Month: June 2013

A tale of two states

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Recent Sightings June 15, 2013

I have always said that Washington State is the beaver-IQ capital of the world, and here’s a lovely reminder. I have been trying to chose the ‘best parts’ of this article to excerpt, but its entirely perfect so its hard to whittle down.

City eyes solutions to beaver-caused dam flooding

Beaver dams along the Deschutes River in property owned by Yelm, Olympia and Lacey are raising the water levels of the river and Lake Lawrence. The cities are currently looking at solutions that mitigate the impact to property owners while protecting the beavers.

Beavers on the property have historically built dams on the river, said Yelm City Administrator Shelly Badger. The cities can’t just go out and remove them, she said.

It wouldn’t make much sense to do so anyway, if beaver dams are removed, the beavers typically rebuild them, Winecka said. If the beavers are relocated, others move in.

Relocating strategies turn into “an ongoing project that will never end,” he said. “At some point it makes sense to use them … for ecological benefits.“They do have a place in the ecosystem and unfortunately there’s sometimes conflict with people.”

Beavers often create excellent habitat for a variety of species, he said. He said the beavers could help the salmon restoration taking place at the Deschutes farm.

Don’t you want to move to Washington right now? Honestly, I think I should be buried there. The article, which you should read in its entirety, goes on to discuss the futility of ripping out dams and the value of flow devices. And no, I didn’t write it. We love Washington.

For contast there’s this letter and response from Michigan. You can see that some folks on the ground are starting to get it, but the Department of Natural Resources still hasn’t a clue.

Wetlands destroyed with dam removal

The management of Fort Custer State Recreational Area recently made a destructive decision to remove a large beaver dam, which had been in place for years, on a little stream flowing out of Eagle Lake.

The more than eight feet long beaver dam had effectively created a beautiful and important wetland in a wild, undeveloped area north of Eagle Lake. This protected wetland was the home of numerous wild creatures.

Spring peepers and frogs filled the air with their interesting, unique songs. Blue heron, swans, geese, ducks and sand hill cranes, along with other numerous birds, nested among the reeds and along the shore of this large shallow lake. Fish and water creatures thrived in this special area that supported many plants, drawn to the moist environment.

Visitors who came to Fort Custer to swim, fish, hike, canoe, bike and picnic were treated to a beautiful, natural overview of this lovely wetland from the road. A hiking/biking trail took you around the lake and provided a close up look at the incredible engineering feat of the beaver’s stick dam.

This beautiful site is now gone, drained away and replaced by a large mud flat with dying water lilies and dead shellfish and plants. The wild creatures are also gone, their environment destroyed.

Joanna Learner

Beautiful letter Joanna, since Battle Creek is 10 miles away from Fort uster, I’m assuming you’re the artist featured in this article a while back.

: ^{One of Joanna Learner’s most recent works, completed this year, is called ‘Mother Nature’s Response to Global Warming.’}

Joanna Learner is an artist-of-all-trades.

The 73-year-old Battle Creek resident is an accomplished sculptor, painter, jeweler, photographer and potter. Much of her work centers on nature, which makes sense since despite living all over America, Learner’s home has always been the crossroads of art and nature.

I’m sorry about your wetlands and beavers Joanna, but very pleased that you wrote this letter speaking up about what was a capricious decision by a DNR that apparently misunderstands the words “Natural” and “Resources”. The paper was protective enough of their friends to give the powers that be a chance to respond to the letter before it was published, and run their rebuttal last. But still you made your point very well. Just remember, beaver advocates beware…don’t ever assume that the playing field is level.

Without knowing more, I can tell you that if that dam did fail naturally, it might put Dickman Road at risk. Additionally, I can also tell you the beavers have done a lot of tree damage on the north side of the road, and that may also be a contributing factor to the decision to remove the dam.

I would suggest you contact the manager of the Fort Custer Recreation Area to discuss your concerns, and I am sure he will listen, and also tell you the issues he is working with. Again, thanks for letting us comment before publishing your letter.

Larry Pio

President, Chief Noonday Chapter

North Country Trail Association

That’s right. The beavers needed to be trapped because they were eating trees. That almost never (always) happens. And we couldn’t wire-wrap them because it’s hard and looks icky and we just make trails through nature – we don’t actually protect it. If Joanna’s last name is “Learner” Mr. Pio’s first name must be “SLOW” because Michigan is obviously half a world behind Washington when it comes to understanding the trickle-down benefits of beavers. Still its a fine start and a rung on the ladder to better beaver understanding, so good work. Keep climbing.

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Last night’s Kitwatch 2013 was not what we hoped, but not without compensations. It was high tide and getting higher when we arrived. The pollen all rushed upstream and clumped into the eddy. This made me laugh when we were waiting. Doesn’t that pond turtle eye look like a velociraptor lurking in the muck?

The city has been a good sport and let the tree remain, and the beavers have been working on it and took a few branches while we sat there. It’s a big tree though, still living, and there’s a lot more to go.

The otter that visited on tuesday has obviously been hanging around all week and the beavers have gotten a little more used to him. There was no tail slapping but no still no kits until almost nine. We saw approximately three adult beavers, both using the overpass on the gap and the ‘underpass’ around the dam under the bank.

The little otter used the gap, the underpass AND the pipe to get over the dam. All my photos are blurry but you get the idea.

Every time the beavers approached the otter ducked into the filter of the flow device, where he and the fish could swim freely because the beavers were too big to come bother him. It reminded me of playing tag as a kid and breathlessly calling out “BASE”!

Just before 9:00, when it was too dark to film and the lights were reflecting in the water, a beautiful kit slipped through the underpass to work on the tree. Immediately voices raised up a register and we all said a unanimous “AWWWW”. We waited, but just one had come by the time it was too dark to stay. Obviously everything is right in beaver world.

Friday is full of beaver friends!

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers June 14, 2013

Great news from Montana where a pilot project for beaver deceivers is being launched and Skip Lisle and Amy Chadwick are at the helm.

Non-lethal beaver techniques for creek

In response to high annual maintenance costs at culverts plugged by beaver, the City-County of Butte-Silver Bow and Mile High Conservation District are sponsoring a pilot project to demonstrate non-lethal beaver management techniques for preventing culvert plugging and flooding of the pedestrian walkway along Blacktail Creek.

Amy Chadwick of Great West Engineering and Skip Lisle of Beaver Deceivers International will lead installation of the flow devices, which allow beaver and the wetlands they create to remain as important components of the stream system.

This is excellent news for Montana. I couldn’t be more certain that they will find they’re saving money installing flow devices instead of unclogging culverts and I couldn’t be happier that Amy Chadwick will be working along with him. We need a new generation of young women working on beaver issues and I want Amy to lead the wave. Unfortunately I can’t find a photo of her but we did meet at the conference and exchange emails. Trust me when I say we want her on our team! And if the name Skip doesn’t ring a bell, why not listen to the podcast interview we did?

Interview with Skip Lisle, inventor of the “Beaver Deceiver”. If he looks familar he should since he was the hero that saved the Martinez Beavers about 4 years ago! (Certain ladies may not recognize him with his shirt “on”.) I apologize in advance for the static on the line, but assure you he’s worth listening to

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Subscribe to all episodes in iTunes here.

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And another friendly face from this letter to the editor, also from Montana

Trapping: Protection theory doesn’t ring true

Scare tactics are the first resort for folks who have run out of arguments, which is likely why trappers often say that recreational trapping on public lands is necessary to protect us from disease, predators and pests.

The most commonly trapped “pest” species is the beaver. Beaver trapping is generally a private lands issue, so a block management model and trapping by trained authorities are more appropriate solutions than recreational trapping on public lands. More importantly, beaver provide vital services in an arid state like Montana. It makes a lot more sense to employ beaver deceivers (non-lethal devices that prevent beaver from damming sites like culverts), to relocate beaver or to find other creative ways to coexist with them, because they improve retention and filtration of water, soil conservation and riparian habitat.

Filip Panusz, Missoula

Filip! A fine letter like that deserves a thank you and a google search. Felip is the executive director of Footloose Montana, a nonprofit dedicated to trap free public lands.

Get it? Foot ”loose”. Hmm, smart about beavers and executive director of a nonprofit with a cleverly sassy name, might be a match made in heaven? Must go, I have a letter to write.

Blame it on the beaver

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere June 13, 2013

Not content with their busy schedules of blocking culverts, flooding towns and killing old men in Bellarus, beavers have been blamed for causing enormous problems all over.

Beaver blamed for brush fire in B.C. suburb

No beaver found at the scene of the fire, but rodent left identifying marks

A beaver is being blamed for a small brush fire that broke out at Lougheed Highway and 105th Avenue in Maple Ridge Monday afternoon. Maple Ridge Fire Chief Peter Grootendorst said the fire started when a tree fell on some live power lines, sparking a fire.

Grootendorst said it was immediately apparent why the tree went down. “The crews on scene reported that there were definite markings on the tree that the beaver had been working on the tree,” he said.“Now, whether it was just recent or if a gust of wind came up and the tree was already weakened, we’re not sure.“

Did you catch that? We don’t know if it just happened or occurred 20 years ago, but we know a beaver is to blame for our untended power lines. Maybe there were no beaver criminals in the vicinity but we know they’re responsible. Their kind always are.

The truly scary part about this story is that its so familiar I already had a graphic. Not for this one though. It’s more unique.

Dam Break Causes Minor Oil Spill

Residents on a lake north of Kingston have a big clean-up on the hands — and it’s all because of a beaver dam.The recent heavy rain caused the dam to break-apart on crow lake … Sending a flood of water and debris into the path of 3 houses.

It also caused an oil spill near Tichborne.

The smell of oil is still in the air and water in crow lake is under a drinking ban after an oil tank used to heat this cottage was washed out by a rush of water around 8 o’clock Tuesday night.

That’s right. Beavers in Utah might famously stop oil spills but beavers in Tichborne Ontario start them. (And what kind of name is Tichborne anyway? It sounds like a disease vector) Of course the property owner isn’t responsible for having an unsecured oil tank right near an active stream. Why would he be? He couldn’t possibly expected to anticipate the sudden impact of a major water event on a stream where water events must always happen. Blame the beaver!

Ken Tallack /Cottage Owner says “A beaver dam can only last so many years, so when it reaches that limit, if no one has periodically taken care of it, it will break and this will be the result”

I assume he means if no HUMAN has taken care of it it will collapse, because if he was talking about beavers I’d agree with him. Sudden thought. What if most of the road washouts famously blamed on beaver dams were actually the result of trapping the beavers so that their were no engineers left to tend the dam? I know some trappers notch the dam as a way to lure the beavers closer, but do all of them?

And then there’s this:

Beaver Caused Accident?

The car of an aledged drunk driver ended up in the Fox River late on Friday night. The driver claims that he swerved to avoid a large beaver that was sitting in the middle of the road.He went on to report that after he exited the vehicle that the beaver grabbed the front fender of the car and dragged it down into the river in an attempt to create a beaver dam.

Well, there you have it.

Beaver Population Density? Or populace DENSE about beavers?

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Dispersal, kits, Massachusetts Trapping Law June 12, 2013

Toward an understanding of beaver management as human and beaver densities increase

Human–Wildlife Interactions 7(1):114–131, Spring 2013. Siemer, Jonker, Becker & Organ

Attitudes toward beavers were more likely to be negative among people who had experienced problems with beaver, and intensity of negative attitudes increased as the severity of problem experiences increased (Siemer et al. 2004a, Jonker et al. 2006). Norms about lethal management also were closely correlated with problem experience. Acceptance of lethal management tended to be higher among people who had personally experienced problems with beaver (Siemer et al. 2004a, Jonker et al. 2009). When presented with a range of interaction scenarios, people who had experienced beaver damage were more likely to accept lethal management actions in any scenario where beavers had a negative impact on people.

So people who are inconvenienced by beavers, (or worried they’ll be inconvenienced by beavers) are more comfortable with killing them than folks who’ve just seen them on the TV? And this gets published as research? I am reminded of Horatio saying sarcastically to Hamlet,

“There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave to tell us this!”

This study revisits the Massachusetts beaver issue and the least-liked voter decision apparently in the history of the world. A 1996 referendum that indicated folks wanted it to be harder to kill beavers cruelly. This is vociferously blamed for ruining every sense of balance the state had previously developed. Even beaver defenders thought the the referendum had ‘tricked’ the voters (although how straight forward are most ballot issues, I ask you?) Once it was passed, alarming reports filled the air like spring pollen. Authorities said the population subsequently exploded because even though you could still use lethal techniques and even though you could use the old methods as long as one of 9 tiny conditions were met, it still took five minutes more time to kill them than it used to and that created anarchy. (Folks in the bay state are very busy and obviously no one has 5 more minutes to spare killing beavers.)

Hence the article, which is based on public attitudes towards beavers and a questionnairre that got mailed to folks who complained about beavers (and for appearances sake, some folks who didn’t) in 2002. Surprisingly, the folks who DIDN”T COMPLAIN didn’t return the survey as much as the people who were mad. (Gosh!) And the two groups said admittedly different things in general, but the researchers knew just how to handle this conundrum to get the results they wanted.

We detected some differences in each state when nonrespondents were compared to respondents (for a detailed description of respondent-nonrespondent comparisons, see Jonker 2003 and Siemer et al. 2004a). Although we found differences between respondents and nonrespondents, we decided not to adjust the data to account for potential nonresponse bias.

Because really, who would you want to do that? It doesn’t matter and it further doesn’t matter that the data for this study is 11 years old. This study is very important. They obviously only questioned residents who were smarter than the average bear. They were PSYCHIC! How do I know they were psychic? Read for yourself.

Sixty-one percent of respondents in the High beaver density group perceived a statewide increase in beaver damage over the previous 5 years. Only 24% of respondents in the Low beaver density group perceived that beaver damage had increased.

Remember, this was 2002. A scant 6 years after the voters passed the referendum to outlaw trapping, which the politicians took another few months to craft into law. Which means it wouldn’t have affected the 96 season. The state only has 2754 square miles of water, so there were a limited number of beavers to start with. Even if there were 1000 yearlings poised to disperse that first year, research tells us they mostly couldn’t breed until their third year or 1999. Now we’ve seen first hand that the first time a beaver has kits the numbers are low. So 500 kits born that year and 1ooo born the following year. Meanwhile a steady stream of yearlings is marching on with similar successes. Lets assume, of course, that these kits weren’t killed some other way or exposed to round worm parasite and die like nearly half of ours did. Let’s assume that the conditions in Massachusetts are so pristine and predator-free that the population gets as big as it can possibly be in those 5 years and increases by 500%.

I suppose 5000 new kits could be impactful. but remember none of these off spring will be ready to disperse until the year 2002 when this study was done, so its hard to imagine folks were feeling the burden of the booming population when these questionnaires were being filled out. Just to be clear, that means folks who wrote that the population was EXPLODING were actually writing that they were IMAGINING it would explode in the future and blaming their beaver problems on the new laws without actually understanding what was happening.

Heidi, you’re so picky. What about the part of the survey where they talk about flow devices and how attitudes change with successful installation? Don’t be silly. They didn’t mention flow devices at all. That’s right, in this entire discussion about WAC (Wildlife Acceptance Capacity) they did not mention the one factor that might conceivably affect this attitude. Because the researchers obviously knew that beavers were ‘icky’, and grant money was freely awarded to folks who said so. The good news for the authors is that as the population climbs more and more folks will get annoyed and become more willing to kill them.

Well, that’s something to look forward to.

Otterly Ruined

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Environmental, Video, Who's Killing Beavers Now? June 11, 2013

Worth A Dam was at the ready with lenses poised for Kitwatch 2013, but an unexpected visitor changed the entire night.

Otter Pipe-1 — Otter on flow device: Photo Ron Bruno

Last night the otter wasn’t ON the pipe, but IN the pipe using it as a tunnel to get over the dam and eat all the fish in the pond. Mom and Dad weren’t happy about this carnivore in their midst and there was a round of tail slapping and water charging. Now a lot of beaver advocates will defend staunchly that otters don’t eat beaver and that the literature on this is ‘controversial’. But the beavers don’t appear to think so. They react with what appears to be very stern alarm when the otters show up in June. The otters might be there for a fish run and have no interests in kits at all, but the beavers don’t care. They don’t ask questions. They just defend. The little otter suddenly remember something he had to do very far away and hightailed it away from the pond. But the beavers remained jumpy and no kits were allowed to emerge and even Jr tried his hand at a very novice tail slap.

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Enough cheer and kitcentrism, we have important beaver jobs to do out here in Castorfornia. Take for example this depressing revisit. I say revisit because we talked about this story back in November, when I took six hours to find the addresses and personally write everyone involved and told tell them how to solve their problem.

Eagle Ranch on beaver watch

EAGLE – High water flows in Brush Creek from spring runoff might take care of the beaver problem that flared up in Eagle Ranch last fall. A rapidly expanding population of beavers was building dams in the residential area, killing trees and clogging storm ponds that are part of a pollution-control system. “With the high water, the beavers likely went up or downstream,” said Eagle Open Space Director John Staight.

Stacy Chase of Chase Wildlife LLC in Gypsum — the company Eagle hired to monitor and mitigate the beaver problem — said she is waiting to see how many beavers move back to the area after runoff. “There’s one dam we’re actively monitoring and at least one beaver that we know of in the area,” she said. “Otherwise it appears the population has scattered.” Chase said she broke up a large dam that was near the bike path.

“We’ll see how quickly the dam is rebuilt and that will give us an indication of how many beavers are working on it,” she said.

Interesting population estimation tool. I wonder if the WHO has tried it? Destroy their economy and see how long it takes to rebuild? Well if the population is our Dad beaver it would take a night, but if the population is some of our yearlings it could take a bit longer. Hmm I may have spied a flaw in your fool-proof plan. The beavers are scattered you say? You killed a few but the rest have escaped. You know, scattering, the way beavers always do. What an interesting expert they’ve chosen to solve this problem! Considering Sherri Tippie is 90 minutes away. Who is this expert ‘mitigator’. I must know more about her.

Oh.

Staight said the town has the option to trap and euthanize the beavers but that is the last thing anyone wants to do. Instead, trapped beavers will be relocated. The town started trapping and relocating the beavers last fall, but was told to wait until the summer to do any relocating.

“The Colorado Parks and Wildlife Department said relocating the beavers so late in the season before winter would likely cause the beavers to starve to death,” Staight said. “They told us if we were going to trap them in the fall we should euthanize them.”

Yes we wouldn’t want to kill the beavers. We just want to move them and scatter them and ruin their families and separate the children from their parents in the middle of winter.

Chase said if the dam problem persists, there are water-flow control devices that can be installed in the dams. “It tricks the beavers and they can keep building the dam without effects,” she said. “We’re always going to have issues because of the way the waterway is and we will need population-control measures,” she said.

Well look at that. After we wrap the trees with fairy dust and kill some family members and rip out some dams, we can try installing a flow device or two if we need to.

Oh goody.