The boardwalk through the wetland and a beaver lodge. Credit Glenda Booth
This was supposed to be Huntley Meadows “crown jewel”. A raised boardwalk through 50 acres of non-tidal wetland where visitors could see great blue heron, snapping turtle, muskrat, otter, and even beaver, who were treated as a fairly appreciated natural feature in the area. The beavers built an excellent dam and lodge in the park right next to a helpful viewing platform for education and everything would have been fine if those dam beavers hadn’t went and moved things around!
Kevin Munroe, Huntley Meadows Park Manager, explains that beavers are building a lodge next to the boardwalk. Credit Glenda Booth
But the wetland is losing water depth and losing some plants and animals that prefer this type of habitat. The wetland is changing because silt washes in from adjacent neighborhoods and beavers are changing their activities. Beavers are nomadic, Monroe said.
In the late 1970s, beavers built a dam across Barnyard Run, which created a swamp and flooded forest that changed the shallow wet lowland into what is called a hemi-marsh. The hemi-marsh evolved into a lake marsh because of the beaver dam, and then eventually evolved into a dry marsh or wet meadow habitat because of droughts, siltation, beaver movements and natural marsh succession.
Beavers change things. It’s what they do. And after they change things they change them again. And again. One of the best quotes I treasure from Skip Lisle is “The principal of beavers is “dynamism“. Which explains why beavers and humans get along so poorly. We want our concrete channels and our set boundaries and our stable levies.
Remember the historic home in Duvall Washington where a beaver dam washed out and flooded the home with mud and debris. Well the beavers rebuilt and the county thought that they could prevent a new washout by installing a “beaver deceiver” which was a noble effort but the wrong effort. Last night there was apparently ANOTHER washout and some 60 neighbors rushed in to pack sandbags around the damage.
DUVALL, Wash. — A dam built by beavers has broken for the second time this month and caused a mudslide in Duvall on Friday evening. About 60 people rushed to a Duvall neighborhood to help save a historic home, roads and a highway after neighbors noticed mud and water flowing towards a family’s 100-year-old house.
I wished at the time that they had taken a look at this instead.
SALEM, NH (CBS) – A Bald Eagle wound up caught in a hunter’s trap in the woods of southern New Hampshire this week.
Police say James Ransom of Methuen, Mass. was out scouting deer hunting locations with a friend on Thursday off of Garabedian Drive in Salem, when he came across the eagle snagged in the trap. Authorities say it appears the bird was feeding on a dead beaver when one of its talons got stuck in the snap-style trap.
I don’t know CBS, but maybe this report should be called “the unintended consequences of leg hold traps”. Or even “why killing beavers is bad for America”. I’m glad the hunter was there to save the eagle. But obviously if he’d done the same thing for a fox or a lynx he’d be looking at jail time. Apparently some species are “worth saving” and some are not.
And America has strong ideas about which one is which.
One thing I was particularly grateful for this year I thought I’d share with you today. It has to do with our good friends at the River Otter Ecology Project. The brilliant and compelling Megan Isadore was able to give a very successful address recently at the Randall Museum for the San Francisco Naturalist Society. It’s the natural history museum in the city and very education focused and beloved.
Because they were interested in doing the same thing for the Rossmoor Nature Association we were able to swap contacts in a way that got Worth A Dam an invitation to present there next summer! Right before the festival our beavers will be featured in all their glory! I thought I’d better start studying up and put together this new species list.
(For those of you following along at home, that’s 15 new species (at least) since the beavers arrival in 2006.)Which reminds me of this prescient child’s contribution:
I’m going to start the morning right by offering your first full plate of the day. It all starts out with a little beaver-stupid from Massachusetts. This time in front of the incomprehensibly- named school “Pompositticut”.
Felled trees that are clearly visible at the front of Pompo. Inset: Square teethmarks are evident on this tree trunk, along with the wood shavings the beaver left behind. Ann Needle
Yes, even as humans have vacated Pompo, beavers are snapping up prime real estate, tax-free, around the building. Told of the potential activity, Animal Control Officer Susan Latham wrote off the notion that lack of humans would have anything to do with an increase in the furry tenants. Instead, Latham explained, “Beaver go where beaver go — they are not shy animals” (easy for an animal possessing fangs). “This is the time of year when beaver are chomping and storing away food for the winter. And the pond is pretty deep [in back of Pompo]; I assume there must be beaver dams in there somewhere.”
Assistant Superintendent of Streets Scott Morse agreed that it is not an empty Pompo calling to the rodents. “We’ve been trapping out of there a lot of years.” Beaver possess cute snoods and appear on the class ring of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — but all of this failed to impress Morse, who apparently knows what it takes to keep the creatures under control and, thus, Stow’s drains working. He estimated that beavers have been a town-wide problem for about a decade, a timeline he maintained coincides with changes in the state trapping regulations.
Now here is something to be thankful for and we should all pause a moment to reflect. Often in my daily forays into the rocky terrain of beaver-stupid I worry. What if there’s nothing left to write about? What if everyone has learned better? What if, after nearly 2000 columns I have said everything there is to humanly say about beavers? And then something like this comes along. Something that I, in my infinite capacity to mock, could not have made up. A cornucopia of stupid, if you will, and I realize I have been chasing a deeply renewable resource.
Where to begin? Killing beavers at a school? Snood? Fangs? Low-hanging fruit I say. Let’s go right for the top.
County workers hiked in Wednesday to a beaver dam that breached two weeks ago. A dam that beavers had already rebuilt in the last week.
They brought in mesh wiring that will be part of a contraption called a “beaver deceiver,” a 20 foot, 18-inch wide pipe installed in the dam. It will allow water to flow out, and maintain the water level. It was installed with the help of the Washington Conservation Corps.
“The assumption is that the beavers will try to build right on top of the beaver deceiver,” said Don Althauser, emergency response supervisor for King County Stormwater Management. “But they won’t block the pipe we put into the damn.[sic]”
Ahh Kings County! Ahh Washington! You are the most noble beaver pragmatists on the planet and we admire your cheerfulhard work and civic effort. An impossibly long time ago their excellent webpage about beavers was just about the only information to be found on the subject. Now we’re grading on a curve so we’ll forgive them calling their installation a “beaver deceiver” (which it clearly is not). Obviously there’s beavers and deception of some kind involved so I guess that’s close enough for government work.
I am, still, a little mystified that someone at the news copy editing department feels the need to swear in this story.
“we put into the damn.[sic]”
Are there really people who spell Hoover Dam with an “n”? Or is it just because everyone gets so mad about beavers?
Room for pie? Finally I thought I’d keep tradition and remind myself of some beaver things I’m grateful for this year. Feel free to add your own!
1. Our paper(s) on historic prevalence were published.
2. Children and adults wearing tails at Earth Day this year.
3. The Beaverettes and Mark Comstock’s excellent song at the beaver festival.
4. The field trip with gifted students from Palo Alto
5. Cheerful, thoughtful, receptive audiences i.e. Sonoma and Rossmoor.
6. Four beaver festivals nation wide this year (and counting)
7. Moses filming 6 otters at once and rescuing the kingfisher
8. Lindsay Wildlife Museum taking care of the kingfisher and giving it multiple surgeries
9. The massive girl scout onefunhudred day
10. 60,000 hits on dad’s beaver movie
11. Thomas Knudson at the Sacramento Bee and his reporting on USDA
12. Martinez beavers on Huffington Post
13. The good people at Blue Host fixing the website after the crash
14. Chris Kapsalis coming up with the idea to cut the beaver out of plywood
15. Bob Rust’s inflatable beaver at the festival
16. Martinez Beavers in Psychology Today
17. Kiwanis for donating to our charm activity
18. Martinez Beavers in the Atlantic
19. 17 podcast interview with beaver experts on Agents of Change
20. A NEW KIT!!!!!!!!!!!!
Because they were interested in doing the same thing for the Rossmoor Nature Association we were able to swap contacts in a way that got Worth A Dam an invitation to present there next summer! Right before the festival our beavers will be featured in all their glory! I thought I’d better start studying up and put together this new species list.
