Month: December 2011

Dakota Beavers

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions December 19, 2011

It struck me this morning that in four years of bemoaning beaver stupidity from sea to shining sea I have never written anything about the Dakotas. We’ve visited beaver policy in Texas, Georgia, Nevada and New Jersey but I never had anything to say about the Dakotas because I never read anything about them.

Circumstances being what they are, I have always assumed that was because beavers were so wholly disregarded and eagerly trapped that they no one thought their killing was newsworthy. No one writes about it in the paper when you kill ants in your kitchen, right? But looking at this article now I’m beginning to think there might be another explanation.

Local Wildlife On The Move

This Year’s Flooding Created Changes For Many Animals Along The Missouri River

BY RANDY DOCKENDORF

This summer’s Missouri River flooding has created hardship for residents in southeast South Dakota and northeast Nebraska, but not only for the two-legged inhabitants.

The flooding has forced relocation of beavers, in turn affecting the trees they feed upon, according to conservationists and river observers. The issue of increased beaver sightings came up during last week’s Game, Fish and Parks (GF&P) meeting in Yankton dealing with a proposed bobcat hunting season, according to Ron Schauer, a regional GF&P program manager from Sioux Falls.

Before you reach for your dictionary, GF & P stands for “Game, Fish & Parks” Department. Interesting way to combine interests. I wonder why it is that California State Parks are always broke and our Department of Fish and Game is always funded? Apparently in the Dakotas they have enough money to send staff around counting beavers.

“I did notice a lot of signs of beavers on the two National Park Service Missouri River tours in late October,” he said. “(I saw the signs) on both the stretch below Gavins Point from St. Helena (Neb.) to Mulberry Bend, and the next day from Fort Randall (at Pickstown) to Verdel (Neb).”

“I’ve also noticed areas on the river between Yankton and Ponca State Park where there seems to be abnormally high beaver activity,” said Tim Cowman, director of the Missouri River Institute (MRI) in Vermillion.

Schauer has seen a shift in the beaver population during recent months.

Wow, states that not only count their beaver population, but know where they should be! How confusing! I bet with all these beavers in new places they’re finding new reasons to kill them right?

The beavers have created some unwelcome damage to cottonwoods in their new habitat, Schauer said. “I’m concerned about the big cottonwoods, which are the preferred eagle site for nesting,” he said. “We have those 50-, 60-, 80- and 100-year-old cottonwoods, and it’s not a good thing that we are losing them.”

AHA! I knew it!

Efforts are under way to protect cottonwoods wherever possible, Schauer said.

“I talked to our Pierre staff, and they are trying to protect the trees with fences so the beavers don’t get to the trees,” he said.

Fish and game wrapping trees? I need to sit down. I’m feeling faint. Everything familiar has become foreign. I better keep reading.

The appearance of beavers outside their usual habitat led many people to believe — mistakenly — they were seeing a huge surge in the critter’s numbers, Schauer said.

“What happened on the river is not a population explosion of beavers,” he said. “The river was up so high that the beavers were within the water levels. Anytime you’re talking about water-based furbearers like beaver or muskrat, and you have high water, they may need to move outside their preferred habitat. There may be increased numbers of them (elsewhere), and we have seen that.”

Well, protecting beavers from flooding is a like protecting banks from money. Sure their lodges might be underwater or washed away, but they can usually find some place to hunker. I can’t even think it would matter that much if all their food was underwater, since beavers normally store their food underwater in the winter anyway! Maybe in that much flooding there are shopping carts, furniture and automobiles rushing downstream but wouldn’t they be upstream too? I can’t think of one reason why beavers would move because of flooding, but I’m still in shock so I may not be at my best.

Anyway, go read the whole story. I’m noticing that the paper says its illegal to reprint the story without written permission and thinking wouldn’t it be ironic if after all the mean things I’ve said about every other region in North America I was prosecuted for saying really nice things about the Dakotas?

It’s a mad, mad, world.

Three Good Things!

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, featured, Friends of Martinez Beavers, History December 18, 2011

Sometimes it is slow news here at beaver central and sometimes it is fast, thick and icky, but this weekend has been a flurry of delightful stories I can hardly wait to share. First up is a grand new discovery about our friend Castoroides Ohioensis. Remember the very large beaver that was the size of a bear and went extinct at the last ice age? Seems they just ran one through a CTscan (don’t ask why no one thought of this before) and discovered a very long chamber behind his noise that they are speculating was used for resonance. Now every archeologist is busy trying to figure out the giant beaver call that echoed through the forests of paleo-history!

LAS VEGAS – Blessed with a hidden chamber in their over sized skulls, extinct giant beavers may have created a unique Ice Age call of the wild. Detailed CT scans reveal a dead-end passageway leading from the back of the animal’s skull toward its face. That chamber connects via a long, narrow slit to another passage going straight through the beaver’s skull from throat to nose, vertebrate paleontologist Caroline Rinaldi reported November 2 at a meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.

“I don’t know of any other animal that has this,” said Rinaldi, of the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine.

Our second grand story comes from the Oregon town of Five-Rivers (which is incidentally, very near where the State of the Beaver Conference was held this February). Seems they had a meet and greet with the locals, served hot cider and Christmas cookies, and asked landowners to open their heart to beavers. “Do it for the sake of the salmon” they encouraged!

FIVE RIVERS – The sparsely settled Coast Range valleys of Lincoln County’s Five Rivers country ought to be a highly productive breeding ground for coho salmon, but logging, road-building and other human activities have altered the landscape in far-reaching ways, leaving threatened fish runs in a precarious state.

Beaver populations also have declined throughout the basin, in part because of those same human impacts. Now the MidCoast Watersheds Council is working to enlist the aid of area residents in shoring up salmon numbers by reintroducing beaver colonies in some of the places where they’ve disappeared – even if that means some inconvenience for rural property owners.

Don’t even THINK that any of this would be happening without the day-in day-out hard work of Leonard and Lois Houston who have made beaver friends out of more folks than anyone can know. When I spoke to him recently about their good relationship with ODFW (Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife – note that they don’t call just care about GAME in Oregon!) he said that one thing he had learned is that it is easier to get enthusiastic support from the fisheries biologists than from the fur-bearer folks. Hmmm. Now that was a revelation!

“Beaver and coho salmon are just inextricably linked,” said Steve Trask, a fish biologist working with the council. “We’ve noticed over time that as beaver populations have declined, there’s been a real loss of production in coho salmon habitats.”Representatives of the Siuslaw National Forest, the Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife and the Alsea Watershed Council, all potential partners in the restoration effort, also were on hand.

Coho salmon fry emerge from the gravel of their spawning beds in the spring, then spend a year dodging predators and bulking up before venturing out to sea, where they spend another year or two before returning to their native streams to spawn as adults. Beaver ponds, Trask said, provide ideal rearing habitat for young coho and other salmonids, such as cutthroat and steelhead trout. The ponds capture nutrients from falling leaves and rotting wood, forming the base for a thriving food chain.

They also perform a number of other functions, from moderating flash floods to restoring old floodplain connections and re-establishing a more natural, complex channel structure that provides a variety of habitats for aquatic life. Bringing beavers back to Five Rivers, he said, could accomplish a lot of the watershed council’s restoration goals for the basin.

“We’re talking about somehow restoring beaver to the landscape so they can be a tool for salmonid restoration,” Trask said. “If we can get it going, it’s a pretty cheap way to do it.”

Wow. Just wow. Steve, do you happen to have any relatives that work for DFG in California? Just asking. And excellent job by the reporter, Bennett Hall, who clearly gets the whole relationship very well. My guess would be this isn’t his first time reporting on the beaver-salmon relationship. All we can do here in plod-along California is plod along. Sigh. Go read the whole thing.

Which brings us to our THIRD good story, and that’s the announcement that starting NEXT WEEK an interview with a beaver expert will air here every Sunday on a podcast series that I’m calling “Agents of Change”. For the past few months I’ve been trotting about wooing the beaver world and trying to get them to talk to me about why they do what they do and how beavers changed their lives. The first interview will be with Sherri Tippie and the second with Skip Lisle. You won’t want to miss these short, remarkable glimpses into the lives of people who make a difference on behalf of the animals who make a difference.!I think you’ll enjoy it, click for a sample.

*Much thanks to David Bowie and poet Mark Seth Lender for their valued contributions!

And because man does not live by beaver alone, I’m passing along this AMAZING look at the 4 night festival of lights popular winner from Lyon, France. Mind you this just has to be the very best blending of history, pop culture and modern technology that I have ever seen.

Delightfully Wrong!

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Environmental December 17, 2011

I’m happy to announce that my woeful complaints yesterday about the Eco-lab that received funding for future genetic and hormonal research on beavers was a false alarm! I wrote the grant-givers yesterday that they should let the beavers do some restoration instead and apparently my letter was forwarded to the director of the program. He wrote me back, defending his beaver creds, and letting me know about the good work they do. With his permission I’ll post the letter here so you all can feel better about Indiana.

Dear Dr. Perryman,

The Nina Maso n Pulliam EcoLab at Marian University is a 55 acre natural area with ~20 acres of wetlands that are being actively managed by our two free-living colonies of beaver. The fact that the EcoLab is a functioning landscape where beaver are free to chop down trees and shrubs, build dams, dredge beaver canals and do the “ecosystem engineering” that they do is the aspect of the EcoLab that we are most proud of. It is also what thrills the thousands of preK-12 students the most when they visit – we love to let the students discover how beaver manipulate the landscape; how similar they are to us in many ways. Kids love to explore the Pulliam EcoLab looking for signs that beaver are present. And, when they get the chance some overcast morning, to hear the slap of the beaver’s tail it’s unforgettable! One student actually wrote a book about her experience in the EcoLab entitled “The Slap of the Beaver’s Tail!” In some instances we also have the kids collect water samples in the inflow and outflow of the beaver-managed wetlands to see how these wetlands contribute to the health of our watershed, and, of course to us. You can’t learn to love something if you don’t know it. We give urban kids that chance who may never before have been outside in anything resembling a natural area.

I agree with you that beaver do a great job of ecological restoration! What they don’t do, however is remove invasive exotic plants like Amur Honeysuckle, Common Buckthorn and Privet. Further, they can’t increase the diminished diversity of a site that was formerly a farm field. We have also put a lot of effort into creating trails for humans, so that our students, the k-12 students, and the general public can be exposed to a small piece of native Indiana.

The genetic research we do on Beaver is non-invasive – we take hair samples from “snags” that we put along some of their routes. We are trying to understand how beaver in an urban environment disperse. The EcoLab appears to be a source population, but, because it is surrounded by the inhospitable “habitat” of the city, we are interested to see how the city affects beaver dispersal and thus their population genetics.

We do hormonal and behavioral work on territorial Song Sparrows in the urban “wild.” It is invasive, that is, we do take small blood samples. But we are learning about how basic breeding biology is affected by the fragmented urban environment.

We believe that the benefit to beavers and birds of these research projects and others by academics and animal lovers around the world outweigh the costs in many cases. I understand that your values may be different, and that you might think that research on animals may not be justified. On this point, but perhaps not many others, I respectfully disagree.

Sincerely,

David Benson

—–

David P. Benson, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, School of Mathematics and Science

Director, Marian University EcoLab

317-955-6028

Marian University

3200 Cold Spring Road

Indianapolis, IN 46222

http://wetland.marian.edu

Obviously he mistook my letter for a PETA don’t-mess-with-animals alarm. How could he reasonably be expected to know that I limit my obsession to a single engineering species at the moment? True, I’m not crazy about animal research, and I think any mother prescribed thalidomide in the fifties will tell you there are limits to its value, (and don’t get me started talking about Seligman and scottie dogs for gods sake) BUT I’m really happy they enjoy their two colonies and that the beavers have a free and happy space to be-aver about.

(And now that we’re on the same team, tell me more about DNA testing those snags because we’ve got some beavers in Cordelia, Vallejo and Napa and I’d love to know if they’re relatives!)

Friends of beavers in Indiana are definitely worth remembering. You can check out their excellent facebook page here.

So close and yet so far…

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver Rehabilitation, Beavers elsewhere, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, Creative Solutions, Environmental December 16, 2011

There was an article yesterday about a foundation grant to a university in Indiana so the ecology lab could study “Beavers and Birds”. My, my, my was I excited! It’s not exactly beaver central out there! I got out my beaver map and looked for the closest expert out that way. It’s a beaver wasteland but I thought Hydrologist and beaver supporter Donald Hey of the wetlands initiative would be a good place to start.

Apparently the million dollar gift is supposed to be the first of a 5 million dollar campaign to create an endowment fund for the ecological lab at the University. Seems they first gave 250,000 to restore the 55-acre wetlands that the lab is housed on. The intention is to protect the lands in perpetuity and teach better stewardship to students and children in the area.

Great! You have wetlands! Students! Money and good intentions! When do the beavers come in?

Students on campus are doing behavioral, hormone, and genetic research on beavers and birds

Ugh. There is no part of that sentence I like. And no part of that sentence that is going to advance your goals OR ecology. Do you mean you spent 250,000 to restore your wetlands, then locked all the beavers and birds in cages and you’re studying what happens when you increase their estrogen or combine their DNA with chickens? And people give you money for this?

Listen, you want to protect those wetlands forever? You want to create an environmental center that will show the world Indiana understands its wetlands? Here’s what you do. Write this down, got a pencil? Let the beavers out of those cages and make sure they have enough friends. Let them build dams and move mud and chew down trees, let them dig channels and turn up the soil. Let enriched soil increase the insect population and replenish the fish population and bring new wildlife. Let the chewed trees coppice and become dense bushy nesting ground for a host of new migratory and songbirds. Let your beavers be the foundation and I promise in 5 years your grad students will be so busy writing down everything they see they won’t have time to count their stipends.