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It's incredible seeing the transition from degraded, single-thread streams into expansive beaver-engineered wetlands. And it only took a handful of #beavers to do this. Imagine what the continent and the rivers looked like prior to the Fur Trade, back when beavers were abundant!

534,313 просмотров • 3 лет назад •via X (Twitter)

Комментарии: 11

Фото профиля Wet Tribe
Wet Tribe3 лет назад

Susie Creek, Nevada - Before and after beavers.

Фото профиля Dr. Emily Fairfax
Dr. Emily Fairfax3 лет назад

The reestablishment of beavers on Susie and Maggie Creeks is one of their best restoration success stories! I actually studied that area and found the beavs buffered the ecosystem against drought year after year. There was plenty of water year round.

Фото профиля Starre Julia Vartan
Starre Julia Vartan3 лет назад

Something I think about a LOT is that in all these examples (& having spent a ton of time outside as a kid-basically lived in the woods when not at school): Nature loves complexity, depth, nuance, difference. Humans do not. That is what "taming" nature is. How do we change that?

Фото профиля Dr. Emily Fairfax
Dr. Emily Fairfax3 лет назад

A great question. A lot of people don't feel like messy, mucky, hard-to-navigate landscapes are good. I take kids out on nature walks to beaver ponds & make sure to talk about the mud as soft, the pond weeds as beautiful, etc. to try to reshape that narrative early on for them.

Фото профиля Danny VLX (DUVEL/CORNET)
Danny VLX (DUVEL/CORNET)3 лет назад

CAME HERE TO SEE BEAVERS. BIG DISAPPOINTMENT

Фото профиля Dr. Emily Fairfax
Dr. Emily Fairfax3 лет назад

Please enjoy this video from one of my field sites of an adult beaver wrangling a adventurous little baby beaver.

Фото профиля Starre Julia Vartan
Starre Julia Vartan3 лет назад

I guess what I'm saying is: How do we get humans—as a group—to be less afraid of complexity, nuance, etc that is evident in thriving natural systems? We even have probs w/it within humanity itself (gender and neurodiversity, etc.) Narrow/hard thinking is so destructive for all

Фото профиля Dr. Emily Fairfax
Dr. Emily Fairfax3 лет назад

Yeah, it's a big uphill battle on that front. I think about how I used to be terrified of murky water & pond weeds as a kid, then as I got older & spent more time in them I started to appreciate them more than I feared them. Positive experiences over time made a difference for me

Фото профиля HalfCaperFarm 🐐🐏🦙🐇🐓🦆🐎🏳️‍🌈
HalfCaperFarm 🐐🐏🦙🐇🐓🦆🐎🏳️‍🌈3 лет назад

I have beavers on my farm. I absolutely love that they're there.

Фото профиля barry goldman
barry goldman3 лет назад

I dont understand all this beaver stuff. How far back in time do they go? Does their behavior go? In a sense, like us, they are 'un-natural' (if that concept means anything at all). Did ecosystems suck before them? Also, were there ever dino beavers? Cld we detect their dams?

Фото профиля Dr. Emily Fairfax
Dr. Emily Fairfax3 лет назад

Beavs have been engineering landscapes for at least 7 million years, maybe longer. There are paleo beavers (some were huge!), but not all of the paleo beavs were dam builders. Most of the landscapes we see today were historically influenced by beavers, even if they’re gone today.

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Absolutely incredible trail camera capture of a coyote attacking a beaver in Connecticut. You might be wondering: “You study wolves in Minnesota, why are you posting this video from Connecticut?” The reason is because this footage illustrates why beavers are important prey for wolves in many forested areas but not coyotes…even though coyotes inhabit many areas with quite a few beavers. Why is that? The coyote tries for several minutes to kill this beaver but the beaver ultimately escapes. Unfortunately, the video was not captured on video but the beaver with his bloodied tail is on the trail only an hour after being attacked. Ultimately, this beaver is almost as large as the coyote and the coyote struggles to really move the beaver at will because of the beaver's size and strength. The coyote bites the beaver's tail repeatedly but virtually never lands a blow to the beaver's muscular body. Coyotes, unlike wolves, simply do not have the strength and size to routinely kill beavers, especially large adult beavers. Wolves, on the other hand, not only have the strength to yank beavers around but they also have the bite strength to grab the beavers body and deliver crushing blows. Killing beavers is harder than it seems because beavers have no obvious neck or easy place for a predator to latch one. They are just one large furry football-shaped hunk of muscle, which complicate the logistics of killing them with one’s mouth, especially for smaller predators like coyotes. Of course, coyotes and other small predators do occasionally kill beavers, especially smaller beavers, but it is not a common occurrence, and there is little evidence that beavers constitute a large portion of coyote diets. We want to extend our sincere thanks to the Traprock Ridge Land Conservancy in Connecticut for reaching out to us and sharing this incredible footage they captured. And big thanks to them for letting us share the footage with everyone here. Capturing an encounter like this on video is one in a million!

Voyageurs Wolf Project

122,172 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад

Wolves transporting the remains of beavers they have killed. Beavers are critical prey for wolves in the Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem for a 7-8 month period of time, roughly April to October/November…i.e., when ice on lakes and ponds is largely absent. Beavers constitute, on average, ~30-40% of all biomass wolves obtain from predation during this period. However, we have studied numerous wolves for which beavers are the primary prey during the spring to fall. For instance, beavers can constitute up to 82% of all biomass killed by some wolves during this 7-8 month stretch. In other words, some wolves rely almost exclusively on beavers during spring to fall and then deer almost exclusively during winter. Given how often wolves are killing beavers, we naturally get footage of wolves carrying remains of beavers they have killed, often taking the carcasses back to their pups. The reason wolves rely heavily on beavers is almost certainly due to the abundance of beavers in the area. Beaver densities have remained roughly around 1 beaver lodge per square kilometer (and there are ~5ish beavers per lodge) for about 40 years now. That is a very high beaver density, and likely is similar to, if not higher than, beaver densities in other southern boreal forest ecosystems in places like Ontario, Manitoba, and Quebec. We suspect beavers are, in part, why the Greater Voyageurs Ecosystems has sustained very high wolf densities for many years, and we are actively trying to understand how beavers drive aspects of wolf population dynamics. Prior to our work, wolf-beaver interactions had received very little attention or research. In 2018, we wrote a peer-reviewed publication summarizing all that was known on wolf-beaver interactions up to that point. In that paper, we dubbed beavers “the forgotten prey of an iconic predator." Of course, biologists knew wolves in a variety of ecosystems hunted beavers to an extent but that was about it. Fortunately, we have made substantial headway in understanding this predator-prey dynamic but there is much we still don't understand...which means there is still much to be discovered!

Voyageurs Wolf Project

10,909 просмотров • 1 год назад

This is an *amazingly rare* and fascinating video of a wolf bounding into beaver pond and catching a beaver swimming underwater—something that has never been documented before! Further, to our knowledge, this is only the 3rd video ever of a wolf catching a beaver. And this might be the most informative of the 3 videos that have been recorded because the hunter recording the video was able to see what the beaver was doing long before the wolves showed up. This video was captured by Jon Galler near Hill City, Minnesota when he was deer hunting this past fall. Had a great chat with Jon about his observation and he provided some great information about the scene prior to kill. Before the wolf and its pack mates started crossing the beaver dam, Jon had watched this beaver that the wolf killed for about 25 minutes. As the wolves were crossing the dam, the beaver was on a rock in a shallow part of the pond grooming itself and appeared unaware of the wolves Similarly, the lead wolf did not seem to notice the beaver initially and went to scent-mark some grass on the beaver dam. After scent-marking, the wolf scraped the ground and this seemed to cause the beaver to retreat into the water off of the rock. The wolf heard the beaver slip into the water and immediately changed its behavior. You can see this clearly in the video. The wolf then bounded into the pond and caught the beaver, who was entirely below the water. The beaver can be heard crying/vocalizing as the wolf pulled it out of the water and Jon said he could hear bones cracking as well, likely from the bite force of the wolf. The wolf brought the beaver onshore but then appeared to see or scent Jon and dropped the beaver and ran. However, two trailing pups checked out the beaver within a short period and carried it into the woods. It is hard to tell but it looked like the beaver still had a bit of life in it when the pups grabbed it. This observation is amazingly cool for many reasons but probably the most amazing is that it shows wolves will not only go into the water to catch beavers but that can also catch beavers swimming underwater—something that had never been documented before! It had been largely assumed that beavers were not vulnerable to predation in bodies of water like ponds because they are adept swimmers and could easily evade predators. Obviously, that is not always the case. And certainly, no one has speculated that wolves would catch a beaver swimming underwater. Now, the reason the wolf was likely successful in this hunt is that the beaver it killed was a kit beaver (i.e., a young of the year beaver that was like 6-7 months old). In other words, this was a very small beaver that didn’t put up much of a fight when caught. We suspect the interaction would have been dramatically different if the wolf had attacked a 50-60 lb adult beaver. Maybe someday someone will get footage of something like that. Anyway, huge thanks to Jon for sharing this video and his observations with us. Absolutely amazing stuff!

Voyageurs Wolf Project

112,485 просмотров • 2 лет назад

Culture is genetic because behavior is genetic. This beaver never saw a dam in its life. No beavers or anything else ever taught it to build a dam. It wants to build a dam because it is a beaver. Many beavers together build a big dam. That is beaver culture. Humans are not different. Nothing is different. This is what life is. This is how life works. Your body is your mind. A caterpillar wants to build a chrysalis. A bee wants to build a hive. A lion wants to build a pride. You are not special. You are not above your nature. you are INSIDE of it. The thoughts that we think are genetic thoughts. The crimes we commit are genetic crimes. The art we create is genetic art. Just like this beaver, you can give the animal different sticks and it will build a different dam, but it will always build a dam. And you can give humans different "education," but the human will always use it to do what its genes tell it to do. This is the first big answer that you need. This is the biggest piece of the puzzle. This is how to understand people 90% of the way. You just... notice what they do, and get out of the way, and watch them do it. And if they need sticks, you give them sticks. And if you don't like what they do, you have to get away from them. You cannot train dam-building into them or out of them any more than you can with a beaver. A beaver wants to build a dam because it is a beaver. Whatever you see people build, that's what they wanted to build from the sticks they got in the river they were in. Stop pretending you can change it.

hoe_math = PsychoMath

1,189,824 просмотров • 11 месяцев назад

The absolute trail camera jackpot—we just captured the second known video ever, as far we are aware, of a wolf attacking and killing a beaver. And this was a pretty sizable beaver too! How amazing is that!? Earlier this year, we posted rare footage we captured of a wolf in our area almost catching a beaver on a dam. That was really neat to see but in that video, the wolf never made contact with the beaver and the beaver narrowly escaped. This beaver wasn’t so lucky. In this video from Sept 17, the beaver left the water at 1:09 A.M. to go forage on a 49 m/160 ft long trail—a pretty long trail for a beaver. Just four minutes later, the beaver was attacked by Wolf V094, the breeding male of the Half-Moon Pack. A brief chaotic struggle ensued and then all went quiet as the wolf and beaver moved out of frame. About 19 hr later, we captured a video of a different wolf walking in front of the camera with a beaver head in its mouth. A few days later, we hiked out and found the bloody remains of this kill not far from our camera. The beaver put up a valiant fight and at a few points was only a few meters from the safety of water. If the beaver could have just freed itself for a few moments, it might have lived. But it couldn’t…there appears to be a thin margin for beavers between life and death when on land! The only other video observation we know of was recorded in Quebec in Fall 2015. Given how rare that was, we worked with the person who recorded the video and wrote a scientific paper on the observation trying to glean as much insight as we could from it. Bit of backstory on the video: The footage was captured by Dani Freund, a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, and two field technicians—Sage Patchett and Olivia Jensen—that are assisting Dani with her work. Dani’s graduate work is looking at how wolf predation and other factors influence beavers stress levels. In other words, do beavers in ponds with higher wolf activity levels have higher stress levels than beavers in ponds that have lower wolf activity levels? Or are beaver stress levels driven largely by other factors such as food availability or competition from neighboring beavers? The way Dani is examining beaver stress is by collecting beaver hair samples and measuring stress levels in the hair. And her hair collection method entails using a strand of barbed wire that the beavers crawl over to get on land (you can see this in the video). When the beavers crawl over the wire, tufts of hair get caught on the wire and then those hair samples can be collected and analyzed. This is a common method used to get hair samples —biologists often refer to barbed wire and other similar contraptions devised to collect hair from wildlife as “hair snares”. All this to say, this camera, which was kindly lent to us from the Offal Wildlife Watching Project at the University of Minnesota, was not set here in the hopes of capturing a wolf killing a beaver but rather to monitor beavers crawling over the hair snare. But sometimes it is better to be lucky than good! And we certainly think we had a stroke of luck. We have had a lot of cameras out over the past 9 years in the area and we have never captured anything like this!

Voyageurs Wolf Project

71,932 просмотров • 2 лет назад

Some incredible footage of two wolves killing a beaver this April in Estonia. Now, you might be wondering: why on earth are we sharing a video captured more than 4,000 miles away on a different continent? The reason is to illustrate that beavers are important prey for wolves in a variety of ecosystems across the Northern Hemisphere. When we share our research on wolf-beaver interactions, folks sometimes think wolves hunting beavers is a unique quirk of the wolves in our area, not something that happens in many other areas. But the reality is, across large expanses of North America and Europe, beavers are important prey. For instance, studies have found that beavers constituted a substantial portion of the diets of wolves in many areas including Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Northwest Territories, Alberta, Manitoba, British Columbia, Quebec, Ontario, and Alaska. Obviously, the extent to which wolves rely on hunting and killing beavers likely depends on many factors such as the size of beaver populations and other prey populations. However, the lack of research on the topic leaves the question unanswered. Indeed, the relationship between wolves and beavers has received very little attention because it is a difficult relationship to study, and because most wolf-prey studies focus on how wolves hunt, kill, and impact socially-important ungulate species like moose, deer, elk, and caribou. For more than a decade, a large focus of our research has been to understand the complex and fascinating relationship between wolves and beavers. Such work is without a doubt the most intensive research ever undertaken on this predator-prey relationship. Although our work has provided many insights, we have many questions to answer still, some that will take many more years to answer. The answers to these questions are not just relevant to our small little corner of Minnesota, but to a large swath of the northern hemisphere where wolves hunt and kill beavers routinely. To continue this research, we need donor support because donors are one of our biggest sources of funding. If you value this kind of research and want it to continue, please make a donation here: Lastly, huge thanks to Janek Joab who captured this incredible footage and allowed us to share it on our social media. Absolutely incredible stuff!

Voyageurs Wolf Project

96,002 просмотров • 1 месяц назад

This fascinating video shows a wolf stalking and then killing a beaver in April—an exceptionally rare thing to catch on camera. For perspective, wolves actively hunting and then killing beavers has only been captured on camera a handful times ever. Now, this isn’t because this behavior is rare—wolves kill beavers in many ecosystems frequently. Rather, the rarity is due to the challenges of observing this behavior in the densely-vegetated/forested areas where beavers live. Observing these events requires being in the right spot at precisely the right time…and that is a very tall order and almost never happens. But sometimes you get lucky. In this observation, we see the breeding female of the Wiyapka Lake Pack, who is clearly pregnant show up to this beaver dam at am. She stand there for 20 seconds before moving forward onto the dam. She then stands on the dam intently staring down into a small secondary beaver pond below the main dam. After a few moments, she crouches down, preparing to launch an ambush. This is the most fascinating part of the sequence because it demonstrates wolves use a sit-and-stalk hunting strategy to kill beavers, which is a very different strategy then they use to kill hoofed-prey like deer and moose. While this might not seem like a huge revelation, virtually no one has been able to witness or watch this behavior. So to be able to see it play out is really fascinating. Two minutes later, she launches her attack and we see her flying down the beaver dam and then hear splashing in the water. We presume this is when she attacked the beaver in the small secondary pond. Unfortunately, we cannot see all the details because it is out of view. At a.m., two minutes after she launches the ambush, her mate comes traveling down the dam and joins her. We then see the two wolves below the dam, and the female trots back over to the either dead or mortally-injured beaver on the water’s edge and bites it while dragging it on land. Six minutes later, at a.m. the female climbs back up the dam with the whole beaver in her mouth and walks right past the camera. A beaver is swimming in the main pond slapping its tail. The male leaves the area about 4 minutes later. And that was the end of the observation. Suffice it to say, we were pretty jazzed to capture this on camera. BUT, we got lucky twice this spring and have another super cool observation—similar to this one— we will be sharing soon! Huge thanks to the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund as well as >8,700 private donors for supporting our project, which allows us to capture, document, and share fascinating observations like this.

Voyageurs Wolf Project

16,579 просмотров • 1 год назад