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Comment by neom | Hacker News Reader

Beavers are extremely cool. Being Canadian, I never gave them very much thought until the youtube algorithm one day had me watching a documentary about them, that lead to me searching out another documentary to watch about them because they're so fascinating.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLyBZ1mdg2c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N15sLwRCmnc

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My parents have been having a kind of entertaining saga with the beavers that have colonized their rural property in Alberta. It's 100+ acres of bush neighbouring forested crown land, and it had been logged out and abused a bit before they moved there and built their house. So they've spent the last decade and a half restoring it.

In the low lying portion of their land there was always a gully with a tiny little trickle of water, a bit marshy, but no creek or pond. Enough you could step over it, that's it.

Fast forward 15 years and it's now a full pond with a beaver dam and at least one lodge and the water is now so high they can't get to the other half of their property. My dad builds bridges but the beavers keep raising the water level. He builds what he thinks are beaver-proof culverts to lower the water level a bit (but still enough for the beavers), and it works for a couple years and then eventually the beavers figure it out.

Unfortunately it has gotten to the point where he may have to do a bit of population control on them, as they are getting beyond destructive and he's getting older. He tried to live in harmony with them, but it's gotten tricky. Luckily their house is well up on the hill but they do want to be able to get to the other half of their property.

Props to your folks for restoring damaged land.

When I was in Canada I was talking to farmers who routinely trapped beavers and blew up their damns with dynamite. Otherwise they'd flood huge swaths of farmland.

In rural Latvia, people will shoot them and eat the meat.

I completely agree!

Beavers make habitats! They create entire ecosystems! They turn semi-arid land into lush wetlands. Their lodges become homes for muskrats and otters. The wetlands they make support bird, and frog, and fish populations.

California used to have hundreds of thousands of them. The now-semiarid Central Valley looked very different before humans started trapping them in masse, and dammed rivers in the Sierras. I wish I could go back in time and see central California circa 1700. I sometimes wonder if we could restore some of what we lost.

I never heard of this before. Thanks for sharing. Any good sources? And do you know of any efforts to reintroduce beavers into parts of California?

Yeah, beavers are one of the few animals like us who toil to adapt their habitat to themselves instead of just accepting it.

I've also heard that beavers can't stand the sound of running water, and if you put speakers playing running water in their lodge, they will go to great effort to try and find and dam it. I don't know if that's true, but it seems plausible.

According to wiki, you're pretty right.

> The sound of running water appears to stimulate dam-building, and the sound of a leak in a dam triggers them to repair it. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver#Infrastructure

The doc I posted is actually in part about how they react to the sound of running water, and they show the exact speaker experiment you mentioned. :)

Reminds me of human's proclivity to fashion pointy sticks first chance they get.

I heard if you lock a human in a room with a rock and stick, they'll make a pointy stick. I don't know if that's true, but it seems plausible.

Sorry, I had to ;)

They want to repair the captivity, should be studied further

I was looking for the (cbc?) story of a farmer in Alberta or Saskatchewan who was attracting beavers by this very method to reintroduce them to the environment, but I didn’t find it. Might have been CBC Ideas[0]. I’ll have to leave it as an exercise for the reader.

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas

Edit: I think it may have been this episode, but I can’t find audio for it: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/rethinking-the-beaver-why-bea...

I am no ecosystem expert, but in particular I recall reading that the lakes they create are essential for migratory water birds.

> I sometimes wonder if we could restore some of what we lost.

We absolutely could; we could make this entire planet a garden if we chose. We simply lack the will.

A lot of people would be willing. The people with power and contradicting interests don't.

I know you're using "garden" in a somewhat hyperbolic sense here, but I have to say that I've never particularly liked that framing; I think it implies a degree of control/domesticity over the natural environment that doesn't quite sit well with me, compared to other terms for the same process like "re-wilding", etc.

Most people would prefer parks and gardens over inaccessible wildlands.

Humans aren’t the only type of animal. Wildlands are preferred by many animals.

They are doing their best to be the only type of animal.

Most people have not ever experienced such a wildland. And majority of these are in fact accessible, just not with vehicles.

> Beavers make habitats! They create entire ecosystems! They turn semi-arid land into lush wetlands. Their lodges become homes for muskrats and otters. The wetlands they make support bird, and frog, and fish populations.

Species that have such major effects on their ecosystem are called keystone species [1]. Beavers are one of the more visible examples.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_species

Beavers are a very special type of keystone species, which is what the GP is getting at. Sea stars and wolves, for example, are keystone species in many habitats because they control herbivore populations but that impact pales in comparison to habitat building animals like reef-building corals or beavers.

On a related note, there's a book called Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter[1] that I read over the holidays that goes really into detail about the animals and their effect on the world around them. Really great read, and I'm really excited/hopeful to see them spread into more areas and do their thing, despite the occasional "mischief" they seem to get into.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39345591-eager

There's a beaver dam near my cottage in Ontario. We pull it apart on occasion as it risks the road. But they build it back up impressively fast.

I've always found them a bit of an annoyance! Algonquin Park is full of them and they make some of the backcountry routes difficult by changing water levels through it. The amount of beaver dams I have pulled my canoe over!

Thank you very much for the links. I have learned so much in 45 minutes.

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