Free Republic

Local beavers are helping Ukraine defend itself from a potential new front in Russia's invasion, Reuters reported on Thursday. The animals are unwittingly helping Kyiv by building dams that keep the ground marshy and impassable, a military spokesman told the agency. This helps Ukraine by making it less likely that an attack could come via Belarus, which borders Ukraine not far north of the capital Kyiv...

The recent discovery of two beavers sighted along Matadero Creek in Palo Alto could be a sign of a major comeback for the species in the Bay Area. Naturalist Bill Leikam, who is the co-founder and president of the Urban Wildlife Research Project, captured trail camera footage of the semiaquatic rodents wandering along the waterway late last month, as the Mercury News first reported. He set up the cameras after he had been tipped off by a resident who claimed to have seen one while they were meditating on the side of the creek, and sure enough, there they were...

WORCESTER - If someone were to mention the animal that built America, you would probably think of some sort of domestic farm animal like the horse or perhaps a cow - one a beast of burden during construction, the other a key economic livestock animal. You wouldn’t think of beavers. But that’s what they are - the animals that both literally and economically built America. “They shaped our country’s landscape and jump-started capitalism on this continent,” said Leila Philip, a professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross, who also teaches in the Environmental Studies Program, and author...

It began decades ago, with a few hardy pioneers slogging north across the tundra. It’s said that one individual walked so far to get there that he rubbed the skin off the underside of his long, flat tail. Today, his kind have homes and colonies scattered throughout the tundra in Alaska and Canada — and their numbers are increasing.... ...Scientists have come to view their landscape engineering as beneficial, and even critical in some vulnerable ecosystems. In many places south of the tundra, conservationists have moved to protect and reintroduce beavers to restore stream and wetland habitats. But in the...

Beaver fur was a symbol of wealth and an important trade item in 10th Century Denmark, according to a study published July 27, 2022 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE...Written sources indicate that fur was a key commodity during the Viking Age, between 800-1050 CE, but fur doesn't often survive well in the archaeological record, so little direct evidence is available. Previous reports have used the microscopic anatomy of ancient fur to identify species of origin, but this method is often inexact. All in all, not much is known about the kinds of furs the Vikings preferred.In this study, Brandt...

In a statement obtained by the CBC, a spokesperson for Telus said, "Our team located a nearby dam, and it appears the beavers dug underground alongside the creek to reach our cable, which is buried about three feet underground and protected by a 4.5-inch thick conduit. The beavers first chewed through the conduit before chewing through the cable in multiple locations." When the repair crews went to investigate, they found damage to more sections of the cable, the New York Post reports. Apparently, multiple beavers had dug underground alongside a creek in order to reach the cables.

fter an absence from Italy of nearly 500 years, beavers are back. The species, which was once widespread across Europe, has been spotted in Italy’s northerly region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia. The animals are believed to have wandered over the border from neighbouring Austria or possibly Slovenia. An adult beaver was filmed by a camera trap in a forest near Tarvisio, a town that lies in the triangle where Italy, Austria and Slovenia converge. “The reason beavers disappeared from Italy is simple – for hundreds of years they were trapped for their fur and also prized for their meat,” Paolo Molinari,...

Least terns. A federal lawsuit. Greenpeace. Vandals. Industrious beavers. Angry homeowners. Bureaucratic delays. These were among the obstacles and setbacks that had to be overcome before the Creek Turnpike was built. At one point, the chairman of the Oklahoma Turnpike Authority declared it a “total disaster” and exclaimed: “The Creek Turnpike in Tulsa, God only knows when that’ll be completed,” John Kilpatrick said, as reported by the Tulsa World’s Wayne Greene on Oct. 19, 1990. “If we had it to do all over again, we wouldn’t do that project,” the exasperated Kilpatrick said after federal bureaucrats held up construction of...

We're sorry in advance if we've just ruined your appetite. But, the rumors are true: There might be small amounts of beaver butt goo in some of our favorite gummy candies, ice creams, sodas and baked goods. Don't worry though, it's safe. For the past 80 years, we've been using the "brown slime" emitted from beavers as a way to add vanilla, strawberry and raspberry flavors to some of our favorite foods. How exactly does this work? Beavers emit the chemical compound castoreum from their castor sacs. The sacs are located under the animal's tail and are secreted when they...

Cpl. Yingling had a unique call for service when the suspect, pictured, was witnessed causing prop. Destruction at a store in Char. Hall. The “suspect attempted to flee the area,” as the sheriff’s office put it in a statement, but it was apprehended by animal control and released to an animal rehabilitator — hopefully not just to be released into the wild, but to be taught basic shopping etiquette.

Ending the drought in the West will require rain—not too much rain—and smarter ways to collect and store that water. But something else that can keep things moist? Believe it or not: Beavers. According to a story in Water Deeply, a group of ecologists have a plan to help repopulate the Central Coast of California with Castor canadensis, the large beavers which once roamed the state in great numbers. (Not to be confused with their ancestors, giant beavers that were seven feet long.) The idea is that beavers are nature’s hydrologists, engineering the way that water travels through the landscape:

Idaho Department of Fish and Game officials struggling to manage a growing beaver population in the 1940s and 1950s struck on an unusual solution.

Boise, Idaho - More than half a century after a group of beavers parachuted into the Idaho backcountry, officials have uncovered footage of the quirky wildlife management moment. The Idaho Department of Fish and Game was struggling with an overpopulation of beavers in some regions in the 1940s when wildlife managers settled on a novel idea. They captured beavers and other furry rodents, packed them into special travel boxes, attached parachutes and dropped them from a plane into..."

A fossilized skull and teeth from a newly described species of beaver that lived 28 million years ago have been unearthed in eastern Oregon. The fossils worked their way out of the soil within a mile of the visitor center at the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, said the monument's paleontologist, Joshua Samuels. The find is significant, he said, because unlike the other species of ancient beavers found at the monument, this one appears related to the modern beaver, a symbol of Oregon found on the state flag. The others all went extinct. The species is named Microtheriomys brevirhinus....

Plan for lethal-virus laboratories leaves Smalltown USA in uproar By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles 29 June 2003 A network of high-security laboratories for storing and investigating some of the most lethal viruses known to mankind is being built across the US, leaving communities in uproar. They not only fear the risk of the viruses escaping, but also contend that the programme, part of the $6bn (£3.5bn) Project BioShield, is a stunning case of overkill. For none of the germs to be studied is related to bioweaponry. In the tiny town of Hamilton, Montana, campaigners worry that they will become...

One team President Barack Obama didn’t have the opportunity to pick when he joined ESPN this week to fill out his NCAA March Madness bracket was Oregon State, which has yet to recover from a disastrous six years under the guidance of his brother-in-law, Craig Robinson. Robinson, Michelle Obama’s brother, was fired by Oregon State after six straight disappointing seasons as head coach—the team went 39–69 in the Pac 12 and never made the NCAA Tournament or the NIT. Not only did Robinson fail to get results at Oregon State, he also left a mess for new coach Wayne Tinkle....

Recent scientific findings date their arrival earlier than ever thought, sparking hot debate among archaeologists For much of its length, the slow-moving Aucilla River in northern Florida flows underground, tunneling through bedrock limestone. But here and there it surfaces, and preserved in those inky ponds lie secrets of the first Americans.For years adventurous divers had hunted fossils and artifacts in the sinkholes of the Aucilla about an hour east of Tallahassee. They found stone arrowheads and the bones of extinct mammals such as mammoth, mastodon and the American ice age horse.Then, in the 1980s, archaeologists from the Florida Museum of...

Researchers at EurekAlert say that our efforts to protect the beaver from extinction have had eco-unfriendly side effects. Beaver’s numbers have rebounded thanks to efforts across the globe to protect them. The new research states that as their numbers rise they are contributing to climate change. Beavers create dams in shallow ponds, which then can host increasing levels of carbon as biological material accumulates on the pond floor. This accumulation results in methane, a greenhouse gas that does not dissolve in the pond, but instead enters the atmosphere. The study shows that today beaver ponds release 200 times more methane...

Gig Harbor, Washington. -- In the Pacific Northwest, we live among behemoths — snowcapped volcanoes, towering trees, great splashing salmon and lattes as big as a child’s head. Yet one of the region’s undeniably superlative titans has slipped beneath everyone’s radar.

Kangaroo meat ‘halal,’ Turkey's Religious Affairs Directorate says Turkey's Religious Affairs Directorate (Diyanet) has issued a fatwa stating that kangaroo meat and grasshoppers are “halal” food, but Islam bans eating “badgers, martens, weasels, beavers and sea otters.” “Islamic scholars agree that ‘halal’ animals that are not mentioned in the Quran and in the hadith [the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad] are those that don’t eat feces and carcasses, and which are therefore neither wild nor coarse,” the Diyanet’s High Committee of Religious Affairs said in response to a citizen’s question. As such, the fatwa continues, kangaroo is classified in the...