I was startled to learn the other day that the state of Oregon classified beavers as predators.
Seems to me the Cottonwood Lobby has gotten a little big for its corporate britches. Or maybe it’s a union issue. Maybe Amalgamated Pond Scum teamed up with the International Brotherhood of Willows. Because unless I miss my bet, beavers don’t eat meat. Not even fish. Not even by accident. They stalk stalks.
I like beavers. I’m favorably inclined toward chunky animals anyway, but beavers have the most amazing impact on the environment of anyone. The Army Corps of Engineers only wishes it could do what a passel of beavers can do, even without taking a bite out of the federal budget. If, for instance, you were interested in flood control, you could invite a family of beavers and have a nice working sustainable wetland situation in no time, or you could hire the ACE for a few billion dollars to do a bunch of squiggly math and pour a bunch of concrete and put all the water where you want it to be, for a few years, until it all goes to hell and you’ve sent all your topsoil into the ocean and maybe drowned a few thousand poor people and the water goes back to where it wanted to be all along.
So, beavers. Hardly anyone is making hats out of them anymore, which is what nearly wiped them out altogether a while back.The reason they were classified as predators was it was a tidy way of putting them in a category where you could kill them and not have to tell anybody.
In fact, all rodents in Oregon are classified as predators, even though the most predaceous of them chomp grubs. The point isn’t to be biologically accurate about beaver diets, but to allow private citizens to get rid of beavers that are busy mitigating wildfire and flooding and sequestering carbon and creating salmon habitat and stuff like that. Especially if they’re doing it on land they had other plans for. Calling beavers predators is like calling immigrants criminals and rapists. Accuracy isn’t the point: being able to harass or kill them is the point.
But it didn’t really seem like the right policy for Oregon which is, after all, the Beaver State, and even has the only two-sided state flag, with a beaver on the flip side. And sure enough, the rule was recently revised. As of June 14, the beaver has been reclassified as a “furbearer,” which means, according to the state, it has value, and can no longer be slain with impunity on private lands.
Well. Value. There is no official state classification recognizing the immense ecological value of our biggest rodent, so the ability to have your pelt ground up as felt for Stetson hats will have to do for value.
I have my own problems with beavers but even that boils down to respect. Pro tip: if you tromp through a beaver pond to count frog eggs, and who hasn’t done that, always poke at the bottom of the pond with a stick, because beavers create their own highway system of trenches and you can easily find your entire self underwater with one false step. Perhaps it was just this sort of thing that got them saddled with the “predator” slur, but in my experience no large rodent shows up to finish you off.
Currently, if you’re a private landowner in Oregon with a beaver that you feel has gotten out of hand, you may not destroy the beaver without a permit. Although you can get permission from the state to forgo the permit, without even acing the essay portion.
WTF Oregon? You were my light on a hill. Clay feet like the rest of us. Seriously I find this really depressing. Musk, the patriarchy, another holiday coming up. I’m returning to bed till May.
Well, we did go for Kamala. So.
Well said, Murr. During public consultations regarding the reintroduction of beavers to certain parts of the UK, it is not unknown for fishing/angling groups to complain about the impact beavers will have on fish stocks. Well, yes, there will be an impact, but it’s a positive one, creating deeper pools, increasing suitable habitat and food abundance for those creatures of a piscine persuasion.
But…maybe not the RIGHT kind of fish?
On the subject of rodents as predators, there are a number of species that will happily eat meat if given the opportunity. Some scavenge for it, others actively hunt other animals. These include things like chipmunks, ground squirrels and rats. There was a recent article that popped up in various places about ground squirrels killing and eating voles.
You are correct that beaver are exclusive herbivores. Generally the larger an animal is the more likely it is to be either an omnivore or a pure herbivore. Eating plants requires a longer gut, sometimes elaborations of the stomach and generally space to hold consumed plant material while gut microbes break it down into something useful. It’s why gorillas are the largest of the great apes and also why they are respectively slow moving and mild tempered, at least as compared with other great apes like chimps and humans, which are omnivorous to varying degrees. Neither species has the dentition or the gut elaborations to deal with a pure plant diet.
I did a post mortem recently on a road killed beaver, which was most first opportunity to actually touch a beaver. The fur is incredibly dense. I can’t make an analogy because I’ve never seen/felt anything like it.
The gut was filled with wood that had been shredded into tiny pieces, again not like anything else. A wood chipper doesn’t come anywhere near the shredding ability of a beaver.
I didn’t see a wild beaver in NJ until I was in my early teens. Now they’re everywhere.
When we lived in Grants Pass in the early 70’s, actually outside of town a few miles in a forested area, I was driving home one day and stopped to see a squirrel on a carcass of a road kill, eating. I even took a photo, it’s long since disappeared.
How did you come to doing forensics on a beaver? I agree, their fur is incredibly dense, and I confess to having an old stetson with their fur.
I thought I’d answered the question about how I came to do a post mortem on a beaver. It was roadkill. I suppose the next question is why I picked up roadkill? If I see an interesting carcass on the side of the road and it’s reasonably fresh I’ll pick it up. I carry gloves and contractor bags for that purpose.
Early in the summer I spotted a beaver carcass that I knew was reasonably fresh and was in a safe place to pick up by myself. I’ve always wanted to see the caudal/tail vertebrae of a beaver and figured it might be my only chance.
So I grabbed it, which makes it sound easy. Beavers are heavy animals and even in an undecomposed state can produce powerful odors from their castoreum glands. Fortunately the gland hadn’t ruptured.
I got it home without incident and then prepped it for maceration by removing the skin and then removing as much of the soft tissue as possible. The body was put into a five gallon bucket with a little water and then buried to keep the decomposition odor from being an issue. Maceration is a process of using bacteria in liquid to consume the remaining soft tissue and just leave clean bones.
I was impressed by how muscular the stomach was. Didn’t spend a lot of time examining it because the digestive tract was perforated in multiple places, it was the summer and I didn’t want to offend my neighbors.
I couldn’t save the skin, so that and the removed soft tissues were buried. I had some issues with rats tunneling in to the buried items and even the bucket.
The bucket is still buried. Ideally maceration should be done in an open bucket in a warm spot. But that stinks to high heaven and tends to attract scavengers. Burial keeps the maceration bucket cool, which means decomposition takes place at a slower rate. I buried buckets two feet deep for several years and when I dug them up, some of the carcasses were still intact, just fermented. Another time I buried an emu in an ice chest in a compost pile for two years. That was perfectly clean when unearthed.
If you’re wondering why I do this, I’m a biologist and comparative anatomy, particularly skeletal anatomy is one of my areas of study.
I was listening to “Wait, Wait” on NPR this weekend. One of the things they said was that scientists have found that squirrels are becoming omnivores (they phrased it as more carnivorous) due to climate change. So maybe since they are so numerous in my yard, THEY are actually eating the mice who had infiltrated my home a year and a half ago, and it’s not the hypersonic devices I have all over my home that’s keeping them out? If that’s the case, I am definitely keeping up with giving them cracked corn and leftover bread and pizza crusts and pasta! They are bigger than most squirrels I see right now! Maybe I can super-size them and they will take on the feral cats! Or the raccoons that have been predating my fish pond! You go, squirrels!
You get an attack squirrel that will take on raccoons, I believe you can rule the world.
Predator doesn’t have a verb. Predating is something that takes place before a point in time or before a romantic event. It is not related to taking prey.
Hey, if Murr can make up words and verbify nouns (your head just exploded, am I right?😄), then so can I!
Well… at least you didn’t put the road-kill beaver in your freezer…. Um… you didn’t, did you…? 😉
Hi Mimi:
Nope, didn’t go into the freezer. It got processed and buried. It hadn’t been dead long enough to offend the nostrils, but it had been dead long enough and run down in such a way that only a very hungry man would think of eating it. We’ve got a very large contingent of vultures, black and turkey and none of them were paying court.
When I was younger and still living at home I had a refrigerator with a little freezer in the basement that was mine as well as the use of the family freezer’s door which I used for my premium finds, mostly birds I was planning to turn into study skins and reptiles. My mom unintentionally triggered the cleaning out of the refrigerator by pulling its plug without checking to see if there were contents. I was alerted to the unplugged state by the distinct whiff of death upstairs. Ran down to check and there was blood drooling out of the fridge. Oh boy.
I never got around to processing the prizes on the freezer door. When I finally moved out they either got the heave ho or ended up macerated.
That’s a way worse story than the one about the black snake Dad brought home to photograph that accidentally got loose and lost in the house (I believe Mom might have moved out at that point) and was eventually found inside the piano, where it deadened two octaves below middle C.
Now that was a beautiful story!
Okay, Should Fish More. You asked, Bruce answered. I have nothing to add, except my own conviction that “beavers” is the plural of “beaver” unless you’re referring to beavers in an already post-value state, such as piled up for the milliners or the perfumers. These days everyone is unpluralizing critters and flowers and I aim to put a stop to it. This ain’t Latin.
Just yesterday, we had a lengthy discussion here about whether mice find and eat spiders. Deer are giant rodents. I have always loved beavers because they build houses. Am I rambling again?
Why do you say deer are giant rodents?
I’m guessing the “rodent = pest” equation has a LOT to do with classifying deer as such.
Please stay tuned for my upcoming actual rodent posts.
Hi Bruce, Sadly, the truth is that my father used to call deer giant rodents. So I googled it. I guess they’re not.
While I was googling, I found this.
“The mouse deer is also not a rodent or a deer, but is an ungulate, a hoofed animal, like camels, giraffes, and wild boars.”
Well, sure. The mouse deer.
Also one of the oddball tusked animals that isn’t a hippo, pig relative or an elephant. All the animals you named are artiodactyls, which bizarrely enough includes whales. Back when whales still had functional hind limbs their ankle bones included a distinctive astragulus which is pretty much the same shaped bone regardless whether you happen to be a giraffe, a cow, a hippo or an early whale for instance. They differ only in size, length and width.
I want to like beavers, and I appreciate everything they do in nature. But it is the ‘rodent family’ thing that holds me back. How can I feel warm and fuzzy about Mr. Beaver when his near cousin, Mr. Rat, routinely chomps through my neighbor’s wooden garage door, and can occasionally be heard late at night, rearranging the spray-in insulation in my attic crawl-space? Yeah, I know — my stereotyping of rodents is pretty much tantamount to someone saying that ‘all French people are rude’ or ‘every hairdresser is an air-head’……
This should help: French people are really nice. Now, revisit the beavers.
I’ve read that French people think it’s the Americans who are rude. When the French buy something from a shopkeeper, they greet each other and maybe even have a brief chat. Americans, OTOH, don’t do the pleasantries. They point at what they want, and say, “I’ll take that.” Reading that inspired me to be more pleasant to the people behind the counter here in America.
My alma mater’s mascot is the beaver; “Nature’s Engineer”!
Other than Oregon State?
So…where does this leave the nutria in the grand scheme of things? As a “predator”, or more along the lines of “unwelcome immigrant”?
Ugly orange-toothed rathead?
By the way, speaking of nutria, I’m wondering if your title photo is a nutria and not a beaver.
I was wondering that too and hoping the photo I scavenged from the internet under “Creative Commons” was the real deal. I have beaver pix somewhere that I took, and beaver habitat also, but I didn’t know which decade of photos to slog through for them.
I just Googled nutria and beaver to compare with your photo. And more sure it’s a nutria. Yours has really long whiskers, which is a nutria trait.
Mark Gamba, our state rep for Milwaukie is the author of the amending leglislation and worked very hard for additional legislation that would have recognized their value and protected them, which did not pass. Contact your reps to offer him more support on the issue. And my second bit of info for those in the Portland metro area is that one of the largest beaver habitats in Portland is in, and takes up the majority of, the new Errol Heights Park at SE 45th & Harney. Go at dawn or dusk if you actually want to see beavers. And a great recent Oregon Field Guide on the beaver habitat restoration occurring in Eastern Oregon – https://watch.opb.org/video/beaver-assisted-restoration-ucs3vw/
Cool! I’ve only seen one dead beaver on NE 33rd near the slough and a couple on Sauvie Island, and good habitat at Mary S. Young Park. I’ll check it out!
Why put roadkill beaver in the freezer? To keep it until you’re ready to skin it, and then eat it. I’ve done both after making sure the roadkill was fresher than the meat I get at the local market, which I discovered is often sprayed with who knows what to make sure it continues to look fresh when it’s not.
And I like beavers too and would never kill one, but why not eat a fresh one that just met its demise if given the opportunity. BTW I’m an omnivore.
Plus, the tails practically come with dicing lines.
Fascinating discussion on this. We are introducing beavers to Britain and they will be merrily altering our river landscapes, which probably will be a good thing, We’ve had a lot of rain recently.
They weren’t there before? Sounds like a gamble! I mean, maybe a good one, but…
I’m pretty sure beavers were in the UK in the past, but got hunted out like so many other things. Bustards, bears, wolves, Neandertals, unicorns…
We just went on a walk by the river where there has been a lot of beaver activity. I was surprised at how large the latest tree was that had been felled. Possibly 18 inches in diameter? Usually it’s the saplings that have been downed. Got me wondering how long it takes to chew a tree until it falls and if there’s more than one in an area, do they take turns gnawing one tree or a beaver doesn’t touch another beaver’s tree? I was kind of unhappy when OSU changed their logo to the mean beaver. I can understand wanting to have something fierce looking when you’re playing football, but UO gets it done without having a mean looking duck.
Actually, ducks are a LOT meaner. From what I understand, Mallard males actually gang up on a female to “mate” (actually, rape) the female. Sometimes she doesn’t even survive. I once saw a duck rape in Cape May. I didn’t realize at the time that this was how they mate. I saw this lame female duck, and all these males were descending upon her. There was nothing I could do. So I left Cape May Point weeping. Much later, Isabella Rosellini had a short online series about how animals mate. Yeah, ducks are real assholes.
Indeed ducks are, however they are very tasty.
They are! And what’s more, duck fat is excellent for making oven-fries. The skin of the potato gets nice and crispy. Just make them the usual way you make oven fries, only substitute melted duck fat for whatever fat you usually use. I find that purple potatoes, which only ONE place around here has, and are pretty much the original potato from Peru, are the best for oven fries. But Yukon Golds are good, too.
It is also great for frying potato latkes. I used to fry them in olive oil diluted with a little chicken fat, but I couldn’t always render enough fat from the bird I was making soup from. I found very small tubs of refrigerated chicken fat in a store in Berkeley, but that was expensive. Finally I learned that duck fat is affordable and available in cans, and it tastes just as good, so I switched. The results have been great, or so my guests have said.
Jeremy, can you share your potato latke recipe?
BRUCE: this recipe will take some experimentation to scale it down — it is for a large party.
Peel and coarsely shred 20-25 lbs (yes, really!) of russets. Use a Cuisinart. Every now and then sprinkle lemon juice and salt into the Cuisinart so the spinning blade will scatter them into the potatoes. I find that a dozen lemons’ worth of juice will do it. Every time the Cuisinart is filled, dump it into a colander. I used to sprinkle the salt and lemon juice over each batch I dumped into the colander, but sprinkling it into the Cuisinart seemed to work better. I don’t have a measurement for the total salt. I leave the shredded potatoes in the colander for the salt to drain them. Two colanders is usually enough to hold two mountains of dripping shredded potatoes. If you’ve added enough lemon juice, the shredded potatoes won’t turn brown. The salt should extract lots of liquid.
(Some people wrap globs of shredded potato into a towel and squeeze the water out, but that is not practical on this scale.) Each colander should be draining into a pot, not into the sink. After they’ve drained long enough there will be liquid and potato starch in the bottom of each pot. If there’s enough starch, decant the aqueous (I’d recommend pouring it into the garden) and scoop the starch back into the pile of shredded potatoes.
Dump the drained shredded potatoes into a 5-gallon bucket. Add a dozen beaten eggs, a couple of cups of matzoh meal (or more, if you like), pepper and maybe more salt to taste. Mix that well.
Fry latkes in about ⅜” olive oil plus a couple of tablespoons of duck fat. Replenish the oil/duck mixture in the pan as necessary, as the latkes will absorb a lot, and who knows, maybe the lights (as we said in the oil industry) will cook off. I don’t measure the size of each glob I plop into the pan, so experiment. Fry them until they are however done you like.
Most people drain cooked latkes on a paper towel, but one of my wife’s favorite aunt’s told me this idea, which sounded absurd at first but worked very well: stack them vertically like vinyl records to drain. I tried using a rack, but too much stuff got caught in it, so I got a big disposeable aluminum roasting pan and lined the bottom with bats of crumpled AL foil instead. Then afterward I could just throw the whole mess out.
Whatever you do, DON’T try to run the potato peelings down the garbage disposal. I should have known better, but I plugged our drain badly enough so we had to call Roto Rooter. The man said we’d plugged the drain pipe all the way out to the street. He declined our invitation to stay for latkes.
I think that’s everything. If I think of anything else, I’ll add another comment.
I FORGOT THE ONIONS! The batter should have one grated large onion for every two russets. Use the Cuisinart and open the windows!
Thanks to Mimi for reminding me!
Both the OSU and U of O mascots are dreadful. Donald Duck and a mean beaver. Honestly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl3xNpeOkE0
From a Michigan resident about beavers, a letter read by Peter Dinklage on Letters Live
A Michigan resident objected to attempts to remove beavers from his land. His letter about their dam project is on YouTube Letters Live read by Peter Dinklage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl3xNpeOkE0
Jeremy’s Latke recipe sounds very similar to the potato pancakes my Polish grandmother made. It made about a dozen pancakes. She’d peel 3 large potatoes and grate them into a bowl. Add 1 egg and 1 1/2 teaspoons salt. Add 1/4 cup flour. A small onion could be grated into it if you like. Melt about 1/4″ shortening. She ladled in the batter to form about 4″ rounds. Turn to brown the other side, drain on a paper towel lined platter and keep warm. It was topped either with jam or sour cream.
At the very least, this may give you an idea of the measurements to use when you aren’t making latkes for an army.
Footnotes: I first make a pot of chicken soup, hoping to get enough fat. The chicken fat has the flavor of the soup — rosemary, thyme, sage, enough paprika to make the fat slightly orange, black pepper, a few juniper berries (very few if they’re fresh), and I can’t remember what else — so the duck fat, while good, is a second choice. And the latke batter should have some white pepper in addition to the black.
I make my own chicken stock… which is different from chicken BROTH. First of all, I use a pressure cooker. NOT like the one your grandma used. A MODERN one. Takes about 45 minutes. I put in 2 1/2 pounds chicken wings. (If you come across chicken FEET, throw a couple of them in, too. Makes it more gelatinous.) I add a quartered whole onion, a couple ribs of celery, a couple carrots, about 4 cloves of garlic (whole), a couple teaspoons of salt, a few peppercorns, !/4 cup cider vinegar, and a teaspoon of turmeric. Add 2 quarts water. If you have a pressure cooker, it only takes half an hour or so. Doing it the usual way… who knows. You just gotta taste as you go along. Let cool at room temperature. Strain and put stock in fridge. I pick off the chicken meat from the bones for a later soup. Next day, when the stock has been fridged overnight, I scoop off the chicken fat to use. The stock, I containerize in 2 cup portions and freeze. So much cheaper and tastier than processed “stock”. And easy if you have the right equipment.
Murr! You didn’t know you had a recipe column!
How vital is the turmeric to the recipe? I managed to sensitize myself to it and now can’t eat anything that has been in slight proximity to turmeric. Unfortunately it is a popular food coloring agent and is used in all kinds of foods to make reds more vibrant, yellows pop and green look appetizing (non-turmeric addled greens go gray).
When I say I can’t eat it, of course I can, but following ingestion depending on concentration and quantity I can’t move far from a toilet for one to several days.
Mimi, your pressure cooker recipe sounds great, especially the chicken feet. I don’t know how many people I’ve had to tell that if the stock — or the broth, or the soup — doesn’t set up like jello in the fridge, they’re not doing it right. Wings is the way my son does it. I used to use stewing hens, but these days I can find nothing but fryers, so wings it is!
Turmeric isn’t vital to it. I just use it in lots of stuff because it’s an anti-inflammatory. Cider vinegar is supposed to extract more nutrients from the bones.
Whoa, I’d have to turn that over to my former fellow coworker to figure out how to make that as a single serving! Thanks for the recipe! And kudos to you for having sufficient friends and family to consume all that!
This year our kitchen is being remodeled and I can’t cook anything that can’t be microwaved, so none of the friends and family are coming 🙁 We might do an anachronistic latke party in the spring.
Ok- this from a person involved in urban watershed restoration projects here in Portland, OR- Both rodents are a challenge- My very first public volunteer planting project back in the early 90’s – 90 % of the plants and shrubs were chewed off in less than a week. By nutria. Probably- until we started vastly over planting 200-300% and protecting with anti critter wire. Then if the waters rise high enough the words can float away. We were using a plastic-y compound that was posed to breakdown in the sunlight within a few years (NAH) . Beavers go nuts at the sound of any water restriction and in urban places that means nearly every street culvert, road crossing, footbridge, etc… They just must plug it up. Not so bad if the land can stand being flooded….. not good if warehouses factories, stores and highways are at risk. Sigh, it’s a problem- and yes- they have chewed many 36 inch cottonwoods down. Size does not matter – they need to wear down their perpetually growing teeth. And any wood pulp will do.