Several aspen trees were felled by beaver along the Blue River in Warriors Mark recently. Special to the Daily
Am I the only one that gets a kind of tingly feeling when a paper runs a photo like this?Colorado Summit Daily has a fairly nice glimpse this morning of beavers-getting-ready-for-winter.
Beavers are active this time of the year!
My friend Terese Keil, property manager for Trappers Villas, called me the other day to tell me a bunch of landscaping aspen had been chewed down literally overnight by beavers.
A call to Fish and Wildlife confirmed several reports of beaver activity in Summit County and loss of trees on properties. Apparently, they are busy building dams and lodges in preparation for winter. The advice was to protect the trees with wire mesh along the bottom of the trunks.
Beavers are prolific engineers and builders, and prefer to work mostly at night; their specially adapted incisor teeth and powerful lower jaw muscles allow them to chew down trees. Their teeth never stop growing, and their four front teeth are self-sharpening. They have been seen to work as a team to carry a large piece of timber.
The author Joanne Stolen is a retired microbiology professor from Rutgers – now turned artist and living in Breckenridge, CO. This is a mere 2.5 hour drive from Sherri Tippie so I’m going to imagine that if they aren’t friends already they soon will be. In the mean time I have been perusing the linocuts on her art websiteand noticing there wasn’t a beaver yet. I’m guessing she’ll be inspired to fix that oversight very soon!
There are typically two dens or rooms within a beaver lodge, one for drying off after exiting the water, and the second, a drier, inner chamber is where the beaver family actually lives. Special to the Daily
And remember this Wednesday I will be talking at the Rossmoor Nature Association about our beavers and their effect on our creek. You know you have friends there, so see if you can get an invitation. I’d love to see some familiar faces.
Oh and if you need provoking after a weekend that was just too relaxing go read this morning’s whimper from Mississippi where they are bemoaning the fact that the federal governement (which they mostly don’t believe in) is now only going to pay for half the cost of killing beavers with the USDA and isn’t that a shame? I mean its not like the state needs the water or the wooducks or the trout or the filtration. Obviously those beavers have to be killed because flow devices never work and Uncle Sam needs to do it!
Guess what our Tahoe Beaver friends did this week?
Here’s a look at the installation of a pond leveler at the (currently) dry beaver pond in Tahoe Vista. Scott Carroll at the California Tahoe Conservancy patiently waded thru getting all the required permits, and provided pipe and labor.
Ted had made the inlet cage to fit under a sturdy willow in (what will be) the deepest part of the pond, where it will be protected and nearly invisible. The pipe rests across an older dam near the inlet, and crosses to go thru
the newer, higher dam. We shot elevations, and with the pipe just set on top and partly into the new dam, the pond level will be where it was last summer, which also covers all of several entrances to a burrow under boulders behind the willows.
Approval from the teacher:
That is very cool! Great idea to preemptively install the pipe before the beavers are established. With the pipe already installed, when the beavers repair the dam and the water level rises it won’t rise more than desired. That is important because it means the water level will not need to be lowered whichcan be a trigger for new downstream dam building by beavers. Too often pipes are installed to late when the water needs to be dropped 2 or more feet which increases the potential for new problematic dams. Beavers are much more likely to tolerate a smaller pond if they never get a memory of a larger pond. Of course you know this which is why you folks were smart to intervene early. Well done!
I see you did a nice job venting the double wall pipe. One question. How is the pipe secured to the ground? Such a long double wall pipe (even a well vented one) needs to be weighted done well with concrete blocks or with crossed and wired fence posts to prevent pipe floatation. I imagine you did this already but cannot see it in the pictures.
Here’s what we found today, after our overnight snow – beaver tracks! It looks like a beaver came up from the Lake, over the sand dunes, tocheck out the pond! That’s a couple hundred yards, and up over a pretty tall dune.
There are 2 sets of tracks from the edge of the Lake, which looksomewhat different, so we figure one set was coming and one going.There are several chutes where it looks like they went into and out of the pond, maybe accessing nearby willows (although we didn’t see any fresh cuttings). The water is up a tiny bit from the snow, so there
is a pond they can swim in, but it doesn’t cover entries to the burrow. The larger pond and wetlands upstream on the other side of the highway, where we saw them swimming last spring, is also filling up. (They access it thru three large culverts under the highway)We will definitely keep an eye on this.
Great work Sherry and Ted Guzzi! I’m sure there are warmer ways to spend your days and easier problems to wrestle, but we applaud your commitment and effort! Knowing how far California has to go to fight the contagion of beaver-stupid in the Sierras we couldn’t have picked a better set of champions! Nice work!
Beaver dam at Mendenhall Glacier: Photo Bob Armstrong
Remember our old friends Bob Armstrong and Mary Willson from Juneau? The were the ones that documented the activity of the beavers at the Mendenhall glacier park and published this lovely book. They also organized volunteers to rip out the dams so that the beavers wouldn’t need to be killed until the rangers could pay for Mike Callahan to come out and do a beaver management plan. It seems like a million years ago now, but its nice to see this morning that Bob and Mary are still going strong!
As we climbed back up the hill to the main West Glacier Trail, we noted old beaver works high on the slope. Several trees had, long ago, been chewed or cut down. At first thought, it seemed odd for beavers to clamber so far up a hill, when trees seemed to be available closer to shore. Then we recalled that a couple of years ago, a beaver lived for a time above the Eaglecrest lodge, building small dams and a house. So beavers do what they need to do, in order to survive.
Go read the whole thing for a gentle friday stroll with two remarkable naturalists. Bob has a nice photo of a water strider, but sadly no beaver dams in this article. Here at home there was snow on Mt. Diablo this morning and in the world of ironic just desserts my internet is down this morning so I’m posting this on the cities dime. I bet they’re happy they installed free WIFI downtown. I can just barely reach it if I face north in the coldest bay window of the house!
Also happy anniversary to a certain Englishman who has traveled with me on life’s journey for 26 years today. You know who you are.
This beaver was trapped along Brush Creek in Eagle Ranch last week. It was about a year and a half old. It was released on site and will be able to live in the area at least until next spring, since it is too late in the year to relocate the animals safely. Meanwhile, the town of Eagle is taking steps to prevent beaver damage to the storm ponds in Eagle Ranch, which is a pollution control system that was being affected by the critters
There are two environmental situations clashing along Brush Creek in Eagle Ranch — beavers and pollution control. Beavers are the root of the problem. “We want to leave the beavers alone but we also don’t want pollutants going into Brush Creek,” said Eagle Open Space Director John Staight. “This is a real problem, not just a nuisance.”
The storm ponds are the main concern, however. They are a filtration system for water going back into Brush Creek from the Eagle Ranch development. By flowing from one pond to the next, pollutants such as fertilizers and petroleum are strained from the water before it goes into the creek.
The mound of debris in the foreground was recently cleaned off the drain of a storm pond in Eagle Ranch. Beavers were damming the ponds, which are a pollution-control system. Wire was put up around the drain to keep beavers from damming the pond again.
“The beavers had raised the water level of the ponds a little more than a foot over the weekend,” Boyd said last week. “I noticed that some sticks and debris from the bottom of the pond were piled over the grate (where water drained from one pond to the next).”
The beavers were damming the outlets of the last two ponds. The final pond is only separated from Brush Creek by a narrow berm. “At that rate, it wouldn’t be long before the pond water washed out the berm and went straight into the creek,” Boyd said.
There is so much to like in this article, it makes sense that Eagle is about 90 minutes away from Sherri Tippie and should easily know what to do or at least who to ask. Good for them for wrapping trees, and good for them for thinking of live trapping. Almost.
The first response was to trap and relocate the beavers. One large male was trapped and relocated two weeks ago, and last week a smaller, younger one was trapped. The second was simply released on site. Colorado Parks and Wildlife Officer Craig Wescoatt informed the town that it’s too late in the season to relocate the animals.
“I recommended that any trapped beavers be put down in a humane manner,” he said. “A relocated beaver would have trouble adapting to a new environment and would likely starve over the winter.”
The town’s new solution is to let the beavers remain and hope they go somewhere else in the spring. “This isn’t the best habitat for them anyway,” Staight said. “We’re trying to make the area even less appealing to them for now. In the spring, when the water rises in Brush Creek, they’ll hopefully go downstream where there’s better habitat.”
I’m still left with a unmistakeable uneasiness. One big beaver moved and the younger one rereleased in the same area? You need to be told by CPW not to relocate in November? Trees wrapped with chicken wire? A quote from the public works explaining that a Beaver Deceiver has to be a trapezoidal shape to keep ‘beavers away’? Hmm, I’m beginning to suspect a Land Trustthat knows part of the story about beavers, and hasn’t taken time to learn the rest. A quick look at their glossy website shows me a motto that reads “Saving land for people forever” and exactly zero mention of wildlife of any kind, including beavers.
Travis Barton grew up in the area and has been trapping beavers all over the county for a long time. He’s the guy people call up when the animals need to be removed. He said he’s trapped at least 30 beavers on Brush Creek alone through the years. It’s been a side job that pays him for each animal he catches.
His full-time job is managing a lumber yard in Summit County. He chuckled and acknowledged that his occupation with wood might give him something in common with his prey.“In a year, every tree here would be lopped off if you didn’t do anything,” he said of the Eagle Ranch situation. “It’s hard to say how many beavers we have here but probably quite a few.”
He said trapping the animals in limited numbers keeps the population healthy.“Otherwise they’ll overpopulate and eat themselves out of house and home and then move on,” he said.
Beavers are vegetarian. They eat wood and some plants like cattails. For baiting traps, scent is more important than anything else.“They don’t have great vision but they have an acute sense of smell,” Boyd said. The traps are baited with a musky scent.After releasing the second beaver back to its Eagle Ranch lodge, Barton packed up his trap. He might not need to come back at all.
“Hopefully we’ll only have to deal with the activity for the next couple months, before they hunker down for winter, and then we’ll re-evaluate in the spring,” Staight said.
Those are your closing arguments: let’s talk to a trapper? I told you this article made me uneasy. The good part is that they are close enough to real solutions to be forced to pretend they’re considering them, which is something. I wrote helpful and respectful advice to all the professionals named in this article yesterday. You can count on zero fingers how many responses I’ve received so far. These folks don’t want beavers. They want to play with ponds to filter all the pollution they allowed to gather in the first place.
You know what’s really really good at filtering out toxins? Go ahead, I’ll wait while you think.
With the warm buzz leftover from last night’s election hangover, I thought I’d remind you of a similar night exactly 5 years ago when Martinez came together to defend their furry friends and local heroes. It was a magically electric night.I had missed the vigil earlier because I had to work, but I heard all about it from friends. Former city councilman Wainwright came to my home before hand with several interested residents for a ‘war-room pre-planning meeting’. He brought a bottle of Viano Vineyards Port which was later described as the quintessential Martinez moment.
Viano vineyards was one of the treasures outside of town that became one of the desired real estate markets inside of town. My 83 year old father describes fondly how if you stopped by the farm for a tasting, Mr. Viano would offer a generous tumbler full and a great chat. (Apparently his wife was more guarded with the tap). With that bit of history and a room full of commitment we headed off for the high school performing arts center where the meeting had been relocated (there were too many people for city hall).
I remember being as surprised by the police presence as I was by the attendance. I had never been to a city council meeting before so I didn’t know what to expect. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one., but I didn’t think it at the time. I also thought that I was the only one unhappy with the last minute ‘relocation’ reprieve that they had heard offered at the vigil. Boy was I in for a surprise.
Maybe you have never watched this. Maybe you think city meetings are boring. Maybe you were there and forgot all about it. I promise you if you listen to the first 5 comments, you will be hooked. Happy 5 year anniversary!
Oh and if you need provoking after a weekend that was just too relaxing go read this morning’s whimper from Mississippi where they are bemoaning the fact that the federal governement (which they mostly don’t believe in) is now only going to pay for half the cost of killing beavers with the USDA and isn’t that a shame? I mean its not like the state needs the water or the wooducks or the trout or the filtration. Obviously those beavers have to be killed because flow devices never work and Uncle Sam needs to do it!
