The Supreme Court of Texas released a Per Curiam decision on friday regarding the 7 year long Barnes v Mathis case. (Per curiam means that the justices can enter the decision anonymously, as opposed to other decisions where they have to sign their names).
Dr. Lee Roy Mathis and H.E. “Buster” Barnes own adjoining property in Anderson County. Lake Creek runs through both tracts, and Mathis’s 1,254 acre property is located upstream from Barnes’s. Mathis maintained a wetlands complex on much of his land, which attracted beavers,waterfowl, and other wildlife. Barnes’s tract was used predominantly as a pasture. In September 2006, Barnes constructed an earthen road across the creek to more easily access his back pasture. To accommodate water flow in the creek, Barnes installed two twenty-eight-inch culverts, or drainage pipes, into the structure. In October 2006, Mathis noticed an elevated water level in the creek, which he suspected was caused by Barnes’s road. By November, Mathis noticed that creek water encroached onto his property, and he asked Barnes to modify the road. Barnes later installed an additional culvert into the structure. In December 2006, Mathis returned to his property after a twelve-day absence to discover that Barnes’s road was washed away. The flooding—and subsequent drainage—also affected over four hundred acres of Mathis’s property, damaging beaver dams, affecting the wildlife population, and draining the wetlands.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the first documented case EVER where damages were sought for destruction of beaver dams caused by flooding and not the other way round. I have asked our beaver-attorney friend for an opinion on this ruling but in the mean time here’s the PDF if you’d like to check it out for yourself. To my untrained eye it looks like the first time around the jury ruled “Mr Barnes may indeed have done something wrong but its not wrong enough that Dr. Mathis gets any money for it” and now it looks like the Texas Supreme Court ruled that it should go back and be retried at the appellate level, with some clarifications of terms.
But mind you, this is Texas. So anything could happen.
First Snow on Beaver Lodge: Harlan @ Canadian Canoe Routes
Have you noticed the strange downward rush of yellowed leaves and the cool evenings that take you by surprise? Even here in sunny Martinez we can tell fall has arrived, and winter is lurking just around the corner. Our beavers have responded to the seasonal shift by reinforcing the primary dam and tackling the second. There used to be an eroded section near the west bank of the primary that just barely held water. It is now gone – covered and repaired so that the whole surface of the dam is even layers of sticks woven together. This isn’t junior’s attempt at dam building, it’s a better homes and gardens version and when the water rises it will rise to match it. If you haven’t seen it lately you really should check it out.
In colder areas beavers are finishing food caches and breaking through newly formed ice each day so they can get where they need to go. Our beavers don’t even need to build a lodge to survive the winter and I often wonder if they have any idea how lucky they are. I guess somewhere in the world there must be a beaver who dispersed from an unfrozen area one winter into a frozen area the next and had to learn and adapt, but it seems so dedicated and sophisticated there must be a lot of instruction involved in learning how to store enough food underwater to last for three or four months.
This next film is a reminder of how difficult life can be under the ice. Check out this brave beaver who not only has to break the ice to get ‘out’ of the water and feed on lichen, but then has to break it again to get back ‘in’! When he turns tail you can see the frozen ice crystals on his fur. Brrrr!
Of course winter is trapping season, when their coats are thickest and the fur worth most. This means that in addition to starvation, freezing, and isolation beavers must be prepared to stay away from merciless men with snow axes who dig down into the ice to kill them or set traps near inviting holes they might be lured to. We are heading towards ‘beaver moon’ which is either a reminder to seasonally hunt the animal or a compassionate reminder of how hard these animals work at this time of year. I know which one I’ll be celebrating!
Photo by "Joe" in Calgary
Oh and congratulations to this years winners of the John Muir Conservation Awards, truly a broad sweep of the best of humanity.
I thought I’d dedicate today to the spectacularly bad attempts made around the country to ‘deceive’ beavers without actually reading any instructions or talking to an expert. Let’s be charitable and assume that at least some of these attempts are truly efforts by well-meaning folks who just don’t know any better, but I am certain that others are purposeful fails: so that DOT or DPW can throw up their hands at those awful ‘compassionistas’ and say ‘see we tried your way, but it doesn’t work. Now we have no choice but to kill them.’
Beaver deceiver helps reduce flooding but preserves habitat:Seattle Public Utilities and the Adopt-A-Stream Foundation are putting the finishing touches on a “beaver deceiver” on Thornton Creek near Northgate.
Any discussion of faulty flow devices must of necessity include two categories: the first is simply an error in nomenclature – meaning someone installs a flow device and calls it a ‘beaver deceiver’ when its really more of a flexible leveler or castor master – these labels refer to a protected pipe that controls dam height. This is the most benign of offenses and much slack must be cut to those who wield this effort or the media who simply mislabels it or misquotes. If the device works what do we care if it is named correctly? Maybe I’ve been grading on too much of a curve for too long, but I say if it appears that there’s a batsqueak’s chance in hell that it will solve the problem, they can call it anything they want and we should classify this as a Type I error and give the installers a cookie anyway.
It’s likely the DPW intends to inspect the integrity of the “beaver deceiver” system once the water recedes and make repairs if needed. Thus they’re clearing the nightly dam installed by the beavers around the pipe. (Photo 2)
Which is not to say that the naming issue isn’t important and any beaver management expert is likely to get fairly hot under the collar if you call the wrong thing by the wrong label. (Trust me, I know.) Even now Jimmy Taylor of USDA in Oregon is fiercly working to write a paper that clarifies the different labels and puts definitions in print so that there will be some consistency in the terms. Still, a rose by any other name….Beaver beggars can’t be choosers.
Of course not all cases of mistaken identity are so benign. More egregious cases of deceit occur with Type II Errors, where we can only drop our jaws in a WTF homage. These are almost certainly deliberate attempts to fool the public, or harm the beavers, or sometimes both. Here are a few breath-taking examples of Type II Errors.
Souris and Area Branch PEI Wildlife Federation
I believe there actually is a kind of Type III Error which I’ve seen more often recently. I would define it as ‘trying a little bit’. In a Type III error there seems to be some recognition of the tools for beaver management and some acknowledgment that these sometimes work, but a failure of commitment to the concept so that the tools are haphazardly employed. A perforated pipe through a dam might be a Type III error, or a short pipe with a tiny fence around it. These attempts are difficult to catagorize because it isn’t immedilately clear whether they are attempts to fool the public or the beavers or just the actions of very lazy installers. But they do deserve their own label for now. An example of this is very near by in Cordelia with a beaver colony we’ve been watching out for. And if our city staff doesn’t get out and put the filter back on Skip’s flow device soon, Martinez will become another one!
Almost Clemson Pond Leveler in Cordelia: Cheryl Reynolds
Remember Susan Allen’s lovely beaver beatitudes last month on her program Open Range? Well I wrote her full of appreciation and she wanted to do a short interview for a future program. Here it is in all its brief beaver glory! Click to play.
I found this lovely footage of beaver grooming, eating, swimming and vocalizing from Sue McMurtrieon Youtube. Slocan lake is just north of Washington over the border, and is a beautifully natural spot. Enjoy!
Archaeologist finds ancient beaver teeth in eastern Oregon — earliest record of the animal in North America
Nice Article from Ken Cole at The Wilderness News about the 7.2 million old beaver teeth found in eastern Oregon. Here’s my favorite part but you should go read it all:
Beavers play an important role in North America and its ecology. Beaver dams provide enormous benefits for all kinds of wildlife. In the West, they are very beneficial to trout by providing slower water refuges where the fish can grow to larger sizes, thus producing more eggs and offspring. The riparian vegetation that grows in association with beaver dams also creates habitat for songbirds and other wildlife.
He goes on to mention that some regions have been so damaged by cattle grazing that beaver could never be reintroduced because there isn’t enough soil to support willow. I suggested he take look at this and maybe rethink that position:
The Supreme Court of Texas released a Per Curiam decision on friday regarding the 7 year long Barnes v Mathis case. (Per curiam means that the justices can enter the decision anonymously, as opposed to other decisions where they have to sign their names).
