Beaver Thanks

heidi08 Creative Solutions November 27, 2010

From left, volunteer Frank Berlin holds a rope to a rowboat as Mike White, Andy Fyfe and Geoff Borneman secure pipes over a beaver dam along side the Bog Meadow Trail in Saratoga Springs. The volunteers are using a “beaver baffler” to try to stop flooding along the trail off Route 29. (Lori Van Buren / Times Union)

How’s THIS for the greatest Thanksgiving Beaver Story Ever Told? Leigh Hornbeck, staff writer for the Times Union wrote just about the best account of why to bother installing a Flow Device EVER. (Don’t imagine that’s just post holiday tryptophan-induced flattery, I have become somewhat of a connoisseur of beaver articles and I mean every word.)

SARATOGA SPRINGS — Knock down a beaver dam, the beavers will rebuild it. Trap and relocate the rodents and they will return. Kill the beavers, and if the eating is good, new ones will take their place. To coexist with beavers, you need to use trickery.

Ahh Leigh, what a great start to an article! You have my full attention. Obviously someone had your full attention, and explained the value of flow devices to you in a way that made sense. You listened and put those concepts together in a way that made readers could understand. You are destined for great things. (Move over Cornelia Dean at the NYT because the Leigh should be writing all the beaver articles from now on.)

Andy Fyfe, the stewardship and education coordinator for the land trust Saratoga PLAN, which owns the wetland around the city-owned trail, said he wasn’t interested in killing the beavers to fix the problem. Instead, he gathered volunteers to build a “beaver baffler.” “If you knock a hole in a dam, the beavers will patch it overnight,” Fyfe said. “But if you put a culvert inside the dam and they don’t hear running water, they won’t make the dam higher.”

Nicely put Andy! Saratoga PLAN is lucky to have you! You clearly know how to look out for your watershed and invest your time wisely. I realize they’re using the term ‘baffler’ generically, like we use the term ‘aspirin’. In truth a beaver baffler is a specific device. Still, the term is sometimes used to apply to anything that confuses a beaver, just like the term beaver deceiver is misused all the time.

Fyfe said he used blueprints created by a group of volunteers in the Finger Lakes area when beavers blocked the Cayuga Inlet and threatened a stretch of the Norfolk Southern railroad. Andy Zepp, executive director of the Finger Lakes Land Trust, said the “beaver dam drain tube” worked for a year, but then the beavers moved away. David Winchell, a spokesman for the state Department of Conservation, said he condones the idea. Trapping and removing beaver is only a temporary fix, he said.”If properly maintained, this will last longer,” Winchell said. “It’s a reasonable way for beavers and people to cohabitate in the same area while minimizing conflicts.”

‘Trapping and removing beavers is a temporary fix“. Wow. Not one. Not two, but THREE voices of wisdom including one from the DC which is almost unheard of. So Fingerlakes volunteers gave them the plans, eh? I had to try to track them down and find out who was spreading helpful advice. I found these online, which describe the device they installed for Cayuga Inlet mentioned and shows how to make something called the “beaver dam drain“.

Reading their advice you can see it comes from the Department of Conservation’s website which outlines 5 ways to use pipes to control dam height. (I should pause here to note that nothing resembling the flexible leveler, castor master or beaver deceiver is included.) In fact all the culvert fences recommended there are square or rounded, and the entire page reads more like a beaver torture museum, complete with elecro shock fences. They recommend at the very least the annual ‘harvesting’ of children so the populations don’t grow over fast.

Well, okay. You get a letter. And I’ll track down Andy and send him plans for a flexible lever just in case this doesn’t work out. In the meantime it’s STILL a great article. I love the language and the emphasis on long-term solutions. Thanks, Leigh!

Oh and if you have a free moment go check out our friends at Beavers: Wetlands & Wildlife! They just launched a smart new website, chock full of useful information (although it could use a link to a certain beaver friend in California!) Go say hi!

Beaver Thanksgiving

heidi08 Beaver Behavior November 25, 2010

i thank you God for most this amazing day

for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky

and for everything which is infinite which is yes

– e. e. cummings

I thought I would leave you with some beaver bounty this morning, (and not the bad kind). All three kits were swimming thankfully last night and at one point revealing very attractive facial profiles by sticking their chins up to the sky as far as they could reach. All is right in their world, and I wish you a day of joy and abundance in yours.

I found this image by chance two days ago and have been admiring it ever since. It is fashioned by Amy Schimler who is an illustrator and fabric designer among other things. She lives in Georgia where they are sorely in need of cute beaver images. What I love best about it (and there are alot of things to love) is the family. Clearly there are adults, yearlings and kits, mostly all doing their own thing but very communal in their activity. And those tails sticking up out of the water! Amy I think you are destined to be our very good friend!

On the left of the website you might notice that there is a gateway to the lodge-cam, with which i’m very pleased. Just click on it and go see what the beavers are doing this morning and thanks SO much Tongass National Forest for fixing it yesterday! Thank you all for your effort and support and now let the festivities begin!

Getting Thankful yet?

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions November 24, 2010

Uh-oh. Looks like we broke the dam-cam. I can’t help it I keep telling people how enormously cool it is, especially between 8:30 and 9:30 in the morning, and I guess it just got a little more bandwidth than it could handle. (Well, who hasn’t these days? ) The USFS worker who turned me onto it connected me with the techno biologist fisheries ranger who’s keeping track of it. He’s been kind enough to tell us what it would entail to operate our own and we swapped stories of what a great guy Bob Armstrong is. I just wrote him in a panic asking where my beaver pictures were and he said he’s on his way out to fix it now. Whew, we’re might get beavers back for the long holiday weekend!

Beaver people are good people!

So this should mean I offer a pithy and well-crafted post undistracted by grainy whiskered beaver images as they settle in for their morning chew and groom. Hmm. Well this morning offers another beaver piece from the Berkshire Eagle, talking about beavers flooding and chewing trees at a place called Greylock. The remarkable part of the article is that it describes a beaver deceiver fairly well,

A beaver deceiver works three ways with the first being the length of the fence making it difficult to dam the whole waterway. Second, the shape of the fence forces the beavers to dam away from the culvert, which is against their nature and third, forces the beavers to dam along the fence. This means that as the beavers dam away from the opening of the stream into the body of water gets further away, the sound of flowing water diminishes. The sound of flowing water triggers the beaver’s natural instinct to dam. If the sides of the fence are at least 12 feet long, beavers will typically not even bother to dam there. Cesan said it may be time to consider using beaver deceivers at the Glen.

You can’t tell from the article who he’s quoting about the way it works but the language is almost word for word from Mike’s DVD, except for the term ‘beaver deceiver’, which is obviously Skip Lisle’s term. See for yourself:

Maybe there’s only one way to explain a beaver deceiver? And everyone does it the same? Or maybe someone from the Berkshire Eagle educated themselves? Someone in Massachusetts has certainly been beaver management trained! And how rare is it to see an article from the commonwealth without a single reference to the inconvenient trapping laws?

The one thing the article DOESN’T do is mention the obvious fact that regardless of how many beaver deceivers you install, it’s not going to protect your trees, which should be wrapped with wire or painted with sand. Oh well, you gave a nudge for beaver mercy, let us know when you’re ready to finish the race!

Beaver Moon is Blue Moon

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Educational, Environmental November 23, 2010

Apparently the full Beaver Moon we just had was also a Blue Moon, because it is the fourth full moon in a season.I wish I had known, I always like to do something once in a blue moon! I just know it was traffic stopping rising up behind Mt. Diablo on my way home. It is of course traditionally the reminder for all good sportsmen and landowners to head out and set their traps before the great freeze. Sniff. I like to imagine it as something kinder, maybe the bright light that allows beavers to gather their winter food in the dark, or a reminder to us that the holiday season is upon us and it’s time to get “busy as a – ‘.

The good news is that it allowed Jon to see dad and a kit coming down stream under the tile bridge this morning with branches. We’re happy for the sighting because we had not spotted our father beaver since September 8th. We’ve been trying vainly to figure out the family structure and wondering if the loss of mom from the colony will mean it separates or drifts apart. Dad and GQ seem to be living pretty separate lives, which suggests to me that GQ is a male. The kits seem to have divided up between the two, although they all interact every night and seem to get along fine. It’s hard to know what the loss of a matriarch means for a colony, but I’m sure no one has observed it more closely than Martinez, so we’ll keep watching.

At the very least the sighting means that our beavers are feeding upstream, which is good because there’s plenty of habitat springing back to life around starbucks. The graphic above is from the Atlantic Monthly, but I thought I’d make my own.

A Mixed Blessing

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Who's Killing Beavers Now? November 22, 2010

Elizabeth Lee wrote an article this weekend that was not quite advocacy, not quite pragmatism, not quite derision. She begins by talking about the flooded swamp in New York that the beavers used to maintain, allowing families to iceskate through the trees when it froze. She notes, almost incidentally, that even though it has no beavers anymore it still provides excellent birding.

In the Webb Royce Swamp in Essex there were beavers that kept the swamp flooded until the 1990s. Local families ice-skated among the trees that remained standing and the hummocks that bulged from under the snow. In recent years, the beavers moved out. Stories vary as to how and why. Now the swamp is dry except for rainfall. The birding is still excellent and the groundcover is habitat for a new mix of plants and animals.

She then goes on to talk about a very humane neighbor who was forced to shoot a beaver whose dam was flooding his property. He had apparently tried trapping but it was just ‘too big’. I guess this very ‘humane’ neighbor didn’t know that it was very unlikely that this monster-beaver was living alone, so even if Papa was shot the other beavers would still tend the dam. Elizabeth then rounds off the article with a hearty discussion of how much beaver pelts go for at auction and how the castoreum sells well also.

One gets the feeling, reading this article, that Elizabeth thinks beavers benefit the land once they leave it and that its useful to have places where they once were. Okay. I don’t disagree with that. But you know what else is useful? Having places where they are RIGHT NOW!!! I wrote her about the documented effect on bird and fish populations near beaver dams and I wrote her that any article that spends three paragraphs on the subject of trapping should devote at least a sentence to the benefit and technology of flow devices: the only long-term solution to beaver problems.

One thing her article taught me that I didn’t know? One of the buyers for castoreum is Phillip Morris, who uses it as a flavoring agent in cigarettes.

Perfect.