#beaver territory

[arborius]

[visionautiks]

composition #9

[rookflower]

i will say im a windclan moor >>> windclan prairie truther in my heart but i also think looking at "warrior cats is set in the new forest/england/the uk" and going "no it's not. it's actually set wherever i live" is awesome so whatever. whatever you think is right and whatever i think is right. 10 billion creative and inspired by personal experience warrior cats settings forever

[sunfishsiestalah]

danya whipping out his old monolith exoskeleton (and gauss rifle) to go hunt for some "big game" 😳😳

doodled another stalker oc of mine who i had for half a decade but never drew him until today :')

his name is danylo/danya (not his real name because he doesn't like people who are not close to him say it)

ex-monolith, but he's also an undercover SBU agent and was declared MIA for more than a year when he was brainwashed with the rest of the original members of the group by the c-consciousness

[rebeccathenaturalist]

This is a really exciting development! We've already seen the positive effects of beavers returning to their historic range here in North America, so it's even better to see the same thing underway across the Atlantic. A single pair with their first litter of kits certainly isn't a large-scale reintroduction, but it's proof that these animals have the capacity to get back to work here.

Beavers are often called ecosystem engineers, and for good reason. These keystone species alter waterways by building dams and lodges, creating ponds and other aquatic habitats for species that can't handle faster-moving water. These also often serve as water reservoirs during summer droughts. The dams and lodges themselves may also provide nesting sites for birds and shelter for other animals, plants, and fungi.

Sadly there are still people who want to see beavers trapped and hunted as pests because their dams can sometimes flood fields, to include those that were historically seasonal wetlands. Until we stop seeing animals' value only in terms of whether they're useful to us or not, the beavers are going to face opposition as they reclaim their old territories on both continents.

Nonetheless, I give a hearty cheer to the Mammalian Corps of Engineers!

[fatehbaz]

In 1946, Argentina introduced twenty beavers (Castor canadensis) to Tierra del Fuego (TdF) to promote the fur industry in a land deemed empty and sterile.

Beavers were brought from Canada by Tom Lamb, [...] known as Mr. North for having expanded the national frontier [...]. In the 1980s, local scientists [...] found that beavers were the main disturbers of sub-Antarctic forests. The fur industry had never been implemented in TdF and [...] beavers had expanded, crossed to Chile, and occupied most of the river streams. The Beavercene resulted in apocalyptic landscapes [...]: modified rivers, flooded lands, and dead native trees that, unlike the Canadian ones, are not resilient to flooding. [...]

At the end of the nineteenth century the state donated lands to Europeans who, in building their farms, also displaced and assassinated the indigenous inhabitants of TdF. With the settlers, livestock and plants also invaded the region, an “ecological imperialism” that displaced native populations. In doing this, eugenic and racializing knowledges mediated the human and nonhuman population politics of TdF.

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In the 1940s, the Argentinian State nationalized these settlers’ capitals by redistributing their lands. [...] In 1946, the president of the rural association in TdF opened the yearly livestock [conference]: We, settlers and farmers of TdF have lived the evolution of this territory from the times of an absent State. [...] [T]hey allied with their introduced animals, like the Patagonian sheep or the Fuegian beaver. At a time when, after the two world wars, the category of race had become [somewhat] scientifically delegitimized, the enhancement and industrialization of animals enabled the continuation of racializing politics.

In 1946, during the same livestock ceremony in TdF, the military government claimed:

This ceremony represents the patria; it spreads the purification of our races … It is our desire to produce an even more purified and refined race to, directly, achieve the aggrandizement of Argentina.

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The increasing entanglement between animal breeding and the nation helped to continue the underlying Darwinist logic embedded in population politics. Previous explicit desires to whiten the Argentinian race started to be actualized in other terms. [...]

Settlers had not only legitimated their belonging to TdF by othering the indigenous [people], [...] but also through the idea that indigenous communities had gone extinct after genocide and disease. At that time, the “myth of extinction” helped in the construction of a uniform nation based on erasing difference, as a geography textbook for school students, Historia y Geografía Argentinas, explained in 1952: If in 1852 there were 900,000 inhabitants divided in 90,000 whites, 585,000 mestizos, 90,000 [Indigenous people] and 135,000 [...] Black, a century later there was a 90% of white population out of 18,000,000 inhabitants. (357) [...] [S]tate statistics contributed to the erasure of non-white peoples through the magic of numbers: it is not that they had disappeared, but that they had been statistically exceeded [...]. However, repressed communities never fully disappear.

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Text by: Mara Dicenta. "The Beavercene: Eradication and Settler-Colonialism in Tierra del Fuego". Environment & Society Portal, Arcadia (Spring 2020), no. 1. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. [Image by Mara Dicenta, included in original article. Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[rabbitcruiser]

Jasper National Park, AB (No. 1)

Jasper National Park, in Alberta, Canada, is the largest national park within Alberta's Rocky Mountains, spanning 11,000 km2 (4,200 sq mi). It was established as Jasper Forest Park in 1907, renamed as a national park in 1930, and declared a UNESCO world heritage site in 1984. Its location is north of Banff National Park and west of Edmonton. The park contains the glaciers of the Columbia Icefield, springs, lakes, waterfalls and mountains.

The territory encompassed by what is now Jasper National Park has been inhabited since time immemorial by Nakoda, Cree, Secwépemc, and Dane-zaa peoples. Plainview projectile points have been found at the head of Jasper Lake, dating back to between 8000 and 7000 BCE. In the centuries between then and the establishment of the park, First Nations land use has fluctuated according to climatic variations over the long term, and according to cyclical patterns of ungulate population numbers, particularly elk, moose, mule deer, and occasionally caribou. Starting in the 1790s, Haudenosaunee and Nipissing hunters and trappers moved in large numbers to the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains, around the headwaters of the Athabasca and Smoky Rivers in particular, most of them employed by the North West Company. By the time David Thompson crossed the Athabasca Pass in 1810, led by a Haudenosaunee guide named Thomas, there were hundreds of Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe people living in the region. When Mary Schäffer Warren became the first settler to visit Maligne Lake—known by the Nakoda as Chaba Imne—in 1908, she did so by following a map given to her by Samson Beaver, a Nakoda guide and hunter.

Source: Wikipedia

[cattimeswithjellie]

You know the only reason that the Empires folks aren't on board with the Hermits going home is that they are not familiar with the natural Hermit life cycle. They have seen the initial exploratory phase, in which friendly Hermits with no homes wander the server and begin gathering up tools as well as making charming little bases to hold their baby chest monsters. They have also seen the intense growth and development phase, in which Hermits are compelled to create massive farms and trading halls to overcome the significant disadvantage of living in a survival world without the infinite resources they crave. These phases have been generally pretty beneficial to the Emperors, who've had a bunch of new neighbors to show off to, plus a bunch of free labor in their own various farming projects. Nothing beats a Stage 2 Hermit on the grind when it comes to building a farm or trading with villagers!

The Emperors are in no way prepared, however, for the next stages of Hermitvolution. They are already vaguely dismayed at the size and scope of Hermitopia, which is merely one industrial district turned on its side and decorated, how would they cope with Stage 3, Megabase Development? Hermits in the wild need vast amounts of territory in which to create their ridiculously oversized build projects; trying to squeeze them in amongst the existing Empires would be like introducing a massive beaver colony into your average creekside subdivision. They are made to build and they must build, and woe betide anything that stands in their way. (Brief aside: the fact that we have not seen Doc "WorldEater" 77 in several weeks should be cause for a lot more concern than is being shown by inhabitants of the world in question.)

Even beyond the build phase, though, is the Destruction Phase, which inevitably occurs when the Hermits begin to complete or grow bored with their mega-projects. In the past, Hermits have been mostly satisfied by going to war with each other in epic landscape-altering conflicts later memorialized in song and animatic, but last season they celebrated the start of Destruction Phase by crashing the whole-ass moon into their server. It could be anything, is all I'm saying. They like a good wreckage.

The Emperors have a great thing going right now. They've gotten a ton of good stuff from their new Hermit buddies, builds and farms and a fun new Murder Hat to share around, and it's all been so nice. It is absolutely the ideal moment to wave goodbye, promise to write and that you'll get together again at the next death game. Surely nobody's going to do something crazy like try to keep the Hermits around by force, right? Right?

[transbookoftheday]

The Prospects by KT Hoffman

The pressure cooker of minor league baseball leads to major chemistry in this exhilarating, sexy, and triumphant rivals to lovers debut romance.

Hope is familiar territory for Gene Ionescu. He has always loved baseball, a sport made for underdogs and optimists like him. He also loves his team, the minor league Beaverton Beavers, and, for the most part, he loves the career he’s built. As the first openly trans player in professional baseball, Gene has nearly everything he’s ever let himself dream of—that is, until Luis Estrada, Gene’s former teammate and current rival, gets traded to the Beavers, destroying the careful equilibrium of Gene’s life.

Gene and Luis can’t manage a civil conversation off the field or a competent play on it, but in the close confines of dugout benches and roadie buses, they begrudgingly rediscover a comfortable rhythm. As the two grow closer, the tension between them turns electric, and their chemistry spills past the confines of the stadium. For every tight double play they execute, there’s also a glance at summer-tan shoulders or a secret shared, each one a breathless moment of possibility that ignites in Gene the visceral, terrifying kind of desire he’s never allowed himself. Soon, Gene has to reconcile the quiet, minor-league-sized life he used to find fulfilling with the major-league dreams Luis makes feel possible.

A joyful, heartfelt debut rom-com revealing what’s possible when we allow ourselves to want something enough to swing for the fences.

[strixcattus]

The Wutugald

I was particularly excited for @maniculum 's Bestiaryposting, since I'm a worldbuilder and love creating new creatures. I'm glad I managed to show up early enough to the party.

Immediately when I began reading the description of the Wutugald, my thought was of some sort of bird. Even though not every detail matched up, I couldn't shake the image—it eats corpses like a vulture; it mimics voices like a parrot; it has a monstrous lion hybrid like an eagle; it can't look behind it without turning like the exact opposite of an owl...

I do have a guess as to what the real Wutugald might be, but in the spirit of the activity I won't say. My rendition is somewhat of a cross between a vulture, a green heron, a crow, and a beaver. You'll see what I mean if you look at the more modernized (if still somewhat fantastical) Wutugald description under the cut.

The Wutugald

The Wutugald (Wutugald sepulchrum), sometimes referred to as the "Death Heron" despite a lack of relation, is a scavenging carnivorous bird found in North America. It stands at over four feet tall, with a wingspan of up to six feet. Its neck is long, but usually pulled into its body and invisible among its thick feathers, giving it a hunched appearance. As one might guess from its long legs, it frequents watery areas, though its territory is quite large and it will hunt and scavenge in any biome it can reach.

Wutugalds have sharp senses of smell, sight, and hearing, and they use these to track down their preferred food—large, fresh corpses. Typically a Wutugald will eat its fill upon finding a corpse, then pick up the remains and carry them to its home by a still, deep body of water. The Wutugald will then drop the corpse into the water, where the cold will preserve it for later consumption. Wutugalds are capable of lifting large amounts of weight, and there have been reported sightings of them carrying off the bodies of animals as large as wolves.

If a Wutugald cannot locate a corpse fresh enough for its liking, it has other options. While stories of Wutugalds digging up and breaking into human coffins have been dismissed as myth, they are still capable of unearthing buried corpses provided the ground is soft and the bodies are not buried too deep. There have been several confirmed reports of Wutugalds digging up and eating the bodies of buried pets.

Wutugalds are also capable of hunting their own prey if the opportunity presents itself. They typically target lone, usually weakened animals ranging in size from a rabbit to a medium-sized dog. In fact, Wutugalds have often been seen picking up pets left alone outdoors. It is recommended that children and pets are not allowed outside without supervision in areas with Wutugald sightings.

A notable feature of the Wutugald is its ability to mimic sounds it hears. It often uses this trait to scare away predators or other scavengers by mimicking the sounds of dangerous animals or occurrences—Wutugalds have been known to imitate the growling of wolves, the rumbling of avalanches, and even the sounds of human speech or vehicles in areas where those are common.

Mature Wutugalds can be identified by the stone in between their eyes. It is unclear what, if any, purpose the stone provides for a Wutugald, but studies have shown that Wutugalds with more prominent stones have more success in mating. Legends say that holding a Wutugald's stone in one's mouth or wearing it as jewelry improves fortune-telling, but conclusive demonstrations of such power have yet to be seen. Due to the myths, however, Wutugalds have been hunted for their stones, and were recently recognized as an endangered species after hunters decimated their population. Wutugald populations are currently recovering following efforts to protect them and their habitat.

Wutugalds are largely solitary and only interact when mating. Once mated, the male Wutugald will be allowed into the female's territory and the two will build a nest at the shore of a body of still water. They will hunt together and stockpile food until the female lays her eggs, at which point she will force the male out of her territory and any future entreaties will be met as violently as if he were a stranger. Wutugalds typically lay only one or two eggs at a time, and the mother cares for her chicks until they are almost fully mature before driving them away as well.

[arborius]

[visionautiks]

midwinter respite

[roseinyoursaltwater]

SOUTHERN WEREWOLF TRIBE HEADCANNONS

SOUTHERN WEREWOLF TRIBE

◦ Southern Tribe (south-ern tribe)

TERRAIN: Surrounded by mountains, the Southern Tribe's territory is the outskirts of Brightport, which leaves them with the less desired land of the region. There are many tall and old trees in the territory as well as a long river that produces many resources. There is limited farmland due to the terrain and the farmable land that is available has mediocre soil. Due to being surrounded by mountains, this protects the tribe from severe weather, the mountains serving as walled protection.

FOOD: Food for the tribe is a little different than the other villages, this is due to the diet of the werewolves and how much they hunt. While humans do hunt and with the formation of villages and kingdoms - it's more of a sport. Werewolves hunt to survive. They eat deer, elk and rabbit as well as fish. They farm - apples, squash, pumpkins and corn.

LIVESTOCK: Sheep (for wool), chickens, pigs

ANIMALS: deer, elk, rabbits, beavers, rats, mice, squirrels

CULTURE: There is a huge culture shift from the other villages within Ru'uan. The wolves are very community based, having large families and living together in large groups. Families living with extended family, large groups. They farm in small amounts, keeping some livestock as well as some farming, they didn't want to run out of food. But they still hunted to honor their ancestors. The werewolves are big on competitive contests and fights, trying to one up each other constantly. Werewolves are big in pologamy, unless they are high up in the pack, for the most part, there's a lot of sleeping around. They don't care for humans or their religions. They believe Irene existed, but they don't view Irene and her way as "for them".

NATIONALITIES: Also a melting pot like Phoenix Drop.

FIGHTING: Hand to Hand, fighting as wolves, some archery

WEAPONS: bow and arrows, spears, daggers

RESPECT LEVEL: 6/10 (by other tribes, they're on the smaller side but there's respect) 3/10 (humans don't really respect the wolves since their morals and culture aren't alike, but people fear wolves because of their strength)

REWRITE LINK BELOW

[arkipelagic]

In the early 1900s, almost 1,000 Filipinos – mostly single men – came to work in Alaska’s commercial fishing industry, a sector that remains the state’s largest private-sector employer. They toiled in fish canneries, where they were often the lowest-paid workers and endured impoverished conditions.

In her 1996 book Filipinos in Alaska, Thelma Buchholdt describes how white workers were housed in heated compounds, while Filipino workers often had to put up with living in cramped, unheated spaces without showers or proper hygiene facilities, and were fed meagre meals of fish and rice.

These Filipino communities became known as “Alaskeros” – a term still used today.

Gabriel Garcia, a Filipino-American associate professor of public health at the University of Alaska Anchorage, explains that these men came to Alaska seeking the opportunity for a better life. “Other Filipinos came to Alaska as seasonal workers from California, Washington, and Hawaii,” he says.

They were US nationals, as the Philippines was an American territory at the time, but they still faced discrimination. Filipinos were not allowed to interact with whites – especially white women.

Native Americans faced similar racism and, as a result, Filipinos and indigenous Alaskans were segregated together.

“They worked together to fight against discrimination,” says E.J.R. David, a Filipino-American professor of psychology and history expert at the University of Alaska Anchorage. “Over time, many Alaskeros and Alaska Natives had children together. They combined Alaska Native and Filipino cultures in raising their families, such as making beaver adobo and salmon lumpia.”

Nez Danguilan, a local Filipino community leader and former television host, says many Alaskans do not even realise they are of partial Filipino heritage until they interact with more recent arrivals from the Philippines.

“I have talked to some of my Alaskan colleagues about food of the Philippines and they say, ‘Wait, my grandpa cooked that’,” Danguilan says.

“Many people also don’t realise that a lot of the Asian food they eat was introduced to Alaska by settler Filipino husbands. That’s why restaurants like Jeepney are so popular … For instance pancit [noodles] or Filipino chow mein – they had been cooking it and didn’t realise its Filipino influence.”

[bonefall]

How do Erin hunter and the rest of the researchers find the clans again after they move to the lake territory? Also, what do they think when there’s the stuff with the beaver dam at the beginning of oots—do they know about the journey to get the water back?

"How do the researchers find the Clans after the destruction of the White Hart?"

They followed Millie, attaching a radio collar to her and releasing her along with Graystripe. It was a gamble that paid off; Graystripe displayed too much distress when he was forced to wear it.

It's not their intention to stress out the cats they're trying to study!

The Beaver Dam

I'm not sure if it's situation 1, or situation 2;

Situation 1: The beavers were introduced by an unrelated rewilding program. There were scientists watching in abject horror when the Clan cats left the Sanctuary Lake Reserve to confront the beavers, fearing that they would hurt them and ruin the entire project.

Situation 2: The beavers migrated here from further west, they were hunted to extinction in this area during Hollyleaf's Century and just now they're edging close enough to return.

In either case, it was Dovepaw who realized that the beavers were defending kits inside that dam, and if destroyed, they would just build it again. So instead of just fighting them and moving on, the patrol steals them and brings them back to the lake.

There are now beavers at Sanctuary Lake, defended zealousy by ShadowClan. Dovewing has a very easy time becoming accepted (hypocritically, even, by Berryheart and her cohorts) because of this act of service.

Beavers are sometimes called "Construction Buddies" in the ShadowClanmew dialect.

[rjzimmerman]

Good story from Yale Environment 360, without a paywall (I think), about beavers, public land, wildfires, endangered species, the largest beaver dam in the world, the degradation of that land and the large pond behind the dam due to the tar sands mining activity in the vicinity. In other words, a microcosm of all the bad stuff and good stuff intersecting in one place in Canada. Excerpt from this story:

Wood Buffalo National Park, the largest national park in Canada, covers an area the size of Switzerland and stretches from Northern Alberta into the Northwest Territories. Only one road enters it from Alberta, and one from the NWT. If not for people observing it from airplanes and helicopters, and satellites photographing it, little would be known about big parts of it. The park is a variety of landscapes — boreal swamps, fens, bogs, black spruce forests, salt flats, gypsum karst, permafrost islands, and prairies that extend the continent’s central plains to their northern limit. The wood buffalo in the park’s name are bison related to the Great Plains bison. In this remoteness, the buffalo descend from the original population, and the wolves that prey on them are also the wild originals. Millions of birds summer and breed here. The park holds one of the last remaining breeding grounds of the whooping crane.

Other superlatives and near-superlatives: the delta in the park’s southeast where the Peace River and the Athabasca River come together is one of the largest freshwater deltas in the world; last summer, some of Canada’s largest forest fires burned in the park and around it; and — just inside the park’s southern border — is the largest beaver dam in the world.

The dam is about a half-mile long and in the shape of an arc made of connected arcs, like a recurve bow. The media has known about it for 16 years, and in that time no bigger beaver dam has come to light, so it’s still known as the biggest, and scientists believe it almost certainly is. Animal technology created it, but human technology revealed it.

Many of the beavers that have reestablished themselves globally are descended from beavers that were planted by wildlife biologists. The thriving beaver population of Tierra del Fuego (another place Thie has studied) is descended from beavers brought to Argentina from Canada’s Saskatchewan River, who are themselves scions of beavers transplanted from upstate New York. No reintroduction of beavers was done in Wood Buffalo Park. Thie believes that the beavers who built the dam are of original stock. Like the wood buffalo and the wolves, they were too remote to be wiped out.

The park is suffering the worst drought in its history. Flows are down by half in many places, owing to climate change, water diversion, poor seasonal snowpack, and dams on the Peace River, upstream in British Columbia. A danger that seems inescapable comes from the oil sands that are being mined for crude-oil-containing bitumen, and from tailing ponds that hold trillions of liters of mine-contaminated water. The ponds are near the banks of the Athabasca River, just upstream from the park boundary. They are fatal to birds that land on them. Given the direction that water flows, conservationists and native people fear the tailings will pollute the park eventually. Toxic chemicals have already been found in McClelland Lake, just southeast of the park. Locals stopped taking their drinking water from the lake years ago.

Gillian Chow-Fraser, the boreal program manager for the Northern Alberta chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, in Edmonton, travels in the park often by helicopter, canoe, and foot. She has described the park’s environment as “super degraded.” When I spoke with her by phone not long ago, she talked about a recent tailing basin leak that was not reported to the First Nations downstream of it for nine months. In places that used to flood regularly but now don’t, the land is drying out and vegetation disappearing. Though she crisscrosses the park, she has never seen the world’s largest beaver dam, but she’s grateful that it’s there and bringing the park attention.