Because the beaver isn't just an animal; it's an ecosystem!

Month: December 2010


Every now and then I just have to post this picture. It’s a recurring need. I guess it means symbolically to me that beavers sometimes just “arrive” in your life. They come in, take up your familiar spaces and occupy your mind and your time. And you have no other choice but to deal with them. You have to figure out how to manage your life with their presence or what you’re going to do about them. You have to learn what kind of person you’re going to be when it comes to dealing with beavers. Beavers change things. And that sometimes turns out to be pretty cool.

I thought I’d share two startling emails from this morning. The first is from one of our friends in Kings Beach, who is pushing to save the ‘next’ set of beavers that come to town. Mary responded to my recent email with;

Our story still keeps me up some nights and right now has brought tears to my eyes. Regardless, we are hard at it up here planning out our strategy for the coming months once the snow melts and the beavers once again attempt to move into our steams. We have found two more sites where beavers have been “removed” within only about 10 miles of the Kings Beach pond. Never again. We have joined forces with a powerhouse of a women and other animal activists in Tahoe Donner, the largest subdivision in California. Apparently, there are 20 beaver dams in that area and they are being told by their forester that the beavers there are safe. A presentation to their board of directors is planned. We are hoping to install a flow control device in the only dam that poses a flood risk to a home, and make it a demonstration pond and example of sane beaver policies. We think Tahoe Donner will even pay for it! Thank you for keeping me informed. Sherry and I are seriously considering attending the conference in Oregon!

I hope you DO come to Oregon! Their will be armloads of information to prepare yourself for any beaver battle and we would love to meet you! Can I remember laying awake nights worrying about our beavers and whether we’d win our city fight? You bet I can. It was three in the morning when I came up with “Worth A Dam” because “friends of Martinez beavers” just felt too polite for the knock-down pool-hall scrap the beaver fight was becoming.

This email came via Sarah who runs the “Unexpected Wildlife Refuge” in New Jersey. It is from someone named Caro Mannanberg in Ontario.

I read “Beaversprite” several years ago and I am inspired to create my own beaver refuge.W e own 160 acres of prime beaver habitat in northern Ontario. We live in a cabin next to a dormant beaver pond, and there are several other beaver ponds on our property. The woods are a mixture of hard and soft woods.Dominant species are black spruce, hemlock, maple, birch, balsam fir,poplar, cedar, oak, and many varieties of shrubs. Besides Beaver, we have deer, moose, wolves, martens, lynx, rabbits, mice, porcupines, bears and many kinds of birds and ducks. Most of the property is low or wet. There is a good sized stream that flows year round, and we are near several lakes and a large river.

What do I need to do to establish a beaver refuge, and develop a management
plan?

Wow, Cary. That’s a lovely letter. I can think of a couple people who would be very happy to read it, and I hope at least one of them does. I don’t suppose you’d be interested in buying real estate in California? Say the ‘Martinez’ area for instance?

Speaking of Martinez, I couldn’t let this very special boondoggle go by unmentioned. You might remember that there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth when the school district asked the city council for money to keep schools running, or when residents implored to keep the opera alive. It was pointed out time and again that Martinez poured money into the Willows theatre and failed to invest in its own resources. Ahh, the council explained, the willows WAS an investment in Martinez! Downtown diners! Revival! Sometimes it just takes a little ‘seed money’ to get a profitable business on its feet!

Well, in what is rapidly becoming the model for our new media, Patch broke the story and the lumbering ‘real papers’ clambered after it. Apparently our city council, (who incidentally have never voted to allow the beavers to stay), voted to ‘forgive the 40,000 loan’ after thanksgiving, only to learn that the Willows was moving back to Concord.

Ahhh, now that’s quite an investment!


And the waters big scare

The pipes bursting in air
Gave proof thru the night
That our dam was still there!

Okay, maybe this won’t be sung by 100,000 at a football stadium any time soon, but you get the general idea. Big rain. Lots of water with trash and stuff flowing over the dam, including what some have suggested might be a TV near the filter. Water level drops and you can see our dams are still looking pretty dam good,  especially the second one, which is kind of amazing given the hit its taken. As I told Cheryl this morning, our beavers are no slackers. My favorite part of the dam survival is that it means, even if they aren’t regularly seen, that Dad and the two year old are in attendance and things are in good hands.


Beaver Building Dam - Photo: Cheryl Reynolds


Regarding the above lyrics I can only ask how many rounds of ‘jingle bells batman smells’ you’ve heard this holiday season and remind you that reshaping lyrics is a fine American tradition. I myself was an odd child who used to sit in church and aimlessly memorize later verse lyrics  of important songs during the sermon. You know how they sometimes have a TV program interviewing people on the street to see if they really know the words to the Star Spangled Banner? Well I’m probably the only registered voter east of the Mississippi who knows the entire second verse. Four verses of America the beautiful, but that hardly counts.


From the WTF files comes this very misleading article about tribal efforts to keep beaver dams from blocking salmon on the Skagit River in Western Washington. It’s a pretty remarkable obfuscation because by the second sentence in the article it pretty much erases years of research by Michael Pollock, (who works all of 70 miles away) and mislabels what a “beaver deceiver” actually is even though Snohomish County (which is the first place I learned about a beaver deceiver) is only 50 miles away . I have sent it to our salmon friends for their review and I’ll tell you what they say. The shocking part to me is that the tribe is actually working with NOAA who is paying Pollock’s salary to research and refute these bogus beliefs. I guess its like betting on both sides in a basketball game.

I suppose the believable part of the article is that beaver dams in culverts block salmon passage. It is true that there’s not much room to jump inside a culvert. (You might have clarified that, but I’m sure the salmon fishermen in Scotland are thrilled that you didn’t bother.) I guess you could get rid of all the culverts and the roads? Hmm, not likely.  Still, the tribe working to plant unpopular trees to keep the evil beavers away is stunning. Read this. And this. And then read this to find out what a real ‘beaver deceiver’ actually is.

Sigh.

Full lunar eclipse tonight which ends with the start of winter solstice. Google tells me those events haven’t happened together since the year 1638. Because of all the recent volcanic activity, it’s predicted to be very red in color. Apparently the west coast of America is supposed to be the best vantage point, so the beavers are lucky. If you’d like a reminder that we still live on a planet, look up at 11:41pm PST. The whole eclipse  will last about three hours.

The Moon’s The North Wind’s Cooky                                                            Vachel Lindsay
What the Little Girl Said

The Moon’s the North Wind’s cooky.
He bites it, day by day,
Until there’s but a rim of scraps
That crumble all away.
The South Wind is a baker.
He kneads clouds in his den,
And bakes a crisp new moon _that… greedy
North… Wind… eats… again!_


State of the Salmonids

Restoring Coho Salmon in the Klamath River,
One Beaver At A Time

by Will Harling, Executive Director, of Mid Klamath Watershed Council

Recent studies from Washington and Oregon by NOAA scientist Michael Pollock and others are further defining the intimate relationship between beaver, beaver ponds, and coho smolt production. A recent multi-year study being prepared for publication by the Karuk Tribe, Yurok Tribe, Larry Lestelle, and others, on the ecology of coho in the Klamath River identifies the lack of low-velocity habitats, primarily during winter flood events, as a major potential limiting factor to coho distribution and abundance3. Further studies are needed to relate the loss of beaver and associated habitats to the loss of coho in the Klamath River, but based on other studies, it appears that beaver ponds would provide much needed overwintering and summer rearing habitat for juvenile coho.

Get your Sunday morning coffee and pastry-of-choice to curl up with Will’s delightful account of the relationship between beavers and salmon. His friend Brock Dolman nudged the article our way, and I have been sending it to everyone I can think of. The Klamath is a much-guarded river that has active stewards from headwaters to mouth. It is also the site of some truly MASSIVE historic beaver trapping in California.

Beaver are slowly coming back to the Klamath, recovering from intense trapping that began in the mid-1800’s and continued for nearly a century after, until beavers were almost extinct. In 1850 alone, famed frontiersman and trapper Stephen Meek and his party reportedly trapped 1800 beaver out of Scott Valley, which at the time was called Beaver Valley. The last beavers in Scott Valley were trapped out by Frank C. Jordan in the winter of 1929-1930 on Marlahan Slough1.

1800 beavers. Ugh. My favorite part of the article details the plan between the Mid Klamath Watershed Council (MKWC) and various tribes to create an engineered log jam in a section of the stream that would divert water and create a great wintering space for salmonids –  no doubt filling out forms and applying for grants and getting property owner permission…

This spring, MKWC proposed a project near the mouth of Boise Creek, a tributary to the Klamath near Orleans on property owned by the Coates Vineyard and Winery, that would have used an engineered log jam to re-route the creek around a bedrock cascade barrier at the mouth through a series of existing ponds maintained by several families of beavers (Figure 1). However, before the project could be implemented, beavers constructed a five foot tall dam across the creek at the exact location of the proposed log jam, diverting a portion of Boise Creek through their ponds, and into the Klamath River at a location that provides adult and juvenile fish access. MKWC and Karuk Tribe biologists have observed thousands of juvenile chinook and coho utilizing these ponds through the summer, and moving through the ponds into Boise Creek above the barrier! This fall and winter, we will see if the beavers have also effectively redesigned the creek to allow for adult spawning chinook and coho salmon to access more than three miles of high quality spawning habitat above the barrier.

Sometimes nature knows best. And sometimes she needs a helping hand….

Seiad Creek provides an example of what can be accomplished on larger tributaries, such as the Scott River (once called Beaver River) which has also been degraded through channelization, dewatering, beaver extirpation, and upslope management. Innovative research by Michael Pollock and others on a small tributary to the John Day River in eastern Oregon is demonstrating how degraded stream and riparian habitat can be restored by working with beavers to aggrade streams, connect off-channel habitats, restore groundwater and increase stream sinuosity. At a presentation in Whitethorn organized by Tasha McKee from the Sanctuary Forest this past September, Dr. Pollock showed how wood posts pounded into an incised stream channel at key locations allowed beavers to recolonize sections of the stream and create stable dams that would otherwise be washed out during high flows, resulting in increased off-channel habitat, decreased erosion, and aggradation of the stream channel.

Wood posts to help prevent washouts! Be still my heart! (Shhh, don’t tell our beavers, they’ll be jealous.) It’s all I can do as it is  to keep from bringing a sandbag or two during the rains.)

The restoration of threatened coho salmon popolations in the Klamath River system may be intricately tied to enhanced beaver populations and restoration projects that mimic the positive benefits of beaver dams. Educating the public about the critical role of beaver in restoring coho salmon populations in the Klamath River and other coho salmon streams in Northwest California may also help to decrease take of beaver as a nuisance species and allow them to reclaim their role as an ecological process shaping our streams and valleys.

I love everything about that paragraph except the word ‘mimic’. I have very little patience for killing off beavers and then using bulldozers to do “pretend beaver works” in our streams. From a Cost-benefit analysis perspective alone its ridiculous. And from a beaver-advocate perspective it’s sacriledge.  Anyway, this is a beautiful article. Read the whole thing and pass it along.  In the meantime I am happy to announce that I bought my plane ticket for Oregon yesterday for the State of the Beaver Conference. I will fly to Eugene and get a lift down from Mike Callahan of Beaver Solutions who will be coming from Massachusetts via Portland. Assuming the hotel has Wifi I will continue to endeavor to bring you the very best in developing beaver news, discoveries,  and gossip.

Mother Beaver Carries Mud --- Photo: Cheryl Reynolds


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