Natures wonders: beavers are weird valuable rodents (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, December 07, 2022, 00:02 (716 days ago) @ David Turell

They have changed the landscape of America:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-beavers-shaped-america-from-capitalism-t...

"These tireless engineers build woody dams that form ponds, which in turn filter out water pollution, sequester carbon, furnish wildlife habitat and avert drought. The Los Angeles Times recently called the beaver a “superhero,” and the New York Times has deemed them “furry weapons of climate resilience.” Wetlands with beavers are so good at fighting megafires that some researchers have urged the U.S. Forest Service to switch mammal mascots from Smokey Bear to Smokey Beaver.

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"In truth, western science is merely relearning what North America’s Indigenous peoples have known for millennia. The Blackfeet so venerated beavers’ water-creating abilities that they forbade killing them, and some Algonquian tribes consider the Great Beaver responsible for molding the Connecticut River Valley. Beavers fascinate people not only because of their landscaping skills but because of their anatomical oddities—their scaly tails, burnt-orange teeth, webbed hind feet and dexterous hands. “[T]here is an element of the sacred in the beaver, if only in its deep weirdness …” writes Leila Philip in her engaging new book, Beaverland. “Is it any surprise that beavers have fired the human imagination in every continent that they are found?”***

"Of course, the most valuable beaver-based commodities were their pelts. Beaverland’s subtitle, How One Weird Rodent Made America, is no exaggeration. The industrial fur trade drove westward colonization, hurled tribes into centuries of resource war, and lined the pockets of John Jacob Astor, the country’s first multimillionaire, who parlayed pelts into a New York real estate empire. By destroying beaver ponds and wetlands, the fur trade also distorted ecosystems. “Before 1600, all of the continent from west to east, save a few desert sections, had stretched out as one great Beaverland,” Philip writes—a lush, wet world whose waterways were “diffuse, messy, spread out, flexible at times, and most of all incredibly dynamic ... hydrating everything like a great wand of moving water.” (my bold)

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"She also visits a forest in New Hampshire where contemporary scientists are studying the hydrology of rebuilt beaver meadows: “giant underground sponges that can soak up and hold large stores of water,” thus saving watersheds from drought.

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"Philip spends a lot of time with contemporary fur trappers. Pelts rarely fetch more than $20 these days, but some trappers still make a half-decent living killing beavers at the behest of agencies and landowners, who fret that expanding ponds will damage roads and private property. Philip admirably negotiates these complex interactions: she’s respectful of trappers’ hard-won knowledge of beaver behavior yet rightly skeptical about whether lethal control is the best way to solve conflicts (although she could have more forcefully refuted the self-serving claim that we need trappers to prevent beaver populations from running amok). Rather than resorting to traps, it’s better to use “pond levelers”—pipe systems that partially drain impoundments, thereby balancing human needs with rodents’ instincts."

Comment: we had a group of them set up a campout while downing pretty trees around a community pound. An expert was hired to remove them. No ecological problem and no ecosystem damage as it was originally a stock pond to catch rainwater and actually dammed a side allowedtributary that appeared only in heavy rain. The beavers are now allowed to do their work elsewhere. FRom s book eviee.