Originally this story Appears on Country news and be part of Climate table cooperation.
Cyrus Harris hopped on a sled one day in early January and darted onto a peninsula near Kotzebue, Alaska, to clear the way for her sled dogs. “The first beaver dam I was running was about three miles from town,” he said. “Nearby is another, about five miles away is another, and that’s just a small area.” Harris (Inupiaq) was born in 1957 and spent his childhood on Kotzebue Sound in Sisualik. “Beavers are really unheard of,” he said. “It’s crazy when the beavers arrive, they’re just attacking the whole area.”
Beavers – once rarely seen in northwestern Alaska – began to appear more frequently in the 80s and 90s. Today, Pastor Lance Kramer (Inupiaq) traps beavers, primarily for fur hats. He recently asked an elder about his first sightings of the area. “They saw this on the tundra, and it looked like a wolf, but it was a long beaver,” Kramer said. “[It] had traveled so far over the tundra to come up this way that it had worn out the bottom of its tail. ”
Now animals — and ponds, dams and lodges — are everywhere. Using satellite images of the Kotzebue area, Scientists found that the number of beaver dams increased from two dams in 2002 to 98 in 2019, an increase of 5,000%. And not just Kotzebue: Beaver Pond double by region since 2000, with 12,000 in present-day northwest Alaska. Beavers, dubbed “ecosystem engineers” because of the way they pervade their surroundings, are transforming the tundra.
North America’s largest rodent is moving northward due in part to climate change: As the tundra grows warmer and greener, it’s also becoming more attractive to beavers, which need shrubs to grow make food, dams and lodges. Their rise has also been linked to a population recovery: Beaver traps, common for centuries, have dwindled and the animals are thriving.
Beaver was recently quoted as a “new disturbance” in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Arctic Report Card 2021, an annual report that tracks changes in the region. That’s because they’re damming rivers and creating deeper, warmer ponds, opening up new types of aquatic habitats. “The key question to ask, wherever you’re standing in the North Pole, is,” says Ken Tape, an ecologist who studies beaver expansion at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. How long will it take the beaver to get there? “. “Because when they get there, it’ll never be the same again.”
Harris is concerned that the beavers swimming in the reservoir that supplies Kotzebue drinking water could overwhelm the community water treatment plant. Beavers (and other animals) carry giardia, which they excrete into the environment, and water contaminated with their feces can cause intestinal infections. Harris and others used to drink straight from the river during their hunting and fishing trips, but today they are thinking again. “If our water quality is damaged, where do we go from there?” Harris said.
