Why NASA Is Watching Where Idaho's Parachuting Beavers Landed

[Nevilledog]

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/beaver-nasa-project

If you were wandering the wilds of the Wasatch National Forest in Utah in September 2023, you might have encountered a strange sight: a line of slowly marching horses, with beavers saddled on their backs. Unfortunately, the rodents were not wearing tiny cowboy hats and boots. They were inside carriers, but their journey via horseback was still a fairly Wild West–type of solution to a problem. These beavers were headed to a new home—a battleground in the fight against drought and wildfires in the region.

“We would need two people to carry a beaver, normally, whereas a horse can carry two per horse,” explains Nate Norman, lead biologist for the Beaver Ecology and Relocation Center at Utah State University. Norman has trekked with a 60-pound beaver, in a 20-pound carrier, on his back, so he knows how unwieldy they can be. He’s also helped others hoist cages attached to rods onto their shoulders like a litter, “kind of like Cleopatra,” he says. The horses are far more efficient at transporting large groups.

For decades, people have gone out of their way to move beavers across great distances. Today’s preferred methods—hiking, humping, and horseback rides—are an improvement over 1948, when beavers were parachuted out of planes in Idaho. Back then, Idaho Fish and Game had loaded the animals into boxes designed to spring open upon landing, and then dropped them over the Sawtooth Mountain Range.

“At the time, when you had a bunch of out-of-work paratroopers post–World War II getting state jobs, and a bunch of airplanes that weren’t being used, and cheap fuel, yeah, that was an affordable option. Not so much today,” says Joe Wheaton, a river restoration expert also at Utah State.

*snip*

[FSogol]

1. A writer was recently fired at Atlas Obscura for making up stories.

Not the parachuting beaver story author, but I have my suspicions.

https://thewalrus.ca/around-the-world-in-eighty-lies/

[sinkingfeeling]

2. There's video!

?si=b7YX_t3jlp4S4kjy

[Journeyman]

5. As God is my witness, I didn't know beavers could fly . . .

[intheflow]

6. .

[canetoad]

3. Fascinating!

There are many projects past and present here to reverse the effects of industry, erosion and human habitation on the course of rivers and creeks and restore a more water-based landscape.

Makes me wish we had beavers here. Platypus just don't cut it.

[Sneederbunk]

4. Hard to believe we would be lied to by the Media.

[Kaleva]

7. Band of Beavers will soon be aired.

[scipan]

8. The Story of Geronimo the Parachuting Beaver

...snip...

In Idaho, the various mountains, heavily forested landscape, and lack of roads made beaver transplantation a difficult and convoluted process, as Elmo W. Heter from the Idaho Fish and Game Department described in a 1950 edition of The Journal of Wildlife Management. First, the targeted beavers would be packed into boxes, and spent days strapped to a horse or a mule, enduring the heat, dust, bumps, and general lack of breathing space on their way to the home of a designated conservation officer. By the time they'd arrive, it’d be almost dark, so they’d have to spend the night with a strange conservation officer they’d just met. What even would they have talked about over tea and biscuits?

They needed a faster, cheaper and more humane way of getting these beavers from A to B, and the solution they came up with? Planes and surplus World War II parachutes. And here’s where our friend Geronimo makes his greatest contribution to science. Says Heter:

"Satisfactory experiments with dummy weights having been completed, one old male beaver, whom we fondly named ‘Geronimo,' was dropped again and again on the flying field. Each time he scrambled out of the box, someone was on hand to pick him up. Poor fellow! He finally became resigned, and as soon as we approached him, would crawl back into his box ready to go aloft again.”

A tough job, but a thankless one? Not even a little bit!

More...

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/why-76-beavers-were-forced-to-skydive-into-the-idaho-wilderness-in-1948/

[pansypoo53219]

9. PBS beaver doc. they found water in texas in a very dry area. big pond.

[albacore]

10. I realize that this post is a comedy magnet, but..

If you read this book, you begin to understand that beavers are a foundation species. They build whole ecosystems, control floods, build fertile soil... the whole thing!
When they were trapped out to near-extinction, the whole system fell apart.
We need to "re-beaver" the continent.