{"id":1093,"date":"2013-07-14T12:06:01","date_gmt":"2013-07-14T16:06:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/?p=1093"},"modified":"2013-07-14T12:21:08","modified_gmt":"2013-07-14T16:21:08","slug":"beaver-ecology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/2013\/07\/beaver-ecology.html","title":{"rendered":"Beaver ecology"},"content":{"rendered":"

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nWe like our beaver pond, but the beavers are a bit too ambitious.\r\nHere’s how they operate.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n\r\nHaemig PD (2012) Ecology of the Beaver. ECOLOGY.INFO 13<\/a>,\r\n

\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nThe forest beside the stream also changes after beaver occupation.\r\nWhen beavers cut down trees for food and for building their dams and\r\nlodges, they select the species of trees that they prefer, and leave\r\nother tree species standing. Consequently, after many years, the\r\nforest beside a beaver pond is usually dominated by different tree\r\nspecies than it was before beaver occupation, and in the gaps where\r\nthe beavers removed trees, bushes and saplings now grow and with\r\nthem the animal species that live in the early stages of forest\r\nregeneration (Barnes and Dibble 1986; Johnston and Naiman 1990;\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nPastor and Naiman 1992; Donkor et al. 2000). In addition, when the\r\nbeaver pond is formed by the dam, water floods and covers the roots\r\nof trees that formerly stood along the stream bank. These flooded\r\ntrees die because the standing water prevents their roots from\r\ngetting air….\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n\r\nIn Wyoming, a survey showed that owners of private lands believed\r\nthat they benefited from beaver engineering because it elevated\r\nwater tables, increased the area of riparian vegetation on their\r\nlands, and also increased livestock watering opportunities\r\n(McKinstry and Anderson 1999). However, these same landowners\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nregarded beaver as pests when these rodents girdled timber, blocked\r\nirrigation ditches and culverts with wood, and flooded roads,\r\nrailroads, crops and timber (McKinstry and Anderson 1999)….\r\n

\r\nIn some places, such as the southeastern United States, beaver cause\r\nextensive damage to valuable timberland by flooding bottomland\r\nforests and eating tree seedlings (Bhat et al. 1993; Conner at al.\r\n2000).\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nAnd girdling pine trees and other trees.\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nThe beavers didn’t build our pond (my father and grandfather did that\r\nin the 1930s).\r\nBut they do keep it there now. Since they and the otters destroyed\r\nthe original dam, only\r\n\r\nthe beaver dam keeps the water in the pond<\/a>.\r\n

\r\n <\/param> <\/param> <\/param><\/object>\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nThat’s good, but beavers are never satisfied.\r\nThey like to keep raising the water level, expanding the pond,\r\ngirdling more trees.\r\nAnd building more ponds upstream.\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

\r\nMany large predators occasionally prey on beaver, however only the\r\nwolf (Canis lupus) does so regularly and to the extent that it can\r\nsignificantly reduce numbers of beaver (Shelton and Peterson 1983).\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nCars sometimes run over beaver in the road; at least one of those nearby this year.\r\nWe have the occasional coyote pack and some large cats,\r\nand of course\r\n\r\nraccoons<\/a>,\r\nbut none of them seem to bother the beavers.\r\n

\r\n\r\n\r\nOnly our two dogs<\/a> have ever done one in that we know of.\r\nBeaver is tasty, by the way, dark, rich, and very filling, like bear.\r\n

\r\n\r\nWe don’t want to get rid of the beavers, anyway:\r\nthat would destroy the pond.\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nWe just want to limit their water level.\r\n\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n

\r\nIn the Appalachian Plateau region of New York, active beaver\r\n\r\nimpoundments contained “significantly more bird species and a\r\ngreater average number of bird species than abandoned beaver ponds\r\nand control sites with no record of beaver occupation (Grover and\r\nBaldassarre 1995).”\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nIn the Upper Piedmont of South Carolina, the abundance, richness and\r\ndiversity of reptiles were significantly higher at beaver\r\nimpoundments than at unimpounded streams, however the “richness,\r\ndiversity and evenness of amphibians was significantly higher at\r\nunimpounded streams than at beaver ponds (Metts et al. 2001).\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n\r\nIn the Adirondack region of New York, Wright et al. (2002) found\r\nthat beaver engineering increased species richness of plants at the\r\n\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\nlandscape scale, because beaver created patches of habitat (beaver\r\nponds and meadows) had a combination of conditions that were not\r\npresent elsewhere in the landscape, and some plant species that\r\nlived in these beaver-modified habitats were not present in habitats\r\nunmodified by beaver.\r\n<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n

\r\nWe get all of that here,\r\nplus in addition to the beaver pond(s),\r\nthere is still a stream above, and a cypress swamp,\r\nand seepage slope, and hardwoods, and pine woods, and open\r\ngrass for bob white quail, and….\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n -jsq\r\n<\/p>\r\n

\r\n\r\n<\/a>\r\n<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We like our beaver pond, but the beavers are a bit too ambitious. Here’s how they operate. Haemig PD (2012) Ecology of the Beaver. ECOLOGY.INFO 13, The forest beside the stream also changes after beaver occupation. When beavers cut down trees for food and for building their dams and lodges, they select the species of […]","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[585,361,64,29,6],"tags":[2832,2821,2781,24,2770,3,23,5,2,2760,25],"class_list":["post-1093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-amphibians","category-beaver","category-birds","category-dogs","category-okra-paradise-farms","tag-amphibians","tag-beaver","tag-birds","tag-brown-dog","tag-dogs","tag-georgia","tag-gretchen-quarterman","tag-john-s-quarterman","tag-lowndes-county","tag-okra-paradise-farms","tag-yellow-dog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4Gj0O-hD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1093"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1093\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1104,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1093\/revisions\/1104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.okraparadisefarms.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}