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Beavers back in London after 400-year absence
- zabzonk 5y agoI 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.
- zwieback 5y agoAs an Oregonian I approve. Make sure to keep em away from your drainage and flood control canals, though.
- davidw 5y agoI was going to say something along the lines of "I bet the ducks never left".
- sydthrowaway 5y agoHow do beavers learn to build dams?
- coffeefirst 5y agoLast time they were in London they had an elaborate program of apprenticeships, but these days it's mostly YouTube.
- t78623878 5y agoFailing that they can always try Stack Overflow
- andrewflnr 5y agoIt's actually damoverflow.stackexchange.com.
- unwind 5y ago*Felling. There, fixed it for you.
- unfocussed_mike 5y agoThe Worshipful Company of Beavers.
- RonaldOlzheim 5y agoCoffeefirst, I´m trying to connect with you on Linkedin. Can you please contact me? Ronald.
- dugmartin 5y agoThe 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 5y agoA great part of it is instinct: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DggHeuhpFvg 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 5y agoI'm still betting on racoons to replace us, but beavers are an interesting entrant in the contest.
- unfocussed_mike 5y agoI 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.
- jl6 5y agoIt’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.
- sydthrowaway 5y agoWhy not use animal brains for self driving cars?
- psd1 5y agoWhat kind of animal would make the best driver?
- unfocussed_mike 5y agoAnts have a very effective convoy mode.
- crakenzak 5y agoHoming pigeons would be the easiest animal to use. Incredibly well shaped by evolution for navigation. Source: https://scroll.in/article/1010703/how-do-pigeons-navigate-complex-landscapes-to-find-their-way-home-our-research-tried-to-find-out https://scroll.in/article/1010703/how-do-pigeons-navigate-co...
- Ourgon 5y agoThat 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.
- Iwan-Zotow 5y agoThey watched TikTok
- jjgreen 5y agoLondon beavers won't, they'll be rifling through the bins and demanding tit-bits from little old ladies.
- rufus_foreman 5y agoSame way woodchucks learn to chuck wood.
- prawn 5y agoI assume it's a mix of an instinct to "scratch an itch" with their teeth gnawing wood (like a cat with a scratching post), and then reacting to the sound of running water and learning ways to stop it.
- 5040 5y agoTo 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 5y ago> The term Cistercian derives from Cistercium,[2] the Latin name for the locale of Cîteaux, near Dijon in eastern France. I really wanted the name to be derived from the word “cistern”, or vice versa. But no!
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- ignoramous 5y agoTracy Young advising startup founders to be like beavers (extolling its virtues) is one of the best presentations I've seen: https://youtu.be/-pKR212H5vQ https://youtu.be/-pKR212H5vQ
- beorno 5y agoGood on Justin!
- bliteben 5y agoI recently read Eager (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40526225-eager https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40526225-eager) which is an amazing book about the tide turning on Beavers in North America.
- dhosek 5y agoA 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 5y agoHere 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.
- meristohm 5y agoRelevant book: Eager: the surprising secret life of beavers and why they matter, by Ben Goldfarb (2018) [0] "The arrival of Europeans warped indigenous peoples’ relationship with beaver from subsistence and kinship to extraction, turning many tribes, as Harold Hickerson put it, into “a vast forest proletariat whose production was raw fur.”12 The trade began innocuously enough in the 1500s, with European cod fishermen casually exchanging goods for pelts during their spells ashore in Newfoundland. When Henry Hudson found the Mohawk eager to trade in 1609 in modern-day New York, the rush was on. Europe was then in the process of exterminating nearly all its own beavers, and the untapped source of pelts proved irresistible." Beavers help the land retain water. Our current, predominant agricultural system in the United States requires significant energy towards irrigation and fertilization. There are other systems that I see as better, and which would include beavers. I'm a "landowner" in the current legal system, and while you likely don't really know me, I welcome a pond here, especially if the surround land also has plenty of insects, arachnids, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals (and all the others). Mosquitoes are not much of a problem around here, but I've lived places where the air is thick with them. Maintaining balanced diversity (including human population) is important to me. Some of my neighbors have beaver families on their land and appreciate what they do. Some of those neighbors also grow food for themselves and others. [0] https://www.worldcat.org/title/eager-the-surprising-secret-life-of-beavers-and-why-they-matter/oclc/1049630875 https://www.worldcat.org/title/eager-the-surprising-secret-l...
- actionfromafar 5y agoMaybe 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.
- w0mbat 5y agoThis 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.
- jart 5y agoMost 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.
- b112 5y agoMost 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.
- throwawaycities 5y ago> 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.
- progre 5y agoThey will help with reducing floods? Downstream maybe. Where the beavers live? No.
- pfdietz 5y agoAnd not downstream, when the beaver dam fails.
- unfocussed_mike 5y agoDownstream 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.
- Zenst 5y ago"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.
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- Tijdreiziger 5y agoIn the Netherlands, we have the fish doorbell: https://visdeurbel.nl/ https://visdeurbel.nl/
- simtel20 5y agoIn case you are not aware, "beaver" is an odd coloquialism for the vagina, so the SEO challenge is to find an urban nature scene and not what the internet has the most of.
- Tijdreiziger 5y agoYou learn something new every day, huh. I’m an L2 speaker, hadn’t heard of that expression.
- rootw0rm 5y agoSong for reference. You're welcome! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYDfwUJzYQg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYDfwUJzYQg
- mprovost 5y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS3LWOTCW4A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wS3LWOTCW4A
- jaclaz 5y agoJFYI, a classic: https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/jbtfo/sometimes_men_make_the_strangest_requests/ https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/jbtfo/sometimes_men_...
- WithinReason 5y ago"Ian Barnes, Enfield Council's deputy leader, said it was "quite emotional" when the pair - who have been temporarily nicknamed Justin Beaver and Sigourney Beaver - were released into the wild."
- gurjeet 5y agoRelated: The Sound of Running Water Puts Beavers in the Mood to Build https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/67662/sound-running-water-puts-beavers-mood-build https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/67662/sound-running-wate...
- prawn 5y agoRidiculous idea, but I wonder if you could motivate beavers to build very roughly to your specifications with carefully placed speakers...
- UberFly 5y agoAnd boy are they ANGRY.
- zeristor 5y agoNo one else has mentioned that the finding that Beaver dams can be a big help in reducing flooding, by slowing down water flow: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/17/beavers-cut-flooding-and-pollution-and-boost-wildlife-populations https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/17/beavers-...
- thisNeeds2BeSad 5y agoA terraforming animal meets a terraforming animal, to find out while its ancestors extincted the terraforming aninmal previously. Beavers will build dams and lodges into the infrastructure, will undermine the whole river bank and start damning up canals. Its easy to cheer this on from a nature in the abstract loving position. But in the real world, this results in the need for constant repairs and downgarded performance. If the headline was "German bombers drop smart anti-infrastructure water-bombletts into thames \ blitz getting more expensive by the day \ pratchett fans cheer for modern Ankh Morpork" it would describe a similar situation, without the disney googles and nobody would celebrate it.
- taubek 5y agoIn my country there were some locations where they have added bevers population on purpose. This was in the rural areas. And there was a lot of floods and damages on crops, orchards, etc.
- tpm 5y agoHere around Bratislava the beavers are doing their stuff last ~10 years after a long absence. A few people are scandalised by the felled trees. Otherwise no issues. They are not causing problems for massive concrete dams we have on the Danube. For smaller rivers, the changes seem to be positive.
- samatman 5y agoOur ancestors extirpated the beaver out of a mania, which developed among the former, for wearing the skins of the latter upon their heads.
- pbhjpbhj 5y agoWe often assume our ancestors to be idiots. Would they have done it if beavers were found to be generally beneficial? (I mean probably, because capitalists are going to sell their last breath of air if the price is right; still worth asking)
- jimnotgym 5y ago> There are plans for a publicly viewable "beaver cam" to be set up, once the pair have settled into their enclosure. That there is an internet search to take extreme care with! Maybe don't search 'beaver cam' on your work pc. Or maybe that is a useful defence when you are in a disciplinary meeting, 'I was looking for the Enfield beaver reintroduction project'
- ChuckMcM 5y agoI thought the same, and tried it in Bing, and even with safe search "off", and it is all beavers of the aquatic mammal type[1]. Not sure if that is because the slang is not as common these days or if there really are so many wildlife cameras out there documenting the lives of beavers that it swamps out the long tail of results. [1] In both 'web' and 'image' search modes.
- user-the-name 5y ago
- jhbadger 5y agoThe magazine "Canada's History" used to be named "The Beaver" in honor of how beaver trapping played a major role both in lives of the indigenous peoples of Canada as well as in colonial history well into the 19th century. It was eventually changed in the 21st century. No exact reason has been given, but one imagines there were a lot of web searches landing on their home page from people not necessarily interested in the animal nor Canada's history.
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