London's history-making beavers are adapting to life in the capital | Hacker News Reader

London's history-making beavers are adapting to life in the capital

bigissue.com

40 pointsMarcusE1W23 comments

The site where they've put the beavers is a small parcel of land (less than 0.04 sq mi) next to an out-of-town retail park and industrial estate. I'm reasonably familiar with the site, and have walked the canal more a handful of times and driven the A4127 so many times I've lost count. The air quality here is poor, about 7.5 times the WHO annual air quality guideline values for PM2.5.

It's a nice idea, but I can't help but feel like the beavers probably had a better life in Scotland where they were taken from. Online sources suggest that a more normal habitat size would be an order of magnitude larger [1]

The problem with Greater London is how dense it all is; if we had better public transport connections and fewer London-centric employers (or indeed, more of an appreciation for remote working) it'd be possible for there to be more and larger green spaces which would help with the whole city being a massive urban heat island.

There are some glimmers of hope, the A4127 has become a nightmare to drive on recently due to HS2 works - a necessary evil - which will hopefully encourage more offices to be established between London and Birmingham. It's a shame the wider HS2 scheme was castrated in yet another example of short-sighted thinking.

[1] https://www.gloucestershirewildlifetrust.co.uk/beaver-faqs

the Big Issue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Issue was created to give genuinely homeless people self respect … a magazine they can sell rather than just beg for cash

sadly this great idea has been infiltrated in the UK by trafficked individuals under the command of modern slavers … there seems to be no action from the authorities or the press to stop this and bring the gang bosses to justice

Do you have a source for this story? First I've heard of it and interested to know more

It's a form of respectable begging, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that it would eventually be exploited by entire families of professional beggars who come thousands of miles to use the magazine as a prop alongside their wheelchairs and dogs.

If you want to see this in action, walk around the financial districts of London at lunchtime.

A professional beggar, as you describe it, has little to do with modern slavery, as mentioned by the grandparent comment.

This is the rote response to anything designed to help homeless people. That it’s being exploited and is therefore unworthy of support. However we seem fine with businesses and individuals exploiting the tax code and banking system without making claims we should simply abandon commerce.

Any system with value will attract a degree of exploitation. It’s proof of its worth, not evidence of it’s irrelevance.

So they put 5 beavers there? Do they not suffer from incest or will they add more later?

Reading about animals adapting to human environments, always reminds me of this image:

https://xkcd.com/1338/

Which is truly depressing. Wild animals have no choice: it's either adapt to whatever little space remains for them, or go extinct.

Remember @ one time much of western Europe was covered in forests & other rough terrain. And in coastal areas: river deltas, wetlands & tidal zones. Animals like beavers must have been everywhere.

Then ~1600, humans cut most of those forests to make farmland, build houses, ships, bridges etc & heat their homes in winter. And hunted many animals to extinction (probably earlier, too).

Sadly there's no easy way to restore balance.

I've never seen that one. Made me think about the claim that all ants weigh more than all humans. Looks like it may or may not be the case exactly, but ants are at least a significant missing part of the picture.

edit: forgot link : https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2201550119

Ants aren’t mammals though

Yeah, which definitely helps a lot, that we’re excluding all the wild fish, birds, insects, etc.

The wild mammals are going to be human adapted ones like squirrels, mice, rats, etc, plus forest dwellers like beavers, badgers and the like. The real tragedy is probably the large mammals like buffalo, zebra, elephants, giraffes, giant cats, etc, and the hunting of those to near-extinction is deeply unfortunate but also predates industrialization if I understand correctly.

> predates industrialization if I understand correctly.

Yes, 'megafauna overkill' [0]

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01672...

Actually in the case of beavers they were mostly deliberately hunted. Beavers get along fairly well in close contact with people, they're happy to live in the peripheral wetlands around the places we like to settle. But their natural behavior is to dam those wetlands, which tends to inconveniently flood the areas we're trying to use. So over time we killed them all, deliberately[1].

So, as long as you're willing to modern hydrology management around their areas to prevent damage, beaver restoration programs like this actually work very well. Beaver chew in suburban parks in the US west is a routine thing to see now.

[1] Also it turned out they made inconveniently fashionable hats, which didn't help.

Why not introduce furry mammals that don't need a large expanse of nature, but can adapt to and live directly in the urban environment. Something that could live in all sorts of corners of the city, even underground, and consume unwanted food from humans ...

I'm joking a bit, but I'm serious. Why are beavers better than rats?

They are larger and build damns and many other differences, so they fill different niches. The idea is to restore the pre-industrial ecosystem as best we can. Maybe their natural land management will improve the quality of the wetlands, or maybe it will cause flooding of nearby human occupied land and cause them to be quietly removed. Maybe they will become prey to wolves and lynx, or maybe they will need to be culled because those predators probably won't be released in London.

So they really are in a pen? I cannot imagine londoners putting up with beaver activity outide of fenced/walled areas. This sounds more like a zoo, very much the opposite of rewilding. What are they going to do when a new generation of beavers seeks a new stream to dam?

This happens in other big cities. In Berlin boars and foxes are part of city life now.

We have beavers in Stockholm too. I occasionslly see them at night when running i central Stockholm. We also have foxes, hares and deer, but those you can see all the time the beavers are a more rare sight since they live in the water and are nocturnal.

In Chicago we have coyotes and deer in the city. They live in and use parks, cemeteries, the river, and quiet residential streets at night to get around.

I once had a big, well-fed coyote trot right past me on the sidewalk of a major road in broad daylight, before darting across four lanes of traffic to a cemetery.

I see foxes all the time in Berlin, often right when I exit the subway. And I live in the middle of the city. Tons of other animals in the big parks too, for example water turtles in Tiergarten

That’s really neat; I’ve seen foxes in the wild a few times when camping (in Ontario) and they seem extremely skittish and uninterested in being around humans.

And lions too. /s

Can't resist plugging the greatest Leslie Nielsen line ever to the twisted minds who thought the headline was a reference to the warmer days coming to London.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvWfbIe4X_4

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