Month: June 2013

Just the pound of cure for Warren

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Environmental, kits, Massachusetts Trapping Law, Who's Killing Beavers Now? June 30, 2013

An aerial view of the problematic beaver pond. (Submitted Photo/MATTHEW DOMNARSKI)

Warren works to stay ahead of beavers

BREACHED DAM FLOODS HUMAN HABITATION

WARREN — When Sherry Rapisarda called 911 on May 25 to say water was rising around her family’s trailer home on Route 67, she was told to evacuate. “I looked out the door and I told (the dispatcher), ‘I can’t evacuate, I can’t even get to my car,’ ” she said, remembering how the Fire Department arrived with a boat and ferried her, her husband, their two grown children and two cats to dry land.

The two floods, which officials have said were caused by the breaching of a beaver dam on state property just west of Colonel’s Mountain, have left behind damage on Route 67 and around the Spring Street area, where cars were sitting in about 3 feet of water.

People whose homes and businesses are flooded should expect their town to protect them and do whatever is possible to prevent it from happening again. They certainly deserve to have the causes analyzed and carefully understood so that they don’t suffer the same fate 3 weeks later. Scapgoats, lazy finger pointing and pretend facts do them no favors.

Before the dam broke the first time, it was holding back a big pond. Mr. Boudreau estimated conservatively that about 3 million gallons of water came down the hill like a tsunami.

But with two floods in three weeks, people will likely remember this for a while, and they won’t let local officials forget, either. They’ve sent a letter to selectmen and want something done about the beavers.

Still, fixing the problem requires a process. First the Board of Health must issue an emergency trapping permit so the beavers can be removed. Health Board Chairman Kenneth Lacey said Mr. Boudreau is working on the permit now.

Since state trapping laws prohibit the relocation of beavers, they must be killed, officials said. So the town needs a licensed trapper to do the job and funding to pay that person. Trapping season, when the beaver pelts would have had some value, ended in April and won’t start again until November, so the trapper doesn’t benefit much unless he is paid.

The beavers have been at the site for at least 50 years. Officials know that because the dam and pond show up on topographical maps from 1956. Mr. Boudreau said there are four huts, which he guesses are home to about 20 beavers.

It’s good to know that the problem is in such capable, thoughtful hands. I’m sure the beaver dam didn’t fail because of some other man-made problem upsteam or some trapping you allowed earlier. I’m sure that the 2012 study you reported almost exactly a year ago, entitled “Warren County study finds roads could be endangered by beaver dam failures“ couldn’t possibly have provided any information at the time that could have prevented this. I’m sure you know it was entirely caused by those verified 20 beavers and if they just kill them it will never ever happen again. I’m sure the trapper hire will give them a money back guarantee that the area will never flood in the future.

I can’t help thinking of this.

Looks like our two kits have moved back to their summer home by the secondary dam. This morning we filmed both of them coming back and downstream into the bank hole to settle for the night. I suppose the entire beaver section of Alhambra creek is like a giant ranch home where they spread out according to their own tastes. Here’s one swimming down under the Marina Vista bridge before ducking home.

And here’s the second high tailing the same distance, filmed from the footbridge.

And if you want to make sure they’re getting all the beaver training they need, check out this perfectly mudded dam.

two sleeping secondary 020 — Freshly mudded secondary dam

Maddening

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Dispersal, Who's Killing Beavers Now? June 29, 2013

Naive child that I am, I once believed that the function of a Conservation Commissions, (charged with protecting wetlands and wildlife and developed as a function of the Wetlands Protection Act), was to actually, you know, CONSERVE things. Silly, silly, Heidi. What was I thinking?

Beavers damming in Hopkinton

In this beautiful weather, beaver damming can cause some not-so-beautiful problems if proper precautions are not taken. “Beavers are out there this year,” said Don McAdam, Conservation Administrator. The Conservation Commission’s job is to protect public and private ground water supply, fisheries, and wild life habitats – even from something as seemingly natural as local beaver populations.

That’s right Don, thank goodness the conservation commission was there to protect Hopkinton from all that NATURE. Anything could happen if you weren’t vigilantly at the ready, killing every water-saver that paddles onto your shores. I guess maybe you should be more specific about what you’re trying to conserve? I can just bet there are more like you at home.

Beavers dam culverts (pipes that go under roadways) and can cause flooding if the dam should break or block pipes, said Public Works Director John Westerling. The animals can pollute water, as well, he added.

Just so you know, Hopkinton is literally 70 miles away from Beaver Solutions. Mike could drive over and fix those culverts in an hour. I wrote of course but they haven’t responded. I shouldn’t be surprise. You have to work very hard to be this ignorant so close to MIT.

Beaver caught in Sherwood

Robin is no longer in the hood. After numerous sightings in the Birch Hill Drive area, the land-locked beaver that made the news last month has been caught today at the Mount Edward grocery.

This week store staff were surprised to find the beaver almost up the steps on the way into the store, said Chuck Gallison, wildlife biologist with the provincial government. He said that his department was giving the beaver the nickname Robin, as in Robin Hood of the Sherwood Forest.

I: Photo of a beaver trying to enter the Mount Edward grocery on Mount Edward Road in Sherwood. This photo was taken on Wed., June 26.

I don’t know if I can take many more of these terrifyingly lost dispersers looking for a place to call home. I am so grateful ours have an excellent waterway to travel. You may or may not remember that PEI has a stunningly bad record when it comes to beaver management – prompting one of my favorite graphics of all time. Their head of wildlife argued vociferously with Wikipedia Rick that the animals weren’t native until he produced an 1830’s document that showed they were. Well, I guess this story is slightly better than their usual but it still makes me very nervous.

With no place to go, the animal stayed put until other wildlife staff arrived with a net, then a cage. The beaver is at this moment on its way to a secret but secluded location on P.E.I., far from the network of culverts it had been using to elude capture for months now.

More beaver stupid from the Taos internet story which has apparently gone viral. My inbox was flooded with stories about the delicious crime from places as far away as Germany and Australia. I suppose I can look forward to days more of this at least. If my internet is spared the voracious beaver-appetite I will let you know.

It made me think about how ready the world is to report and repeat bad news about beavers, and what an uphill batter it is to get the real story out. Even Bay Nature has been reluctant to talk about the salmon issue yet, and got forbid the AP should pick up on a story of a flow device working! I am reminded of an old John Donne poem…

Now if you’re like me you need something nice after all those irritants. Beaver friend Glenn Hori was down the other night to photograph two kits and five adults. Enjoy!

glen adult and kit — Adult & Kit: Photo Glenn Hori

Fascinating beaver friday…

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver Rehabilitation, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions June 28, 2013

Lots of good beaver news to get to this morning. Yesterday the Gazette very kindly ran my press release for the beaver festival in its entirety

Beaver Festival draws film crew from Washington

Six years after the Martinez beavers captured the attention of the Bay Area and challenged the city to try something new, the dramatic story continues to generate interest.

Just ask Semester in the West, a multi-disciplinary program at Whitman College that closely follows ecological and political landscapes. They were interested in the regional drama of the Martinez beavers. Sarah Koenigsberg, of Tensegrity productions, will bring a team of students to film the festival as part of her ongoing documentary, “The Beaver Believers.” The team will travel to Colorado, Oregon, Idaho, and Utah before stopping in Martinez, to look at some fairly famous urban beavers.

Go read the whole thing. Thank them for the coverage and see if you can ‘spot the compliment!’

Now there’s this delightful article from Michael Luntz of Canada who I connected with through Donna Dubreuil of Ottawa and found out he is about 6 months away from publishing a book of his 25 years observing and photographing beavers. His pictures graced the Beaver Whisperers Documentary which aired in Canada this March and will show in America later this year.

Beaver ponds are excellent habitats for seeing animals

Moose visit beaver ponds to acquire their sodium fix.

During my search, I encountered no fewer than eight Beavers and 14 Moose. Most of the Moose had shed their winter coats and looked quite sleek. The bulls were sprouting new antlers (these fall off every winter and grow anew in the spring) covered in velvet, soft skin that feeds blood to the bone growing beneath.

These huge animals were wandering into beaver ponds to feast on new aquatic growth. This food does not provide a lot of nourishment but is a rich source of sodium, an essential nutrient that Moose lack almost completely in their winter diet of dry twigs and coniferous needles. The sodium they glean is stored in the rumen of their stomach, and is used through the rest of the year. There were many other creatures active in the ponds I visited. Hooded Mergansers, Ring-necked Ducks, Mallards, and American Black Ducks were present, one Mallard was already leading around her ducklings.

Nice. The end of the article says he’s off to Norway to watch Castor Fiber so I of course asked if he was meeting Duncan Haley and he wrote back that Duncan has been enormously helpful but will be 8 hours away! I’m looking forward to his castor fiber photos and wonder if he’ll see the difference like I think I can?

BTW can’t you just imagine the city council’s face if moose showed up at our beaver dams?

Now you’ve been very good this week and deserve this. Click for major AWW action and donate here.

Dozens of wild animals rescued from deluge

I’ve been good too, so I deserve to be rewarded by sharing this story which made me laugh out loud. It obviously required a graphic.

Beaver blamed for disrupting Taos cell, Internet service

Ha ha ha. How does a beaver knock out cell and internet service? Excessive beaver bandwidth?

Obviously the service reps at TAO Cell graduated from the SAY ANYTHING school of telecommunications.

After offering conflicting explanations about what severed a fiber optic cable east of Eagle Nest, CenturyLink representatives now say the 20-hour cell phone and Internet outage last week was caused by an over-eager beaver chewing through the line.

Thanks guys, that goes in the scrapbook. Beavers blamed for flooding, fires, mosquitoes, disease and now service blackouts. Perfect.

New Hampshire comes to the table

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions June 27, 2013

Living, working with beavers

Granddaughter Hayden asked, “What does ‘pesky’ mean?”

I’d just commented about “those pesky beavers” on our way to observe a Harris Center beaver-deceiver project in Stoddard. I said it means rascally, as in little rascal beavers that are outsmarting humans.

Beavers at the Fremont conservation land in Peterborough have been outsmarting me for a month now. Hayden, Carl and I were going to observe installation of Phase II of the Harris Center beaver project. The beavers had thwarted Phase I.

I like this article from Francie Von Mertens for the Ledger-Transcript in New Hampshire. She is enough of a nature appreciator to understand that beavers mean good things for birds and wildlife and a plucky problem-solver and writer.

We like beavers. They’re one of a handful of “keystone species” that benefit a wide range of other wildlife species.

So far so good. The wildlife center wants to live with beavers, and knows why they’re good. It even knows about beaver deceivers. Although I’m getting the feeling they think that any pipe stuck in a dam is a deceiver.

My new routine became an early morning visit to the dam to unclog the two beaver-deceiver pipes. It took the beavers one night to figure out the pipes, as well as the other small breeches I made in their dam to keep the water level down.

Mud, sticks and grasses patched each breech and clogged each pipe.

Each morning I cleared the two pipes and remade the breeches. Once I slipped on the muddy dam and fell in. I pictured the beavers finding that hilarious. I did begin to worry that the beavers were having to spend too much time undoing my work and might not have enough time to forage.

Full marks for effort I guess, and raw commitment to the beaver ideal. I can’t imagine our city would be interested in doing the right thing if it had been forced to endure even one night of failure. But you aren’t responsible for re-inventing the wheel here, and there are very solid plans for how to do this already in place. You could use them. Sometimes letting smart people do their job makes YOU look smart.

This Monday, Carl, Conservation Commission member John Patterson, and Eric Masterson from the Harris Center installed Phase II at the Fremont modeled after the Phase II system installed at the Harris Center’s Robb Reservoir property in Stoddard.

It’s a long stretch of 12-inch culvert pipe embedded in the beaver dam. It reaches well out into the pond and is circled by a wire cage that will be very difficult to clog.

Gosh. Did it look something like this? I just contacted beaver friend Art Wolinsky in New Hampshire so I can send the author his way and he said just exactly what I thought. “Phase II should have been Phase I!” Well they got there eventually. Obviously even now the author has a hard time imaging that these efforts will succeed.

As a diversionary ploy, I just might keep up my morning routine at Fremont with hopes the pesky beavers won’t associate the new thing in the middle of their small pond with the humans messing with their damworks.

I give up. The writer is just too adorable. I can’t even be sarcastic. Go ahead and do the morning routine or rain dance or whatever you want. Those beavers (and all the wildlife that depends on them) are lucky to have you!

mommudding — How beavers plug pipes - Cheryl Reynolds

Doubtful deliberate decisions

heidi08 Beavers June 26, 2013

Busy beavers called a threat to Yukon salmon

A first nation in Yukon is looking to help one species by undoing the work of another. The Ta’an Kwach’an Council hopes it can help boost numbers of Chinook salmon.

The Whitehorse area First Nation has received environmental approval for a month-long project to remove abandoned beaver dams on Fox Creek.

Thank goodness, because everyone knows those salmon need wide open expanses of un-dammed creek to grow up where they are exposed to exciting challenges of predation and drought. Keeps them agile! Certainly there are mountains of hard scientific studies proving that beaver dams help salmonids, but none of them look specifically at ABANDONED beaver dams. They’re obviously special.

Gosh, I wonder why those dams were abandoned? Did something maybe happen to those beavers?

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that somewhere a low-level city biologist is feeding this tribe misinformation to trick them into thinking that if they just kill enough beavers their salmon population will recover. (Never mind the pollution and the concrete channels.) They are using the tribe as the ‘cow pusher’ on the front of the train to get the protesters off the tracks, because no one will express outrage by what a native tribe does! And after they talk the tribe into doing it first, and the policy gets noticed, the city can do it, and say “What? We learned this from the Whitehorse!”

This article has been up for a couple days now. The CBC article on the same topic had a dozen comments that were pro-beaver (including mine) which are all gone now. Hmm.

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Flooding has devastated much of southern Alberta, killing three people and prompting authorities to evacuate the western Canadian city of Calgary’s entire downtown — an estimated 75,000 people. But at least one resident of Calgary has stayed behind. Cameras caught a beaver swimming through strong flood waters up the Bow River.

Sorry for Alberta and the flooding but it’s nice to remember what strong swimmers beavers are. I know it has reassured me on more than one occasion!

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Great photos from Cheryl last night, you won’t want to miss. Great kingfisher too, who has been clatteringly noisily around the dams and making herself known!

long mud — Mudding the dam Cheryl Reynolds

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Yesterday I sent Ian’s raptor blues film to Tom Knudson of the Sacramento Bee and today he has tweeted it. I let Ian know and he sent me this amazing article. If you’ve been at all following this incredible young man you really should go read it for yourself.

ACHIEVER | St. X grad wins awards in animation competition

Since he was 11, Ian Timothy has enjoyed making stop-motion animation films. Now 18 and a recent St. Xavier High School graduate, he’s won two major awards for his approximately two-minute film “Day Shift.”

“Day Shift” won a Gold Medal in the student film category of the New York Festivals International TV and Film Awards Competition, one of only two student films to win the Gold Medal, the highest award.

For that film he also received a Silver Telly Award in Animation, the highest award given in that professional — not student — competition.

Ian will attend CalArts — the California Institute of The Arts in Valencia, Calif. — in the Experimental Animation program. The competitive program accepts 15 students per year and has trained “greats” such as Tim Burton and John Lasseter, Ian said.

Ian believes he was accepted because, “They want to see somebody has a voice as an artist. Not only that they are good, technically, but they know where they want to be and what they want to be.”

Okay THIS article is definitely going in the copy of the DVD he will be donating for the festival. You better save it because it will be a collector’s item one day. We disagree about one thing. Ian says his newest film is about the liberating effect of creativity. I say its about the creative influence of nature.

Maybe for Ian they are actually the same thing.

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Oh and as you can definitely discern: I have a new keyboard and a functioning “d”! Delicious Delight and Darwinism! All I can say is thank goodness it wasn’t the “B”.