At first it sounds completely strange to relocate the beavers with airplane and parachute. But this story reminds me again how little I know about the vast rural areas of other countries. In Germany we have no spot that can not be reached via car and foot in a day.
It's hard for me to imagine how big the rural Areas in America are. A plane is the most efficient transportation vehicle for those.
In this situation it's not necessarily how 'big' the rural area is, it's the topography. As the crow flies, the basin in the SNRA these beavers were dropped into isn't more than ~60 miles away from where they were picked up from.
We lived in the US midwest. My in-laws live in a New England state, but on the end farthest from the coast, i.e. closest to us. That was a 15 hour drive, not counting meal and gas stops.
One time a group of friends and I drove from San Diego to Denver and back. It took 38 hours, and that was averaging 60.0 miles per hour according to hours_total/miles_total. We never left the western 1/3 of the US.
I live in Texas. It takes about 8 hours drive to get out of Texas regardless of the direction I go. That's just one state. Texas is the only state that has 8 different climate zones.
I don’t know where you got that climate zone information, but I don’t think it’s true. New Mexico has more koppen climates areas than Texas, and Arizona too (and also California). Texas is undeniably huge though - I have driven El Paso to Beaumont on the way to Louisiana
Although El Paso is closer to Los Angeles than it is to the Mississippi River, by Interstate it is 200km closer to Dallas and slightly closer to Houston and Austin.
>> how big these states are compared to say, Colorado
And Colorado is tiny compared to Canadian provinces, most of which are at least triple its size. Want big, look at how long it takes to drive from Seattle to Anchorage.
It's because California and Texas were both pre-existing political entities when they were annexed by the US. Most of the other Midwest and western states had their boundaries defined by Congress as they carved up the US's unincorporated territory, which is why they all have similar sizes and very geometric shapes (with borders often defined lines of latitude and longitude).
Also predating much of the growth in the Rocky Mountains. The population of Idaho in the 1950 census was 589K, compared to 1.96M today. Idaho is still a very low density state, but at the time there were an average of 2.7 people/km^2, just over 1% of modern Germany's 233/km^2.
It's hard for me to imagine how big the rural Areas in America are.
Part of that is that the most vast vastnesses are not rural. They are wildernesses.
Humans don't live in them. And they don't have infrastructure to encourage or facilitate visitors.
In the US, you can't drive a car, ride a bicycle, fly a drone, or sail a sailboat in a designated wilderness. You can ride a horse or burro, however. But need to carry feeds free of invasive species seeds.
Then there are vast public lands where you can in theory ride a bicycle, etc. but climate and terrain make it a bad idea for most people. Much of the Mojave Desert for example (maybe search HN for "Death Valley Germans" if you want a rabbit hole to dive down).
Then there is Alaska, where airplane is the most practical and often only means of travel to and from and within.
Or to put it another way, if you thought of Siberia as part of Europe, then the scale of Europe would be more like the scale of the US. But it seems Western Europeans usually mean Western Europe when they say "Europe." And not the Balkan countries, let alone Azerbaijan.
"On foot in a day" gives you about 10 hours of hiking - let's say 20 miles (a 10 hour day 20 mile hike is pretty good, trained hikers could do further and people run marathons, but let's take an estimate).
So even from a single trailhead (end of road) you have a 1,257 sq mile circle! (Pedants would say that it's less because the road has to get inside your circle, and points on the circle would be closer to the road elsewhere.)
Very quickly places become basically unnavigable by humans even today, and even in places you'd think of as "not rural".
I'm sure there are places even in Germany where things could go missing forever.
Amusingly enough, large swaths of the "unaccessible backlands" of America is BLM land in the desert or high desert, and quite accessible to off-road vehicles, because it's basically flat dirt and so if you plow a road across it, the dirt road lasts nearly forever.
> In Germany we have no spot that can not be reached via car and foot in a day.
I know this story was about Idaho that has, at least today, relatively fewer places that are completely inaccessible. But if you go to Alaska, there's enough territory that's inaccessible by car that is 3x the size of all of Germany (that is, I think there's well over 1 million square kilometers of inaccessible places in Alaska).
The lower 48 is much less so, especially today. Still if you get up into the mountains, in the crazy wetland areas (parts of Florida everglades, parts of extreme north Minnesota, etc), it can get impossible to traverse by car, and very difficult by foot.
Lower 48 has vast deserts, mountain ranges, large national parks. There is loads of inaccessible wilderness in the lower 48, especially when compared to Germany.
Hilarious! If beavers had a mythology and could pass it on to subsequent generations think of what a great story The Great Drop would be within this relocated colony.
> As for Geronimo, Heter reported that he had a “priority reservation on the first ship into the hinterland,” accompanied by a harem of three young females.
it seems like we are devolving as a civilization, when was the last time we air dropped wild animals? some are even beginning to wonder if we still have the capability.
Geronimo was a military leader and medicine man from the Bedonkohe band of the Ndendahe Apache people. From 1850 to 1886, Geronimo joined with members of three other Central Apache bands – the Tchihende, the Tsokanende (called Chiricahua by Americans) and the Nednhi – to carry out numerous raids, as well as fight against Mexican and U.S. military campaigns in the northern Mexico states of Chihuahua and Sonora and in the southwestern American territories of New Mexico and Arizona.
For anyone who enjoyed this I'd highly recommend reading Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. My favorite tidbit is that there were beaver ancestors the size of small bears, so yes there were rodents of unusual size in real life
> One beaver forced its way out of the top of the box while parachuting; the beaver then fell to its death and became the only casualty of the operation.
76 beavers with only one casualty.
Seems like the drop was a big improvement over the previous relocation strategies. I don't see much reasoning for why it wasn't done again. Budget? Improvements in overland technology? Dwindling demand for beaver relocation?
There is probably more demand than ever before for these types of ecological support operations. Beavers are insanely valuable to local river ecosystems. When they dam up rivers, they incur a whole host of positive effects for that river, including but not limited to erosion mitigation, temperature drops, vegetation increases, etc...
It's hard for me to imagine how big the rural Areas in America are. A plane is the most efficient transportation vehicle for those.