Ben Goldfarb
@ben_a_goldfarb
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Independent environmental journalist. Author of CROSSINGS, on #roadecology , and EAGER, on beaver belief.
Colorado
Joined August 2011
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Ahem: I'm overjoyed to announce that I'm moving forward with another book, on the organisms that are perhaps nearest to my heart (with sincere apologies to beavers). Thanks to my friends at
@wwnorton
&
@AevitasCreative
for helping me make this dream project a reality. Fish on!
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The beaver battalion will express solidarity with its javelina comrades by sabotaging ill-advised floodplain infrastructure.
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Here's a rather stunning visualization shared during today's
@Y2Y_Initiative
conference on
#roadecology
, via Tom Martin of Montana DOT — a young grizzly bear attempting, and nearly always failing, to cross I-90. Each X is a highway approach. About as permeable as the Berlin Wall.
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Harper, a great blue heron who summers in New Brunswick, just flew *68 CONSECUTIVE HOURS* over open ocean to reach her wintering grounds in the Everglades. Even the most familiar animals are capable of astonishing feats of endurance and navigation.
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Okay how did I not know about the overpass for Christmas Island crabs?! One of the coolest pictures I've ever seen; thanks to
@ptsarahdactyl
for the great story on wildlife crossings.
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PITCH: a podcast on successes in ecological restoration. Every episode tells the story of another project—a species reintroduction, a piece of land returned to nature, a community-led fisheries conservation plan. Tone is upbeat, funny, narrative; scope is international. Who's in?
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Signing onto Twitter for the first time in 36 hours to say: holy fuckin' shit!
Ben Goldfarb wins the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award for Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter!
#PENawards
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Something poetic about losing Wilson and Lovejoy at once, given their work's interplay. EOW basically invented island biogeography, then TL proved in the Amazon that fragmentation creates islands. Hard to imagine ConBio without those scientific underpinnings.
Photo: Mark Moffett
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I want to live in a world where sturgeon are once again so abundant that they pose a navigational hazard.
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I suppose that framing the Sixth Extinction as a threat to human welfare is necessary to make people care — and of course it's true! — but, jeez, it's such a sad commentary on the limits of our empathy.
A million species are going extinct — sucks for us!
Breaking News: As many as 1 million species are at risk of extinction, posing a profound threat to human well-being, a sweeping U.N. report concluded
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Happy
#InternationalBeaverDay
to all who celebrate (i.e., everyone who likes to drink water, eat food, catch fish, watch birds, live in a stable climate, and not get swept away by floods and/or immolated by wildfire).
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For years, the beaver community has waited for a scientist to rigorously study how our favorite rodents interact with wildfire.
@EmilyFairfax
is that scientist. This is that study.
For
@NatGeo
, I wrote about a very important development in Beaverdom.
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News: I'm stoked to have received an Alicia Patterson fellowship to spend 2019 writing about the environmental impacts of roads. Yep, roads.
Now seeking contacts in the
#roadecology
world—direct mortality, barrier effects, wildlife x-ing design, etc. Thx!
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tired: beavers can save California from drought
wired: beavers can save California from wildfire
inspired: beavers can save California from flooding
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@asher_elbein
There's only one correct answer to this question, and it's the animal that doesn't weigh upwards of a thousand pounds.
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For
@hakaimagazine
, I wrote about beach dogs, which are both shockingly harmful to coastal ecosystems *and* a wildly contentious political issue. Note: I am not w/out sin when it comes to letting my little killer roam free!
Let the angry emails commence.
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CROSSINGS has its first official review, and it's a doozy from
@KirkusReviews
, which bestowed a coveted ⭐️:
"Goldfarb’s follow-up to Eager, his award-winning book on beavers, is another illuminating, witty work... an astonishingly deep pool of wonders."
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Recently spent a couple of days poking around beaver streams in UT & ID with castor-master
@fluvialwheaton
. Here's a not-so-brief 🧵about what we saw. I'll provide a bit of commentary, but will mostly let the beauty, genius, & obvious utility of these complexes do the talking. 🦫
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Last week I went to the Arctic to report on the impacts of northward beaver range expansion due to climate change. As ever, the best way to appreciate the scale of rodent engineering is from the air; below, a few shots from a helicopter flyover of the area around Nome.
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I don't think there's another animal that radicalizes laypeople quite like beavers. Maybe wolves.
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Personal news: In a few weeks, I'll be moving to Salida, Colorado, where Elise will be working as the sole provider at a women's healthcare clinic. I'm beyond proud of her, and excited for the next adventure.
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Thrilled to announce that CROSSINGS, my forthcoming book on
#roadecology
, has hit a couple of immense milestones: We have a spectacular cover *and* galleys! The
@wwnorton
design team crushed it.
Coming September 2023, and available for preorder now. 👇
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Update: Ellie George, the Adirondack naturalist who described seeing mink and otter hanging out in beaver lodges, passed along a few photos of the phenomenon. Pretty amazing stuff! Thanks to Ellie for letting me post her spectacular pics.
Here's a neat observation from a reader: otters and mink hanging out in a beaver lodge! I've observed beavers cohabitating with muskrats, but never with mustelids (and otters have been known to predate kits, so I'm surprised these beavs put up with them).
Anyone else seen this?
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Just gave a beaver talk to a Trout Unlimited chapter & marveled at how times have changed. When I preached about beavs to fish-centric audiences in 2018, the reaction was often hostility; now anglers wanna tell me about the huge brookies they haul from beaver ponds. Progress!
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Last week I made a pilgrimage to Minnesota's
@VoyageursNPS
, home to America's highest beaver densities.
Any beaver activity is impressive to me. But Voyageurs' dams—well, they're among our most jaw-dropping natural wonders, deserving of international renown.
Time for a thread!
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Ahem: For the last two years I've been writing a book about
#roadecology
for
@wwnorton
. Today I'm thrilled to report that this work-in-progress has received the
@WhitingFdn
's Creative Nonfiction Grant, which will support crucial reporting and generally keep the lights on.
Congratulations to the recipients of the 2020 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant! Learn more about their awe-inspiring and essential forthcoming books and read excerpts from their work on our website:
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We also need to talk about Arctic beaver lodges. Anecdotally, they're huge compared to ones in the Rockies (think 20-30 ft wide x 8-10 ft tall). More insulating mud? Bigger interior chamber? 🤷♂️
In general, dams are so impressive that sometimes we forget to be amazed by lodges!
And a few shots of Arctic beaver dams on the ground. Obviously there are no trees on the tundra, but they're easily making do with shrubby willow stems and mud. We saw many dams that measured >100m. Castorid ingenuity never ceases to amaze.
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I hesitate to point out that you can spend the night in decommissioned Forest Service fire towers — they're hard enough to reserve as it is — but, well, this was the view from Bald Mountain Lookout (Harvard, Idaho) on Friday night.
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Big and long-awaited
#roadecology
news today:
@USDOT
announced recipients of the first round of its Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program funding! $110 million for 19 grants in 17 states.
After eyeballing the announcement, here are a few lukewarm takes:
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So much amazing in this story. Like:
"The common bristlemouth is the most abundant vertebrate on the planet."
What?! Or:
"Recent evidence suggests there are more animals (in the Twilight Zone) by weight than in all of the world’s fisheries combined."
The U.S. Navy once thought it was the ocean's bottom. What their acoustics were detecting was actually an enormous mass of living sea creatures. Welcome to the ocean's twilight zone.
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No one ever said being a semiaquatic mammal was easy. Photo by Tukasz Tukasik, from the Bevers in Nederland facebook page.
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A memorable encounter with my second-favorite large rodent. Ben Burr Trail, Spokane, last night.
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Just received this all-time favorite picture:
Glenn Harper, range & wildlife division manager for the Santa Ana Pueblo, plugging a certain
#roadecology
book at a Senate staff briefing in DC on tribal support for wildlife crossings.
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More aesthetically pleasing beaver infrastructure in the San Miguel drainage.
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According to my midwife wife, Trump is the ultimate anti-aphrodisiac.
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And a few shots of Arctic beaver dams on the ground. Obviously there are no trees on the tundra, but they're easily making do with shrubby willow stems and mud. We saw many dams that measured >100m. Castorid ingenuity never ceases to amaze.
Last week I went to the Arctic to report on the impacts of northward beaver range expansion due to climate change. As ever, the best way to appreciate the scale of rodent engineering is from the air; below, a few shots from a helicopter flyover of the area around Nome.
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tired: throwing beavers out of airplanes over Idaho in the 1940s
wired:
if anyone wants to get serious about rehydrating the west, let me present my three-step plan:
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The classic Maddux backdoor sinker — but at 98 mph! How does anyone ever make contact in 2019?
(Okay, back to beavers.)
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Mid-zoom w/ source:
Source's 5-year-old: <strolls into frame & mumbles inaudible question>
Source: Uh, possibly. Hey, I'm in the middle of something.
Me: What'd he say?
Source: He wanted to know if you could float in Jello.
Me: That is... a better question than any of mine.
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Aldo Leopold, proto-island biogeographer. Mind-boggling what this guy just intuited about nature, and how subsequent research so perfectly corroborated those intuitions.
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This multimedia
@hakaimagazine
feature, on the catastrophic impacts of Alaskan cruise tourism, should win awards — it's deeply reported, cleverly and beautifully presented, and, oh yeah, absolutely horrifying.
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Sandhill crane stopover in Colorado's San Luis Valley yesterday. In a world that's hemorrhaging spectacular wildlife aggregations and migrations, it's thrilling to witness such abundance.
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Disappointed to see this anti-beaver screed in the
@nytimes
. I truly don't know how you write about these animals in 2021 without including at least a couple of grafs about their ecological benefits. This story could've been written forty years ago.
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The first book I read upon moving to Spokane in 2018 was
@1JessWalter
's "We Live in Water" — a hilarious, profoundly empathic introduction to this weird and wonderful corner of the world. So cool to see it recognized here.
As we wind down 2019, I wanted to share with you my annual list of favorites that made the last year a little brighter. We’ll start with books today — movies and music coming soon. I hope you enjoy these as much as I did.
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A number of homebound parents/teachers recently asked me for a digital beaver lesson they could show their kids. So I put together the following 30-min video on our favorite rodent (also appropriate for adult social distancers). Hope it helps!
#BeaverOn
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You may have read that the infrastructure bill earmarked $350 million for wildlife crossings. But what does that mean, why does it matter, & how did it end up in the bill? For
@voxdotcom
, I dug into the political history of wildlife infra.
#roadecology
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Big shoutout to Mark and Cat Beardsley of EcoMetrics, who made the best (and perhaps only) process-based stream restoration cake I've ever seen. Look at those little pretzel-rod Beaver Dam Analogs!
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Although it didn't make our conversation's final cut, I will always cherish the memory of explaining how a culvert works to a rapt Terry Gross.
#TeamCulvert
.
@ben_a_goldfarb
on NPR's Fresh Air: "We sometimes fail to recognize that roadkill is a true crisis for biodiversity."
Goldfarb's new book CROSSINGS, on the new science of
#roadecology
, is in stores now.
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Happy
#InternationalBeaverDay
to the architects who designed these absolute behemoths!
#DidYouKnow
that orthodox Beaver Believers celebrate this occasion with a customary holiday feast of boiled cottonwood cambium and sautéed aspen shoots?
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Ho-ly shit. Had a truly harrowing grizzly encounter in Yellowstone today. Still vibrating with joy/fear/adrenaline.
#EndlessBeaverSummer
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A few "secrets":
—Hakai, bioGraphic, Undark, etc., don't have NYT's name recognition, but reliably pay $1+/wd & treat writers well.
—Advocacy group pubs (Sierra, Audubon, Nat'l Parks Mag, et al) pay well & assign fun stories.
—Authorship can create paid speaking opportunities.
Any freelance writer who says they are only making a living on journalism, I have questions! The Post, the Atlantic, The Times - you get $500 for a piece for them, and it's a lot of work. Do you have "family money?" Do you live in a very cheap place? What is your secret?
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Someone needs to write up this beaver TikTok in a peer-reviewed journal! Longstanding assumption is that dam-building is triggered by auditory stimulus, i.e., sound of running water. But this guy seems to consider the doorframe a visual cue—it's the leak in the "dam" of the wall.
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Beavers should be permitted to flood 90 percent of extant Forest Service roads.
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Since writing about seafaring beavers for
@hakaimagazine
two years ago, I've received a half-dozen intertidal beaver observations from folks around the world. Thanks to Braden Paul Photography for sending me this striking image from Surrey Beach, BC.
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⭐️⭐️ NOT INTENDED FOR INDOOR USE
Good: FurSaw effectively removed backyard cottonwoods. Teeth self-sharpening. Runs on bark!
Bad: Chewed through dining room table, used legs to build dam in bathtub. Better suited for homes w/ metal furniture.
#rateaspecies
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Recently had a chance to drive beneath Colorado's newest wildlife overpass, on Hwy 160 between Durango and Pagosa Springs. Historically more than 60% (!!!) of the crashes in this area were wildlife-vehicle collisions.
#roadecology
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Still picking my through Meine's biography of Leopold, and I wonder: Who's our contemporary Aldo? A groundbreaking researcher who willingly wades into advocacy, writes exquisite prose, and is influencing the trajectory of land & wildlife mgmt? Can one even be such a person today?
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Skipped the fireworks and spent the evening doing something truly patriotic: capturing America's two iconic wetlands mammals, beaver and moose, together in a single photo.
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Mind-blowing fact I learned from a source yesterday: fishers in Maine frequently prey on adult lynx, despite being half their size. Meso-carnivore carnage!
Freakin' weasels, man.
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Personal news: our backyard has been overtaken by western tanagers.
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"Perceptive... Goldfarb charts a path toward a less destructive future." — the New Fuckin' Yorker
#roadecology
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In the years that I have been writing and thinking about
#roadecology
, I have seen many animals cross highways: deer, elk, bison, moose, bears, bobcats, turtles. I can very safely say, though, that yesterday was my first wild muskox.
#WhenInNome
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Recently got an email from a guy looking to donate his collection of beaver toys. I suggested he send them to
@martinezbeavers
, a wonderful organization devoted to conservation/education in the Bay Area. Apparently the box just arrived and... well.
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Whatever the failings of modernity, I take comfort in the knowledge that we're living through the greatest boom period for beaver web comics in human history.
by
@jimmytried
; h/t
@TKDano
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Someday I will cover a topic that's not animals being slaughtered by infrastructure—but for now, I'm gratified to report that my 2023
@bioGraphic
story on bird/window strikes has been selected for the next edition of Best American Science & Nature Writing.
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It's not just interstate highways that impede critters — even a residential curb can be an insurmountable barrier. The lesson, as always, is that roads shape wildlife movements in unpredictable ways, and at all scales.
#roadecology
O, be still my heart! A baby javelina so bitty it can't follow mamma over a curb.
📽️Erin McGee
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PITCH: a reported monthly column (or a podcast! or a substack!) on the intersection of ecology and infrastructure. We're talking dam removal, constructed wetlands, mitigation of wind/solar impacts, wildlife crossing structures (obvi). There may be beavers. Who's buying this?
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Imagine being half as good at anything as this man is at throwing a baseball.
#LFGM
Jacob deGrom, 13th, 14th and 15th Ks.
New Career High. 🐐
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Babe wake up, full-page
@WSJ
review just dropped:
"Mr. Goldfarb is perceptive about how roads tangle animals together with humans... CROSSINGS is well-paced and vivid, an engaging account of a potentially dull subject."
#roadecology
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Book proposal: WHERE FISH GO, a scientific/cultural exploration of global fish migration & mitigation of threats to aquatic/marine mobility. Obviously anadromy's in there, but also chapters on big pelagics, lotic drift of larvae in freshwater, assisted migration, etc. Who's in?
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“We’re trying to describe the indescribable. What a great, futile mission.”
What the world needs most, as 2021 draws to an end, is one last take on
#DontLookUp
. For
@highcountrynews
, I spoke to director Adam McKay about turning hyperobjects into stories.
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This week Elise and I completed one of our lives' great adventures: the John Muir Trail. (Well, she *actually* completed it; I was merely privileged to be her sidekick for the last 140 miles.) Clockwise from left: McClure Meadows; the descent from Whitney; crossing Forester Pass.
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"Nevada completed its first project on U.S. 93 in 2010 at a cost of about $2.2 million. Over the next four years, NDOT found that more than 35,000 mule deer used the crossings."
If you build it...
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Favorite assignment in recent memory, for the winter issue of National Parks Magazine: "Just, uh, go hike and fish in Black Canyon of the Gunnison for a few days and write 3000 words about it."
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Brian Doyle died last week. He wrote the most beautiful damn paragraphs.
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"Beaver dams hold back water & canals spread it out... The result: a verdant valley bottom that doesn’t burn."
Loved this
@ColoradoSun
feature on the firefighting skills of our semiaquatic saviors, feat. (who else?)
@EmilyFairfax
(+ an Eager shoutout).
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Hey
@wildlifesociety
, thought you'd wanna know that I caught a typo!
I just read the phrase "beaver dams are a major cause of habitat degradation" in the below article, where surely you meant to write "provider of ecosystem benefits."
Happy to help.
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Sorry for self-aggrandizement, but just learned that one tribal fisheries manager assigns this 2014
@highcountrynews
feature to all new hires as a crash course in salmon politics.
As always: you never know who's reading your work, & how they're using it.
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Powerful demonstration of an important
#roadecology
truth: noise pollution is habitat loss.
A few more videos from our playback experiment looking at human disturbances along salmon streams. Sound on 🔊
🐻 Brown bear responding to the ATV treatment.
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Whenever I'm in a river, I'm astounded by how much of the in-stream woody debris has been felled and mobilized by beavers. Dams are awesome, but I don't think we talk enough about how much complexity these inadvertent, beaver-created micro-habitats add to aquatic ecosystems.
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One of America’s most important marine conflicts hinges on a patently absurd question: is seaweed... a fish?
Here’s my latest feature for
@hakaimagazine
about a crazy legal battle featuring sea manure, snails, Supreme Courts, and Rachel Carson.
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Momentous news on the
#beaver
beat: Our favorite rodent is protected in Scotland, making it illegal to kill beavers or destroy dams/lodges w/out a license. Congrats to
@ScotsBeavers
,
@ScotWildlife
,
@gow_derek
, & everyone who's been working toward this day.
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Here's a curiosity, found by an
#EagerBeaverBook
reader on Texas' Trinity River: a nearly perfect beaver-chewed sphere! Anyone seen this before? Perhaps a kit, still learning how to be a proper beav?
Thanks to Allan Posnick for sending me this delightful oddity.
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Stumbled upon my new favorite dam complex this weekend. Hard to beat.
“As animal life goes, that of the beaver stands among the best. His life is full of industry and rich in repose. He is home-loving and avoids fighting. His lot is cast in poetic places.” — Enos Mills
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Apropos of nothing: Aldo Leopold was an enduring genius not only because he was a gifted interpreter of landscapes who wrote endlessly quotable prose, but because the dude readily admitted and corrected his own errors. May we all share Aldo's intellectual flexibility & humility.
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Merry Christmas, but only to those headline writers capable of telling the difference between a beaver and a groundhog.
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"On your own land, everything will help you to defend it."
Just when you think that every conceivable benefit of beavers has been documented, they go ahead and help win a war.
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If you're still feeling cynical about whether this new administration will bring about meaningful change, here's a list of Executive Orders that Biden has *already pledged* to enact on DAY ONE of his presidency. Buckle up, folks.
#BeaverBelieverInChief
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This thread is an all-timer. Nothing better than seeing animals ingeniously exploit a built world designed to exclude them.
Bird nests made from anti-bird spikes! 🤯 Even for me as a nest researcher, these are the craziest bird nests I've ever seen. Today my paper came out on this rebellious behaviour. And it's like telling a joke...
A thread. 🧵
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Fifty years from now, I will still have an inbox full of charming emails from total strangers describing their beaver interactions in meticulous detail. Today's dispatch, from the Olympic Peninsula:
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Caution: CROSSINGS *will* make you want to quit your high-paying job at a renowned tech company to devote your life to helping animals cross roads.
#roadecology
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