More and more when I stumble towards the computer in the bleary hours and try an decide what to write about beavers, it is like being a raja sorting through a pile of rich jewels and deciding which to wear for the party. This morning I feel positively indulged with treasures. Let me assuage my Catholic guilt at having too much good fortune by sharing all of it with you! The first is from Melanie, who I met at the beaver dam Sunday night, and got her permission to post this morning. This is an example of how nurtured kits are by family members. We couldn’t even say if this is mom, because that’s a pretty big tail for our little mom. It might be dad or uncle for all I know, but I am certain beyond any doubt that beaver kits are loved.
Photo by Melanie 6-23-13
Many of you may be following the rodenticide-raptor problem which is killing and sickening hundreds and thousands of birds around the world and even prompted the EPA to rear its head in response. Our friend Lisa Owens Viani started the organization RATS {Raptors Are The Solution} to help educate and get cities to ban the poisons that are killing hawks an owls at an alarming rate. She has been hard at work to get the word out an asked me a while back if I thought Ian Timothy might be interested in helping and would I introduce them? So it turns out that Ian’s first natural passion was raptors and he was VERY interested. In the midst of going to Carnegie Hall and graduating from high school he agreed to work on this which was just released. Remember that telling the story is the most important thing we do, and Ian just made Lisa’s job a lot easier!
Isn’t that amazing? One of the things I love about his work, besides his delightful humor and artwork, is his compassion. He has the judgement not to show the dying hawk on camera just like he had the wisdom to show the teddy bear [and not its owner] get stuck in the trap. He gets the point across without shocking the viewer, which is very, very rare. I can’t wait to see what he does to improve Pixar!
A final jewel in today’s crown of beaver activity is this. The Beaver Whisperers aired in Canada in March this year, but the International Version is still being finalized. It will include a great segment on Sherri Tippie and have less of a Canadian focus. The producer has promised to generously donate a copy for the silent auction, but she let me watch the entire thing yesterday, which is where I saw this. I can’t tell you how irrationally happy this makes me.
in Just- spring when the world is mud- luscious when the world is puddle-wonderful
Well last night was Just-summer when the world was KIT-luscious and PADDLE-wonderful! Last night there was lots an lots of this
Which was followed a smart young family with fascinated little girls, the youngest of whom kept repeating to herself the helpful reminder that you couldn’t pet beavers because they were WILD. [Yes, I agree, unless your name is Sherri Tippie.] I invited the girls to the Beaver Festival and the parents promised they would come but sadly they weren’t around when this happened!
You have to watch all the way through to see an epically cute little tail.
It was a magical beaver night an the second [smaller] kit made an appearance as well. Three adults and both kits came up from the secondary, which has me thinking the family has relocated AGAIN!
The tree is looking worse for wear an the beavers are still obviously enjoying their ‘windfall’,
Finally an email this morning from Margaret about the success of the first-ever Canadian EcoFest!
Well, I survived! The weather was perfect, hot and sunny. I am sure you are seeing some pictures on the facebook page and there will be lots more coming. Aspen Valley did not have as much beaver stuff as I hoped, but they were there. Vicki and Florine were the volunteers doing the booth and Florine was the one that did so much work trapping and transporting the Stanton beavers to safety, so if anyone had questions she certainly had the knowledge. I was happy to have one of my neighbours show up and she asked why an EcoFest. So I told her about the London beavers and what happened last year and I think people are so misinformed about the wildlife around us, so a Festival is a great place to learn in a happy setting.
Congratulations Margaret! I know it was a huge amount of work but you made a real difference!
{And as an aside, a series of unfortunate events lead a drop of water to fall upon my ‘d’ key yesterday and now I cannot type any d whatsoever. The d’s you read in this article I all needed to paste in. Worth A _am & Hei_i is what comes out when I type.}
Defenders of Wildife (who in addition to making a HUGE difference, was kind enough to donate 200 copies of their magazine on Sherri Tippie for our last festival) has a fantastic paper on ecosystem services and how we should factor the services of wildlife when discussing what to do. I mention it because you-know-what provides excellent ecosystem services, and is offered as their final case study in Yellowstone.
The recovery of the ecosystem is still in the early stages. (Ripple and Beschta, 2012). However, beaver activity has the potential to provide the following benefits:
• Reduce water temperatures and improve habitat foraquatic organisms.• Improve habitat for fish by providing a source ofdetritus and woody debris.• Increase riparian plant diversity and songbird habitat.• Increase waterfowl, amphibians, reptiles, muskrat and river otter populations.• Reduce excess amounts of sediment and organic material in surface runoff.• Reduce steam bank erosion.• Increase carbon storage in plant biomass and soils.• Recharge the water table, increase water storage and wetland acreage (Gilgert and Zack, 2010)
Nicely done! The beavers in Yellowstone are getting some excellent press, that’s for sure. Lets hope there’s a interpretive ranger on hand that is equally committed to showing off flow devices too. You can check out the entire report online here.
Beavers: Wetlands and Wildlife posted this video yesterday of their annual meeting in April. It’s a presentation performed by their intern Susan Hendler. Enjoy!
And today is the auspicious occasion of the very first EcoFest in Komoko Ontario! Aspen Valley Sanctuary will be on hand to talk beavers with lots of other displays and vendors. We wish everyone a sunny, festive, well-attended exhaustion of a day!
Way back when Worth A Dam was just forming, (during the punic wars, as Edward Albee would say) I was looking for a licensed non-profit to be our receiving organization and was having conversations with an urban wildlife group based in LA. I was so excited they were interested in being involved I wrote it about it on the then nascent website and they were so annoyed I had blasted the secret liaison-in-process that they withdrew. Keeping secrets, I learned, is very important for beavers. Who knew? It was okay, very soon after their withdrawal I did a presentation for Pleasant Hill Creeks and met Bill Feil of Land for Urban Wildlife who became our official non-profit umbrella and that has worked very well for 5 years. I think it was all for the best, but I did learn something about keeping secrets.
Sarah Koenisberg
What I learned is to not talk about the thing you’re not supposed to talk about, but to keep asking for permission over and over in alternately charming and irritating ways until your requests are so annoying you are given the all clear! So when Suzanne Fouty called to ask me if I’d talk to Sarah Koenigsberg of Whitman college in WA a few months ago, I said sure. Talk beavers to a complete stranger? Of course! Turns out Sarah is an instructor working on a film project about beavers and their advocates, focusing on climate change and water. She was going to interview Mary Obrien and Suzanne Fouty and Sherri Tippie for the film, but all three insisted they talk to me as well.
It was an incredibly exciting moment to think that the three believed I had something important to offer to the film, because I admire those three women slightly more than God. I could remember the amazing article that first introduced me to Mary way back when she was described in that excellent article from High Country News. It remains one of my favorite beaver reads, even though I now realize the photo at the beginning is a muskrat – not a beaver.
Whitman College Semester in the West is an interdisciplinary field program focusing on public lands conservation and rural life in the interior American West. Our objective is to know the West in its many dimensions, including its diverse ecosystems, its social and political communities, and the many ways these ecosystems and communities find expression in regional environmental writing and public policy.
We agreed that they would come help with Festival VI, get some film of it and we’d do an interview as well. Wow! Can I tell everyone right now? I was dimly able to ask. No, Sarah said, let me get it confirmed and formalized and then it can happen. I promised to hold my tongue. Which I did. Can I talk about it now? How ’bout now?
Cat out of the bag! All I can say is Sarah should be thankful there were distracting new kits to keep me occupied! Yesterday I finally got the ALL CLEAR so now it’s official and I can formally say that Sarah of Tensegrity productions will be coming to do an interview and film the festival.
The project at hand is a documentary film with the working title, The Beaver Believers. It tells the story of several strong women and their allies, and their common cause of seeking to restore Castor Canadensis, the North American beaver, to much of its former native habitat to provide more water and habitat in the ever-warming West. We propose to tell their stories of creativity, grit, and whimsy with the same spirited spontaneity and serendipity as their activism and ecological citizenship itself. The film will be 35- to 45-minutes in length, appropriate for the “documentary short” category in film festivals.
A collaborative effort between filmmaker Sarah Koenigsberg (director of photography) and Whitman College Professor of Politics Phil Brick (director), The Beaver Believers is already well on its way into pre-production, and we have a rigorous production schedule planned for the summer of 2013. Filming will take place from May to August with shoots scheduled in Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. {eds note: AND MARTINEZ!}
Now you must hear a taste of their reporting on the subject, listen to this podcasts started at the Utah festival last year. Click on the photo to listen and imagine how the first festival in Utah might compare to the 6th in Martinez. Don’t you live their voices? Mary’s metaphor of the wildlife riding on the beaver tail is an art project waiting to happen! And Sherry’s voice always makes me want to sit in the front for and listen! Suzanne is outstanding! Oh and while you’re listening remember that painting beaver tails and pinning the tail on the beaver are all things the learned about from us.
Click to Play
They’re stuck with us now. We’re on the calendar and they are sending a team to help lift, carry and film. I’m sure they’ll want to do a beaver viewing too! I’ll do an official announcement this weekend and let Martinez know they’re going to be on camera for beavers. Again! I heard from Sarah that they just got back from Idaho yesterday, visiting some places with beautiful beaver dams and some places that should have them but don’t because they’re always trapped and killed.They also met with Carol Evans of the BLM in Nevada and checked out their amazing habitat in Elko.
I confess to you that I am deeply excited and appropriately terrified about their coming, but every contact I’ve had with Sarah has been reassuring. When I listen to the clip yesterday I realize that this is going to be a inescapably big deal and I can only comfort myself in the usual manner by thinking critically. The very young voice behind that podcast (one of the students) gets to describe Dr. Obrien’s face as being “lined with the desert”? (!) And Dr. Fouty wears “hippie clothes?” (!!) Goodness, what does Mr. ‘Sage’ look like? No comment? Why are the women itemized in narration and not the men? We would have words. That ought to keep me focused. I can do this. I’ve been interviewed in my living room before. Don Bernier filmed me and the first ever meeting of Worth A Dam and Richard Parks used an interview for his final project at UCB school of journalism. I’ll carry on as best I can. Think of the beavers.
And speaking of distracting new kits, our bravest 2013 model was out at 7:30 on Thursday night, allowing me to catch this glimpse as he made his way up from the secondary, through the primary and back home.
Dietland Muller-Schwarze, of Manlius, holds a piece of artwork of beavers given to him by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as part of a "Lifetime Achievement Award" he received for his 25 years of research and other work involving the animal (David Figura | dfigura@syracuse.com)
Dietland Muller-Schwarze, 78, a retired SUNY ESF professor in wildlife biology, studied the animal in parts of the Adirondacks and in the Alleghany State Park for more than 25 years. He wrote two books on them — the most recent, “The Beaver: Its Life and Impact,” was published in 2011.
They do a lot of good. Their dams create wetlands, which cleanse the water. The water percolates slowly through the area and gets purified, everything from bacteria to toxins get taken out. In addition, these wetlands create habitat for other large animals, birds, insects and plants. In the Adirondacks, beaver-made wetlands are assisting the comeback of moose. Finally, beaver-made, wetland/meadows were attractive to the early settlers of this country, who drained them and easily turned them into farm land because of the fertile soil.
Nowadays, we know there are many ways to design and regulate things like stream flows by doing things like putting pipes in beaver dams so that beavers and humans can live peacefully together. There are such things as “beaver deceivers’ that can be set up in front of culverts so that beavers can’t block them up.
Oh Dietland! I don’t think I’m ready for you to retire unless you use your free time to start a Worth A Dam Manlius chapter? What will all those forestry students do without you? I remember how firmly I clutched your book and scoured through its pages when I was on the beaver subcommittee. I gave a copy to the city council who must have at least read the jacket. One year you donated a copy for our silent auction and I remember your email praising Worth A Dam as one of my most prized possessions. Well, enjoy your retirement. And let us know if you feel inclined for a little volunteer work?
Sigh. Why do the good ones always retire? Here’s someone who’s NOT retiring.
EMC News – Out of necessity, Central Frontenac Public Works Manager Mike Richardson has become something of an expert on beaver dams. As such, he was at Central Frontenac Council’s regular meeting last week in Sharbot Lake with a draft bylaw to help his department deal with this ongoing problem.
“Section 1.1. says ‘no person shall permit a beaver dam or other obstruction on property.
If he’s an expert on beaver dams I will eat my labrador. Our old city manager called himself an expert on beaver dams once. Permit me to doubt. Here’s another one who’s apparently not retired…or arrested.
There’s a stat that Denis Fournier repeats often, both when he writes and during the course of our phone interview. The average beaver, he says, cuts down 200 trees per year. “A beaver colony can have nine to 12 beavers in it. So that’s 2000 trees per year,” says Fournier, who works as a wildlife management technician for the City of Montreal. “After humans, they’re the animal the most able to change their environment. They can cause a tremendous amount of damage.”
For people like Fournier, responsible for maintaining the ecosystems at Montreal’s nature parks, that was a huge cause for worry. So the City conducts its own struggle against the beavers, and in the case of Parc-nature du Bois-de-l’Île-Bizard, located just off of Pierrefonds, that means capturing them, tagging them, and finally vasectomizing them.
The vasectomy program, in place since 1995, came about after beavers were seen as being an increasing threat to ecosystems around Montreal. Thus far only six beavers have been sterilized, all of them in Île-Bizard. Fournier used to go out into the wetlands himself and set the traps, which would then have to be checked every day so as not to traumatize or endanger the beavers. Nowadays he’s too busy with other responsibilities, so the city hires a professional trapper to do the work. If they find any younger, unsterilized beavers that move into the park, they’re taken to the Biodome, sedated, sterilized, implanted with a microchip and then released 24 hours later into the wild. They continue to set traps in the fall so that they can monitor the beavers.
I am speechless. What is wrong with people? Have they lost their minds and all sense of human decency? Are there some kind of toxic spores in beaver scat that make people insane? I found this article cheerfully posted on the Beavers:Wetlands and Wildlife facebook page, but I’m assuming they hadn’t read through the vasectomy details. (Nope: Owen says vasectomy is better than trapping. I’m not so sure.) There is even a photo of the operation in process. I don’t see the word VET anywhere in its glossy pages, so I’m going to assume that someone from city staff performs these delicacies themselves. Maybe Mr. Fournier and his son. Just to be clear, it is true that in general vasectomies are far far more simple than hysterectomies to perform. But remember that all beaver sex organs are internal, so we’re not talking about a simple snip here.
The article says that the project was started in 1995. And since then 6 beavers were successfully treated. That’s barely one successfully surgery every two years. I guess if a few beavers are killed in the process, it’s time well spent.
Montreal is an island where the water recently was declared unsafe to drink. It is home to about 4,000.000 people who mostly speak French. Its 141 square miles boast an apparently uncounted square miles of water, because even though its surrounded by water, I can’t find the statistics for that anywhere on the Google. This is the only part of the article that came even close to making me laugh
There could be anywhere up to 100 beavers around Montreal, though not of all them in city parks, which makes containing them an ongoing process.
11 colonies of beavers in a city half the size of New Orleans? Must go, I have letters to write.
