a number of beaver theme songs for my little boy river and. i had brought this for you because this has been sitting the back of my closet and i haven't worn it in forever. and i want you to have. 1957 portland beavers, jersey. oh, no way. yes, right. olympian johnny. i just played. oh, my gosh. for the portland beavers back in the day. it's great. now i have to go to readings wearing this. yeah that's why i gave it to you. and you have to go to the office and play that. and blair, this over the eager the beaver and beaver and the honeybee. it sounds great. all right. let's talk about our favorite little aquatic rodent now. how you fall in love with beavers and why and what was the genesis origin story of beaver land? well, the origin story was really serendipity or accident, because i was just walking in the woods one day and i heard this crack a literally thought a

gun had gone off my froze. i froze. but then i looked out to where my dog looking and i saw the which had been just kind of dry swamp had become this so gleam of water and i thought, wow, what has happened here? and then i saw this beavers swimming back and forth. then they slammed their tail again. it was just incredible, you know, i think we think of moments of all as being big. but that for me was a moment of awe. and i thought, i have to understand this. they are one of nature's engineers at, least for this part of the world. talk about they made america well. how the indigenous folks thought of them and reacted to them. yeah. and so their origin story on this continent. well let me just back up to how they made america because beavers really did make america it's not an overstatement so first of all transatlantic trade jump starts, beaver pelts and

the fur trade and by 19th century you got capitalism the engines of capitalism just roaring into fast pace with the fur trade. so our first economies are based on beavers. but it isn't just that the river systems of north america were shaped by beavers. and this is huge and this is why they're playing incredible role now in our environmental future, because we need them back now to help us restore the integrity, integrity of our river system. so it's really exciting, new role they have to play. so we almost wiped them out through the fur trade. but thank goodness we didn't. how to extinction do they think we were? well, no one's exactly sure. but the estimate is that something like 400 million beavers were living throughout all the water sheds of north america. so just imagine that creek, that river that you used to seeing as maybe a thin stream of water was

actually once a river scape. it was just a messy multiple circulatory of water going into the land with because beavers were there managing there are original rivers river keepers and now there's probably 10 to 15 million beaver but efforts were made big efforts were made in the 1900s to bring them back. and we really have to, you know, applaud whoever was behind that. and remember that we have a lot of mistakes. we have a lot of success stories. and beavers are one of them. they're one of the greatest conservation stories we have. they're like the comeback. exactly. i'm actually working on a special for cnn. it airs sunday night about whales and one of the other huge comeback stories, whales which were driven all right to the brink, but they are the oceans, farmers and engineers. they are the biggest fertilizer pumps. so they go down deep and bring up all this nutrients and

fertilize the the top of the sea. and they create more food wherever there's more whales. saw this with wolves in yellowstone. right. that you take a key species out of a landscape for profit or ignorance. but what was it that brought back the beaver did someone thought think they were cute or do they understand this role? i think it was mixed. i mean, i think there have been beaver there have been people throughout history who have understood the importance of beavers and their message has been out and it's been forgotten. there's been a kind ecological amnesia, but i should say who the is because the indigenous peoples who have always lived have had long standing indigenous, ecological knowledge bases and understanding of the value of beavers. so here in the east, up and down the atlantic seaboard, they peoples hunted beavers, but very carefully and stories like the great beaver really teach us again and again their role in

river system. can you share that a little bit of that story? oh, that's a great story. so about beavers in the connecticut and i open the book with that because book starts in connecticut. it's about beavers where i live and i live in northeastern in connecticut right now. so this rascal beaver comes to the valley and there's no water there yet, except a little bit of a creek. and he dams it up and he creates the connecticut river and it becomes so big it starts flooding everybody and the humans are hysterical. and obamacare, the the shafer is called upon to discipline the beaver because the are going to perish. so finally tries to discipline the beaver the beaver will not listen to reason and obamacare has to him up and down the atlantic seaboard into the great lakes and, where he follows the beaver a of geography, follows lakes and waterfalls. so this is it's teaching story

about geography place, but it's also there are many algonquin stories, the dangers of hoarding resources is. so it's a kind of environmental parable and love it because it's so subversive course. it's humans that really need learn not to be greedy not the beaver it's you know so here's a story you like and this is going to feel like industry gossip. but it's not because i think it's probably still online, but years ago i used to have this little lake house in northern jersey, sussex, way up right near where the appalachian trail goes through new jersey. beautiful, beautiful, natural at the top of a watershed with wetlands on either side and beaver dams and. i love them. and they'd swim in the lake and i'd paddle board them and watch them all the time. but then they came for like one of my prized trees. right. which they will do, which will do. but really, it was their tree if you think about it properly. and i posted on twitter, i said other chicken wire. what do i do about, this beaver problem? chris cuomo was a colleague at

the time, replied baseball bat in a tarp, which. yeah so a lot their attitude towards beavers but is that still prevalent are they seen as as pests that are just need to be managed around our arctic. yeah in our landscaping. well mean that's a really great question and it varies region to region because i think beavers definitely need a rebrand. i mean they were pelts then they were considered pests and now they're water superheroes. so i mean, beavers can help us with every environmental problem. we have to do with accelerated climate change. we have drought. we have too much water and then too little water. we're in this climate whiplash. so thinking about things in the east, when have beavers in the river system creating, wetlands, when we have an extreme rain event, that water isn't going to go into the river system and rush out into the ocean. it's going to be held the

wetlands which are like sponges under the ground are going to hold it. they're going to store, they're going to cleanse it. so you have groundwater recharge and that water is cleansed and, you know, a wet sponge, a really great way to hold floodwaters. so they're also being discovered about ten years ago. the light bulb went on in california about how could actually be harnessed help with wildfire mitigation. and in the book, i have a picture of and the idaho wildfire in 2018 they went back and they're these picture of charred mountains. and in the middle of that is where the beavers were. and it's a green refugia. so where beavers are. there's wildfires closed down and there's a resurgent. it's after a wildfire. so they're incredibly valuable in the watershed. oregon, washington, calif to utah have been harnessing the

work of beavers for the last ten years. so the light bulb is turned on in many places where climate change has had extreme outcomes. here in the east, it's mixed and i think there's still a lot of places where people to realize that what they do is more valuable than the inconvenience, right? they are going to flood because. we're living in lowland places where river used to be. so we're not going to move infrastructure. we're not going to move manhattan. we're not going to move hartford. but there are a lot of places where we can tolerate coexistence with, beavers and get the benefits from what they they do but it is it is going to require lot more education. yeah. so i have a first book coming out in april were kind enough to take a look at it and actually i devote a few pages to beavers, not the whole thing. but my book is called life as we know it can be and it it's sort of addressed as letter to my kids, but it's framed around a

reexamination of maslow's hierarchy of needs in the age of climate change. so i my way up through the pyramid of the basic physiological needs a chapter on air, water, temperature. and then we go to shelter and security and all of that and i came across so many inspiring stories of people and. really, the big takeaway is the communities that get through this, these changes the most, the ones that have the most trust, the most connection with each other and nature and. people who are using these beaver dam analogs out west that try to bring back wetlands thought, hey, maybe if we could just beef up this beaver dam, let's see how long it lasts and how much more of the wetlands are recovered. and it's led to these dams even in the arid west. if you arrange rocks in a certain way that just slows down the water the way the beavers, even if they don't live there, it's a way forward in a healthier way. you in this? yeah. yeah. and i think know here in new york there are other examples of

you know we might call that nature based restoration and using the power of nature to restore a degraded environment. you know with beavers it's really interesting because in a place like the chesapeake just hundreds of thousands of dollars spent every year to try to restore the waterways going into the chesapeake with engineered solutions. and i interview this man called the beaver whisperer in the book and he is an environmental leader. and he will talk openly how yeah i can build you water storage for $1,000,000 or you can have beavers do it for free, you know. so i think the light bulb is on also that that communities, individuals and municipalities can save lot of money. and out west you know ranchers who historically were at war with beavers are now calling up beaver places. the utah relocation center and

saying, can you get me some beavers? my cattle need grass in my stream system's going dry. and you know, when i have beavers, it's wet for an extra month. so as people realize how valuable they. but i do want to loop back because out west in the arid plains people like the blackfeet had strict against hunting beavers at all because they knew how valuable they were to the grass ecology. so they were dependent on the bison, which are dependent on the grass and it was really the beavers were just managed in the water that would lead to the grass. it would it just incredibly foolish to them to all these europeans arrive and want pelts like why would you want to pelt if it means you're not going to have a bison. you know, that just didn't add up. but took the europeans a while to figure it out as it does. is there a beaver trapping trade

today? i know. i think you spoke to some in the book and what is what's the industry like and what's their attitude about this new era? well, i think it's changing. i mean, i everything now in an era of accelerating climate change is but i talk a lot about and i profile herb semansky you met in the book he was a fur who really was my first mentor about, beavers. and this was so surprising to me. i'm an lover. i'm an environmentalist and here i am out tromping through the swamps with a fur trapper. there were times i was like, what am i doing here? and i learned so from her. he was an extra ornery conservationist. he knew the beavers better than anybody. and i didn't come from a family that of hunters. conservationists like, sort of came from a family that enjoyed well, we've farm the hudson valley. so i guess i always was interested in the interface

between humans and the natural world. but in kind of way and it was really, it was actually from herb that i got the title of the book because one day he was out in the swamp and he looked around him and he just loved the wetlands and he loved the beavers and he said this beaver land with so much in his voice, i thought, wow, i have to write that down. i have no idea what he's talking about. and after several of research i would understand so was an example of how you knowledge comes to us in different ways and we need to if we're going to solve climate change problems, we need to be open to solutions that come from every and listen to all different kinds of people. and that's, you know, absolutely. that's the trust building exercise. it takes some bravery sometimes to talk to somebody that you think may not agree with you on these sorts of things. but imagine the wisdom he can offer to the greater cause. and if treated with respect, an

ally can become an ally right. yeah. and i'm i've been monitoring a beaver now. i write about it in the afterword and when i was out there with scientist river scientists measuring the water and we were trying to figure out we basically were i watched two very young beavers flee a drastic situation go down into the river system and a a dam over a dry area and within something like three months in pound. over 5 million gallons of water. it was incredible the speed at which they did this. but nobody had any idea about the animals themself. and i realized, okay, i'll do what herb taught me. i built a bait pile and i brought them in and i exactly how to do it because i watched him. so i wasn't bring them into a trap. i was bringing them into wildlife, but i had the beavers on within 24 hours and they were like, how'd do that? and i was like, well, maybe

there something to learn from fur trappers. he knew exactly. you know, i was just thinking what would perv do? and so so anyway i think there's there's some value in that. what is happening in my home state of wisconsin when it comes to legal yeah beaver futures. well you know wisconsin is one of those states that has is really the light bulb is coming on a slow way because there's been this myth about beavers that because they slow down the water, they warm it too much for trout and therefore trout lobby has been taking out beaver dams in the midwest. trout unlimited. well, actually, trout and ducks unlimited are now very much working with pro beaver. okay. because and i read about this in the chesapeake some of the farmers down there are realizing maybe these beavers are flooding a half acre of corn, but that beaver pond they have created i

can sell a duck hunting lease there for a lot more than i could ever sell corn. so, you know, i think, you know, farmers tend to be practical people they have to pay bills and there's like, okay, now we'd rather have some beaver ponds than than corn right there, which is probably what should have always happened, because they in low lying areas. but in wisconsin, i think historically, beaver, beaver dams were being removed because they thought that they were bad for trout. now, out in the northwest they're actually and many of the indigenous tribal councils working the do and the tulalip tribes council up in washington, they are working to recover salmon by bringing beaver back because now we understand what the peoples understood, which is that beavers taught salmon to jump and. actually, they co-evolved they're both necessary for the ecosystem. i mean, if you think about it

why we was taught that salmon to jump. yeah that's actually an expression out in the northwest and trout are also a cold fish so i think that's changing and there's actually a lawsuit happening right now on behalf of the watershed, which is really interesting. and the watershed is the plaintiff for the well they're suing wisconsin department of fish and wildlife. i believe that's the organization and saying look, you removed 17,000 beavers that you didn't need to and you damage the watershed and you are supposed to be protecting the watershed. and you know what they've they were like, well, we don't have an answer for that. so i think they're actually making well, they put an actual dollar figure, the value of a beaver colony or that sort of thing. yeah, actually, i about some of that in the book, i mean extraordinary now that a dollar figure is being put so out in milwaukee. there was a study in 2020 and they figured that beavers in the

upper watershed of the milwaukee within 25 years would generate 1.7 trillion gallons of water storage a year and that much water hold on it is valued at $3.3 billion a year. and that's just it's not that many beavers either. it's like 4000 beavers. yeah. and so and this this is 900 square miles of land that's open. it's as if you have to move someone's soccer or worry about infrastructure. we have a lot of open land that is beaver ready that people just haven't thought about. so i think, you know, the coexistence strategies that you mentioned before are important putting in pond level areas to control when they flood. you can control the level of flooding culvert to protect culverts. but i think it also we need to change our thinking in some

places maybe we put the soccer field in in the wrong and we could move it someplace else. exactly. it takes some humility and some you have to do that. but the of that are amazing. what are you i want to read your quote you were saying that in reference to the 2023 supreme court decision to really roll back protections the waters of the u.s. you call that nothing of delusional. what do you mean by that? well, the sackett decision from last may narrowed the protection, the river system to just visible and continuous water. so what now understand about the river system? and again, the we i have to say sort of contemporary science because the indigenous peoples who have always lived here didn't think about beavers out and manipulating the river and in fact out in california you if i may, in on the klamath river,

the europe tribe has actually given the river. and so it's it's interesting. but so if you think the river system as a circulatory system rather than just a trunk of water, that's like a conveyance like the hudson river out there, would look at it. and we see this long body water that's it's almost like a big ditch of water. i know that seems disrespectful, but that's pretty much what we've done to that river. we've ditched it because. we wanted it for transportation. but a river is like a circulatory system. so this supreme court decision removed protection on 70% of the river system because the tributaries, all the perennial streams, all the intermittent streams, all wetlands, they're not protected anymore unless they're like literally connected to the big river, which is usually not the case so disconnected wetlands. what we call disconnected wetlands, which are actually of

the vast circulatory system of the river scape, are no longer protected and. it's just heartbreaking. i mean, we've got the inflation reduction act, which finally this really ambitious, impressive piece of legislation that now people use to do watershed restoration. and and that's happening. and in some actually like out in washington there they're harnessing beavers as part of that. and then we have this decision which seems to like roll it, roll it all back. it certainly is going to put streams at risk. so what learned researching this book is that a river, a creek stream. that's just the water you what? the water you can't see is an incredibly valuable part of the river system. and if we take protection away from that it's pretty delusional. right? right. is there any legislation in

congress now that could reverse any of this or what is the beavers best tell our ally? i think the beavers best hope is actually individual states and individual finding out about their watershed getting involved in protecting their watershed. i mean, california actually leapt ahead in the last year as a leading state in the west because they an official beaver working group the governor just hired five beaver specialist. i mean it's a real policy of the state to harness beavers for watershed protection. they know they have to get about dwindling groundwater and wildfire mitigation and. right. and so what's interesting is the first beaver relocation 75 years is happening out and it's actually happening on historic mida traditional lands of the middle mountain people and that's because they managed buy that land back.

it's complicated when a major power company went bankrupt, they managed to get their historic traditional lands back. so i think individual individual organizations land restoring river scapes is probably where a great deal of hope lies and a lot of activity is happening there and other states might follow that lead if they see the fruits of that labor. yeah. yeah, i mean people are working incredibly hard been so heartened as the books come out to have met so many incredible people i met and i met so incredible people researching the book past and present and had fun writing about their stories, but also the books come out meeting, working on watershed restoration and river restoration here up and down the hudson valley and in the new york area, you know, working so hard to, restore the river. that's a billion oyster project, right here in the in the harbor.

got a lot of things going on. that's the thing we often forget i'm lucky enough to live right between the brooklyn and the bridge and walk around city brooklyn bridge park all the time. and that is an ecological comeback that's up there with the beaver and the humpback was an open sewer when i was a child and there was a humpback whale a mile times square following menhaden upstream, the oysters and all of that. it's how nature can heal itself given, the space. right. well, and i think amazing what people can do on a grassroots level. i mean, i think the thing is when the book first came out, i you know, i fell in love with beavers, but i also fell in love with the story of beavers in north america because it such a story of hope and for our time. but i think we need more than hope. we need hope that leads to action. and i see a of action happening by individuals and it builds and i think also once you take an

action however small you feel so paralyzed by change because you realize there a lot of things we can do and you'll allies you never knew you had and to turn that anxiety into action. right this is great. should we ask some questions? sure. from these folks? yeah, sure. anybody got time for some questions and we'll pass to my ground if anybody's one. i've got one there, sir. are there are many outside of the united states? well that's a great question. thank you. yeah, well there's a eurasian beaver. it's related to caster candidates is the north beaver, but it has some differences. so are there's a big happening in the uk, scotland, wales, ireland germany, throughout europe actually too they call it rewilding. they're because river restoration was, a big push in deer in the eu and also in great

britain. so a lot of work returning beavers last summer beavers were seen in an area of west london and the mayor of london was down there on on you know bbc news talking how exciting it was and of talking about how much restoration be happening. so, you know, they just as concerned about flooding and dealing with that as we are urban flooding is a huge and again there's much that can happen beavers are just you so weird and quirky and extraordinary i mean they they seem be remarkably adaptive at moving into places where you wouldn't think they could be and then they're they are, you know, their beaver thing. so that's kind of fun about beavers. in fact, there were beavers in the i think a couple of years ago, they the toronto subways maybe was not so fun but walked into a toronto subway stop and everybody had to stop we got

pizza rat, they got subway beaver. well, we should be so lucky that we so lucky, right. canada, a lot more beavers than we did the day we get. they're also beavers. and there's a project to bring beavers to mongolia and actually a russia had had been quite a leader in beaver research and it's really interesting i have some pictures of early beaver nurses from from russia in the book so it's really interesting story that's fascinating. yeah, there was a piece i don't know if anybody else has a question, raise your hand. but there was a piece in the times few months ago about a study, canadian beavers and how they changed this the species of the trees right around here they're they're then and then they wander out to get more trees but the wolves were basically containing how far

they could roam fast. yeah like you said they taught the salmon how to how to jump but everything is in is balancing each other out. yeah it's sort of like the i think they used it sort of like regulators, the wolves regulators on just how much rearranging beavers can do. yeah, i it's really interesting. a couple of weeks ago, i actually was at the kerry institute of ecosystem studies and i was to have a conversation with clive jones, who actually coined the term engineer. and it was interesting to talk to him. how did he come up? i said, how did you come up with this? why beavers? and he said, we looked at snails beavers and elephants, which i thought was really interesting. so apparently rock eating snails were one thing and beavers and elephants. elephants, we can kind of get. but i think the ways in which beavers are so brilliant at constructing, it's also

interesting, we don't fully understand yet how they do so i think researchers now are starting to crack the code of beaver intelligence. yes. and i write about this researcher, i think is really doing interesting work. she's out montana now on the blackfeet. she grew up on the blackfeet reservation. but when i interviewed her she was at harvard and. she thinks that beavers are able to build massive constructions and their constructions some of them have lasted 200 years and successive generations of beavers are working on them that that we need to think about them closer to ants and termites working in a in a kind of group. so we tend to think about intelligence in a human way as an individual. and she said we really need to think what beavers do in a more collect way, which i think is pretty fascinating amazing. and you think i just to a scientist who's using artificial intelligence ice to do census of

penguins in antarctica and figure that out and could use a.i. to understand beaver and duplicate it with some sort of biomimicry. well they actually are a.i. now. they're trying to teach google earth how to identify beaver because would be really useful if google earth could locate all beaver dams in north america. that would be super useful for beaver research would also be really useful for flood research because see how many beaver dams after a flood. so biomimicry engineers are looking at beaver dam constructions because. beavers never one big dam. they build at least three and it's in an engineer sense a really smart way to capture the sheer force of water because. if the top dam a little bit impinged, the second dam catches it in the third and the lower

dam, all that water that's collected below presses against the top dam and helps support it. so there are a lot engineering things going on that are actually quite sophisticated. i sometimes look at the beavers, i'm watching, i think, god, you're 36 inches tall. you really like a funny looking little creature. how do you do this? i think that's the question humans have asked for centuries. busy genius. those are those little guys. yeah. yeah. i think a of new yorkers would be interested to know why is the beavers a major design element in the astor place subway station? oh, great. yes, that beautiful tile. if you haven't seen it, you have to go see it. so john jacob astor, our multimillionaire, made his fortune selling beaver pelts in the wharfs of manhattan. so that's why that is there for

john jacob astor. so and he would go and it's a story i have a lot of fun writing about because he would actually, you know, almost dupe jefferson and build what would become a he would create a global trade empire but he would almost clinch it by following lewis and clark's expedition across and send a boat envoy and found the first trading point on the west coast in oregon, which he would of course name after himself astoria and. so then fur would be sent from astoria. it would go to china and then it would come back by of london, pick up trade goods to new york and go round and round was quite brilliant. the only thing that was not brilliant about his scheme was that like everyone else in his time considered beavers in

exhaustible resource and within years they were trapped out. so he had more beaver pelts, but he didn't care because was moved on to other things. so he into real estate by then so interesting i'm curious i left one sec so we can get the mike c-span folk want to hear you. hi. i'm curious if they have a preference for specific species of trees. oh, trees. yeah, they do have favorites and so trees, like here in the east willow and poplar have a a big scent and are quite sweet, and they really like those a lot. they'll eat, you know, they basically survive on trees when they don't have a quarter quarter plants. and they also use trees to make building material. so they don't actually feed on trees because don't get that much nutrition from underlying

layer of bark that can become native birch. they'll eat, they do not like pine. it's too sticky, but they they like trees that that are sweet. and the animal devotion is to build a place for water plants to grow. yeah their farmers so they need water they are incredibly awkward on land i mean they waddle around and anybody could eat them very easily. so they know that. and it's really interesting because when i've been watching these two beavers with their ponds. they went to a perfect pinch spot in a valley and i was thinking, how did they know it's a valley there they couldn't have seen lay of the land so it's really a kind a mystery. you know there's, they're small and they have very poor eyesight. so they're just going what they can see in a very small around them or by smell, but so anyway out west they really like things

like aspen but basically trees have more sugar in them they birch so if you have ornamental birch in your yard, paint it with sand. the paint, they don't like that or protect them. chicken wire is another good way so they will go after those trees. good to know. yes. oh. hi there. hi. in this discussion, talked a lot about so many positive things that beavers are bringing to ecosystem, how they can be so financially helpful to society. in your research what have you found are the counterarguments for employing beavers and pretty much solving a lot of these issues we're having like i was really surprised by that fact that you told us that legislation was passed to really not protect all of these watershed ads in these rivers and streams and not using beavers. how is that how is that argument

even viable. well, i think the to go back the sackett decision. i think that decision flies in the face of science and congress just because it was a bipartisan decision, vote in the clean water act. so basically a small group of justice overturned that in the supreme court in last may. but i think, you know, we just have been hardwired to think beavers either as well for, you know, 300 years as a resource. and then they became this pest. we were moving into lowland areas. the river used to be where would be. and so beavers were in the way of where we wanted to be. they be flooding our roads or our train. a lot of our infrastructure. so i think before there was an understanding of a their value b that they're actually co-existence that can work. people just thought we just have

to get rid of them. and also, i think to go back to the efforts to return them big. efforts were made in the 19th century to return them. and because there were so many abandoned farms the early 1900s, there's so much woodland out here in the east that was returning. beavers had a lot of area to return to, so they did rebound in the park and then they moved down the fort to beavers, came to connecticut in 1914 and so i think people just sort of got used to thinking about as so durable and we could just take as many out as we wanted to. and i think, yeah, rodents and i've even seen these diagrams of sort of rodent kind of reproduction that don't make any sense because beavers only have 2 to 4 kids. they limit their population of food goes, they have fewer kids. not all the kids survive.

so it's not they're not like mice where you're going to have two than four than 16 than a, you know an explosion of beavers which is what people like to talk about and that that would be the rationale for taking out 30% of the population every year which was sort of the standard response. but i think what happens is that agencies just sort of they have policy, they have a culture and that that culture just goes on until shake it up with size its and i think people are shaking it up now but sometimes it has to be shaken up by lawsuits. sometimes it has to be shaken up by grassroots and a really motivator is the dollar sign. so when people realize they can save money, that that really gets the wheels turning. so that's encouraging for beavers. but i think it's cultural, you know, but, but i think that's a great question. you how do we make change happen. yes, sir.

how far do beavers travel? i mean, i, i guess we're moving them, but they move themselves as well. so what's the range of, of a beaver family? well, that also is a really good question and i should say what we don't know beavers as i you know i spent six years researching this book. i thought wow. i really know everything about beavers and then one year into this observing i'm calling up beaver and them saying, look, the beavers did you told me they didn't do that. and they're like, well, you know what? we didn't know they did that. now know. so there's really an absence of there's been an absence of research about. beavers, the more charismatic mammals, wolves and bears been studied. and then the beaver, the that have been needed for hunting like and elk and wild turkey have been studied because people wanted to hunt them. so we needed information about

them. so now that we know beavers, valuable people are like, oh my gosh, we need more information about animal itself and discovering that, hey, we actually don't know, but that very question is being monitored out in voyageurs park where that's probably the densest population of beavers in north america right now. it's an incredible. that park is relatively but it's in the reaches of minnesota this beautiful boundary waters boundary waters and the beavers have been rebounding and now they've tagged them so that they can see how far they go. you know, there's been anecdote total reports story and up in alaska it's been incredible because beavers as the climate is warming been moving north and they've actually been creating problems alaska because they're bringing water which is thaw the

permafrost they're not the only animal didn't used to be there that's moving there but they actually have been seen on video camera climbing over a mountain to get to where they are. so nobody's up. beavers climbed mountains before. that's our next pixar movie. yeah, i think it would be a good one. i want to make a disney film about these two young beavers who just their story is so poignant and incredible. they're like refugees. lost their family. they lost their parents they lost everything. and they're just down, you know, surviving, making it happen. these are the ones that created all that. yeah. yeah. and there there are sibling and they clearly kind of, sort of sometimes don't know how to do something. sometimes their dams fail and it's like they're teenage, teenage. they didn't they didn't have enough time to how to do it right. so. one more question.

yes. thanks. just wondering if beavers across the country are facing challenge from invasive species, things like phragmites or nutria or beavers just that good at sort of adapting and changing their environment that they're better suited to face challenges. yeah, that's a really good question. and they they actually are so phragmites, which is this invasive kind of water plant that's taking over wetlands that is cattails and cattails eels are really nutritious food for beavers, for muskrat, for a lot of different species and nobody eats phragmites. but phragmites grows everywhere. it's pushes out the cattails. that's a problem because a major food source is disappearing down region is that it's happening right here. it's here. yeah. in fact, all up and down the

hudson river will volunteer are removing phragmites and it's it's really important if you have a pond and you have phragmites, you should get rid of it. but neutral is a problem down south, which is a kind of rodent that is causing a lot of havoc. they're an invasive species. but, you know, a lot of the species we think of as being here, we european colonists brought. and it's an interesting conversation because now sometimes the climate is changing to the extent where we're not sure whether we should keep the invasive or try to go back to the original species. that's a more complicated conversation. well, thank you so much, lila it was really a treat talking to you.