Wishing a happy birthday our own stellar photographer, Cheryl Reynolds, who has sat for countless hours at the dam angling for just the right photograph, and saturated at least two computers with her countless pixels. Her beautiful images have allowed thousands of people to see beavers in a new way and made it easier to argue why they should be protected. Thanks Cheryl for all your hard work, and the beavers thank you too.
Friday night creek watchers saw a first in beaver behavior maturity. Keep in mind that we’ve regularly seen our three kits picking up sticks and experimenting with where to lay them down, but each time they have demonstrated silly, childish, kitish and irrational attempts, like taking sticks OFF the dam and swimming away with them. So Friday, when we saw a kit swirling about mud clouds under the water and grabbing mouthfuls of sticks and leaves, I didn’t hope for much.
“If he does something useful with that, I’ll eat a bug.” I told Cheryl.
Remind me never to doubt our beavers again. The kit swam straight over to the gap and climbed up on it. Then proceeded to lay the mud and sticks directly over the pathway, tamping them down with his nose and paws. Remember that in the high flows we had the past few days the gap was the only part of the dam that was ‘leaking’. The adults must have spent a lot of time doing just that, so he was just following in Dad’s footsteps.
A Real Beaver Behavior! We were so proud. Sniff. All growed up.
Well not quite ALL growed up because after laying the single application the kit decide that was plenty of work for one night and swam off over the dam. Not exactly the sustained labor we’ll see later.
Stay tuned!
Yesterday, we had a beaver visitor from Sebastapol. He is on the board for the Leadership Institute for Ecology and the Economy and a friend of Brock’s. He came down and waited very patiently with us, discussing the possibility of beavers in the Atascadero. Unlike the last few nights there were no beaver sightings for a very long time. At seven he needed to head back home, and at 7:14 we saw the first very tardy kit. It was a great conversation though, about what beavers could do to help his watershed and how to manage difficult behaviors. The institute teaches a course for people planning careers in shaping policy that are interested in sustainable goals. The course is nine months with one day of classes each month, divided into topics like food, and water. Brock lectures for them on the water section, and I made sure I plugged the idea of adding a short beaver lecture to the water day. Here’s one of the projects he’s been involved in.
What else is new? I got my final arrangements for the beaver conference yesterday including my room and meal allowance. Thanks Len. I promptly posted the speakers agenda on the Facebook for for the ‘Save the Tay Beavers’ group and Paul Ramsay wrote back very intrigued. He says despite the distance he’s very tempted. Paul was involved with the quarantine of the beavers imported from Norway for the trial and is adamantly opposed to trapping the free beavers. I think given how terrified the scottish fishermen are about beavers, they ALL need to be there to hear Michael Pollock. But that’s just me.
Peter Fimrite’s alarming aricle about Tahoe Bears Gone Wild triggered my skepticism meter even before I heard from our friends in Kings Beach. There are several telltale signs of hyperbole in the article, which I’ve come to recognize after years of reading countless “Beavers Blamed for Another Bank Failure” articles. Let’s look at them together, shall we?
Maybe we should start with the title. “Black Bears Wreaking Havoc on Tahoe Area.” Not exactly subtle. Clearly the problem with Tahoe isn’t unfettered development encroaching on animal habitat and hardscape causing acres of erosion down the mountain side. The problem is BEARS!!! Wreaking Havoc! Well, often the reporter doesn’t choose the headline, so we can’t blame Pete for that. Let’s keep reading.
Black bears, normally shy around humans, have been smashing windows, yanking doors off their hinges and entering homes and businesses in the Lake Tahoe area like never before, according to the California Department of Fish and Game.
Smashing windows! Yanking doors off their hinges! Is this bear gang violence? (Has there been tagging? Is that what that bear was doing hanging over the bridge?) Of course bears have always yanked doors off their hinges and smashed windows to get things they really want. They’re BEARS after all. You know there used to be people in Tahoe that understood that. They were accustomed to dealing with bears. Now if you walked down the condo’d streets and canals you would see the very same neighbors you’d recognize from your home in the Bay Area. 62 depradation permits? Nice to know Fish & Game still has a purpose. It occurs to me that its possible the number of blood thirsty bears hasn’t gone up, Pete. But the number of bear-stupid humans who leave food and ice chests and candy wrappers out, has.
Hunter said the brute tore a window out of the restaurant on Nov. 11 and raided the kitchen, gobbled a 3-gallon tub of spumoni ice cream and sampled the salami, ravioli and tortellini before sacking out in a wine box in the kitchen. He found the snoring beast the next morning and, with help from his son and an expert from the Bear Education Aversion Response, or BEAR League, splashed ammonia on the hairy slob’s face and shooed him out.
Brute? Hairy Slob? Are we talking about an animal break-in or a frat party? Well I’m sure after the reporter exhausts his supply of perjorative labels he’ll get down to the real story. Maybe he’ll talk about the increase in development in the Tahoe area, or how, when the economy tanked, newly developed units got abandoned and allowed more animal traffic. Maybe he’ll talk about since we humans know this, we’re responsible for keeping our supplies locked up and out of sight. We need to make our trash bear-proof. We need to keep from attracting these animals into our backyards and restaurants.
These skills take education and community response to develop, so enter the program described later in the article “BEAR” (Bear Education Aversion Response) Guess who’s on the BEAR team? The husband of our beaver-saving friends in Kings Beach. Guess who the reporter didn’t talk to? I’ll give you a hint, here’s his response to the article.
This account is completely wrong. I was the volunteer who originally showed up to chase the bear out of Bacchi’s restaurant. No ammonia was thrown on anyone’s face – I tossed about 1/4 cup of ammonia on the floor near where the bear was lying down. He exited, and I chased him down the hall and outside across the meadow and into the woods. I shot him with a paintball gun to even keep him moving. This was a very old, very sleepy and slow bear, well known by neighbors for years, and never aggressive. As volunteers for the BEAR League, we advised the owners of several precautions to take, including securing their garbage (their dumpster bin was NOT locked) and securing old, loose windows. This was 10 days before the bear was shot, plenty of time to have done something. Mr. Hunter’s account also clearly shows he was blocking the bear’s exit path – ‘the bear realized it was a dead end and turned back toward me’ – which is the only reason a bear would come toward someone, other than the short ‘bluff’ that Mr. Hunter also described. Nobody was attacked, but someone obviously likes the undeserved attention. Your reporter should have known better than to repeat such hyperbole without checking the facts. Ted Guzzi
So let’s get this straight: you’ve written an article that blames the animals for exaggerated human fears, thus creating more human fears so that more animals can be blamed in the future. The article fails not only to discuss the responsible options this man neglected to exercise, but it goes on to describe a rampant increase in the number of bears roaming about the state without mentioning the rampant increase of humans.
“He came around that table and just charged me,” Hunter said. “He covered about 30 feet in three bounds. I knew bears were fast, but this was the fastest thing I’d ever seen in my life. I had no time to get the shotgun around. It was the proverbial life flashes before your eyes kind of thing.” Miraculously, Hunter said, the bear turned away at the last second. “He was between these two tables 6 or 7 feet away when he realized he was trapped there and he reared up again and turned back toward me,” Hunter said. “I wasn’t going to let him get close to me. That’s when I shot him.”
What was the man’s name again? The innocent victim who was forced to shoot the bear. I won’t say it. It’s just too easy. But tell me the truth, Pete, have you been watching a little too much Stephen Colbert lately?)
Mary also wrote the chronicle. Let’s see what she has to say,
I am a 39 year resident of Lake Tahoe. What happened at Bacchi’s is tragic. This man was advised over and over to secure his property and make his garbage inaccessible, but instead he ignored the experts advice and shot this old bear that was known and not feared by the neighborhood. Now his photo is on the front page of your paper as if he is some hero that narrowly escaped with his life. In addition, your story and the story in our local paper, the Sierra Sun, are only vaguely similar. Is the sensationalism for the sake of circulation or dinner counts? Shame on you.
Well, what Tahoe residents read the SF chronicle anyway? Oh, right. The flatlanders who come up for Christmas and the weekend ski and wish it was more like the Bay Area. They’ll get together with Fish & Game and make sure the hunting regulations are changed for bears in the state. I can see it coming. So can Mary. She’s organizing a candelight vigil at the restaurant and calling the media to invite them. I just had one piece of advice.
Invite children, and have everyone bring their Teddy Bear.
Remember Adrian Nelson, the young man who is communications director for Fur-Bearer Defenders and recently installed a flexible leveler in Langley? I found later it was his first one and he had a long chat with beaver friend Mike Callahan before hand. Now I see he’s written a letter to the local paper, and I couldn’t be happier!
Beaver solutions
Re: They’re ‘just oversized rats’ (Letters, Dec. 6). It’s of little surprise that Glenn Lennox hadn’t seen beavers outside of the park until recently. Beaver populations in North America were once estimated to be between 60 million and 90 million, but due to heavy trapping and exploitation, those populations were reduced to as little as six million to 10 million.
It is only recently that we are seeing the populations starting to rebound. Current estimates put the population at about 10 million to 15 million, a far cry from its original numbers.
Canada has been losing its wetlands at an alarming rate, a vital habitat in which beavers are a keystone species. Many communities across North America are successfully implementing alternatives such as simple tree wrapping, beaver deceivers and pond levellers, which keep beavers in the area without the risk of flood and property damage.
In fact, hundreds of thousands of acres of land have been effectively beaver-proofed using these methods, saving the vital wetlands.The simple fact that trappers must continue to trap beavers from the same area year after year is evidence this is not a long-term solution.There is no need to cut down trees, kill beavers, or ship them somewhere else. In order to outsmart a beaver, one needs only to be smarter than the beaver.
Adrian Nelson, Winnipeg
Great letter, Adrian! I love the part about trapping being a short term solution especially! Being ‘smarter than a beaver’ is familiar in the very best way. Keep it up and let us know how the installation is working! We’d love to arrange for you to do a short ‘internship’ with Mike and Skip so that you learn all the best from the best!
I’m sure you heard something about the mountain lion shot in Berkeley near Chez Panisse at the end of August. It was slinking through the neighborhoods at 2 am and leaping over fences before a neighbor called the police. For a short period of time they hoped they could drive it out of the urban area into the park, but then gave up and killed it with a shotgun. It was a female, around 95 lbs, and surely the closest brush with a mountain lion that part of Berkeley has ever known.
Could something else have been done? Zara McDonald, of the Felidae Conservation Fund in Sausalito says no. Even if the police had used a tranquilizer gun they wouldn’t have known where to bring the big cat. Zara was the dynamic speaker at the most recent Valley of the Moon lecture. She’s involved with the Santa Cruz Moutain Lion project and co-founder of the Bay Area Puma Project that is in its early stages. It is estimated that, given the population of humans we have now around the state, our cat numbers are ‘at capacity’. We don’t have room for many more, although we clearly need to figure out how to take care of the ones we have.
Enter Jim Hale (remember him from the article in Bay Nature?). He wants to develop a mobile crisis unit that can respond the next time a Big Cat wanders where he shouldn’t be. He would like to train the local police, network with wildlife advocates and educate the public about the value of these animals. My dinner guest last night, Cindy Spring of Close to Home, wants to help, and Gary Bogue thinks it’s an idea worth getting behind and wants to be involved.
This is an idea in its infancy, but one that these people are passionate about. I know we’ll hear more about it soon. I thought I’d give you an initial glimpse so you can see how these things get started. Good people with good ideas getting together to make a difference.
I’m told that (to the untrained eye) sleek mountain lions are somewhat ‘sexier’ than lumpy beavers, so I have every faith they’ll get lots of help!
