064: Beaver Believers II

Episode Transcript

[0:00:33 – 0:00:34] Adam: Welcome.
[0:00:35 – 0:00:37] Adam: Welcome, cha-cha, babina.
[0:00:38 – 0:00:45] Erik: Welcome to Beaver Home, a Tumble podcast, episode 063.
[0:00:45 – 0:00:46] Erik: 063.
[0:00:49 – 0:00:51] Erik: It’s a good show.
[0:00:51 – 0:00:52] Erik: It’s a good show.
[0:00:53 – 0:00:55] Erik: Seriously, it’s a good show.
[0:00:56 – 0:01:03] Erik: Yeah, so this is a Tumble Home, a Boundary Waters podcast, part two of Beaver Boys.
[0:01:03 – 0:01:04] Erik: Welcome, welcome.
[0:01:06 – 0:01:09] Adam: I was convinced… Castor canadensis.
[0:01:09 – 0:01:11] Adam: This was going to be a two-part.
[0:01:11 – 0:01:12] Adam: I was not.
[0:01:12 – 0:01:18] Adam: I thought we were going to get it into one hour, but I forget the gift of gab.
[0:01:18 – 0:01:19] Erik: The gift of gab.
[0:01:19 – 0:01:21] Erik: We did talk for about 20 minutes before we even got into it.
[0:01:22 – 0:01:24] Adam: Yeah, that was problematic, but we still have…
[0:01:25 – 0:01:27] Adam: 70 pages to go on the book report.
[0:01:27 – 0:01:28] Adam: It’s going to be an eight-part series.
[0:01:29 – 0:01:30] Adam: It might end up being three parts.
[0:01:30 – 0:01:30] Adam: No.
[0:01:30 – 0:01:31] Adam: I can’t get to all of it tonight.
[0:01:32 – 0:01:32] Erik: We’ll get through it.
[0:01:32 – 0:01:38] Erik: We have nothing else to talk about besides beavers except for sponsors.
[0:01:38 – 0:01:39] Erik: Absolutely.
[0:01:39 – 0:01:40] Erik: We’ve got to start at the top.
[0:01:41 – 0:01:43] Erik: Thank you, patrons.
[0:01:45 – 0:01:49] Erik: You are the world to us.
[0:01:49 – 0:01:50] Erik: Bless your hearts.
[0:01:50 – 0:01:53] Erik: At this point, you are the reason that we do this.
[0:01:54 – 0:01:56] Erik: And we have talked about this in the past.
[0:01:56 – 0:02:02] Erik: You also contribute to protecting the place that allows us to do what we do.
[0:02:03 – 0:02:08] Erik: We put money towards the folks that can protect the Boundary Waters in multiple ways.
[0:02:09 – 0:02:09] Erik: We’re all helping out.
[0:02:10 – 0:02:12] Erik: That have louder mouths, if you can believe it.
[0:02:12 – 0:02:13] Erik: Than us?
[0:02:13 – 0:02:13] Erik: Than us.
[0:02:16 – 0:02:19] Erik: Welcome to Tumble Home.
[0:02:19 – 0:02:22] Erik: It’s a good thing we got that levelator, otherwise they’d blow out ears.
[0:02:23 – 0:02:24] Adam: Too bad, yeah.
[0:02:24 – 0:02:25] Adam: Sorry.
[0:02:25 – 0:02:32] Erik: Besides our patrons, our poppin’ wheelers, our Coglins campers, our pizza biter boys.
[0:02:32 – 0:02:33] Adam: Oh boy.
[0:02:33 – 0:02:35] Erik: That’s a level we haven’t come up with yet.
[0:02:36 – 0:02:39] Adam: That’s the next level for the achievers.
[0:02:39 – 0:02:42] Erik: I don’t want to exclude the ladies.
[0:02:42 – 0:02:46] Adam: The Little Lebowski Park Boundary Waters Achievers.
[0:02:46 – 0:02:48] Erik: The Pizza Biter Achievers.
[0:02:48 – 0:02:50] Adam: The Little Lebowski Pizza Biter Achievers.
[0:02:50 – 0:02:51] Adam: Episode 063.
[0:02:51 – 0:02:52] Adam: Episode…
[0:02:54 – 0:03:09] Erik: zero six three part two of one of the greatest animals on the planet absolutely this point i’m not even i’m halfway through learning about these guys and i think beavers are the greatest things ever
[0:03:10 – 0:03:17] Erik: Just imagine if you were the person who was sponsoring this episode where things are going to hopefully culminate and finish.
[0:03:19 – 0:03:21] Erik: This is a Dr.
[0:03:21 – 0:03:29] Erik: Robot Blackberry Lemon Sour from Monday Night Brewing.
[0:03:29 – 0:03:29] Erik: Look at that.
[0:03:30 – 0:03:33] Erik: It’s like John Madden is like pumping a fist or something.
[0:03:34 – 0:04:01] Erik: yeah is this a bunch of ties or clubs yeah i don’t know i think it’s ties it’s a bunch of ties there’s got to be an inside story because there is no story on the can well the monday night brewing up top the guy the logo yeah besides high it’s like a tie and a guy like pumping a fist like truth the power eric i’m a john madden i’m gonna coach you is this john man’s brewery i don’t know what’s going on is john madden still alive
[0:04:03 – 0:04:04] Erik: Maybe.
[0:04:04 – 0:04:05] Erik: Possibly.
[0:04:05 – 0:04:08] Adam: But anyway, this is… What you want to do is you want to run and get a touchdown.
[0:04:08 – 0:04:11] Erik: What you want to do, you got to watch the snap.
[0:04:11 – 0:04:12] Erik: This is…
[0:04:14 – 0:04:16] Erik: This is from Sean.
[0:04:16 – 0:04:18] Erik: Sean!
[0:04:18 – 0:04:19] Erik: Thank you, Sean.
[0:04:19 – 0:04:29] Erik: He visited us at Clearwater a few months back and never thought in a million years that he would find himself in Georgia.
[0:04:29 – 0:04:31] Erik: But this beer is from Atlanta.
[0:04:31 – 0:04:33] Erik: He finds himself there now.
[0:04:34 – 0:04:35] Erik: And he was kind.
[0:04:35 – 0:04:36] Adam: A lot of beavers down in Georgia.
[0:04:37 – 0:04:41] Erik: Kind enough to bring us some local beer.
[0:04:41 – 0:04:42] Erik: We love it.
[0:04:42 – 0:04:47] Erik: From his home, as of right now, state, Georgia.
[0:04:48 – 0:04:49] Erik: Monday Night Brewery.
[0:04:49 – 0:04:50] Erik: Dr.
[0:04:50 – 0:04:52] Erik: Robot Blackberry Lemon Sour.
[0:04:52 – 0:04:53] Erik: Let’s crack these babes.
[0:04:55 – 0:04:56] Erik: That’s true stereo.
[0:04:56 – 0:04:58] Erik: We got it figured out now.
[0:04:58 – 0:04:59] Erik: We know what we’re doing.
[0:05:03 – 0:05:04] Adam: Ooh, that’s nice.
[0:05:04 – 0:05:05] Adam: It is hot.
[0:05:05 – 0:05:06] Adam: It is hot out today.
[0:05:06 – 0:05:07] Adam: Refresco.
[0:05:09 – 0:05:10] Adam: And it’s Trey Tasty Ammo.
[0:05:11 – 0:05:11] Erik: Mmm.
[0:05:12 – 0:05:12] Erik: Mmm.
[0:05:14 – 0:05:16] Erik: You have anything to say before we get back into it?
[0:05:16 – 0:05:20] Adam: It’s a lot of lemon and a hint of blackberry.
[0:05:20 – 0:05:20] Adam: Yeah.
[0:05:20 – 0:05:22] Erik: And also John Madden’s tie.
[0:05:23 – 0:05:23] Adam: Yeah.
[0:05:23 – 0:05:24] Erik: In there a little bit.
[0:05:24 – 0:05:24] Erik: Absolutely.
[0:05:24 – 0:05:25] Erik: It’s kind of like…
[0:05:26 – 0:05:30] Adam: I wish I had a tie with this kind of, you know, get up and print.
[0:05:31 – 0:05:31] Erik: Yeah.
[0:05:32 – 0:05:40] Erik: It’s like blackberry, lemon, and then like a hint of 1988 Thanksgiving.
[0:05:40 – 0:05:40] Erik: Thanksgiving.
[0:05:44 – 0:05:52] Adam: All right, well, no, I don’t think I have anything else to add before we get back into beavers.
[0:05:52 – 0:05:53] Adam: Let’s keep it to two parts.
[0:05:53 – 0:05:56] Adam: Where do we leave it?
[0:05:56 – 0:05:59] Adam: Oh, I never even got to share this beautiful image.
[0:06:00 – 0:06:04] Adam: Of the symbiotic nature of the Beaver Lodge.
[0:06:04 – 0:06:07] Erik: Oh, the one with the moose in the background?
[0:06:07 – 0:06:09] Adam: Yeah, the moose is moving in.
[0:06:09 – 0:06:10] Adam: Yeah.
[0:06:11 – 0:06:11] Erik: That’s how it works.
[0:06:12 – 0:06:14] Adam: It’s the old moose.
[0:06:14 – 0:06:18] Adam: They brought him in for a comedic relief for the sitcom.
[0:06:18 – 0:06:20] Adam: Everybody knows how funny moose are.
[0:06:21 – 0:06:22] Adam: Old Uncle Moose.
[0:06:23 – 0:06:28] Adam: So you can see the kits and the beaver, and then there’s even some otters over here.
[0:06:29 – 0:06:30] Adam: All these are fish.
[0:06:30 – 0:06:31] Adam: Those count as fish.
[0:06:31 – 0:06:32] Adam: These are all count as fish.
[0:06:32 – 0:06:32] Adam: You can eat these.
[0:06:34 – 0:06:36] Adam: Not this one, though, or the bird.
[0:06:36 – 0:06:39] Adam: I don’t know if I’m going to get to that, but apparently swans…
[0:06:40 – 0:06:42] Adam: And definitely not snow geese.
[0:06:42 – 0:06:46] Adam: But swans love to nest on top of beaver lodges.
[0:06:46 – 0:06:49] Adam: Just another example of how well they play well with their neighbors.
[0:06:50 – 0:06:55] Adam: They’re like, hey, beaver, you mind if we set up our nest on top of your lodge?
[0:06:55 – 0:06:55] Adam: Not at all.
[0:06:56 – 0:06:56] Adam: Go ahead.
[0:06:56 – 0:06:57] Erik: Why would I mind?
[0:06:57 – 0:06:58] Adam: Nobody’s using it.
[0:06:58 – 0:06:59] Erik: The terrace is open.
[0:07:00 – 0:07:02] Erik: I mean, seriously, I’m just using the underwater part.
[0:07:03 – 0:07:04] Erik: You can sit on top.
[0:07:05 – 0:07:05] Erik: Go for it.
[0:07:06 – 0:07:06] Erik: Yeah.
[0:07:07 – 0:07:07] Adam: Yeah.
[0:07:08 – 0:07:10] Erik: Hey, keep it down up there, though.
[0:07:10 – 0:07:10] Erik: I mean, seriously.
[0:07:10 – 0:07:11] Erik: Keep it down.
[0:07:11 – 0:07:11] Erik: The kits are asleep.
[0:07:12 – 0:07:17] Erik: I mean, I said yes, but at the same time, keep the honking down and the flapping of the wings.
[0:07:17 – 0:07:18] Erik: Yeah, they’re noisy.
[0:07:18 – 0:07:19] Erik: You’ve got big flappers up there.
[0:07:19 – 0:07:21] Adam: They’re big and noisy.
[0:07:21 – 0:07:21] Adam: Please.
[0:07:21 – 0:07:22] Adam: But somehow they get along.
[0:07:22 – 0:07:23] Adam: They’re fine.
[0:07:23 – 0:07:23] Adam: I don’t know.
[0:07:23 – 0:07:26] Adam: Maybe the swans deter predators.
[0:07:26 – 0:07:26] Adam: Maybe it’s somewhat tenuous.
[0:07:26 – 0:07:27] Adam: We’re talking about that.
[0:07:27 – 0:07:28] Adam: Maybe it’s not 100%.
[0:07:32 – 0:07:33] Adam: Moving on.
[0:07:33 – 0:07:34] Adam: All right.
[0:07:35 – 0:07:37] Adam: Part two, the fur trade.
[0:07:38 – 0:07:38] Adam: Oh, man.
[0:07:39 – 0:07:42] Adam: So things didn’t go so great for the beavers.
[0:07:42 – 0:07:43] Adam: Let’s get there.
[0:07:44 – 0:07:59] Adam: Beavers, when we left it in the last part, they’re raising their families in peace with their beautiful spaghetti rivers and amazing wetlands and just enjoying North America in general, just living it up, really.
[0:07:59 – 0:08:04] Erik: Isn’t this great how we’re just being left alone out here in the woods and the waters?
[0:08:04 – 0:08:05] Adam: We’re doing our thing.
[0:08:05 – 0:08:11] Adam: We’re just making North America just a bountiful, wet, lush, amazing.
[0:08:12 – 0:08:13] Adam: Even the desert was lush.
[0:08:13 – 0:08:14] Adam: It was all of us.
[0:08:14 – 0:08:15] Adam: It was an oasis.
[0:08:15 – 0:08:16] Adam: Are you doing okay?
[0:08:17 – 0:08:18] Adam: Yeah, we’re doing great.
[0:08:18 – 0:08:19] Erik: Good.
[0:08:19 – 0:08:20] Erik: I’m doing good, too.
[0:08:20 – 0:08:21] Erik: Let’s just keep hanging out.
[0:08:21 – 0:08:22] Adam: Do you want us to club you to death?
[0:08:22 – 0:08:25] Erik: We’re not doing anything but chilling out and doing great.
[0:08:25 – 0:08:27] Adam: How about we club you to death and make you into a bunch of hats?
[0:08:28 – 0:08:28] Erik: Oh, wait.
[0:08:28 – 0:08:28] Erik: What?
[0:08:29 – 0:08:29] Erik: What was that?
[0:08:29 – 0:08:30] Erik: Did you hear?
[0:08:30 – 0:08:32] Erik: What did he say?
[0:08:32 – 0:08:35] Erik: Maybe some white man over the horizon there.
[0:08:36 – 0:08:47] Adam: More than timber, cod, or any other natural resource, beavers help explain just about every significant American geopolitical event between European arrival and the Civil War.
[0:08:47 – 0:08:48] Erik: Yes.
[0:08:48 – 0:08:49] Adam: So let that sink in.
[0:08:49 – 0:08:51] Adam: They’re responsible for everything.
[0:08:51 – 0:09:19] Erik: think i said that in the last episode there is a full blown like how the world we live in now has been affected by the fur trade book yeah oh yeah it would be fun to do i’m looking forward to what you have to say on the beavers but like in general like what exists now in terms of yeah where roads are cities we built everything we uh built on top of the beavers former habitat yeah
[0:09:20 – 0:09:25] Adam: White settlers were a millennial short of being the first North Americans to depend on the beaver.
[0:09:26 – 0:09:35] Adam: For thousands of years, the continent’s native peoples had eaten the rodent’s flesh and fatty tails, draped themselves in furs, and used castoreum as medicine.
[0:09:36 – 0:09:45] Adam: The arrival of Europeans warped indigenous peoples’ relationship with beaver from substance and kinship to extraction.
[0:09:46 – 0:09:46] Erik: Nah.
[0:09:47 – 0:09:47] Erik: You guys, listen.
[0:09:48 – 0:09:50] Erik: These beavers, they’re just gross things.
[0:09:50 – 0:09:52] Erik: You just eat.
[0:09:52 – 0:09:53] Erik: All you got to do.
[0:09:53 – 0:09:53] Adam: Imagine that.
[0:09:53 – 0:09:56] Adam: The native peoples were living harmoniously with beaver.
[0:09:56 – 0:09:57] Adam: Yeah, you just eat.
[0:09:57 – 0:09:58] Adam: They’re like, hey.
[0:09:58 – 0:09:58] Erik: Just grab them.
[0:09:58 – 0:10:00] Erik: Just grab them and take everything they have to offer.
[0:10:00 – 0:10:03] Adam: Everyone’s worth five bucks or a free burger.
[0:10:03 – 0:10:04] Adam: Don’t do anything with them.
[0:10:04 – 0:10:06] Adam: You can make a hat out of these things.
[0:10:06 – 0:10:07] Adam: Except turn them into clothing.
[0:10:08 – 0:10:08] Erik: Profits.
[0:10:08 – 0:10:09] Adam: And perfume.
[0:10:09 – 0:10:11] Erik: And profits.
[0:10:11 – 0:10:12] Erik: What is money?
[0:10:13 – 0:10:14] Erik: That’s what we care about most.
[0:10:14 – 0:10:15] Erik: You have so much to learn.
[0:10:15 – 0:10:17] Adam: You have so much to learn.
[0:10:17 – 0:10:21] Adam: The trade began innocuously enough in 1500.
[0:10:22 – 0:10:23] Erik: Wow, we’re only in 1500?
[0:10:24 – 0:10:25] Erik: Yeah, part two, 1500.
[0:10:26 – 0:10:27] Adam: Now we’re going to move forward.
[0:10:27 – 0:10:28] Adam: Sorry.
[0:10:28 – 0:10:30] Erik: Quickly.
[0:10:30 – 0:10:33] Adam: Beavers have the unfortunate habit of betraying their own presence.
[0:10:34 – 0:10:42] Adam: The very dams and lodges that protected the rodents for millions of years became unmistakable billboards advertising active colonies to trappers.
[0:10:44 – 0:11:03] Adam: uh yeah so they would just drain the ponds and at first this is how at first they got them they would drain the ponds and then the beavers would flee and they would literally club them or net them that’s how they at first they got them that was 1500s beaver level that’s like yeah 100 level beaver extermination technique
[0:11:04 – 0:11:06] Erik: 1500s level human brains?
[0:11:06 – 0:11:08] Erik: Like, what is that equivalent to?
[0:11:09 – 0:11:26] Adam: By the early 1700s, the English introduced steel traps and castoreum lures to the trade, this foolproof combination that by century’s end had found their way into the kit of almost every trapper and led to the exhaustion of the beaver fields.
[0:11:27 – 0:11:49] Adam: huh i’ve never heard the term beaver field before but uh neither have i steel traps and castoreum lure um just uh too too good to pass up for the beaver they’re very easy sure i imagine it’s probably in they are a beautiful and magnificent creature but they’re apparently not smart they just are easy to trap
[0:11:50 – 0:11:56] Adam: I don’t know that that’s actually true, but from the way they make it seem, it’s like, oh, once they got the steel traps, that was it for them.
[0:11:57 – 0:11:58] Erik: Well, I don’t know.
[0:11:58 – 0:12:07] Erik: I think that you throw into the equation the invention and creation of steel and huge springs.
[0:12:07 – 0:12:11] Adam: Big springs and then lures that they think some other beavers in their pond.
[0:12:11 – 0:12:13] Adam: I got to go over and check this thing out.
[0:12:13 – 0:12:14] Erik: It’s probably like…
[0:12:14 – 0:12:16] Erik: in their own world and their own realm.
[0:12:17 – 0:12:17] Erik: It still takes skill, though.
[0:12:17 – 0:12:24] Erik: They probably are very intelligent and smart in what they do, but then we come in with like… Yeah, stuff they can’t even comprehend.
[0:12:24 – 0:12:25] Erik: It’s next level.
[0:12:25 – 0:12:28] Erik: And we can outsmart anybody, but we’re kind of outsmarting ourselves.
[0:12:28 – 0:12:31] Adam: That’s the only thing we can outsmart is everybody else.
[0:12:31 – 0:12:31] Adam: Yeah.
[0:12:32 – 0:12:43] Adam: Since most Europeans lacked the skill and patience to catch beavers themselves, they bought pelts from Indians in exchange for knives, hatchets, kettles, cloth, and bead.
[0:12:44 – 0:12:45] Adam: Also, liquors and guns.
[0:12:46 – 0:12:49] Adam: Yeah, a lot of liquors and guns being traded for beaver pelts.
[0:12:51 – 0:12:53] Erik: What kind of liquors were available in the 1500s?
[0:12:54 – 0:13:16] Adam: schnapps with caster um land stuck in them beaver hats the oil flavored kind or the old cheese flavored kind um i think i’m not sure which ones are better honestly i can’t tell i assume that the oil would be attracted to the cheese flavor and the cheese flavor would attract the oil
[0:13:17 – 0:13:27] Erik: I guess I would prefer if I had to drink some kind of a toilet bowl 1500s liquor.
[0:13:27 – 0:13:31] Erik: I’d want it flavored like oil, not old cheese.
[0:13:31 – 0:13:36] Erik: Because I imagine everything else that you ate back in that time was flavored like old cheese.
[0:13:36 – 0:13:37] Adam: Yeah.
[0:13:39 – 0:13:40] Adam: Yeah, probably.
[0:13:41 – 0:13:44] Adam: They probably hadn’t had any oil-flavored things in the 1500s.
[0:13:44 – 0:13:47] Erik: No, they weren’t greasing any 6V6s.
[0:13:51 – 0:14:03] Adam: The fur trade pushed west, driven by strapping, good-humored French-Canadian voyagers piloting slender birchbark canoes in quest of la castilleur.
[0:14:03 – 0:14:04] Erik: Calm down.
[0:14:04 – 0:14:07] Adam: You’re turning me on.
[0:14:07 – 0:14:20] Adam: Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, the industry was a frenzied free-for-all, characterized by shifting alliances, geopolitical intrigue, and brutal slaughter of both beavers and humans.
[0:14:21 – 0:14:24] Erik: So kind of like the firework industry today.
[0:14:27 – 0:14:30] Adam: The only constant remained the prodigious supply of pelts.
[0:14:31 – 0:14:33] Adam: What were they making?
[0:14:33 – 0:14:34] Adam: Well, it was hats.
[0:14:34 – 0:14:36] Adam: It was all hats, as we’ve said before.
[0:14:36 – 0:14:40] Adam: They were the most durable, waterproof, and malleable head toppers.
[0:14:41 – 0:14:42] Adam: Head toppers?
[0:14:42 – 0:14:46] Adam: Yeah, why did head toppers go away in favor of the fine word hat?
[0:14:47 – 0:14:50] Erik: I wish there was a way to just bring some of these things back into the fold.
[0:14:50 – 0:14:52] Adam: I got three names of hats for you.
[0:14:52 – 0:14:55] Adam: Can you name a type of beaver hat fashion?
[0:14:56 – 0:14:57] Adam: Head topper.
[0:14:57 – 0:14:58] Adam: Head topper.
[0:14:59 – 0:15:01] Adam: The one was the regent.
[0:15:02 – 0:15:03] Adam: A regent?
[0:15:03 – 0:15:05] Adam: The regent, not a regent.
[0:15:05 – 0:15:06] Adam: The regent?
[0:15:06 – 0:15:10] Adam: Clearly you’ve never worn a regent on that tag.
[0:15:10 – 0:15:11] Erik: That’s quite the regent you’re wearing.
[0:15:11 – 0:15:12] Adam: How about the wellington?
[0:15:13 – 0:15:13] Adam: A what?
[0:15:13 – 0:15:14] Adam: A wellington.
[0:15:14 – 0:15:15] Adam: A wellington?
[0:15:15 – 0:15:17] Adam: Oh, the wellington.
[0:15:17 – 0:15:18] Adam: So they’re both the.
[0:15:18 – 0:15:20] Adam: And the Paris Buu.
[0:15:21 – 0:15:21] Erik: What?
[0:15:22 – 0:15:22] Erik: Boo.
[0:15:22 – 0:15:23] Adam: Yeah.
[0:15:23 – 0:15:26] Adam: Those were the hottest trends in beaver hat fashion.
[0:15:26 – 0:15:27] Adam: In like when?
[0:15:27 – 0:15:28] Adam: 1600s?
[0:15:28 – 0:15:29] Adam: 1700s there.
[0:15:29 – 0:15:30] Adam: That’s the 1700s.
[0:15:31 – 0:15:32] Erik: Kill all the beavers.
[0:15:32 – 0:15:34] Erik: I need the regent on my head.
[0:15:34 – 0:15:36] Erik: I prefer the Wellington.
[0:15:39 – 0:15:39] Erik: However…
[0:15:40 – 0:15:48] Adam: In 1843, John James Abaddon traveled 2,200 miles along the Missouri in search of mammals to paint.
[0:15:48 – 0:15:50] Adam: You know, Abaddon?
[0:15:51 – 0:15:51] Adam: Abaddon?
[0:15:52 – 0:15:52] Adam: Abaddon?
[0:15:52 – 0:15:53] Adam: You mean Audubon?
[0:15:53 – 0:15:54] Adam: Audubon.
[0:15:55 – 0:15:55] Adam: Audubon.
[0:15:55 – 0:15:56] Adam: Yeah.
[0:15:56 – 0:15:57] Adam: That’s what I said.
[0:15:59 – 0:16:00] Erik: I don’t know where you’re looking.
[0:16:00 – 0:16:01] Erik: Audubon.
[0:16:01 – 0:16:03] Erik: He’s looking at a camera that doesn’t exist.
[0:16:04 – 0:16:08] Adam: That’s where you guys… That’s where you guys… John James Audubon.
[0:16:08 – 0:16:09] Adam: Audubon.
[0:16:09 – 0:16:11] Adam: He was looking for mammals to paint.
[0:16:11 – 0:16:19] Adam: Though he saw tracks and heard a tail slap and dismantled an entire lodge, he did not see a single beaver.
[0:16:19 – 0:16:20] Adam: This is in 1843.
[0:16:20 – 0:16:22] Adam: This is 20 years plus before the Civil War.
[0:16:24 – 0:16:27] Erik: He’s just in a river just ripping up a lodge.
[0:16:27 – 0:16:28] Adam: Not just a river, the Missouri.
[0:16:28 – 0:16:29] Adam: Ripping up a lodge.
[0:16:29 – 0:16:32] Adam: He was on the Missouri and couldn’t find a beaver in 1843.
[0:16:32 – 0:16:34] Adam: There’s nothing.
[0:16:34 – 0:16:35] Adam: These are just muds and sticks.
[0:16:35 – 0:16:38] Adam: I skipped over like 40 pages of Beaver Massacre.
[0:16:38 – 0:16:38] Adam: Oh, sure.
[0:16:39 – 0:16:43] Adam: So from 1700 to 1843, there’s very little beaver left.
[0:16:43 – 0:16:46] Erik: It’s just funny thinking of him shredding an old dam.
[0:16:47 – 0:16:48] Erik: There’s no such thing as a beaver.
[0:16:48 – 0:16:49] Adam: What a beautiful painter.
[0:16:49 – 0:16:51] Erik: All I found was a pile of logs and mud.
[0:16:52 – 0:16:54] Adam: Um, that’s not to say there wasn’t beaver.
[0:16:55 – 0:16:58] Adam: On a continental scale, the fur industry was far from moribund.
[0:16:58 – 0:17:03] Adam: The Hudson’s Bay Company had its biggest pelt trading year in 1875.
[0:17:03 – 0:17:04] Adam: Cheers to that.
[0:17:05 – 0:17:07] Adam: Way to go, Hudson Bay Company.
[0:17:07 – 0:17:08] Erik: Moribund.
[0:17:10 – 0:17:25] Adam: 1875, they vended more than 270,000 furs, almost all of them from Canada, sure, but the beaver’s days as one of the preeminent drivers of American culture, economy, and politics were over.
[0:17:26 – 0:17:37] Adam: The one true thing about every American frontier that seems concrete and immutable, the essayist Charles Pierce has written, is that it does not last.
[0:17:39 – 0:17:44] Adam: Truthfully, Audubons shouldn’t have been surprised to find the Missouri Baron.
[0:17:44 – 0:17:56] Adam: For more than two centuries, a conquering army of white trappers and traders had ravaged the beavers in every stream and pond they encountered, leaving ruins in their wake.
[0:17:57 – 0:18:00] Adam: The first wave of trappers encountered a continent molded by beavers.
[0:18:00 – 0:18:05] Adam: The farmers and settlers who followed met a landscape shaped by their absence.
[0:18:07 – 0:18:07] Erik: Okay.
[0:18:07 – 0:18:07] Erik: Okay.
[0:18:07 – 0:18:11] Adam: Yeah, on one hand, you had a barrel of beavers.
[0:18:12 – 0:18:17] Adam: And after like 100 years of just crazed trapping, almost no beaver.
[0:18:20 – 0:18:20] Adam: That’s sad.
[0:18:21 – 0:18:21] Adam: I don’t like it.
[0:18:22 – 0:18:23] Adam: I don’t like it either.
[0:18:24 – 0:18:28] Adam: The ecological repercussions of this were very severe.
[0:18:28 – 0:18:35] Adam: Many beaver-formed wetlands were inherently liminal, transitioning ceaselessly from one state to the next.
[0:18:36 – 0:18:46] Adam: A beaver complex is one of the few opportunities we mortals have to watch geological processes unfold within the duration of a single human lifespan.
[0:18:46 – 0:18:47] Adam: I like that.
[0:18:47 – 0:18:52] Adam: They talk about beaver dams and wetlands as a geological process, which it is.
[0:18:52 – 0:18:57] Erik: It’s not quite, but yeah, it is close to something that you can witness in a life.
[0:18:59 – 0:19:00] Erik: Don’t mess with it.
[0:19:00 – 0:19:14] Adam: Often, the progression runs from water to earth as beaver ponds slow flows, trap sediment, and gradually fill with silt and pioneering plants, whereupon their creators move upstream to begin the cycle again.
[0:19:14 – 0:19:24] Adam: Left behind are open, grass-filled meadows, their surfaces flat, treeless, flan-like underfoot, bermed with overgrowing contours of long-ago dams.
[0:19:26 – 0:19:46] Adam: So it’s just a process of like you build up a dam and pond and over time it fills in with plants and sediment and then you just move upstream and build another dam and kind of this damming of the river and creation of wetlands just kind of folds upon itself against the gravitational flow.
[0:19:49 – 0:19:54] Adam: When trappers de-beavered North America, they threw the natural evolution into fast forward.
[0:19:55 – 0:20:00] Adam: As dams deteriorated and ponds drained, they left behind some of the finest soil a farmer could till.
[0:20:01 – 0:20:05] Adam: A newly exposed melange of leaves, bark, rotten wood, and other manure.
[0:20:05 – 0:20:06] Erik: No, that’s not great.
[0:20:07 – 0:20:10] Erik: I mean, it’s good for the farmers at the time, but I can’t imagine…
[0:20:10 – 0:20:12] Adam: It was really good for the farmers at the time.
[0:20:12 – 0:20:17] Erik: I can’t imagine that’s going to lead to a very sustainable way of operating.
[0:20:17 – 0:20:24] Adam: In the 1600s, the lower 48 was dampened by around 220 million acres of wetlands.
[0:20:25 – 0:20:29] Adam: By 1980s, their extent had fallen by more than half.
[0:20:30 – 0:20:33] Adam: Only around 100 million acres of wetland remained by 1980.
[0:20:35 – 0:20:42] Adam: This is largely in part to the complete destruction and elimination of beaver habitat across North America.
[0:20:43 – 0:20:49] Adam: Deforestation and drainage did no favor to beavers, who of course depend upon the wood and water for food and shelter.
[0:20:49 – 0:20:56] Adam: In turn, the elimination of our continent’s original architects proved catastrophic form of habitat destruction in its own right.
[0:20:57 – 0:21:04] Adam: In many corners of North America, it’s harder to think of an animal that doesn’t use beaver compounds than one that does.
[0:21:06 – 0:21:07] Erik: Yeah, that makes sense.
[0:21:07 – 0:21:09] Adam: Nobody needs ducks, though.
[0:21:09 – 0:21:09] Adam: Yeah.
[0:21:28 – 0:21:33] Adam: That beavers increase plant species streamside in areas by more than a third.
[0:21:34 – 0:21:37] Adam: That fish communities are more diverse near beaver dams.
[0:21:37 – 0:21:41] Adam: That mink and raccoons hunt crawdads and snakes in beaver complexes.
[0:21:42 – 0:21:45] Adam: That frogs breed in beaver ponds.
[0:21:45 – 0:21:49] Adam: That profuse mosses grow in beaver meadows.
[0:21:51 – 0:21:55] Adam: No organism is too small or too large to gain sustenance from beavers.
[0:21:56 – 0:21:59] Adam: Nutrients from castor feces breed zooplankton.
[0:21:59 – 0:22:03] Adam: Sawflies lay eggs on beaver-browsed cottonwood shoots.
[0:22:03 – 0:22:11] Adam: Moose are so reliably attracted to wetland plants that biologists often use the extent of beaver ponds
[0:22:12 – 0:22:15] Adam: as a surrogate for the antlered giant’s range.
[0:22:15 – 0:22:20] Adam: They literally, when they’re trying to figure out how many moose are around, they count beaver ponds first.
[0:22:21 – 0:22:27] Adam: There’s another example of how they are very important to and relate to the boundary waters.
[0:22:27 – 0:22:31] Erik: If you’re at the end of a quote, I was jokingly cheersing before.
[0:22:31 – 0:22:33] Erik: This is a serious cheers.
[0:22:33 – 0:22:36] Erik: Cheers to the gad beaver.
[0:22:36 – 0:22:38] Erik: From the zooplankton to the moose.
[0:22:38 – 0:22:39] Erik: Gad.
[0:22:39 – 0:22:40] Erik: Like,
[0:22:42 – 0:22:46] Erik: pure, natural fertilizer for the world.
[0:22:47 – 0:22:48] Erik: Go beavers.
[0:22:48 – 0:22:56] Adam: You add up all these dependents and you begin to comprehend why scientists consider beavers the ultimate keystone species.
[0:22:56 – 0:22:58] Erik: Do not mess with them.
[0:23:03 – 0:23:04] Adam: Yeah, I don’t know.
[0:23:04 – 0:23:05] Adam: That’s nuts.
[0:23:05 – 0:23:08] Adam: I got to hold on to this page for a second.
[0:23:08 – 0:23:10] Adam: They impact so many.
[0:23:10 – 0:23:12] Adam: We were talking about it in part one.
[0:23:12 – 0:23:15] Adam: From the very big, like a moose.
[0:23:15 – 0:23:16] Adam: I love that.
[0:23:17 – 0:23:23] Adam: To consider how many moose a habitat can sustain, the first thing they do is count beaver ponds.
[0:23:24 – 0:23:25] Adam: Yeah, that’s a good sign.
[0:23:26 – 0:23:27] Adam: And then they go from there.
[0:23:29 – 0:23:34] Adam: But we were talking in part one, it’s on the small end of it too, down to zooplankton.
[0:23:34 – 0:23:36] Adam: Yeah, what’s happening in the lake.
[0:23:36 – 0:23:42] Adam: The biodiversity of the zooplankton, down to the amount of germs and bacteria in their own guts.
[0:23:42 – 0:23:44] Adam: Right.
[0:23:44 – 0:23:53] Adam: They have so much more to offer us as a planet than we do in a lot of ways, just the way that they actually positively affect the landscape.
[0:23:54 – 0:23:56] Erik: Is there any way that they negatively affect it?
[0:23:57 – 0:23:59] Adam: Yeah, I mean, they flood stuff that doesn’t need to be flooded.
[0:23:59 – 0:24:00] Adam: But, like, for who?
[0:24:00 – 0:24:01] Adam: They ruin culverts.
[0:24:02 – 0:24:03] Erik: Yeah, I mean, that’s what I’m saying.
[0:24:03 – 0:24:08] Adam: For highway departments and communities and farmers and ranchers.
[0:24:08 – 0:24:12] Erik: They don’t ruin anything in the natural world, though.
[0:24:12 – 0:24:15] Adam: Well, that’s pretty subjective.
[0:24:15 – 0:24:29] Erik: So if you want to say that humans are like, we exist and we have evolved to the point where, yes, culverts are a part of the natural world because we’ve learned how to make them.
[0:24:29 – 0:24:29] Erik: Yeah.
[0:24:30 – 0:24:32] Erik: That’s an argument, but I’m arguing…
[0:24:34 – 0:24:42] Erik: Aside from that, there is no negative repercussions that the beaver causes to other animals besides the human.
[0:24:43 – 0:24:53] Adam: No, and there’s so many things they do that are positive for other species that without them, there’s countless species that would be harmed.
[0:24:53 – 0:24:54] Adam: Probably not exist.
[0:24:55 – 0:24:56] Erik: Yes.
[0:24:56 – 0:24:56] Erik: Yeah.
[0:24:57 – 0:24:57] Erik: Okay.
[0:24:57 – 0:24:57] Erik: Okay.
[0:25:01 – 0:25:06] Adam: I like this passage, too, and it’s sort of a transition from what we just covered into what we’re going.
[0:25:08 – 0:25:18] Adam: In some ways, beavers are akin to fire, a maligned and misunderstood disruption that society has quelled for decades with disastrous ecological side effects.
[0:25:20 – 0:25:33] Adam: Um, so yeah, it was only because they like got in our way and that people thought they had to drain wetlands to make farmland and that they were flooding our farmlands and flooding our towns and roads that we built on their habitat.
[0:25:34 – 0:25:35] Adam: Those rascals.
[0:25:35 – 0:25:35] Adam: Yeah.
[0:25:35 – 0:25:36] Adam: We got to get rid of them.
[0:25:36 – 0:25:39] Erik: They’re akin to those slimy Germans.
[0:25:40 – 0:25:45] Adam: I just really like the idea that comparing what beavers are doing to the landscape to what fire does.
[0:25:46 – 0:25:47] Adam: They’re a disruption.
[0:25:47 – 0:25:49] Erik: They’re an inconvenience.
[0:25:49 – 0:25:53] Erik: But as you look at it, you would just assume that’s bad.
[0:25:54 – 0:25:54] Adam: Yeah.
[0:25:54 – 0:25:55] Adam: It looks bad.
[0:25:55 – 0:25:58] Adam: There’s still ranchers out west that shoot beavers on site.
[0:25:58 – 0:25:59] Adam: Yeah, and that’s bad.
[0:25:59 – 0:26:05] Adam: Even though it would be really good for them to allow the beaver to remain and provide their cattle with more water.
[0:26:05 – 0:26:06] Adam: We’ll get to this.
[0:26:06 – 0:26:14] Erik: But yeah, I see the correlation between the beaver and the fire where on its surface, yeah.
[0:26:14 – 0:26:19] Adam: This is where the beaver goes from being just an animal to being a process.
[0:26:20 – 0:26:21] Erik: To being a god.
[0:26:21 – 0:26:23] Adam: Yes, to being a god.
[0:26:24 – 0:26:27] Erik: A god animal.
[0:26:28 – 0:26:40] Adam: Unlike combustion, beavers are living beings, but like fire, they’re also a process, the catalyst for sweeping transformations that have driven evolution of codependence for thousands of generations.
[0:26:42 – 0:26:43] Adam: Interesting.
[0:26:45 – 0:27:09] Adam: Brock Dolman, an ecologist and beaver believer in California, is fond of using beaver as a verb, a linguistic device, he told me, meant to help his interlocutors see the organism as an actor, as a manipulator, as an entity affecting process over an unfolding continuum of space and time.
[0:27:09 – 0:27:10] Erik: Wow.
[0:27:10 – 0:27:11] Erik: Yeah.
[0:27:12 – 0:27:32] Adam: that’s great it’s a little far out but it’s also an evocative coinage just as landscape can burn shape-shifting from charred moonscape to grassland to timber it can also beaver from pond to wetland to meadow to forest a centuries-long cycle of flooding and filling and growing
[0:27:33 – 0:27:37] Erik: I’m so glad that that has been recorded on this podcast.
[0:27:37 – 0:27:40] Erik: Thank you to Beaver.
[0:27:40 – 0:27:41] Erik: Thank you, Beaver.
[0:27:42 – 0:27:43] Erik: What’s the guy’s name again?
[0:27:45 – 0:27:46] Adam: That was Brock Dolman.
[0:27:46 – 0:27:47] Erik: Brock Dolman?
[0:27:48 – 0:27:49] Adam: He is a Beaver believer as well.
[0:27:50 – 0:27:51] Erik: Beaver believer.
[0:27:51 – 0:27:52] Adam: That was quite the quote.
[0:27:52 – 0:27:53] Adam: That’s a great quote.
[0:27:57 – 0:27:58] Adam: So, yeah, the beavers are on the reel.
[0:27:59 – 0:28:03] Adam: They’re getting taken out because people want to farm.
[0:28:03 – 0:28:09] Adam: And they’re like, well, this old beaver habitat is great farmland, and they’re not helping us out by flooding it all out.
[0:28:09 – 0:28:10] Adam: We don’t really care.
[0:28:11 – 0:28:14] Adam: The water is wet, and the fields are growing.
[0:28:14 – 0:28:15] Adam: They’re prosperous.
[0:28:16 – 0:28:22] Adam: All this fine old manure and decomposed things, like this is great farmland.
[0:28:22 – 0:28:23] Adam: And so they got rid of the beaver.
[0:28:24 – 0:28:33] Erik: I listened to a podcast a couple weeks ago about how they tried to get rid of the squirrel back in World War I times because they were killing the crops and stuff.
[0:28:33 – 0:28:35] Erik: And it’s one of those things where it’s like…
[0:28:37 – 0:28:44] Erik: The animal that you’re fighting doesn’t even understand that it’s in a war with you.
[0:28:44 – 0:28:47] Erik: It’s just going to keep doing what it’s doing.
[0:28:48 – 0:28:48] Erik: Yes.
[0:28:49 – 0:28:51] Erik: Like, just leave it alone.
[0:28:51 – 0:28:59] Erik: You really just think about what, like, maybe you could coincide with it, like the beaver or the squirrel.
[0:29:00 – 0:29:02] Erik: Instead of just trying to eradicate it.
[0:29:02 – 0:29:07] Erik: There’s no other animal on this planet that thinks, I’ve got an idea.
[0:29:08 – 0:29:09] Erik: I want to do this thing.
[0:29:10 – 0:29:14] Erik: But in order for me to do it, I need to eradicate that other animal.
[0:29:15 – 0:29:15] Adam: Yeah.
[0:29:16 – 0:29:17] Erik: Humans are the only ones that think that way.
[0:29:17 – 0:29:19] Adam: It’s a pretty sick way of thinking.
[0:29:20 – 0:29:23] Erik: Let’s live together with the squirrels and especially the beavers.
[0:29:25 – 0:29:29] Adam: 33, FDR forms the Civilian Conservation Corps.
[0:29:30 – 0:29:31] Adam: The CCC?
[0:29:31 – 0:29:32] Adam: Yes, CCC.
[0:29:33 – 0:29:37] Adam: One of their core responsibilities was tackling soil erosion.
[0:29:39 – 0:29:50] Adam: And, yeah, gee, you get rid of all the beavers who are helping to control and maintain and hold water in wetlands.
[0:29:51 – 0:29:55] Adam: You got rid of them all, and then you ended up with a bunch of crazy soil erosion.
[0:29:57 – 0:29:59] Erik: Oh, no, erosion’s out of control.
[0:29:59 – 0:30:00] Adam: Yeah, no, so…
[0:30:02 – 0:30:10] Adam: They end up like, okay, in the 30s, they were like, well, what if we start reintroducing beavers to these streams to help control this water and erosion?
[0:30:10 – 0:30:11] Erik: Sir, I’m sorry.
[0:30:11 – 0:30:11] Adam: Yes.
[0:30:12 – 0:30:16] Erik: We’ve killed all the beavers, but there aren’t any more beavers.
[0:30:16 – 0:30:19] Adam: Oh, well, I don’t know what we’re going to do then.
[0:30:19 – 0:30:21] Adam: I guess build dams with concrete.
[0:30:22 – 0:30:24] Erik: Okay, well, we can do that.
[0:30:24 – 0:30:25] Erik: We have a lot of concrete.
[0:30:26 – 0:30:28] Erik: All right, boys, head out with the concrete.
[0:30:29 – 0:30:45] Adam: They did figure out that there were about $5 apiece to capture and plant a beaver elsewhere, and the services rendered for soil conservation were valued at $300 per animal.
[0:30:46 – 0:30:51] Adam: Five bucks to throw a beaver in there, and it was doing about $300 of work for free, just doing what it was doing.
[0:30:53 – 0:30:53] Adam: Why fight it?
[0:30:54 – 0:30:55] Adam: Just learn to work with it.
[0:30:55 – 0:30:58] Adam: What were they paying the CCC guys?
[0:30:58 – 0:30:58] Adam: I don’t know.
[0:30:59 – 0:31:01] Adam: Five bucks a day to go, okay, if you got a beaver, you got five bucks.
[0:31:01 – 0:31:04] Erik: They took our jibs.
[0:31:04 – 0:31:06] Erik: Those beavers took our jibs.
[0:31:06 – 0:31:07] Erik: FDR gave our jibs to the beavers.
[0:31:07 – 0:31:10] Adam: Apparently, this really helped.
[0:31:10 – 0:31:12] Adam: The beavers were roaring back in the 30s.
[0:31:14 – 0:31:17] Adam: First, folks of all stripes celebrated the comeback.
[0:31:17 – 0:31:20] Adam: Conservationists got their ecosystem engineers.
[0:31:20 – 0:31:21] Adam: This won’t have a downside.
[0:31:21 – 0:31:28] Adam: Trappers renewed their stock of pelts, but it wasn’t long before the rodents caused trouble.
[0:31:29 – 0:31:31] Erik: Up and uprising.
[0:31:31 – 0:31:39] Adam: Yeah, well, you know, they started causing flooding and messing up roads and destroying entire fields of crops.
[0:31:40 – 0:31:41] Adam: Doing what they’re doing.
[0:31:41 – 0:31:45] Adam: As we said earlier, they, you know, they hear trickling water, even in a
[0:31:45 – 0:32:10] Adam: barren room they tried to build a dam yeah that’s just what they do um being weird with their so oh weird we got rid of them all we killed them all yeah and then built a bunch of farms and towns right on their prime habitat in the streams on the water and then uh the landscapes to which beavers return bore little semblance to the places that they’d once thrived
[0:32:10 – 0:32:34] Adam: huh this doesn’t power lines telephone wires railroad tracks highways and suburban sprawl proliferated where construction was easiest in the river valleys and lowlands beavers once called home this brings us to carrying capacity you may want to have a sip huh
[0:32:36 – 0:32:50] Adam: there’s two kinds of carrying capacity we need to be concerned with biological carrying capacity is how many animals a habitat can really sustain the more important one for this day and age is cultural carrying capacity
[0:32:53 – 0:32:54] Adam: that’s harder to pin down.
[0:32:55 – 0:32:58] Adam: It’s more dependent on societal attitudes, public perception.
[0:32:59 – 0:33:08] Adam: A populace that’s convinced that beavers are pests will inevitably have a lower capacity than one that considers them a habitat-creating boon.
[0:33:09 – 0:33:30] Adam: okay wildlife biologists often talk about cultural carrying capacity as though it’s an immutable number but the only reason we struggle to tolerate beavers is that we’re so bad at preventing them from drowning our roads and property the better we get at averting conflicts the more beavers society can tolerate and the more fully we can reap their rewards
[0:33:32 – 0:33:37] Adam: Most people don’t care about beavers being on the landscape as long as the roads aren’t being flooded.
[0:33:37 – 0:33:43] Adam: Once you protect the culverts, the cultural carrying capacity becomes basically whatever the landscape will allow.
[0:33:43 – 0:33:47] Erik: So put some mesh nets and grates in front of your culverts.
[0:33:47 – 0:33:50] Adam: The biological carrying capacity is what we need to get to.
[0:33:50 – 0:33:51] Erik: Right?
[0:33:52 – 0:33:53] Adam: Well, yeah.
[0:33:53 – 0:33:54] Adam: Flow devices.
[0:33:55 – 0:33:56] Erik: Flow devices.
[0:33:56 – 0:33:57] Erik: Yeah.
[0:33:57 – 0:33:57] Erik: No.
[0:33:58 – 0:33:58] Erik: Dynamite.
[0:33:59 – 0:34:02] Erik: We need dynamite and blow darts slash shotguns.
[0:34:03 – 0:34:04] Adam: So yeah.
[0:34:05 – 0:34:10] Adam: For one, you know, a lot of times they end up finding a road in a culvert and they’ll just dam it.
[0:34:10 – 0:34:16] Erik: Well, I mean, because a lot of times the reason that that culvert exists is because that’s a good spot for a beaver dam.
[0:34:16 – 0:34:18] Erik: That’s a natural spot where water was going to flow.
[0:34:18 – 0:34:22] Adam: So they come in and they jam a couple of twigs in the culvert and dam it up and easy peasy.
[0:34:23 – 0:34:23] Erik: Yeah.
[0:34:23 – 0:34:24] Erik: You can’t.
[0:34:24 – 0:34:25] Adam: That’s not good.
[0:34:25 – 0:34:27] Erik: I had a road here and I’m a human.
[0:34:27 – 0:34:29] Erik: I got to haul in some buckets.
[0:34:30 – 0:34:33] Erik: That guy wants me to haul off his property.
[0:34:33 – 0:34:34] Erik: You’re a pest.
[0:34:35 – 0:34:36] Erik: No, I’m just doing my thing.
[0:34:36 – 0:34:37] Erik: I’m here, Beaver.
[0:34:37 – 0:34:38] Erik: I’m doing a Beaver thing.
[0:34:40 – 0:34:44] Adam: All we got to do literally is put some like metal caging around the culvert.
[0:34:44 – 0:34:44] Adam: They’re dumb.
[0:34:45 – 0:34:45] Erik: Yeah.
[0:34:45 – 0:34:47] Adam: They have a brain the size of a walnut.
[0:34:48 – 0:34:49] Adam: You put a little metal caging around it.
[0:34:50 – 0:34:52] Adam: They can’t really dam up the culvert, but the water is still there.
[0:34:53 – 0:34:55] Adam: It’s controlling the level of the water.
[0:34:56 – 0:35:20] Adam: flow instead of allowing them just build it up and cover the road it’s called uh yeah flow what was it a flow device device yeah you’re restricting the flow through this area like so they live fine but they’re not ruining the road it’s really easy to put one in there’s like 100 pages of this book that go into these flow devices and why they’re a good thing
[0:35:21 – 0:35:23] Erik: That sounds boring, but also interesting.
[0:35:23 – 0:35:24] Adam: No, it is.
[0:35:24 – 0:35:25] Adam: It’s really boring.
[0:35:25 – 0:35:26] Erik: 100 pages on flow devices?
[0:35:26 – 0:35:30] Erik: I mean, I love beavers, but that also sounds a little much.
[0:35:30 – 0:35:31] Adam: Yeah, we’re not going into that.
[0:35:31 – 0:35:36] Adam: But basically, you can build these little cages around culverts so the water can still flow.
[0:35:37 – 0:35:42] Adam: They have enough water to thrive, but it’s not going to overflow the roads or somebody’s field or whatever.
[0:35:42 – 0:35:44] Erik: Stay tuned to part four.
[0:35:44 – 0:35:46] Erik: Part four, flow devices.
[0:35:46 – 0:35:48] Erik: Flow devices and beaver mitigation.
[0:35:49 – 0:35:58] Adam: Yeah, I mean, you can try and steer beavers to where you want them to go, but they’re going to go wherever they want to go, which is the natural way to live for them.
[0:35:59 – 0:36:00] Adam: It’s in the streams.
[0:36:00 – 0:36:01] Adam: It’s in the water.
[0:36:01 – 0:36:02] Adam: They’re creating wetlands.
[0:36:03 – 0:36:04] Adam: That’s what they’re meant to do.
[0:36:04 – 0:36:05] Adam: Exactly.
[0:36:05 – 0:36:07] Adam: It’s like telling a squirrel not to climb a tree.
[0:36:07 – 0:36:07] Adam: Yeah.
[0:36:07 – 0:36:09] Adam: It’s like telling a dog not to chew the tree.
[0:36:10 – 0:36:14] Adam: It’s like telling a cat not to climb up on top of the air in Roger’s signed picture up here.
[0:36:14 – 0:36:15] Adam: Get down, Agnes.
[0:36:15 – 0:36:17] Adam: It’s like telling me not to drink a beer.
[0:36:18 – 0:36:19] Adam: Am I right?
[0:36:19 – 0:36:27] Adam: Much though we want beavers to settle where we put them and reliably filter our water and irrigate crops, the creatures ultimately follow no designs but their own.
[0:36:28 – 0:36:34] Adam: Our relationship with beavers may have advanced light years since the fur trade, but it’s still fundamentally utilitarian.
[0:36:35 – 0:36:39] Adam: Only now it’s their dam building skills rather than their pelts that we exploit.
[0:36:41 – 0:36:43] Erik: Dam building skills.
[0:36:48 – 0:36:51] Adam: Yeah, so anyways, there’s ways around it.
[0:36:51 – 0:36:52] Adam: You can have beavers.
[0:36:53 – 0:36:55] Adam: There’s the whole section, and go read the book.
[0:36:55 – 0:36:56] Adam: It’s an amazing book.
[0:36:57 – 0:37:03] Adam: So there’s ways that you can have beavers, but that they won’t overwhelm our infrastructure and ruin our roads and fields.
[0:37:04 – 0:37:04] Adam: All right?
[0:37:05 – 0:37:07] Adam: Just leave it at that, but go read the book.
[0:37:07 – 0:37:08] Adam: It’s very interesting.
[0:37:09 – 0:37:09] Adam: I can’t get into it.
[0:37:10 – 0:37:10] Adam: I got it.
[0:37:10 – 0:37:11] Adam: All right?
[0:37:11 – 0:37:12] Adam: I got it.
[0:37:14 – 0:37:15] Adam: This is the part I really liked.
[0:37:15 – 0:37:16] Adam: Yes, there you go.
[0:37:17 – 0:37:29] Adam: This is the part where I would start talking about water retention and how they actually… You think like, oh, the Hoover Dam can control more water than any stupid beaver can control.
[0:37:29 – 0:37:29] Adam: You’re wrong.
[0:37:29 – 0:37:31] Erik: Hey, how dare you?
[0:37:31 – 0:37:40] Erik: You take your sticks and your mud and your pebbles and you can shove them up your asexual beaver butt.
[0:37:40 – 0:37:43] Erik: I’ve got my man-made concrete.
[0:37:43 – 0:37:51] Adam: It must be pretty discouraging to an engineer who built the Hoover Dam to realize that a bunch of rodents could control more water than they could.
[0:37:51 – 0:37:53] Erik: Yeah, listen up, engineers.
[0:37:53 – 0:37:54] Erik: You’re going to get schooled.
[0:37:54 – 0:38:00] Adam: So at first when they tried to measure it, they were like, well, no, I mean, these ponds are a foot deep or whatever.
[0:38:00 – 0:38:01] Erik: It’s not possible.
[0:38:01 – 0:38:02] Adam: And they’re only this big.
[0:38:03 – 0:38:07] Adam: So you’d have to have a thousand of these dams to control as much water as the Hoover Dam.
[0:38:08 – 0:38:11] Adam: But that’s not the full measurement of the water capture.
[0:38:12 – 0:38:13] Adam: Most of it’s underground.
[0:38:13 – 0:38:15] Adam: Most of it’s in the aquifer.
[0:38:15 – 0:38:17] Adam: If anybody’s read, have you read about the Ogallala?
[0:38:18 – 0:38:19] Adam: It’s crazy.
[0:38:19 – 0:38:20] Adam: They’re sucking the straw.
[0:38:20 – 0:38:22] Adam: The milkshake is gone dry.
[0:38:22 – 0:38:28] Erik: It’s like that episode of The Simpsons where they drill at an angle under Moe’s bar.
[0:38:28 – 0:38:28] Adam: Yeah.
[0:38:29 – 0:38:30] Erik: No, it’s under the school.
[0:38:30 – 0:38:33] Erik: Yeah, it’s an angled drilling company.
[0:38:33 – 0:38:33] Erik: Sorry.
[0:38:33 – 0:38:36] Adam: It’s also the plot of There Will Be Blood.
[0:38:36 – 0:38:37] Erik: Yeah.
[0:38:37 – 0:38:38] Erik: Yeah, no, sorry.
[0:38:38 – 0:38:39] Erik: Your oil’s all gone.
[0:38:39 – 0:38:41] Erik: We kind of took it from over here.
[0:38:41 – 0:38:41] Adam: Side sucked it.
[0:38:43 – 0:38:43] Adam: Oh, man.
[0:38:44 – 0:38:45] Adam: Anyways, the point…
[0:38:45 – 0:38:48] Erik: So the point is that beavers are not capitalists?
[0:38:49 – 0:38:49] Adam: They don’t care.
[0:38:49 – 0:38:50] Adam: They don’t care.
[0:38:50 – 0:38:51] Adam: They don’t care about profits.
[0:38:51 – 0:38:52] Adam: They’re just doing their own thing.
[0:38:52 – 0:38:53] Adam: They’re just doing their own thing.
[0:38:54 – 0:38:58] Adam: Here is the thing that I found the most interesting about the whole book.
[0:38:58 – 0:38:59] Adam: All right, we’re in.
[0:38:59 – 0:39:01] Adam: This is like over two hours.
[0:39:01 – 0:39:05] Adam: Anybody who’s stuck around this long into beaver talk is about to get a real treat.
[0:39:05 – 0:39:05] Erik: Here we go.
[0:39:05 – 0:39:08] Adam: If you think about a beaver pond, it holds this much water.
[0:39:08 – 0:39:10] Adam: It’s like a bathtub, right?
[0:39:11 – 0:39:12] Erik: Got it.
[0:39:12 – 0:39:12] Adam: It’s not.
[0:39:13 – 0:39:36] Adam: okay it’s not it the weight of the water that is being um held back by the dam the weight of that water you think like okay it’s just capturing this water no the weight of just the water in this small pond it pushes uh the water down into the aquifer
[0:39:37 – 0:39:41] Adam: In ways that, for whatever reason, a concrete dam will not do.
[0:39:43 – 0:39:45] Adam: Because the concrete dam is just holding it there.
[0:39:46 – 0:39:49] Adam: A beaver dam is allowed to breathe a little bit more.
[0:39:49 – 0:39:50] Adam: It’s more natural.
[0:39:50 – 0:39:59] Adam: And so it allows water to slowly filter through, and therefore it allows the weight of the water itself to work magic.
[0:40:00 – 0:40:05] Adam: It pushes an insane amount of water down into the aquifer itself.
[0:40:05 – 0:40:08] Erik: Well, I mean, you might need to explain this magic a little bit more.
[0:40:09 – 0:40:19] Erik: So water is pushing itself up against a beaver dam, which is made up of twigs and logs and obviously some sediment and stone.
[0:40:19 – 0:40:19] Erik: Yes.
[0:40:20 – 0:40:22] Erik: And that’s pushing…
[0:40:23 – 0:40:28] Erik: More water into a place that’s not as cut off?
[0:40:28 – 0:40:41] Adam: Instead of pushing water out and making a reservoir that covers up cities and entire valleys, the beavers just keep the water in the river floodplain itself.
[0:40:42 – 0:40:45] Adam: And I’m sure I’m not explaining this perfectly.
[0:40:45 – 0:40:46] Adam: Well, it’s fine.
[0:40:46 – 0:40:50] Adam: But the way that the book explains it is that it…
[0:40:51 – 0:40:58] Adam: It allows the water to slowly seep and be gravity-forced down into the aquifer itself like a sponge.
[0:40:58 – 0:40:59] Erik: Into the earth.
[0:41:00 – 0:41:06] Adam: Rather than like, yeah, it’s either just you’re holding it and like building this huge reservoir which scours down to bedrock.
[0:41:06 – 0:41:07] Adam: Yeah.
[0:41:08 – 0:41:09] Adam: You have this like system.
[0:41:09 – 0:41:27] Adam: It’s more like throwing a, basically they said it’s like throwing a big towel into the river and it just sort of soaks it all up and then the weight of that like pushes all the water that comes into the pond down into the aquifer before letting it go downstream like in the original riverbed.
[0:41:28 – 0:41:29] Erik: Okay.
[0:41:29 – 0:41:42] Adam: I don’t know if I explained that correctly, but basically the gist of it is, like, beaver dams, the weight of the water itself pushes water down rather than, like, into the ground rather than allowing it to go downstream.
[0:41:43 – 0:41:47] Adam: Whereas if the beaver dam wasn’t there, the water would just go downstream like a ditch.
[0:41:47 – 0:41:47] Erik: Sure.
[0:41:48 – 0:42:03] Adam: But by trapping the water and kind of slowing it down and letting it do its thing with these plants that kind of build up into it, all the willow, the shrubs and the trees that grow on the banks, down to the little microscopic little plants that grow in the river itself.
[0:42:03 – 0:42:03] Erik: Yeah.
[0:42:04 – 0:42:10] Adam: All this slows the water down like a sponge and allows it to actually take the time to seep and push itself into the ground water.
[0:42:11 – 0:42:26] Erik: But isn’t a half-mile tall big wall of cement that’s just blocking all of this natural flow of water in the middle of the desert way cooler?
[0:42:28 – 0:42:31] Adam: Well, for at least 30 years until it needs maintenance.
[0:42:31 – 0:42:32] Erik: Oh, okay.
[0:42:32 – 0:42:36] Adam: Let me just read this passage because I don’t know that I’m quite saying it right.
[0:42:37 – 0:42:47] Adam: As the pond’s weight pressed into the forest floor, the impounding water forced itself through the earth’s cracks and pores, infiltrating soil and recharging the underlying aquifer.
[0:42:47 – 0:42:50] Adam: Some 30% of the world’s freshwater is stored underground.
[0:42:51 – 0:42:59] Adam: In many rain-deprived places, aquifers, layer of soil and rock, whose minute crevices are saturated with groundwater, provide the primary source.
[0:43:00 – 0:43:05] Adam: Our relationship with groundwater, as with most natural resources, tends towards abuse.
[0:43:06 – 0:43:16] Adam: So yeah, farmers are sucking the aquifers dry because they got rid of all the beavers and there’s no more beavers around to help force water back down into the aquifer.
[0:43:16 – 0:43:21] Adam: Basically, they help to restore the more natural order of water.
[0:43:22 – 0:43:24] Adam: Aquifers are often linked to savings accounts.
[0:43:25 – 0:43:31] Adam: Withdraw more than you make in interest, and pretty soon you’re eaten into your principal, and then you’re broke.
[0:43:32 – 0:43:38] Adam: There’s this whole section in there about how farmers are living on a fixed income now, and there’s a lot of groundwater becoming rationed.
[0:43:39 – 0:43:41] Adam: It’s more like a commodity, especially out west.
[0:43:41 – 0:43:42] Adam: You only get so much.
[0:43:43 – 0:44:11] Adam: uh beaver dams are one of the most economical and efficient ways to trap and store water and yet in many places in america they are no longer there because we got rid of them to make room for farmland you see the the uh what’s the word i’m looking for the irony you got rid of the beavers to make farmland but because the beavers are gone the farmland no longer has the water it needs to be productive yeah it’s a weird double irony
[0:44:13 – 0:44:13] Adam: It’s abuse.
[0:44:13 – 0:44:14] Erik: Multi-layered.
[0:44:14 – 0:44:15] Adam: It tends towards abuse.
[0:44:16 – 0:44:21] Erik: Tends towards abuse if you’re not already listening.
[0:44:21 – 0:44:22] Adam: I never thought about this, though.
[0:44:22 – 0:44:33] Adam: It was just this idea that you think about, yeah, beaver dams are just trapping this water on the surface, but it’s kind of the iceberg thing where you see this tip of this iceberg.
[0:44:34 – 0:44:35] Adam: That’s what we see with beaver dams.
[0:44:36 – 0:44:41] Adam: And then what they’re really doing, most of the water they’re trapping is being pushed down, not
[0:44:43 – 0:44:44] Adam: flat on the surface.
[0:44:44 – 0:44:45] Erik: Yeah, out to the sides.
[0:44:46 – 0:44:52] Adam: It’s what they’re doing on the sides and surfaces, which really pushing the majority of the groundwater they’re trapping is going down.
[0:44:52 – 0:44:53] Erik: Yeah.
[0:44:54 – 0:44:56] Adam: I had never even considered this before.
[0:44:56 – 0:44:57] Erik: No, not really.
[0:44:58 – 0:45:01] Adam: And so then you look back, like, oh, this river back here.
[0:45:01 – 0:45:04] Adam: You know, our well is 100 foot.
[0:45:04 – 0:45:06] Adam: It’s a super shallow well for Cook County.
[0:45:06 – 0:45:06] Erik: Yeah.
[0:45:07 – 0:45:09] Adam: It’s some of the best water I’ve ever tasted.
[0:45:09 – 0:45:13] Adam: There’s a beaver dam right back there, and everybody’s like, don’t drink water from the beaver dam.
[0:45:13 – 0:45:20] Adam: It’s all because of this aquifer right back here is being, like, constantly, like, flooded by this sponge in our backyard.
[0:45:21 – 0:45:23] Adam: That’s some of the best drinking water I’ve ever tasted in my life.
[0:45:24 – 0:45:24] Adam: It’s all…
[0:45:25 – 0:45:31] Adam: When I was reading this passage, it’s like, yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
[0:45:31 – 0:45:32] Adam: Water is heavy as hell.
[0:45:33 – 0:45:35] Adam: It’s pushing this more water down into the aquifer.
[0:45:35 – 0:45:37] Adam: What’s our aquifer like around here?
[0:45:38 – 0:45:42] Adam: I mean, like I said, a lot of this book takes place out west where their aquifers are drying up.
[0:45:43 – 0:45:45] Adam: I think there’s a bunch of small ones up here.
[0:45:45 – 0:45:47] Adam: Yeah, it’s a bunch of little ones interconnected.
[0:45:48 – 0:45:50] Erik: No, no, huge ones out west.
[0:45:50 – 0:45:51] Adam: Little pockets.
[0:45:51 – 0:45:52] Adam: Everything’s real wet here.
[0:45:53 – 0:45:54] Adam: We’re very lucky.
[0:45:54 – 0:45:58] Erik: As soon as those big ones out west get dried up, they’re going to start coming for ours.
[0:45:58 – 0:46:00] Adam: They’re going to stick the sideways straw up here maybe.
[0:46:00 – 0:46:01] Adam: I will.
[0:46:02 – 0:46:02] Adam: The water wars.
[0:46:03 – 0:46:04] Adam: We’ve talked about it.
[0:46:04 – 0:46:05] Adam: We’ve mentioned it at least a few times.
[0:46:06 – 0:46:07] Erik: I’ll go to war over that.
[0:46:07 – 0:46:08] Erik: Over water?
[0:46:08 – 0:46:08] Erik: Yeah.
[0:46:08 – 0:46:09] Erik: Yeah.
[0:46:09 – 0:46:14] Erik: Over the water that is for everyone in this Great Lakes region.
[0:46:15 – 0:46:15] Erik: Yeah.
[0:46:15 – 0:46:20] Erik: If it’s going to be transported into a place where it shouldn’t belong.
[0:46:21 – 0:46:24] Adam: Anyway, that’s a different story.
[0:46:24 – 0:46:36] Adam: You know, another thing they did when they’re trying to transplant beaver and move them around, they’ll kind of build up a few little starter dams for them called beaver dam analogs, BDAs.
[0:46:37 – 0:46:37] Erik: Here you go, guys.
[0:46:37 – 0:46:39] Erik: We’re going to get you started.
[0:46:39 – 0:46:40] Erik: It’s a little moving already.
[0:46:40 – 0:46:41] Erik: Just a little starter.
[0:46:41 – 0:46:48] Adam: It gets them going, and then those colonies produce, and they start to take over the watershed up and down from these BDAs.
[0:46:48 – 0:46:51] Adam: See, beavers, they don’t even care if they’re being patronized.
[0:46:52 – 0:46:52] Adam: No, they don’t care.
[0:46:52 – 0:46:53] Adam: They love it.
[0:46:53 – 0:46:54] Adam: We’ll take it.
[0:46:54 – 0:46:55] Adam: We’ll go with it.
[0:46:55 – 0:46:57] Adam: We’re going to run with it.
[0:46:58 – 0:47:03] Adam: You know, and so then they’re doing these projects and they’re like, well, we’ll try these two streams.
[0:47:03 – 0:47:05] Adam: They had two streams and they’re both barren.
[0:47:06 – 0:47:06] Adam: There’s no fish in them.
[0:47:07 – 0:47:09] Adam: They’re just ditches and bedrock.
[0:47:09 – 0:47:11] Adam: There’s no floodplain.
[0:47:11 – 0:47:12] Adam: There’s no plants.
[0:47:12 – 0:47:14] Adam: Everything’s dead from overgrazing.
[0:47:15 – 0:47:17] Adam: They’re just junky streams.
[0:47:17 – 0:47:20] Adam: So we’ll put a couple of these BDAs in one stream and
[0:47:20 – 0:47:24] Adam: and we’ll try and stick some beaver couples in each stream and see how they do.
[0:47:24 – 0:47:27] Adam: Of course, the one that had the beaver starter homes went really well.
[0:47:29 – 0:47:32] Adam: 2016, blockbuster report.
[0:47:33 – 0:47:37] Adam: And one of the things they wanted to check out was like, yeah, sure, the beavers can handle it.
[0:47:37 – 0:47:39] Adam: They love it when you put these BDAs in.
[0:47:39 – 0:47:43] Adam: But a lot of people are like, well, like the Cadence, it’s labeled as a trout stream.
[0:47:44 – 0:47:47] Adam: But you’re like, well, how can there be trout in that?
[0:47:47 – 0:47:48] Adam: It’s just flat water.
[0:47:48 – 0:47:50] Adam: It’s warm, beaver dam water.
[0:47:50 – 0:47:52] Erik: I think there’s trout in there, though.
[0:47:53 – 0:47:55] Adam: And there’s no riffles.
[0:47:55 – 0:47:58] Adam: Trout can’t migrate or go up and downstream from the beaver dams.
[0:48:01 – 0:48:02] Adam: I sort of thought the same thing.
[0:48:03 – 0:48:05] Adam: Like, well, yeah, that’s not really that trouty looking back there.
[0:48:05 – 0:48:08] Adam: This is part of the reason I ended up getting the kayak out.
[0:48:08 – 0:48:09] Adam: I was wrong.
[0:48:11 – 0:48:13] Adam: Oh man, the results were unequivocal.
[0:48:15 – 0:48:22] Adam: The One Creek’s mess of channels, pools, and slackwaters produced nearly three times more fish than the impoverished control stream.
[0:48:22 – 0:48:25] Adam: Steelhead survival rates were 52% higher.
[0:48:26 – 0:48:36] Adam: The study also detected adult steelhead navigating more than 200 dams on their way to spawning grounds, putting to lie the notion that beavers stymie fish passage.
[0:48:37 – 0:48:45] Adam: They talk about this in more detail here, and I’m not going to read that part, but they literally have documented fish can wiggle through beaver dams to go upstream.
[0:48:45 – 0:48:50] Erik: Sure, I’m sure there was some old school… Yeah, like, oh, you got to get rid of the beavers.
[0:48:50 – 0:48:51] Erik: Beaver dams in the way.
[0:48:51 – 0:48:58] Adam: There’s still fishing organizations, like fishing clubs, that are dynamiting beaver dams because it’s ruining their trout habitat.
[0:48:59 – 0:49:01] Adam: On the contrary, it’s helping the trout habitat.
[0:49:01 – 0:49:01] Adam: On the contrary.
[0:49:01 – 0:49:03] Adam: But no, let’s get rid of them.
[0:49:03 – 0:49:03] Erik: 62%.
[0:49:04 – 0:49:05] Adam: They’re making the water warm, Eric.
[0:49:06 – 0:49:07] Adam: No, they’re not.
[0:49:07 – 0:49:07] Adam: Yeah.
[0:49:09 – 0:49:09] Adam: That’s great.
[0:49:09 – 0:49:10] Adam: This is the next part.
[0:49:11 – 0:49:15] Adam: And this is the part that got me to decide I’m going to try and fish the Cadence River some more up here.
[0:49:15 – 0:49:17] Adam: I was going to say, if you’re not on board with beavers yet.
[0:49:17 – 0:49:23] Adam: I thought, you know, it’s slack water, it’s mud bottom, all these things, all these assumptions.
[0:49:24 – 0:49:27] Adam: Like, this book has never made me feel more foolish.
[0:49:28 – 0:49:33] Adam: Because everything I thought about beavers and what they’re doing to the stream behind our house is completely all wrong.
[0:49:35 – 0:49:35] Adam: Fake news.
[0:49:36 – 0:49:38] Adam: That wasn’t the only myth they dispelled.
[0:49:38 – 0:49:41] Adam: Fish biologists often fret that beavers make creeks hotter.
[0:49:41 – 0:49:50] Adam: If that were true, it could spell dire trouble for cold-loving trout who get stressed at 77 degrees and start dying at 84 degrees.
[0:49:50 – 0:50:01] Adam: The group found that far from boiling baby fish, however, beaver dams and the dam analogs actually blunt daily heat spikes, preventing temperatures from skyrocketing.
[0:50:02 – 0:50:03] Adam: This was a blessing.
[0:50:04 – 0:50:13] Adam: Dams may pull that off heat by encouraging the all-important hypopheric heat exchange, forcing water underground to cool off before emerging downstream.
[0:50:14 – 0:50:22] Adam: So, yeah, they’re pushing the water downstream, and then there’s springs, because the aquifer is full, that then percolate up from the groundwater.
[0:50:23 – 0:50:29] Adam: It’s like, what do they call that when they got the tubes in the ground to help heat and cool a house?
[0:50:30 – 0:50:31] Adam: Geothermal?
[0:50:31 – 0:50:33] Adam: It’s a geothermal system, Eric.
[0:50:33 – 0:50:33] Erik: Yeah.
[0:50:34 – 0:50:37] Adam: You think they’re just trapping this water, and it’s going to be a hot pond.
[0:50:37 – 0:50:38] Adam: We have talked about Johnson Falls.
[0:50:38 – 0:50:44] Adam: It’s like, oh, it’s all beaver ponds and moose ponds up there, and that’s why the water in Johnson Falls is so swimmable.
[0:50:45 – 0:51:14] Adam: true but like it doesn’t allow it to reach that like critical level of heat where it’ll like kill out all the fish just sitting on the surface for it’s pushing the water down into the aquifer and then farther downstream that same water is like at cooled by the uh by the underground uh sponge of uh aquifer yeah that was not the best but it comes back up cooling ground sponge yeah it’s a geothermal system for streams yeah this was the moment in the book where i was like
[0:51:14 – 0:51:15] Adam: yeah, I’m going to get some worms.
[0:51:15 – 0:51:17] Adam: I’m going in there, and I’m going to try and fish.
[0:51:17 – 0:51:23] Adam: Unfortunately, the dog keeps following me down there and splashing around, spooking the fish.
[0:51:23 – 0:51:25] Adam: But I do believe there is fish in there.
[0:51:25 – 0:51:30] Adam: It’s deep, as I described earlier, like paddle and arm deep and with a hard bottom.
[0:51:30 – 0:51:38] Erik: We’ve had some staff this summer who have been down on the Cadence and the Cascade down on the shore and have been catching fish.
[0:51:43 – 0:51:44] Erik: Goodbye video.
[0:51:44 – 0:51:45] Erik: We love you.
[0:51:49 – 0:51:50] Adam: Okay, welcome back.
[0:51:50 – 0:51:55] Adam: And so, you know, like I said, a lot of this book takes place out west.
[0:51:56 – 0:52:05] Adam: And, you know, a lot of the book focuses on how to rehabilitate a stream that has been degraded.
[0:52:07 – 0:52:13] Adam: And a lot of it’s on grazing, you know, be it cattle or elk or like bison.
[0:52:14 – 0:52:16] Adam: Bison just rip willow up by the river.
[0:52:16 – 0:52:36] Adam: the little saplings they just eat the whole thing relatively natural and they’re yeah but they’re real bulldozers and like even they aren’t even deterred by wolves you know whereas elk you know you can reintroduce elk to yellowstone or uh wolves yellowstone and they’ll kind of like check the elk back and they’ll keep them away from the wetlands yeah hey take it easy take it easy buddy
[0:52:39 – 0:52:42] Adam: Yeah, I had a lot of notes on this section, but this is the point.
[0:52:42 – 0:52:48] Adam: Overgrazing is overgrazing, whether the perpetrator is wild or domestic.
[0:52:49 – 0:52:53] Adam: And a big part of the book, then, the author had spent a lot of time in Yellowstone.
[0:52:54 – 0:53:03] Adam: And so a lot of the book was then spent on talking about the reintroduction of wolves and how that then, like, okay, the elk are destroying the stream.
[0:53:03 – 0:53:07] Adam: The plants on the edge of the stream are being just ravaged.
[0:53:07 – 0:53:28] Adam: too many elk beavers will like kind of do a crop rotation where they’ll only like pick like four year old willow no they’re not really yes wow and but elk and bison are not so discerning they’ll eat anything yeah right and if you just let them like there’s no predators to scare them off they’ll sit down by the stream and eat everything sure until it’s all gone yeah and that um
[0:53:29 – 0:53:58] Adam: troubling for a stream and so this is one of the greatest ways to degrade it also one of the greatest ways to rehabilitate it is to allow those plants to thrive with the plants keep the beaver because without the plants you have no beaver and without the beaver you have no water as we said before where there is water there is beaver and where there is beaver there is water and so a lot of things they’re doing out west now is they’re like alright just put some fencing up
[0:53:58 – 0:54:19] Adam: restrict like what sections of the stream your cattle can get at at a certain time here and rather than just always open grazing yeah try and uh you know do what the beaver doing like don’t just continually farm the same soil exactly yeah um so this is a big way forward um you know a big thing in yellowstone was they brought the wolves back and so then it was like okay the elk
[0:54:20 – 0:54:39] Adam: can’t just sit there the bison are another thing they like aren’t really scared of the wolves but like at least with the elk they’re like okay the elk can’t just sit there all day chewing on it they can help by putting in these beaver dam analogs and like reintroducing beaver and so like okay um everything’s kind of like doing well in yellowstone now
[0:54:40 – 0:54:50] Adam: This is called a trophic cascade, a dynamic in which the influence of a top predator ripples throughout the food web.
[0:54:52 – 0:54:58] Adam: It changes everything from the vegetation to the top end of the food pyramid.
[0:54:58 – 0:55:00] Erik: By having the wolf there… Up and down.
[0:55:00 – 0:55:01] Adam: Yeah, everything.
[0:55:01 – 0:55:03] Adam: Again, like the beaver does.
[0:55:04 – 0:55:04] Adam: So…
[0:55:05 – 0:55:08] Adam: Yeah, I mean, he talks a lot about this.
[0:55:08 – 0:55:09] Adam: It’s really interesting.
[0:55:10 – 0:55:18] Adam: But despite the wolf reintroduction and despite beavers’ recovery, many Yellowstone valleys still remain untransformed.
[0:55:19 – 0:55:27] Adam: The sad reality was that a century of mismanagement had inflicted damage that neither wolves nor beavers could readily repair.
[0:55:27 – 0:55:29] Erik: To a man-made thing?
[0:55:29 – 0:55:38] Adam: Yeah, I mean, just by eradicating the beaver, turning wetland into farmland, and doing that on a continental scale.
[0:55:39 – 0:55:45] Adam: It’s like, yeah, you can bring back wolves, and you can reintroduce beaver couples by smelling their butts and sending them up a creek, but…
[0:55:45 – 0:55:47] Erik: This one smells like old cheese.
[0:55:47 – 0:55:48] Adam: And this one smells like oil.
[0:55:49 – 0:55:50] Adam: Let’s put him in this canyon.
[0:55:50 – 0:55:51] Erik: I can’t find the oily boy.
[0:55:51 – 0:55:53] Erik: Where’s the oily boy?
[0:55:53 – 0:55:53] Erik: He’s gone.
[0:55:54 – 0:55:54] Erik: I’m sorry.
[0:55:55 – 0:56:00] Adam: Yeah, it was a millennia to create this beautiful continent.
[0:56:00 – 0:56:03] Erik: So it’s going to be a millennia before it ever comes back.
[0:56:03 – 0:56:04] Adam: And a decade to unravel.
[0:56:04 – 0:56:07] Adam: And yeah, it’ll take another millennia to build it back.
[0:56:07 – 0:56:11] Erik: Is there anything that’s analogous to that?
[0:56:12 – 0:56:24] Erik: That you could compare that something that is so long to build up but is so easily broken down that will take…
[0:56:25 – 0:56:33] Adam: Well, I read that book, Golden Spruce, and they talk about these amazing big spruce and cedars, the western red cedar.
[0:56:33 – 0:56:34] Erik: So just basically anything in nature.
[0:56:34 – 0:56:35] Adam: It’s virgin timber.
[0:56:36 – 0:56:37] Erik: Anything in nature.
[0:56:37 – 0:56:38] Adam: None of us will ever see virgin timber again.
[0:56:38 – 0:56:39] Erik: Just dumb.
[0:56:39 – 0:56:40] Erik: Dumb humans.
[0:56:40 – 0:56:40] Erik: They cut them down.
[0:56:40 – 0:56:42] Adam: They cut down trees the size of this house.
[0:56:43 – 0:56:45] Adam: They cut them down, and we’ll never see one again.
[0:56:45 – 0:56:48] Adam: And we’ll never see what North America looked like in its true prime.
[0:56:49 – 0:56:59] Erik: We haven’t gotten to our creed, but I feel like this show is going to become a show that just disparages crap like that to try to keep us from doing it again.
[0:56:59 – 0:57:01] Adam: It is going to kind of end on a sad note.
[0:57:02 – 0:57:04] Adam: There is no happy ending to this book.
[0:57:04 – 0:57:05] Erik: Yeah, we’re not living in golden times.
[0:57:05 – 0:57:13] Adam: This is kind of the bookend to the line that I really liked from part one, and this is my second favorite line from the book.
[0:57:13 – 0:57:14] Adam: To bring it back around.
[0:57:15 – 0:57:22] Adam: The absence of beaver opposes the return of tall willows, and the absence of tall willows opposes the return of beaver.
[0:57:24 – 0:57:24] Adam: They have nothing to eat.
[0:57:25 – 0:57:26] Adam: There’s no tall willows.
[0:57:26 – 0:57:27] Erik: That works perfectly.
[0:57:27 – 0:57:28] Adam: They have nowhere to start.
[0:57:28 – 0:57:30] Adam: You can’t move into a stream where there’s no food.
[0:57:31 – 0:57:31] Erik: Yeah.
[0:57:31 – 0:57:37] Adam: And so that’s why still many streams, despite their best efforts to make things right, will never be right.
[0:57:37 – 0:57:38] Erik: Yeah.
[0:57:38 – 0:57:45] Adam: Because they can’t establish the willows and aspens they need to eat and get a colony started.
[0:57:45 – 0:57:48] Adam: And therefore, the colony will never be started.
[0:57:48 – 0:57:52] Adam: And therefore, there will never be the proper amount of willows they need.
[0:57:52 – 0:57:53] Adam: Yeah.
[0:57:54 – 0:58:20] Adam: where there’s water there will always be beavers and the same is true with the willows it’s kind of a downer but we’re going to leave it on a high note we have countless examples sorry start again I was just saying they seem resilient they are and they don’t really care what we’re doing they have a short memory they only live to be 20 as we’ve established we should have looked that up between parts 1 and part 2
[0:58:21 – 0:58:22] Adam: Wait, they only live to be 21.
[0:58:25 – 0:58:26] Adam: I don’t know.
[0:58:26 – 0:58:27] Adam: Maybe they live to be longer than a cat.
[0:58:27 – 0:58:28] Adam: That sounds about right.
[0:58:29 – 0:58:42] Adam: We have countless examples of how Castor canadensis uses and abuses human-built infrastructure, but precious few places we can observe beavers interact with a full complement of native wildlife.
[0:58:43 – 0:58:46] Adam: Beavers are defined by their role as a keystone species.
[0:58:47 – 0:58:51] Adam: The Greater Yellowstone is one of a handful of ecosystems where the arch remains intact.
[0:58:53 – 0:58:54] Adam: And here is where I will interject.
[0:58:55 – 0:59:01] Adam: The Boundary Wanderers is also one, and I would say probably a lot better example than anything in Yellowstone.
[0:59:01 – 0:59:04] Adam: Yellowstone got kind of dismantled from what the book says.
[0:59:04 – 0:59:09] Adam: They’re really fighting to make it right again, to try and bring Beaver back.
[0:59:09 – 0:59:11] Adam: A Yellowstone without Beaver is not Yellowstone.
[0:59:14 – 0:59:19] Adam: Just as like, can you imagine on Boundary Waters where they took out all the beavers and then they’re like, hey, we should try and bring them back.
[0:59:20 – 0:59:21] Adam: I don’t know what that would look like.
[0:59:21 – 0:59:21] Adam: Yeah.
[0:59:22 – 0:59:23] Adam: Yeah.
[0:59:23 – 0:59:26] Adam: So this is where it was left to me.
[0:59:30 – 0:59:35] Adam: Yeah, I mean, Yellowstone was abetted by this relocation program.
[0:59:36 – 0:59:39] Adam: It was a wild ecosystem, and I like this line.
[0:59:40 – 0:59:44] Adam: It was indelibly smudged with human fingerprints.
[0:59:44 – 0:59:45] Erik: Mm-hmm.
[0:59:45 – 0:59:48] Adam: I don’t feel like the Boundary Waters is that smudged.
[0:59:48 – 0:59:51] Adam: Sure, there was motorboats in there at one point.
[0:59:51 – 0:59:52] Adam: It’s been logged.
[0:59:52 – 0:59:53] Adam: It’s been logged.
[0:59:54 – 0:59:57] Adam: And you can definitely see remnants of that.
[0:59:57 – 1:00:02] Adam: And just everyday visiting there, you see the smudge of the human fingerprint.
[1:00:03 – 1:00:07] Adam: But from what the book was describing, how there’s basically no beavers there.
[1:00:08 – 1:00:12] Adam: I’m sure at one point during the hat craze of the beavers.
[1:00:12 – 1:00:13] Erik: The hat craze?
[1:00:13 – 1:00:14] Erik: The hat.
[1:00:14 – 1:00:15] Adam: Yeah.
[1:00:15 – 1:00:17] Adam: Trying to make all the wellingtons they can make.
[1:00:18 – 1:00:18] Adam: Yeah.
[1:00:18 – 1:00:25] Adam: There probably was a point in the Boundary Waters and in this area we call home where their beaver were a lot less than they are now.
[1:00:26 – 1:00:26] Erik: Oh, I’m sure.
[1:00:26 – 1:00:33] Adam: But I don’t think that this area ever received that kind of punishing blow that we’re like, whoa, they almost knocked them out of here.
[1:00:33 – 1:00:35] Adam: And now they got to try and reintroduce them.
[1:00:35 – 1:00:35] Erik: Yeah.
[1:00:36 – 1:00:39] Adam: You know, the beaver are still here.
[1:00:39 – 1:00:44] Adam: And I don’t think it ever got that bad here to the point where like everything got degraded.
[1:00:45 – 1:00:46] Adam: The boundary waters is a huge part of that.
[1:00:47 – 1:00:48] Erik: I think it got close.
[1:00:48 – 1:00:52] Erik: I mean, I think the fur trade with the obsession with hats over in Europe.
[1:00:53 – 1:01:00] Adam: Yeah, it went from millions and millions of animals down to like almost none and then back up to, you know, what I said at the beginning, 15 million now.
[1:01:01 – 1:01:06] Adam: So there was definitely a, you know, they came close to taking them out of North America.
[1:01:06 – 1:01:13] Adam: I would say this part was one of their like stronger hold fasts.
[1:01:13 – 1:01:13] Erik: Well, yeah.
[1:01:14 – 1:01:26] Erik: I mean, in a place where it was very difficult for them to be trapped, killed, you know, and hauled back off to Europe is probably a big part of it.
[1:01:26 – 1:01:27] Erik: Yeah.
[1:01:27 – 1:01:30] Erik: It was really great accessibility to them, but.
[1:01:31 – 1:01:53] Adam: yeah no the that whole i mean it was just reading this book made me like even more sad about the west like just you know these big dams they’ve built strangling the rivers they have um man kind of you know and i get you know you gotta you need water but like that’s what happens when you have too many people living in an area where there’s not water
[1:01:54 – 1:01:58] Erik: Yeah, it’s a conversation that you could…
[1:01:58 – 1:02:01] Erik: I don’t even know what to make of it.
[1:02:01 – 1:02:07] Erik: In terms of where we stand as a podcast to try to talk about it.
[1:02:08 – 1:02:14] Adam: Yeah, but I mean, what I took away from it in the end was like, yeah, I think we’ve come to the point where
[1:02:16 – 1:02:21] Adam: Beavers were regarded as pests and they must be exterminated at all costs.
[1:02:21 – 1:02:23] Adam: Which you could say… Manifest destiny.
[1:02:23 – 1:02:25] Adam: You could say about a lot of animals.
[1:02:25 – 1:02:26] Adam: Take them out and turn that into farmland.
[1:02:27 – 1:02:27] Adam: Yeah.
[1:02:28 – 1:02:34] Adam: And now they’ve kind of come back to where a lot of people are starting to recognize how beneficial they can be, but not everyone.
[1:02:35 – 1:02:41] Adam: And the areas that need them the most have the most difficulty trying to get them to come back and thrive.
[1:02:41 – 1:02:44] Erik: They’re probably the folks that don’t recognize their importance the most.
[1:02:44 – 1:02:45] Erik: Yeah.
[1:02:45 – 1:02:45] Adam: Yeah.
[1:02:46 – 1:03:09] Erik: um the there’s still a lot of people that view them as pests and um are there any animals that are truly pests that actually cause mozzies well of course besides mozzies like what the mosquitoes really do anything to help humans in any way or even like the the animal kingdom i don’t think they do
[1:03:10 – 1:03:11] Erik: I don’t know.
[1:03:11 – 1:03:12] Adam: There’s got to be something.
[1:03:12 – 1:03:13] Adam: I’ll go on record.
[1:03:13 – 1:03:15] Adam: We need a book about mozzies.
[1:03:15 – 1:03:17] Erik: Yeah, is there a book about mosquitoes?
[1:03:17 – 1:03:18] Erik: The Untold Truth.
[1:03:18 – 1:03:19] Adam: They’re actually good for humans.
[1:03:19 – 1:03:20] Adam: I don’t know.
[1:03:20 – 1:03:24] Adam: I mean, it was kind of a, you know, the book left me a bit sad.
[1:03:24 – 1:03:25] Adam: You know, it’s like, of course.
[1:03:26 – 1:03:31] Adam: Yeah, just another book about how we’re ruining this planet and how it’ll never be the same.
[1:03:32 – 1:03:36] Adam: And we’ll never in a million years understand like anybody who’s left
[1:03:36 – 1:03:41] Adam: We’ll never even see then like what it was truly like before we wrecked it all.
[1:03:42 – 1:03:42] Erik: Yeah.
[1:03:42 – 1:03:44] Adam: Like, how can you be uplifted by that?
[1:03:44 – 1:03:47] Adam: And how can you make a two hour, two part podcast out of that?
[1:03:48 – 1:03:51] Adam: But what I was left with was like, yeah, damn, we’re lucky.
[1:03:52 – 1:03:55] Adam: Like, we live in my backyard at the Cadence River.
[1:03:55 – 1:04:00] Adam: There’s a natural, you know, there’s a family of beaver back there making a go of it.
[1:04:00 – 1:04:01] Erik: Yeah.
[1:04:01 – 1:04:16] Adam: And relatively undisturbed and probably pretty close to what this, of anywhere in North America, like, this is probably what they’re talking about, this spaghetti river of, like, wetlands and just little flows of water and the aquifer operating how it should.
[1:04:16 – 1:04:16] Adam: Yeah.
[1:04:20 – 1:04:24] Adam: We’re very lucky to live in a place where things are this undisturbed.
[1:04:24 – 1:04:25] Adam: That’s what I was left with.
[1:04:25 – 1:04:29] Adam: And anytime you paddle the Boundary Waters, anybody who’s been in the park can see that.
[1:04:30 – 1:04:31] Erik: Yeah, and that’s why it exists.
[1:04:32 – 1:04:41] Erik: I think that’s, if there’s anything, say what you will about the proliferation and the expansion of man and how we want to affect the world that we live in.
[1:04:42 – 1:04:42] Erik: All right, fine.
[1:04:43 – 1:04:48] Erik: Do what you want, but just save a little sliver, please.
[1:04:49 – 1:04:54] Erik: Just a little place that people can go to and say, this is what it used to be like.
[1:04:54 – 1:04:56] Erik: This is where we came from.
[1:04:56 – 1:04:59] Erik: This is what I can relate to.
[1:05:00 – 1:05:04] Erik: I’m not going to argue with anybody who wants to do anything with the Twin Cities.
[1:05:05 – 1:05:08] Erik: I mean, there are problems down there that I can’t even comprehend, I am sure.
[1:05:09 – 1:05:13] Erik: But don’t… Just don’t mess up a few areas.
[1:05:13 – 1:05:15] Erik: At this point, that’s all I can say.
[1:05:15 – 1:05:18] Adam: One of the few areas where, like, from the zooplankton to the moose… Yeah, from top to bottom.
[1:05:18 – 1:05:22] Adam: …that everything is kind of still intact and, like, functioning together how it should.
[1:05:23 – 1:05:24] Adam: And, of course, it’s not perfect.
[1:05:24 – 1:05:24] Adam: No, it’s…
[1:05:24 – 1:05:27] Adam: But, like, of anywhere we have left, another…
[1:05:27 – 1:05:30] Adam: like example of how important this wilderness is.
[1:05:30 – 1:05:32] Adam: And that’s what really drove it home to me.
[1:05:32 – 1:05:33] Adam: This book wasn’t about Minnesota.
[1:05:34 – 1:05:34] Erik: No, right.
[1:05:34 – 1:05:38] Adam: This book was about beavers, but it was about water.
[1:05:40 – 1:05:59] Erik: The concentration of the BWCA and the Quetico Wilderness, both of those together is like, because I have a friend who did research just on the edges and the fragmentation of wilderness and roads and power lines and how that affects animals and birds.
[1:06:00 – 1:06:13] Erik: And just on the edges, you can notice a huge difference in how animals from flying, swimming, walking gets affected by human interaction.
[1:06:13 – 1:06:13] Adam: Yeah.
[1:06:14 – 1:06:19] Erik: Even on the peripheral edges of the Boundary Waters and Quetico.
[1:06:20 – 1:06:32] Erik: So to be able to maintain all of that as one, no matter how, I mean, in the grand scheme of things, it is quite small, is something that at this point, I mean, that’s the only thing I can fight for.
[1:06:33 – 1:06:36] Erik: I can’t say let’s make more wildernesses because that’s not going to happen.
[1:06:36 – 1:06:38] Adam: No, it will not.
[1:06:38 – 1:06:38] Erik: Everything that I…
[1:06:38 – 1:06:43] Adam: I hope where there’s not wilderness, they can find ways to coexist.
[1:06:43 – 1:06:43] Adam: Yeah.
[1:06:43 – 1:06:47] Adam: Because they can do a lot of good still, even in a suburban environment.
[1:06:47 – 1:06:50] Adam: Beavers can thrive there and help.
[1:06:50 – 1:06:52] Erik: If you just make a few different choices…
[1:06:53 – 1:06:55] Adam: Grazing lands out west.
[1:06:55 – 1:07:02] Adam: There’s a lot of examples in the books about how instead of shooting them all, how about you let them just thrive and keep your cows off the banks?
[1:07:03 – 1:07:04] Adam: And look at that.
[1:07:04 – 1:07:06] Adam: When there’s a drought, your cows still have water to get to.
[1:07:07 – 1:07:07] Adam: Amazing.
[1:07:07 – 1:07:09] Adam: And so people are coming around to it again.
[1:07:10 – 1:07:12] Adam: And this is a theme, too, I see in everyday life.
[1:07:12 – 1:07:16] Adam: Like this is everything’s in cycles.
[1:07:16 – 1:07:17] Adam: Time is a flat circle.
[1:07:17 – 1:07:21] Adam: Like we are back on the upswing towards getting it right again.
[1:07:21 – 1:07:23] Adam: And we’re never going to get it back to where it was.
[1:07:23 – 1:07:27] Adam: But here we have a place that looks almost like it did back in the day.
[1:07:27 – 1:07:28] Adam: And we got to protect it.
[1:07:29 – 1:07:29] Erik: Yeah.
[1:07:30 – 1:07:31] Adam: And I don’t know.
[1:07:31 – 1:07:32] Adam: It was a really neat book.
[1:07:32 – 1:07:33] Adam: I learned a lot about beavers.
[1:07:33 – 1:07:36] Adam: I hope you enjoyed this series, and thank you for listening.
[1:07:37 – 1:07:41] Adam: I will never, ever curse a beaver dam again when I’m traveling in the park.
[1:07:42 – 1:07:53] Adam: Every time I get to carry over or paddle through beaver terrain, I’m going to definitely appreciate it a little bit more and give a little head nod to Castor Canadensis.
[1:07:54 – 1:08:02] Erik: Yeah, we do a series on skunks, so every time I’m driving down the road and I smell a skunk, I’ll be like, yes, thank you, skunk.
[1:08:03 – 1:08:03] Erik: Our friends.
[1:08:03 – 1:08:06] Erik: No, but seriously, yes.
[1:08:07 – 1:08:14] Erik: It was always kind of a thought, like, yeah, these need to be here, but it was always like, yeah, beavers.
[1:08:14 – 1:08:16] Adam: Gotta go over another beaver dam.
[1:08:16 – 1:08:17] Adam: Stupid beaver dams.
[1:08:17 – 1:08:19] Adam: Like even the Frost River trip a couple years back, and it was like,
[1:08:19 – 1:08:22] Adam: Oh, we had to go over 12 beaver dams today.
[1:08:22 – 1:08:22] Adam: Yeah.
[1:08:22 – 1:08:25] Adam: No, you got to go over 12 beaver dams today.
[1:08:25 – 1:08:37] Erik: Yeah, I was not even close to where I am right now in terms of appreciating and knowing just what the beavers bring to the boundary waters.
[1:08:38 – 1:08:59] Adam: other animals existence including humans it’s great i’m glad that was a great book report i look forward to doing there’s a lot more in there too like i highly recommend the book as we said at the top of the part one it was an award-winning book by ben goldfarb this was eager the story of castor canadensis and uh yeah it was the winner of the 2019
[1:09:02 – 1:09:17] Adam: pen eo wilson literary science writing award published in june 2018 check it out it’s available at any library system i wish i had bought a copy maybe someday i will nice um but thank you for joining us on this adventure and uh
[1:09:17 – 1:09:24] Adam: Yeah, I hope next time you’re out paddling and you encounter beaver habitat that you see it in a little bit different light.
[1:09:25 – 1:09:31] Adam: They’re not just out there gumming up the works for us for no good reason.
[1:09:31 – 1:09:36] Adam: This is what they do, and there’s a lot of benefits to animals that aren’t us.
[1:09:36 – 1:09:36] Adam: Yeah.
[1:09:36 – 1:09:39] Adam: And we need to understand that and appreciate it.
[1:09:39 – 1:09:43] Erik: Most animals that exist are probably around for a reason.
[1:09:43 – 1:09:44] Adam: Yeah, and they all work together.
[1:09:44 – 1:09:45] Adam: Yeah.
[1:09:45 – 1:09:45] Adam: So…
[1:09:46 – 1:09:49] Adam: Yeah, I think that’s a good place to leave it.
[1:09:49 – 1:09:55] Adam: So this has been episode 063 of Tumble Home, a Boundary Waters podcast.
[1:09:56 – 1:09:59] Adam: And we are both now beaver believers, I believe.
[1:09:59 – 1:10:02] Adam: Beaver believers, for sure.
[1:10:02 – 1:10:05] Adam: And now you know why I was dressed as a beaver on the 4th of Brulai.
[1:10:07 – 1:10:07] Adam: And…
[1:10:08 – 1:10:16] Adam: Yeah, I look forward to spending more time on the Condense River, and I do believe I will catch a brook trout out of there if I can ever get down there without the dog.
[1:10:17 – 1:10:18] Adam: Yeah.
[1:10:18 – 1:10:27] Adam: It looks to me like it opened my eyes just on a local level of seeing this river as just kind of like, eh, just like a muddy, flat, boggy little creek back there.
[1:10:27 – 1:10:28] Adam: Sure.
[1:10:28 – 1:10:31] Adam: Like, no, this could be prime brook trout habitat because of the beaver.
[1:10:32 – 1:10:34] Adam: Without them, they would be trash back here.
[1:10:34 – 1:10:35] Adam: It’s just a swamp.
[1:10:35 – 1:10:36] Adam: Yeah, just be trash.
[1:10:37 – 1:10:39] Adam: But they’re keeping the water cool.
[1:10:39 – 1:10:39] Adam: Yeah.
[1:10:39 – 1:10:40] Adam: They’re regulating.
[1:10:40 – 1:10:45] Adam: They’re encouraging lots of insects to be in there for the fish to feed on.
[1:10:45 – 1:10:45] Adam: Exactly.
[1:10:47 – 1:10:48] Adam: Freaking mozzies.
[1:10:48 – 1:10:49] Adam: Freaking mozzies.
[1:10:49 – 1:10:50] Adam: All right, folks.
[1:10:50 – 1:10:51] Erik: I love the science.
[1:10:51 – 1:10:52] Erik: It’s great.
[1:10:52 – 1:10:52] Erik: It was fun.
[1:10:52 – 1:10:57] Erik: I really think that this is going to be a continuing thing we do going forward.
[1:10:58 – 1:11:04] Erik: It’s not all fun and games of us just hanging out in the park, although it’s fun.
[1:11:04 – 1:11:05] Erik: Fun in the park is what it’s about.
[1:11:06 – 1:11:12] Erik: Getting out and enjoying that wilderness that we exist in and around is awesome.
[1:11:13 – 1:11:19] Erik: But some of the animals and the things that allow us to do it should be talked about.
[1:11:20 – 1:11:22] Erik: And that’s where the beavers come in.
[1:11:24 – 1:11:24] Adam: Right on, brother.
[1:11:24 – 1:11:30] Erik: I don’t know where we’re at in terms of what we’re doing next, but that’s a two-part series on beavers.
[1:11:31 – 1:11:33] Adam: Yeah, that’ll probably take us into August.
[1:11:34 – 1:11:34] Adam: Probably.
[1:11:34 – 1:11:40] Adam: Until next time, may your incisors be sharp and your tail meaty.
[1:11:41 – 1:11:44] Adam: Thank you, friends, and happy battling.
[1:12:13 – 1:12:17] Adam: Oh, and may your fur be very luscious and hattable.
[1:12:17 – 1:12:18] Adam: Yes.
[1:12:18 – 1:12:19] Erik: No, not hattable.
[1:12:19 – 1:12:20] Erik: Oh, yes.
[1:12:20 – 1:12:21] Erik: Just for yourself.
[1:12:21 – 1:12:22] Adam: Very woolly.
[1:12:22 – 1:12:25] Erik: Just right under your armpits for a nice warm…
[1:12:27 – 1:12:30] Adam: Can you imagine having a beaver fur kilt?
[1:12:31 – 1:12:34] Erik: Made all of beaver wool.
[1:12:34 – 1:12:36] Erik: We just talked about how amazing beavers were.
[1:12:38 – 1:12:41] Erik: Just think about if you get a hold of their fur.
[1:12:41 – 1:12:44] Adam: Well, I’m going to start trapping, as I said.
[1:12:44 – 1:12:45] Adam: Sustainably trapped?
[1:12:45 – 1:12:47] Adam: Sustainably trapped.
[1:12:47 – 1:12:48] Adam: There’s plenty of beavers out there.
[1:12:48 – 1:12:51] Adam: You don’t have to exterminate them.
[1:12:51 – 1:12:52] Adam: Just take one or two here and there.
[1:12:52 – 1:12:53] Adam: It’s like walleye fishing.
[1:12:53 – 1:12:57] Erik: We’re going to end the video before we end the audio.