A ruptured beaver dam caused major flooding Monday near Duvall, Wash., severly damaging at least one home. According to officials, a large beaver dam on a pond broke, causing the flood. Witnesses nearby said it looked like millions of gallons came rushing through in a manner of minutes.
Well this is one problem Martinez didn’t ever worry about, but it’s one of the only ones. The truth is that folks are worried when beaver dams break, and also when they don’t. I’m sorry for the home owners, but I’d like to suggest they consider the reinforcement suggestions used by NOAA in this film next time.
There is a temporary lull this morning in beaver killing articles, so I thought we’d spend a little time talking about a very great injustice in the world that has troubled me mightily lo these many months. I’m not talking about poverty or political rape or climate change or slavery.
I’m talking about something much worse.
Source unknown
I’m talking about this outrage! And people who have things like this in their sinks or bathtubs or living room floors. I’m talking about the fact that they get to pick up this tiny fury wet thing with a flat tail and I don’t. Oh the humanity! I thought I’d share some of the more outrageous examples of this injustice with you today. But I warn you: It’s going to get worse. These graphic images are not for every pair of eyes to behold, and I warn you to use caution and common sense and step away from the screen if you feel a swoon coming on. I don’t want a bunch of letters later whining that you didn’t know what to expect or didn’t know how viscerally you’d be affected. You’ve been warned!
Kellie Ball: Wildlife rehabilitation
Kellie is a friend of BWW who saw our website and thought we should be beaver buddies. She’s was specializing in rehabbing beavers in Texas for a while there. The state cheerfully supplied her with orphans but it was hard work finding a safe place to release them. recalling the “using a can of beans to trap a beaver in Edcouch incident” I believe her. Let’s just say that beaver savvy hasn’t yet trickled down to Texas and leave it at that.
Kellie Ball: Wildlife rehabilitation
I told you these photos were bad. Who in there right mind would put a rubber duckie in with a beaver? It’s just sick. As if the one wasn’t cute enough without the other. The ‘rehabbers’ (as they like to call themselves) just toss their exploits around like they were nothing. Like everyone had beaver chewing their chairlegs and building dams out of newspaper under the ottoman. Like every porcelain vessel was just waiting for the addition of a beaver.
Kellie Ball: Wildlife rehabilitation
This Public Service Warning has been brought to you by the good people of Worth A Dam who have after 5 years only had the privilege of handling sick beavers and dead beavers and want you to know we’re mad as hell and not going to take it lying down.
Lots to talk about this morning. I’m told some visitors from Sonoma are coming down tomorrow for a beaver viewing because they heard my talk at Audubon and wanted to see the heroes themselves. I went down this morning to verify arrival times with the new clock. Mom came back over the secondary at 5:50 and jr swam around under the footbridge at 6:25.
Some odd Martinez beaver remnant conversations on the bridge this morning. A woman who said she moved to Martinez from out of state with her daughter in 2006. When all the excitement started they were drawn to hang out at the beaver dam and were picked up by a news crew. The little girl pointedly told the camera “We just moved here. Martinez is our home now. And it’s the beavers home too”.
Her daughter is now 15.
Also a boisterous cycling man who helpfully explained that he was the one who “started” this whole beaver thing by protesting on the dam when city staff was trying to remove it. (I actually remember this story.) He forced them to carry him off the dam and was arrested he says by the officer who was later shot in Martinez (Paul Starzck). He noted that the fallen officer was such a decent guy he let him drop off his bike at home before bringing him to the station, and he even talked about it at his funeral.
He also explained that he was really mad at that “Swede named Bork” who came in and took down their dam by so much. (Swede? Bork?) He had tried to explain that they need that protection from predators and of course did I know after he did it that one kit died and got all scratched up by a raccoon?
Which I repeat here primarily to note that the Martinez Beavers weren’t ever protected because it was the right thing to do, or the easy thing to do. They weren’t preserved because they were good for creeks or birds or children. They survived only because they were functionally family pets and “owned” defensively protected by many, many people. People who talked to their neighbors and friends, and news media. They said good things and wrong things and had remarkable insights and repeated gossip and got facts incorrect. People who thought beavers ate fish and lived in the dam and people who still swear they regularly see them in the daytime. Now those who have seen me wince at the conversations will know that I have an allergic reaction to misrepresenting the facts about beavers, but it doesn’t matter because my accuracy didn’t save their lives.
Their populism did.
Are the beavers still important to Martinez? Well, this campaign flyer in the Gazette this morning appears to think so. I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that he’s not using that ad with the South of highway 4 crowd, but it’s a funny thing to see anyway. I used to joke about the “beaver bump” but I don’t think there was ever anything as unified as a beaver voting block. We were libertarians and democrats and republicans and teachers and policemen and seniors and shopkeepers and health care workers and homeless people and criminals. We were motivated by compassion and ecology and revenge and sour grapes and good will. We were the original big tent: eclectic with a purpose. And that’s why we won.
We got the city to hire “Bork the Swede”. Ha ha.
Happy Almost 5 year Anniversary by the way!
Which makes this new article from BBC Nature timely to say the least.
Reintroducing a species is never easy. The cause is championed by some, while critics question the wisdom of the species’ return, as with the case of the European beaver’s return to Scotland. Hunted to extinction in Scotland in the 16th century, the beavers are part of an official reintroduction trial in Knapdale Forest, Argyll.
Since the trial began, controversy has surrounded the project but it could be that reintroduced species can benefit local economies as well as ecosystems. Given that the beaver is the first extinct native mammal to officially return to the wild in Britain – the wild boar has also come back, but by accident rather than design – you might think this would be cause for celebration.
But the beaver continues to cause controversy, with a small but persistent alliance of landowners, anglers and foresters ranged against its return.
This is a smart, well written article and our scottish friends are very happy with it for a good reason. The answer of course is “no, not all by itself”. Tourism alone can’t justify beavers in Scotland or Martinez for that matter. But when you combine it with birds, and fish, and mammals, and dragonflies, and community spirit and the wash of bad will you would have incurred to get rid of them, the beaver equation is looking pretty nice.
Even for the illicit beavers:
Earlier this year SNH finally announced that it was suspending any attempts to capture beavers along the Tay, a decision that will be reviewed in 2015. In the meantime a working group has been set up to advise landowners on how to co-exist with beavers on their land.
But given that this population now seems to be fully established, any attempts to eradicate beavers from Scotland would now surely be a case of shutting the stable door long after this particular horse has bolted. Sir Lister-Kaye certainly thinks so, suggesting that by 2015 there could be as many as 300 beavers living wild in Scotland.
“We do need a constant on-going educational effort, aimed at a new generation of young people who understand fundamental ecological principles and who can lend weight to the debate about the beaver,” he said.
The reality is that, whether people like it or not, beavers are now firmly established in many of Scotland’s river systems and wetlands. And polls show that the majority of the Scottish public welcomes this new – or rather returning – addition to their fauna.
Paul Ramsay suggests that instead of worrying about beavers, we should be celebrating their return.
“When you consider that in Europe as a whole this creature was on the very brink of extinction, and yet has made an incredible comeback, this is a fantastic conservation success story – and something we really should be boasting about,” he said.
Offered with literally no trace of self awareness or irony whatsoever. The new book by Jim Sterba describes a urbanity overun by nature and “do-gooders” who feed raccoons as pets and will not allow the noble sharpshooters to take out their geese.
Those conflicts often pit neighbor against neighbor. After a small dog in Wheaton, Ill., was mauled by a coyote and had to be euthanized, officials hired a nuisance wildlife mitigation company. Its operator killed four coyotes and got voice-mail death threats. A brick was tossed through a city official’s window, city-council members were peppered with threatening emails and letters, and the FBI was called in. After Princeton began culling deer 12 years ago, someone splattered the mayor’s car with deer innards.
I find this article as provoking as any single thing I have ever read and I’ve read some beauties. I have been madly trying to no avail to post a comment this morning, so I will content myself with writing a letter. The notion that the problem is that we have allowed wildlife to recover too MUCH and that those crazy bunny huggers are mean to noble hunters who are just trying to save our cities is beyond outrageous. The simple fact is that humans have expanded into wildlife habitat and taken away their spaces. To adapt they have gotten smarter about living with us. But we have gotten much stupider about living with them.
If you are part of the 1% of America that hasn’t already heard this alarming phone call, you should listen and then think about what it means that we have become a species that is almost incapable of thinking about the habits and limitations of the animals that we complain eat our daisies. As unbelievable as it sounds its a real phone call, who the announcers called back to verify after the massive public response. She had realized by then her mistake and said she was “embarrassed”. I just wonder what lead to that realization, because she robustly warded off at least three attempts to explain in the audio alone. (Surely there must have been others, all her life, from car-poolers, neighbors and friends to tow truck drivers over the years?) But the point isn’t that she is horrifically stupid, the point is that WE all suffer from “nature-deficit disorder“ and the problem with Jim’s book is that it gives our ignorance protection.
Between 1901 and 1907, 34 beavers from Canada were released in the Adirondacks. With no predators and no trapping, they grew to 15,000 by 1915. Today they are almost everywhere that water flows and trees grow. Beavers are wonderful eco-engineers, a so-called keystone species building dams that create wetlands that benefit countless other species, filter pollutants, reduce erosion and control seasonal flooding. The trouble is, they share our taste in waterfront real estate but not in landscaping. We put in a driveway, they flood it. We plant expensive trees, they chew them down. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that the cost of beaver damage may exceed that of any other wild species.
Once upon a time the city of Martinez was worried about flooding with some urban beavers. The city council said they should be euthanized and a neighborhood objected. During the bruhaha that ensued, someone sent one councilman an email saying that his children should be euthanized instead, and the city decided to take that as a serious enough threat to have 11 fully armed police officers at the meeting where it was discussed. The $5000 in overtime pay for their presence was added to the ‘costs’ that city incurred because of the beavers.
(Dam beavers.)
The end of the story is that despite the city’s pearl-clutching and theatrics enough people were upset enough that they were able to demand a humane solution. This meant that the city pried open its tightly clenched purse strings and hired someone who was smarter than a sharp-shooter OR a beaver. Skip Lisle installed a flow device that has successfully controlled flooding since that time. 16 beaver kits have been born in Alhambra creek since then and because young ‘disperse’ we still have a population of 4. Because of the beaver dams we have new species of bird, fish and wildlife.
Wildlife biologists say that we should be managing our ecosystems for the good of all inhabitants, including people. Many people don’t want to and don’t know how. We have forsaken not only our ancestors’ destructive ways but much of their hands-on nature know-how as well. Our knowledge of nature arrives on screens, where wild animals are often packaged to act like cuddly little people that our Earth Day instincts tell us to protect. Animal rights people say killing, culling, lethal management, “human-directed mortality” or whatever euphemism you choose is inhumane and simply creates a vacuum that more critters refill. By that logic, why pull garden weeds or trap basement rats?
He sees some of his liberal suburban neighbors coming to believe that “hunting is good—one of the best, most responsible forms of stewardship of nature,” he says. “Maybe I’m dreaming,” he adds, “but hunters are the new suburban heroes.”
Being as that I’ve reviewed 35 articles about noble ‘lost art” hunters in the last year alone, and maybe three articles about tying down trash can lids or installing flow devices, I’m going to say that Jim is wrong. Hunters are already adored because humans are enormously lazy and sharpshooters get rid of problems that would take effort and thought to solve.
So this year’s Autumnwatch is following a beaver in its lodge at the Aigas Wildlife Centre– and if you never heard of Autumnwatch or Springwatch you are missing out on a rare insight into the british capacity to enjoy wildlife. This is why they’re never going to get away with killing badgers. Here in America we could never tolerate such niceties unless it was Autumn – when sharks attack! or some such nonsense. Never mind, the BBC sticks cameras all across the countryside and people watch badgers digging or duck families growing up and flying south. Click on the video and turn your sound UP because I never really thought about the sounds a beaver lives with every day of its life. I was assured by Warwick Lister-Kaye, general manager and heir of the estate, that that sound is genuine and not added later. Honestly, if you’re ever tempted to try a wildlife holiday, Aigas looks idyllic in so many ways! The beaver video below has a surprising visitor that I’d love to see at our pond someday!
And as if having a beaver in Autumnwatch wasn’t enough, I just learned from Louise Ramsay yesterday that she received word that they’ll include some free Tay beavers as well! That’s right! Not just captive-watch but FREE beavers doing their own thing watch, which is a huge step on accepting them in a country that’s had a beaver tantrum for 400 years. Congratulations to Paul and Louise Ramsay and the incessantly hardworking folks at the Free beaver group including Bob Smith who has been nagging at the BBC to include the once-illicit now-temporarily-tolerated beavers! I will show you the footage if I can!
