WILD BEAVERS

[Trig]

Great clips.
I went to knapdale earlier this year to try and see the beavers there. Never saw a beaver, but interesting to see the lodge and a little bit off the side of the loch that they have flooded.
Was surprised at the size of trees they felled, always assumed it was just skinny little birches etc. Definitely wouldnt fancy a bite off one!

 

[SCOMAN]

Caught a few seconds of footage of the local beavers. There was another off camera munching away.

More photos of some new beaver sign in a completely different area on my blog.

 

[TeeDee]

Videos taken on the River Otter in Devon.

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[Robson Valley]

Very nice Scoman. Love to see the trail camera stills and videos.
Does it get cold enough for the ponds to freeze over for a time in winter?

Twig barks are the common food resources, the trees are for lodge and dam building.
Total environmental destruction/modification.

 

[Sundowner]

Love those clips, keep'em coming?

 

[C_Claycomb]

Teedee,
Last post doesn't show anything but your text saying there are more clips. When I open your post in Moderator Edit the content you posted in isn't even hyper links, just says it is metacafe and a number.

Chris

 

[SCOMAN]

Very nice Scoman. Love to see the trail camera stills and videos.
Does it get cold enough for the ponds to freeze over for a time in winter?

Twig barks are the common food resources, the trees are for lodge and dam building.
Total environmental destruction/modification.

The pond does freeze but I couldn't see a lodge when I looked last year. I'm going out tomorrow morning with my drone to have another look. I'm a bit wary in case the resident swan, ducks or geese interact with my drone. My drone would not survive. I have noticed that there have been some small trees approx 10cm diameter where they've been eaten and taken away. The larger trees have been felled and stripped of bark. It's becoming quite a topic over here with a large group trying to get protection for the Beavers. Lots of the farmers want to shoot them.

 

[Robson Valley]

The vast majority of beaver lodges here are free-standing islands out in the pond.
>> keep looking, you'll find it.
Yet from time to time, we see a lodge built into a river bank. Very risky business given our erratic
snow melt conditions. A river like the Fraser can come up 3-4 feet before dark on a sunny day.

Besides the simple business of total forest destruction and death by flooding, your
farmers will be upset when the surrounding arable land is flooded.
Machinery does not float well at all.

Beaver here will use a built up road way as the dam and block the culvert to create the pond in notime.
Then the road bed gets saturated and that disintegrates.

Trap some each year for fur as a crop like any other = sustained yield.
Your own Hudson's Bay Company just about perfected that in Canada and to this very day, as well.
The bustards can and will take over an entire valley and create the worst wasteland of swamps.

 

[SCOMAN]

Aye the farmers here are keen to take 'affirmative action' against them. Your description of the culvert was described to me last night by my brother in law about a friends farm. I caught some more footage last night I'll need to process and post it up. I had my drone up over the pond this morning but nothing obvious, it's predicted to get cold here in the next month so once everything hardens up in the surround I'll get boots on the ground for a look.

I'm fascinated by the furry little foresters I have to admit but acknowledge the challenge of having them in a heavily farmed area of Scotland. We don't have vast tracts of land where we can life in harmony. I have felt the fur, it's beautiful and felt so warm in my hand. Are they good eating?

 

[Janne]

I bought a beaver fur hat in Canada last year, and it is fantastic. Beautifully warm. Looks nice too!

There is a tv programme on Netflix ( Youtube too?) called Wild Chef, two Canuck chefs cooking, and when they cooked Beaver they liked it.
It is one of the meats I would love to try.

 

[Tengu]

Uncontrolled they certainly are a menace. I have read accounts of beaver controlled areas in S America...big trouble.

But I think we might have a few years before they get that bad.

Still, they are a handy resource.

 

[Janne]

Like all wild animals they are self controlling, but then we must not expect to have full control of the landscape.

They create lots of wet lands. Slows down the off run, good for fish, other water lovers.
Moose love to eat the water veg.
Plenty of mozzies, which birds like.

Nature has a way to create a balance.
Humans have a way to destroy this.

 

[Robson Valley]

The populations here are far from self regulating.
We can tour entire valleys which have been devastated by pond building.
The dams do burst to flood entire city housing subdivisions.

Thank heavens for fur trappers to take off a sustained yield.
I can't believe the complacency to watch a perfectly good, flowing water ecosystem
turned into a fetid swamp by these vermin.
If people did that, they would be stuffed into the shade for some time to come.

 

[Janne]

Of course they are self regulating, they have been in that habitat and done that for tens of millions of years before the Pre Clovis people migrated into the Americas.
The Beaver became a pest when humans decided to build on flood plains, or?

The fetid swamp is a fantastic biome for hundreds of animal species.

Southern Sweden was a haven for Anopheles mosquitoes in the past. Malaria was one of the big killers of humans there. After the rivers got regulated, swamps and wetlands drained, it disappeared. The last ;home grown Malaria case in Sweden was in the early 1930's.

Yes, Malaria got eradicated. Together with several frog species, several birds species, most famously the Stork. Several other animal species vanished too, or are pushed into a tiny habitat. Snakes? Rare. Birds of prey? Rare. Swallows? Rare.
The whole food chain got disrupted. Destroyed.


(It is not often I disagree with you Brian. But your Poem is so beautiful I am OK with that! )

 

[Robson Valley]

Exactly: Get rid of the beaver swamps as a means of malaria control.
Part of Ontario is further south than the northern border of California.
Malaria was a serious scourge in the Ottawa river valley in the 1700's.

There's nothing glamorous about their landscape destruction.
The site will look like Hello for a century, even with no beaver.
Many fish species become locally extinct because there's no moving water for reproduction.

 

[Sundowner]

I don't know zilch about beavers and environmental destruction, but, having read and watched a documentary about some of the impact of their damming, I think we we could do with a few more of the critters here in the UK as they would certainly do less damage than the EA (Environment Agency) who keep straightening rivers and totally ignore upland streams!!

 

[Janne]

My favourite stupidity is when they build houses on flood plains.
Beaver or no beaver, not the best idea!

 

[Robson Valley]

You think you like your forested landscape along streams?
Here today and gone tomorrow if the little buggers are nocturnal.

When our highways are threatened, blow the dam in late January if the local trap line holder
didn't clean them out. No chance of fixing anything.

Muskrats don't build lodges until late summer.
Those little guys regularly get flooded out in the spring.
We lose an entire year-class of kits (babies).
The adults can escape but the babies all drown.

 

[Janne]

They do not have those problems in the areas in Sweden where the Beavers are.
Maybe a slightly different behavior between the two subspecies? I have never heard that have problems like that in Mother Russia either.

 

[Robson Valley]

A lot of Highway #16 across the interior of BC is a wide track, carved into mountainsides.
Drainage of the uphill side is done with typical culverts under the highway.
The beaver try to plug the culverts and presto! the road is the dam and almost instant pond!

That pond water saturates the constructed road bed.
Then that piece of highway, maybe 100M of it, goes whooping off down the mountainside.
I can point out maybe 6-8 "fresh" pieces of highway, rebuilt in just the last decade on my regular drive to the city.

So be careful what you wish for.