Here Come Those Dam-Building Beavers To Northwest Arkansas

Beavers are on the rise in Alaska – specifically Northwest Alaska – as this Wired.com report states. Here’s more on those dam(n) builders making themselves at home on the tundra:

Beavers—once seldom seen in northwest Alaska—started appearing more frequently in the ’80s and ’90s. Pastor Lance Kramer (Inupiaq) traps beavers today, mostly for making fur hats. He recently asked an elder about the area’s first sightings. “They saw this thing on the tundra, and it looked like a wolverine, but it was a really long beaver,” Kramer said. “[It] had walked so far on the tundra to get up this way that it wore out the bottom of its tail.” 

Now the animals—and their ponds, dams, and lodges—are everywhere. Using satellite images of the Kotzebue area, scientists found that the number of beaver dams surged from two in 2002 to 98 in 2019, a 5,000 percent jump. And it’s not just Kotzebue: Beaver ponds doubled regionally since 2000, with 12,000 in northwestern Alaska now. Beavers, dubbed “ecosystem engineers” because of how they flood their surroundings, are transforming the tundra.

North America’s largest rodent is moving north partly because of climate change: As the tundra grows warmer and greener, it also becomes more inviting to beavers, which need shrubs for food, dams, and lodges. Their proliferation is also linked to a population rebound: Beaver trapping, popular for centuries, has tapered off, and the animals are thriving.