Month: December 2012

Cody Considers Castor

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Who's Killing Beavers Now? December 11, 2012

Male lifestyle not so unlike beaver’s life

DAVE DONLEY

I first detected the beaver’s presence early one morning before dawn. I was walking the dog around the pond and heard boulders falling out of the sky, pounding the water with a great splash. Looking up, however, I saw no boulders or meteor shower or frozen effluent streaking off an airliner. We all were delighted our small pond would seem fit for a beaver. In fact, the pond attracts an abundance of waterfowl, including a recent sighting of snow geese. Having a beaver-in-residence raised the stature of the pond from fowl worthy to mammal friendly.

Ahh the old story. Boy Meets Beaver. Boy enjoys watching beaver. Boy can’t believe there’s a beaver. Boy says “we never have beavers HERE”. Boy muses “where did they come from?” If I’ve heard that story once I’ve heard it a thousand times since we first told it to ourselves in Martinez in 2006. The truth is beavers have always strolled up our creek and checked to see if we were fit quarters to raise a family. It’s just that they did so when we weren’t looking and the explorers were routinely and quietly dispatched.

After just a couple of weeks, the consensus decreed the beaver had to go. The options for removal appeared to be few. The default position for invading beavers seems to be its removal by a licensed trapper.

Like that… and like they would have done in Martinez if it weren’t for some very special circumstances.

Then there’s the notion, promoted by any number of beaver hugging websites, that man and beaver can peacefully co-exist. This research taught me that in special cases this may be true and worth a shot.

Beaver hugging websites? Do you think he means us? (Blush) I’m so proud! Tell me about those special circumstances? Is there something particularly rare about the watershed or the stream shape? Or the stream flow? Or the weather? Is it something unique about the beavers themselves?

No. It’s not the beavers that were special. It’s was the humans.

In Martinez we had very rare and special humans who could use the google, crack open a book, open their eyes and actually see that beavers improve streams. . We knew how to watch Nature specials on National Geographic or Animal Planet and saw that Flow Devices could work. And we talked, to our neighbors, to the news cameras, and to our officials.We had very special humans with ears and brains who realized that sometimes city officials exaggerate dangers and don’t tell the truth

That’s REALLY rare!

In some mystical way, I connected with this beaver and was not willing to give up finding a compromise. As an engineer, I can personally relate to the incredible focus possessed by the beaver, almost to its detriment.

The beaver has a plan forged by evolution and is determined to fulfill that destiny. The beaver builds its lodge, makes and takes care of the family, and tends to the maintenance of the dam. My life in a nutshell.

I had thoughts of grabbing the beaver, reforming it of its ways, then getting him cast in a Disney film. He would live out his days blissfully on the pond. My research abruptly ended after my Internet search for “domesticating your beaver” turned up empty.

Too bad.

Very Rare Indeed.

Tribal Velvet Brick

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Environmental December 10, 2012

Kahnawake Mohawks get Cree help with beaver boom

The Mohawks of Kahnawake on Montreal’s South Shore have called on Cree trappers to help them grapple with an overpopulation of beavers that is wreaking havoc on the community.

“They’ve been a nuisance, chopping down trees,” said Mohawk Council chief Robert Patton. He said the beavers’ dam-building habits have caused floods and blocked roadways.

The Mohawks were key players in Canada’s fur trade, but the descendants of those early trappers and merchants have lost their trapping skills. So the Mohawk Council called on the more experienced Cree from Waskaganish on the southern tip of James Bay.

Isn’t this touching? Native peoples working together to kill native animals? A chance to teach the young ones the old ways. (Of course when the old ways were in their heyday there were millions more beavers to go around. That is, until those HBC folks started coming and paying us per skin and we found out about alcohol and things got a little crazy.) But that’s blood under the bridge. Now we just do it to help our friends.

And make some slippers.

Three Cree trappers drove the 1100 kilometres from Waskaganish to Kahnwake late last week to lead a four-day hunting blitz, culling dozens of beavers. Gordon Weistche, a Cree trapper, was happy to share his knowledge with his Mohawk students on his first trip to Kahnawake.

“We set traps along their routes, there’s routes under the water,” he said. Once caught, the beavers were skinned, boiled and made into a meal.”

Never mind that beavers left in the stream would create more habitat for trout and game animals and raise the water table and purify the water and give the Mohawk more to celebrate. Never mind that beaver dams would filter some of the arsenic and mercury in their water and slow down some of the toxicity of the area. Never mind that understanding the Cree and Mohawk idea of wasting nothing means not wasting the talents of the best ecological engineer Nature ever provided.

Don’t think that the Minister of the Environment isn’t sitting happily back in his green leather chair brushing his palms together and chuckling. When one problem takes care of another problem, bureaucrats are always happy. They wanted a cull anyway, it’s their favorite solution for beavers, deer and rabbits. But all those PETA folks make it damn tricky to sneak it past the voters. If they can wrap the whole thing up in a moccasin and get some elder to chant over it they can do what they wanted all along!

And that, ladies and gentleman, is the using-Natives version of what I like to call “The Velvet Brick“.

Welles-SLAY-beavers

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Environmental, Who's Killing Beavers Now? December 9, 2012

Beavers have been making their presence known at Longfellow Pond in Wellesley. Town park officials have placed wire mesh around surviving trees to try to save them from the animals’ teeth.

Wellesley on Alert as Beavers Return to Town

Guess which famous college town killed beavers in January of this year (after appearing to consider a flow device from Beaver Solutions) and needs to kill some MORE beavers now? That’s right, it houses the Alma Mater of Hilary Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Diane Sawyer. Earlier this year they said that no ponding whatsoever could be tolerated and had the beavers trapped and killed. Now, because they got rid of the old beavers, they’re worried that some new ones moved in.

It looks like Wellesley’s beavers are back, and town officials have their fingers crossed that the animals are not planning to stay. “We’re holding our breath that hopefully, we don’t have a new family moving in,” said Janet Bowser, Director of the town’s Natural Resources Commission.

Last year, she said, beavers built two dams in Fuller Brook, bordering Needham and the town’s Recycling and Disposal Facility. Their dams caused flooding, and the town had to have the beavers trapped and euthanized. It was the first time in the 15 years she has worked for the town, said Bowser, that beavers have caused problems – and officials were hoping that it was a one-time issue.

But Wellesley is a pretty nice town, so who can blame the beavers, really?

I don’t think its a nice town. I think it’s an infuriating town. I think that in the entire city there isn’t a janitor with an IQ less than 115 and they STILL won’t listen to reason. I think they know as much about beavers and ecology and problem solving as Winston Churchill knew about doilies. Just look at the quote from the head of their Natural Resources Commission.

Right now, said Bowser, the town is just keeping an eye out.“Once you have them in an area, they do come back to mate,” she said.

Come back to mate? Like Buffalo? Or Tule Elk? Apparently the head of the Conservation Commission in Wellesly thinks that beavers are herd animals. I would be more patient with her misinformation if I hadn’t personally written to Pamela 11 months ago and explained everything she needed to know. I could probably be more understanding if she hadn’t told the paper back then that she had never seen beaver problems in 14 years, (when a cursory google search showed that they were happening all around her).

Never mind. Just because the town is surrounded by great minds and peopled by professors and houses a prestigious ecology department, it doesn’t mean they have a clue. In the words of Dorothy Parker, “you can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.”

Wisdom from the ages

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Environmental, Why We Care December 8, 2012

beaver_1[1] — The focus of North America’s first natural resource stampede, beaver pelts attracted legions of traders (Photo: C.W. Mather, Ernest Brown and Boone & May/C-001229/Library and Archives Canada)

Rethinking the beaver

Has there ever been a national symbol more loathed or misunderstood? Has there ever been a more important time for the beaver to flourish?

By Frances Backhouse

The beaver revival is, indeed, one of the continent’s great conservation success stories; beavers are thriving throughout their traditional territory in North America. But as beavers continue to multiply, not everyone is cheering them on. Each year, the average adult beaver cuts approximately one metric tonne of wood — about 215 trees — for food and building materials. Not only do we complain when they compete with us for timber or meddle with the scenery, we also object when their dams flood highways, farm fields and waterfront real estate. In 2010, one even killed a husky in a suburban park in Red Deer, Alta.

Yet a growing body of research suggests that we need more beavers not fewer, that beavers perform a vital service to the riparian world that will be particularly needed in the drought years ahead. It may be an argument Canadians don’t want to hear.

Be still my heart! What an unexpected treasure! Frances article appears in the December issue of the Canadian Geographic (who knew there even was such a thing?) and rewards us with two pages of history and smart ecology surrounding this keystone species. You really must go read the whole thing, but I’ll give you some highlights to get you started. A big thanks to our Ottawa friend Donna Du Breuile for passing it my direction when a friend sent it her way. I don’t know how I missed it before!

In the 1930s, Grey Owl and Jelly Roll, his pet beaver (above), led the conservation charge. Beavers now can be seen throughout their traditional territory. (Photo: William J. Oliver/PA-15000/Library and Archives Canada)

Grey Owl’s death in 1938 spared him from seeing how quickly his beloved beavers fell into disfavour once they became plentiful. The first systematic survey of Prince Albert National Park, conducted in 1935, pegged the resident beaver population at approximately 500. By the 1940s, park officials were live trapping “surplus” beavers and relocating them to other public lands in a futile attempt to curb their numbers. In 1952, with the population nearing 15,000, they switched to lethal traps and killed thousands of beavers before moving to a more benevolent management approach a few years later.

I love that the article includes Grey Owl, but if I were Frances’ editor I’d make sure she launched straight into a discussion of flow devices and how the very real problems beavers cause can be successfully managed. People need to know two things about beavers: certainly that they’re useful and good, which Frances really promotes beautifully – but also that the problems that they cause can be easily solved.

Let’s face it, we humans won’t do much that’s not easy.

Like Westbrook, Glynnis Hood, an associate professor of environmental studies at the University of Alberta, is working on addressing our ecological amnesia and determining what beavers mean to North America. Fittingly, Hood works in the Beaver Hills, just east of Edmonton.

Pocked with shallow sloughs and pothole lakes, this rolling, hillocky landscape lost its namesake in the mid-1800s and remained without beavers until 1941, when a few individuals were reintroduced to Elk Island National Park. When Hood and her co-investigator Suzanne Bayley analyzed park beaver census figures, climate data and aerial photographs for the period between 1948 and 2002, they discovered that wetlands with active beaver colonies had nine times more open water than those without, regardless of the amount of precipitation. In 2002, which was drier than the notorious Dust Bowl era of the 1930s, the beaverless wetlands were visibly more parched than the occupied sites; some were even reduced to mud flats.

“Our results,” wrote Hood and Bayley in a journal article published in 2008, “confirmed that beaver have an overwhelming influence on wetland creation and maintenance and can mitigate the effects of drought.” Citing climatechange models that predict increasingly frequent and persistent droughts, they recommended that we make more of an effort to coexist with beavers — by installing perforated pipes to regulate flow, for example, instead of removing problem dams — and even recruit them to help with wetland rehabilitation projects. While the language may be academic, the message is clear: we need to rethink our relationship with beavers and learn to appreciate them as stewards of our most precious resource.

Go Glynnis and Cherie! Smart minds using smarter research to stem the tide of beaver-stupid that is storming the land. Go read the entire article and think for a moment about the number of fronts this battle has to be fought on. Small scale wars in communities like Martinez, tribal and regional efforts focused on certain species like salmon, legislative efforts like the hard-won relocation bill in Washington state last year, and pragmatic neighbor-to-neighbor conversations like wrapping instead of trapping. It’s a mammoth, leviathan battle of epic proportions.

I see the wake first, then the wedge-shaped head and a sliver of back. The beaver’s blunt nose creases the water, but not even a ripple betrays the hidden kicks that power its smooth, forward momentum. Suddenly, the tail flicks up and smacks the surface with a gunshot crack. As the beaver corkscrews out of sight in a blur of brown, sunlit droplets explode like fireworks. Gone, but not gone for good. Smiling, I watch the expanding circle of wavelets vanish into the cattails.

But its worth it. Go read the whole thing and leave a comment about how people and beavers can coexist. I did.

Great Blue Herons and Great Brown Beavers

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere December 7, 2012

Maine working to save great blue heron colonies

An adult great blue heron perches beside at least one nestling (others could be hunkered down) at a colony in Kennebec County. An adult great blue heron perches beside at least one nestling (others could be hunkered down) at a colony in Kennebec County

In flight, great blue heron’s wings stretch six feet, tip to tip. Wading through water, the majestic bird stands more than three feet tall. And when it comes to building nests, the heron doesn’t hide away. Like the osprey, it constructs a large stick nest, high in a tree, 100 or more feet off the ground. In other words: “They’re hard to miss when they’re there,” said Danielle D’Auria, wildlife biologist with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. “But that said, I don’t know if people see them as often as they should.”

More Great Blue Herons! Maine agrees they should work on conditions that help these lovely, leggy, croaking birds. And guess who wants to help them achieve their goals?

It’s believed that the great blue herons living inland have benefited from the recovery of U.S. beaver populations, which have created a patchwork of swamps and meadows ideal for the heron to forage and nest in, according to Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

You see, Great Blues nest in rookeries of dead trees – the kind that are found in in standing water. The kind of trees that die off in a flooded beaver ponds. Even though there are still pockets of “Beavers-eat-trees-so-they-must-be-bad-for-nesting-herons” in the world (And I’m looking at you, OVC Sierra Club) in much of the country people have noticed that “MORE BEAVERS” equals “MORE GREAT BLUES”.