Month: July 2010

Slightly better than lying…

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Who's Killing Beavers Now? September 10, 2010

Do you remember the story last November about the city of Oshawa that said it was going to ‘relocate’ some beavers and the residents found out it was actually killing them? Six Furry Lies (To be fair, I guess death’s a kind of relocation…”the undiscovered country, from whose bourne no traveler returns…“) But it was a pretty bad lie, even as cities go, and there was a lot of red-faced finger-pointing from those who had made it, saying they hadn’t known the trapper was going to kill them.

(I am reminded of the old joke about the man who finds a tiger in his garden and is told by a neighbor to take it to the zoo. The next day the neighbor sees the same tiger in the yard and asks what happened. The man replies, ‘Of course I took it to the zoo like you suggested! We had such a great time that tomorrow I’m taking it to the aquarium!” Ba-dum-dum)

Back to our less charming story. At the time resident Joyce Schnegg had just found out that they hadn’t killed ‘all’ the beavers and there were still four left. (Because even their cruelty is incompetent.) The mayor promised to bring in an expert to find solutions to the problem. The reporter of the story wrote me back and visited the website. It looked like there was going to be a kind of progress. “The arc of environmentalism is long but it bends towards beavers.“

Turns out the ‘expert’ the city brought in was this company, Beacon Environmental, a regular hire of the city of Oshawa and especially dedicated to assessing things like bird hazards at airports. They cashed their check from the taxpayers of Oshawa and said there were three basic options: install a beaver baffler (cutting-edge beaver management when Reagan was president), move the beavers or kill them.

In a June 22 memo to the City, Beacon Environmental said there are three options for beaver management: using a “beaver baffle” — a device that regulates water levels in the pond while allowing beavers to remain — removing the beaver dam, or leaving the status quo. In its report, engineering firm Greck and Associates recommends removing the dam, saying it could “increase peak storm flows, increase downstream flood elevations and reduce storage and discharge capacities.”

A subsequent City report makes no mention of the beaver baffle, instead laying out three possibilities for removing the dam: live trapping and releasing the beavers, lethal trapping or repeatedly breaking apart the dam until the beavers get frustrated and leave. Beacon Environmental ecologist Brian Henshaw says lethal trapping is the most humane route if the City is set on removal.

“We don’t make that recommendation lightly,” he said. “But it’s not fair to move an animal to a place it doesn’t know, where it can’t set up a lodge and get a food store in place before November. That could result in death by starvation.”

Three choices. Guess which one the city picked?

So about 50 residents gathered on the corner to protest the decision to kill the beavers, including 2 council members. One advocated the use of a beaver deceiver (which the paper reported tricked the beavers into thinking the water flowed the opposite direction.) (!) and both shuddered at the traps brought by a resident from the dam to show how they worked. 50 people is a pretty nice number for a beaver protest. Check out their facebook page.

The two protesting council members were able to get actions slowed enough to manage a temporary ‘stay’ on the execution. There will be a ‘last chance ever -and I mean it this time’ meeting next week to discuss options. Clearly the mayor had 8 months to do something productive and used it to apply taxpayer money to find a firm that would say exactly what he wanted to hear and take the blame. (See “Cal Engineering report on the wall behind the beaver lodge for an example) I’m sure Martinez understands that civic decision well enough. Apparently, it’s just a language barrier. When Oshawa said last year that ‘the beavers were going to be relocated’ they didn’t mean they going to be alive when they were relocated, and when the mayor told the press they were looking for solutions they didn’t mean they actually wanted to solve the problem.

Drop a note to the Mayor and the Council so they know that there are options and lots of reasons to use them.

A Good Metaphor

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, Who's Killing Beavers Now? September 10, 2010

I was checking to see what new reports there might be on Red Deer Park and found a nice article about people rallying around the beavers written by Drew Halfnight in the National Post. Apparently there are now four potential property owners willing to have the beavers relocated.

Residents of Red Deer, Alta., have rallied to save about a dozen beavers that have been attacking dogs in a downtown off-leash park, killing one of them. The city’s parks department said Wednesday it would trap and kill the beavers due to the severity of the attacks — at least six dogs have been seriously injured while swimming in a pond in Three Mile Bend park — but the idea of euthanizing the animals has set off a firestorm, and the city is re-thinking its plan.

Re-thinking might be a bit of an exaggeration (twice), but we are happy that the people of Calgary and beyond have found their ‘beaver-saving groove”. It’s a good thing when it happens, and powerful: humane, civic-minded, and communal. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that saving beavers might easily be the best and most collaborative thing Martinez has ever done. A disjointed ‘uptown’ and ‘downtown, two distinct school districts with competing high schools to split the town in half. Don’t forget to include a city council that has always understood how to play one side against the other and you have a civic recipe for discord. Saving beavers was a unifying goal and remains a reason why people from Virginia Hills drive downtown and people from Castro Street think of them as neighbors.

Now its their turn: Ohhh Canada! Not only have the adjectives changed, the narrative changed. the heroes changed, but the superintendent’s name has changed too. He’s gone from “Trevor” to “Kevin”—a much more ‘man of the people’, less aristocratic name. (Well, as I’ve often said, beavers do change things. It’s what they do…)

“We have received an abnormally large number of calls and e-mails,” said Kevin Poth, superintendent of the city’s park system, who said about 75 dog advocacy groups, wildlife groups and concerned citizens had contacted him in two days.

“It really has opened up our community to have an interesting discussion about how we interact with wildlife in an urban centre,” he said. The callers fall into three categories, he said: those who want the animals killed, those who want them re-located and those who want nothing done at all. The vast majority have defended the beavers.

So as I’m enjoying this lovely article, thinking about our own November 7, 2007 dialogue, when I see this towards the end, mentioning the horrific intentions of P.E.I. to prove its ignorance 150 times.

The Red Deer beaver debate is not isolated. Last month on P.E.I., officials said they would kill about 150 nuisance beavers whose dams were causing flooding and destruction of roadways, killing mature trees and interfering with migratory fish runs. A member of beaver advocacy group Worth A Dam compared the practice to “controlling speeding by destroying cars.”

This surprised me, because I didn’t think my letter was ever published. Ahhh but it was sent to a host of carefully chosen names, one of which was Drew Halfnight at the National Post. I thought his name looked familiar. “Halfnight” is the kind of Tolkein-worthy name one doesn’t forget. (“Go not halfgently into that halfnight...”)

Nuisance Beavers, May 15th

I was confused to read about the PEI ecision to trap another 150 beavers this year saying they “cause flooding and destruction of roadways, kill mature trees, contaminate water and interfere with migratory fish runs.” Damage to roads and culverts is easily managed, not with a ‘magic wand’ but with a wrench and some tubing. Beaver taking of trees produces a natural coppice cutting encouraging new and bushy growth which is why migratory and songbird population increase with the number of beaver dams in an area. Their dams actually improve water quality and act as a natural filtration system in streams. Although there are rare incidences of their carrying giardia when it is present in a stream they never cause it. (we do that) The misunderstood relationship between beavers and salmon though, is if the greatest concern. Research from NOAA fisheries in the past ten years has documented consistently the significant benefit beaver dams provide to juvenile salmonid. In fact in many places where beavers aren’t naturally present they are introduced or people are hired to build little ‘beaver dams!’.

If trapping was a successful, long term solution, PEI would not need to kill twice as many beavers this year as last year. I certainly don’t believe conibear or snare traps are humane, but I am more concerned about the inhumane treatment you are giving to all the wildlife and birds who depend on beaver ponds for their survival. I would recommend you do your own wildlife count in the area of the targeted beavers, so you can see for yourself next year the fallout of your decision. Beavers are a keystone species and the decision to solve the problems they cause by killing them is akin to controlling speeding by destroying cars. It would work, but at what cost? Flow devices and culvert fences are proven, inexpensive tools that require little maintenance or experience to install. Beavers are an investment in your watershed and removing 150 of them will have trickledown effects that PEI has clearly not considered – not the least of which is a population boom next year when you need to remove 300 and so on and so on.

I would be happy to provide more information or connect you with resources that can. Beaver management experts are a short trip away, including Skip Hilliker in Maine, Michael Callahan in Massachusetts, and Skip Lisle in Vermont. You don’t need a magic wand or a snare to solve beaver problems. You just need to be smarter than a beaver, which I assume most of PEI is.

Heidi Perryman, Ph.D.

President & Founder

Worth A Dam

www.martinezbeavers.org/wordpress

Sometimes a good metaphor can stay in a reporters mind for two whole months! That’s pretty powerful!

Our Latests Baby Duck

heidi08 New Species July 16, 2010

The Squeaky Wheel…

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver News, Beavers elsewhere July 16, 2010

So yesterday’s post about the uppity dogpark beavers in Alberta prompted me to write a couple letters to the media and powers that be. I actually got a response back from a local paper, which seemed like a good sign that protest to the decision to kill the beavers was brewing. They even visited our website and snagged a photo or two. Lo and behold, look at the lovely headline this morning!

Pet owners defend killer beavers

People in Red Deer, Alta., want the city to move, rather than kill, beavers that have attacked at least six dogs in an off-leash park.Media attention has led to offers from private property owners to allow the beavers to live on their land, Poth told CBC News on Thursday. Parks staff are exploring those options, but killing the beavers has not been ruled out as a worst-case scenario.

Ahhh now that’s worthy of a big beaver grin! Not to mention the delightful footage of the muskrat pretending to be a beaver for some lazy cameramen who think beavers are the size of puppies. Go CBC! (Maybe its a baby beaver?) (By itself! In broad daylight?)

On Thursday, two landowners offered space on their properties for the beavers, after reports of beaver attacking dogs at the off-leash dog park last week. “What we’re really working on right now is ensuring that the sites where we’d be relocating the beavers to are appropriate for the long-term health of the beaver and its family,” said city parks superintendent Trevor Poth.

Long term health? Your concerns shifted from ‘crushed to death’ to ‘long term health’ in an afternoon? Well I’m pretty sure that wherever you stick those beavers they’ll be better off than they would be if you killed them. But it would help to know how many you have, this ‘six to twelve’ vagueness isn’t promising. You mean your facts could be off base by 50 percent? Is that typical for your city? Just checking, but you do have actual beavers, right? Because I’m pretty sure those little swimmers on the video aren’t beavers…Come to think of it has someone actually seen a dog getting bitten by a beaver? I mean you know for a fact that we’re not talking about a coyote attack or some feral dog that got left in the park years ago whose a great swimmer and attacks in the water because its where he’s stronger? Someone’s actually seen the teethmarks and noticed their flat sharp cuts? not pointy?

“We’re a little unclear whether it’s one or more. Beaver identification is pretty challenging,” Poth said.

I really, really believe that, Mr. Poth. Here’s my guess. Assuming they’ve indeed happened, the attacks have been a yearling, that is just ‘feeling his oats’. Mom and Dad know other ways to stay out of doggie paths and if they wanted your pooches dead they’d just grab on and dive down to start holding their breath. Chasing off a big dog is full of ‘flourish’ and more like a teenager than a parent. The kits are probably not out much yet, certainly when dogs are around, since your summer is later than ours, but yearlings are protective of them. So you probably have somewhere in the vicinity of 6-8 beavers. (Mom, Dad, two yearlings, two-four new kits). Make sure you get all the kits and you don’t leave some babies orphaned. Imagine how many news stories that would get?

Beyond the misleading muskrats, the worrisome part of the video is the comment that “fencing would reduce the beavers territory”. Aside from the obvious existential observation that death would also reduce vastly their territory, there doesn’t appear to be much effort to think about the differing skill sets of the different species here. A waterline fence would keep out dogs, but not beavers, who swim just as well underneath the water. Your beavers have to deal with “natural fencing” every winter when they swim under the ice and make their way out of their lodge and to their food cache. They would be just fine with a fence, thank you very much, and it could protect their young until their large enough to do it on their own.

I’m thrilled that the city has had the sense to realize that any story with 300 media reports in 2 days is not a good place to display your stubbornness or lack of compassion. But live trapping beavers isn’t a mindless guarantee of their survival. Sherri Tippie is about 1500 miles directly south of you, but she knows more about relocating beavers than anyone on the planet. At least pick up the phone and have a conversation with her. Also you might want to figure out how many you have there, first. Beaver stake-out, anyone?

“Defending your life”

heidi08 Beaver News, Beavers elsewhere, Who's Killing Beavers Now? September 10, 2010

Obviously that was the beaver’s first mistake. It should never have protected itself or its young from the approaching dog. Now officials in Red Deer Calgary have no choice but to kill it and its entire family so that the off leash park can be left in its slathering, ruthless peace. You understand: dogs are more important than beavers, and every dog needs the liberty to chase an aquatic rodent that won’t defend itself.

City spokesman Trevor Poth says a dog was swimming in the water and chasing the beaver when the large rodent turned to defend itself. Because of the severity of the attacks, Poth says it’s necessary to trap and kill the beavers to keep park users safe.

Some weaker minded folk might feel sorry for the beaver, given that it was just protecting itself and its family, given that its summer and it has new kits to look after (well not anymore –), given that the dog was an intruder and the beaver was in its home. Ahh, but there are no second amendment rights for beavers. Like uppity slaves with pitchforks they can’t possibly be allowed to defend themselves. They’re second-class non-citizens that don’t matter. The only reason they were allowed to remain in that park in the first place is because it’s a dogpark and nobody cares about it. Now that the dog owners have been offended, their time is up. A beaver’s only option when being pursued by a dangerous attacker is to go quietly and make the sacrifice as peaceful, or as “sporty” as possible, depending on the mood of the attacker. End of story.

So some lucky trapper gets the job to take out the twelve beavers in the park, although they kindly won’t kill any newbies that replace them, at least not until they make the same egregious mistake of trying to save their own wretched lives.

That seems fair.