mountain beaver revisited

[terry glavin]

as promised.

for everyone's amusement, this is my chronicles column for this week's
georgia straight, inspired by this list's thread on "mountain beavers". no
point in alerting me to any error - it's gone to press. and thanks to all
for the help.

.....


 On Sumas Mountain there exists a mysterious animal. It is not a spotted owl
or a marbled murrelet. It lacks even the demi-celebrity of the Pacific giant
salamander. Although it shares the same endangered-species classifications
as those more well-known creatures, there is no protection society dedicated
to its stewardship.

 It is a 40-million-year-old haplodon, a relic of the Upper Eocene, the sole
mammalian occupant of an evolutionary cul-de-sac that was plentiful in the
days when woolly camels and sloths that once roamed North America. It may
seem disgraceful that the Sumas haplodon has no fan club of any kind, but
the creature must share much of the blame for its own obscurity. It spends
most of its life in underground tunnels. It comes out almost exclusively at
night. It rarely strays more than 200 metres from its home burrow during its
entire life.

 Its scientific name is Aplodonta rufa. While the first hint of its
existence was whispered to western science in the 1806 journals of
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, scientists have shed little light on its
habits. The academic literature remains informed as much by folklore as by
clinical, methodical observation. In the standard reference texts, the
animal is said to weep great tears when distressed, grind its teeth when
angry, and, by some unknown means, utter loud booming sounds.

 Lewis and Clark made note of an animal which the Lower Columbia people
favoured "in forming their robes, which they dress with the fur on them and
attach together with sinews of the Elk or deer," and which they called the
"siwelel." It has gone by many names: Ground bear, whistler, mountain
boomer, kickwilly, showtl, ogwoolal, oukala, kula possum, giant mole, ground
beaver, and kulata.

 Among the very few people who have even heard of the thing, it is most
commonly called the mountain beaver, although it isn't anything like a
beaver. At a distance it could be mistaken for a beaver without a tail,
maybe, or a muskrat, but there are few people have ever seen one, even at a
distance. One who has is 63-year-old Abbotsford naturalist Glen Ryder. It
was four years ago, on Sumas Mountain.

 "It was just a fleeting glimpse, really," Ryder said. During a ecological
survey of the mountain commissioned by the Fraser Valley Regional District,
Ryder, an ornithologist with an interest in peculiar local fauna such as
moutain beavers, rubber boas and tailed frogs, saw something move out of the
corner of his eye. It was in the upper reaches of Clayburn Creek. "It ran
out of a burrow and found itself in daylight, then it ran down another
burrow."

 What Ryder saw was a specimen of Aplodonta rufa rufa, a coastal subspecies,
which ranges well into Washington state but is confined in Canada to Sumas
Mountain and the mountains south of the Fraser Valley from about Cultus Lake
to, say, Hedley. There is another Canadian subspecies, Aplodonta rufa
rainieri, can be found from around Princeton to Merritt. The B.C.
Environment Ministry classifies the coastal subspecies as threatened or
endangered. The interior subspecies is considered sensitive or vulnerable.
There's very little difference between the two - a slightly more reddish hue
to the coastal species' fur, for instance. There are two other subspecies
north of the Columbia River, and four subspecies south of the Columbia,
which persist in tiny pockets in California. And that's all there is.

 One of the few living human beings who has seen a member of the coastal
subspecies is former Canadian Wildlife Service biologist Les Gyug, who now
runs an independent consulting firm in the Okanagan. In 1996, the B.C.
Environment Ministry hired Gyug to conduct some research into the animal and
its habitat, so that loggers could be told how to avoid pushing it into
oblivion. Gyug saw his first and only mountain beaver in 1998, on a plateau
above the Tulameen River.

 "It was eight o'clock on an overcast September morning. I was walking
along. All of a sudden it was there, about six feet in front of me," Gyug
remembered. "It just sort of scattered away."

 Gyug doesn't believe the stories about the booming or the whistling or the
gnashing of teeth. Neither does he believe that the peculiar "hay bales"
mountain beavers construct are a function of any elaborate den-construction
behaviour.

 Gyug reckons that the creature merely harvests large amounts of nettles,
salal and sword ferns and leaves them in piles around its burrows so that
they're handy. That's how you find them. Chances are you'll never see a
mountain beaver, but chances are good that if you look for one in the right
places - rainforest valleys, thick with undergrowth - you;ll find big piles
of succulent shrubs, and the ground will be pockmarked with holes.

 In his Yellowstone diaries, the great American naturalist John Muir wrote
that mountain beavers routinely alter the flow of streams and construct
canals to feed intricate subterranean watercourses and to keep the shrubs it
likes well-irrigated.  "It is startling," he wrote,  "when one is camped on
the edge of a sloping meadow near the homes of these industrious
mountaineers, to be awakened in the still night by the sound of water
rushing and gurgling under one's head in a newly formed canal."

 Could be. We just don't know much about these beasts, any more than we know
much about the creature that came to be called the giant sea mink, an
amphibious Atlantic-coast mammal of some kind that Sir Humphrey Gilbert
described in the 16th century as "a fyshe like a greyhound." Two centuries
later, the English naturalist Joseph Banks described the animal as most
closely resembling an Italian greyhound, "legs long, tail long and tapering.
. . it came up from the sea." Environment Canada uses the term sea mink to
describe it. It is extinct, and what little science knows about it, beyond
those early descriptions, comes from a few bones found in aboriginal kitchen
middens in present-day Maine.

 We should know more about these things. The isolated Sumas Mountain
population of haplodons, cut off from their counterparts by malls and
subdivisions and freeways, now occupies the northwestern extent of the
species' entire range on the planet.

 It should have a fan club or something.



----- Original Message -----
From: Mike Cleven <ironmtn at BIGFOOT.COM>
To: <CHINOOK at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>
Sent: Friday, May 04, 2001 10:12 PM
Subject: Re: mountain beaver revisited


> Linda Fink wrote:
> >
> > The Peterson's field guide to mammals shows the mountain beaver to be
from
> > the cascades westward in Wash., Ore., and No. Calif., extending only a
short
> > way into Canada. So you east siders, even those of you who hang out in
the
> > woods, are not going to find boomer holes in your hills.
>
> Qualifier: except on the dryland side of the Cascades; Terry mentioned
> Merritt and Hedley, which definitely are on the leeward side of the
> Range, Hedley especially.
> >
> > Specifically, Peterson's says: "This family of rodents, now restricted
to a
> > small strip along the western coast of N. America, contains but 1
species.
> > It is presumed to be the most primitive living rodent. It has 5 toes on
each
> > foot, but the thumb is much reduced and without a claw. Skull has 22
teeth.
> > There are 6 mammae. Known as fossils from Upper Eocene."
> >
> > Other stuff:
> > "Aplodontia rufa, head and body 12-17 in., tail 1 - 1 1/5 in., wt 2-3
lb.
> > This dark brown rodent, the size of a small house cat but chunkier, has
> > small rounded ears and small eyes. . .  It looks like a tailless
muskrat.
> >
> > More active at night than during day. Makes extensive tunnels, runways,
and
> > burrows beneath dense streamside vegetation; in diam. burrows are 6-10
in.
> > Rarely climbs trees. Feeds on herbaceous plants and shrubs of many
kinds;
> > builds hay piles along runways in late summer and early autumn. Home
range
> > not known, but probably less than 400 yds.
>
> Makes me wonder if I'd have run into them had I been raised in
> Chilliwack or Hope instead of Mission (which is on the north bank of the
> Fraser just above the SW apex of the Boomer Triangle described by
> Terry); I was in the woods all the time and burrows like that sound kind
> of familiar.  We _did_ have giant gophers, but everything in the
> rainbelt gets big, including the garter snakes and slugs....
>
> MC