[HN Gopher] Beavers back in London after 400-year absence
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Beavers back in London after 400-year absence
Author : zeristor
Score : 86 points
Date : 2022-03-17 08:25 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.co.uk)
| Zenst wrote:
| "There are plans for a publicly viewable "beaver cam" to be set
| up, once the pair have settled into their enclosure."
|
| 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.
| w0mbat wrote:
| This is a misleading headline which implies that improvements in
| the environment of London has allowed beavers to return
| naturally.
|
| These beavers are on a farm, and were deliberately brought there.
| They might as well be in a zoo.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| I'm not sure how beavers would return _naturally_ to London
| when they are extinct in the UK? Perhaps this is just me as a
| Brit seeing this as obvious.
|
| 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.
| jart wrote:
| Most farmers kill beavers because they don't want to share the
| land. Beavers nearly went extinct in North America because of
| that, and it caused things like the great dust bowl to happen,
| because beavers irrigate soil systemically. They're little
| defenders of the commons. People still haven't learned their
| lesson, so just having one farmer or two who are willing to
| lend resources to an enlightened cause is a big step.
| throwawaycities wrote:
| > Most farmers kill beavers because they don't want to share
| the land. Beavers nearly went extinct in North America
| because of that
|
| 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.
| bbarnett wrote:
| _Most farmers kill beavers because they don 't want to share
| the land. Beavers nearly went extinct in North America
| because of that,_
|
| 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.
| 5040 wrote:
| To celebrate, here's a piece of beaver-related trivia:
|
| _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."_
| elliottkember wrote:
| > The term Cistercian derives from Cistercium,[2] the Latin
| name for the locale of Citeaux, near Dijon in eastern France.
|
| I really wanted the name to be derived from the word "cistern",
| or vice versa. But no!
| zabzonk wrote:
| I am having my flat in North London done up at the moment -
| beavers are beavering away at almost all the work. My brother and
| nephew help occasionaly.
| beorno wrote:
| Good on Justin!
| progre wrote:
| They will help with reducing floods? Downstream maybe. Where the
| beavers live? No.
| pfdietz wrote:
| And not downstream, when the beaver dam fails.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| Downstream flooding is the big issue _everywhere_ in the UK.
|
| 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.
| bliteben wrote:
| I recently read Eager
| (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40526225-eager) which is an
| amazing book about the tide turning on Beavers in North America.
| zwieback wrote:
| As an Oregonian I approve. Make sure to keep em away from your
| drainage and flood control canals, though.
| davidw wrote:
| I was going to say something along the lines of "I bet the
| ducks never left".
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| How do beavers learn to build dams?
| Iwan-Zotow wrote:
| They watched TikTok
| dugmartin wrote:
| The dams are pretty impressive but more impressive, I think, is
| seeing the perfectly straight canals they dig. I saw one at
| least 100 feet long on an oxbow of a river when I was paddling
| as a teenager. It was dead straight.
| Teever wrote:
| A great part of it is instinct:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DggHeuhpFvg
|
| 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.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| I'm still betting on racoons to replace us, but beavers are
| an interesting entrant in the contest.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| I think it's a mistake to assume that any one animal
| species will replace us.
|
| 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.
| asdff wrote:
| Millions of years from now? Probably nothing but crabs.
| jjgreen wrote:
| London beavers won't, they'll be rifling through the bins and
| demanding tit-bits from little old ladies.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| Same way woodchucks learn to chuck wood.
| jl6 wrote:
| It's probably innate, like how spiders know how to build webs.
| Evolution has optimized the process to the point where the
| algorithm is baked into the hardware.
| Ourgon wrote:
| That depends on whether you're talking about nature beavers or
| nurture beavers. Nature beavers just build 'm and as such seem
| to have been able to massively outcompete nurture beavers, the
| fate of which has yet to be determined.
| coffeefirst wrote:
| Last time they were in London they had an elaborate program of
| apprenticeships, but these days it's mostly YouTube.
| unfocussed_mike wrote:
| The Worshipful Company of Beavers.
| t78623878 wrote:
| Failing that they can always try Stack Overflow
| andrewflnr wrote:
| It's actually damoverflow.stackexchange.com.
| unwind wrote:
| *Felling.
|
| There, fixed it for you.
| dhosek wrote:
| A few years back, my wife and I were walking in the woods along
| the Des Plaines River (just outside Chicago) and we saw a beaver
| in the water. I'm not sure when they returned to the river, but
| as a kid in the area, I never saw any there. I wasn't sure if it
| was actually a beaver initially until it grew tired of us walking
| along the bank of the river following us, slapped the water with
| its tail and dove below the surface.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Here in the US midwest beavers are shot and their dams dynamited
| wherever they are found.
|
| 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.
| lukas099 wrote:
| Fortunately, the North American beaver has a conservation
| status of 'least concern'
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_beaver)
|
| They are one of the most important animals due to their roles
| as 'ecosystem engineers'.
| ionwake wrote:
| Not sure if this is interesting to anyone but, I grew up in
| Spain, in a relatively wild area near the coast, and then spent
| my remaining couple decades in England in different places.
|
| 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.
| rmah wrote:
| There are 10 to 15 million beavers in N.America. In
| comparison, there are 400 beavers in the UK.
|
| 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.
| arprocter wrote:
| I had a similar experience moving from the UK to US - 'indoor
| cats' were an alien concept to me, but a friend explained
| they couldn't let theirs outside because 'they'd be eaten by
| coyotes'
|
| 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
| grosswait wrote:
| Thank you for sharing your perspective. It never occurred to
| me that seeing things like deer, foxes, bear, eagles etc
| would be a similar experience in rural Europe. I've never
| seen such things when I've been there, but I figured it was
| just my bad luck or bad timing. Makes me appreciate more my
| surroundings. Thanks!
| nkrisc wrote:
| Growing up in the middle of Chicago, it wasn't terribly
| uncommon to be walking down a major four lane road and see a
| coyote running down to the road to the nearby cemetery.
|
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| It's very common for white-tailed deer to wander into ones
| backyard if one lives sufficiently far out in the suburbs.
| These animals can weigh as much as 135 kg (male) or 90 kg
| (female). I've had as many as five on them on my property at
| the same time (upstate NY).
|
| 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.
| beezle wrote:
| There are deer on Staten Island, not really the suburbs.
| Unfortunately the only real predators left to take down
| deer are hunters and cars. People (often hunters) even
| freak out if a dog chases one.
| lukas099 wrote:
| In addition to taking out their predators, we have also
| fragmented ecosystems.
|
| 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.
| csomar wrote:
| Relevant: https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen
| kingkawn wrote:
| It's because Europe has hunted to extinction nearly every
| large mammal on the continent that america seems shocking by
| comparison.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Well, I grew up in southern Illinois, and we had beaver in my
| literal backyard. Which, granted, was a wetland which flooded
| several months of the year, but that was mostly owing to the
| Army Corps of Engineers doing their job, not the beaver (they
| flooded where we were to prevent flooding elsewhere).
|
| So, unless this beaver eradication program is a 21st century
| novelty, I can say that it is not generally true of the US
| midwest.
| hh3k0 wrote:
| For better or worse, climate change will put an end to the age
| of mankind.
|
| So, who knows? The age of the beaver may just see a reboot.
| gwright wrote:
| > For better or worse, climate change will put an end to the
| age of mankind
|
| 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.
| RajT88 wrote:
| In northern IL beavers are doing OK, as near as I can tell.
|
| 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).
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Maybe I'm missing something, but the US is so incredibly vast,
| I can't understand why you don't have place for a least a few
| beavers.
| nickff wrote:
| According to Wikipedia, there are quite a few beavers in
| North America, but not as many as there used to be:
|
| > _" 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
| njarboe wrote:
| Beaver populations are increasing dramatically on wilderness
| and other public lands in the western US. They definitely
| change the landscape and kill a lot of trees. Good for vistas
| and stream health, but I don't know much about it. Sometimes I
| get a bit sad when I see large cottonwood trees taken down by
| beavers, but the meadows they create when their ponds silt up
| are quite beautiful.
| genericone wrote:
| And the standing water that beavers create probably do assist
| in groundwater infiltration in a not insignificant way for
| the local flora. Otherwise that water will just runoff down
| the stream to some other spot where it can spread out.
|
| 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.
| OtomotO wrote:
| > For better or worse, the age of the beaver is definitely
| over. At least in the US.
|
| 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?
| rmah wrote:
| Age of the beaver is over? There are _millions_ of beavers in
| the wild in the US.
| [deleted]
| verisimi wrote:
| I love wildlife; I spend lots of time in nature.
|
| 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.
| lukas099 wrote:
| > 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.
| kajecounterhack wrote:
| In the Pacific Northwest, beavers increase resilience to
| wildfire and drought. They do so by creating natural fire
| breaks and by increasing groundwater storage. They also do this
| in a way that also creates fish habitat and deeper pools that
| coldwater fish like trout and salmon can take advantage of to
| survive lower water years.
|
| 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
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| What? I'm from the US midwest and have never heard of that.
| Where?
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Not sure what the question is. Do you have beaver where you
| live? Were they flooding fields and parks?
| reaperducer wrote:
| Most of what you wrote is about 30 years out of date.
|
| _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.
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