Grandma Weavre's Garden

07/24/2026

During five major wildfires across the American West, the ground around beaver dams stayed green while everything around it burned. In Arctic Alaska, beavers have built more than 12,000 new ponds on the tundra, and the water is melting the frozen ground underneath them. The same animal doing the same thing it has always done is shielding one landscape from fire and thawing another from below.

A beaver does not know any of this. A beaver builds a dam because water that is not deep enough to cover its lodge entrance is a problem a beaver solves by making the water deeper. It cuts trees, drags them to the stream, packs them with mud and sticks, and raises the water level until the entrance is submerged and the pond is wide enough to cache a winter's worth of food beneath the ice.

Everything that happens after that, the raised water table, the flooded floodplain, the saturated soil, the changed temperature of the ground, is a side effect that the beaver never intended and that two different ecosystems experience in two completely different ways.

Emily Fairfax at California State University Channel Islands measured the fire effect. She and Andrew Whittle compared satellite images of vegetation greenness in stream corridors with and without beaver dams across five large wildfires in the western United States. The paper, titled "Smokey the Beaver" and published in Ecological Applications in 2020, found that during active fire, vegetation in unbeavered stream corridors lost three times more greenness than vegetation in beaver-dammed corridors. The water held behind the dams had saturated the surrounding soil and kept the vegetation wet enough that fire could not consume it. The green ribbons of surviving riparian forest that showed up in post-fire satellite images traced the exact locations of beaver complexes. Everything on either side was black.

The mechanism is not complicated. A beaver dam spreads water sideways. Instead of a narrow creek running through a dry valley, the stream becomes a series of shallow ponds, wet meadows, and saturated banks. When fire arrives, the wet ground will not burn. The green plants will not ignite as readily as the dry ones uphill.

Animals that cannot outrun a fire can reach the ponds. Fish survive in the deeper pools. After the fire passes, the beaver complex becomes the seed bank from which the rest of the drainage recovers. Fairfax found that the greenness bounced back in unbeavered areas within a year, but during the fire itself, the beaver corridors were the only things still alive.
Four thousand miles north, the same engineering is doing the opposite.

Ken Tape and Benjamin Jones at the University of Alaska Fairbanks have spent over a decade tracking beaver expansion into the Arctic tundra using 70 years of satellite images and aerial photographs. In the 1950s, there were no beaver ponds visible in northwestern Alaska's tundra. By 2019, there were more than 12,000. The number doubled between 2003 and 2017. Beavers that had historically been confined to areas south of the tree line followed the warming climate and the northward creep of shrubs into terrain that had been treeless and frozen for thousands of years.

When a beaver builds a pond on permafrost, the water traps heat. A tundra surface frozen for ten months of the year reflects sunlight and stays cold. A beaver pond absorbs sunlight, holds warmth through the summer, and in some cases stays unfrozen through the winter. The heat transfers downward into the permafrost and thaws it. Jones found in a separate study that beavers were the dominant factor, accounting for 66 percent of the increase in surface water in one extensively studied area of northwest Alaska. The ponds are not a symptom of thaw. They are a cause of it. The beaver is not responding to melting permafrost. It is melting permafrost.

The animal that saved green corridors during western megafires is drilling holes in the Arctic's frozen foundation. It did not change its behavior. The latitude changed, and the same dam that holds water against fire in Oregon holds water against ice in Alaska, and the water wins both times.

Source: Fairfax and Whittle (2020), Ecological Applications / Tape et al. (2022), Scientific Reports / Jones et al. (2020) / Glass et al. (2025), Ecosphere / NOAA Arctic Report Card / UAF Geophysical Institute.

07/16/2026

This is EXACTLY what I mean when I explain to people that if you tend the forest as lovingly as if it were a garden, focusing on its health rather than your wants, it will feed and shelter you easily in return.

06/29/2026

Some of the prettiest, most interesting plants grow only in the fairy garden...
..
(*The "fairy garden" - the fascinating world full of beauty and adventure, wondrous beasts and wild fungi and so much more, that's all around us but invisible to most people because we simply fail to look, to "use our fairy sight.")

06/07/2026

Absolutely, positively, when people (adults or kids) need mental health treatment, including medication, they should get it with no stigma attached.

And also, when an external cause of emotional challenges is identified, it's worth addressing that cause. Pretending to separate ourselves from the rest of the natural world isn't good for us, and restoring that balance can heal the damage caused by the artificial rift.

Nature is calling, but our kids are wearing noise-canceling headphones. We can help them listen.

06/06/2026

A newly filed federal lawsuit exposes a quiet shift in wildlife policy. In order to clear the way for big logging projects like the Larabee Hat project in Montana, the U.S. Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife Service have officially rewritten the rules of grizzly bear survival.

​For decades, the standard scientific consensus mandated that a female grizzly bear requires a minimum "secure habitat" patch of 2,500 acres free from roads and human development to safely forage. Under new administrative guidelines, that requirement has been decimated down to just 1 acre.

​As wildlife biologists point out: a one-acre island of trees completely surrounded by logging roads isn’t a secure habitat, it’s a death trap. Worse yet, this policy shift targets the exact public lands corridor needed for bears to migrate and achieve crucial genetic exchange between Glacier and Yellowstone.

​Where do you draw the line? Drop your thoughts on grizzly bears below

06/05/2026

In the early 1980s, a Pennsylvania bear biologist named Gary Alt carried an orphaned black bear cub into a winter den, placed it beside a sleeping wild mother, and walked out. The mother woke up in the spring raising one more cub than she had given birth to. She never knew the difference.

Then Alt tried it outside the den, in spring, and the mother smelled the strange cub and killed it.

That failure is what led to the Vicks VapoRub.
Alt was the black bear biologist for the Pennsylvania Game Commission for twenty-seven years. During that time, he expanded the state's bear population from roughly three thousand to nearly fifteen thousand animals. He also dealt with a problem that every bear state faces. Orphaned cubs. A mother bear gets hit by a car, gets shot during season, gets killed in a management action, and leaves behind cubs that are too young to survive alone. The standard options were captive rearing or euthanasia. Alt wanted a third option. He wanted to give the orphan to a wild mother who was already raising her own.

The biology said it should not work. A black bear mother identifies her cubs by scent. She licks them after birth, and the chemical signature of her saliva marks them as hers. If she encounters a cub that does not carry her scent, she treats it as a threat or an intruder. Outside the den, in the active season, a mother bear that smells a strange cub will reject it. In some cases, she kills it. Alt learned this the hard way.

Inside the den was different. A hibernating mother is in a reduced metabolic state. Her senses are dampened. Her aggression is lower. Her discrimination between her own cubs and a stranger's is weaker. Alt tested the theory by opening a winter den, placing an orphaned cub beside the sleeping mother's existing litter, and backing away. The mother did not wake. The orphan nestled against her body alongside her biological cubs. When the family emerged in the spring, the mother was raising all of them. The orphan had been absorbed.

The technique worked reliably in the den. But orphaned cubs do not always appear in January. Sometimes they show up in April or May, after the mothers are already active and mobile and operating with full sensory awareness. Alt needed a way to introduce orphans to awake, alert mothers without the mother detecting the scent mismatch that would trigger rejection or killing.

He tested two approaches. In the first, he treed a mother bear and her cubs using dogs, released the orphan into the trees, and kept the mother separated from all the cubs for two to seven hours. The extended contact between the orphan and the biological cubs during the separation appeared to transfer enough shared scent that when the mother returned, she accepted the group without identifying the newcomer. The orphans were accepted.

In the second method, Alt sedated the mother, smeared Vicks VapoRub in her nostrils, and placed the orphan with her while she was unconscious. When the sedation wore off, the menthol overwhelmed her olfactory system. She could not distinguish the orphan's scent from her own cubs' scent because she could not smell anything except eucalyptus and camphor. By the time the Vicks wore off, the orphan had been in contact with the mother and siblings long enough that the scent lines had blurred. The orphans were accepted.

Alt later refined the technique further. He found that simply rubbing Vicks VapoRub on the orphan cub, without sedating the mother, was enough to inhibit aggression during introduction. The menthol on the cub's fur masked the foreign scent long enough for the mother to begin treating it as part of the group.

One Pennsylvania mother that supplemented her diet with garbage raised six cubs through the summer, including two orphans Alt had placed with her. Six cubs from a single sow is an extraordinary litter by any measure. The mother did not distinguish between the four she had birthed and the two that a biologist had carried in from somewhere else and smeared with cold medicine.

Lynn Rogers, the Minnesota bear biologist whose long-term research we referenced in the Bear 56 post, confirmed and expanded on Alt's work. Rogers published a framework in 1985 describing four options for orphaned cubs: returning them to their own mothers, introducing them to foster mothers, leaving them alone or transporting them to favorable areas, and raising them in captivity for later release. He noted that mothers with cubs would readily accept strange cubs in dens and sometimes outside dens under certain conditions. The den introduction, Rogers wrote, was the cleanest option. The mother's reduced state during hibernation made acceptance almost automatic.

The technique is still used today. In February 2020, the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries placed an orphaned cub, rescued by a dog that had carried it home in its mouth, with a wild foster mother nursing three cubs of her own. Virginia's wildlife center maintains GPS-collared female bears specifically so they can locate denning mothers when an orphan needs placement.

Conservation officers track the collar, listen for cub sounds in the den, assess whether the mother has capacity for an additional cub, and make the placement. The mothering instinct is just very strong in most animals, wildlife biologist Bill Bassinger told reporters. Generally, most females will take the young back, even after it has been handled by humans.

A black bear mother that would kill a strange cub on sight in May will adopt it without question in February if you put it beside her while she is sleeping. A black bear mother that would kill a strange cub on sight in May will adopt it without question in May if you rub enough Vicks VapoRub on the cub to overwhelm her nose for an hour. The difference between a dead orphan and a living one is timing, temperature, and a two-dollar tube of menthol ointment from a drugstore.

Gary Alt figured that out in the mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania with a sedated bear, a jar of Vicks, and an orphaned cub that had nowhere else to go. The technique he developed has been used in bear states across the country for forty years. Every spring, somewhere in the Appalachians or the Rockies or the North Woods, a wildlife officer opens a den, places a cub beside a sleeping mother, and walks away knowing that the mother will wake up in April and count one more mouth to feed without ever questioning where it came from.

Source: Alt, G.L. (1984). "Cub Adoption in the Black Bear." Journal of Mammalogy 65(3). / Rogers, L.L. (1985). "Aiding the Wild Survival of Orphaned Bear Cubs." Wildlife Society Bulletin. / North American Bear Center / Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources.

06/05/2026

Looking to the future... There's some interest in Forest Bathing walks, which are quite different from the Meditations on the Mountain, and I'm intrigued enough by the possibility of offering these to consider pursuing an actual certification in doing them well. Is this something many of you would like?

I'm also considering doing more of the Science and Stories events in the future, possibly even trying to find room to add a public one this year. They're usually tailored experiences for private groups, but could certainly be done as open ones. Would people be interested in these as well? ( Feel free to ask if you've not been to one and would like more details.)

06/04/2026

I have to give a signal boost to the awesome Bear Creek Cafe's reopening!!

After far too long an absence, the cafe will again be open Tuesday through Saturday, 8am until 3pm, beginning next week. I won't be at all surprised if it's better than ever - and that's a very high bar to clear!

06/03/2026

No filter, just bright midday sunshine and looking straight up through the trees. 🩵🩵🩵