Nothing Could Be Finer…

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Festival, Who's Killing Beavers Now? March 27, 2012

The beavers are on the warpath in North Carolina, kicking ass and taking names building dams and taking trees along the 70 mile stretch from Cary to Greensboro. This picture was snapped by someone enjoying Bond Park and sent to a columnist who wrote that the beavers were ‘being relocated’, which I’m sure you understand as well as I do. (You know like when your parents told you that puppy went to ‘live on the farm’.)

I did a little searching for the Beaver Man and found the number is linked to the home of a 77 year old man in Stantonsburg NC. No business listing but his (?) son is listed as the rifle safety coordinator for the North Carolina Trappers Association, so that’s nice. Gosh, I can’t tell you how surprised I am that someone with the name ‘beaver man‘ on his truck turns out to be a trapper!

Well apparently they have lots of feelings about beavers in NC because look at this clip from Greensboro where they are worried that beavers will ruin their water quality.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but are you saying that this town rips out beaver dams over and over, tipping mud and silt and debris into the water again and again and then worries about water quality? Apparently the terms ’cause’ and ‘effect’ are not well understood in the area. Dear, challenged Greensboro. Don’t you know that beaver dams are sometimes called the ‘earth’s kidneys‘ because their filtering actually improves water quality?

Well, the benefits of beavers bandwagon may not have reached North Carolina yet, but it certainly has been making the rounds. Yesterday I received a call from Guelph, Ontario about printing my letter to the editor, a call from Maine from someone who wanted to save some beavers in the city park and start their own beaver festival there, and an email from Kentucky where a certain young stopmotion filmmaker we are fond of spent an hour with a reporter walking through bulldozed beaver habitat and talking about their benefits to the ecosystem.

To paraphrase for our friends in North Carolina: the arc of restoration may be long but it bends towards beavers!

Three more good things:

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions March 26, 2012

Beaver Town: Residents Coexist With Wildlife

Photo Credit: Steven David Johnson via Flickr

(ANIMAL NEWS) OREGON — The town of Corvallis, Oregon has decided to protect beavers residing in Dunawi Creek, right next to a local popular park. The park’s fields frequently flood from the beaver’s damming. However, an engineer team with support of the community is finding a way to coexist with the beaver’s natural behavior, instead of getting rid of them. Read on to learn how communities can live peacefully amongst animal neighbors. — Global Animal

Let’s start Monday off on a bright note! What an adorable picture! This feel-good beaver-tale comes from Corvalis Oregon, south of Portland where there are plenty of beaver fans among football goers. I’ve been reading something about this story for at least two weeks now as the city is making sure to get maximal promotional value for its kindness. Now it’s an AP story which is even better press than Martinez ever got. Good for them.And good for beavers!

Corvallis parks officials have decided that solving flooding caused by beavers at a local park will take a little engineering of their own. The Gazette-Times reports that for years beavers have caused flooding at the softball fields at Sunset Park from damming the Dunawi Creek. But now parks officials are planning to install pipes to keep the water in ponds at a manageable level.

Maintenance supervisor David Phillips says they considered removing the animals, but that moving the critters may not sit well with the community by Oregon State University, where the mascot is a beaver. Phillips says they “decided we should try and see if we can live with the beavers, this being a Beaver town.”

Mind you an earlier article reported that what they had put in was actually a 15 inch pipe with an elbow – so that the water drains into the elbow until the pond’s a certain height and then it stops until the water rises. No protection on the intake. Which is nice if the beavers don’t plug the pipe since the opening isn’t blocked in any way. The article describes the city as having a “team of engineers”. I’m sure they thought of this.

The beaver-gods must be smiling down on us this Monday because two other amazing things happened before I fell asleep last night. Worth A Dam received a last minute invite to the 100th anniversary celebration of Girl Scouts at the Alameda County Fairgrounds. (As in 20,000 girls and their families do some art and learn about beavers.) And I finally persuaded the iconic beaver author Hope Ryden (of the much beloved Lily Pond) to talk with me on Agents of Change. Since the subtitle of her book is “Four years living with a family of beavers” I’m thinking we’ll have LOTS to talk about! Stay tuned!

John Hadidian: Agents of Change

heidi08 Beavers March 25, 2012

Humane Society of the United States

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Beaver-Watchers in Illinois

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, kits March 24, 2012

Good weather means good sights in the outdoors

Les Winkeler, Southern Illinoisian

You know it’s a good day when you feel like a cameraman for The Discovery Channel or Animal Planet. My wife and I took advantage of the unseasonably warm weather last week to take a hike as sunset approached. We stopped near a small body of water to watch, and listen, to a dozen or more double-crested cormorants heading to the roost for the evening.

My wife was watching through binoculars when she noticed something swimming. At first, it appeared to be a muskrat, but as the critter approached, it was obviously too large. It didn’t take us long to figure out it was a beaver swimming toward us.

What a delightful start to an article! I can practically hear the frogs peeping in the background as I settle in with Les to see what unfolds! And the fact that it’s from a part of the country where I know of only one [ONE] beaver advocate in the entire state makes it even more interesting! Let’s hope Les and his wife see something amazing at the beaver pond, so that they are inspired to come to this website and learn more about beavers – and end up teaching fellow Illinoisians how and why you should live with beavers. Mind you I don’t want to get too mystical or anthropomorphic on you but I have noticed that beavers seem to have a sixth sense about who to show remarkable things to.

This time he was even closer. And, as he passed by, he made a hard left turn toward the bank, no more than 25 yards away. The beaver appeared to be carrying something in his front paws. Remarkably, when Theodore reached the bank he stood up. Still carrying something in his front paws, he walked out of the water on his hind legs. After surveying the bank for a few seconds, he put his cargo down and re-entered the water.

I’ve seen beavers before. I’ve seen them swim about. I’ve seen them gnaw on logs. I’ve seen, and heard, them smash their tails against the water. However, I’d never seen a beaver walk on its hind legs before.

Aha! A very special viewing indeed! This is as good a time as any to repeat our discussion on wednesday that no beaver observer ever saw any beaver working on the lodge except mom, and the walking upright seems to be lodge based. My guess is that “Theodor-A” was thinking where to put her lodge” so that she could give birth to the kits that were already starting to make their presence known in side her. I have also said on more than one occasion that the matriarch of the colony usually decides who or what is safe for everyone else. Our mom beaver was the bravest and easiest to observe. She seemed to have razor sharp people skills and knew who and what to avoid. Listen to Sherri Tippie’s interview again and think about her comment that the mother beaver was always the last to be trapped.

Dad makes his way in the world by caution. Mom makes her way with judgement.

When it became obvious he wasn’t coming back, we checked out his cargo. It turned out to be a gooey mass of mud, leaves, twigs and aquatic vegetation.

I had the opportunity to talk to a biologist later in the week. He suggested the beaver might have been caching raw materials for a building project — a logical possibility.

Ya’ think? Les that beaver was starting a lodge, and probably you didn’t see her again because she was working from under the bank on the entrance. Here’s a picture of our mom beaver carrying those building materials for her second lodge:

Mother beaver carries Mud — Mother Beaver Carries Mud - Cheryl Reynolds

If I were you I would keep an eye on that pond. Beaver gestation period is 107 days, but based on the season I’m guessing she’s already half way through her pregnancy. For the first month after their born we never see the kits, but in about 2 months you should see some truly amazing sights in that pond.

Paddles, the beaver

heidi08 Beavers March 23, 2012

Yesterday a child walked into my office with a button that caught both my eyes. It was a beaver holding a stop sign under a veil of cherry blossoms. It was circled with the letters Cherry Blossom Festival Washington DC 2012.The beaver was adorable and the blossoms were pretty nice too. Because I am a modestly responsible adult I did not tackle the child and rob her of her button. But there is no denying I had the impulse.

You see a while back I read about beavers eating the famous cherry trees at the monument and creating a stir as people decided how to protect the trees and deal with the beavers. The idea that the flurry of publicity caused by these criminal rodents lead to their eventual adoption as a mascot for the festival pleases me very, very much.

Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is to find me that button! The internet is a very big place, and somewhere in the world it’s image is captured and displayed. I can’t spend the time with [the] google today that I wish I could, but maybe you have a spare lunch hour or moment to check for paddles under the cherry blossoms. I’d like to know what happened to those beavers too, as it seems unlikely they were killed since dead bodies rarely make a good mascot.