Racoons and beavers, OH MY! #club100

First it was Rob the Racoon moving into my sister's house and refusing to leave. Now it is a lost beaver eyeing up my trees. These things come in threes so I shudder to think what is next.

I mean--just look at this guy? He looks all wet, but there is no body of water around. The closest he can get is an alkaline pond about a mile away. He is likely hungry and I have a few nice green shoots on my poor trees.

Please, Mr Beaver, do not eat my trees. They are so hard to grow and a single beaver cuts down about 200 trees per year.
I can't cope with the thought of a beaver moving in.

Once they come of age, male beavers are often driven off by their mothers. She can't have lazy lay-about bachelors stinking up the place. She has more babies to rear.

That is likely the reason why Mr Beaver was sniffing around my trees. Recently ejected from the comforts of home, Mr Beaver is migrating overland in search of a proper situation for himself. If he is lucky, he will find a pleasant girl beaver looking for a husband. Even better, he may luck out and find himself a young widow already in possession of a lodge.

A beaver dam and lodge is a pretty nice set up, but please, not in my back yard!

The increased migration of beavers is a recognized problem related to climate change. As the Arctic warms, beavers are moving north. This is a new phenomenon as the Arctic climate has been previously inhospitable as a beaver habitat. Trees are pretty sparse and hungry beavers like to eat.

Due to climate change, the Arctic tree line is gradually moving further north.

This diagram is from a research paper entitled: "Implications of Climate Change for Northern Canada: Freshwater, Marine, and Terrestrial Ecosystems" by Furgal, Wrona, and Reist.

There are never any trees north of the tree line, and therefore, never any beavers north of the tree line. As the tree line moves north, so do the beavers.

Why is this a problem?

The first issue is that the beavers are accelerating warming in the arctic. This is because their ponds are thawing the permafrost. That leads to serious problems for many other animals that depend on the permafrost. For example, as the permanently frozen riverbanks thaw, they collapse and fill the rivers and streams with thick mud. Now the salmon can't get to their spawning grounds. If they can't spawn, there is no new generation of fish. Without new fish, there is no food for the Indigenous peoples who populate the area to eat.

Related to the decimation of fish stocks, is the work of the busy beavers themselves. Beavers are engineers and they change the landscape in consequential ways. While a beaver pond is beautiful, the cold truth is that they stole that water from another animal's habitat. Just one beaver lodge has the ability to make important spawning grounds disappear as streams and river tributaries are dammed.

The other problem with the beaver ponds is the contamination of ground water with the Giardia parasite. Yikes, that sounds bad, and it is. Beavers carry Giardia and frequently contaminate water. This is mostly manageable in cities and other developed regions, but it becomes much harder to treat water in remote regions.

I had Giardia as a teen. Trust me when I suggest you do NOT want to get it.

So what is to be done? It is not exactly the beaver's fault this is happening. It is not even the first time that it has happened. Apparently, there have been fossils found in the north of giant 2 meter long beavers that lived in the Arctic before the last ice age.

Ultimately, we need to learn how to live better with the beavers, but if we refuse to live with them, there is always the terrible option of harvesting them.

Beaver top hats probably will not come back into vogue, but beaver fur mittens like these keep hands warm during the winter months. Beavers are also a food source--if you dare.

Would you eat beaver meat?
What can we do to stay friends with the beavers?

This is a 100% POWERUP! post for #club100