city center.
I enjoyed this story of a sea lion breaking into a public pool in Dunedin, New Zealand. Unfortunately I can't find the video that includes the CTV footage of it making its way through the cafe but it's still fairly entertaining https://youtu.be/7cjL1qjaUkE
I recall there is a picture, but I’m not completely sure. I’d have to search around. If you search “Lincoln park coyote” you might find it. If you search “Lincoln park pirates” you’ll find a wonderful song by Steve Goodman.
A large part is down to the trade in beaver pelts Hudson Bay company, and the Russian expansion into Siberia was in large part down to obtaining more beaver pelts.
I don't know about England or Spain, but in all of the Eastern Europe wild animals are pretty commonplace and it never occurred to me someone would think of them as some kind of attraction. It's hundreds of occasions that I've seen a beaver, or a fox, or a deer, a hedgehog, a hare, etc., even in cities. I've never personally seen a boar, but it happens for them to stumble into central areas of the city at night as well. So it sounds surprising to me (and kind of sad, honestly) that it's so desolated in Spain. Is there really absolutely no wildlife?
It's very common for white-tailed deer to wander into ones backyard if one lives sufficiently far out in the suburbs. These animals can weigh as much as 135 kg (male) or 90 kg (female). I've had as many as five on them on my property at the same time (upstate NY).
It's a function of lower population density, I think, as well as agriculture tending to have moved to the midwest and plains states. There's been a lot of regeneration of forests in the Eastern US since they were clearcut in the 19th century.
There are deer on Staten Island, not really the suburbs. Unfortunately the only real predators left to take down deer are hunters and cars. People (often hunters) even freak out if a dog chases one.
They freak out for a good reason. A pack of dogs will pull down a deer, eats it hind quarters and leave it to die. I had a relative who worked for the Department of Lands and Forest. When he was the FNG he would get called out every few weeks to kill them. After the third one he started carrying a rifle whenever in the woods and shot every unaccompanied dog he saw.
In addition to taking out their predators, we have also fragmented ecosystems.
Certain species like deer thrive in the boundaries between two different ecosystem types because they get different resources from both ecosystems.
Humans do not only reduce forest size, but also change the geometry of forests: fragmentation makes the edges more pronounced (increases the perimeter:area ratio)
This harms some animals like large solitary predators who require vast ranges, but helps other species like deer who prefer the edges.
Here in Iowa we have mountain lions - maybe 100 in the whole state, but they're here. Very secretive, and a sighting is rare.
I have dozens of deer living on my property. Badgers, skunk, chipmunks. Eagle fly by regularly. Flocks of crows in the thousands will occasionally park in my orchard, then move on.
In the Pacific Northwest, beavers increase resilience to wildfire and drought. They do so by creating natural fire breaks and by increasing groundwater storage. They also do this in a way that also creates fish habitat and deeper pools that coldwater fish like trout and salmon can take advantage of to survive lower water years.
They're really ecologically important, and while some may complain that they fall trees, that's actually very beneficial in the west where we have forest fires that burn far more trees than any beavers could hope to destroy to build their structures. This is not just for the northwest, but other drought and fire-prone western regions (Oregon, Colorado).
TL;DR Our elimination of beavers is exacerbating the problems of drought and fire in the american west.
> A growing number of scientists, conservationists and grass-roots environmentalists have come to regard beavers as overlooked tools when it comes to reversing the disastrous effects of global warming and world-wide water shortages. Once valued for their fur or hunted as pests, these industrious rodents are seen in a new light through the eyes of this novel assembly of beaver enthusiasts and “employers” who reveal the ways in which the presence of beavers can transform and revive landscapes. Using their skills as natural builders and brilliant hydro-engineers, beavers are being recruited to accomplish everything from finding water in a bone-dry desert to recharging water tables and coaxing life back into damaged lands.
Apparently beavers are attracted to the sound of running water.
Most of what you wrote is about 30 years out of date.
Here in the US midwest beavers are shot and their dams dynamited wherever they are found.
Not whenever. Sometimes. Today, in many places, even in the Midwest, beavers are considered beneficial to restoring a habitat to a more natural state. As long as they're controlled. But the wholesale slaughter you describe is simply false.
The majority of the US used to be endless chains of mosquito-infested beaver ponds, the entire length of every stream and river
Also completely false. Unless you define "majority of the US" to mean "portions of the Ohio, Mississippi, and Red River watersheds," which is far from the majority of the US.
The extinction of the beaver is what made the US agriculturally useful.
The beaver is not extinct.
For better or worse, the age of the beaver is definitely over. At least in the US.
You have generalized your personal experience in your very small part of the world to be representative of a vast nation.
Beaver populations are increasing dramatically on wilderness and other public lands in the western US. They definitely change the landscape and kill a lot of trees. Good for vistas and stream health, but I don't know much about it. Sometimes I get a bit sad when I see large cottonwood trees taken down by beavers, but the meadows they create when their ponds silt up are quite beautiful.
And the standing water that beavers create probably do assist in groundwater infiltration in a not insignificant way for the local flora. Otherwise that water will just runoff down the stream to some other spot where it can spread out.
I am under the impression that beavers intrinsically hate the sound of running water, and some beaver brain process causes them to feel the need to dam it up.
Well, I grew up in southern Illinois, and we had beaver in my literal backyard. Which, granted, was a wetland which flooded several months of the year, but that was mostly owing to the Army Corps of Engineers doing their job, not the beaver (they flooded where we were to prevent flooding elsewhere).
So, unless this beaver eradication program is a 21st century novelty, I can say that it is not generally true of the US midwest.
According to Wikipedia, there are quite a few beavers in North America, but not as many as there used to be:
>"Protections have allowed the beaver population on the continent to rebound to an estimated 6–12 million by the late 20th century; this is a fraction of the originally estimated 60–400 million North American beavers before the days of the fur trade."
> For better or worse, climate change will put an end to the age of mankind
What are you talking about? Climate change, as predicted in the IPCC reports at least, don't even come close to describing the demise of mankind. That sort of talk is just apocalyptic fear mongering.
If you're really reading what the IPCC is saying, you'd understand that western lifestyles are under threat. Within most peoples' lifetimes, the carrying capacity of earth will be cut in half, unless emissions are reduced severely. Perhaps this is not the demise of mankind, but I think most people would categorize that as a kind of apocalypse. I'd love for you to tell me how human population being halved is somehow okay.
Relevant book: Eager: the surprising secret life of beavers and why they matter, by Ben Goldfarb (2018) [0]
"The arrival of Europeans warped indigenous peoples’ relationship with beaver from subsistence and kinship to extraction, turning many tribes, as Harold Hickerson put it, into “a vast forest proletariat whose production was raw fur.”12 The trade began innocuously enough in the 1500s, with European cod fishermen casually exchanging goods for pelts during their spells ashore in Newfoundland. When Henry Hudson found the Mohawk eager to trade in 1609 in modern-day New York, the rush was on. Europe was then in the process of exterminating nearly all its own beavers, and the untapped source of pelts proved irresistible."
Beavers help the land retain water. Our current, predominant agricultural system in the United States requires significant energy towards irrigation and fertilization. There are other systems that I see as better, and which would include beavers.
I'm a "landowner" in the current legal system, and while you likely don't really know me, I welcome a pond here, especially if the surround land also has plenty of insects, arachnids, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals (and all the others). Mosquitoes are not much of a problem around here, but I've lived places where the air is thick with them. Maintaining balanced diversity (including human population) is important to me.
Some of my neighbors have beaver families on their land and appreciate what they do. Some of those neighbors also grow food for themselves and others.
In the UK it has been recently realised that ensuring that rivers, upstream, prevents downstream flooding. There's certainly a belief that beavers could help.
I'm from the Chicagoland area, i've seen a beaver or something very similar, as there are numerous huge forest preserves, and have never heard of humans bothering them. Perhaps that's because their activities are quaint in the area.
Whereas in the UK part of the attraction of beavers is as part of the amelioration of climate change and the flash flooding it can produce. a few additional swampy areas and floodplains upstream can reduce disasters downstream
But I'm not a fan of re-introducing (or introducing) these species into this habitat. Into London no less! After 400 years!!
Today, everything is politicised.
In the UK, farmers are forced to keep their cows enclosed in barns, in order to allow the orchids to grow. The message is 'nevermind the cows, nature is for orchids'.
I strongly suspect that these sorts of measures are taken in order to justify further governmental intrusion on what people are allowed to do, and to erode property rights in the name of conservation.
> erode property rights in the name of conservation.
I wish we would
erode more property "rights" in the name of conservation, since th actions of landowners affect everyone else, including all future generations.
Every extinct species is another burning of the Library of Alexandria.
A few years back, my wife and I were walking in the woods along the Des Plaines River (just outside Chicago) and we saw a beaver in the water. I’m not sure when they returned to the river, but as a kid in the area, I never saw any there. I wasn’t sure if it was actually a beaver initially until it grew tired of us walking along the bank of the river following us, slapped the water with its tail and dove below the surface.
I'm no expect but I wouldn't be surprised if there's some level of 'learning' and 'teaching' that goes on in groups of beavers that lead to different types of dam architecture in different regions.
Beavers are really neat to me because they seem like they have the right sort of body type and proclivities to be really expert tool makers. They're one of those species that would probably take over the human ecological niche if the human species just blinked out of existence tomorrow.
People always love to talk about tool-making animals like crows and chimps and that's cool but I've always been fascinated by examples of animals that build complicated and vast structures like beavers or ants and termites. It's interesting to me that we've domesticated animals for so many purposes but not for construction. Like we have domesticated animals for eating (cows), for riding (horses), for self defense/hunting (dogs) pest control (cats) but I can't think of an example of using animals for construction. I guess using grazing animals for trimming grass/scrub is maintenance which is similar.
What I find remarkable about the video I linked to above is that once that beaver has it's Maslo's hierarchy of needs is met it seems to want nothing more than to collect the appropriately sized/shaped stuff to dam anything that resembles a waterway. If we could some how find some way to harness that, if we could engineer a species of animals that we fed and nourished and they would go out in the wilderness and do remediation work for us, it could potentially be so much more sustainable than using heavy equipment or other alternatives and cheaper than using human labour.
I think it's a mistake to assume that any one animal species will replace us.
It's much more likely that visitors to earth in a few million years will encounter beavers, squirrels, raccoons and magpies locked in a complex planetary cold war, with shifting alliances.
Fair. Don't forget the dolphins and cephalopods duking it out in the ocean. (Also I think bears are one of the stronger contenders on land, ahead of squirrels for sure).
Realistically, though, one of them has to be first, if only by a couple thousand years, and then they'll attain global control sufficient to keep the others from gaining significant power. Much like we did. (though actually the ocean is still a viable second sphere of influence).
> Fair. Don't forget the dolphins and cephalopods duking it out in the ocean.
This kind of thing led to some species thinking it was a great idea to walk on land, and a few billion years later, you have humans all over again. Hopefully they'll avoid this stupid mistake in the next go-around.
It’s probably innate, like how spiders know how to build webs. Evolution has optimized the process to the point where the algorithm is baked into the hardware.
The dams are pretty impressive but more impressive, I think, is seeing the perfectly straight canals they dig. I saw one at least 100 feet long on an oxbow of a river when I was paddling as a teenager. It was dead straight.
That depends on whether you're talking about nature beavers or nurture beavers. Nature beavers just build 'm and as such seem to have been able to massively outcompete nurture beavers, the fate of which has yet to be determined.
I assume it's a mix of an instinct to "scratch an itch" with their teeth gnawing wood (like a cat with a scratching post), and then reacting to the sound of running water and learning ways to stop it.
Most farmers kill beavers because they don't want to share the land. Beavers nearly went extinct in North America because of that, and it caused things like the great dust bowl to happen, because beavers irrigate soil systemically. They're little defenders of the commons. People still haven't learned their lesson, so just having one farmer or two who are willing to lend resources to an enlightened cause is a big step.
Most farmers kill beavers because they don't want to share the land. Beavers nearly went extinct in North America because of that,
Untrue. Just the gazillion of billions of acres of untamed land, too unusable or too far north (but still fine for beaverkind) makes this an impossible statement. There are literally areas of Canada, where beavers live, larger than some European countries, where no person has stepped in years.
Beyond that, there are endless tracts of mountains, in the US and Canada certainly, where there are no farms, just endless millions upon billions of acres of mountain, tree, river, untouched.
The only thing which could have caused the potential extinction of beaver, would be trapping for pelts, something not really done in serious quantity for 150 years.
And in the time prior to that, there were not enough people, certainly in Canada, to trap beaver to extinction.
Only local regions had their beaver populations killed off by farmer. Any claim you hear/read otherwise is malarky.
> Most farmers kill beavers because they don't want to share the land. Beavers nearly went extinct in North America because of that
Wasn’t it the commercial fur trade that was responsible for the devastation of the North American beaver population and not farmers settling the lands impacted by the dust bowl. I think the commercial fur trade entered decline nearly 50 years before widespread settlement/farming of those lands and had already pushed the beaver populations to remote areas in the wilderness.
I'm not sure how beavers would return naturally to London when they are extinct in the UK? Perhaps this is just me as a Brit seeing this as obvious.
This is part of a nationwide reintroduction plan though. And the London environment quite possibly has improved enough to introduce them, especially the wetlands to the south and east. The Thames is no longer a dead river at any point on its length, and there are habitat improvements everywhere; seals and dolphins are seen etc.
Whether they will ever be reintroduced near such valuable real estate is another matter entirely.
Downstream flooding is the big issue everywhere in the UK.
The further upstream you go on any given river, the more country/park/national park land there is.
Downstream towards valley basins you have many more towns and cities that are settlements of hundreds or in some cases more than a thousand years old, and have therefore extended from their initial (flood-aware) long term settlements, well onto their floodplains (especially from the early 1970s).
In the last seventy years everything has changed so dramatically that catastrophic flooding is now routine; encouraging beavers onto farmland and helping farmers defray the costs of their habitat is almost certainly a better strategy than any kind of planned works.
In case you are not aware, "beaver" is an odd coloquialism for the vagina, so the SEO challenge is to find an urban nature scene and not what the internet has the most of.
The Cistercians often chose places between landscape features, e.g. where a river comes out of a wooded forest. Since they often started communities in the bottoms of valleys they had to drain excess water and reclaim land for agriculture. They often accepted donations of land deemed unusable because of drainage problems, since they were expert in the construction of waterworks. With the new bodies of water they developed fishing activity. For this reason they were dubbed the "human beavers of Europe."