By Joel Thurtell
Amazing what one beaver can do.
This lone paddle-tail isn’t just damming Conner Creek.
A beaver’s image, captured by a DTE Energy camera as it worked some timber along the Detroit River, has inspired claims by a federal agency that its presence means the river has been cleaned enough to sustain wildlife.
Baloney.
I’ll say it again: One beaver on the banks of the Detroit River does not prove all is well with this once highly-polluted river.
Here’s what it signifies: A beaver is living on the Detroit River.
Nothing more.
I’m not questioning that the the river has vastly improved in the past few decades due to major efforts by some hardworking humans to stop other humans from polluting it.
But the beaver isn’t logically connected to whatever success there’s been.
It reminds me of the claim I once heard from an environmentalist who said a gyrfalcon’s brief sojourn alongside the Rouge River in metropolitan Detroit somehow proved that stream’s water quality was better.
No, no — it just meant the arctic-loving raptor took a break beside the water.
I first saw the beaver story in the February 16, 2009 Detroit Free Press: “Their return,” the newspaper said, “signals that a multiyear effort to clean up the river has paid off.”
“Leave it to beaver,” the Free Press Page One headline said, “To prove river cleaner.”
Wonder how much that beaver weighs?
The Windsor Star swallowed this whopper, too, quoting a U.S. Fish and Wildlife staffer declaiming that “it’s part of a larger story of recovery. What a dramatic ecological recovery of one of the most polluted river systems in North America.”
The recovery may well be real. But the beaver doesn’t prove it.
By the way, I think it’s great that there’s a beaver in Detroit, and I applaud the enterprising DTE Energy folk who followed their hunch and planted the video camera that captured footage of a beaver working on a tree.
But I wonder, how did the beaver learn the water is okay?
From the newspapers?
I don’t think it tested the river. If it did, it was more environmentally proactive than its homo sapiens neighbors. Water quality monitoring by humans is, like Detroit’s beaver of yesteryear, heading for extinction. In recent years, there have been monstrous cutbacks in funding for monitoring.
I also wonder about the claim that the last time a beaver was seen in Detroit was “at least 75 years ago, possibly as long ago as a century.”
Really? Which is it? Seventy five years? More than 75 years? “Possibly” 100 years ago? Why so fuzzy on the timing? Because the statement can’t be substantiated?
Nobody knows why this beaver moved to Detroit, other than that it must have found food, shelter and work. If the beaver, as claimed, returned because the pollution is gone, then it follows that its reason for decamping 75 or 100 or however many years ago must have been because the place was too contaminated.
That would be logical. But it seems not to be the case.
It seems more likely that beaver, being shy, hard-chewing engineers accustomed to working night shifts, might have departed for the same reason many human city-dwellers left — in quest of quieter, more sedate places. Or, as the Free Press suggests, maybe they were “wiped out” by trapping.
The fur trade, not pollution, may have done the beaver in.
But if the beaver didn’t leave because of pollution, what would motivate them to return because it’s gone?
The idea that people and animals will leave a place because of pollution is an illusion, anyway. If it were true, no animal or human would live in Southwest Detroit, where water and air are terribly contaminated.
Pollution doesn’t keep animals away. Fish, for instance, will live in water contaminated with human and industrial waste. That’s why the Michigan Department of Community Health advises limited eating of fish from all Michigan waterways on account of mercury contamination, and warns of eating fish caught in many other places due to chemicals like PCB.
There’s another reason besides pollution why beaver might not like this area. Take the Rouge River, for example. It might be too “flashy” for beaver. Flashiness — the tendency of the river to rise or fall suddenly — is caused by human misuse of land surrounding the waterway. Storm runoff from streets, parking lots, roofs and other hard surfaces no longer percolates through the ground, but rushes through gutters and drains and storm sewers to rapidly fill the river. Fast rising and falling water levels blow out wildlife habitat. Also, beaver might not like the four miles of concrete pavement underlying the Lower Rouge, just as fish find it inconvenient for forage and reproduction.
Still, I would not be surprised to learn there are beaver in the Rouge. What do they care if the water has crap in it? I once counted nearly two dozen mallards paddling in the Rouge, the biggest tributary of the Detroit River. Where were the ducks? Below a huge sewer outfall. The stink of sewage didn’t faze them.
I would not claim that the presence of ducks or mergansers or green herons or snapping turtles proves the Rouge is clean enough for human contact when analysis of E. coli testing tells us that this river is safe for us to swim in no more than 5 percent of the time.
The claim that a beaver in Detroit proves the river is clean is not scientific. It is a policy statement. It is meant to justify money spent on reducing pollution. It is meant to rationalize the means humans chose to alleviate pollution and, by extension, it approves the individual humans and agencies that chose those means.
It is about politics.
True, the intent partly may be to cheer people up about the state of water quality. But these phony statements also make people complacent and too trustful of environmental agents who make logic-defying claims.
The beaver’s presence is interesting, but false deductions about what it means about the environment tell us more about the humans who issue them than they enlighten us about the beaver.
Science?
Nah. Sheer propaganda.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
As you know I work on Zug Island, one of the dirtiest places in Detroit. We have an abundance of wildlife here, foxes, raccoons, cats, rats, ducks, geese, coyote, and pheasant among other things. It’s always amazed me the tenacity and abilty of these animals to survive and thrive in the harsh environment here.
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It would be ironic if we cleaned up Detroit’s waterways sufficiently to enable more wildlife to survive while at the same time allowing Matty Moroun to put up a second bridge to double (or triple!) the amount of diesel exhaust that is affecting children’s lungs and shortening people’s lives, causing asthma and all sorts of breathing problems and lung disease. Detroiters owe our children — and our elderly — clean air and the opportunity to breathe as God and nature intended. Put the bridge downriver, NOT through areas heavily populated with so many children — in Detroit and in Windsor. Scrooge Moroun needs to be visited by the ghosts of life past, present and future. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if they turned him into the beloved post-Christmas Scrooge who used his money to care for Detroiters, the River and especially the children of the area so that when he dies, people would mourn him instead of applauding his departure?