Where Credit’s Due…

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, History September 30, 2012

Remember how I wrote about the McLeod Report last sunday? Well, he decided to write about us in return! Check out the Martinez beaver story being discussed in Canada:

Even if we don’t, someone likes the beaver

Londoners owe the beaver much more than a bit of space along some neglected creek. This industrious rodent is a good part of the reason there’s a country called Canada here at all. Which makes it all the more shameful that the city which really knows how to pay homage to the beaver isn’t even in Canada; it’s in California.

Martinez, a community of 36,000, is just east of San Francisco. According to a Wikipedia entry, in 2007 a group of beavers settled in a section of Alhambra Creek that flows through the city and built a six-foot-high dam. Worried the dam created flood hazard, city officials proposed moving the group. Instead a committee was formed to consider alternatives.

The end result was installation of a flow device that could reduce the level of water behind the dam and mitigate the flood risk.

And then, well, they became a huge tourist attraction. Their engineering has transformed Alhambra Creek, attracting steelhead trout, river otters and mink. The Martinez beavers also have a website where, would you believe it, news about the fight faced by London’s beavers was top news on Sunday.

Wow that story sounds familiar! (Although it reads a little nicer than the dog fight I remember). I was surprised to come upon this article but happy that our happy ending was nudging the story in London. Not to mention that thousands of Canadians had to read the words FLOW DEVICES several times!

That should be enough good news for us on a sunday, but I’m very spoiled and I received more this morning. Our Wikipedia editing friend Rick Lanman received his copy of the spring issue of Fish and Game journal yesterday, and we are officially publiished: California Fish and Game 98(2) 65-80 2012

Let the official re-education of every ranger and warden for Fish and Game and California State Parks begin!

Beavers and Wolves…

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental September 29, 2012

Great column yesterday in the New York Times about the role that wolves play in creating habitat for beavers, who in turn create habitat for everyone else.

An example of this can be found in Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park, where wolves were virtually wiped out in the 1920s and reintroduced in the ’90s. Since the wolves have come back, scientists have noted an unexpected improvement in many of the park’s degraded stream areas.

Stands of aspen and other native vegetation, once decimated by overgrazing, are now growing up along the banks. This may have something to do with changing fire patterns, but it is also probably because elk and other browsing animals behave differently when wolves are around. Instead of eating greenery down to the soil, they take a bite or two, look up to check for threats, and keep moving. The greenery can grow tall enough to reproduce.

Beavers, despite being on the wolf’s menu, also benefit when their predators are around. The healthy vegetation encouraged by the presence of wolves provides food and shelter to beavers. Beavers in turn go on to create dams that help keep rivers clean and lessen the effects of drought. Beaver activity also spreads a welcome mat for thronging biodiversity. Bugs, amphibians, fish, birds and small mammals find the water around dams to be an ideal habitat.

If you’re more of an auditory learner, allow me to recommend that you listen to my interview with Suzanne Fouty on this very topic.

And since we’re following other species today, lets talk about the fastest bird in the world who was nearly destroyed by DDT and is now making enough of a comeback to show up at the coast where I haven’t seen him in 15 years. This is a peregrine falcon who was flying back and forth between two craggy ocean perches and somewhere around the corner are the piled bodies of a hundred sanderlings or oystercatchers that he is feasting on. Tennyson springs obviously to mind.

Alfred Tennyson The Eagle (er…peregrine)

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

Friday Good News Report

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere September 28, 2012

It’s been a long week of beaver wankery, so you deserve a friday report that will fill your weekend with optimism and hope. We’re in luck! Let’s start with this excellent bit of news about the Mendon Conservation district deciding to hire Beaver Solutions to control flooding on their property! Apparently, I knew Mike got the job hours before he did.( I wrote back really? just hours?)

Mazar said on Wednesday that the funds would be used to hire a firm, Beaver Solutions, to create a bypass for water flow.“They put a pipe under the dam, so water can pass through,” she said. “The pipe is long enough that the beavers don’t detect a leak.”

Since the beavers don’t detect the leak, Mazar said, they don’t attempt to block the pipe. Mazar said this solution was chosen because the other methods of controlling beaver activity are not especially successful.

“When dams are built, people often trap and kill the beavers, but they just come back,” she said. “Also, sometimes when the dam is pulled apart, it brings the water level too low.

Nice! And all the wildlife that depends on that pond will thank you! Good work! I’d wish Mike good luck installing the flow device, but he really doesn’t need it.
(Or a crane.)

Then a lovely account from an Alaskan fisherman about rescuing a dispersing beaver from the road and releasing him safely in water. You’ll want to read this nice account yourself, and you can find the only paragraph I dislike, but the rest is fabulous!

Last spring, while driving between Paxson and Maclaren on the Denali Highway, we came upon a medium-size beaver in the middle of the road near the top of the Maclaren Summit. The snow berms were at least four feet high on the sides of the road and there was no water for miles. What in the world was a beaver doing way up there?

Spring is the time of year when young beaver, usually 2-year-olds, leave the family house to make their way in the world. Beaver lodges are home to the family group. In the Interior of Alaska, this group usually consists of six to eight individuals. There are the breeding adults, their young from the previous year and the new young. The spring kits are born in early May after a gestation period of about three and a half months. The house gets crowded with the new additions, so off go the teenagers to make their own way in the world.

There was only one thing to do if he was to have a chance at survival — take him to water. I threw my coat over him and he obligingly put his head in a sleeve. With him thus immobilized, I zipped the coat, picked him up and put him in the Subaru. That seemed like a good way to transport him down to the Maclaren River and safety.

A beaver good samaritan! What a great image of this fisherman driving along with a beaver in his subaru! Thanks for the good cheer and the lovely imagery. (Of course there was once a beaver in my subaru, but it was mom and she was dying at the time, and she made a great passenger). Go read the whole thing yourself.

Now I’m off to the coast for some hard earned R & R! Happy Fall Friday!

Flow device for castoroides?

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental September 27, 2012

Sometimes, as the only beaver-reviewer in the nation, hemisphere, or possibly world, I am confused by stories about cities managing beaver problems in one way or another. Sometimes it is clear that they are doing a willfully misinformed job and blaming nature for man’s mistakes. Sometimes their stories stir the heartstrings and inspire you with their pragmatic compassion.

But sometimes, I’m torn, frozen mid-sentence between ‘hurray’ and ‘WTF’ with jaw dropping confusion about whether to describe the event as a gallant but woefully misinformed try, or a deliberate effort to fail on a visibly massive scale on purpose so that folks stop talking about flow devices once and for all.

Once, a million years ago, when I worked at daycare we needed new sand for the play structure in the backyard. Since we were poor as church mice we had the delivery truck drop the sand in the parking lot and employed the 45 children with buckets and shovels to haul it in the back. The cheerful work scene that followed could have had a ‘snow white and the seven dwarfs’ sound track – that is until we noticed young Dylan.

He wasn’t carrying a bucket or a pot like the other children, (marching like mickey with two pails in the sorcerer’s apprentice,) but rather an alarmingly small plastic teacup barely full of sand.

“Dylan! Have you been carrying sand in that cup the whole time?” (We exclaimed and he soberly nodded) “How many trips have you made with that?”

“Seventeen.”

Which is exactly how I felt when I saw this picture of them re-installing the flow device in Grand Tetons National Park in Wyoming.

Mind you it wasn’t that Doran (Wyoming) wasn’t trying. Dylan made seventeen trips to the parking lot with the other children. And Wyoming tried to use a flow device instead of killing beavers. So hurray for effort. But I know that in addition to my email (which contained a link to Sherri Tippie’s book and Mike Callahan’s DVD), Sharon Brown of Beavers: Wetlands & Wildlife personally contacted them as did Mike Callahan of beaver solutions. Maybe folks in Wyoming don’t much cotton to advice from city dwellers in blue states such as California, New York or Massachusetts. As you can see from this photo the re-installation of this flow device required at least six men, a double tube of thirty foot piping and a crane.

They did install a fence around the pipe this time, which is good. But check out how small that mesh is on the wire and tell me again why the beavers won’t use it as a basis for ‘mud lathe and plaster’ treatment?

Oh and the article also says “beavers have been known to raise pipes to render flow devices ineffective”, to which even I, (who irrationally believe beavers are brilliant and wonderful in every possible way), would have to say ‘WTF’ and question the notion that beaver physical knowledge extends to the principal of osmosis inside of a curving opaque PVC pipe. Is it possible that high flow moved the pipes in those instances where it actually happened? Pipes do float and that’s why Mike and Skip tie concrete blocks and drill holes along the bottom. If you listened to experts you’d know that.

She says signs will be put up at the beaver pond to explain how this system works. “We’re trying to find that nice balance to protect the park road but also protect the beavers, our number one priority.

Have I become too cynical for this work? Do I suffer from credulity fatigue? If beavers are really your number one priority and you really, really want this installation to work, why aren’t you using proven tools that have worked for 20 years? Why would you install at 2 inch mesh filter? It can’t be that you were trying to save money by using what you had on hand because obviously the six men and the crane cost a pretty penny. How on earth do you get such massive media attention for what is basically a many-thousand dollar example of a man refusing to pull the car over and ask for directions?

Hrmph.

Now here is something AMAZING from our friend in New Hampshire to rinse with.

Beavers and Birds: Part MCMLXVIII

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Environmental September 26, 2012

Got an email this week from our friends at Madrone Audubon where Worth A Dam is officially in the newsletter for our October 15th presentation. Brock Dolman will be on first talking about why Sonoma wants beavers, and then I’ll chat about what Martinez did with them. The newsletter described us as a nationally acclaimed non-profit which certainly sounds nice, if a little exaggerate. Well, I suppose someone in the nation has acclaimed us on one occasion or another. Maybe internationally if you count Scotland and Canada?

I was pulling together my talk when I saw this. Art Wolinsky of New Hampshire has been motion-sensor filming his beavers with some amazing results. (visit his website for some tree-chopping infrared footage). The other night the beavers half chewed that big tree. Look what happens now:

And now is as good a time as any to remind you of Steve Zack and Hilary Cooke’s excellent 2008 finding that beaver dams significantly improve migratory and songbird numbers. I exchanged emails with both of them to try and urge them to come present at the beaver conference in January, but I don’t think I was persuasive enough.

Yet.