Beavers: Radical Rodents and Ecosystem Engineers

Beavers: Radical Rodents and Ecosystem Engineers — page 7
CASTOR FACT The scientific name for the beaver family is Castoridae Members of this family are called castorids The North American beaver’s historical range Before 1500 Castor canadensis inhabited almost every part of the continent where there was wood and water THE BEAVER DISTRIBUTION MAP HINTERLAND WHO’S WHO CANADIAN WILDLIFE SERVICE ENVIRONMENT CANADA REPRODUCED WITH PERMISSION OF THE MINISTER OF PUBLIC WORKS AND GOVERNMENT SERVICES 2005 Humans have significantly changed the beaver’s world over the past 500 years PHILIPPE HENRY DESIGN PICS GETTY IMAGES different genetic blueprints Nevertheless they do all the same beaverish things like felling trees and building dams This book is mostly about Castor canadensis but a mighty beaver is a mighty beaver no matter where it lives Beaver Geography In ancient times Eurasian beavers were common through out Europe northern Asia and Great Britain Unfortunately humans nearly drove them to extinction By the 1600s there were no more beavers in Britain In Europe and Asia their numbers hit bottom around 1900 At that point only about 1,200 Eurasian beavers remained mostly living in remote parts of Scandinavia Russia and Mongolia Today the Eurasian beaver is making a comeback across much of its range The North American beaver’s homeland is you guessed it North America Long ago beavers populated populated almost every corner of what we now call Canada and the United States plus a sliver of northern Mexico Their domain stretched from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast and from just south of the Rio Grande all the way to the northern tree line In a few places it even reached the Arctic Ocean Pretty much the only parts of North America without beavers were those with no trees