Month: July 2010

Groundhog Day for Beavers

heidi08 City Reports July 9, 2010

Ahhh the endless loop. The möbius strip of reasons for getting rid of beavers. Not nearly as much fun as this:

Last week the press reported that the beavers in Sammamish State Park in Washington had to go. The story was that they had burrowed under the road and the asphalt was collapsing. (Asphalt is to modern society what Gold was once to the 49ers: Nothing matters more.) I followed up with a letter about the value of beavers to the watershed and the tools for effective beaver management. I also pointed out that being just outside Kings County they could open their front door and find 10 professionals easily that could tell them how to solve this problem without trapping.

This morning I read that its not the burrowing, but the hazardous hardship to salmon that warrants beaver removal.

Kerry Ritland said that’s not the worst of it. “The fish can’t possibly jump over that dam or make it through a hole. So, it’s a full fish passage barrier for Coho salmon primarily, possibly Chinook salmon,” said Ritland.

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This is a picture of a salmon jumping a beaver dam. Which they do. It was taken by Dr. Kristina M. Ramstad who gave permission for its publication on Wikipedia. Obviously, we used to have millions more salmon and at the same time millions more beavers. The two species co-evolved, which could never have happened if beaver dams were harmful to salmon. In fact, since salmon benefit enormously from beaver dams during two phases of their development, it looks like the two species are going to have to co-recover. Of course the ‘salmon argument’ doesn’t have anything to do with reality. Its a symbolic argument intended to provide environmental cover for the person who wants said beavers gone. Just use the search function on this website to see examples in Canada, Oregon, Washington and Martinez. It’s “see I care about nature” paper mache, designed to cloak the intolerance in compassion.{/column2} It’s right next to the “they’ll hurt the trees” argument, because its ostensibly protecting one living thing by removing another. Never mind that both these living things depend on beavers to build and maintain their dams.

So Kerry Ritland gets a letter. The reporter at Fox gets a letter. The reporter at Kings 5 gets a letter. But I’m not holding my breath. Issaquah just did this a month ago with some beavers that were buiding too high a dam in Laughing Jacobs Creek. Clearly strapped cities that can’t afford crossing guards or hot lunches always have enough money to pay city workers to uselessly tear down a dam and ultimately hire a trapper to kill a few beavers.

Oh, and did you notice our new updated logo in the left hand corner at the top which reflects mom’s tail? Beaver-friend Jean Matuska updated the header, which if you can’t see yet, will show just as soon as your cache clears, I promise. Thanks Jean! We are grateful for the help.

Both Sides Now

heidi08 Educational, Environmental July 8, 2010

Last night’s very high tide had the curious effect of making the water level downstream about 8 inches higher than the water level upstream. The flow device was working in reverse, pumping water upstream even though the dam hadn’t been crested. Maybe the beavers were, for a moment, grateful for the pipe and its installation. “That was so nice of you to bring us more water! We really appreciate it!”. I suppose the pipe could have been fitted with a ‘one way door’ so that the water could only push out and never push in, but then they wouldn’t get the benefit of the tide and we wouldn’t have had our waterslide otter to enjoy.

It was a strange, vertigo feeling though, to sit at the dam and see the perspective reversed. The hole under the platform was trickling water too, obviously all the mudding and labor had plugged up the big holes but some little gaps remained at the top, and the high water found them and pushed through the cracks. The water exchange is good for the beavers and the fish – a little fresh salty water to replace and mix with the pond.

Three babies and the yearling were seen, as well as the green heron, a swimming pond turtle, and a massive leaping fish.

The treat of the day is Mark Twain’s previously unpublished essay on “the interview” on the NewsHour. If you haven’t read it, go here for a delight of beaver proportions. He cleverly compares the interview-er to a cyclone. (Once you’ve had your first bad moment with the press you will understand why.)

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{/column1}{column2} “Concerning The Interview”

No one likes to be interviewed, and yet no one likes to say no; for interviewers are courteous and gentle-mannered, even when they come to destroy. I must not be understood to mean that they ever come consciously to destroy or are aware afterward that they have destroyed; no, I think their attitude is more that of the cyclone, which comes with the gracious purpose of cooling off a sweltering village, and is not aware, afterward, that it has done that village anything but a favor. The interviewer scatters you all over creation, but he does not conceive that you can look upon that as a disadvantage. People who blame a cyclone, do it because they do not reflect that compact masses are not a cyclone’s idea of symmetry. People who find fault with the interviewer, do it because they do not reflect that he is but a cyclone, after all, though disguised in the image of God, like the rest of us; that he is not conscious of harm even when he is dusting a continent with your remains, but only thinks he is making things pleasant for you; and that therefore the just way to judge him is by his intentions, not his works. {/column2}

See numbers 4 & 5 in my “Advice for Advocates“

Assorted Goodness

heidi08 Beaver News, Beavers, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, Environmental July 7, 2010

:Yesterday beaver-friend Joe Eaton published a column in the Berkeley Daily Planet that was the very best memorial article yet written about mom beaver. (And I say that as somewhat of a connoisseur.) Go read the entire, painfully comforting piece.. A small taste of what awaits you follows,

Mom, as she was generally known, was thought to be about six years old. (The longevity record for a North American beaver, according to the Animal Ageing and Longevity Database genomics.senescence.info/species, is just over 23 years.) Recognizable by a distinctive notch in the side of her tail, she had been observed in the Alhambra watershed before she paired with her mate and got down to the business of dam construction in the fall of 2006.

I first connected with Joe when he was writing an article on the Martinez Beavers for the San Francisco Estuary Partnership Newsletter. That article has always been one of my favorites as he is the only reporter who included my oft-repeated quote ‘Any city that’s smarter than a beaver can keep a beaver’. We met at the Creek Seeker’s Express last year. I am heartened by his thoughtful attention to wildlife, but even more by his knowledge base and effort to connect with experts and references. His article on the mink last year was a thing of beauty. He concluded yesterday with,

In her short but prolific span, the female beaver was an effective good-will ambassador for her species. The Martinez family, just by being beavers, did a lot to enhance consciousness of the beaver’s role as an ecosystem engineer. Public support forced city officials to back off from an initial plan for lethal control and to work out a modus vivendi with the rodents. What happens now? Will the two-year-old sibling stay on as a parent-surrogate? Will the widowed male mate again? Will one of the dispersers return? Stay tuned.

More good news? The Director of the Montana Zoo wrote me back yesterday and is excited about taking the opportunity presented by the orphan baby beavers to teach about the value of beavers in the watershed and educate the public about effective and humane beaver management. I put her in touch with Mike Callahan who offered to help in any long-distance way he could and showed her the successes we have had using art projects to educate children about beavers. I also offered my children’s beaver powerpoint and several helpful articles. Looks like Montana is going to have a little beaver-teachable moment.

And the final piece of good news? Ahh I’ve been saving the best for last. A while back I wrote about NOAA’s March draft of the 2010 “Recovery Plan for the Evolutionary Unit Of Central California Coast Coho Salmon“. The document outlines policies and procedures for helping the suffering salmon population. Guess what it doesn’t mention? At all? I’ll wait. Honestly, beavers are such an unpopular solution that saying they can help the fish population is like discovering you can cure impotence with feminism. “Really? Isn’t there another way?” The unwanted answer hardly recruits followers.

Still, the document is a ‘draft’ so they are still accepting comments, and a host of very smart minds have written back about the missing piece of the puzzle. Last night I read the comments of a certain prominent beaver-salmon researcher who can remain nameless. The whole thing was an exhaustively sourced thesis that makes my meager endorsement seem silly. I don’t have permission to quote but my favorite part is something like “Given that salmon depend on beaver ponds for two stages of their development, we will need the beaver population to recover before the salmon can.“

Swear to God.

Be still my heart. Wow! We are inching towards the promised land where salmon people and beaver people have actual conversations and listen to each other and where commenting aloud that ‘beaver dams hurt salmon populations’ is a punchline that makes everyone in the room burst out laughing. I’m waiting for the day where every time a city or property-owner decides to kill some beavers they have to pay a salmon-tax and face the consequences of their destruction of habitat.

Fingers crossed. I’ll keep you posted.

Montana Zoobeavers

heidi08 kits July 6, 2010

BILLINGS – This week ZooMontana welcomes two more animals to its family. Zoo keepers are calling these two month old beavers “Xena” and “Hercules,” although, they tell us they may be holding a contest to find official names for the babies. Story is the beavers were orphaned when their mother died in a dam building accident. The animals are in quarantine right now, but will be debuted for the public at Zoo-Fari on July 24

kulr8

A Dam-building accident? Really? Was mom using a crane to lift heavy steel-girders into place and one just slipped and suddenly orphaned her children? Did she accidentally fall on a long sharpened branch and impale herself? Or maybe there was a washout and she drowned? Hmm. I bet this is this the kind of ‘dam accident’ where the property owners hated beavers, destroyed the dam, and waited until they came to fix it that night before shooting everything furry they could see. The exterminating-hero(es) didn’t realize there were kits in the lodge until they came out whining and hungry. I guess that’s a kind of accident. I was thinking about the zoo’s assumption that these were ‘orphans’ given the fact our dad and 2-year old are caring for the kits now, but then I realized that the accident-causer(s) probably shot enough beavers to be certain they were ‘orphans’.

Ahhh, reminds me of the old favorite tune; “I still miss you honey, but my aim is getting better!”

Good luck, Montana. Hey, I have an idea. Why not use the interest in these adorable fuzzballs to teach visitors about the value of beaver in the watershed and to educate about the solutions to common beaver problems? Wouldn’t that be a great way to honor your ‘orphans’? Meanwhile, our logo designer, Kiriko Moth, offers this lovely update to our logo in mom’s honor. It;s very fitting, don’t you think?

Guardian

heidi08 kits July 5, 2010

Photo: Cheryl Reynolds

Last night Worth A Dam kept an eye on our beavers while all the world was watching brightly colored explosions and some of its inhabitants were making rather noisy explosions of their own. After the first big bang at the bridge the bi-yearling seemed to make a decision that he wasn’t going over that dam until things got quieter. He carried large branches into the lodge so the kits would feed inside and we didn’t see much of them for the duration of the night. At one point he sat motionless in the water, watching the bank to see if there was trouble. Whale-watchers call that behavior ‘logging’ but we had never seen it in our beavers. Clearly he knew tonight was different.

Necropsy results received from UC Davis via Lindsay last night indicate the following conditions present in Mom beaver:

1. Meningoencephalitis, (inflammation of the layers protecting the brain and the brain), associated with amoeba or protozoans
2. Pneumonia
3. Malocclusion and secondary gingivitis, (due to the broken upper tooth)
4. Conjunctivitis grossly, but only mild to moderate.inflammation on histology

Conversations with our vet friends have suggested that the infections could all have been triggered by the broken tooth and spread from there. We will keep asking and trying to understand the sequence. For now it means that she was dealing with a host of problems, and we are again awed that she was able to bring three healthy kits into the world.

When we left last night at 11 things had calmed down and the steady stream of cars had cleared from downtown. Two cautious kits made their silent paddle around the pond to get branches on their own. All the appreciative people, all the families with children, all the defiant teens and all the angry drunks went homeward. We wished the beavers a happy independence day and left them to their privacy.

If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year.
Do you suppose,” the Walrus said,
“That they could get it clear?”
“I doubt it,” said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.

Lewis Carrol

I haven’t posted about the trauma in the gulf lately not because it isn’t ongoing, and not because it isn’t continually horrific beyond anything we can possibly imagine but because we’ve had a singular focus lately for obvious reasons. This video caught my attention today and just had to be posted. Dr. Pincetich used to work for SPAWN. I tracked him down last year and we exhanged information about the positive relationship between beavers and salmon. He even invited me to come to a watershed training he was doing at Samuel Taylor and say a few words about beavers. SPAWN will be at the beaver festival this year, but Dr. Pincetich has moved onto to studying turtles. Wow, some timing. He has pretty alarming things to say about Corexit. I particularly like his language about ‘turning a two dimensional problem into a three dimensional problem.’