Month: September 2010

Beavers in Sonoma!

heidi08 Burrowing Owls, City Reports, Educational, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers September 15, 2010

Our good friend Susan Kirks writes the following about Cheryl’s recent Sonoma re-discovery. (Go click on the link please so she gets full credit for her smart work.) Turns out that Sonoma is well aware of these beavers, and wants to take this chance to learn more about the animals. Tom Rusert of Birding Sonoma Valley (who just did an amazing job helping raise awareness with the Burrowing Owl Consortium that is near and dear to our friend Scott’s Artis heart) is working on this years Valley of the Moon Nature lectures and is interested in having me to come talk about beavers. He knows Cheryl because he sometimes picks up extra birds from IBRRC, and is very excited to teach about the relationship between birds and beavers! Think for just a moment about the important connections these beavers are making in the world….Susan-Scott-Tom-Cheryl…I’m thinking that’s the best way to encourage new advocates for these Sonoma beavers is to talk first hand about their impact on our urban creek. I’d be thrilled to do a little wine country, Jack-London trip that benefits all our friends. (No sacrifice too great…) Speaking of which my parents were having lunch in Calistoga last year, wearing their Worth A Dam shirts and met two other people wearing the same shirt! Small world about to get smaller!

Beavers in Sonoma!

by Open.Spaces

While we in Petaluma await in-depth information regarding the recent Petaluma River oil spill and cleanup, there’s good news to report about fresh water happenings in nearby Sonoma.

Cheryl Reynolds of the Martinez Beavers protection nonprofit, Worth a Dam, recently visited Sonoma, following up on beaver dams she’d observed a couple of years ago. She discovered 3 dams in Sonoma Creek, constructed by the efficient beaver engineers.

The Sonoma Beavers are using both rocks and sticks to build their dams.

Unlike human constructed impervious dams, some benefits of the naturally engineered beaver dam include creation of wetlands through natural water backup, supporting key habitat for other species, and slow filtering through the wetlands of environmental contaminants (Wild Neighbors, John Hadidian, Humane Society of the United States 2007).

Experience of the Martinez Beavers group in installing a water flow control device in Alhambra Creek awaits if ever needed in Sonoma Creek. Meanwhile, the Beaver, an herbivore eating mostly bark, twigs, roots, leaves and aquatic plants (Natl. Geographic), is busy as can be in Sonoma.

Thanks so much Susan for your beautiful nod to flow devices. Well timed! We appreciate your steady friendship more than we can say!

As if all that isn’t exciting enough, I heard yesterday from Bob Cellini that they are planning the mom memorial installation for Thursday at ten. The Contra Costa Times and Gazette are coming to photograph and Paul Craig’s lovely metal beavers will soon grace the sheetpile. We are thrilled about the development, and you’ll just have to go see it for yourself soon.

Apparently, we can wear ‘Nutria’ now…

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, In the News, New Species September 14, 2010

A fur that’s politically correct and even ecology-friendly to wear? Is such a thing possible?

Nutria is the animal most often mistaken for beaver. They are aquatic mammals who eat grasses and dig holes and produce large litters several times a year. They were ostensibly brought in from South America, where they were native, intended to feed a hungry fur trade industry that mostly petered out. Nutria means ‘otter’ in spanish,so it was a smart way to sell the fur – but they are very different creatures. Now people hate nutria. I have even heard them classified as a ‘negative keystone species’ because of their impact on the watershed. Lucky for us since environmentalists tell us they are bad, t his article brings the good news that we are welcome to kill them and use their fur!

Oscar de la Renta, Michael Kors, Patrik Ervell and Gilles Mendel are among the designers who might be described as nuts for nutria fur. … the Coastwide Nutria Control Program was introduced in 2002. Managed by the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries and funded with federal dollars, the program is currently paying $5 for each nutria tail turned in to the program, enabling coastal trappers — many of them survivors of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita — to make a living.

Isn’t that nice? Hurricane victims (and gulf coast survivors) can make money trapping rodents and you can wear them! Apparently nutria are all the rage in China. And, since synthetic fur is a petroleum product, this is better for the planet!

Lots of coastal trappers are earning money through the Coastwide Nutria Control Program,” Edmond Mouton, biologist and program manager for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, told TODAYshow.com. “We took in about 300,000 tails in the years before Katrina and Rita. Post Katrina and Rita, it dropped a bit because of the impact of the storms, but this is a fairly resilient group of people. In the past year, they set a record of 445,963 tails.After the state takes the tail, the trappers can then sell the pelts for additional income. “A lot of the fur is shipped to China and used in the Russian and Eastern European markets to make hats and coats — medium-price type garments,” Mouton explained. “They get $1 to $1.50, sometimes $2 per pelt, depending on the quality.”

Just in case all that didn’t make you feel good enough about wearing fur, there’s Keith Kaplan (newly appointed head of the we-love-fur club) (FICA) to tell us that wearing nutria is good for the environment. Trapping helps animals! Just look at Maryland! Ever since those darned bunny-huggers outlawed trapping beaver the evil critters have eaten all their trees. Now people want trees back and want trapping back! One can only rejoice that this evil menace will soon be off the waterways for good. Look at this horrific footage if you dare!

On the local (non-sarcastic) front, Worth A Dam’s artists FRO and Randy presented at the school board last night and were well received. The mural looks excellent on display and FRO sends the following summary;

Randy and I took turns talking about the “slides” and had a good – enthusiastic presentation. We expressed our knowledge of the keystone and the importance of the Beaver as a Keystone species. We also expressed the importance of educating our children; who now seem to be educating the Martinez mucky mucks and have changed the hearts and minds of some important city figures. Strange what we can learn from the younger generation. F

Mancrush?

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, Who's Killing Beavers Now? February 8, 2021

Johnny, a licensed trapper, walks down a street in Scarborough with some of the tools of his trade. The tools he is carrying are for breaking up beaver damns and digging after animals.

That’s the ‘critter-getter’ Johnny walking away in Carlos Ososrio’s Toronto Star photo. Look at that manly trap-setting profile and the way the ‘traffic orange’ sets off his biceps. Johnny won’t show his face or give his last name to keep the ‘nutbars’ from finding him. (His word, not mine. It’s possible he means us.) The Star-ry-eyed reporter Carola Vyhnak, appears to have a mancrush of her very own. She describes the critter-getter with the awed, breathless language usually reserved for tales of French heroes rescuing Jews during the holocaust.

He is one of the most loathed people in southern Ontario. He’s been threatened with bodily harm and property damage. He works in secrecy and under cover of darkness.

and then goes on to say

But don’t jump to judge the tall, fit outdoorsman with more than 30 years of hunting, trapping and “dispatching” under his belt.

Is it just me or do you get the feeling that Carola is chewing on the end of her pencil speculating about something else that might be under Johnny’s belt? Well, there’s time for all that later. Right now there are trappers to extoll and beavers to kill! Hard working sportsmen driven to near-financial ruin by the crazy bunny-huggers and bleeding hearts. Like you.

It’s humans who are usually to blame when he has to pull the trigger, he says, touching tiny replicas of the tools of his trade — a rifle and leg hold trap hanging on thin gold chains around his neck.

Did you get that? While he’s flexing his manly frame for the cameraman he’s also stroking a tiny gold rifle and leg hold trap on a necklace just to show the interviewer, I suppose, that while Johnny knows how to handle the big game he can also use his fingers for more delicate operations — in case she was interested. Which apparently she was. (Are there really jewelry shops that sell gold leg hold traps? Should we add one to the keystone species charm bracelet?)

“Do I get joy out of going out and whacking animals? No. But the critters are going to keep coming and people are going to keep messing with them. It’s not the animal’s fault. But most times, the animal pays the price.”

He goes on to sagely opine that people ‘mess with them’ by unintentionally providing the three things animals need, food, water or shelter. Since it’s unlikely living humans will ever stop messing with them in this way, his career is made for life. Only one thing can keep this grimly reaping entrepreneur from earning his alimony and boat payments: the rising tide of public opinion. Just look at what happened to Massachusetts. The crazy PETA-fairies start calling their friends to outlaw trapping and now they have to catch beavers with a suitcase! Goodness knows there are no other ways to solve animal problems besides trapping. It’s not like any one else on the entire planet makes a successful career over animal exclusion or the installation of flow devices.

He fumes about two recent high-profile cases, one involving “Neville” the coyote that killed a small dog in the Beach last year, the other in Oshawa where a colony of beavers is causing a potential flooding problem. In both instances, he believes city officials should have let him “trap and dispatch them legally, quickly and humanely: problem solved.”

Ahh, the noble hero just trying to do his job to make the world safe for small dogs and subdivisions. Johnny has his work cut out for him. The animals are drawn to the wasteful humans and since animals are incapable of being discouraged by any other means his only tool is extermination. It’s a dirty job but somebody has to do it. It’s all he knows. (I really, really believe that.) These trappers try their best against impossible odds. (I just read that the mother of the beaver-saving teen in Comox Valley was contacted by a trapper who assured her that conibear traps are very humane. He knows they kill beavers instantly because otherwise their teeth would be worn down from chewing on the metal underwater, and did she perhaps want to come look at the beavers in his freezer? She foolishly declined but hmm…Add a vodka tonic to the invitation and maybe Carola would be interested?) Our hero Johnny is not worried about those animals. It’s the other animals that trouble him. The damn compassionISTAS who go around on two legs trying to find alternatives to trapping. These are the ones that must be eliminated.

Johnny grew up in a family that has trapped for generations. “It’s all I know. It’s what I am,” he says, Johnny, a licensed trapper, walks down a street in Scarborough with some of the tools of his trade. The tools he is carrying are for breaking up beaver damns and digging after animals.claiming a preference for “the big guys, the dangerous ones.” But he maintains he loves all creatures, especially coyotes — “the smartest animal in Ontario” — and can spend hours watching white-tailed deer.

There’s nothing I enjoy more than a good read about how much trappers love wildlife. Get me another cup of coffee so I can savor it again! Thanks for a lovely story and I think some where in Canada there’s a muddy reporter and a ink-stained trapper that should be leaning back and smoking a cigarette about now.

Keeping Promises

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, Recent Sightings, Who's Killing Beavers Now? September 12, 2010

I promised I would offer Cheryl’s adorable otter picture from Friday night, when he snorted at her and demanded she leave the area in his “I’m an otter” manner. Look at the teeth on that charmer and tell me he isn’t eating well! With our kits long past danger-size its easier to just enjoy this unexpected visitor. Lots of water movement. Lots of noisy eating and satisfied crunching. Otters are fully prepared to enjoy everything they do — and you just ruin it. They make sure you know.

Let’s see what else. Well, the city of Oshawa promised their beaver-saving residents they’d find a non-lethal solution. They pointedly ignored the names and suggestions of every single professional we sent them and went back to the same environmental firm that said killing them was the best option in the first place. Then they awarded them a contract of 60,000 dollars to do a few tweaks and monitor the situation. 60,000 dollars! You could bring Skip, Mike and Sherri in dancing costumes for that kind of money! (Hmmm…that sounds kinda fun. Next years festival?) The paper is calling it a ‘temporary solution’ which it may well be. (I of course wrote and asked if they used the same headline when they recommended trapping, which is also a ‘temporary solution’.)

Oh and the council did keep their promise and try to find out the gender of the beaver that was ‘accidentally’ trapped after the trapping had been halted. Guess what they learned? The trapper, a seasoned and pragmatic animal culler with years of experience, told them that “you couldn’t know the sex because beaver sex parts are all on the inside.” No, I’m not kidding. (Mind you, I’m fairly certain that delicate condition describes half of any species ever discovered). He means of course that even male beavers have no external sex characteristics. They do have a different anatomical structure but it takes a moment (and an ounce of training) to identify and by then the body was already tossed in the incinerator and he was off for his next job. For the record, I am wholly certain that sexual organs would be of no use to any species whatsoever if they all remained inside…just saying.

Which brings us to Riga, Latvia where the city kept its promise to hold a ‘contest’ to solve the pesky beaver problem which gave them an excuse to let maintenance slag while tires and crates clog up their culverts. It rained a massive amount a while back and now their streets and parks are flooded and of course its the beavers fault. Go watch the video and tell me whether you think a few beaver dams created that problem. Apparently 90% percent of the population thinks they did, which was obviously the point of this machiavellian delay. One article says that the items seen here, ripped from a culvert were “used by beavers in their dam making”. (Ahh many’s the morning I’ve watched mom and dad beaver painstakingly laying tires on the dam. I just start to worry when they take them directly off the cars.)

Now before we in Martinez get full of righteous indignation at those Northern European Neanderthals, I must keep my other promise, which was to talk about sheetpile and what I learned from Alex’s Riga photos. The city park has a series of canals that are lined with sheetpile for stability. Alex sent some lovely pictures for us to ponder including this one:

Click on the picture to see it larger. Look at those lovely manicured banks. Gosh, I would like to go there. Look at that even line along the waters edge. It almost makes the sheetpile invisible. I wish our sheetpile ended at the waterline like that. Wait a minute. Wait just a worthadam minute! Why doesn’t it? Why on earth does the sheetpile wall in Martinez continue 8 feet up the bank? Um, because of the beavers? Nope. Beavers only dig holes they started under the waterline, not into the bank like badgers. Are you sure about that? I mean they are pretty darn destructive. Yes I am sure. When beavers dig their massive caverns under the ground they enter from below the water line. Look it up.

So what’s all that sheetpile there for? Why is their concrete poured behind it? Why doesn’t ours end at the water or a foot above it (to account for tides) like Riga’s? Why isn’t it like the historic sheetpile wa ll at the waterline Worth A Dam discovered in historical photos? Because, dear readers, the sheetpile wall was never put there to stop beaver damage. It was put there to stop water damage. So that in the high flow months, when water pours down the gutters and streets and floods the creek like it did last winter (when the beaver lodge was completely under water), it won’t erode the bank and cause damage to the property. This is what the city of Martinez promised to do way back when they made creek businesses pay a special assessment into the flood abatement project 10 years ago. This is what Martinez ran out of money for by the time they got to Escobar Street. This is what that particular property owner always resented and why he wanted meeting after meeting about the beavers. And this is how the beavers gave them all an excuse to solve the problem once and for all.

(Beavers change things. It’s what they do.)

So we get 8 feet of sheetpile, lose half a million dollars, turn one of our most visible and visited stretches of creek into a scene from “cannery row” and the floods are averted.

I guess cities do keep promises – just not in the way you’d expect.

Who’s Killing Beavers Now?

heidi08 Uncategorized September 11, 2010

I’ve been bombarded in the past 24 hours with dire beaver stories, which prompted me to add the new feature to the website. Click on the icon in the left margin to find the ‘beaver-killing story du jour. I will try to add email addresses to the pdf so its easy to contact key players. I went through and tagged articles I’ve written for similar stories, and added them to the “series” articles. I’ve only made through two years so far, but I’m pretty happy with how it came out. I like the idea that foolish decisions get to be featured, and that there is a simpler way to show that these bad decisions are as common and unoriginal as dirt.

Today’s issue is about Comox Valley in Vancouver Island, BC. A family has been told that the ministry of the environment is sending a trapper to kill the beavers on their pond. One would think that one controls the residents of one’s own pond, but obviously the dam threatens the road which makes it government business. The human residents share our peculiar strain of thought that killing beavers is a bad idea, drowning them is a worse idea, and wouldn’t it be nice if there were another solution? They started a facebook page on thursday, that has about 650 members now. Go join them and add your support.

I have sent articles about the benefit of beaver and how to manage their constructions and I sure hope their job is easier because of it. The remarkable thing is that the driving force on this, Joey Clarkson, wrote yesterday that they might be able to save the beavers in her pond, but she was really thinking about ALL the beavers in Canada, and changing the way the MOE dealt with them forever. GO JOEY!!!! The article says she is considering trapping and sterilizing the beavers which we hope she reads a little and rethinks that position, but the first instinct, slow down, think about this and don’t be cruel, is spot on.

Sadly, not every story is as encouraging as Joey’s. Take, for example, the story of the Riga Canal Beavers. They announced last year that they had a huge beaver problem but wanted to avoid looking murderous to the voters so decided to hold a contest to solve it — (or rather to NOT solve it). (I always suspected that the silliest idea would get implemented and then they would wipe their hands and say “well we tried but it didn’t work! Guess we have to kill them.”) Remember our friend Alex traveled from Frankfurt to Latvia, toured the area, had lunch with the Minister of the Environment and hand delivered instructions on how to manage beaver conflicts humanely from Sharon Brown of Beavers:Wetlands & Wildlife? What do you suppose the ending to the story is?

FAIRY DUST!

Well, spruce dust actually. They’ve decided to sprinkle it on the banks to make the bad beavers go away. No I’m not kidding. The article’s in Latvian, but google translator gives us this. Lets hope there’s plenty of people to clap and think ‘happy thoughts’ because that intervention is beyond doomed. Hmm. Maybe those are the ‘happy thoughts’ they’re relying on. It seems to be a city standard: try an ostentatious and ineffective humane solution, and then say, well I guess there’s nothing else we can do…”

“We tried saving the beavers humanely by wrapping the trees in cellophane and hello kitty dolls, but it just didn’t work!”

Thank you so much, Alex, for trying to offer a real solution, and for offering final proof to all of us back home that the contest was bogus. You did a beautiful thing for beavers and sent a message of responsible stewardship across the globe – even if it was unheard. Also you showed me something new about sheetpile, which completely blew my mind and is worth its own post tomorrow.

The little otter was seen again last night, (you won’t believe Cheryl’s picture), two kits up stream, and the smallest one and GQ downstream. The beavers made sure there were no more strawberries. Our favorite part was GQ lumbering out onto the dam and scrounging around in the dark for them. That is one big beaver! Just as we were getting ready to leave I head the distinctive low hoot-hoot-hoot of a female great horned owl so we scrounged about to find sign of her. Like most birds of prey the female is larger, so her voice is lower. Often you hear them in pairs, with a higher call answering as they roam about keeping track of eachother. This had no partner. We found her sitting in the tree behind the red tiled apartments on Escobar. She flew silently into the very tall deodora redwood across from the dam and was hooting there when we left at 8:15.