Guest Essay by Kip Hansen
Oh those busy, busy beavers — aren’t they great? There’s the little guy in the corner of the photo, he and his pals built that dam that slowed the stream and produced a large shallow beaver pond. The American beaver is a keystone species on the North American continent in that modifies the environment in such a way that the overall ecosystem builds upon the change. The ponds, wetlands, and meadows formed by beaver dams increases bio-diversity and improves overall environmental quality.
This lovely active creature has been accused — in the NY Times Science /Climate section by Kendra “Gloom is My Beat” Pierre-Louis [seriously, that’s her real Twitter handle] — in an article with the anti-Darwinian title of “Beavers Emerge as Agents of Arctic Destruction”.
This is a marvelous piece of CAGW propaganda based on the AGU Poster presented by Ben Jones, Ken Tape and others at the recent 2017 AGU meeting in New Orleans. The poster made a splash in the press, including an article in the blog Earther with the amusing title of “Hordes of Beavers Are Invading Alaska’s Tundra”.
It is true that the beaver are making a comeback in the great northern reaches of North America. It is not, however news, and has been well discussed in the literature since as early as 2009.
Thomas Jung and others describe the situation:
“Jarema et al. (2009) demonstrated that beaver respond strongly to climate warming, both by expanding its range and by increasing its abundance at the core of its range. in terms of range expansion, beavers are similar to moose (Tape et al. 2016b) and Snowshoe hare (Tape et al. 2016a) in that they would be expected to benefit from shrubification of tundra environments be – cause they can forage extensively on shrubs (Aleksiuk 1970; Busher 1996), and they also use shrubs as building materials for their lodges and dams (Jung and Staniforth 2010). Given that shrubification of the Beaufort Coastal Plain is underway (Myers-Smith et al. 2011b; Naito and Cairns 2015; Tape et al. 2016a) and has likely increased habitat suitability for beavers, it is plausible that they could colonize waterbodies there, once barriers to colonization (i.e., mountain passes or the ocean) were successfully crossed.”
Those clever beavers somehow have managed to find their way to the spot marked on Canada’s Beaufort Plain — without any suitable habitat through which to travel.
The American beaver has a distinct connection to the history of European settlement of North America (United States and Canada). It was mostly because of a hat, this hat:
That’s the beaver top hat — all the craze in all of Europe in the 1600-1700s.
Between 1600 and 1800, Europe was in the thrall of the beaver hat, every man simply had to have a beaver hat. Women too wore hats made of beaver felt.
A single high quality hat required 2 to 3 beaver pelts according to a description of the process online here.
Hudson Bay Company records show that that between 1700 and 1770 alone, 21 million beaver hats were exported from England alone (not including domestic consumption of beaver hats nor beaver pelts also known to be exported to other European countries) — using up to 60 MILLION beaver pelts. This figure does not include the number of beaver pelts shipped to Europe by the French voyagers trading companies nor the America Fur Company founded by John Jacob Astor.
The end of the beaver hat craze did not come for many more years but eventually, by 1840, the silk top hat had replaced the beaver hat in Europe.
By that time, in North America, the beaver had been entirely trapped out of most of its range, dropping from populations as high as 60 million to an estimate as low as six million. Luckily, beavers live remote areas and rough terrain and by the mid-1800s, their value having dropped, they were saved from extinction — but only after they had been extirpated from most areas of North America, including the far north.
Since that time, the beaver has been slowly fighting its way back into the American landscape, often to the consternation of their humans neighbors. This is true where I live now, at the foot of the Catskill Mountains on the west side of the Central Hudson River Valley of New York, beavers dam up tiny streams on expensive land, flooding the flat places where owners wish to build half-million dollar homes.
Not everyone is angry with the little busy beavers though, the Lands Council considers the beaver “as a silver-bullet solution to our natural resource and environmental health concerns.” NPR’s PBS’s NATURE program has a wonderful episode on beavers titled “Leave it to Beavers” in which are shown to be “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.”
While the Tape and Jones AGU poster was mostly negative about the Arctic beavers and the effects they would have, Tape was more even handed when speaking to The Earther, which reports:
“Research shown at last week’s American Geophysical Union meeting revealed that everyone’s favorite rodent has been using sticks to build dams on the Alaska’s treeless tundra. The colonization is reshaping the geography of the north and could allow other animals to follow beavers into the brave new warming world.”
Why the beavers are moving into the tundra is an open question. Climate change may play a role, but it’s highly speculative at this point. Ken Tape, a University of Alaska, Fairbanks researcher working on the project, said it’s difficult to know if trappers hunted beavers off the tundra prior to the start of the aerial photography.
“Beavers may be changing the Arctic, but I’d bet there’d be as many (or more) winners as losers,” Ben Goldfarb, a journalist working on a book about beavers slated to come out next year, told Earther. “As other species move north with climate change, are arctic beavers actually helping them adapt?” Goldfarb suggested moose might be one species to benefit. Beaver ponds could allow more willows, a favorite food of moose, to prosper in the harsh landscape and give them the ability to branch out into new areas.”
Bottom Line:
I’m with Ben Goldfarb. The re-introduction of beavers into the landscapes of the far north do not represent destruction — on the contrary, they represent a restoration.
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Author’s Comment Policy:
Love to read and respond to your on-topic, civil comments.
What do you think?
Beavers as pesky, habitat-destroying interlopers? or
Beavers as habitat restoration agents?
Let me hear from you below.
If you want me to respond specifically to a question or comment, address it to “Kip…” so I am sure to see it.
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About 17 years ago, I was living in a suburb of Chicago when a beaver moved in on a small stream. The resulting pond threatened to flood the yards and basements of the very expensive houses that were allowed to be built on the stream’s flood plain.
The beaver was protected so it’s dam was untouchable. Eventually the problem was solved by putting in a drain pipe to limit the beaver pond’s depth. While this didn’t protect the ornamental shrubbery it did create a new and hopefully more interesting back yard environment for the home owners.
With a little planning, patience and foresight we can live with beavers. Now if we could only convince those who are responsible for planning (EPA, Army Corps of Engineers, city planners… ) to be practical and implement reasonable solutions that benefit everyone.
Paul ==> “The beaver was protected so it’s dam was untouchable. ” Thta’s the problem — we like beavers in beaver-land but not our backyard — they should be protetced in their own place, but not in our backyards.
“expensive land,… where owners wish to build half-million dollar homes”
Writing from Palo Alto, CA: Hahahahahahahahahahah! 🙂
You say: “— using up to 60 MILLION beaver pelts.
By that time, in North America, the beaver had been entirely trapped out of most of its range, dropping from populations as high as 60 million …”
If they used “up to 60 million” and there were only “as high as 60 million” then beaver have gone extinct.
No one knows how many there were.
mkelly ==> The 60 million beaver pelts were harvested over a 70 year period — they are very prolific — the large initial population was able to support the massive harvests for a while but over-trapping finally drove their numbers down to historic lows…..they are on a comeback the last 100 years.
The spread of beavers may be as destructive as the rise of the oceans! Remember that guy in Belarus who was killed by one for taking its picture?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2332422/Beaver-kills-man-Belarus-Shocking-wound-caused-fisherman-bleed-death-attack.html
Andrew ==> Thanks for the reminder:
Kip, even little wild animals can cause more grief than one might suppose. Mapping geology in Yukon Territory Canada some 50yrs ago, I was climbing down a steep creek bank that put the top of a small spruce near face level and I surprised a martin in the tree. I took out my camera and raised it up to take an ‘award winner’ of a close-up. The martin ran right into my camera, a mouthfull of needle sharp teeth causing me to jerk back and I lost my footing and tumbled down the steep bank into a string of boulders. Fortunately only a few bruises and scratches and a deep respect for this pint sized terror was all I sustained. The picture? Sky and blurred spruce boughs.
Gary ==> Thanks for sharing your story — I once poked a sleeping shark with a sharp piece of coral so my wife could photograph us (underwater)….Not my brightest moment….
I know a man who’s two swimming dogs were attacked by a single, swimming beaver as he paddled with them in a canoe. He said the howling and yelping was terrible. One dog was so badly wounded it had to be put to sleep. Teeth that can cut down trees are no joke. Don’t wade into the water to get closer to a beaver. They will flee you on land but water is their territory.
One night at our remote cabin a beaver took objection to our presence, apparently he wanted to gnaw on the trees around the cabin, and he started whacking his tail on the water at 30 second intervals for about 45 minutes. For those who haven’t heard a beaver tail whack, it sounds like a bowling ball being dropped in the water from a height of about 10 feet. His persistence was ridiculous and we all got a good laugh out of it, usually they whack their tail once and disappear. We have some weird animals around there, there was once a black bear that would herd river fisherman back to their cars and make them leave. Gotta love it when there is a healthy diversity of wildlife around, it makes life fun.
Beavers aren’t just making a comeback in the northern reaches of North America, they’re doing it here in the central Appalachians since cultural marxism has almost eliminated hunting & trapping. And their “results” are destructive wherever they go. They also spread water-borne diseases & parasites.
Where I work we have “sludge lagoons” and are required to report the daily estimated flow from them into the local creek to the EPA. About 10 or so years we had difficulty doing so because some beavers kept trying to dam up our outfall structure!
Yeah, yeah, they’re great little rodents right up until they flood your local community 9 hole golf course and government says – “Sorry, they’re protected. Be happy you still have 5 holes to play.”
Yeah, I was going to say that — beavers are just big #%#$^%^& rodents. And rodents have always been friends-of-man. /sarc
benj153 ==> First time I’ve seen rabid prejudice against an entire Order of Mammals: Rodentia — the order includes five suborders, one of which are the mice and rats. The others have squirrels, beavers, dormice, gophers and springhares, mole rats, and old world porcupines.
Well Kip, which ones don’t ‘breed like rabbits’ (yes, rabbits are not rodents but) and cause plenty of problems in many circumstances? Maybe old world porcupines? Don’t know about them but new world porcupines (yes, not rodents) sure do! They’re really good at chewing tires and other rubber parts of vehicles left parked in the woods, which can be extremely inconvenient to put it mildly.
So, again, rodents are great in the right places. As many provide staple foods for all sorts of predators and do all sorts of ecologically valuable and vital functions they are in fact better than great.
The New York Times article that is the topic of this blog post starts: “Even as climate change shrinks some populations of arctic animals like polar bears…”
As Susan Crockford has been pointing out, polar bear populations are (inconveniently) not shrinking. But this, of course, is the NYT which spares no ink fact-checking others but seem unable to review their own work. Sad.
The NYT has been trying to confirm Crockford’s numbers but every person they’ve sent up there to count is never heard from again.
yum
Remember this article from three years ago in which they were fingering squirrels and beavers for global warming? Apparently the vast increase in the beaver population means they are contributing 200x more methane than they did a century ago.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/11300380/Squirrels-and-beavers-contributing-to-global-warming-more-than-previously-thought.html
My favorite is termites. They said 35 years ago that termites “produce more than twice as much carbon dioxide as all the world’s smokestacks.”
http://www.nytimes.com/1982/10/31/us/termite-gas-exceeds-smokestack-pollution.html
We need to change how we live so termites can keep producing twice as much CO2 as humans.
Love, love, loving the stories about the come-back of beavers.
Send them my way!
They’ll know what to do with our occasional flood-waters!
They’ll make better neighbors than my present (human) neighbors.
And they’ll help almost all other native species to live better.
Also, I’ve heard that beavers are good to eat.
Works for me.
Mil
It’s fortunate that polar bears do not build dams or there would not be such a major effort to ‘save’ them.
Oops
‘Mil’ should be ‘Kip’
John ==> Polar bears are lucky they don’t live nearer centers of human population — or we’d hunt them to extinction – we almost did anyway. With protection from being hunted for sport, they are rebounding nicely.
looks like beavers know its warmer up there. and they cant even read thermometers.
they’ll proliferate where the food is and where the predators are not.
they don’t care about the temp … that’s a human construct.
[and you should know that, given a little practice and persistence, a beaver can be taught to recognize a thermometer. As such a beaver can therefore read the thermometer to within its range. I have set up a field test and have approximately 857 thermometer measurement/recognitions over the last 10 years.
“Yes, the beaver has consistently indicated that the temperature is 60 degrees F (*/- 70 degrees F). Given our field measured baseline of 50 degrees, and our 857 beaver data points, it is obvious that the trend is increasing at an alarming rate”. (submitted for peer review …) ]
Mosher ==> They’re just there for free grub…you know those beavers.
looks like BEST knows its warmer up there. and they cant even read thermometers
EH ==> BEST does not do thermometers — they make “least wrong predictions” of what temperatures would be if there were thermometers there. Mosher himself is pretty sure of these facts “The LIA was cooler than today…it’s the meaning that allows us to say the day side of the planet is warmer than the nightside…The same meaning that allows us to say Pluto is cooler than earth and mercury is warmer.” I doubt he knows much about the north slope of the Brooks Range in Alaska though. For a scientific view of Alaskan temperatures, see my Baked Alaska post.
Kip, you’re correct. I was trying to use Mosher’s quote as completely as possible but after posting I realized I should have said “don’t even use thermometer readings.” They just molest that data.
Pity the beavers can’t be trained to gnaw the trees into wood pellets so we can significantly accelerate the green believers destruction of North America’s forests by burning them in the insanity of our UK and EU energy policies. I do hope president Trump has this mindless destruction brought to his attention and puts America first by banning this idiotic environmentalism. Perhaps instead of genetically retro-engineering Mammoths or Sabre-tooth’s we should go for a mega-fauna giant beaver. Now that really would be undoing climate change (or something).
[The mods must point out that the beavers DO eat the wood trees, and DO produce small, rounded output pellets of (mostly) carbon by-products that CAN be burned into fruitful and productive (and nose-some) gasses. .mod]
Why is it that those so intent and devoted to preserving “Nature” get so upset when something natural upsets their plots and plans?
Kip:
Here in Vermont we have a different view of the little four-legged, flat-tailed bulldozers that left on their own have resulted in significant property damage when their dams let go. Despite our benevolent view towards wildlife and all the best practices described in the attached pamphlet property owners, town select boards and road foreman have the final decision on how to deal with the destructive buggers. They destroyed my man-made pond In the course of one summer when I was focused on home renovations. “Lethal reduction” and beaver stew (page 12) are the favored best practice here.
http://www.vtfishandwildlife.com/common/pages/DisplayFile.aspx?itemId=4395079
Keith ==> I recommend a very pragmatic, human-centric view when confronted by wildlife/human interactions. In the wild environment, the wildlife gets the benefit of the doubt — in my town or backyard, humans get the benefit.
A recent example of why things are so ridiculous re beavers; note the language used by the ‘journalist’:
“A death sentence has been temporarily suspended for a colony of beavers living in the Gulf Islands after a group of concerned citizens threatened to take action.
Residents of South Pender Island, where the beavers have been busy building dams in Greenburn Lake, had planned a blockade to save their long-toothed friends.
Parks Canada administers the area as part of the Gulf Islands National Park Reserve. It was planning to euthanize the rodents, whose work is threatening an earthen dam.”
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/gulf-island-beavers-temporarily-saved-from-euthanization-1.4399711
So, when these beavers breach this dam, what will these fools say then?
E.H. ==> A fine example of sensible public action being thwarted by irrational pressure from eco-nut greenies.
Hint to public officials: Never announce plans to do things like necessary elimination of wildlife — just do it, note it in the official records, and go home to your wife and kids. Don’t be bullied.
Everything in moderation. Too many beavers, not good. Too few beavers, not good. Same with everything else, too many old, dry trees, you get California.
Oh noes, a beaver died…
“A wildlife protection group says the city of Port Moody didn’t do enough to ensure the safety of four beavers that needed to be removed from a storm sewer pipe in Pigeon Creek last week. One of the beavers died.”
http://www.tricitynews.com/news/beaver-s-death-raises-concerns-1.23128714
garymount ==> According to the story linked, the Mom and Pop beaver “intentionally” blocked a bypass pipe set to prevent the water from rising high enough to drown the beaver kit shoulkd it enter the trap set to remove the beavers from the storm drain pipe (which they had block with the lodge — threatening the flooding of a local housing track).
In New York state, a permit would have been issued to destroy the beaver den, and move the beavers if possible. If it turned out not to be possible, the permit would have allowed the killing of the beavers. A Nuisance Wildlife permit would have allowed a trapper to come in and and trap them for fur.
Port Moody, which is near Vancouver, BC, Canada must have way too many eco-nuts being allowed to enforce idiotic regulations.