Rob Rich

And then they can dollop all their castoreum on top of that, which is a very unique smelling excretion from a particular gland in them. But they can bring that out to put on the castor mound or scent mound, sometimes called to kind of ward off non-related beavers.

Well, they definitely do have a particular scent and it's not something that, you know, is out of question to smell yourself. You can definitely find these, especially in the springtime when beavers are actively dispersing that, you know, the same time about when new kits are born is a really important time to kind of mark the territory, so to speak.

And so these scent mounds are all over the place at that time. And it does have kind of a vanilla-ish tint. I think it's very nice. It's probably dependent on the The nose who's smelling it. And it does have a history of being used in certain products. And, you know, we have used it for perfume and different things. I believe there's schnapps in, is it Germany?

Or I believe it's Germany that uses beaver hot. And it's kind of like a schnapps liqueur that relies on that.

They're kind of artificially synthesized now.

It's not that sharp. It won't be wafting everywhere, but it's very concentrated and localized. And you do kind of know when you hit it when you're kind of near it yourself. But it generally takes leaning down and just kind of getting up close to it. But it's a very nice smell. It doesn't have anything related to scat or urine. They do have a very pronounced anal gland as well. Oh, nice.

But that's used for waterproofing. That's not used for the purposes of defending their territory.

Yeah, I am. And I think that's one of the things that I'm really passionate about is just interpreting beaver landscapes wherever you are. I mean, so many of us on the North American continent live in and among beaver wetlands without even knowing it sometimes. We have this issue, I think, as a people, just of beaver amnesia, not being able to see what the beavers created before us.

And I would bet, you know, almost the entirety of us that are drinking water and flushing toilets and taking showers and all the things, our water is coming from somewhere that at some point in its history was shaped by a beaver. And there are things, you know, that we can still see looking at aerial photography, looking at, you know, different ways the land drains that land stacked up.

And that might have been a beaver dam from like a couple centuries ago or something. And so it's really neat to be able to interpret it at that level of history in a contemporary sense. I love being able to kind of know my neighbors, so to speak, of who's building and who's active, who's, you know, it's a very much a dynamic ebb and flow cycle of the beaver. So fun to watch.

I didn't have like one big light bulb moment. I consider myself very fortunate to, you know, grew up in a family that really supported just my natural curiosities in a lot of ways. And I grew up in the Northeast and spent a lot of time in Northern New York and New England. you know, doing hiking and stuff. And beavers were certainly part of the theme then.

I would spend a lot of time in the woods, saw beavers, but they were just another animal at the time. For me, it wasn't anything like they were changing the world in the way that they do. But I think one of the Kind of milestones for me was going to Isle Royale National Park after college. One of my first wildlife fieldwork gigs was I was helping out with this wolf moose project.

It's called our ostensible purpose was really to track down the bones of moose that were killed by wolves the previous winter. I was there in the summer, and I was just mind-blown with how the beavers had changed the environment there in a way that was not only conducive to the moose, but also really important for supporting the wolves as well.

One of the leaner times for them is in summer, and so I was just fascinated by this is a time when the wolves have adapted to eat beavers as well. I really got to get... A really close look and just appreciate their keystone role is just how complicated and connected and all the things that they do for diverse animals, predators, prey, and everything in between.

And so they're a real integrator of a lot of things. And that's one of the areas where it really lit up for me.

Yeah, thanks. You're welcome. So I think one of the things that is happening is that it is an instinct. There is part of that proclivity to do that instinctually, but it's also a learned response. They've shown how young beavers are actively learning with their parents and watching them and manipulating wood in the same way. And so building a dam is not a necessity for a beaver.

That is not in itself, is not what's necessary.

Beavers are thriving on lake systems where they can have plenty of water. They're on rivers a lot of times where they can bank up in the side of the riverbank without any consequence. And they don't need to build an entire dam across a river or whatnot to have their way. But what dam building does is it is a mechanism for...

extending their safety from predators, but also increasing their access to food. And so when they build a dam in a stream system, it's not only spreading the water out across the stream system laterally, but it's also stacking up a lot of weight behind that dam. And so it's sinking more water into exchange with the groundwater system.

And I think too often we just think of our river systems as one upstream, downstream, going one way. And what's natural about rivers and watershed systems is that when they spread out as well as down, so laterally and vertically as well. And the researcher Ellen Wohl has just done a lot of great work showing that kind of hydrological complexity of beaver systems.