US film of parachuting beavers found after 65 years | Hacker News Reader

US film of parachuting beavers found after 65 years

theguardian.com

135 pointsrickdale50 comments

I had a hard time understanding how and why you'd drop beavers from a plane when a camera man could clearly get to the same spot, to, you know, make the film.

Then I thought that the camera man could have parachuted in, too. But, then I thought that either meant he then hiked out, in which case, why not hike in with beavers, and save the plane time? Or, perhaps, the plane could land on a lake, but in which case, why not land with beavers?

I may just be pre-caffeine, but I'm not sure I understand the point here.

It's possible that the on-land shot was staged and taken pre-flight, or maybe it was a test run to show what the landing would look like.

Alternately, hiking in with 20 angry beavers is probably a PITA.

I am wondering the same thing, but perhaps they did test drops to see if the idea worked and the camera man just filmed those?

Test or staged shot is likely. That was common, and probably still is. Here is an interesting collection from the Met.

http://aperture.org/blog/grand-illusions-staged-photography-...

Or you film the landed beaver back where you started an a "scripted" event. Bascially drop one in the original area where a camera is set up, let it film the decent and the beaver getting out. Then you film dropping beavers from the plane as they head down. The viewer can extrapolate that to the rest of the boxes in the back country.

Most, if not all, of these films were informational but did not have the full events filmed for technical reasons. Today of course you could just strap a phone to the beaver box and have it broadcast live on YouTube or something, which would have been pretty futuristic for the beavers.

It didn't even have to be "scripted", it could simply be a test drop to check that the boxes open as expected and the beaver can survive the ordeal. Sounds like a pretty sensible thing to do.

A stunned or half dead beaver woudln't have made the cut I think

Also, you don't want to show all the children what happens if the drop does not go according to plan.

I seem to remember some old films that didn't mind showing animals dropping which went so far as to stage their deaths ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsFVzywPNEc

Heck, just parachuting out of a plane is a post-Singularity event relative to a beaver!

Along the other explanations maybe the camera man was happy to do the say 2-day hike out. But wasn't happy hiking in for 2 days carrying multiple beavers. I'm guessing they won't take kindly to being in a box for 2 days and would require feeding etc enroute. Plus it's a lot of extra weight

So all in all hiking in with beavers could be a bit of a nightmare.

An experienced packer would take them in on a mule train, with the cameraman on horseback.

It's one thing to hike with a camera on your back, even if back then they did weigh 50lb or so. It's a whole different thing to hike with a pack of 20 beavers. And I am sure they made multiple loads of 20 beavers, to kick start the population. I am not sure why helicopters weren't used though. Perhaps helicopters were still too expensive back then.

How did the boxes open? Strictly on impact? How often was this done? Were the parachutes and boxes later cleaned up and reused? Did this curb the original issue, beaver over population? I would imagine that overpopulation means hundreds, if not, thousands of extra beavers. How much did this operation cost? Who thought of this? It seems like something a child would dream up as a solution.

lots of questions from that clip. I wonder if anyone looked at it and thought "they're going to be confused in the future when they watch this. lol" ?

If I understand it correctly, the problem isn't really overpopulation, it was a mix of overpopulation and underpopulation. IIRC, beavers were trapped for their fur, which lead to their population being wiped out in some areas. At the same time, you had beavers in urban or suburban areas, where their dams can cause flooding and other problems.

So what they did was trap the beavers that lived close enough to humans to cause problems, and airdropped them into places where they would benefit the environment (at least from our perspective).

I assume back then - when fur coats were a thing - the idea of increasing the beaver population was considered an economic win.

They're also ferociously devour trees; urban areas are less likely to be able to support that, e.g. see the penultimate paragraph of this section https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver#Urban_beavers_in_United... in which a pair was reported to cut down $5 million in trees.

They also help preserve ecosystems even as they are destructive to human endeavors:

http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/environment-and-nature/2014...

Well, it's all an "in the right place" sort of thing. Put them just outside a human area with too low tree density and pretty much everyone loves beavers, aside from as I recall trout fishermen who better running water.

However, when the article says "Beaver dams bestow benefits to the environment that we humans can’t easily copy. They turn land into a sponge for water.", that presupposes there being some water for them to actually capture and manage!

Kind of a bricks without straw problem; hopefully the 2015 El Niño will give them and everyone else a lot of water to work with.

This being modern, high tech California, surely there's an opening for a "Disrupt Drought!" modern version of this Idaho effort using the latest in drones et. al. ^_^

Beavers do not devour trees at random, the mostly kill dead or dying trees which is very important for the forest.

Killer trees in areas that lost their beaver population are actually quite a big risk to humans.

Beavers do not devour trees at random, the mostly kill dead or dying trees which is very important for the forest.

Bullshit. Not only is that contradicted by my very direct and personal observation of their targets, it obviously contradicts their use of bark as food.

Agreed. Also from personal observation, they prefer young, tender saplings, though they do seem to do some sort of tradeoff calculus based on size of tree/distance to water (i.e., they'll take a bigger tree if it's right by the water, so they don't have to drag it as far).

Given their choice, they appear to prefer two or three inch saplings, but I've seen them take six inchers if they happen to be right on the shore.

The OP is right, though, that beavers do serve an important function in the ecological succession between from stream->pond->bog->meadow->forest.

It is clear that they are testing the minimum height you can drop someone from a parachute in the same way that the excuse of scientific knowledge of the moon was used for recording Soviet Russia signals through moon reflection.

They don't show you the cuts under the minimum height, but in the video you see a shoot of the chute almost not having enough time to open.

Dropping people at this height means time in the air is minimum and radar does not detect the plane, but is incredibly dangerous.

> the excuse of scientific knowledge of the moon was used for recording Soviet Russia signals through moon reflection.

In case anyone else is curious about that bit: http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB479/

My Dad is a physician and was in/worked for the Air Force in the 60's and he worked in a lab where they were dropping monkeys strapped into seats on vertical rails. It was to test ejection seats and human/animal limits. Pretty gruesome honestly.

> It is clear that they are testing the minimum height you can drop someone from a parachute in the same way

Are you joking? You can do that much easier with a simple weight. You don't need a beaver.

Sounds to me like they're relocating beavers.

It's the beaver equivalent of alien abduction. "They took me up there! I swear!"

Certainly does give them someting to chew on for the rest of their lives!

If this was supposed to be a solution to a beaver overpopulation problem, I'm really interested in how the government planned on scaling this to an effective beaver volume -- since the video only shows two or three beavers being dropped from a fairly small GA taildragger.

It'd also be interesting to know if this could have applications as a discreet bioagent delivery vector (either as a weapon, or as something less destructive).

Ad fontes!

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3796322?seq=1#page_scan_tab_cont...

http://www.martinezbeavers.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/...

It was probably more useful as a method to get some of the surplus beavers into remote areas that needed them. Following the Guardian link to the original source (http://boisestatepublicradio.org/post/remember-parachuting-b...):

Fish and Game is transplanting beavers now in the Owyhee desert, where years of watershed use has denuded the vegetation. The beavers can go in to help restore the land. [Statewide fur bearer manager for Fish and Game Steve] Nadeau says beavers make good ponds that can hold water all year, and that’s important to the landscape.

You may find this interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb

An earlier article in the Boise paper gives context: 76 beavers were dropped.

http://boisestatepublicradio.org/post/parachuting-beavers-id...

Is anyone else disappointed to have not seen beavers with little backpacks, helmets and goggles running out the back of a C-130?

> US film of parachuting beavers found after 65 years (it's OK, they survived)

Those are some old beavers.

Ah, the ol' HN beaver-aroo.

YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APLz2bTprMA

Relevant section starts from ~7:00 and includes the magical words "..the beaver DropBox."

BRB; preparing YC application for the underserved market of North American rodentia. (The market is huge! And think of all the pivot opportunities....)

Log storage for everyone!

Here is that section:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APLz2bTprMA&feature=youtu.be...

I'm not sure I understand how the box is supposed to magically open once it lands..

Suspended from parachute connected to cord holding the box shut. Once parachute no longer pulling on cord (on ground), box easily can be pushed open.

Perhaps by the cameraman that filmed them leaving the box?

Beavers in wooden boxes, what could possibly go wrong!

In fact, dozens of them on an airplane, this should be turned into a prequel of the Airport film franchise: "Airport '50: Beavers on a Plane"

On a more serious note, the ropes keeping the boxes closed seem to be tensioned by the chutes, so the boxes were probably expected to open on impact. Note how the rope also passes through the inside of the box, so they may have hoped for a fallback via the mechanism of a terrified, trapped beaver gnawing on stuff for stress relief. I suspect that most of people involved knew more about the intricacies of beaver containment than about those of airdrops, so I'm more retrospectively concerned about the beavers' safe landing than about their subsequent escape from the return capsule.

meanwhile in Canada, back to the drawing board for the US invasion plans

Something similar is done to control fish populations- often they will "air stock" a waterbody by flying over it with a plane and dropping a bunch of fish from hundreds of feet in the air. The fish (mostly) survive unharmed.

Imagine how those beavers must have showed off afterwards: "Dude, I'm a paratrooper."

>Now it has been digitized and released by the Idaho Historical Society and the department of fish and game on YouTube.

But we will not link you to it. Because...this is a news website...

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