A single beaver lodge was found and photographed along the Detroit River, and suddenly it’s a sign that the river is cleaning up. Detroit River refuge manager for the USFWS said: “Their return signals that a multiyear effort to clean up the river has paid off,” according to an article in the Free Press.
The thing is, a lone beaver was also spotted along a river way in New York, and another in Windsor. Are they clean too? Because Pennsylvania, formerly a cesspool of industry from steel mostly, has a plethora of beavers, some 32,000 in fact. That amount of beavers didn’t get there overnight. Surely there was plenty of pollution to go around in the 70’s for every state, yet the beavers were in force in Pennsylvania.
And is the fact that the beaver was discovered in an intake canal at Detroit Edison’s Conners Creek power plant an attempt to make the plant look clean too because I think the lone beaver as part of that larger story of ecological recovery in our lakes and rivers is a hoot just like walleye are some sort of gage for clean water. Yeah, I’ve seen that gage before, big tumors on the bigger fish.
Besides Science NetLink website tells us: “Ranchers and watershed managers in the West are employing some of nature’s own engineers for water quality improvement. Beaver-created impoundments (the “lakes” that form upstream of their dams) can be extremely useful in agricultural watersheds. They have been known to retain up to 1,000 times more nitrogen than streams without beaver dams. This has really opened the eyes of some water quality managers to ecosystem services.” So if the beavers are in the immediate area of these watersheds they are evidently NOT adverse to pollution at least not from agricultural sources.
Truth is if we really wanted to see the little critters succeed in re-establishing themselves, we would have reintroduced them long ago like Pennsylvania did way back in 1917 after grotesquely over-trapping them for their fur to extinction in 1912. To assume they haven’t been around Michigan in 75 years because of pollution, and now that one has appeared we’re obviously cleaning up, is a crock.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/08/980814070511.htm
http://www.sciencenetlinks.com/lessons.cfm?DocID=275
Tags: Beavers