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From the January-February 2022 issue of the Bay Journal.
That people see such degraded streams as natural while considering beaver ponds out-of-place nuisances is a symptom of what some call "ecological amnesia". "Most of our understanding of this continent came after beavers were already removed from the landscape," said Frances Backhouse, author of a recent book on beavers, Once They Were Hats, at BeaverCon. "And that really skewed our perception of what natural ecosystems look like and how they function. It also delayed our scientific study of this animal because they simply weren't there to study." In 1607, when europeans established Fort James in the colony of Virginia, Nort America had between 60 million and 400 million beavers - somewhere between 10 and 75 per square mile... By the mid-1800s, they were gone from Pennsylvania and probably the rest of the [Chesapeake] Bay watershed. Continentwide, their population was reduced to around 100,000.
The article goes on to discuss efforts to reintroduce beavers to the rivers that flow into the Chesapeake Bay so that they will construct dams. Over time, this leads to more water reaching streams through groundwater rather than runoff, which latter route causes nutrient pollution harmful to organisms in the Bay proper.
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