I was amazed to read of a gigantic beaver dam in Canada.
This woodland construction is actually the world's biggest beaver dam. It is so big that it spans twice the width of the Hoover dam and can even be seen from space.
The enormous edifice measures 2,790ft (850 metres) in length and shows the skill of the big-toothed furry animals.
The mammals use trees, mud and stone to make a type of moat where they can use their swimming skills to evade any predators.
The families live in lodges on the dams and spend their days adding to and repairing the incredible structures.
The dam was spotted by experts monitoring the size and spread of the beaver dams in north America.
It is located on the southern edge of Wood Buffalo National Park in Northern Alberta, Canada.
There's more at the link, including more photographs.
It's astonishing to think that a few families of relatively small animals can be so industrious as to build a dam that big! Shows what hard work and singleness of purpose can accomplish, I guess.
Peter
They were considered an endangered species not too long ago...
ReplyDeleteYou'd be surprised where they'd pop up. A couple of years ago, several were found building a dam across a small creek next to a retirement village on the outskirts of KC. They were inside city limits and about 200yds from a 4-lane highway. The state conservation agency finally came and hauled they away. Seems a MO game warden saw some pictures posted on the internet by some of the folks in the retirement village. The retired folks had been watching the beaver for several months and were fairly successful keeping the beavers secret---until one of them posted the pics on Facebook.
ReplyDelete"Busy beavers", indeed...
ReplyDeleteAround 30 years ago, I used to hunt in an area in the middle of Michigan's Lower Peninsula - the "Mitten" part - near a town called Reed City. The landowner who gave me permission to hunt one part of it asked me to please shoot any beavers I saw - he said that they'd made such a swamp of about 30 acres of his land that most of the otherwise-usable timber was now drowning out; he claimed you'd need a box or two of dynamite to get rid of all the interlocking dams.
As they were then classified as "endangered", I didn't shoot any of them - but he was right about the swamp, I found.