Yes, as it happens. Because we’re going to advertise the festival this year in the April-June issue of Bay Nature, which means we need the artwork in by February. Team beaver must have bought enough martini glasses to coax her into helping us again – (though more wouldn’t hurt!). We’ll also do a web ad on their site for July and hope it brings all the right sort of people!
Month: January 2013
CPU stands for “Catch Per Unit” of effort. Tidy description eh? It is an actual measure used in actual research and actual population monitoring. See when the CPU gets lower we can infer the population is dropping. And when the CPU is more productive that means the population is rising. The unit in question is most often time. How many hours did it take for you to kill that many animals? Apparently our government agencies charged with stewardship don’t actually need to spend hours tracking or monitoring the population to understand these complex trends: We just need to ask the folk who are catching them how hard they had to work! Hey, why use time at all? It’s so ephemeral and who wears a watch anyway?
Why not BPU’s? (Number of beers consumed.)
Although used most often for fish, it was discussed in Oregon applied to beavers as well. See the CPUs for beaver are going down in Oregon, which lead to a voluntary moratorium on trapping in some parts of the state. I assume the CPUs for beaver are going up in Massachusetts, which is why folks always complain the population in the state is exploding.
Of course it doesn’t take into account the variability of Effort or Motivation or Skill. A place with trailing interest in/understanding of beavers could produce a low CPU and a place where everyone loses their collective minds when one is seen (Like MA for instance) could produce such a fire alarm effect that their CPU could be quite high. Not all beaver trappers are created equal.
In case it wasn’t clear, I don’t much like the statistic, or the idea of using murder rates as a way of tracking population. But I do like this one odd fact.
The CPU for Martinez California plummeted in 2007 to exactly zero.
Now for something completely different, I was sent this video yesterday by our old beaver friend and photographer Glenn Hori.
Too much talking and not enough beavers! This is how I was feeling around day three of the conference, so I thought it was a perfect time to share our friend Ann Cameron Siegal’s excellent photos of the beavers at Huntley meadows in VA. It’s a great spot for watching wildlife. I first met Ann when she wrote an article about beavers for the Washington Post. I thought it was a good idea to establish first contact and found out she has been watching and photographing beavers for years. Remember it can be freezing but it’s fairly balmy there at the moment, so these beavers decided to make a break through the ice for the ‘outside’ when the weather warmed up.
Click on any photo for a closer look.
Mapping beaver habitat amenities and dis-amenities: Spaces of human-beaver predation in Oregon
One of my favorite presentations at the conference was this from Sonoma State’s own Jeff Baldwin. Jeff is a member of the California working beaver group, and worked with Suzanne Fouty on his doctorate. He attended my Valley of the moon lecture in Sonoma and is an all around great guy. His talk was about identifying specific sites where beaver would thrive, and contributing factors to understanding why certain places were inhospitable.
Remember that, (in what my line of work would call a ‘schizophrenogenic policy’) Oregon beavers are a protected species on public lands and classified as a ‘predator’ on private lands so they can be killed with out permits or records. Relocation is legal in Oregon but in its early stages, and the requirements involve getting permission from land-owners up and down stream for 5 miles in both directions of where they were introduced. Also, it is not legal to ‘hold beaver family members’ while the entire colony is being trapped to aide in relocation of the family unit, so family members get separated and the corresponding survival rate isn’t great.
He appropriately mentioned that cougar, coyote, and bear habitat were not great places for beavers to thrive, but then added that certain human-populated areas were actually much more dangerous (“Unless, he said, you had a guardian angel like Heidi there“). (Nice!) He pointed out that the unique Oregon laws that allow un-permitted killing of beavers on private land includes leased lands as well. This includes some government lands, regional parks, all soil and gas sites. He took the time to map out just how much of Oregon was beaver-killable and how much was safe. And safe was a very small portion.
It’s hard work being a beaver.
Add to this the fact that only a limited portion of ‘safe’ includes water access and you can see that beaver numbers are going to be limited. Which is why certain regions always seem to have beavers and certain places, which could have beavers don’t have any safe passage for beavers to get there, so they never seem to have them. Which is why, by inference, the beavers continue to come back to Martinez even though we have dam washouts and train whistles and garbage.
Specific Oregon question: I understand that land can be privately held but aren’t waterways and submersible lands public? And, by extension, don’t the beavers that live in those waterways belong to the state? And why don’t you have to get permission from landowners 5 miles up and down stream to be allowed to trap beavers?
What is the Public Trust Doctrine?
This doctrine of law provides that the State of Oregon holds submerged and submersible land in trust for the benefit of all the people. The general public has a right to fully enjoy these resources for a wide variety of public uses including commerce, navigation, fishing, and recreation.
And beavers.
The ‘science’ at a beaver conference can get a little heavy. Lots of figures and graphs, from folks who are mostly interested in justifying beavers as a ‘means to an end‘. That’s very useful for creating persuasive arguments, but not great for telling stories. Even though the science is essential, to my mind what a conference also needs is ‘heart’.
Meet team heart.
Louise and Paul Ramsay were an epiphenomena at the conference. They flew in from Scotland specifically for the event, and dazzled us all with their tales of the highlands. In her presentation Louise showed an image of their house, and pointed out that when the left section was built in the 16th century, there had probably been beavers in the surrounding waterways, but by the time the larger right portion had been added in the 1700’s, beavers were long gone. Whether it was Paul’s forlorn admission that he had actually been arrested for ‘introducing an inappropriate animal’ (charges were eventually dropped), or Louise’s fearless and deftly delivered Scots brogue reading of Robert Burns at the awards dinner, they dazzled everyone.
Only a truly brave woman could read that aloud to a roomful of 150 people, and then soberly explain that at the time this was written beaver had been extinct in Scotland for so long that the poem is referring to ‘fixing one’s hat’ and not the animal (or the anatomy). Honestly, they were both amazing, but Louise as ‘keystone’ speaker at the awards dinner was breath-taking.
What I never realized was that the original ‘escape’ of the free Tay beavers had happened years before the bruhaha, before the knapdale trial, and with no interest by the BBC. Beavers had been spotted around the Tay since the early 2000’s and certainly before the Ramsay’s ever got their own. Beavers that had made their own way in the world long before Knapdale ever got permission and funding to try an official go.
How proud was I to see that the graphics I had made for their facebook page had made it into Louise’s striking presentation! From Eric behind bars to Rob Roy and the ‘tomb of the unknown beaver’. It’s always nice to contribute.
Louise and Paul have spent years talking endlessly to the media, public figures, the community, organizing meetings, children’s groups, an official charity, a website, reviewing international law, knowing when to push and when to demur, I can honestly say that their job was much, much harder than ours. (And I don’t say that very often.) It made it all the more moving to see how cordial and sanguine they both still are.
Louise ended her wonderful presentation with a passage from the 19th century poet Gerald Manly Hopkins from his work ‘Inversnaid‘. It could not have been better chosen or better delivered.
What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet;Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
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