APHIS Wildlife Biologist and long-time beaver-obseror talks about his research and current role with graduate students at Oregon State University.
Month: March 2012
Isn’t that funny? A beaver walking around the road where everyone in Nashua goes to pick up their children from Dr. Norman Crisp school. Nashua is the second biggest town in the state and twice named ‘the best place to live in New Hampshire’ by Money magazine. The woman in this photo apparently saw a child ‘taunting’ the beaver and called 911 to get him taken care of. Of course 911 said ‘we don’t do beavers’ and the beaver was left to his own devices. Nearsighted, separated from his family, and far too low to be seen by even the most cautious driver, the brave beaver continued on his ill-fated journey. And the children and their parents continued to enjoy staring at him and taking photos and maybe there was even as a contest at the newspaper for the best headline. ‘Why did the beaver cross the road‘ was an obvious win, but ‘How is a beaver like a speed bump‘ came in a solid second.
Yes taunting is childish and not very nice, but you know what they say, ‘Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me and a couple impatient autos can run me over flatter than the proverbial pancake.”
So the inexplicable city of Nashua spent an entire day stopping and staring at the young beaver, taunting the beaver, snapping a million photos, shooting video and gossiping about it on the local rag, but not one citizen in the population of 86,000 people could actually, you know, DO ANYTHING about it all day, because six hours later there was this headline:
Visiting beaver dies after being struck by car
NASHUA – A beaver that was spotted on Arlington Street on Thursday and attracted a small crowd of onlookers never made it back to the water. The beaver was put down later Thursday because it had been struck by a car and suffered serious injuries, Nashua Police Sgt. William Dillon said Friday.
Beavers die. It happens all the time, and we both know it. But something about this story is even more upsetting than the usual heartless trapping tales where beavers are killed for their own good or for ours. Because these people obviously enjoyed this rare sighting, they thought it was cool enough to snap a photo or shoot some video with their iphone so they could show their co-workers or their neighbors. Maybe children excitedly told their dads about it at the dinner table or looked up beavers on wikipedia that night.People were interested in this beaver – but no one was interested enough to care.
I’ve been a psychologist long enough to understand Bystander Apathy is always shocking, but this story got under my skin in a way I didn’t expect. Maybe it got under your skin too. If it did you should add your comments to the article so Nashua learns what it was supposed to do for next time.
STRATHAM — An overachieving band of beavers have dammed a babbling brook outside the Cooperative Middle School, turning it into a proliferating pond that threatens to encroach upon the school’s ropes course.
“These guys have been doing what they’ve done for years, it’s part of their cycle,” Tarr said. “But they are chewing all the way around the trees which can kill it. Some of the bigger ones can handle it… but some can’t survive with their roots inundated with water too long.”
I read the article this morning with trepidation, expecting at any moment to hear that the beavers were not long for this world. Conservation Commissions (despite the ironic naming!) aren’t always champions of beavers and wetlands. Would the school realize that beavers on their borders were an asset? Would the community take time to see the forest for the trees? Taking my cue from lady Macbeth I ‘screwed my courage to the sticking place’ and bravely read onwards…
Tarr explained that the beavers will expand their dammed area so that they can swim closer to their source of food, which in this area seems to be white oak, greenbriar and hazelnut. “That’s why trapping them out of here won’t work,” Tarr said. “This is a relatively new dam and if the habitat is right, they will move back.
Trapping won’t work? What’s that you say? Matt! Sit down and let’s talk about it. Here, have the comfy chair. Go on…tell me everything.
Tarr explained that to draw down the water, they can install “flow devices,” which are commonly three-sided boxes, or perforated pipes that will drain through the dammed area. Beavers are stimulated to build their dams by the sound or feel of running water, and many of these pipes prevent the beavers from hearing the water drain out and creating a permanent drain in the dam.
Wow, Matt! Great idea! Are you sure you’re not from Martinez? You could be our brother from another mother! You might need some new info on flow devices because perforated pipes are so last decade, but your heart is entirely in the right place! And look at this
“From a habitat standpoint this is phenomenal,” Tarr said. “The wildlife education aspect is great.”
From New Hampshire we disperse a little farther East to Maine where this was the letter to the editor this morning in the Bridgeton News.
Beavers
I guess word is out that the Town of Bridgton is looking at sprucing up Shorey Park with native species because, to the joy of some and consternation of others, Castor Canadensis (the North American Beaver) has moved in. Apart from their charismatic personalities, beavers are a keystone species that improve water quality and play a crucial role in promoting a biodiversity that includes fish, amphibians and birds.
As someone who is enamored with the idea of having wildlife living in close proximity to humans but also aware that it is just a matter of time before the Bridgton’s Downtown Beavers cross paths with humans, I think it is advisable for the town to be proactive in seeking solutions to this potential conflict of interest.
Perhaps we should consider what the city of Martinez, California (population 40,000) did when beavers took up residence there. In October 2007, the beaver dam was posing a flooding hazard and the beavers were given a death sentence. However, a huge public response pressured the City Council to form a “beaver committee” to look into the possibility of coexistence. County flood control engineers, property owners and environmental groups along with local beaver advocates teamed together to create a win-win solution for both humans and beavers. Beaver Deceiver International from Vermont installed a flow device that manages dam height and maintains safe water levels. In a nut-shell, the “Castor Master” is a flexible tube that moves water from upstream to downstream and tricks beavers into believing that their dam is operating to their industrious busy beaver specifications.
The Martinez beavers have their own website and YouTube videos. A children’s book, titled “The Comeback Kids, The Martinez Beavers”, raises money to pay for re-vegetation and an on-site interpretive program.
The Bridgton Economic Development Committee will be happy to know that Bridgton’s beaver colony will be very good for business since the positive publicity generated will bring in more visitors to the downtown area. Martinez is now planning for the Fifth Annual Beaver Festival, “a Dam Good Time” which is a family event that celebrates the relationship between beavers, the community and the watershed.
Obviously, there are many other considerations that have not been included here and that will need to be discussed, but given Bridgton’s multi-talented population that includes town personnel, environmentalists, educators, business leaders, artists and volunteers of every persuasion, we can come together to welcome and celebrate our town’s biological heritage and diversity.
Check out www.martinezbeavers.org/wordpress. It is a very informative and entertaining site with pod casts, videos and resources that will be useful so that we don’t have to “reinvent the wheel”.
Lega Sammut Medcalf
Bridgton
Lega! You are honory Martinez material! Our sister from another mister! Anyone else up for a fieldtrip? The good news is that if Bridgton opens their purse strings far enough to install a flow device you are 3.5 hours away from Skip Lisle and 4.5 hours away from Mike Callahan. She has already arranged a book signing for the best children’s book ever written on beavers who’s author lives in Maine and once crisply explained to me that she only helps non-profits in her state. Oh. Let’s hope she is very busy very soon! And thanks for the great letter!
That’s been the motto of America since day one apparently. Look at today’s headline from the Sun Chronicle in Maine this morning:
The Pilgrims and the beaver trade
That’s right, the Pilgrims apparently paid for their journey to religious freedom with money they borrowed from the Company of the Merchant Adventurers of London. And guess what was the fastest way to pay them back after those first hard winters? I’ll give you a hint, it starts with a ‘B’.
By 1625, the Pilgrims concluded that the fur trade would offer the most viable means to retire their debt. They were able to obtain a charter from the King granting them rights on the Kennebec River in what is today the state of Maine.
So the Pilgrims built a shallop, a sailing vessel designed for coastal navigation, and set out for Merrymeeting Bay, 200 miles to the north, then up into the Kennebec River. Twenty five miles upriver, at the head of the tide where current and tides mark the extreme of navigable water, they established a trading post at Cushnoc, the site of modern-day Augusta.
The indigenous tribe, the Abenaki, were anxious to trade. They had abundant furs to offer in exchange for corn, of which the Pilgrims were producing a surplus, and other goods. As Governor Bradford put it, “not only with corn, but also with such other commodities as the fishermen had traded with them, as coats, shirts, rugs and blankets, biscuit, pease [sic], prunes, etc.” In exchange for a shallop-load of corn sailed up the river, 700 pounds of beaver pelts came back down. With beaver fur in great demand in London, the Pilgrims were able to satisfy their debts by 1636.
700 lbs of beaver skins. Wow, since the specified weight for an adult beaver pelt was 1.25 lbs that means that the pilgrims paid off their credit card with about 600 beavers on a single stream, plus of course killing all the kits and incidental young that weren’t good for anything. Let’s see, that’s like 56 beavers a year in a 170 mile stretch of river…let’s say 3 a mile….yup that seems about right.
Religious freedom, thrift, hardwork and beaver killing! Now I know just how to decorate for thanksgiving this year! And just to show that beaver intolerance spans the centuries fully from our founding to the modern day, there is
apparently a new episode of ‘Duck Dynasty‘ out this week that shows the hardworking Bayou entrepreneurs blowing up a beaver dam. A smart man would think to himself, hey since they make their money selling decoys for duck hunting maybe they would want more to keep the animal that builds conditions that make more ducks – but a smart man would be nowhere near this ambivalent hickfest. Apparently they think the beavers live in the dam! If you want to see the explosion go here but I’m sure you have better things to do.
(Tell me again what A&E stands for because I must have forgotten.)
If you need some good cheer after this beaver killing extravaganza go read this op ed by Karen Levenson of Guelph Canada. She’s the Director of the Animal Alliance in Canada that wrote me last week about starting a beaver festival in Ontario. Enjoy!
Beavers are an environmental asset
Throughout North America, cities such as Guelph are recognizing the critical role beavers play in protecting our environment. Beavers are a keystone species that help maintain healthy aquatic habitat, which supports a wide variety of animal and plant life, thus ensuring biodiversity.
Let’s be proud that Mayor Karen Farbridge and forestry supervisor Randy Drewery are taking a progressive, science-based approach by wrapping vulnerable trees to discourage beavers from chewing. The city can also plant trees that beavers prefer, fast-growing species, such as poplar, willow, birch and trembling aspen, close to the water’s edge to discourage beavers from removing more valuable trees further up the bank and to help stabilize the slope and prevent erosion. An added benefit is when these trees grow back they are fuller, with lots of new growth, providing nesting sites for a variety of bird species.
Brace yourselves. This is a horrible story. I intensely dislike this story – no let’s be honest, I hate this story. Seems some private property along Orrington Rd. in Bangor Maine was owned by a man with a soft spot for beavers. So far so good. For all the reasons we talk about every day he let some beavers build a dam on his land and create some wetlands. When the city wanted him to get rid of them, he resisted. Of course he received the usual benefits of more birds, more fish and more wildlife. About 10 years ago there was a massive washout of the dam and the flooding caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to nearby roads. The property owner was stiffly reprimanded by the city and he- to his credit- nobly responded by installing a flow device.
The flooding Friday night was in the same area that washed out on May 23, 2001, when a beaver dam failure washed out a half-mile stretch of Swetts Pond Road and created a gully at least 10 feet deep at the entrance of Cemetery Road.
A device called a “beaver deceiver,” which resembles a culvert, was installed after the last major flooding a decade ago, but has since failed, White said.
“It’s a culvert that we placed in the dam to control the level of the dam,” the town manager said. The device now “is completely visible and it’s completely jammed full of sticks,” which caused it to stop regulating the water levels, Stewart said.
Ugh. The first thing attentive readers will notice is that this device was not in fact a beaver deceiver, since it was a pipe designed to lower dam height. Okay naming issues happen all the time. Let’s keep reading. The pipe was found stuffed full of mud and sticks. Hmm. If it was stuffed full that must mean it had no protection? No roundfence to keep the beavers from plugging up the pipe?
So I wrote the reporter about the issue. She wrote back and said that the pipe HAD a filter at both ends and that over the years it had decayed enough to give the beavers access and eventually failed – meaning they plugged up the pipe, and the water backed up higher than the dam could hold with the spring thaw and the washout did the rest.
“When the beavers built the dam they created an environment for other wildlife to use” that falls under state and federal protections, Fire Chief Stewart said
Did I mention how much I hate this story? This is one of those rare situations where so many people did the right thing and it still turned out horribly. Mind you it would have been nice if the landowner checked the filter once in a while or paid a 16 year old to do it. Flow devices don’t require MUCH maintenance, but they don’t last forever and you will need to do an ‘eyeball check’ at least every year! Especially when you know the area is vulnerable to flash storms that can wipe the heck out of beaver dams and roads because it’s already happened! Of course now the land owner has given up the beaver defense and is hiring a trapper to come remove the little culprits ASAP.
Larry Pelletier told town selectman Monday night he’ll hire a trapper to remove the colony of beavers on Swetts Pond Road. He says the town will do everything it can make sure this doesn’t happen, again.
Never happen again – as in no beavers will be allowed near a road ever again and we won’t put our faith in some crazy beaver deceiver ever again. I hate hate hate this story but I suppose the part of it we should learn from is that just because a flow device was installed a decade ago doesn’t mean the beaver challenge is solved forEVER, and we still need to pay attention to conditions and be proactive.
We need good cheer after that. Check out Gary Bogue’s be-nice-to-beavers blog this morning for comfort!
BEAVER FESTIVAL XVI
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