> The thriving beaver population of Tierra del Fuego (another place Thie has studied) is descended from beavers brought to Argentina from Canada’s Saskatchewan River.
They've been trying for years to get rid of them, since they are destroying the native forests. [0][1][2][3]
Beavers do absolutely everything humans could possibly want. Drought resistance, flood prevention, water filtration, wildfire refuge and firebreaks, riparian habitat for fish and songbirds. I'm always happy to see a story about them coming back.
Have you ever lived next to a place with beavers? I don't recommended it.
First, if you have a pond beavers will come over at night and dig holes the width of a basketball about a meter from the edge of the pond into the water (vertically down, then sideways). They camouflage these holes or they simply overgrow, good luck to an unsuspecting human that had his/her leg fall into such a deep hole.
Then, they dig such holes and passages into earthworks designed as flood defenses. Huge amount of money goes into fixing such earthworks.
Finally, if you(or anyone nearby) happen to have drainage channels or small rivers, these will be blocked by beavers to the point of flooding the surrounding area. Various compensation schemes exist, but not everyone has documentation to use them.
Fibally,a braver can be a very dangerous animal when startled/provoked/cornered. Around here every person is told in their youth, "don't approach beavers" or if they bite you in the leg (usually groin area) you'll bled out in 20s.
No, beavers are not nice... If course they shouldn't be eradicated, but they should be managed properly, not enjoy 100% protection as they do here in Poland, for example.
That's nothing. I once lived next to a colony of industrious critters, who practically carpeted over a millennia old habitat to lay down refined rocks that they periodically dug up and relaid just so that they could haul more refined rocks through the habitat without stopping, usually on these large wheeled containers that sporadically would kill everything in sight. Was a nightmare to live there.
Note that this does not really reduces the validity of the comment you react to. Beavers could probably say pretty much the same thing. "Did you try living next to humans? I do not recommend it. Not only do they break the dams we took so long to build, but they love to put stupid wire around the best trees. And some of them even have rifles and will shoot without warning. At least I could bite one in the groin!"
I know how annoying it can be to have wild animals destroy your property (there are for instance beavers, racoons, wild boars and woodpeckers where I live, and I own a wooden house), but in principle we do not have more right to shaping our habitat the way we like than beavers and wildlife in general. More than "managing beavers", what we need is to find ways to co-exist peacefully. One part might be "managing" them, but another part is definitely to accept that their needs in part conflict with ours, and that we need to give them some space and accept some of the damage as a price to pay to share land with them.
> Fibally,a braver can be a very dangerous animal when startled/provoked/cornered. Around here every person is told in their youth, "don't approach beavers" or if they bite you in the leg (usually groin area) you'll bled out in 20s.
Don't approach wild animals if you don't want them to bite you? This is just common sense.
Overall, the issues you discuss pale in comparison to the benefits they provide. Humans have built developments where naturally there would be beavers if they hadn't been wiped out. The lesson isn't that we need to fight nature harder to preserve our victories against it. The lesson is that we need to be more thoughtful so our developments aren't incompatible with beneficial natural processes.
Land that they were already using turning into lakes.
Beavers can make lakes that are absolutely enormous because they aim their dams so carefully, and can construct them to very impressive heights. I've had a 20 meter wide two meter high beaver dam on my Canadian property. It seemed incredible that such tiny animals can make such enormous constructs.
Flooding. We had beavers at the south edge of our property for years. They would dam the large creek there, and flood an 80 acre field pretty effectively.
We managed to convince the little bastards to move down the creek to a section where the flooding would hit some woods and CRP ground that we could never really farm due to terrain.
But that took like 10 years. Shooting them and destroying the dam would've taken a day.
> Beavers do absolutely everything humans could possibly want. Drought resistance, flood prevention, water filtration, wildfire refuge and firebreaks, riparian habitat for fish and songbirds.
I don't know where you live, but, around here, humans want growth and profit. Due to this, they are not able to build a dam, but complain about floods. /s
Beaver dams are really impressive. A couple summers ago I was hiking down from San Luis Peak in Colorado and came across what I thought was a set of terraced land built by people (I assumed old mining infrastructure). Turns out it was actually dozens of beaver dams.
I think the pictures in the article are actually pretty good. The beaver dam is so big that it’s impossible to get one that’s simultaneously close enough to see details (like Rob Mark’s selfie) and far enough to get the full view (like the photos by helicopter).
There are more photos in an Atlas Obscura article [1] discussed here a few years back [2].
The best part is how it's marked as a tourist attraction on Google Maps with 14 5 star reviews, despite only one person ever visiting it.
The article kind of glosses over how inaccessible this place is. Rob Mark got extraordinarily lucky that the water level got high enough to boat to the area because unlike the jungle, the water is way too cold to survive for very long even during the summer and there's no solid ground for miles at a time like in a tropical jungle. It's all bog and peatland as far as the eye can see.
Unless the government clears helicopters to rappel people down, he might be the last person to visit the area given climate change.
What a load of bunk, don't make excuses because of weakness to leave the house and live life.
Every year things get easier and people are better off.
> The boatman replied that he had no GPS
This is now called a "phone", in the amazing future of 9 years later.
Now you can buy a cheap sat phone and call the boatman (Also having the standard iPhone Emergency SOS via satellite). Next year many cellphones should start having satellite voice access.
The article also uses football fields as a measurement. But that leaves me wondering if they mean American Football or Canadian Football. (I expect the latter.)
This very much reminds me of timber born. It's been a while since I played the game but it was all about building dams, facing droughts and water conservation.
Is there any estimate how old it is? I imagine it would take possibly hundreds of years to establish but perhaps the steadystate maintenance has reached into thousands of years.
Ah yes good catch. The article must have been published a decade ago as I didn't think too critically of the line when I cited: "It has at least existed at this spot for over 25 years as it can be observed on the 1990 Landsat 7 Pseudo Color Imagery provided by NASA World Wind"
The beaver dam and the story of reaching it is so cool especially as I'm loving playing Timberborn right now, but I wish journalists wouldn't insist on throwing deceptive claims about climate change into every possible story. It is exactly this kind of casual but pervasive manipulation that makes people tune out all scientific assertions about environmental damage:
> It’s hard to remember, but in the early ‘70s some scientists thought the Earth might be cooling. Thie’s research had showed evidence of the opposite; the paper about permafrost melting that he published in 1974 is now considered one of the pioneering studies of climate change.
This is all lies. In the paper [1] Thie states clearly that the world was cooling, and that the changes in the permafrost were connected to entirely natural cycles. That's all stuff that has been fully memory-holed today in a world where scientists insist that temperatures are fully stable if not for fossil fuel burning. Here are some quotes from it:
> "Especially with the trend of cooling of the past 20 years, new permafrost might develop again in some area"
> "If the present trend of cooling of the climate does not continue, the slow northerly movement will continue"
The Yale article makes it sound like the paper disagreed with global cooling, but it states it as a pure matter of fact.
> "it was estimated that extensive melting started between 100 and 200 years ago, and has progressed most rapidly over about 120 years ago till the present"
1850 is considered by climatologists to be pre-industrial as there were hardly any CO2 emissions at this time.
There is also an extensive discussion of at the time well known long term temperature cycles:
> "The first alternative seems somewhat unlikely, as during the warm period of about 1000 years which followed it, permafrost would have collapsed and most collapse scars would most probably have become overgrown. The second alternative is therefore a distinct possibility: most of the permafrost in the study area is probably not much older than about 600 years and not younger than about 150 years. The southern limit of collapse scars as mapped by Zoltai (Zoltai and Tarnocai 1969) must have had permafrost dating from between 600 B.P. and 120 B.P. Possibly this limit was reached during the “Little Ice Age” which started around 550 B.P. and ended about 1850 (Lamb 1963) - most likely between about 400 B.P. and 200 B.P"
The Little Ice Age! A term that you hear only from supposed climate change deniers these days. But also:
> "It is inadequate to suggest that a single meteorological parameter, such as temperature, controls permafrost development and collapse."
Fossil fuels, CO2 and man-made climate change isn't discussed in this paper at all. Yet Yale tells us it was a consensus busting pioneer that showed the world that global warming was real.
It is all deeply unfortunate. The frequency with which we are told lies about the history of climatology is one of the strongest arguments for being skeptical about all claims by academics, not only about their present day findings, but also about the past.
They've been trying for years to get rid of them, since they are destroying the native forests. [0][1][2][3]
[0] https://es.mongabay.com/2023/06/castor-invasor-plaga-que-arr...
[1] https://www.infobae.com/tendencias/2023/06/06/castores-invas...
[2] https://www.telam.com.ar/notas/202011/536780-castores-tierra...
[3] https://www.scidev.net/america-latina/news/con-trampas-errad...