Beavers back in London after 400-year absence
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
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."
I really wanted the name to be derived from the word “cistern”, or vice versa. But no!
That there is an internet search to take extreme care with! Maybe don't search 'beaver cam' on your work pc.
Or maybe that is a useful defence when you are in a disciplinary meeting, 'I was looking for the Enfield beaver reintroduction project'
[1] In both 'web' and 'image' search modes.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/17/beavers-...
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.
>"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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver#Distribution_and_status
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.
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.
Maybe I am wrong - just wanted to share, thanks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_fur_trade
Beaver pelts have been referred to as ‘soft gold’.
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.
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.
Or the time I saw the fattest coyote I'd ever seen casually walk right past me on the sidewalk.
Or the coyote in Quizno's (sub sandwich chain) incident: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2007-04-04-070404...
A coyote walks into the shop and cools off in a drink cooler.
How can no-one have taken a picture, or, if they did, how can the Trib not have included it?
In town, though, they're brazen and walk right by people and sometimes will snatch their pets from their backyards as a snack.
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.
https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/bear-sightings-around-alberta-ca...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/moose-calgary-northwe...
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
Apparently they have wild raccoons in Germany
Farmers haven’t been happy though, as the wolves kill their sheep.
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
There are 100's of thousands of bears roaming the US, 10's of thousands of mountain lions, millions of alligators, thousands of wolves, etc. etc.
We have a colony of bats in our backyard at the moment. A very noisy colony of bats that leave at dusk and return at 4 in the morning, squabbling.
It was fun for the first month. Now we're hoping it will get too cold for them and they will move back to the coast for a while.
https://www.austintexas.org/things-to-do/outdoors/bat-watchi...
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.
So, who knows? The age of the beaver may just see a reboot.
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.
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.
So, unless this beaver eradication program is a 21st century novelty, I can say that it is not generally true of the US midwest.
I see them in office complex ponds, in addition to forest preserves and in rivers and streams.
Yes, ponds in the middle of office parks. This office park, in fact:
42.046093034875774, -88.0546786192792
I have been seeing them there for years (I believe there's at least 2 distinct animals that live in those ponds).
I wouldn't be so sure about that.
After all, the age of apes may be over sooner or later and who knows, maybe beavers will take over?
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.
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.
I was unable to find anything close to this after some searching.
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.
Good video from PBS's Terra series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lT5W32xRN4
> 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.
They are one of the most important animals due to their roles as 'ecosystem engineers'.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/aug/08/dam-it-h...
We're also animal lovers in the UK, with, I think, a bit of a sense of guilt for the animals we've made extinct on our island.
We had bears, beavers, wolves and so on - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinct_animals_of_the...
Speaking of bears, there is even a surviving bear pit about 10 miles outside London on the Thames: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosherville_Gardens
"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.
[0] https://www.worldcat.org/title/eager-the-surprising-secret-l...
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/67662/sound-running-wate...
There, fixed it for you.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Source: https://scroll.in/article/1010703/how-do-pigeons-navigate-co...
These beavers are on a farm, and were deliberately brought there. They might as well be in a zoo.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That is going to be one heck of an SEO challange I feel, though I look forward to seeing how people react to watching two beavers and one pond.
https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/jbtfo/sometimes_men_...