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Episode: Castorology (BEAVERS) with Rob Rich
Author: Alie Ward
Duration: 01:25:06
Episode Shownotes
Orange teeth! Vanilla butts! Architecture with twigs! Olde-timey joke books? Field naturalist, conservationist, wildlife tracker and “beaver believer” Rob Rich works with the National Wildlife Federation’s coordination of the Montana Beaver Working Group and answers all of our Castorological questions about: baby beavers, tooth tools, lodges, dams, the sound of
water, the slap of a tail, who eats beaver and why, beavers in peril, in folklore, in smut books, in your neighborhood and in your dreams forever. Also: yes we discuss slang. Follow Rob Rich on LinkedInA donation went to Tracker Certification North AmericaMore episode sources and linksSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesOther episodes you may enjoy: Hydrochoerology (CAPYBARAS), Bisonology (BUFFALO), Road Ecology (ROAD KILL), Sciuridology (SQUIRRELS), Oreamnology (MOUNTAIN GOATS ARE NOT GOATS), Lutrinology (OTTERS), Procyonology (RACCOONS), Opossumology (O/POSSUMS), Mammalogy (MAMMALS), Scatology (POOP), Gynecology (NETHER HEALTH), Sexology (SEX), Dasyurology (TASMANIAN DEVILS)Sponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, hoodies, totes!Follow Ologies on Instagram and BlueskyFollow Alie Ward on Instagram and TikTokEditing by Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio Productions and Jake ChaffeeManaging Director: Susan HaleScheduling Producer: Noel DilworthTranscripts by Aveline Malek Website by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn
Full Transcript
00:00:00 Speaker_02
We have this issue, I think, as a people, just of beaver amnesia, not being able to see what, you know, the beavers created before us.
00:00:08 Speaker_02
And I would bet, you know, almost the entirety of us that are drinking water and flushing toilets and taking showers and all the things, our water is coming from somewhere that at some point in its history was shaped by a beaver.
00:00:23 Speaker_05
Oh, hey, it's the lady at the donut store who knows that you like bear claws. Allie Ward. This is Ologies. This is beavers. Finally, the beavers are here.
00:00:32 Speaker_05
And ushering them in is an absolutely delightful beaver man who is a field naturalist and a conservationist who does a ton of biological surveys and teaches wildlife tracking and beaver ecology. And he writes about the beaver as well.
00:00:46 Speaker_05
He's a coordinator for the National Wildlife Federation's Montana Beaver Working Group, and he knows so much about beavers. So he spoke to me one morning from his chilly house in the Swan Valley outside of Missoula, Montana.
00:00:59 Speaker_05
He was wearing a coat and a hat. and a warm smile. And we just we had the loveliest time chatting beavers as I knew that we would. So we're going to get to it in a moment.
00:01:08 Speaker_05
But first, thank you to all the patrons at patreon.com slash ologies who submitted questions for this. You too can join for as little as $1 a month to support the show. Thanks for everyone in ologiesmerch at ologiesmerch.com.
00:01:22 Speaker_05
And to everyone who reviews the show, which helps us so much, it costs you $0. I read them all. Such as this week's from Max Amelie, who wrote, I have been a dedicated listener since the inception of this podcast in 2017. Max, seven and a half years.
00:01:38 Speaker_05
You're a real one. I like you. Thank you for that. Thank you to everyone who leaves reviews. And thank you also to sponsors of the show who make it possible to donate to a cause selected by the guest each week. So one sec.
00:01:51 Speaker_05
Okay, so castorology, it's a study indeed. It comes from the root for castor, which may come from the Greek for he who excels.
00:02:00 Speaker_05
And there's this big debate about whether this divine Greek mythological twin named Castor, who was worshiped as a healer, got his name from smelly beaver juice used as a medicine for millennia, or if it was the other way around.
00:02:15 Speaker_05
But we're here, it's now. Let's get to what patron Stratford Abbott calls swimming, furry chainsaws. And let's talk about baby beavers, tooth tools, lodges, dams, the sound of water, the slap of a tail. Who eats beaver and why?
00:02:32 Speaker_05
The best beaver real estate, the plight of the beaver, hats, whiskey, beavers in folklore, in joke books, in your neighborhood and in your dreams forever with naturalist, wildlife ecologist, tracker and castrologist, Rob Rich.
00:03:06 Speaker_02
Rob Rich, he him, was great.
00:03:09 Speaker_05
And castorology, I would, this seems like it's something that's been in the books before. Do you, beaver people call themselves castorologists?
00:03:19 Speaker_02
Generally not castorologists. There was an early book in the late 1800s that had that name actually, but
00:03:27 Speaker_02
Generally it's not castrology, it's either just beaver fans, beaver believers, all the things that are associated with interest and curiosity about beavers.
00:03:37 Speaker_05
I love that they have the term beaver believer because I think not all species get a catchy name like that.
00:03:43 Speaker_02
That's kind of the classic at the moment.
00:03:45 Speaker_05
And where are you right now? Can you set the scene? You're in Montana?
00:03:50 Speaker_02
Yeah, I'm calling from northwest Montana, and I live in a valley called the Swan Valley, a little bit northeast of Missoula and south of Kalispell, up against a part of the Rocky Mountains there and below Glacier National Park.
00:04:05 Speaker_02
This is a special valley. In a lot of ways, it's very well watered. It has a lot of historic beaver activity and current and was also shaped by glaciers, which the beavers actively followed.
00:04:17 Speaker_05
Oh, so the beavers followed the glaciers down in their evolution to where there was water, the beavers went.
00:04:26 Speaker_02
In a way, yeah, the last glaciation that covered America was about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, I believe, as it pocked out a lot of depressional wetlands and carved the rivers in certain ways that made it really conducive to complex flows, which beavers are actively seeking out all the time.
00:04:45 Speaker_02
And so they find in glaciated regions of North America. And so beavers and glaciers together are two of the major continental shapers of North America.
00:04:54 Speaker_05
And you mentioned North America. Where else in the world do beavers live? Are they just a North American species? I feel like I should know this, but I feel like maybe zoos all over the world have beavers, but do they naturally occur in other places?
00:05:07 Speaker_02
Yeah, so that's a great question. You know, the beaver evolution is very complex and we actually at one time had 33 different genera of beavers and genera like the genus species binomial classification.
00:05:20 Speaker_02
So we had 33 different types of genus of beaver across the northern hemisphere at one time. And that is totally, at this point, winnowed down to one genus, the genus Castor.
00:05:33 Speaker_02
And Castor canadensis is the North American beaver, the only one native to this continent. And Castor fiber is the beaver, the Eurasian beaver, and that is over in Europe and parts of northern Asia as well.
00:05:48 Speaker_05
The fossil record dates back 33 million years with 33 beaver genera. That's not even species. So many beaver options.
00:05:57 Speaker_02
About 33 million years ago, I believe, is when the beavers really started diversifying and a lot of rodents generally. That was a really time of rodent diversification.
00:06:09 Speaker_02
And so we had beavers, one that was kind of more recent times, the Castoroides that lived just south of the glacial ice sheets and whatnot. And so that was one that was about the size of a bear, almost like 175, 200 pounds in a very large beaver.
00:06:26 Speaker_02
We had beavers, one called Paleocastor that actually dug corkscrew-like tunnels with its teeth. into what we now know as the prairies of Nebraska, and so very different lifestyle.
00:06:38 Speaker_05
Huge beavers, bear-sized beavers, and some that dug spiral tunnels. They are gone, but they are never going to be forgotten. Please tell all of your friends.
00:06:49 Speaker_02
But it wasn't until they really converged on that semi-aquatic behavior and the wood cutting and dam building behaviors, when all three of those parts converged in the beaver, that is what drew their evolutionary success.
00:07:03 Speaker_02
And that's kind of the one that's persisting today.
00:07:06 Speaker_05
I cannot imagine a beaver so big. That's unfathomable to me. Not unsurprising, but what about modern day beavers? Let's say the North American ones, or I'm not sure they differ much with Eurasian, but how big are they?
00:07:21 Speaker_05
If I were to, let's say, just be blessed with the ability to hold a beaver, is it like a sack of potatoes? Are they smaller than we think? I can't even get my head around, because I see them from so far away if I ever get to see them.
00:07:34 Speaker_02
Yeah, good question. So there's some regional variation in that, but generally beavers in the North are a little bit larger just to have a larger body size to sustain themselves through the winter and have that energy capacity.
00:07:48 Speaker_02
But I would say an average size would be between 40 to 50 pounds for an adult beaver. but they can get up to, you know, 60 to 90 pounds in some of those areas where they're quite large. And this is not a sack of potatoes size for them at all.
00:08:04 Speaker_02
It's more along the sides of a small dog in some ways, maybe like a border collie, but much lower to the ground, obviously shorter legs, but something along those lines when they're
00:08:16 Speaker_02
Born though, they're only about a pound or about the size of a loaf of bread maybe, that would be a good comparison. For a newborn beaver, it's about a pound.
00:08:26 Speaker_05
You know what weighs a pound? Like a big apple or an orange. A baby beaver, the size of a piece of fruit. In fact, one rehabber site I went to described them thusly, a healthy kit looks like a large fuzzy softball with a rubber like tail.
00:08:43 Speaker_05
They're so tiny! How many are in a litter?
00:08:47 Speaker_02
Generally two kits, a newborn beaver is called a kit. And so generally two kits per litter, they can have up to four sometimes. The yearlings of that same monogamous pair of male and female will stay on with the family.
00:09:01 Speaker_02
And so you can have a combination of, you know, the two adults and then yearlings from the previous year and then newborns all in one lodge at the same time. But by the time they reach two years old, that's typically a natural dispersal time.
00:09:16 Speaker_02
for beavers and so the two-year-olds will leave their natal birth area and strike out to find a new wetland that they can call their own.
00:09:26 Speaker_05
And they're monogamous? How long do they tend to stick together for?
00:09:30 Speaker_02
That's a great question. Generally, they stay together for the entire time.
00:09:34 Speaker_05
Beavers. They love love. We love them for it. Although some North American beavers do cheat, I found out. But the Eurasian ones are pretty much totally loyal.
00:09:44 Speaker_05
But beavers co-parent, which is more than we can say for a lot of bitter couples that I see posting on TikTok.
00:09:50 Speaker_02
And very social and very territorial against other non related beavers. They erect a lot of scent mounds they're called or, and they can be up to, you know, over a foot wide, a foot tall.
00:10:01 Speaker_02
And so there are these just heaps of dredged up vegetation and mud from the bottom of the, you know, the pond or the wetland where they are.
00:10:10 Speaker_02
And then they can dollop all their castoreum on top of that, which is a very unique smelling excretion from a particular gland in them.
00:10:18 Speaker_02
But they can bring that out to put on the castor mound or scent mound sometimes called to kind of ward off non-related beavers.
00:10:27 Speaker_05
I'm so glad that you brought up that gland because I'm boggled by it and I didn't know that castoreum was a product necessarily. Is it really used for things like artificial vanilla and strawberry and raspberry?
00:10:43 Speaker_05
Is there any known history on how humans realized that these scent mounds and that these secretions from beavers would be delicious additives to things?
00:10:55 Speaker_02
Well, they definitely do have a particular scent and it's not something that, you know, is out of question to smell yourself.
00:11:02 Speaker_02
You can definitely find these, especially in the springtime when beavers are actively dispersing that, you know, the same time about when new kits are born is a really important time to kind of mark the territory, so to speak.
00:11:15 Speaker_02
And so these scent mounds are all over the place at that time. And it does have kind of a vanilla-ish tint. I think it's very nice. It's probably dependent on the the nose who's smelling it. And it does have a history of being used in certain products.
00:11:30 Speaker_02
And, you know, we have used it for perfume and different things. I believe there's a schnapps in, uh, is it Germany or, or I believe it's Germany that uses beaver hot. And it's kind of like a schnapps, um, liqueur that relies on that.
00:11:46 Speaker_05
Okay, so I looked into this and castoreum is again, not in the anal glands, but in these different pouches near there. And yes, both male and female beavers make it. Everyone makes it. Not you, but beavers do.
00:11:59 Speaker_05
And this unctuous, creamy orange substance has vanilla notes and suggests the smell of an old leather chair and a den full of antique books. And I've read that's owing to all the trees that kind of make their way through beaver guts.
00:12:15 Speaker_05
And you can gently milk castoreum from a beaver, but that is seen as very rude to many beavers. So sadly, most of it comes from trappers who harvest the sack. And they sometimes let that sack dry out and mellow for a few years before grinding it up.
00:12:31 Speaker_05
Now, other than actively seeking it out, you're not likely to find castoreum like hiding in your foods. It's just much cheaper to use actual vanilla or artificial vanilla flavor, a lot easier to harvest.
00:12:43 Speaker_05
So it's rare to find anything with castoreum on a shelf. Although that liquor that Rob mentioned, it sounds extremely German in concept and its name has umlauts and it translates to beaver howl, but it's actually Swedish.
00:12:57 Speaker_05
And my dear friend Simone Jetsch happens to be both Swedish and in Sweden. And so I texted her and her mom at an ungodly time for me, but it was a normal person time for Sweden.
00:13:09 Speaker_05
And I asked if this was like a common beverage and she was like, no, no, I've never heard of that.
00:13:16 Speaker_05
But there's this place called Tamworth Distillery in the US and they do offer an eau de musk beaver gland perfumed whiskey in case you need to get your hands and your tongues on that. Why would you though?
00:13:29 Speaker_05
Well, it's supposed to be tasty, but also for thousands of years it was used to treat gout and fevers and headaches and other ailments.
00:13:37 Speaker_05
But the 1969 publication Pliny's Pheromonic Abortifacients in the journal Science says that castoreum used as an incense could provide the termination of a pregnancy. according to the Roman naturalist Pliny who lived in the first century A.D.
00:13:57 Speaker_05
What else was used back then as family planning? Well, your other options were looking at a viper, holding a raven's egg, stepping over a beaver, or letting pass into your crotch the fumes from an ass's house.
00:14:12 Speaker_05
And the paper notes, parenthetically, donkey stable. But thanks to several thousand years of progress medically, one need not dance over a beaver or invite donkey fumes up your tunic because there are pharmaceuticals now.
00:14:26 Speaker_05
But while here in the U.S., many states have rolled back access to that health care to pre-Castoreum in a lantern times. But anyway, rodent secretions, many uses throughout the years.
00:14:37 Speaker_05
But no, your birthday cake flavored lip gloss does not have beaver butt in it. You're good.
00:14:42 Speaker_02
They're kind of artificially synthesized now.
00:14:44 Speaker_05
And you can smell it when you're out looking for beavers or if you're out in the fields. Is it something like the breeze shifts and then suddenly you can smell a mound?
00:14:56 Speaker_02
It's not that sharp. It won't be wafting everywhere, but it's very concentrated and localized.
00:15:02 Speaker_02
And you do kind of know when you hit it, when you're like kind of near it yourself, but it generally takes, you know, leaning down and just kind of getting up close to it and just, but it's a very nice smell.
00:15:12 Speaker_02
It doesn't have anything related to scat or urine, or they do have a very pronounced anal gland as well. Oh, nice. But that's used for waterproofing. That's not used for the purposes of defending their territory.
00:15:25 Speaker_05
Do you have any idea how far away you are from a beaver right now? Like where you live in the Swan Valley, do you know when I cross this bridge into town there's a dam or a lodge there? Are you pretty aware of where they are in your local environment?
00:15:41 Speaker_02
Yeah, I am. And I think that's one of the things that I'm really passionate about is just interpreting, you know, beaver landscapes wherever you are.
00:15:48 Speaker_02
I mean, so many of us on the North American continent live in and among beaver wetlands without even knowing it.
00:15:56 Speaker_02
Sometimes we have this issue, I think, as a people just of beaver amnesia, not being able to see what, you know, the beavers created before us.
00:16:05 Speaker_02
And I would bet, you know, almost the entirety of us that are drinking water and flushing toilets and taking showers and all the things, our water is coming from somewhere that at some point in its history was shaped by a beaver.
00:16:18 Speaker_02
And there are things, you know, that we can still see looking at aerial photography, looking at, you know, different ways the land drains, that land stacked up. And that might've been a beaver dam from like a couple centuries ago or something.
00:16:34 Speaker_02
And so it's really neat to be able to interpret it at that level of history in a contemporary sense.
00:16:40 Speaker_02
I love being able to kind of know my neighbors, so to speak, of who's, who's building and who's active, who's, you know, it's a very much a dynamic ebb and flow cycle of the beaver. So fun to watch.
00:16:52 Speaker_05
And what about you? Where did you grow up and when did you start wanting to be involved with tracking beavers and learning more about them?
00:17:00 Speaker_05
I've only seen maybe one or two in my life in Montana, splashing from afar, but I know I'm fascinated with them. But when did it start for you?
00:17:10 Speaker_02
I didn't have like one big light bulb moment. I consider myself very fortunate to, you know, grew up in a family that really supported just my natural curiosities in a lot of ways.
00:17:20 Speaker_02
And I grew up in the Northeast and spent a lot of time in Northern New York and New England. doing hiking and stuff, and beavers were certainly part of the theme then.
00:17:30 Speaker_02
I would spend a lot of time in the woods, saw beavers, but they were just another animal at the time. For me, it wasn't anything like they were changing the world in the way that they do. But I think one of the
00:17:41 Speaker_02
kind of milestones for me was going to Isle Royale National Park after college. One of my first wildlife fieldwork gigs was I was helping out with this wolf moose project it's called.
00:17:55 Speaker_02
Our ostensible purpose was really to track down the bones of moose that were killed by wolves the previous winter.
00:18:03 Speaker_02
You know, I was there in the summer and I was just mind blown with how the beavers had changed the environment there in a way that was not only conducive to the moose, but also really important for supporting the wolves as well.
00:18:19 Speaker_02
You know, wolves are one of the leaner times for them is in summer. And so I was just fascinated by, you know, this is a time when the wolves have adapted to eat beavers as well. I really got to get
00:18:31 Speaker_02
a really close look and just appreciate their keystone role is just how complicated and connected and all the things that they do for diverse animals, predators, prey, and everything in between. And so they're a real integrator of a lot of things.
00:18:48 Speaker_02
And that's one of the areas where it really lit up for me.
00:18:51 Speaker_05
you're talking about them as something that changes the ecosystem and can have a lot of impact on things like literally downstream. And humans, unfortunately, have kind of stepped into that role, not in good ways a lot.
00:19:07 Speaker_05
But I'm so curious about the beaver instinct and they can have such huge impacts on environments. And I don't know how they know how to do that because I couldn't go just build a boat by myself, I couldn't just go build a house by myself.
00:19:23 Speaker_05
How do beavers know how to chop down wood? How to stack it? What exactly are they doing with all of this instinct and how is it shaping the environment in their immediate way? What does it do for beavers to make dams and lodges?
00:19:40 Speaker_02
Yeah, thanks. You're welcome. So I think one of the things that is happening is that it is an instinct. There is part of that proclivity to do that instinctually, but it's also a learned response.
00:19:54 Speaker_02
They've shown how young beavers are actively learning with their parents and watching them and manipulating wood in the same way. And so building a dam is not a necessity for a beaver. That is not, in itself, is not what's necessary.
00:20:12 Speaker_05
Wait, they don't need to build dams? Like all of them? I guess if you score an apartment next to a park, you don't need to erect a swing set in the front yard.
00:20:22 Speaker_02
Beavers are thriving on lake systems where they can have plenty of water. They're on rivers a lot of times where they can bank up in the side of the river bank without any consequence.
00:20:35 Speaker_02
And they don't need to build an entire dam across a river or whatnot to have their way. But what dam building does is it is a mechanism for you know, extending their safety from predators, but also increasing their access to food.
00:20:52 Speaker_02
And so when they build a dam in a stream system, it's not only spreading the water out across, you know, the stream system laterally, but it's also stacking up a lot of weight behind that dam. And so it's sinking more water
00:21:08 Speaker_02
into exchange with the groundwater system. And I think too often we just think of our river systems as one, upstream, downstream, going one way.
00:21:17 Speaker_02
And what's natural about rivers and watershed systems is that when they spread out as well as down, so laterally and vertically as well.
00:21:26 Speaker_02
And the researcher Ellen Wohl has just done a lot of great work showing that kind of hydrological complexity of beaver systems.
00:21:37 Speaker_05
So beavers making dams not only spread the stream water wider out, but deeper into the soils as well and into the groundwater.
00:21:46 Speaker_05
And for more, you can see Dr. Wohl's 2017 paper in the Journal of Water Resources Research titled, Beaver-Mediated Lateral Hydrologic Connectivity. fluvial carbon and nutrient flux, and aquatic ecosystems metabolism, which maybe you've already read.
00:22:01 Speaker_05
But if not, TLDR is that our beaver friends make complex watery environments, and that those areas are a good sink for water when the streams run low, and for carbon capture and nutrients for the rest of the ecosystems.
00:22:16 Speaker_05
Even hydrologists are like, damn beavers, that's cool.
00:22:19 Speaker_02
But when the water spreads out, you know, they are very comfortable in water. but not as much on land. You know, you got to imagine a beaver has front feet that are very dexterous, about the size of like a deck of cards or so.
00:22:34 Speaker_02
And then the hind feet are double or, you know, even more than double that size and they're webbed, entirely webbed. So it's like walking on hands on one part, but then like enormous flippers on the back.
00:22:50 Speaker_02
And so they're very awkward and just ungainly, very slow. And they, they do smell a lot. And so they're very attractive to a number of predators on land. And so being in water is a safe place for them. They're just ultimate graceful in the water.
00:23:06 Speaker_02
And so that's safe. And as the water extends, they're both. Encouraging new like Willow Aspen, Cottonwood regeneration, and then able to access that for their own food and building uses as well.
00:23:19 Speaker_05
So they're kind of shoring up that river, it spreads out, it gets deeper, and then naturally willows and other things use that water source to grow into it. They create this new little ecosystem where more things start to thrive there.
00:23:38 Speaker_02
Yeah, that's right. A lot of species, wherever beavers were in that range, have co-evolved with beavers and depend on their work and their disturbance factor to make the habitats where they thrive. And so willows are just a consummate example of that.
00:23:55 Speaker_02
truly an amazing plant in their ability to be you know just a sprig if it's attached you know gets a little bit of a root hold in moist soil can just take off and can propagate very fast in ways that are really great and so
00:24:11 Speaker_02
beavers are a little bit different than like an elk or a deer or other browser and that they're not seeking so much the buds, you know, they don't want that just fresh shoot growth.
00:24:22 Speaker_02
And so plants like willows, aspens, cottonwoods, those are kind of their three favorites really. Those are some of the plants that evolved in those riparian systems that really thrive as well. And so it is a very dynamic cycle.
00:24:37 Speaker_02
And beavers, they create diversity by being dynamic. One of the things that they do is they don't always stay in that spot. As one food patch will become diminished a little bit, they'll shift to another.
00:24:51 Speaker_02
And so at each of those different stages, temporarily in the beaver succession, that brings a whole new suite of species that will thrive in that altered state. And so it's a constantly shifting mosaic that beavers really promote.
00:25:06 Speaker_05
Well, if they get up and go, if they're like, hmm, not as much here, and they get up and go, do they have to build an entirely new dam? Or do they ever find abandoned dams from other beavers? And they're like, this is pretty good.
00:25:19 Speaker_02
Yes. I mean, one of the greatest predictors of future beaver habitat is historic beaver presence.
00:25:25 Speaker_02
And so that's why it's important to have that eye to be able to see, you know, where a prior dam complex was or other old chew sign that you can see on sticks and things around. Those are all great signs.
00:25:37 Speaker_02
for where future beavers could establish as well. And that's really important for people involved in beaver restoration is looking at kind of where those prior sites were productive because those are the places that they will likely come back to.
00:25:51 Speaker_05
You know, it always boggles me to hear how fast a spider, like an orb weaver, can spin a web. Kind of the timeline of how different organisms create things, I think it can be really surprising.
00:26:04 Speaker_05
But when it comes to making a dam, and I know they're really huge ranges probably in sizes, but are they working on it for like a year? Is it a multi-year project? Or do they say, all right, let's chew some trees down. Let's get this thing done.
00:26:18 Speaker_05
And it's like pretty fast.
00:26:20 Speaker_02
Yeah, great question. So it does vary a ton, but generally they are working very hard and in a way very fast on it. Sometimes alterations or blowouts will happen in a dam system naturally or human caused for various reasons.
00:26:35 Speaker_02
And beavers are very fast to, you know, return to that leak and triggered a lot by the sound of flowing water as well. The instinct, you know, that, that is a trigger to, to where the leak is, so to speak.
00:26:47 Speaker_05
Not only that, but they tend to work the night shift and they dig out trails and even canals to float sticks and tree trunks toward the dams. They're making log rides.
00:26:58 Speaker_02
But, you know, I also sometimes resist the idea of just the busy, you know, being a beaver. If you ever get the chance to watch a beaver doing its work in this setting, they're not, they're never frenzied, you know, in their activity.
00:27:12 Speaker_02
I always really appreciate just how deliberate and just like tactful they are in placement. It's more of just like a constant process as opposed to just like this frenzy of activity. They have just really mastered the art of maintenance.
00:27:28 Speaker_02
I think so many of us humans just don't know how to do basic maintenance activities sometimes. We can dispose of something or get a new one, but we don't know how to really just tinker and maintain things over time.
00:27:42 Speaker_02
And so I think that's part of what makes beaver structures so resilient is that they're constantly evolving and adapting with the changes that they're facing.
00:27:52 Speaker_05
How are they making those dams? Are they threading different size diameter trunks and sticks? Is it almost like they're weaving it or are they piling it and then kind of plugging in gaps?
00:28:06 Speaker_02
Kind of all of the above. It generally starts with, you know, just some berming of some mud at the base. You know, it's not only stick.
00:28:14 Speaker_02
So there's some anchoring things in there going on, like the mud, sometimes even rocks are rolled in and stones can be rolled in as part of like a supporting base. But you know, it's, it is a very complex, and remember this is in a aquatic,
00:28:30 Speaker_02
environment where water is flowing around all the time. You don't have the ability to do this in dry times, but they use that to their advantage as well.
00:28:38 Speaker_02
And then as it crests out of the water, they do add a berm of mud, especially on that upstream edge where the water is pounding.
00:28:48 Speaker_02
And they will use mud as well to kind of add a little shellac-like coating to it to keep it from just water getting through all those crannies of the sticks, so to speak.
00:28:59 Speaker_05
And with a pair of beavers, are they both working on it, typically? Or do they ever get the yearlings in on it? Like, hey, you're going to have to do this eventually. Go grab me some mud.
00:29:11 Speaker_02
Yeah, very much all the above. I think, you know, it's not a gendered activity. It's, I think both male and female contribute to dam building and the yearlings as well.
00:29:21 Speaker_02
Um, it takes, takes the cats a little bit of time to get comfortable to that point when they're born, they actually don't have their waterproofing gland active yet.
00:29:32 Speaker_02
And so they stay in the lodge for a little bit of a time, but after they get that waterproofing gland active and they can, be in the water effectively, they will also watch and participate and learn from the process as well.
00:29:47 Speaker_05
You mentioned, obviously, we're talking baby beavers. Sometimes a wildlife rehabber will have videos of baby beavers and they're very fuzzy and very cute. And I've seen videos of them taking all the towels or toys or items around them and trying to
00:30:05 Speaker_05
plug up a doorway with them? And I imagine that's got to be instinctual, but do they start looking for stuff to push around even when they're little, little?
00:30:16 Speaker_02
I believe so. I'm not as familiar with those type of environments, but play and just experimenting and using those tools is very important for so many animals.
00:30:28 Speaker_02
You look at bears or wolves or any other animals that are socially oriented like that, that watch each other, learn from each other, and do have that play and practicing with their future tools as a very important instinct or way of entering their future work.
00:30:48 Speaker_02
And so I think that is a possibility, yeah.
00:30:50 Speaker_05
This reminds me of when my nephew, Mason, wanted to play this video game, and it was just a video game about working at a diner, making sandwiches and burgers.
00:31:00 Speaker_05
And we're like, you know, Mason, one day you can do this for as long as you want, and they give you money for it. You're never gonna believe it. It's called a job.
00:31:07 Speaker_05
But yeah, that video I saw, which was uploaded to YouTube in 2022, is titled, Rescue Beaver Makes Christmas Dam In-House, and it features a rescue beaver scooting down a nice hardwood floored hallway and stacking items including a flip-flop, a SpongeBob SquarePants plush toy, a small Christmas tree, a rag rug, a teddy bear, and a full roll of red shiny wrapping paper.
00:31:34 Speaker_05
and at times this beaver pauses thoughtfully, just blinking, touching his tiny hands together, as you might when you have walked into the kitchen but you've forgotten why.
00:31:45 Speaker_05
Now, the uploader, Holly Muraco, writes in the video's description that this beaver is being raised by wildlife rehabbers after being orphaned as a newborn Her parents were killed and their dam and lodge destroyed.
00:31:59 Speaker_05
Beavers are classified as nuisance animals in many U.S. states, Holly writes, and can be killed anytime. Beavers need to spend two years with their human rehabbers and have lots of opportunities to practice instinctive behaviors.
00:32:12 Speaker_05
This beaver enjoys playing this game inside the house, but lives with the other orphaned beavers outside most of the time.
00:32:19 Speaker_05
Now Holly who works with the Woodside Wildlife Rescue in Mississippi writes, this misunderstood and unique species needs lots of love. And I want to reach into this video and I want to pet this big rodent.
00:32:31 Speaker_05
I want to tell it it's doing a good job of stacking all of those objects together. I want to softly pat its big weird tail because I love it.
00:32:41 Speaker_05
A question I feel like I have never gotten to ask someone who gets to study and learn about beavers, but what's with their tail? How big is it? Is that all skin or is it hairy? It looks like a big cactus leaf, kind of. What does that feel or look like?
00:33:02 Speaker_02
So definitely not hairy. It is more scaly. So the beaver tail is really a fascinating part of their body in a lot of ways.
00:33:11 Speaker_00
Please tell me.
00:33:13 Speaker_02
For one, it's used a little bit as a rudder as they're swimming through the water. And so it can help them steer a little bit. It's also important when they're propping up to chew down a tree or whatnot.
00:33:24 Speaker_02
And one of the most important functions of it though, It's a very important alarm system as well.
00:33:30 Speaker_02
You've probably either heard yourself or heard of beavers slapping their tail as they get alarmed by predator or potential threat or some other non-related beaver or some other concern in their environment. They will really have this impressive slap.
00:33:48 Speaker_02
action on the water and it's it is kind of jolting and that is a warning to other beavers that there might be a threat around and so they know how to respond to that.
00:33:57 Speaker_02
But the fourth one that's so important that the tail does is that it's a very much a heat or a thermoregulation and heat storage energy storage organ and so
00:34:06 Speaker_02
In the winter, it actually that is the part of their body that becomes quite larger than it is in the summer. They have a lot of body fat, but they take on most of that in the winter and store it in their tail.
00:34:18 Speaker_01
Same as a dump truck.
00:34:20 Speaker_02
And so that is really important for one of the ways for them to keep warm in the winter. So the outside is very scaly, always black. And that has also been shown to have like a unique signature. You can look at the tail
00:34:36 Speaker_02
and tell individual beavers by their tail details, just like we can with a fingerprint on a human. But then inside of the tail, it's just very thickly layered of white, gelatinous kind of fat.
00:34:51 Speaker_02
And so all that fat is what's really important for their heat storage in the winter.
00:34:57 Speaker_05
I never thought of it this once in my life before, but are there bones in the tail? There's gotta be. Is it like a dog tail, but just real flat and big?
00:35:07 Speaker_02
There is a central node of vertebra extending down through the tail that is in the center of it there, but it's more filled with more capillary-like blood vessels, and so there's a lot of blood exchange in there that keeps it from freezing in those times, and again, serving that heat storage purpose.
00:35:27 Speaker_02
So other than that central area of bone going down the middle, it is entirely fat, pretty much.
00:35:34 Speaker_05
Oh, I never realized that. I would have thought it was kind of like a mat of leather. We have so many questions from listeners that are very excited to have a Beaver expert on. Can I ask you some listener questions?
00:35:46 Speaker_02
Sure.
00:35:47 Speaker_05
Okay. The new year coming on, we've organized them as best we can. into some categories. I thought this was a great question.
00:35:54 Speaker_05
Shannon O'Grady, Olivia Lester, Onyx Monolith, Rachel Prostenko, Ash Mickelright, Gemma, Shirley Lozanobo, Addie Capello, and Alexandra Rambeau. They want to know about their teeth. How are they so strong?
00:36:08 Speaker_05
Alexandra asks, has the strength of their teeth been measured? What are they comparable to? Onyx wanted to know, is it comparable to like tigers and alligators? What kind of jaw and teeth strength are they working with?
00:36:21 Speaker_05
And we will get to the root of that tooth question in a minute, including why they are the color of a tangerine. But first, we donate to a cause of theologist's choosing.
00:36:30 Speaker_05
And this week, the wonderful Rob Rich selected Tracker Certification North America, which aims to create a future where ecological literacy is common, valued, and accessible to all.
00:36:41 Speaker_05
And they do this by providing education, resources, support, and professional certification for all who aim to improve their skills as wildlife trackers. either recreationally or professionally.
00:36:51 Speaker_05
And they explain that wildlife tracking is a field science, which helps identify and interpret the signs of animal activity and wildlife observations amid a changing world. It also gives people a feeling of a meaningful connection with the landscapes.
00:37:06 Speaker_05
So that was Tracker Certification North America, with whom Rob works. So thank you to our show sponsors for enabling that donation. Okay, and folks submitting questions are patrons of ologies at patreon.com slash ologies. You can join for a dollar.
00:37:22 Speaker_05
And we're all eager to get back to the Bieber questions. What's what's with those teeth?
00:37:28 Speaker_02
Their teeth are supported by a skull that makes their teeth effective. And so they have a very flat top wide skull with these things we call zygomatic arches, which are what we call cheekbones sometimes.
00:37:42 Speaker_02
And so, when those are so widespread, that allows for a lot of muscle attachment coming down over the top of their cranium, attaching to the outside of those cheekbones and then going down into their mandible.
00:37:58 Speaker_02
All that complex muscle attachment does make for a lot of jaw strength. I can guarantee you it's quite strong to bring down to cottonwood or a large tree that is double the size of their body or something.
00:38:10 Speaker_05
And for patron Alexander Rambo, hi, hey, who asked, has the strength of their teeth been measured and what are they comparable to?
00:38:18 Speaker_05
It's about 180 pounds per square inch, which is greater than the 150 or so of a human's, but it's a lot less than the 1000 pounds per square inch that a Bengal tiger or a grizzly would use to snap your bones.
00:38:33 Speaker_05
Maybe it's because trees can't run away from beavers. They can kind of just succumb to their fate being savored bite by bite as slow as they want to. I don't know. I'm neither a tree nor a beaver.
00:38:45 Speaker_02
But the teeth themselves, like all rodents, they're defined by ever growing incisors. And so those are kind of the hallmark front teeth that we see. And then they've got a really robust set of molars as well.
00:39:01 Speaker_02
The molars are for grinding, masticating all that wood pulp down is important. But the incisors are what do the heavy work of the cutting. And so on the top ones, they're very orange on the outside.
00:39:15 Speaker_02
And so if you see a beaver's front teeth, you will see that orange that's enamel and it's colored that way because of some of the iron and the compounds that they eat in the wood that they're having.
00:39:26 Speaker_02
But that closes over a whiter area on the bottom teeth that is called dentine. And so that whiter area is softer. The enamel is harder. When they rub against each other like that, it's a constantly sharpening chisel.
00:39:44 Speaker_02
And so the beaver's teeth are extremely sharp and constantly becoming more so. And if they don't have access to wood and don't keep gnawing and working on that, the teeth will keep growing and can become a quite a dental hazard for them.
00:40:01 Speaker_02
So they do require wood for that purpose as well. But yeah, hard enamel outside soft white kind of dentine on the inside for those incisors and then just a lot of continuous action to keep it sharp.
00:40:13 Speaker_05
So our exposed teeth, your exposed teeth, if you're listening to this, have hard enamel on all sides, but touch the back of your teeth with your tongue. So in a beaver, that side is softer.
00:40:26 Speaker_05
So their teeth are self-sharpening because the harder marmalade-colored enameled front surface of the bottom teeth wears down the soft backside of the uppers. So you've got yourself a whole set of mouth shivs taken down trees, ready to go.
00:40:43 Speaker_05
Now, according to the 2018 paper, a mathematical model of beaver incisor tooth morphology, beaver's front teeth, they just keep getting worn down and growing its whole life.
00:40:54 Speaker_05
They grow a total length of about six feet in its life, which I guess when you consider that they are an entire tool chest for building stuff and they are also your silverware, it's kind of a worthwhile metabolic investment for the beaver.
00:41:10 Speaker_05
Some folks asked about diet, and I had never thought about this before because, honestly, I just figured they ate fish and frogs and stuff.
00:41:17 Speaker_05
But Eli the fish guy, Mo, Prince Nocturnal, Amanda, Key Lime Pie, Shannon O'Grady, Jim, Ziz, Sam and Katie, and Jackie G wanted to know, in Sam and Katie's words, what do they eat? Do they eat any of the bark from the trees they use for their dams?
00:41:32 Speaker_05
Shannon O'Grady said, do they eat wood? Do they eat fish? And Jackie G says, do beavers really poop sawdust? No idea what a beaver eats, to be honest.
00:41:44 Speaker_02
Great. So they are definitely 100% vegan. No animal fair of note. Maybe an insect or something will slip in occasionally, but there's very minimal to no record of of them relying on any animal food in their diet.
00:42:02 Speaker_02
And so in the spring and summer and warmer months when the veg is succulent and there's a lot of herbaceous or non-woody plants out there, there's a number of wetland associated plants that they will eat.
00:42:14 Speaker_02
They will also use the roots of certain things like water lily roots are sometimes important for beavers and just in the water lily pad leaves, you know, a lot of those succulent plants are not available certainly year round.
00:42:28 Speaker_02
So, when they cut down a tree or cut down a branch or whatnot, they're not ingesting the entire thing. They're mostly after what we call the cambium, which is this thin layer of sugary cells where the tree is actively growing.
00:42:45 Speaker_02
And so, you know, most of what we call on a tree is actually dead cellulose material.
00:42:50 Speaker_02
It's not something that is nutritious in any way, but they will seek out that cambium layer just below the bark and below before you get into the real kind of deadwood of the tree.
00:43:02 Speaker_02
And so they will eat first and then use some for building or some they're just used for feeding as well. A little bit of a mixed bag there.
00:43:12 Speaker_05
So yes, they eat trees, people. They eat trees. And for more on the different layers inside the tree, which is the most delicious, you can see our wonderful dendrology episode with Jay Casey Clapp of the Completely Arbitrary podcast.
00:43:28 Speaker_05
We also have a scatology episode, and that is about animal poop. Speaking of, what is a beaver log like? What's coming out of their wood chipper?
00:43:37 Speaker_02
It's about a golf ball-sized lump a lot of times. And I sometimes liken it to shredded wheat or something. It takes that kind of character.
00:43:46 Speaker_02
And beetroots are one of the rodents, in addition to the lagomorphs, the rabbits and pikas and whatnot, that will re-ingest their own first poop. And so they will eat that to kind of extract a second round of nutrients out of it.
00:44:02 Speaker_02
This is a practice called coprophagy. Delicious. And so by the time it comes out that second time, it is very loose, easily disintegrated lump of sawdust like shredded wheat.
00:44:15 Speaker_02
Most of the time it's deposited in water and so it's very prone to disintegration quite quickly.
00:44:22 Speaker_05
All we are is dust in the wind. All we are is beaver scat in a pond. Jacob Ellsbury says, I've never seen a beaver before, but I see their chew marks everywhere. Where do they go? Maya wants to know, are they nocturnal, or did I make that up?
00:44:37 Speaker_05
Sidonius wants to know, how can I increase my likelihood of seeing them?
00:44:42 Speaker_02
Great, so the two marks are definitely something you want to look for and if you don't see them and you know there are beavers there, just you want to be looking for like a cut on the branch at like a 45 degree angle.
00:44:57 Speaker_02
That's just because of how they kind of turn their head and then how the branch typically falls. It's kind of like this angled cut, which is typical of all rodents really, but that sharp angled cut is really important.
00:45:10 Speaker_02
To see beavers, they are, you know, fascinating because they're at once very conspicuous.
00:45:15 Speaker_02
You can see their activity from aerial images, which is fascinating, but they're also kind of cryptic sometimes in that they do prefer to be active at nocturnal or crepuscular kind of dawn dusk kind of times sometimes.
00:45:30 Speaker_02
So a great time is really to just get out there first thing in the morning, And you can kind of wake up with them as they're about to tuck in for their time kind of in the lodge or their safe spot for the day.
00:45:43 Speaker_02
And they'll typically come out in the more dusk hours as well. Those are kind of good times to try, but beavers are not hard and fast about being nocturnal. You can find them during the day as well.
00:45:56 Speaker_05
Oh, OK. But get up early. When it comes to them getting up versus sleeping, a lot of folks wanted to ask about their lodges. And I did not know there was a difference, really, between a lodge and a dam. I don't know why I never thought about that.
00:46:11 Speaker_05
Megan Walker, Adam Foote, Katie Bauer, Stephanie Rosso, Amanda Lander, Haley Kirby, Jeanetta Soar, Valerie Bertha, first-time quest asker Jean Genoir all wanted to know what the vibe is in a beaver lodge. What's it like in there?
00:46:25 Speaker_05
Rebecca King wanted to know, is their lodge really impenetrable by bears? But Ghoul Next Door asked, I was always enchanted by their homes as a kid, and I imagine they had beautifully furnished, cozy living rooms down there.
00:46:36 Speaker_05
But what are those dens like? And is it one big room? Is it different little kind of nests off of one big space?
00:46:45 Speaker_05
Other folks wanted to know if they all kind of cohabitate with more than just their family or with other animals, kind of what's happening in their lodges?
00:46:53 Speaker_02
Yeah, great question. So again, a lodge, you are correct, the lodge is separate from a dam. And so they're not ever living in the dam, but they are definitely using a variety of different lodge styles.
00:47:06 Speaker_02
And sometimes they can be like freestanding in the water. And sometimes they can be half affixed to like a bank. Sometimes it can just be a hole dug into a bank and made burrowed in that way.
00:47:18 Speaker_02
Those are the places where they're living and kind of sheltering over winter if it's in an environment where they need to do that. And they are not impenetrable, but they are very difficult to enter for a lot of predators.
00:47:31 Speaker_02
The ones that are made of sticks and mud are generally like the dam in a way, you know, the sticks are kind of latticed in and then the mud fills in a lot of the cracks.
00:47:41 Speaker_02
And so when that freezes in the winter, that can become pretty rock hard and they do all all the family is living in there together.
00:47:51 Speaker_02
One of my most fascinating parts of beaver existence is just that time in the winter of how they're doing that under the ice, in the darkness, in cold environments, in wet environments.
00:48:02 Speaker_02
And it's just, you know, we thought COVID was bad and isolation in a lot of ways. I mean, they are very much isolated in that time when they can't come back out above water surface for months at a time, potentially. It does have
00:48:18 Speaker_02
different layers, terraces, a lot of times you can see in them.
00:48:22 Speaker_02
If you ever are lucky enough to find an abandoned beaver lodge, sometimes I have been able to enter into some of the chutes that go into a lodge, and you can see for yourself kind of what the size is like, but it can generally fit
00:48:37 Speaker_02
them together, generally some body warmth in there involved. But Casey McFarland, who's a great tracker and wildlife ecologist, he has a great video just showing one of those abandoned beaver lodges, what the interior is like.
00:48:54 Speaker_05
Okay, so Rob, already established, he's amazing. He sent me a link to Casey McFarland's video of an abandoned beaver dam.
00:49:02 Speaker_05
His whole YouTube channel is great, but this video is titled Inside a Beaver Lodge and Cross-Section of a Dam, where he's able to peek inside an opening that was previously underwater.
00:49:14 Speaker_01
But let's go inside. This is pretty cool.
00:49:18 Speaker_05
Casey scoots through some shallow water and into a clearing in this giant 10-foot mound of sticks and inside we see what looks like a collapsed barn.
00:49:31 Speaker_05
There is timber of every diameter and hard-packed mud and almost a ramp that leads to a platform toward the back.
00:49:40 Speaker_01
But it's like a messy, but very robust and well-built log cabin.
00:49:48 Speaker_05
I gotta say, it's pretty freaking cool to see inside a beaver lodge.
00:49:52 Speaker_01
Pretty freaking cool to see inside a beaver lodge.
00:49:57 Speaker_02
But in the lodges, you know, there can be muskrats particularly are one that are often cohabitating with beavers. And there are things like spiders, all sorts of invertebrates and insects that are certainly dwelling in there.
00:50:13 Speaker_02
Sometimes amphibians as well. And then after the beavers leave sometimes, you know, there can be other larger animals that use them as well. Sage Raymond is a colleague that has done really neat work up in
00:50:25 Speaker_02
Elk Island National Park in Alberta, just showing that coyotes and porcupines and different animals are following after the beaver to use those where tree sources are limited.
00:50:35 Speaker_02
And so beavers are incredibly important throughout, again, throughout their temporal history of their wetland complexes is fascinating to me.
00:50:45 Speaker_05
Do beavers winter in their lodges or somewhere else? Do they hibernate? Joe Dauphiné and Megan Walker wanted to know about ice holes.
00:50:53 Speaker_05
Joe said that they had a natural history professor who said that beavers smash the ice with their head to create a path for them to swim, and then they come up and breathe during the winter months.
00:51:03 Speaker_05
Other people say that doesn't happen, but yeah, in some winter behavior, how much sleeping versus how much activity?
00:51:09 Speaker_02
Yes. To survive in the winter, most of the times they're relying on what we call a cache. And so it's like this stored up massive sticks that they will plug into the floor of the stream or pond or whatever water source they're on.
00:51:25 Speaker_02
And this is just this raft of sticks that they have like piled up and are in the bottom of the water source there. And so that is their primary food during the winter. And they're going in and out of the lodge to access that.
00:51:39 Speaker_02
There is a certain time before freeze-up where it's not quite frozen, but it's not quite flowing water everywhere either. So it's kind of that delicate in-between time.
00:51:51 Speaker_02
And they will use their flat, thick, scald head to kind of bash up through thinner ice to do that and keep it open as long as they can. But in my area, there does come a point where there is no more of that bashing to be had.
00:52:07 Speaker_02
And the ice just takes over. And so once that happens, they are fully locked under there for months at a time.
00:52:15 Speaker_05
So when it's so cold that a beaver's habitat is too iced over to even slam their head into, they stay just in their dry above land lodge. But they take that ramp down into the water and the entrance is usually underwater.
00:52:31 Speaker_05
They swim underneath the ice sheets on the surface of the pond or the lake to get to their aquatic pantry of sticks to eat. And then they swim back under the ice to the opening to their lodge. All of that when things look still on the surface.
00:52:47 Speaker_05
Winter for them means going so hard but looking so low-key.
00:52:51 Speaker_02
You can tell activity sometimes. One of the fascinating signs to look for is these bubble trails that go in and out. of water, or not water, air escaping from their interstitial spaces of their fur. You know, there's air trapped in there.
00:53:08 Speaker_02
And so when they go in and out of their lodge, all those bubbles are escaping from their fur and rising up to the surface of the ice.
00:53:17 Speaker_02
And so before the ice gets all snowed over and kind of opaque, you can see those bubbles to see where the beavers have been coming and going.
00:53:25 Speaker_02
But after that, after the snow gets all over the ice, it is pretty much total darkness for potentially months at a time.
00:53:32 Speaker_05
Wow.
00:53:34 Speaker_00
Like the duck.
00:53:35 Speaker_05
You know, you mentioned the fur, and I know that their fur has played a huge part, too, in their decline. And Catherine Vela and Gemma wanted to know, what does their fur feel like? Is it wiry or is it coarse?
00:53:48 Speaker_05
Megan Walker wants to know, how does it not get soaked through? And first-time question asker Rebecca Morrison asked, what is it about beavers and their fur that made them so popular for trapping and trade? Sam and Katie asked simply,
00:54:03 Speaker_05
And I imagine with a tremble in their voice, is it soft? And that thickness obviously must keep them nice and dry or at least warm during the winter. Can you tell us a little bit about the fur?
00:54:17 Speaker_02
So it is multi-layered as well. It's super dense.
00:54:22 Speaker_02
It's one of the most dense furs of animals on the planet really, right up there with like sea otter and other semi-aquatic mammals that are spending a lot of time in really cold water in really cold northerly environments. And so it is dense.
00:54:37 Speaker_02
The layer on the outside that you would touch first is coarser. It's composed of more guard hairs. That's what waterproofing oils from their anal glands are constantly being lathered onto to keep them as sleek and waterproof as possible.
00:54:54 Speaker_02
But below that, you get more into some more downy, dense layers that are even softer. And so, that is what's kind of right up against their body. The fur is so dense, I've heard it, one stat I seem to recall is like 23,000 hairs per square centimeter.
00:55:12 Speaker_02
And so, you can imagine a square centimeter. That is not large, but that is a ton of hairs in that area.
00:55:19 Speaker_05
On your scalp, if you grow hair there, you've got about 150 hairs per square centimeter.
00:55:26 Speaker_05
Beavers have 150 times that, up to 23,000 hairs per square centimeter, and they never wash it, and it's shiny, and for product, they use an organic finishing oil sourced from their own ass sacks, obsessed.
00:55:41 Speaker_02
And so that density is probably about 25% of the beaver's insulation through the winter. And so even all that hair, because they're in the water so much, doesn't do all their needs to stay insulated.
00:55:55 Speaker_02
And that's why they rely so much on their fat stores as well to accommodate the rest of their insulation. But it is incredibly dense fur and it is in the interior, very soft. Yeah.
00:56:06 Speaker_05
Well, you mentioned that fatty tail, and Naya Squirrel, or Nia Squirrel, first-time question asker, wanted to know if you've heard what the tail tasted like, and if it's true that at one time this was a highly sought-after delicacy.
00:56:20 Speaker_05
And some other folks wanted to know beaver meat. This was an audio question from one Dr. Tegan Wall.
00:56:28 Speaker_03
I've heard that some places are trying to control their local beaver population by integrating the meat into their cuisine. So my question is, What does beaver taste like and what is the best way to eat a beaver? And have you ever tried it?
00:56:42 Speaker_03
That's my question.
00:56:56 Speaker_02
So that varies. The tail, I think, it was definitely relied on at certain times in certain people that live in climates where that was needed throughout human evolution. They have certainly relied on beaver tail as a fat source.
00:57:12 Speaker_02
And beaver meat as well is something that has a lot of importance in certain times of human evolution.
00:57:19 Speaker_05
So in a Harvard University article titled, Damned If They Do, one beaver conservationist and environmental engineer, Jordan Kennedy, explained that the beaver is considered one of the fundamental animals of creation in Blackfeet culture.
00:57:32 Speaker_05
So when trappers started to expand west into what's now Montana, the Blackfeet nations who revere the beaver were not typically willing to help them with their trapping within that territory.
00:57:43 Speaker_05
And as a result, the animals weren't wiped out the way they were in much of North America.
00:57:48 Speaker_05
And resources at this website, blackfeetclimatechange.com, describe ecological projects in homage of the beaver, saying that beaver mimicry is this restoration technique that has been gaining popularity due to its cheap and easy and effective application.
00:58:02 Speaker_05
So there's this pilot project that they're working on exploring the use of beaver mimicry as a restoration and educational activity in the Blackfeet Nation.
00:58:11 Speaker_05
However, in some places where locals are still at war with the beavers, industriousness, and their architecture, trapping is legal and folks enjoy not just the thick pelts, but the meat too. And I found a 2022 article titled, How to Eat a Beaver.
00:58:28 Speaker_05
And it describes it similar to elk or bison with a deep woodsy character. And it reads that the meat is clean and sweet smelling, garnet colored and lean with a thick cap of pristine fat under the skin.
00:58:42 Speaker_05
As for the other eating beaver, that's a whole different episode. And we have ones on sexology and gynecology, as well as philology for anyone feeling left out. Why are there so many beaver innuendos?
00:58:53 Speaker_05
I'm glad you asked, Mouse Paxton, Pavka34, Lauren Otto, Katie Murray, G. Sharon, Annie G., Hannah Riddle, Rebecca King, Waldron, and Spencer Aldridge. So, we're all wondering, and I looked into this, right?
00:59:05 Speaker_05
So, in the 1920s, a fad went around London, and a 1922 Associated Press article bore the headline, English Lord Tells of Game of Beaver, and it contained some thrillingly Bridgerton sentences. I'll read them.
00:59:22 Speaker_05
Lord and Lady Mountbatten, she is one of England's prettiest and richest women, and he is King George's cousin, decided today they would attend the World Series and compare it with London's new outdoor sport, beaver.
00:59:36 Speaker_05
Beaver, said Lord Mountbatten, is a street game anyone can play. You walk along with a friend. If you spot a chap with a beard, you call out, Beaver! That counts 15 points. If it is a white beard, this is a polar beaver and counts 30.
00:59:52 Speaker_05
You score as in tennis, the winner makes the loser buy the drinks, and it is driving beards right out of London," Lord Mountbatten says.
01:00:01 Speaker_05
Now, there was another 1922 article in the Columbia, Missouri Evening Missourian News, and it wrote that the unwhiskered have entered joyfully into the game and try to spot a beaver before their fellows. Okay, great game, got it.
01:00:15 Speaker_05
But then five years later, A 1927 book of poetry titled Immortalia, an anthology of American ballads, sailor songs, cowboy songs, college songs, parodies, limericks, and other humorous verses in Doggerelle contained a limerick.
01:00:29 Speaker_05
It read, there once was a lady named Eva who filled up a bath to receive her. She took off her clothes from her head to her toes. When a voice at the keyhole yelled, beaver,
01:00:40 Speaker_05
So this book is still in print, and one modern reviewer praised, this is a most fabulous collection of the smut our forefathers actually giggled about in taverns. So there you have it, from beaver to beaver to beaver.
01:00:52 Speaker_05
Bring that up at dinner or a New Year's party, or if there's a lull in the conversation, or maybe bring it up at Easter, since yes, Jen Ringney and Rowan Doyle, the Catholic Church does consider beavers to be fish, because they are aquatic.
01:01:05 Speaker_05
And for more on all of that, to see our wonderful Capybara episode because if you're Catholic, those big rodents are also fish. Nothing makes sense. Sometimes I get very mad about it. Onward.
01:01:17 Speaker_05
Aveline is a first-time question asker and says they're from Canada and they've met a trapper who has an annual quota of beavers he must trap and says that without human control, they would essentially wreck our world, the human and water infrastructure.
01:01:32 Speaker_05
Other patrons, Rebecca Morrison, Will, Caitlin O'Malley, Mish the Fish, Jay Shea, and Tyler Williams asked about historical trappings and the fur trade causing this steep decline in beaver populations and the sustainability of current beaver trapping.
01:01:47 Speaker_05
Are we trying to preserve or cull numbers? What's happening?
01:01:52 Speaker_02
I can't really speak to what the first listener was talking about, about wrecking the world. I think that would be a little bit extreme.
01:02:00 Speaker_02
Beavers, like I said at the start here, for seven and a half million odd years, they've been on this continent shaping and transforming it in different ways.
01:02:11 Speaker_02
We at one point had between one hundred and four hundred million beavers across north america and in the course of about three centuries.
01:02:21 Speaker_02
No that in the about the sixteen hundred through the early nineteen hundred you know that window down to about a hundred thousand.
01:02:29 Speaker_05
That is up to 400 million beaver on the continent, down to 100,000. So over a few centuries of colonization, the percentage of beaver population remaining was one quarter of 1%. 99.75% of the beavers had been killed right off.
01:02:51 Speaker_02
And so we are very lucky that they didn't become extinct or endangered, but their populations at this point are very patchy, dispersed, and in many places, recovering. But beavers do not need us to keep their populations in control.
01:03:08 Speaker_02
I mean, for all those years, they have had
01:03:11 Speaker_02
other predators that are doing that effectively and their own you know population saturation densities is is a important regulation on that and and so I think a lot of times where the conflicts come into play is that you know we are
01:03:27 Speaker_02
Living in the same places that beavers also thrive and in other words those low lying arable flood plains and good soil and all those things where there's good water access and things those are the things people want to and so there's a lot of times some tension there but.
01:03:46 Speaker_02
there's a lot of other non-lethal solutions to beaver coexistence as well. And so a lot of times when trapping, you know, when that's used as a solution to beaver problems, that's really just creating a void for new beavers to come in.
01:04:03 Speaker_02
Because again, if the habitat is good, future beavers will find that and be a part of that somehow.
01:04:09 Speaker_05
Do they have more than one litter each year? It seems like just a having two a year, they wouldn't be multiplying that fast, right? Or are they pretty prolific?
01:04:20 Speaker_02
No, you're right. Not as prolific as other rodents, for sure. And only one litter per year. And they generally are mating in late winter, January, February, and then having their kits in May, June, around that time.
01:04:34 Speaker_02
So yeah, mice and voles and other rodents that are much more prolific than beavers are. So they're not that prolific, really.
01:04:42 Speaker_05
You mentioned summer too, and I had a really sweet question asked by a first-time question asker, Sarah Moore, who says that they have been listening to the show for years and have been saving their first question for the beavers episode.
01:04:57 Speaker_05
And they said, a few years ago I was camping in Colorado and I observed through binoculars a group of beavers swimming around and playing with a duck.
01:05:04 Speaker_05
And they say, I don't know how else to describe it, but they were all swimming around and doing little splashes and twirls and playing. Maybe I'm projecting, Sarah writes, but it looked like they were having so much fun. My question is, am I crazy?
01:05:17 Speaker_05
Do beavers play? And is it possible they'd ever play with another species?
01:05:21 Speaker_02
Wow, great question and great observation. You know, I think I do not have the answer to that, but I do know that beavers do play and I do know that there are interspecies interactions, intraspecies interactions that we are constantly learning about.
01:05:37 Speaker_02
And that's one of the areas that I'm most fascinated by is the beavers themselves, but also how they're shaping and interacting with
01:05:44 Speaker_02
all kinds of species from the butterflies that are attracted to the sap on the branches they cut to other things they're swimming around.
01:05:52 Speaker_02
And so I can't say it's a regular thing that beavers and ducks are playing together, but I would not doubt that there's possibility for interaction there that I've not observed either.
01:06:04 Speaker_05
Christy Sullivan was another listener who says, just a side note, that there's a beaver that lives in the creek that runs through their neighborhood, and they say, we love him.
01:06:14 Speaker_05
It's a highlight of our walks to see him swimming around with the ducks and geese. I guess maybe they do love ducks and geese.
01:06:21 Speaker_03
There you go.
01:06:22 Speaker_05
Go figure. I guess they do play around. Knowing that they do play, that you have seen that.
01:06:28 Speaker_05
Someone else, a first-time question asker, Fiona Blum, who's been waiting for this topic also, wondered if you had heard of the beaver deceiver devices and are the beavers outsmarting us? It seems like they might be. Can they be strategic like that?
01:06:43 Speaker_05
And have you heard of these beaver deceiver devices? I've never heard of one.
01:06:47 Speaker_02
For sure, yeah, they're really central to the work I do and I'm a part of tangentially and directly.
01:06:52 Speaker_02
The beaver deceiver is kind of pioneered and patented by this guy named Skip Lyle, really brilliant guy based out of Vermont currently, but he grew up around just watching trapping take place and whatnot and was like, sure, there had to be a better way than just this remove and fill the void, just this never ending cycle.
01:07:15 Speaker_02
that all kinds of road crews and private landowners and public agencies are dealing with.
01:07:21 Speaker_05
Okay, so I assumed that a beaver deceiver was some kind of ultrasonic technology that made beavers think that a culvert was haunted.
01:07:29 Speaker_05
But it turns out that Skip Lyle, a one-time construction worker who later got his master's in wildlife management, inspired by beavers, he invented a kind of fencing system around these big drain pipes for streams.
01:07:42 Speaker_05
that prevents the beavers from jamming up the culverts themselves. But it still lets the water flow under the road because beavers, they love a big pipe with water. They love it.
01:07:54 Speaker_02
Sometimes culverts, you know, those big pipes that go under a road to allow the stream through, you know, to a beaver, that is just like a ready-made dam with a hole in it. And so beavers are always plugging these culverts
01:08:10 Speaker_02
with their sticks and mud and whatnot and causing a real headache for a lot of those people. And so the beaver deceiver is one way to exclude them from these high conflict areas like culverts in its simplest definition.
01:08:26 Speaker_02
It's kind of like a fence that goes around the culvert to exclude that, but you want to do it at the right angle and the right distance and the right site specific ways that it's effective. And so, um, Skip Weil kind of pioneered that.
01:08:39 Speaker_02
But then there's also some flow device things that are kind of like a pipe that we put through a dam that can siphon water through a dam from upstream to downstream.
01:08:53 Speaker_02
And so that allows people to kind of strike a compromise with the beaver in the sense that they can still stay there, they can still have their dam, and still have all the benefits to their ecology there.
01:09:04 Speaker_02
but the water level can be lowered just enough where it's not as much of a headache for other people that are worried about getting flooded out or that type of thing.
01:09:15 Speaker_02
And there are numerous entities growing up all around the country right now that are starting these. California is one of the biggest success stories right now.
01:09:25 Speaker_02
Here in Montana, we have a big one, the Montana Beaver Conflict Resolution Project that I'm a little bit affiliated with.
01:09:33 Speaker_05
A lot of people had queries about parachutes, and some people might know this, some people might not, but Janie Rounds and Andrea Levinson, Nikki Aki, Jen Squirrel Alvarez, Therese, Erin White, all wanted to know.
01:09:49 Speaker_05
In Andrea's words, I'm begging you to ask about the parachute reintroduction efforts from the 40s and parachuting beavers. Was that ever a rabbit hole that you went down in terms of what's going on here?
01:10:03 Speaker_02
It was a real thing. It did happen in, I believe it was 1948. A lot of interesting things came back after World War II there. And one of the things is that we were really infatuated with air travel and airplanes at the time.
01:10:17 Speaker_02
they were trying to figure out the, you know, how to get one of the early solutions has always to beaver conflict problems has always been like, Oh, let's just move them somewhere else and do that.
01:10:30 Speaker_02
And that's still a kind of a gut response for anything from skunks to squirrels to, you know, anything else that we're having a conflict with. And so they tried on mules with that group of beavers in Idaho. This was outside of McCall, Idaho. And.
01:10:46 Speaker_02
That was not successful for the mules particularly. They were not very conducive to that. And so they got this idea to release them from the air. And you can find footage of it still, of it happening.
01:11:00 Speaker_00
On the shores of Payette Lake are crates full of beavers. Into the drop box, nearly ready for that flight back into the mountains.
01:11:09 Speaker_02
But they did release a number of beavers in these boxes that had straps that would open upon impact with the ground, but not before.
01:11:18 Speaker_00
I think it was a few dozen beavers that they
01:11:31 Speaker_02
launched out of the air into this kind of wilder area outside of McCall, Idaho. And they did have one fatality, but over, you know, a couple dozen beavers were dropped out of the sky for that purpose.
01:11:44 Speaker_02
So reintroduction has a really complex history in different iterations, 60, 70 years later, we've realized today how important it is to really relocate beavers
01:11:55 Speaker_02
as a family unit, because as we've talked about already, you know, they really have strong and complex social bonds. And so it's not effective to just take one beaver and just dump it out in a new place.
01:12:09 Speaker_02
You know, that beaver is most likely going to suffer and suffer immense risk as well from that relocation. But when relocated as a family unit, there is potential that they can do well, but again, it is a lot of risk for the animals still.
01:12:25 Speaker_05
So like an expensive cafe that suddenly pops up in your neighborhood full of gas station coffee, a beaver can change the ecosystem of an area.
01:12:34 Speaker_05
And many people, Autumn Nikosen, Keegan Newman, Rowan Tree, Aver Zink, Melissa Dawoskin, Olivia Rempel, Smiley Kylie, Maria Shoner, Julia Stratford-Abbott, Emily Totero, Amanda Abbey Lawson, Megan Radcliffe, Isu Party, and Ghoul Next Door wondered about the beaver's role in engineering ecosystems as a keystone species.
01:12:53 Speaker_05
which is an ecological term for being the main character.
01:12:56 Speaker_02
There is no doubt that as a ketone species like they are just disproportionately impacting many more lives than we even are aware of at this point.
01:13:07 Speaker_02
So just knowing what species are in your area and what are thriving and you can really get a pulse on that yourself too.
01:13:14 Speaker_05
Chyle Pham and Shannon Strom, in Chyle's words, they say, are beavers the answer? My husband is a fish biologist and feels that in terms of habitat restoration and protecting rivers and the species that live in them, beavers are the answer.
01:13:26 Speaker_05
Is this true? And are beavers also just generally the answer? Because they're great. And Shannon Strom wanted to know, should we think of them as nature's miracles against global warming? Is making sure that beavers are protected also protective for us?
01:13:44 Speaker_02
Great question. Yeah, then what's neat about beavers in addition to being keystone species for all these countless organisms that inhabit our environment around us is that beavers are keystone species for all kinds of
01:13:59 Speaker_02
I mean, we've got entomologists and ornithologists and fluvial geomorphologists and all kinds ofologists that are coming together to realize, hey, the beaver is at the nexus of a lot of what we do.
01:14:16 Speaker_02
I think as a growing awareness, you know, we had so much of the 20th century between the early 1910s or so through the late 1900s, where we, one, just didn't have the eyes to see beavers.
01:14:32 Speaker_02
And we didn't have the beavers actually physically weren't there. And so they were kind of out of sight, out of mind for a while. But one of the great thinkers that helped reverse that a lot was this guy named Robert Nyman.
01:14:46 Speaker_02
And he was a hydrologist and ecologist that really showed, wow, beavers had a huge impact on the North American continent. And he was one of the first people to just show, OK, if there were millions of beavers, what kind of water storage did that do?
01:15:03 Speaker_02
What did that do differently than a concrete dam, that were type of building? And so he looked at a lot of those things And that was in the late 80s, early 1990s when he started doing that.
01:15:16 Speaker_02
And then another one of his students, Michael Pollack, really took that into the fish realm a little bit and looked at, hey, these coho salmon, they spend 18 months of their life in fresh water.
01:15:29 Speaker_02
When they are in fresh water for that long, the beaver pond is like a nursery
01:15:34 Speaker_02
for all their their feeding and growth before they go out to sea in these pacific coastal systems and so he did a lot of work with coho salmon and he was actually one of the big guys launching the kind of beaver revolution in 2014 really is when a lot of people really started to take off with this of of just like yes they are answering a lot of things for for fish as well as other species
01:15:59 Speaker_05
So 2014, Brangelina gets wed, Gwyneth Paltrow famously consciously uncouples, the first season of True Detective premieres. It was a very big year for tight jeans, Iggy Azalea, and Ebola, but it was also very memorable for the Beaver.
01:16:16 Speaker_02
And I am kind of wary myself of just deification and demonism. We just swing so strongly between these poles of love and hate that I think one of my goals for working with Beaver is really to just integrate them
01:16:34 Speaker_02
into kind of all we do and just see them as another intrinsically valuable species that we can live with and among and they can really do us a lot of good and we can learn a lot from being with them as well.
01:16:49 Speaker_05
And do beavers need more castrologists out there? Zoe Dunham, First Time Quest Asker, Lisa Nyhuls, Andy Pepper, and Celia Stanislow wanted to know, in Zoe's words, how does one get into researching beavers?
01:17:09 Speaker_05
If someone's interested in beaver ecology, what things they could study or what you do when you're working with tracking organizations?
01:17:16 Speaker_02
One of the great things is that there is no one way to be a beaver or a castorologist. There are many different ways into this. And so if you're really into the water angle, the hydrology of it, that's one thing.
01:17:32 Speaker_02
There's lots of opportunity for wildlife biologists and whatnot. I think I consider myself a lot of a field ecologist and a wildlife tracker in a lot of ways in that I and looking at the beaver as one among many of the species that I study.
01:17:48 Speaker_02
And I'm doing a lot of work to help kind of assess where habitat is good, where potential is good and inventory and assess those connections.
01:17:58 Speaker_02
But just the best way to start getting into it is just to go out to just see if you can find beavers near where you live and just start watching, observing and asking questions. And beavers are one of the species
01:18:13 Speaker_02
that is not in danger today and they don't at this point don't have any likelihood of becoming an endangered species. but they are unique and also that they're really accessible. They can live alongside us if we let them.
01:18:29 Speaker_02
And so I find that very hopeful in that there are species that so many people wherever they are can really learn from.
01:18:36 Speaker_05
Is there a part of working with beaver tracking that is either annoying or just the most difficult part?
01:18:44 Speaker_02
So I do a lot of like habitat and species inventories and assessments. and kind of just trying to census the life that's out there, so to speak. And one of the more complicated issues that I find a lot of times is with invasive species.
01:19:00 Speaker_02
And as we mentioned, beavers are not an invasive species through anywhere in North America, but they can be woven in with species that were not here when they got here.
01:19:12 Speaker_02
But I'm thinking plants in particular, but reed canary grass, Japanese knotweed are some. And so when those enter in their areas, they can kind of complicate what the beaver is doing because those are not
01:19:27 Speaker_02
willow-rich areas with the nice woody shrubs that they need on. But at the same time, beavers can be sometimes a vector for helping those to spread inadvertently.
01:19:40 Speaker_02
And so they're just wrapped in this mess that we have made for them that I don't have answers all the time to how to deal with that. But in some areas, riparian invasive species can be pretty tricky with beaver.
01:19:53 Speaker_02
And it's a really sad thing to see them wrapped into.
01:19:56 Speaker_05
Yeah. So invasive species, a bunch of weird weeds getting all tangled up in the ecology. And for more on how to eat some of those, the weeds, not the beavers, you can see our foraging ecology episode with Alexis Nelson, AKA Black Forager.
01:20:12 Speaker_05
Or to learn how to basket weave some of those weeds, you can see our recent canistromology episode with James Bomba. Now, before I ask about the highlights of Rob's life, one thing is nagging at me and I can't stop thinking about it.
01:20:26 Speaker_05
Also, when do people say beavers versus beaver?
01:20:29 Speaker_02
You know, that's a great question. I've asked that of others and myself as well. I kind of go back and forth. I don't have a hard way. I don't think there's an answer to that.
01:20:37 Speaker_05
Okay. I want to make sure I wasn't doing it wrong. But what about your favorite thing about beavers or beaver?
01:20:47 Speaker_02
Yeah, I mean, I might sound like it's generalizing too much, but just the sheer feat of existence is really amazing to me.
01:20:55 Speaker_02
And in the fact that, I mean, we talked about winter already and how they survive in these really cold, it's just a very fascinating thing to me.
01:21:05 Speaker_02
the fact that, again, they have winnowed down from 33 different genera of beavers to this one genus that survives today. And they made it through the gauntlet of the fur trade and all these things.
01:21:17 Speaker_02
And they are still here persisting and enduring and doing what they do. It blows my mind. There haven't been other animals that have really made it through those type of changes throughout their life history, which is pretty amazing to me.
01:21:34 Speaker_05
Thank you so much for just telling us everything you know about beaver and beavers. And I already loved them. And not just because they're cute. I think they're just cool in general. So thank you so much for everything you do and for talking to me.
01:21:50 Speaker_05
Yes, thank you. So ask beaver geniuses deep and shallow questions and may fortune find you in the midst of these critters. They are majestic. Thank you again so much to Rob Rich for talking to me. So worth the wait.
01:22:05 Speaker_05
And to find out more about the Tracker Certification North America, you can see the link in the show notes as well as a link to our website at alleyward.com slash ologies slash castrology, which has so many more links to research and other resources that we mentioned in the show.
01:22:18 Speaker_05
We are at ologies on Instagram and out blue sky. I'm at alleyward on both. We also have shorter, kid-friendly versions of Ologies Classic episodes in case you need G-rated ones. They're available anywhere where you get podcasts.
01:22:30 Speaker_05
You can just subscribe to Smallogies and look for the new green logo. We also linked it in the show notes. Ologies merch is available at ologiesmerch.com and to join the Patreon, head to patreon.com slash ologies.
01:22:42 Speaker_05
Thank you to Aaron Talbert for adminning Theology's podcast Facebook group. Thank you, Aveline Malik, for making our professional transcripts. Kelly Ardwyer makes the website.
01:22:49 Speaker_05
Scheduling producer Noelle Dilworth worked for two and a half years to get this one on the books. Susan Hale managing directs the whole show.
01:22:57 Speaker_05
Jake Chafee edits beautifully and joining him just as busy and chill as a beaver is lead editor of Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music and if you stick around till after the credits, thank you for listening.
01:23:08 Speaker_05
Here's a secret that the other people don't know. So in 2017, I was toying with this format for ologies, and I was trying to figure out just what the show would be. And I had a few trusted friends listen to some early drafts of episodes.
01:23:20 Speaker_05
And one, Dr. Teagan Wall, who is a neuroscientist and a screenwriter, She took a listen, and one suggestion that she still maintains is that the show should have a cold open, that little stinger at the top with an excerpt as like a soundbite sample.
01:23:33 Speaker_05
And I've never done it until this episode, and so I'm doing it in honor of her. So you can let me know on Patreon if you like it. Teags, you can just text me about it.
01:23:42 Speaker_05
But meanwhile, I had the best cookies of my life at our friend Aubrey and Myles' house, and I begged for the recipe, and Aubrey sent me a picture of a handwritten index card, like grandma style.
01:23:53 Speaker_05
with a, I think, a family recipe and I'm going to give it to you now. Don't write it down if you're driving. Wait until after. You can come back later, rewind, find this, then jot it down.
01:24:03 Speaker_05
Okay, so these are thumbprint cookies with like jam in the center, but the cookie is so soft. There's cream cheese in the dough. I ate like 10 of them. Okay, these are cream cheese cookies. Ready?
01:24:13 Speaker_05
2 cups unsalted butter, 8 ounces cream cheese, 2 cups of sugar, 2 egg yolks, 1 teaspoon of vanilla, 2 teaspoons of salt, 5 cups of flour.
01:24:25 Speaker_05
Do the wet stuff, you add the dry stuff, chill overnight, and then you roll into balls and you indent and you put some jam in the middle, bake at 400, 8 to 10 minutes. Honestly, the best cookies I've ever had. Please enjoy.
01:24:39 Speaker_05
Be safe, happy holidays, be kind to beavers. Bye-bye.
01:25:01 Speaker_00
Nice Bieber.
01:25:03 Speaker_04
Thank you. I just had it stuffed.