One of my personal great underground beaver campaigns is correcting the ‘beaver as nutria’ myth. Photos of nutria are routinely tossed around on the internet(s) showing close-ups of animals that appear somewhat beaverish in nature from the front, but would, (if you could turn them around) have a long skinny tail from the back.
Take for example this photo:
Not A Beaver
This was taken by photographer David Westphalen and sold to Painet as an image available for download purchase. It’s a nice photo, crisp and detailed with only one small problem. It’s NOT a beaver. It’s a nutria Myocastor coypus (Coypu). Because its for sale on a major photo outlet it gets downloaded incorrectly all the time. I have written Mr. Westphalen and Painet about the error and have received zero response for my effort.
So Far.
Recently this image appeared on the NPS page for Fort Smith National Park in Arizona. That was a bridge to far. We can’t have the national park service posting bogus photos of beavers. I wrote the rangers twice about the mistake and suggested the check out this newspaper article about it. I got a response yesterday from the ranger who referred it to their IT ranger who will be removing it when he gets back to work. How cool is that? He should also ask for a refund from Painet and maybe that would help the larger campaign. I also suggested he might want a REAL beaver photo from our own Cheryl Reynolds.
Have you ever seen one of those movies where someone embarks on a grand quest and has little mishaps and adventures with countless people along the way who point them towards their destination? There’s danger and upset and for a while things look bleak, but all the help the hero has gathered by then pulls them through? And at the end of the movie, once the quest is accomplished, there’s some big gathering or celebration and all those people are there? Together? Maybe they say ‘we knew you could do it’ or maybe they have no idea what all was involved but they’re just happy to see the hero and everyone have a good time?
Let’s just review. Back in November 2007 when I was, (lets be honest), FREAKING OUT that the city was going to kill our beavers I made a series of desperate pleas for help. The first was to Mike Callahan who seemed to have a pretty straight forward website that actually suggested beavers flooding could be prevented without trapping. When he seemed willing to help I bombarded him with pictures and the engineering report, (poor man). He wrote back, hmm, “that’s actually more of a problem than I thought, you’re in for a real fight”, and I despaired.
Undaunted, he wrote back, don’t panic “Strange things have I in head that will to hand“, which is a quote from Macbeth and I knew we would become excellent friends. He’s presenting after me.
That same day Sharon of Beavers: Wetlands & Wildlife gave me Sherri Tippie’s phone number and I called her about the steps for successful beaver relocation. We talked about her work and what the risks were of housing and caring for the animals during the process. She’s presenting before me. She suggested I contact the attorney she worked with on a Southern California case, whose letter to our mayor she had already sent me.
I wrote Mitch Wagner right away and learned that he had tried the Friends of Lake Skinner case, which had been won at the appellate level against Fish & Game, Riverside Conservation Agency and the Metropolitan Water District. Seems they removed some beavers from the area with a bunch of bogus fears and Mitch successfully argued that because the decision was ‘discretionary’ rather than ‘ministerial’ it required an Environmental Impact Report according to the standards of the California Environmental Qualities Act. Mitch has been a solid beaver supporter for us and he and his wife generously donated the funds for the children’s mural last year. Remember because they won, damages and attorneys fees were paid for. There were a couple star witnesses in that case, one was Sherri Tippie and the other was the Keynote speaker for the conference.
Donald Hey!
Donald Hey is the co-founder of The Wetlands Institute, with a doctorate in environmental engineering. He’s a big advocate for beaver wetlands and soil hydrology. At the advice of everyone I wrote him for help when our beavers were allegedly tunneling under Bertola’s but I never heard back. Now I can listen to what he has to say and ask him in person.
Joe Cannon from the Lands Council introduced himself on Mike’s Facebook page, and Amanda was going to come for the beaver festival last year. I first connected with the lands council when I discovered there were several of our photos on their web page! I wrote them with possessive interest and they apologized profusely. It seems they thought they had asked us, but mixed us up with someone else at the last conference. Now the photos all link to our website and give us credit, and Joe’s a good beaver friend who I look forward to meeting.
Then of course there’s Len and Lois Houston, who wrote me a year into the beaver battle to offer support. He admired our website and thought we should be beaver friends. Is that everyone I know? Brock who I met through Wikipedia Rick who contacted us because he liked the website and wanted to learn about beaver in his area.
UPDATED ATTENDEES: just mailed by Len include Bruce Baker (who wrote the seminal beaver chapter, chatted with me and sent me a copy when I was on the subcommittee so I could use excerpts for the ecology section AND Michael Pollock whose salmon-beaver research is going to change everything.
I think that rounds out the attendees list that I know so far…I’m sure I’ll have plenty more stories to tell on February 6th. After our particular quest, the interviews, the subcommittee, the sheetpile, losing mom and three beaver festivals, it should be a pretty remarkable celebration.
It’s official, the partial schedule for the 2011 State of the Beaver conference is out and I couldn’t be happier. I present just after Sherri Tippie and before Mike Callahan, which if you think about it, is a pretty nice beaver-loving sandwich. Yesterday I introduced Brock Dolman to Leonoard Houston who organizes the conference and now he’ll be presenting on watersheds as well. Brock was so enjoying my lyrics to the ‘beaver and the salmon should be friends’ that he wants to find some eco-singers to do it at the salmon conference cabaret, which made me very proud. I also introduced him to Tom Rusert of Sonoma Birding where I’ll be doing a beaver talk in February. Their recent Mt. Lion talk had 250 attendees! Tom was interested in maybe doing one on the beaver salmon relationship, so I suggested he talk to Brock and they’re getting together to chat next week. Small beaver world.
Of course I asked Brock if the beavers get a ‘finders fee’? And he assured me that he was “fee-ling” out multiple property owners in the region to find volunteers for a beaver re-introduction project, which is the best kind of fee!
Anyway, since I introduced myself to Susan, Susan to Tom, and Tom to Brock, I’m thinking of starting my own ecological escort service. I even made this comercial for GQ yesterday!
I just wanted to let you all know that our ‘Pro-Beaver is Pro-Salmon’ perspective will get a bunch of myth dispelling boosts at next spring’s Salmonid Restoration Federation Conference in San Luis Obispo 2011! Dr. Michael Pollock will bestow his abundant research-based beaver basics as the keynote speaker for Conference!!! Fellow Beaver-Booster Paul Jenkin of Surfrider Foundation will inspire us with the exciting vision for the removal of Matilija Dam and Ventura River Recovery!! Paul, like many of us, is clear that “not all dams are not created equally”!!
Afflicted with an unrelenting case of Beaver-Fever – I will be facilitating a day long ‘Sustainable Water Conservation’ workshop, with a roofwater hands-on project and for the morning have lined up for the speakers portion a few of our Castor-Compadres: Rick Lanman – Beaver-Buddy extraordinaire with his very informative historical distribution information on the pre & post contact occurrence beaver in CA! Mattolian Beaver-Booster Tasha McKee will be talking about her work with Beaver mimicry efforts in engineering beaver ponds until the real deal can be re-introduced into the Mattole Watershed!
So Cal Steelhead Super-Star – Matt Stoecker will inspire us with Dam removal efforts in the Santa Maria & Sisquoc Watershed and reinforce his observations that where he has observed beavers he has generally observed greater numbers & larger endangered Southern Steelhead!!
This is my favorite part….
Bit by Bit and Bite by Bite – Down come the Trees of Beaver Fallacies …Limb-by-Limb and Whim-by-Whim shall Castor and Coho be comrades again!!??
Thanks Brock (and Rogers & Hammerstein) for inspiring this….
The salmon and the beaver should be friendsOh, the beaver and the salmon should be friendsOne thing likes to eat a tree, the other likes to swim to seaBut that’s no reason why they cain’t be friends.Waterbody folks should stick togetherWaterbody folks should all be palsBeavers dance with the salmon’s daughterSalmon dance with the beaver gals! I’d like to say a word for the salmonHe swims from little creek out to the oceanHe bumps among the foam, then he jumps to get back home.I can’t imagine where he gets the notion!The salmon is essential to the waterHe feeds at sea and brings back all its gloryMakes food for other things with the nutrients he bringsAnd all our fishermen can tell the story! But the salmon and the beaver should be friendsOh, the salmon and the beaver should be friendsOne thing brings the sea to shore, the other makes the water storeBut that’s no reason why they cain’t be friends.Waterbody folks should stick togetherWaterbody folks should all be palsSalmon dance with the beavers daughtersBeavers dance with the salmon’s gals! People always worry about beaverWill dams they build cause flooding when its wetter?Could all these dams prevent fish from getting where they wentBut once we understand we all know better!The beaver builds without a plan or rebarHis dam makes ponds that all the critters shareIn summer and in snow, salmon have a place to goAnd everybody hungry gathers there! Waterbody folks should stick togetherWaterbody folks should all be palsBeavers dance with the salmon’s daughtersSalmon dance with the beaver’s gals!
Is it me or does that beaver sound vaguely Scottish? On a related note Louise Ramsay of the Tay Beaver Bruhaha offers this excellent read…
Here is an article by Jim Crumley in the Dundee Courier today. It is very entertainly written and highly recommended if you have a moment.
Jim Crumley
I SUPPOSE I should really know better by now, but I have been trying to fathom the logic that underpins the thought processes of the denizens of that strange and faraway land known as Scottish Natural Heritage.
“Oh, what now?” I hear you ask, the answer to which is,“Beavers.”
It seems that SNH has commissioned the services of SASA, that’s the Scottish Agricultural Sciences Agency since you ask, and no, I’d never heard of it either, but I do lead a rather sheltered life, and have never had cause to prompt an investigation of potato blight, which I gather is the agency’s stock-in-trade. But SASA has another arrow in its quiver, which is to go Pied-Piper-like around the land ridding it of vertebrate pests – rabbits, mink, rats, that kind of thing – a skill that SNH has called on in an attempt to rid Tayside of its beavers.
“Hold on,” I hear you say, you being of a thoughtful turn of mind, “surely SNH wants to establish a beaver population in Scotland? Didn’t it fund a reintroduction scheme in Argyll?”
You see, I knew I could count on you to ask intelligent questions. Yes is the answer to both questions. You may be surprised to learn (I know I was pretty astounded), that putting a handful of beavers back in to Argyll has cost £2million, which seems to my o-level arithmetic to work out at rather more than £100,000 a beaver.
The figure is all the more astounding when you consider that the Tayside population has established itself free of charge and is apparently self-sustaining, a state of affairs which poses a number of problems for SNH.
Firstly, the Argyll project begins to look like not very good value for money.
Secondly, the Tayside population seems to suggest that allowing nature to manage nature is a better idea than allowing people to do it, which is embarrassing at the very least for SNH, the Scottish Government’s advisor on conservation. Reading between the lines, it is fairly safe to assume that SNH feels that its Argyll project is threatened by the Tayside beavers. As the government scours the public sector for every unnecessary scrap of spending it can strike from the record as if it has never been, there must already be mutterings in dark corners that if we can have beavers on Tayside for nothing, why don’t we do away with the £100,000-a-head beavers in Argyll?
Hence the involvement of SASA whose role in all this will be to trap the Tayside beavers and either send them off to sundry zoos or otherwise dispose of them, which means killing them. They are, after all…wait for it, wait for it…the wrong kind of beavers.
The £100,000-a-head beavers are from Norway, and are thought to be genetically more or less identical to the long-extinct Scottish population. The problem with them is that they come from a localised Norwegian population and they have brought with them some of the obvious defects of sustained in-breeding. Several have died as a result.
The free Tayside beavers are from Bavaria. Actually they’re from Perthshire, which is where the origins of the population are thought to have escaped from a wildlife park, and where they seem to have established a breeding population in 2001, and from that small beginning they have migrated up into Angus and other parts of east Perthshire No-one knows how many there are and estimates seem to vary between about 30 and about 100.
So they seem to be prospering, and the slightly hybridised nature of the Eurasian beavers of Bavaria has none of the defects of the genetically pure but inbred European beavers from Norway. In other words, those animals defined as the wrong kind of beavers seem to be the right kind if the object of the exercise is to establish a wild population of breeding beavers.
And here is where the logic starts to fall apart at the seams. Instead of studying the Tayside animals to learn more about them from nature, SNH’s response has been to take nature out of the equation so that the only beaver study in the land is the one it has spent £2million on. Of course, studying the Argyll beavers is made simple by the fact that every beaver is radio-collared and micro-chipped and generally equipped with enough technology to make it worthwhile establishing a new branch of PC World in Oban. The Tayside animals have none of these things, and the only way you can watch is to practise stealth and patience and get cold and sit still and just watch them when they turn up.
When you watch their behaviour patterns represented as meandering lines on a graph on a laptop screen, you have achieved little more than reducing a wild animal to a computer game, which is hardly an accomplishment to be proud of. When you sit still outside in their world and watch their behaviour patterns unfold before your very eyes, you pay them the compliment of allowing them their mystery. They may or may not reveal their mysteries to what they judge to be the right kind of watching eyes.
And what is more valuable in terms of our understanding of this animal we have invited back into the land that once extinguished it: to watch it hamstrung with technology and fankled by bureaucracy, or to watch it on its own terms, as nature intended?
And here is another question I feel certain you are about to ask as the SASA people confront their task of capturing and quite possibly killing wild beavers: is that legal?
We may not have got around to a specific beaver protection law in Scotland yet: the introduction project is still officially a trial, which may yet be abandoned. But the EU species and habitats directive of 1992 requires member governments to look at ways of re-introducing lost mammal species, and the beaver is one of these, and whether it is Norwegian or Bavarian should not affect its right to protection within the reintroduction process.
In the same way, a sea eagle that wandered across the North Sea from mainland Europe would be given the same level of protection here as a sea eagle raised from the egg at a Scottish nest.
So it seems to me that nature is trying to tell us something with its Tayside beaver colony. We spend so much of our time and energy and resources trying to persuade nature to do our bidding, to operate within conditions we impose on it. Here is an all too rare opportunity to bear witness as nature unfolds the direct opposite of that process, as nature imposes new conditions on us. We should watch and learn and delight in the possibilities that will flow whenever we are willing to give nature its head.”