Our Beavers of Guadalupe?

heidi08 Beaver News, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Environmental November 11, 2010

The Guadelupe River takes its short jaunt from the headwaters in Santa Cruz to its outlet in the San Francisco Bay, winding its way through the heart of San Jose. It is surrounded by many parks, and trails, including Almaden winery. It was once important to the gold mining trade and like all such rivers is now burdened with more than its fair share of mercury from those days. The entire 3 mile downtown stretch, from Interstate 280 to Interstate 880, is part of the Guadalupe River Park and Gardens, one of the largest urban parks currently in development in the United States. Also, the Guadalupe River Trail runs along 11 miles (18 km) of the river bank.

What does this have to do with beavers you ask? Nothing yet.

Leslee Hamilton is the executive director of the Guadalupe River Park Conservancy. She attended Saturday’s creek conference and was very excited by the talks about beavers. She immediately wondered whether beavers could play a role in the Guadalupe system, augmenting water flows, restoring wildlife and serving as a teaching focus for children’s watershed education and stewardship.

Yesterday we scheduled a ‘chat’ about beavers, which turned into a conference call with Rangers and interested biologists. There are no beavers currently in the Guadalupe, they assured me. And relocation is illegal in California. Could they go about getting a scientific permit to do a specific project locally? What kind of habitat would support them best? What tools are useful for beaver management? How do beaver populations grow? How have we involved children’s education with our beavers? What have we noticed in our watershed since the beavers came?

Quite the conversation. Silicon Valley Beavers? It’s possibleReader JR points out that the Dell graphic must be a mistake since beavers are so fond of ‘apples’.

Beaver ASCII

heidi08 Beaver Art November 10, 2010

There are few things more iconic than an ASCII signature for a wildlife advocate. You may not know the reference but you’ve all seen one. Even the ubiquitous colon and bracket smile is one. Wikipedia says:

ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters (beyond the 128 characters of standard 7-bit ASCII). The term is also loosely used to refer to text based art in general. ASCII art can be created with any text editor, and is often used with free-form languages. Most examples of ASCII art require a fixed-width font (non-proportional fonts, as on a traditional typewriter) such as Courier for presentation.

So I’ve seen signatures with ASCII owls and ASCII mountains and recently received an ASCII steelhead and I was just wondering if there were any ASCII beavers out there…see for your self. The three letters at the corner are the initials of the artist.

       .-"""-.__     ltb
      /      ' o'\
   ,-;  '.  :   _c
  :_."\._ ) ::-"
         ""m "m

Excellent start! I’d like the tail to be a little bigger though. Obviously this is a kit.

           .="   "=._.---.
         ."         c ' Y'`p
        /   ,       `.  w_/
    jgs |   '-.   /     /
  _,..._|      )_-\ \_=.\
 `-....-'`------)))`=-'"`'"

I love that nose, eye and ear placement. The accuracy is better than at least half the photos you see of ‘beavers’ on google….since they’re mostly nutria anyway.

                   |     |
                   |     |
                   |    .|
               ____|    .|
             .' .  ).   ,'
           .' c   '7 ) (
       _.-"       |.'   `.
     .'           "8E    |
     |          _}""     |
     |         (   |     |
    .'         )   |     |
.odCG8o_.---.__8E  |    .|
`Y8MMP""       ""  `-...-'   cgmm

But of course this is the blue-ribbon winner. A beaver chewing down a tree! What ambition! Smart work, although the tail is still too small, and if you’re going to fill it with random letters why not spell out BEAVER???

Well, its obviously an artform that takes a certain amount of faith, because the individual lines don’t always look like much but the whole picture usually does. These were borrowed from Chris Johnson’s Website where you can find literally every animal, object, concept, feature or plant imagined. My favorite has to be the Egyptian Ibis which is just lovely. A special treat is the Castle section which will completely blow you away. There are tutorials on how to develop this art yourself and I’m hoping some creative soul with time on their hands will look into adapting our logo. Wouldn’t that make an excellent signature?

All’s Well that Begins Well…

heidi08 Beaver News, Beavers elsewhere, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, City Reports, Creative Solutions November 9, 2010

One of the beavers is seen recently at Griff Creek munching on a branch.

North Tahoe officials: Human beings, beavers can peacefully co-exist

Matt Renda Sierra Sun

KINGS BEACH, Calif. — Human beings and beavers can peacefully co-exist, Tahoe wildlife advocates said during a recent community forum, and Placer County officials agreed, vowing to explore alternatives to hunting and killing the animals. Co-existence is especially practical since the recent advent of many Tahoe-based water flow control devices and techniques which successfully manage flooding hazards and damage to property associated with beavers and their dam building.

Now isn’t that a great beginning to an article? The news out of Kings Beach affirms the report of our own Lory Bruno who attended the meeting in person. Apparently there is broad support for humanely maintaining the beavers the ‘next time’ they come to town. Honestly if we keep having success stories like this I pledge to start a new section on the website called “Who’s saving beavers now?”.

The primary solution for the specific problem at Griff Creek consists of installing a Flexible Pond Leveler, Millham said, a water flow control device designed to ensure the water of the beaver-created pond will not reach flood levels that could potentially create a driving hazard on a nearby section of Highway 28.

The Flexible Pond Leveler — invented by Mike Callahan, owner of the Southampton, Mass.-based company Beaver Solutions — makes use of a pipe, with the outflow portion installed in the middle of a beaver dam allowing water to flow through the dam instead of over it. The intake portion of the pipe is protected by wire fence, to prevent beavers from clogging the pipe.

Okay now THAT’s some good press. Good for beavers, good for beaver friends, good for Kings Beach. A very interesting conversation is brewing in the community about how to respond to the new plan to deal with the situation humanely next time. There are some who are so upset about the shooting of those four beavers that they want to ask for the director of public works’ head on a plate. And then there are the more conciliatory ‘lets wait and see’ voices. My favorite was from a smart childcare worker who said ‘lets hope for the best and not burn bridges’ and ‘btw I’m having every child in the day care personally make a card for the director and the supervisor thanking them for keeping their promise’.

Ahhh now that’s a woman after my own heart! Miss Manners meets Machiavelli!

Representatives from Wylie Animal Rescue Foundation and Worth A Dam — a beaver advocacy organization — pledged $500 each to the project during the forum.

Oooh good press for us too! There are lots of great things in the article, go read for yourself, and only a few head scratchers (protect trees with cayenne pepper?) But the very best and smartest part from the reporter, (who we already know does his research), comes from the price comparison for the cost of shooting the beavers. Check it out:

By the numbers

Costs of Placer County beaver removal operation at Griff Creek

• Direct cost to Placer County for California Conservation Corps crew: $5,700

• Indirect cost to state of California to maintain that crew: $2,800

• Cost to Placer County Department of Public Works to plan and administer project: $500

• Cost of Placer County Wildlife Agents (which carried out the hunting and killing of the beavers): $500

• Costs of refuse disposal, erosion control materials: $500

• Total: $10,000

Costs of installing water flow control device:

• Materials: $1,500

• Permitting: $500

• Annual maintenance: $150

• Total (over a 10-year period): $3,500

-Source: Tahoe Truckee Wildlife Coalition

Now that’s what I like to see! Good luck Kings Beach. You have funds, friends and a promise from the powers that be. That’s all any city with beavers can hope for.

“We need to do all the preparation work so that once the device is built — it stays,” Placer county Supervisor Jennifer Montgomery said. “We can truly be an example to the rest of the lake, and I know Peter and I are committed to making sure what happened to the Griff Creek beavers doesn’t happen again.”

Beaver Eradication Program

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, Recent Sightings, Uncategorized, Who's Killing Beavers Now? November 8, 2010

Yes, you read that read that right. Not depredation but ERADICATION, as in kill every beaver under every circumstances everywhere in the entire state. This is what the state of Arkansas enacted in 1993, and with a little revision it in 1997 it still has a policy of setting aside $ 150,000 for counties to buy into a ‘tail collecting’ bounty, providing that they do the following:

designate a beaver control officer
provide that tails be notched when brought in to the beaver control officer
set up a schedule for the beaver control officer to submit reports of payments to harvesters to the district board and for board application to the Commission for reimbursements
approximates the number of beavers to be harvested within the fiscal year

So kill all the beavers in your county and we’ll pay you for doing it. Oh and make sure to notch the tails because we don’t want to pay you twice for killing the same beaver. As far as I know, Arkansas is the only state with a ‘kill ’em all’ policy. Other states wait until they blink or cause what appears to be the whiff of the suggestion of a problem before exterminating. Arkansas leaps to judgment.

Allow me to say that I have read hundreds of beaver killing articles, and it takes a lot to shock me. This series of articles left me open mouthed and gaping. Beaver Eradication Program. The only other eradication programs I could find was for small pox and cholera. There isn’t even a rat eradication program, or a cotton mouth eradication program.

Just beavers.

One can only wonder how the wetlands in Arkansas and the population of trout and wooduck are faring. It looks like there’s been a couple years of drought conditions in the state. No matter. I’m sure they can just get their hard working ‘global warming deniers’ to disbelieve the drought too.

But if that doesn’t work you might try letting a few beavers live.

When I’m done being stunned by this a bunch of somebodies will get letters. In the mean time I will let you now that Lory discovered all three kits coming over the primary dam today at noon. After some mulling and consulting we think that what happened was that the high tide made life in their lower lodge too uncomfortable and required a midday relocation to the upper lodge. We’ve been wondering whether tide impacts where they end up sleeping for the night, and certainly the bank lodge below the primary dam has fewer options. All three went over and headed for the main lodge, so at least they know where to turn.

Update: Alhambra Valley Band

heidi08 Friends of Martinez Beavers November 7, 2010

Just found out that our friends of AVB will be on air at KPFA from 3-5 appearing with Ray Edlund on the finely named show “Pig in a pen”. Tune in and show your support!