 John's also on the board of Protect Our Wildlife for a Month, which is how I was directed to him. I've been a member for a number of years and I'm really happy with their work. There's a little bit of information right here about what Bill and the process has been discussed. I'll be talking about that. Oh, and he'll be talking about that, so that's great. I could go on and on about that, but I'm not going to, we're going to talk about beavers, plus that John's going to be talking about. The first John's name is not Alberth, as is in the program, it's Aberth, and that was totally my fault. I apologize. I'm going to read this now. John's an retired professor of medieval history, has taught at various colleges and universities, but was full of part-time for 20 years, between 1991 and 2011. He taught part-time at UBM, and full-time at Norwich University, and then the University of Nebraska. It was quite a distance. Yeah, that was a big commute. Yes, it was. Nowadays, he guides the school bus part-time, and is a volunteer licensed wildlife rehabilitator, specializing in raptors such as hawks, owls, falcons, and some mammals such as beaver, bobcat, coyote, mink, and weasel. Which is what brings in here to us today. John. Okay. Thank you. Thanks, Allison. Very nice to see you all here today. Yeah, we have a facility at Roxbury, Vermont, which is about half an hour south of here, called Flintbrook Wildlife Refuge. I got my training at VINs or Vermont Institute of Natural Science for raptors, and I took an avian rehab course, and then I did an apprenticeship with the head wildlife keeper there. But I also do some mammals, including beaver, bobcat, coyote, mink, and weasel. So I do some mammals and beaver are one of them. And what I'm going to talk about today is my rehabbing of one orphan beaver for two years, and then he was paired with another orphan beaver for the second year. And then I released them this past May, in May of 2021. No, sorry, May of 2022. I got the first beaver kit on May 10th of 2020, about the same time as we were locking down for the coronavirus pandemic. So I had plenty of time to my wife and I to rehab this beaver. So I'm going to be talking about that for the most part. I have some video and pictures. And I'd like to thank my wife, who's the photographer, and she took all these pictures and video that I'll be showing you. And towards the end of my talk, I'll talk a little bit about the main threat, the main mortality threat to beaver, which is trapping. And I'll talk about that a little bit. Anyway, many people will come up to me and say, hey, John, why do you do beavers? Well, beavers are perhaps one of the most important animals on our landscape. Because when you save a beaver, you save a lot of other wildlife. Beavers are called the keystone species because when they dam streams and create ponds and wetlands, these create habitat for so many other animals, waterfowl, fish, moose, deer, mink, amphibians. You could go on and on. They create habitat for other animals. So if you want habitat for animals, you want beavers because they create some of the richest habitat on earth. They have been compared to rainforest and coral reefs in terms of the biodiversity they support. So beavers are a key species. I could go through a lot of benefits of beavers. They create diverse habitats. They increase biodiversity. They have been used to promote drought recovery, regulate stream flows. They create catchment areas so that you can prevent flooding when there's heavy rainfalls. They improve water quality. That's because they create deeper water. And when you have deeper water, a lot of the sediment will settle down into the bottom part of that pond. And that'll purify the water. They replenish aquifers and stabilize the water table, repair stream channels, restore watersheds. And they reduce the risk of flooding and restore carbon and help mitigate climate change. So a lot of benefits to beavers and creating their wetlands. They've been in the news lately. This is from a New York Times article in September of 2022. A rancher used to blow up or dynamite beaver dams. Now he's cherishing these beavers on his landscape because they help store water and prevent drought. They help protect against climate change. This is from the Los Angeles Times of the same day, September 2022. Beavers have been called the superhero fighting climate change. They've actually produced maps showing where wildfires have torn through areas. And there's always the green areas where the beavers have created their watersheds or their wetlands. That's green. The rest is scorched by the wildfires. So beavers act as a break on wildfires and also protect against droughts by creating these aquifers. Now beavers are perhaps the most difficult animal to rehab of all the animals that rehabbers do. There are a few reasons why this is so. One of the reasons is that when you're taking a beaver, you're taking in that animal for two years. So it's a two-year process. You know, when I take in a mink or a bobcat, even a coyote, you may rehab them for a few weeks or a few months. But then you release them in the fall, which is when they normally go off on their own and leave the family unit. That's not the case with beavers. Beaver kits stay with their parents for two years. So that's how long you're stuck with this animal for two years. So that's a very long process. Beavers are also very family-orientated. They're unlike other animals. If I get a bobcat, I'll put it in the enclosure and I won't really have much to do with it. It'll be on its own. Beavers need attention. They need that contact with another family member. We say in rehab, you have to provide food, you have to provide safety, you have to provide warmth. But with beavers, you need a fourth thing. You need companionship. And beaver kits have actually been known to die from neglect, from just being left alone. This was told to me by a beaver lady. I call her beaver lady, but as a woman who has 30 years' experience rehabbing beavers in New York and she was a great resource while I was rehabbing my beaver that I first got in May of 2020. So first thing is when you get a beaver kit, there's no telling what the sex is. You can't tell the sex of a beaver from the outside. All sexual organs are inside the body. The only way to determine the sex is to x-ray it. So this is an x-ray of the first beaver we got, BK, Column BK. That's short for beaver kit. But how do we know he's a male? He was a male and that's because of the os-penis of the bone and the penis that shows up on the x-ray. You can see it here. You can also see it right here. So that's the only way you can sex these animals. It's very important to do so because if you're trying to pair up beavers, beavers are very territorial. If you try to pair up two males, they're going to fight each other for territory the whole time. That's not that has happened. But if you pair up a male and a female, they will become very inseparable companions. They mate for life and they'll form a stable unit that you can then release and they'll stay where in the release site where you release them. So that was one of the challenges. I never named the animals I get in. One of the reasons I do that is because my goal is to release them back into the wild. I don't want to get too attached to these animals. These animals are not pets. These animals belong to everybody. They belong to you and me. They're part of the natural resource and the common ownership, common property of all the moners like the air and the trees. So I never named them. I simply called them BK. That was short for beaver kit. But anyway, he was only a week old. When he came to me, he was just one and a half pounds. Well, yeah, that's a story in and of itself. But he was found on the rail trail in St. Albans. There was a beaver pond on one side and a beaver lodge or a house on the other side. And on either side of the rail trail was private land. And the farmer wanted to get rid of that pond because it was flooding his agricultural land. So he took out the dam on one side and then he crushed the lodge on the other side. So the safe space for beavers is their pond. They first escape into water. And then he took out the lodge, which is their second refuge. So he was the only survivor of this incident. So this massacre, you might want to call it, which is very unfortunate. But he was just found wandering the trail. And he was picked up by a man and brought to me all the way from St. Albans. So we had to figure out how to feed him. And another interesting thing about beavers is he only go to the bathroom in water. So they're not going to make a mess of your house. But he had to live in the bathtub because he needed water. It was May, it's still cold in Vermont. He couldn't be outside. So he had to live there for a month or two. And then we had to feed him every day. So anyway, I had to spend time with him. He would spend time with me as I was working on my computer. You have an inside look of our bathroom here. Outside, he might snuggle up to the crook of my arm. This is him sleeping in the crook of my elbow. It's awfully cute. But you have to spend time with him because they're part of a close family unit. And they form these close bonds with the members of the family. And when the family is gone, you have to take that place. But the only bond with the single member of the human family, with my wife and I, if they counted any other humans, he would hiss. They make ass sort of like Darth Vader. And he would not accept any other humans. So it didn't mean I couldn't release him. He didn't get so attached that I couldn't release him two years later. But you do have to spend some time with them. And we would feed him a special formula using a miracle nipple, which is a nipple that goes on to a syringe. And then you can regulate how much milk formula to give him. This is the formula. It's a very special formula. This is made by a company called Fox Valley, which supplies zoos. And it's 30% protein, 50% fat. So a lot of high fat content to this milk formula. He also learned, you know, he was swimming from day one. So he would swim in our bathtub on the upper left. And then we also had a pool outside. He would swim out there. And then when he was in the enclosure, he was able to get in and out on his own through a ramp going into the pool. He also went through various lodges or houses. The first was this plastic tub that was used for filing papers. And he lived in there for the first few weeks of his life. Then he began chewing on this. So I had to make a wooden one. So it wouldn't matter if he chewed on the wood. Then when he got bigger, he lived in this dog glue, which is for dogs, but it's big enough. So I took a large and was, you know, useful in the outdoor enclosure. I include this because, you know, he's too cute, you know. This is a beaver, as I said, to be smiling. This is the natural confirmation of their face. But here's him, you know, walking through the grass. He is showing off his incisors as he's scratching himself underneath his chin. There's another picture of their incisors, you know, are usually orange colored, and they grow throughout the length of their lives. They're always wearing them down through their chewing. Here's him yawning. Good view of his mouth there as well. I include this picture because, you know, it's an aw picture. You know, he has his paw on my hand. It's like, you know, reaching out across the species divide. Beavers have a tail, which is very distinctive. It sort of looks like a snakeskin. It has scales on it. What is the function of the tail? Well, that's, you know, up for debate. It's never used for building dams like in the Bugs Bunny cartoons you may have seen. They don't use the tail to scoop up mud. The tail is used as a kind of rudder and kind of belast in their swimming. And it's also used to slap the water if they're alarmed and they warn each other that way. Beavers also have these impressive hind feet, which you can see in the upper part of the slide. They have web feet. There's this sort of skin membrane in between their toes. And it's very effective. It's like flipper feet. They, you know, they're very impressive swimmers. They're really designed to spend their lives in water. They're an aquatic animal. They also have a nick-kitty membrane. I don't know if you can see that. But it's right here. It's a membrane that comes over the eye in terms of blue. And that's sort of like goggles when they're swimming. It protects the eye when they're in the water. Birds have this membrane, too. Like woodpeckers, for example, have that membrane when they're pecking. And it will protect that eye. They also close their ears. Their ears have a valve that sort of shuts the ear. As you can see on the top and the bottom when he's dry, it's open. So that's very impressive. All these adaptations allow beavers to spend a lot of their lives in water. So we also would take him for walks on the lawn at this time in the first three months of his life. He would dry out pretty quickly. He looks like a drowned rat on the upper right. And then he poofs out. It took about five, ten minutes. He also had a beaver buddy to keep him company. He would play with his beaver buddy and sleep with that beaver buddy. And they got along pretty well. We also, at this time, even at a young age, we took him to the stream. Although he's part of the rodent family, beavers are part of the rodent family, he had many of the characteristics of a dog. He would follow me down to the stream and he went right to the stream. He wouldn't wander off anywhere else. And he would stay in this cove in the stream and swim around. This was to get him adapted to a natural environment, get him used to that. And he would practice chewing sticks and building dams and doing the things that beavers will do in the wild. So that was good experience for him. So this is one of my videos here, one of many I'll show actually. But this is a short video showing him, you know, at about a couple weeks old swimming in the pool. And you can see how he uses tail in order to change direction in the water. So he's also using his feet, which are well adapted to swimming. And his tail seems to give him stability in the water. And then, you know, we put a rock in there so we'd have something to climb on to. This is another one, this will show him doing a 360 in the water, turning himself around 360 degrees. I think this is actually the one we just saw. Maybe I'll go to the next slide, sorry. This is another one where he's, you know, he turns himself around 360 degrees. So he has a good time there. Do they make what? They do make noises. I don't know if there's sound here. I can try to put the sound on. Yeah, they do. They make an ah, ah, kind of almost like the cry of a baby. But yeah, you know, they do make that kind of noise when they want something or, you know, that's a pretty friendly noise. When he wants you to go away or warn you off, he'll hiss. But yeah, they make various sounds. This is one of us grooming him. This, you know, we're using a flea comb. But he also beavers groom themselves quite a bit, especially when they come out of the water and they're drying off. He'll groom himself, scratch himself, that kind of thing. Yes, I'll show that too. Let me see. Okay, go on to the next one here. This is showing him, you know, coming to us. You can pat the ground, for example, and it'll come, you know, come to you and then it'll go off and then it'll come back to you when you pat the ground or, you know, make a noise on the ground. Beavers have terrible eyesight. They can't see five feet in front of them. Their best sense is their sense of smell. They also have pretty decent hearing. But they can't see very well. So anyway, let me fast forward to the next one. This is one of us feeding him with a syringe. You know, he'll suck up this milk formula and he got so well at it that I didn't have to push the plunger at all. He would just suck up it on his own and, you know, this next one will show it even better. You know, the plunger would go up all on its own because he was sucking the formula up through the nipple. So, you know, we would feed him, you know, three or four times a day. He would drink, you know, initially about, you know, eight ounces or a cup and then it got up to two cups, three cups, four cups a day. So he went through a lot of formula in the end. This is just him showing up in the bathtub. He was in the bathtub for a while and this is also of him in our bathtub. So he was in here, I would say, until July and then we were able to put him out in an enclosure outside. This is him playing with his beaver buddy in the bathtub. He's, you know, he's a little bigger now. I would say he's close to three months. You know, he's done well in that milk formula, that's for sure. But he's, you know, he would play with this beaver buddy. You know, they need some kind of companionship. This is him grooming himself on the top of his head, using one of his hind feet. You can see the hind feet are a lot bigger than their paws and they're very impressive in terms of their ability to propel them in the water. So, you know, you get the idea of that. This is him in the pool outside with some foliage. There was a frog living in here for a while with him. So that was interesting. But you get the idea there. This is him in our stream that's only like, you know, I think 50 or 100 feet behind our house. It's right behind our house. So it's very convenient. I could just walk him to the stream and then he could be in a natural environment. And he would collect sticks and pile those sticks and, you know, use those sticks to dam the water. So this is all good practice for being a beaver out in the wild. So he's, you know, he's doing that. You get the idea there. That was like, you know, I would say that was for like two months until mid-July. And then he was weaned off that. He was simply eating solid food, which is basically willow or poplar. Those are the two main favorites, trees that they like to eat, willow or poplar. You know, or, you know, quaking aspen. They also like the buds. That's, you know, a favorite thing. The popular buds, for example, he really loved those. He would eat like that, like popcorn. They'll also eat, you know, they'll eat in the wild. They'll eat aquatic plants in the ponds. We would give him a special treat of an apple or a carrot. He loved those. He didn't like celery, though. Didn't like that. But we also fed him a specially formulated rodent chow, I call it. It's nuggets that are specially formulated for people who have, you know, pet rats. But they have all the vitamins and minerals they would need. They would get out in the wild, too. So we'd eat a lot of those. So anyway, the next phase, you know, three to four months, he's getting up to 15 pounds. So he's getting pretty big. And he was ready to go out into the enclosure. And we would take him down to the stream every day. I kind of like walking your dog. You know, you'll walk your dog. But in this case, you're swimming your beaver. And that's what we'd do. He would, you know, he had his dog glue house. He had his pool. He had sticks that he could chew on. Sometimes he would chew on my shoelaces, you know, which, you know, was a problem. Beavers also love to wrestle. That's one of their main activities being shown here, where he's wrestling me holding a towel. And, you know, if they are part of a beaver family, the beaver kits will wrestle each other or push against each other. They're pushing, pushing. It's sort of like miniature sumo wrestlers. I think maybe this develops their upper strength or their muscles to be able to push over trees when they chew through trees and can push them over. But that was one of the favorite activities. And you see that on the video. So anyway, this video is of me walking him down to the stream. So, you know, he would follow me down and Beavers normally create a path down to water. So he was very attracted to water and he would naturally go to that. You know, he wouldn't go anywhere else except in the direction of the stream. So this is of him going down into the water. He's stopping along the way to Chew on a Fern. But you get the idea. Beavers are usually prepuscular, so they're usually most active at dawn and dusk. So his typical pattern was that he would sleep until about 11 or 12 o'clock until about midday. Then he would get up and then he would play with us or swim in his pool. And, you know, then he would, you know, chew on bark and, you know, eat some nuggets. And, you know, he usually go to bed, maybe around after dusk. But then sometimes he got up in the early morning and he would make these noises and we'd have to go down and be with him at 2 or 3 in the morning. So, you know, he had these rhythms but it didn't always accord with human rhythms. But this is of him chewing some sticks in the stream. So you sort of get the idea. He's having a good old time here. And this is all good natural environment where he's, you know, in this natural cove of the stream behind our house. I usually have to pick him up and carry him back. You know, we usually spend an hour or so and then, you know, okay, it's time to come back. We might entice him out with a nugget. But then, you know, he's very slippery when he's wet. So it was hard to pick him up. But, you know, you could still pick him up at this stage when he got up to, like, 40 pounds. That was harder. Beavers can get up to, like, 60 pounds, 70 pounds. He got up to 50 pounds when I released him. So I wasn't really picking him up at that stage. 84. But anyway, yeah, I mean, I'd have to carry him back usually. Yeah. No. Well, once he was in the water, he might. He might want to go upstream and explore. Beavers will travel, but they always travel on the stream bed because that's a safe space. He wouldn't wander off over land. They might go, you know, maybe 50 feet from water as they're trying to get food. But, you know, water is their safe space, so they don't stray far from that. So if he explored, he would sometimes go upstream and we'd have to, you know, follow him and bring him back. But yeah, that was the only direction that he would wander off in. So anyway, you get this idea. You know, he's having a good time in this stream exploring its flora and fauna. So the hearing is pretty good, but their sense of smell is the best sense. So he would smell me, and if I was off in any way, like if I had washed my hands or something, he might be suspicious. But, you know, they're like dogs in that sense. Their sense of smell is the best sense. And this is of me wrestling with him with a towel. I guess we don't have any sound. A little bit. But anyway, and this is more Beaver Russell here. So this is one of his favorite activities. You know, this is part of, you know, play time. So, you know, you have to have this interaction. Otherwise, they don't develop very well. And this is me trying to bring him back, but you can see the nuggets that are there. Those are specially formulated nuggets that you would feed them as well. So by the autumn of 2020, it was up to 20 pounds. You know, the water is getting colder, so it was harder to pick them up out of the water. But, you know, I like these shots that Laura took. You know, it's very artistic. The leaves on his body. And this video is, again, of me getting him to walk down to the stream. He's living in his enclosure still, so I had to try to persuade him to. He could usually clamber out of that, but I had to pick him up here. Now, you know, it's very much of a trust issue. I could put my finger right in his mouth, and he wouldn't bite down at all. When we scratched him, he would nibble back. He would, like, give you little love nibbles. But it felt like, you know, a little pinches. But, you know, no, he never bit me, but in the wild, a bite from a beaver can be quite serious. So, but yeah, it's, you know, you just trust him, and, you know, you were part of his family, so he never offered to bite. But anyway, this is another video of walking down to the stream. This is a video of him, you know, moving sticks in the water, and Laura's able to get some close-up shots. Well, yeah, in a sense. He also was a lot of trial and error, too. But, you know, he's basically moving these sticks to dam this part of the stream where the water is flowing. They're attracted to flowing water, to the sound of flowing water. And they'll try to stop that flow. You know, so that's instinctual. They will try to stop water flowing. And that's how they build their dams. Yeah, I mean, that is the trigger for them. You know, it triggers their dam in instinct, which is why when you have a culvert going under a road, that's a natural, you know, trigger for a beaver to dam that, because that water flow will trigger their dam in instinct. So, you know, this is more video of him swimming. Here, you'll see him, you know, come right up to the camera carrying his stick, which, you know, he's carrying to a certain location. He wants the dam. And this is of him going into the water. This is a great little clip Laura was able to take of him underwater. This camera was waterproof and was able to, you know, take a video of him underneath the water as well. Sort of like Jacques Cousteau kind of thing. But yeah, I think this is pretty nice. But anyway, so, you know, they're very well adapted for being in the water like this. Yeah, yeah, he had a reddish brown fur. The other beaver I got, who you'll see, had dark brown fur. So, they do have distinctive qualities, distinctive markings to them. You know, the normal protocol is to separate them and get them used to each other. But I'll talk about that in a minute when I saw pictures of that. But it took about two weeks for them to sniff each other out and then they got together and they were inseparable after that. So yeah, this is pretty good shots of him underwater. Another shot of his face in the camera, in the face of the camera. Anyway, yeah, this is of him, you know, going upstream. Pretty strong water flow here, but they're good swimmers. So he's able to, you know, swim against the current using his hind legs like this. This is a nice shot of him swimming underwater. Beavers can hold their breath for 15 minutes. So they can stay underwater for 15 minutes. That's pretty impressive. So yeah, this is another water shot. So in the winter spring, you know, he got up to 38 pounds. He was a year old. And we were also able to pair him with another beaver, a female beaver during this time. I think this is a nice shot of him with his teddy bear. You know, how cute is that? That's pretty cute. But, you know, he's all snuggled in there. So in this, especially in this first year, we kept him in an indoor facility. And it's important to do that because, you know, they're, without their family, they're on their own. And they don't have sources of other bodily heat. So they're, I've known other rehabbers who've kept their Beavers outside and they've died in the lodge. Frozen to death or getting sick from pneumonia. You know, so you have to really keep them inside for the first year because they don't have their family around them. You know, normally the temperature, they've measured the temperature inside a beaver lodge. It's about 70 degrees. But, you know, without the additional family members, it can be very risky to keep them outside, especially in their first year. You had a nice pool. This is a, you know, normally a feed tub for horses. But this is like six feet long, three or four feet wide. So you get some good swimming in here. And he had his sticks. And he also had, in the upper right, he had a smaller pool. He would typically often go to the bathroom in the smaller pool and use the other one for swimming. Sort of like, you know, litter box training for a dog. Pretty impressive. And, you know, he would, he was getting too big for my lap. You know, part of him could fit in my lap. But this is me grooming him. And he'll give me, he would give me little love nibbles with his teeth. Never biting down hard. But he did chew holes in my jeans. And that got annoying. This is just the video of him, you know, grooming himself. But anyway, the main event that happened was at a year old. He got a companion, Mrs. Beaver, we called her, who was orphaned as a yearling and came to us from another location. And she was mated with our BK. She was smaller, about 23 pounds. And, you know, as I said, it took two weeks for them to get together. We had them separated with a railing. They had two separate enclosures. And that was okay for about two weeks. And then one morning I came down to find them lying together like that. And I thought, oh, you know, is she dead? And then I saw a hind foot come up and saw her scratching her belly. And I knew she was fine. And they were inseparable after that. And the amazing thing is somehow she had gotten through that railing into his side of the enclosure. I've never really figured out how they did that. Kind of scary, but I think somehow they lifted the railing up and she screwed it underneath. And, you know, they would sleep together. They would play Beaver Russell together. And so, you know, that's him on the left. You can sort of see a reddish tinge to his fur. And that's her on the right. She had more of a brownish fur. So they spent all their time together. And these Beavers made for life. This is just of her. She sort of had these bug eyes. She had these prominent eyes, which was the one way you can tell them apart. For example, this is her. She would sleep flat out with her mouth open like that. She sort of looked like she was almost dead, but Beavers will often lie flat out and they'll make themselves into a kind of rug. They'll look like a Beaver rug. They can flatten their bodies when they relax like that. So this is a video of them, you know, swimming together in the large tank. So, yeah, they had this ramp going up and then into the tank and then eventually he lets her in. And they swim around together. But we were filling up the tank at this point. That's why the hose is in there. It took about an hour to change the water. We had to change the water every day. We had to drain all the water out, clean out all the poo inside the tank and then fill it with fresh water. And we did that every day. So that was a chore that I don't miss. But anyway, so, you know, they could both swim in this tank and you see them do rolls. They would roll in the water. They were sort of like otters. In the water like that. This is a, sorry, let me go back here. The water temperature was just, you know, it came from our hot water tank. But it would be, you know, room temperature, you know. The water, you know, the water is inside their beaver lodge too. And that will never freeze. Because the beaver lodge is about 70 degrees. So they can always have access into the water and under the ice. But, yeah. Now the water came from our well. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, this is, you know, you can't keep them outside for a number of logistical reasons. One of them is that the water freezes in a pool, but freeze in a pool outside. So they wouldn't have access to water. They would need water every day. Because, you know, when they go to the bathroom in water and they drink a lot of water. But, yeah, that was our water source. Yeah. Oh, yes. Yeah, no. It's not like anyone can do this. Yeah. I should have said this at the beginning, but I have a license from the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife to rehab animals. And I also have a permit from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to rehab birds. You need that for birds because birds are migratory. They're cross state lines. So you need a federal permit. If you're doing birds, you need a state permit only. If you're doing only mammals, which some rehabbers do. But if you want to do birds, you need both a state and a federal permit. And there's a whole process that's involved. They come out and inspect your enclosures. There's an exam. You have to answer over 40 questions and so on. So, yeah, it is quite a process. And once you're done with that, what do you have? You've got a, what do they call it? It's a rehab rehabilitator permit. And the issue every year. And it's just a piece of paper says that you're authorized. And do they do it? Yes, they periodically will do that too. Not always. I've had them simply show up. And do you do that? Do you visit other folks? I'm not in the spot. I'm not associated with the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife in any other capacity. Okay. Yeah, they just issue the permit. I also have to report all the animals I take in every month. And I have to send those reports to them. There's a special officer dedicated to, you know, dealing with all the rehabbers in Vermont. There's about 16 of us. And I send my reports to her. And then, you know, she communicates back to me. But I have to send it in an Excel spreadsheet every month. You know, I have to report on a yearly basis to US Fish and Wildlife every year. I have to send them a report too. Yeah. Not usually now. Now, I mean, that's more the case with rabies vector species that are called. That's raccoons, foxes, skunks. There, they usually like you to release them in certain locations. But with any other birds or mammals, you know, you can release them in what's called a soft release or simply open the door of the enclosure and they go off. I've done that. Or a hard release is when you put them in a carrier, take them to a certain location, and then release them. With birds, for example, with raptors, we like to release them in their home territory. So yeah, with him, I release them in a special location, which I'll show you. That was, you know, obviously because they need water. So it had to be a location that was suitable. Yeah. Are you allowed cats or dogs? Sure, why not? I have to keep them separate, of course. We run a horse farm, so we have a dozen horses, but they're separate, you know. I don't have to worry about other animals coming in and killing them, like other wild animals. Sure, yeah. I mean, I'll show you the enclosure I built this for them that, you know, it had chain link mesh underneath and on top, so nothing could get in or out. Yeah. This is all volunteer. We do accept donations, but we can't ask for any money when we take in animals. I mean, typically, I'll have someone call me, all the rehabbers are listed on the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife website. And people say, I have, you know, I found this beaver and I say, okay, I'll meet you here and we'll do the transfer. But, you know, I never, I'm not allowed, and I never would ask for any money. But sometimes people give money as a donation and I'm allowed to accept that if it's voluntarily. Yeah. Yeah, I'm retired, as I said. You know, I've retired from teaching. So yeah, I mean, also this is during the coronavirus pandemic. So even with bus driving, we were furloughed in March when the governor declared a state of emergency and there's nothing else to do. So why not raise a couple beavers in your basement? No, I mean, that's not normally you would do, but it is a big commitment. It's a lot of commitment in training. You know, I said I trained at VINs. That was nearly a year long process. And, you know, it's a lot of investment of time and also of money because you have to build the enclosures. It's kind of like a CATS-22. You can't get a license until you've built the enclosures for those animals. Did Laura need training too? Well, she's trained. She can be sub-permitee under me. She trained under me. So yeah, that's allowed. But otherwise, you know, you have to get a license and, you know, each rehabber needs a separate license. But yeah, I have an enclosure for raptors and I have an enclosure for the mammals and they're separate. Yeah, and they're separate from all the other animals that are on our farm. But yeah, this is, I think, BK carrying a stick. He's trying to carry this stick into the tank. But yeah, it's just impressive how strong they are. They can, you know, this is of him trying to carry this stick out of the tank. And sort of having a hard time with that. But yeah, they got pretty used to that ramp. They would never fell off that ramp. But this is an interesting video. This is of them wrestling each other. When he got his mate, he no longer wrestled with us. He could wrestle another beaver and that was a lot of fun for him. But she's on the left and he's on the right and guess who's winning? She always won these wrestle matches and maybe that's an allegory for humans. I don't know, I'm not going to comment on that. But she always won those matches. She was stronger than he was. So that was very impressive. You know, she was pretty strong. And that's possible. He was a chivalrous beaver maybe. But eventually they get tired and one would run off and that was the end of the match. Do they have what? Do they have eyelids? They don't. Now they have that dictating membrane I mentioned. But normally otherwise they don't have an eyelid. But their sight is not very good. But they have a dictating membrane. Their eyes look sort of blue when it comes across when they're in the water like that. They usually might mate in the middle of winter like December or January and then they'll give birth usually around April. It's designed so that they're giving birth in the spring when there's water. And they might have three to four kids at most. So yeah, that was eventually one run off and that was the end of that. And this is of them wrestling in the water itself. So they also wrestled on the floor but they also wrestled in the water as well. And they could get quite rambunctious in the water like that. But they're very good swimmers, so that was okay. And then you'll see him chase her off the ramp. He says, you know, I want to get out now so get a move on. So they usually, you know, they immediately groom themselves when they're out of the water. So you know, he says, you know, get a move on. You know, I want to get out so they both get out. So I'll just finish up here on the rehab part. So this outdoor enclosure I built in the summer of 2021 and as you can see, there's chain link on the top of this enclosure and there's chain link on the bottom. So nothing can get in, nothing can get out. And it's half in the water, half in the stream behind our house, half on the land. So they could, you know, they love this. They could get access to the water whenever they wanted. You know, they would swim together, eat together. This is a video of them in this enclosure swimming around in the water part at least. And he would try to dam the downstream side of this enclosure. So he would get some sticks and pile them on that side and it made the water deeper actually. So that's that. This, you know, just is a video that shows a good shot of the enclosure and then, you know, Laura comes into the enclosure and you can't see the beavers. The reason you can't see the beavers when you come into the enclosure like this is because they're underwater. So it's hard to see them. So they were often hide when someone came into the enclosure. So the water was their safe space, their refuge, if you will. That was their lodge or their house. That's a dog loop where they would sleep. But you can't see the beavers at first because they don't know who's there. So they hid. And then this then shows them swimming around in the water and you get the idea here. And this shows them, you know, coming up onto land when they realize it's a friend and they come up and ask for nuggets or something. You know, this is of her eating some nuggets out of her dish. You know, they love these. But you get the idea. They can grab things pretty well with their fore paws. We built this pond, a little pond which will be the new enclosure for them instead of the one I showed you in the previous slide. So finally, we released these two guys May 20th of 2022. I won't disclose the location except to say that it's part of the New England Wilderness Trust, or NUT. And it's protected against trapping. There's no trapping allowed. And this is an existing beaver pond, but there are no beavers there for a number of years, no evidence of activity for years. I already had a dam which you can see on the left. And I think there may have been a lot somewhere, although I never found it. But to release them, we made them a temporary lodge which you can see is a plywood box, basically, three feet square with a covered ramp going out of the box directly into the water. So they could always be safe from predators because they would go directly into the water and then come out of the water into their lodge. So we built this special release house for them. We set up a trail camera to capture these pictures. This is of him swimming in the new pond. He was very happy with it. This is a video of them swimming together in their new home, their new release site. If I can get this to go, yes it is. Yeah, I would have to release them in Vermont. You can't take these animals out of state. Yeah, I guess that's not working. Anyway, we checked up on them four days later and they were doing quite well. And he was already wild. At that point, when he came up to me, he hissed at me, like, get out of my territory. This is my territory. This is my home now. Get away. So they wilded up pretty fast, which was nice. This is what you want to see. About a month later, June 20th, 2022, Beaver release house looks like this. Obviously they found a new home, built a new lodge, and this was falling apart. So that was good to see. Good to see. Captured a moose. A trail camera. Captured a moose. So this is why, you know, Beaver wetlands are so important. They provide homes and food for other animals. And there's another picture of the moose checking out the abandoned Beaver release house, I guess. And finally, you know, it's completely disintegrated and we came to remove the house on July 5th. And that was the last time I saw him. Both he and she came up to us and checked us out as we were, you know, dismantling this release house and taking it away. No, he didn't hiss at me, but we kept our distance. But yeah, I got a new Beaver. Almost right after I released these guys. But it's sort of a sad story. This Beaver kid's parents were trapped, you know, out of season by a private landowner. And it was trapped as a newborn, I think. The Beaver was only one and a quarter pounds, which is their weight when they're born. And the Beaver died about a month and a half later. And there was really nothing I could do. It was eating formula, drinking formula, rather. But the vet did an autopsy and thinks that it never got colostrum from the mother. And therefore, it was never able to have a good metabolism, could never really digest the milk that I gave it. And it just simply stopped growing. It stopped growing and became thinner and thinner. And then I watched it as, you know, I watched it one day in my bathroom. It died from death throws. It simply wasn't able to metabolize any food and didn't survive. So I'll just end by talking a little bit about trapping of Beavers. Beavers are the second most trapped animal in Vermont. And they're trapped for a couple reasons. One of them is because people want their fur, which historically is the reason why Beavers almost went extinct because in the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, they used their fur to make hats and so forth. The other reason is because they are so-called a nuisance and they flood roads or, you know, they flood roads or other areas when they dam culverts. So let me talk about both for a second. This is a Vermont furbearer newsletter issued by the Department of Fish and Wildlife. And this is, you know, for the trapping community. You know, Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife promotes trapping as an activity. And it says in this newsletter, their instructions to trappers are, post-tasteful photos with as little blood and animal suffering as possible. We know animals in best management practice traps suffer very little. But many people don't realize that. That's an outright lie. And I'll prove it. I'll show you why. Animals suffer horribly in these traps. Even if they're the best traps available, they suffer terribly. When I put an animal, a wild animal into an enclosure, even in an enclosure, it's stressed out because it's contained. It can't move freely. The best thing you can do is provide a place for it to hide, like a hollow log or, you know, a piece of culvert pipe for them to go into hide. Imagine in a leg-hold trap, the animal is restrained for hours on end. Trappers only have to check the traps every 24 hours. So they can spend hours in this trap and exposed to the elements to predation. There's nowhere else for them to go. They can't hide. You know, that's horrible suffering for an animal. And that's very different from hunting. I have no problems with hunting. You know, hunters make a path to people that bring me animals. And I grew up in a hunting community. I don't hunt myself, but I understand hunting. But trapping is not hunting. Trapping is not clean kill. It's not fair chase. These animals are suffering for hours. And the leg-hold trap is not even trying to kill it. So I have a big problem with that quite frankly. Because animals shouldn't suffer if you're killing them. I have to kill animals every year. I kill dozens of animals. They can't be released back into the wild. But there are only certain ways I can euthanize an animal by, you know, fish and wildlife regulations. I can use a CO2 chamber, which is how I euthanize birds. It's very quick and painless. You can give them an injection, which, you know, is usually how you euthanize mammals at the vet. I work with vets, and I have a vet do that. You can also shoot the animal. But we, as rehabbers, are not allowed to drown animals. We're not allowed to club them. We're not allowed to strangle them. And we certainly can't keep them tied up until we're ready to kill them. Trappers can do all that. I'll talk about that in a minute. Yeah, I have the flyer on the table about that. But yeah, there is a law in the legislature that would ban recreational trapping. It's still allowed, you know, nuisance trapping or trapping to protect infrastructure. Towns can still trap if they feel they need to do so. Farmers and landowners are still allowed to trap if the animal is caught in the act of doing actual damage to the farm. So this is just a listing from the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife newsletter showing all the animals trapped. There's 13 species. Beaver, about 1,400 beavers are trapped every year. Altogether, about a little over 10,000 are trapped. So thousands of these animals are trapped every year for what purpose? I don't know. Why are trappers trapping animals? Does anyone buy their fur? Not anymore. No. You know who has the most fur? Vermont, it's me. I have whole racks of fur coats downstairs. Why? Because people donate to me their fur coats. They don't want them anymore. And I cut them up and used them for rehab. I used them to rehab these beavers. So, you know, no one really wants fur anymore and why also are they trapping? You know, it's very separate from what municipalities do when they're trying to stop flooding of roadways. This is all recreational trapping. It's all done. You can buy a license and you can trap for sport. And that's all it is. So, as I said, animals do suffer in traps and this has been studied by the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies. This is the research arm for wildlife agencies in every state that conducted research on thousands of animals that were neck properties were done on the carcasses of these animals that were caught in best management practice traps, the best traps you can find. And they all had these injuries. Bone and teeth fractures, amputation of digits, often self-inflicted, laceration of tissue, and so on and so on. You know, even if there are no visible injuries, there's physical damage because as a veterinarian who testified in Idaho with a thousand hours of experience in the field, you know, the trap clamps down on a limb of an animal. It's constricting the blood flow of that limb and after two or three hours that releases toxins and causes long-term permanent damage and pain and eventually death. So even if the animal doesn't seem to be harmed, you can't really release that animal and expect it to survive in the wild. So I'll just go back and point this out here. You know, he, in this article, they said, we acknowledge the issue of animal welfare as complex and involves physical injury and other considerations, but there's insufficient knowledge or technology to incorporate other metrics. In other words, the only measure of physical damage, there was no measurement of psychological or non-physical suffering in these traps. Typically, beavers are trapped by conifer traps. These are body-crushing kill traps. They, very often, though, the beavers are not trapped outright. It'll take them about 15, 20 minutes to die, as I said, because they can hold their breath under water for 15 minutes. They're also indiscriminate, like leg-hold traps. You can have non-target animals caught on these traps. These traps are indiscriminate, especially leg-hold traps, because it's simply open. Anything can be caught in these traps. Typically, the testimony has been that two non-target animals will be caught for every target animal. Some studies have found it's actually three to one, three non-target animals for every target animal. That's a big problem. You can't limit the animals you're trying to kill unlike hunting. Hunters often say, you can't pull a trigger on a trap. It's too indiscriminate. Some trappers will say, well, you can adjust the tension on the pan, but this is really only help if the animals are vastly different weights. In the study it said traps are best management practice traps are specific for furbearers. We divided the total number of capture of furbearers by the total number of captures of all species. In other words, what he's saying is that these traps are selective for furbearing mammals. That means they'll catch a mammal, but it can't be more specific than that. That's a very low bar. The alternative is that perhaps it's trapping mammals and not raptors, or it's trapping mammals and not humans, or it's trapping mammals but not pets. That's hardly specific or selective. It can't be selective within species or between species. You can't distinguish between a bobcat and a lynx. The lynx are an endangered species. You can't distinguish between a mink and a pymarine, which is pymarine is also endangered. This is a big problem in terms of wildlife management. It can't distinguish between species. It certainly can't distinguish between sexes and ages within those species. In hunting, you will have regulations about the number of points a buck has to have because they want older, more mature bucks. You simply can't do that with trapping. Is trapping well-regulated? Well, I'd say not really. There's few restrictions on the type of traps used. They will recommend using best management practice traps, but that's volunteer. They can basically use any kind of trap. The only restriction is that the trap can't have jaws on it. There are no restrictions on how animals ought to be killed, bludging, stomping, strangling, and so forth. No reporting of non-target animals. You have no idea. Other animals that are being trapped, including domestic dogs and cats. No bag limits, no limits on how many animals you can trap. No limits on the age, size, sex of the animal traps. No limit on the number of licenses issued. The season is very long for trapping. It goes from October through March. That's half the year, you know, unlike hunting seasons. Nuisance wildlife control officers are also not regulated. Fish and Wildlife Department will say, well, we need trapping as a way to monitor or control populations. But trapping is dependent on human factors, such as how active the trappers are, how intensely they trap. So it's a very imperfect measure of monitoring population. The catch per unit effort can also be interpreted very differently in monitoring populations. Trying to use trapping to control populations, well, that's, you know, very controversial too. You can argue trapping is too indiscriminate to target specific members of a species, disrupts colony and pack hierarchies. This is true of beavers. When you trap a beaver, you're disrupting that family unit, and you might only cause dispersal of those beavers, which creates more potential conflicts. Much recreational trapping takes place in underpopulated areas, such as wildlife management areas, where there's no conflicts at all with these beavers. Some targeted species can respond well to trapping, others grow into decline. In fact, sometimes the population will only increase. As a result of trapping, many trappers will justify this trapping, though, by saying that, well, if you don't trap, then this will result in, if trapping would end, wildlife populations would increase. Wildlife damage would increase. Landowner tolerance for wildlife would decrease. Property values would fall. Habitat would be lost because landowners would lose an incentive to maintain wildlife habitat. That's a scenario that if you end trapping, you're going to have beaver armageddon. Beavers are going to populate out of control. And that was actually one article cited a study in Massachusetts that apparently in Massachusetts, they enacted a trapping ban by Ballon Initiative in 1996. And the claim here is that after that Ballon Initiative, beaver populations tripled in size over five years. That is an outright lie. And I'll show you why. This is a graph that was produced at every presentation that was ever done by the furbearer biologists at Fish and Wildlife on Beavers. They always showed this graph. And this graph, if you look at the purple line, which says it's known population growth, it was very almost flat up until the trapping ban went into effect in 1996. And then look what happened. What do you see happens with the graph? It explodes. Allegedly, you have 50% population growth. Well, look at this. At the bottom, can you see these light blue bars? Okay, this is the basis for this study. The number of pelts, beaver pelts that were being trapped. So guess what happened after the ban in 1996? There are no more pelts. You went from 1,136 pelts year before the ban to 98. They could still trap with live traps, live capture traps. So it was only a tenth of what it had been before. So then how are they getting this 50% increase? Plus, look at what percentage is the trapped animals compared to the total population. The population of beavers is over 20,000. There's only a little over 1,000 beavers trapped. So if you took away all those trapped animals, in other words, that's 0.5% of the population. So that's how much you would expect an increase. They're saying it's 5,050% increase. How is that mathematically possible? This is very suspect because your evidentiary base, your evidence base is gone after the ban. So how can you say there's this explosive growth? Can anyone explain that to me? I can. And I asked Dave Waddles, who is the furbearer biologist for Massachusetts, getting this from the horse's mouth, so to speak, he said to me, harvest was greatly reduced after 1996. A valid question is how did that affect population estimate? Because they base that estimate on the harvest. Did low harvest numbers inflate the estimate, lower it, or doesn't that matter? I'm not familiar enough with the inner workings of the model to even speculate. So in other words, I have no clue. I have no clue what was going on. And yet this is what was being shown to the public by the Department of Fish and Wildlife. In every presentation of beavers, look for tapping if you take away our trapping. You're going to have an explosion of beaver populations. Not true, no evidence. I'll show you what is true. This. This is the best study of beaver populations out there. This is a 50-year law and study of beavers at Quabban Reservation in Massachusetts. And it was done by colony counts. This is the most accurate you can get. Actually counting beavers on the ground. And what's happening here? Well, beaver population does grow when, as beavers expand into existing habitat. But then what happens? It reaches a peak and then declines and ends up almost where it started. There's a natural cycle here. Just like there's a natural cycle to every beaver site, beavers will use all the food in that site and reach the carrying capacity and then will leave. And the site will grow back. There's a cycle. And that's what happens naturally. You don't need to trap beavers to control their populations. Beavers control their own population. And the cycle will go on at Infinitum, as shown at Sage and Creek in California, where you had an increase and then a decline and then an increase and a decline. So you get the picture. So anyway, also in surveys of the public, they found that the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife conducted a survey in last year in 2022. They found that 68% of Vermonters opposed recreational trapping. 62% opposed trapping for fur and clothing. So solid majorities opposed recreational trapping. A study done by the EVM Center for Rural Studies in 2017 found that 75% of Vermonters want to ban trapping. This is true. Generally too, in the Northeast region, surveys have found that 79% opposed recreational trapping and the country are large at 72%. Majorities thought regulated trapping is okay, but only quote if the animals die quickly and without undue pain or if animals accidentally caught can be released. Well, the problem is neither of those happens. Animals do suffer in these traps and if they're caught in these traps after two or three hours you can't release them without expecting them to survive because they suffer long-term damage. So that's the problem there. Fur, I'll just mention something about fur. This New York Times article from a couple days ago mentioned how fur sales in California are down and California's banned the sale of fur, but does anyone care? No one wants fur anymore. And I've studied fur because I've studied fur on live beavers and as coats, and I can tell you fur is meant to be on a living animal. The only way fur really functions is on a living animal. The fur will dry out because of the internal heat of the animal drying out the fur. If you get a fur coat wet, it'll take a very long time for it to dry. Also, if you get a fur coat dirty, you basically have to throw it out because there are barbs in the fur that hold on to that dirt and you'll never get it clean. The only way beavers clean themselves is by constantly grooming themselves. Fur was mainly a status symbol for Hollywood stars back in the day, for example, or it was used as a punishment. You wear the fur inside out against your skin. It's very irritating. So it was used as a punishment in the church. So I would argue trapping is counterproductive to good wildlife management largely because it's indiscriminate impacts upon populations. It's unreliable as a method of population control. Recreational trapping is controversial, not popular with the public. A large problem is it invites political considerations into policy decisions. The Fish and Wildlife Department is making policy decisions really because for political reasons it wants to promote trapping because it feels itself beholding, beholding to the trapping lobby. And that's pretty outdated because in the old days Fish and Wildlife Department was financed by trapping fees. Nowadays they're mainly financed by taxes from the general fund, from people like you and me. So they really have to expand their outlook and the reasons why people appreciate wildlife and 43% of respondents thought that it was influenced by politics. Well normally there is a season for trapping and it ends in March. Yeah, I mean the reason for that is so that you're not orphaning beaver kits because the mothers haven't given birth to the kits yet. So that's why it ends in March. The beaver kit I got on June 1st was born pretty late in the season but that was done by a landowner and there are no regulations in terms of landowners who can trap beavers if they're seen to be doing damage to the property. Anyway, feel free to take this sheet about H191. This is an act introduced in the legislature in the house that would end recreational trapping and it gives a fact sheet of what it does and what it doesn't do. So feel free to take that. And there are 25 co-sponsors of that bill which is very impressive. If you want to write to your legislator or local representative or senator ask them to support this bill, that would be great. There's also an online petition. If you go to www.protectourwildlifevermont.org there's a link to signing that petition as well. So I think that's all the time I have.