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Comment by adameasterling | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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

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. :)

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...

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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