Month: June 2013

Unexpected treasures

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver-themed merchandise, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions June 20, 2013

Let’s start with surprises. How about this throwaway paragraph from the Syracuse outdoor writer David Figura

Figura writing about beavers

Meanwhile, here’s what I’ve been working on for this week: An interview with Dietland Muller-Schwarze, a retired SUNY ESF prof and nationally recognized expert on the subject of beavers. He’s written two books about them and in 2007 was given a lifetime achievement award by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for his 25 years of research on the animal.

If you’re at all like me your first thought on reading this passage is not “Cool! I can’t wait for that interview!” or ” Finally! beaver appreciation spreading through New York” but rather, huh? “USDA gives lifetime achievement awards”? I honestly only thought they recognized ‘deathtime’ achievements! And they gave this award to the most powerful, convincing beaver advocate on the planet? Wait, I need to sit down! Everything is spinning.

Sadly if USDA truly did this noble thing, they are clearly ashamed of it, because I can’t find a single reference to it in the enormity of the Google except for his resume and this article. Hmm, I shall investigate.

____________________________________________

And now for something completely different, this lovely passage from Jo Marshall the author of the Twigs stories who was asked to share what she learned about water management and beavers for the educational blog by Jacqueline Rhoades because of her very successful Twig stories and the giant beaver character, Slapper. Enjoy!

The first Twig Stories novel – Leaf & the Rushing Waters – is about a young, boyish Twig named Leaf whose old tree home is inundated by a glacial outburst flood. His family is trapped high in the Old Seeder’s knothole. Leaf and his Twig friend Rustle set off to find a goliath beaver named Slapper, who can build a mighty dam to block the raging torrent. What I love about Twig Stories is the opportunity to blend science fact into fantasy. The idea that Slapper and his colony could build such an enormous and effective dam comes from an actual beaver dam in Alberta, Canada. It is twice the length of Hoover Dam and can be seen from space!

The key message in ‘Rushing Waters’ is beavers are natural control agents to mitigate extreme flood and drought. Many wildlife nonprofits have made it clear beaver dams are effective tools for flood control, if allowed to flourish. In many areas, beavers were trapped and hunted to nonexistence, so beaver advocates are dedicated to the reintroduction of beavers into those areas now suffering from disastrous flood and drought due to climate shifts.In spite of those who believe beavers are a nuisance, many nonprofit groups and researchers have shown that the impact of drought is actually reduced since beaver dams allow a controlled, consistent stream of filtered water during long periods of hot weather. These periods are growing longer and hotter all the time.

Another critical theme in ‘Rushing Waters’ is we must protect endangered animals. Beaver dams help create healthy ponds and wetlands, which save threatened species such as salamanders, frogs, birds, and small mammals from extinction. This benefits large predators, too. Nonprofit organizations with passionate beaver defenders such as The Lands Council , Martinez Beavers.org, and Beavers: Wetlands and Wildlife have developed excellent methods to allow communities to coexist with beavers in their parks and private lands. If necessary, humane relocation of nuisance beavers should be utilized rather than trapping or killing these remarkable, helpful creatures.

This post from Jo Marshall was originally featured on the Jacqueline Rhoades education blog. What I really enjoy about this column is the fact that it makes “Beaver Advocates” seem like a real thing – a voting block- like baby boomers or code pink. As if we were a growing force to be reckoned with. Well, okay then! Jo’s website and next projects can be visited here. She generously donated several copies of her books to the silent auction last year which were all promptly sold. Thanks Jo for taking on such a great subject!

Game changer?

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions June 19, 2013

Beaver Fever

In Glen Ellen, a colony of beavers arrives—and this time, they’re a little more welcome

by James Knight

Brace yourselves. Here at Martinez beaver central we’ve been called a lot of names in our 6 years. But this just might be the best.

A HARDY TAIL Popular beavers in Martinez set a game-changing precedent for a new family of dam-builders in Glen Ellen. – Cheryl Reynolds – Worth a Dam

In the mid-1990s, a family of beavers found their way up Sonoma Creek and settled in Glen Ellen. Although they were the first beavers that had been seen here since the animals were extirpated decades earlier, they got the same welcome that is traditionally offered to beavers: they were trapped and killed.

Then in 2006, a mating pair wandered out of the Delta and constructed a dam on Alhambra Creek in the middle of Martinez. “You could sit at Starbucks and watch the kits play,” says resident Heidi Perryman. The city council, worried about flooding, first considered the quiet, business-as-usual approach. But with so many people watching and protesting, the beavers got a stay. Perryman formed the nationwide advocacy group Worth a Dam, to help people navigate similar situations. (Her next talk on the issue is Thursday, July 11, at San Francisco’s Randall Museum.)

This article by James Knight for the Bohemian is an excellent read, you should go check out the whole thing. This is what happens when you take a little time to get the story right. (I first connected with him way back on May 3!) I suggested he follow up with Brock Dolman of the OAEC and that really gave a regional back bone for the article. Now when wine country folks spot a beaver problem, they know just who to turn to for help.

In Martinez, it isn’t just about beavers anymore. When the pond filled with fish, river otters returned to the area. Mink also turned up, along with a host of waterfowl and songbirds.

That kind of result could improve habitat for the North Coast’s federally endangered coho salmon, says Dolman. “Having grown up in Idaho and back East, I loved to fish in beaver ponds because there were a lot of fish in there. So I got to thinking: Why aren’t we talking about beavers?” While state agencies and landowners are trying to slow down stream flow and erosion with costly projects, “beavers can do it better, faster and way cheaper.” Dolman’s organization was invited to contribute beaver language to the 2012 Coho Recovery Plan.

If beavers pop out of the creek into another vineyard, it may not play out the same as last time. In Siskiyou County, Dolman says, the Department of Water Resources had requested a trapping permit almost annually for 30 years, because beaver activity interfered with a data collection point. “Two years ago, they were doing the same thing, and the biologist said, ‘Wait a minute, we’ve got to talk about this.’ They had a community meeting, created a beaver technical group, and for the first time the DWR didn’t get that permit.”

I’d really like to think James was right, and that Martinez was a ‘game-changer’ for how we deal with beavers in northern California. Certainly some things were changed. But even in Martinez it is clear that everyone isn’t playing the same game, so changing the rules of that game just won’t effect them. If new beavers showed up in the city tomorrow do you think that they would ask Worth A Dam what to do? All we can hope is that enough folk read smart articles like this and know to hold their leaders feet to the fire long enough to nudge things in the right direction.

Speaking of nudging, the 6th beaver festival was approved last night and the game is definitely on. Also our lovely artist Amelia Hunter was kind enough to tinker with the flyer and make the adult a little bigger.

Speaking of which, it was very high tide last night, and both dams were totally flooded. An adult beaver filmed pulling a branch through the gap of the primary and down towards the secondary!

One kit was finally spotted last night around nine. He also swam through the gap and was totally spooked by the fact that the water was rushing the wrong way! (Can solstice come any faster? This extended daylight thing is starting to get out of hand.)

Up to date

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports June 18, 2013

Do you remember back in high school when the smartest kid in your class who everyone envied did that amazingly stupid thing that got talked about for weeks and still surprises you? Sometimes beautiful things come from unlikely places. And sometimes folks who should know better obviously don’t.

Take this recent report from Orondo, Washington, for instance. When I read this I practically got out the atlas and tape measure to make sure this was actually inside the state I frequently credit for having the highest beaver IQ in the country. I was stunned, though maybe I shouldn’t have been. I believe it was Hamlet who said “virtue cannot so innoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it.”

Beavers believed to have survived lodge fire

ORONDO — Fire officials say they think a fire in a beaver dam at Daroga State Park was human-caused. “There were no other sources of ignition in the area,” said Jim Oatey, chief of Douglas County Fire District 4 at Orondo. He said he thinks fire crews stopped the fire before it reached the beavers inside.

That’s right. There was a fire inside the DAM and they are hoping they put it out before the animals burned. Scouring this article where words are used like lego pieces (interchangeably), I see that the fire was actually in the lodge on the bank of the Columbia and not in the dam. Maybe the firemen knew the difference and the readers knew the difference and only the reporter is confused. I’m reasonably sure that even sleepy beavers slipped down their escape hatch and got to safety before anything happened. You have to wonder if someone lit it on purpose. Ugh. Two things to dislike about Washington.

Tonight is the “Official Permission for the Festival” at the Parks, Recreation, Marina and Cultural Commission where the city has their last chance to prevent it from happening. In the beginning when the festival was just starting out we were raked over the bureaucratic coals, but last year we were practically greeted as liberators, fingers crossed. Here’s the new family tree I worked on this weekend to show off our new additions.

What I hope will be the last word on the Belarus man-eating beaver story comes from Dietland Muller-Swarze (author of Beaver: The Natural History of a Wetlands Engineer) and reported by Beavers: Wetlands and Wildlife in their upcoming summer newsletter.

“Really, the beaver did not “kill the man; it just defended itself,” states Dr. Muller-Schwarze. “In such a Perfect Storm, the man could have just as well suffered fatal injury from a dog, a snapping turtle, or for that matter, by barbed wire. Does barbed wire ‘kill a person’? The key is, you just don’t handle a wild (or even domestic) animal in that manner. You are asking for trouble. Especially in the wild, far from medical help, you don’t take unnecessary risks.”

You can read the rest of his letter and subscribe to their newsletter here.

Frog and Beaver are friends

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental June 17, 2013

Back in that other millennium, when I worked at day care, one of my favorite things to read in the afternoon on a swim day when 30 children flopped onto the floor for quiet time was “Frog and Toad are friends”. The series used very nice illustrations to tell great stories of ‘Frog’, (who was free-spirited and easily social), and the more inaccessible ‘Toad’, who was kind of asperger’s-y and harder to love. They were “friends” and had lots of adventures together, but with this article from the Oregonian we may need to tell a new story.

Study finds a steady decline in territory occupied by amphibians in the United States

Herpetologist Michael Adams was the lead author on a groundbreaking study that found a steady decline in the territory occupied by amphibians in the United States. The decline stretched across all regions, and into relatively unspoiled national parks and wildlife refuges.

Instead of focusing on individual populations, Adams and his colleagues analyzed “occupancy” – whether a spot is occupied by a particular amphibian or not. That’s a blunter gauge than individual population counts, but less variable, simpler and a clear way to track how fast creatures are disappearing from places where they’re known to live.

The researchers also developed a statistical model to account for false negatives — the chances that field workers missed a stray amphibian when declaring a spot unoccupied.

Their estimates “quantify amphibian declines to an extent that really hasn’t been possible,” says Michael Lannoo, a professor at Indiana University School of Medicine and the United States’ representative on IUCN’s Amphibian Specialist Group. Lannoo was among the peer reviewers of the study.“We’ve known about amphibian population declines for a long time, but the problem may be worse than we thought,” Adams says. “We need to be careful.”

The article is a nice look at complex ecoscience, with stunning photos that make you feel like you’re outdoors on a early summer day in the sierras and just found a private creek of your very own. Go check it out. Apparently the ozone layer isn’t killing as many amphibians at the moment but there may be lots of other things that are, like fungus and predators and habitat.

But this is my favorite sentence in the entire article, and what I would define as the ‘money shot’.

Beaver dams can create prime amphibian habitat, so carefully re-introducing beavers can help, too.

Which reminds me, that this is the first year SAVE THE FROGS will be exhibiting at our beaver festival!

A river runs through it – (now)

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports June 16, 2013

Broken beaver dam may have caused West Warren flooding

WARREN, Mass. (WWLP) – Mass DOT is repairing Route 67, Main Street, in West Warren after flood waters damaged part of the road Friday morning. Warren Police Sgt. Joe Laflower says he thinks a nearby beaver dam may have broken due to all the rain we’ve had lately. He says its expensive to continue repairing the road, and they hope the state can come up with a more permanent fix.

Quaboag is the name of the river that flows through town, and the historic plantation for which it was founded. In the 19th century it was a hard-working river with multiple dams to support industry along it. The decayed dams are still visible along its path, but it’s a beaver dam we’re interested in today. 40 miles away from Mike Callahan of Beaver Solutions a beaver dam MAY have caused flooding twice this year and once in 2005 and they aren’t sure what to do to solve the problem? Really?

Obviously the answer is more concrete. And trapping. Don’t forget the trapping.

_____________________________________________

And Happy Father’s Day to all the Dad’s out there, including the human variety.