Last night Lory and Cheryl were enjoying beaver-july. Cheryl was at the primary and Lory was at the footbridge and they were watching for kits and photo opportunities. Lory picked up the phone and said, “Okay we have two down here eating blackberries” and Cheryl answered and said “What? I have one up here with an adult!”
And that, ladies and gentlemen, makes three.
Which isn’t impossible, but sure comes as a surprise. We usually figure out the number of kits by the first week, but I guess that’s because they have a stable residence and we know where to look. This year they seem to be dividing their time between the bank hole by the footbridge and the one by the primary, depending on how high the tide gets. The good news is that they’re all healthy and happy. God knows when we’ll ever get the whole family together for a photo, but until we do, enjoy this.
Two and adult – Cheryl Reynolds
This morning I got a surprise email from Bob Armstrong of Juneau. He’s the remarkable photographer behind the Mendenhall Glacier Beavers book, and gets the credit for my favorite beaver dam photo of all times, which remains my screen saver 5 years later.
Beaver dam at Mendenhall Glacier: Photo Bob Armstrong
Seems he is trying his hand at video. He sent me a very large file which I managed to upload to Youtube. Notice how big that log is and how little that beaver is. Every time he tries to dive with it he floats up. He can’t be a year old. Make sure you stay for the soundtrack that starts at 1.20, and think about this the next time you feel like giving up.
And just between you, me and the lamp post, Cheryl has been working hard with a team from San Jose who has been trying to rescue the mother beaver that appears to have something around her middle. Trash? Cord? We don’t know for sure, but it is restricting her movements and doesn’t look good. Channel 5 was there when they were trying to live trap last night, so it will be all over your TV soon. No luck rescuing mom yet, but we have the very best minds at work getting her safe again. Stay tuned.
A new beaver blog has appeared from our friend Duane Nash in Southern California. He got inspired by Wikipedia Rick and the salmon gang, and sent me the interview questions a while ago. He will be in town next week to visit so if you see him introduce yourself! If there is any possible thing about how this happened you haven’t heard 8 million times already, you might appreciate the interview. Cheryl’s photos look great on another website!
Looking forward to beaver advocacy from our SoCal friends! Welcome to the beaver’hood, Duane!
In the mean time the update from the Utah beavers isn’t great news, but at least they succeeded in getting their voice to the media. Get ready for more beavers in towels.
If they can continue to get the story out about they’re not being ready, those young beavers will have hope of a timely release. Speaking of young beavers…
Excellent beaver watching last night, with lots of kits self-directing and reaching for blackberry vines. We saw both kits and Junior toodling up and down between the dams. I was thinking that the “kit reach” seemed very July and was happy to see the date on this movie, which puts our kits four days later than their predecessors for the same exact behavior in 2007. Nice!
Mt. Holly — Leave it to beavers to kick off this summer’s popular “Know Your Wild Neighbors” series at the Mount Holly Town Library, Wednesday, July 24, at 7 p.m. Chris Bernier of the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department will be the featured speaker at the workshop, which is sponsored by the Ninevah Foundation and free of charge.
Bernier will explain how beavers accomplish their amazing engineering feats: gnawing down large trees to construct dams that create the ponds where they live, and building domelike lodges of branches and mud that are home to several generations and are reachable only through underwater entryways.
The presentation will also cover how the beaver’s work benefits other wildlife, and what to do about unwanted beaver activity, such as a beaver dam that causes flooding. Beaver pelts, a beaver skull and a sample of “beaver-gnawed” wood will be on display, as well as beaver “baffles” – structures designed to control water level and protect culverts affected by beaver dam-building.
Did you catch that? Someone from Vermont Fish and Wildlife will be talking about controlling beaver problems by wrapping trees and installing bafflers. Someone bring me the smelling salts because I may faint. Vermont in particular should know their way around beaver issues better than most. It’s the home of Skip Lisle, inventor of the beaver deceiver. I suppose they are using the term ‘baffler’ just to show their fierce independence. But this is almost encouraging. Almost.
Chris Bernier, a specialist with the state Fish and Wildlife Department said the animals are particularly active this time of year. “There’s a lot of busy parents running around collecting food for their young in the springtime,” Bernier said.
Beavers running around in the springtime? You mean like months before their children are born? I’m glad you know there are ways to control beaver problems besides trapping but I hope you leave that part out of your talk.
A couple hiking with their dog in the northwest corner of Brookline near the power lines Saturday, July 6, had an unexpected detour to the animal hospital for emergency surgery after their dog was bitten by a beaver. – See more at: “The owner said the beaver was initially circling, it would go under and come back up,” Monachelli said. “This went on for 30 to 40 minutes, antagonizing the beaver. The owners heard the dog cry out and (discovered) two big gashes on the left front paw, bleeding profusely.”
Ow. Here’s a general rule. Dog owners everywhere jot this down. We don’t let our pets swim with beavers in June and July because they are worried protecting their little kits and will attack an intruder that’s capable of doing harm. Got that?
“The dog was rushed in on a human stretcher,” Monachelli said. “I anesthetized her, sutured and bandaged (the wound) and gave her antibiotics and pain medication. The bite punctured muscles and blood vessels, and there was a lot of bruising, but it wasn’t very extensive.”
Once she was patched up, Gracy was able to go home and is expected to recover. Her owners were unavailable for comment. Beavers are found throughout the area, but are bites common? According to the state’s Fish and Game website, beavers are strictly vegetarian and mainly nocturnal, appearing most often at dawn and dusk to repair their dams and gather food. Mo
Todd Szewczyk, Brookline’s Fish and Game officer, said the beaver was likely just trying to defend itself. “Coyotes prey on beavers,” he said. “The dog was just trying to play, but the beaver thought it was a predator. The two don’t come in contact very often, but (beavers) do meet coyotes pretty frequently.”
I’m glad the dog got better care than the man from Bellarus. And I’m glad the Fish and Game officer saw it in a reasonable way. Let’s hope the owners tell all their friends why its not a good idea to let your dog swim in a beaver pond in the summer.
Property owner Ramona Wesley says the water isn’t draining properly because beavers have built dams on the pond. DHEC officials said the water needs to be low enough so crews can access the holes the beavers have made and fill them in.
Lower the pond, fill in the holes so you can drain more water? What aren’t I understanding? Are they talking about a manmade dam that they think beaver dug into? Are they talking about lodges around the lake they are mislabeling as dams? I only understand it enough to realize it makes zero sense. You might assume the reporters noticed that it was illogical too, but I now know that reporters don’t think at all when they’re reading the teleprompter. Yesterday I heard a reporter read this OUTLOUD on channel 2 with no dawning realization whatsoever.
Every now and then some saucy commenter on a beaver article who thinks he’s seen the big picture remarks that beaver dams release carbon into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming – there by undoing all the good things beaver dams do. Since Ellen Wohl is very beaver-savvy researcher from Colorado State University and the one who wrote definitively about beavers shaping America, I think her study was motivated by finer impulses, but parts of it still makes me a little anxious.
Now, it appears that beavers play a complex role in climate change, too. A new study suggests that beaver dams and the sediments corralled behind them sequester carbon, temporarily keeping greenhouse gases containing the element out of the atmosphere. But when the animals abandon these sites, the carbon leaks back out, contributing to global warming.
Did you get that? When beavers are actively maintaining the dam they are sequestering carbon. But when they abandon the dam – OR ARE TRAPPED OUT – those broken dams release carbon.
In recent fieldwork in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park, Wohl studied the wetlands and floodplains upstream of beaver dams—areas collectively called “beaver meadows”—along 27 streams draining watersheds covering more than 700 square kilometers. She analyzed the carbon content of 29 samples of sediment collected along two of the larger waterways (one of which included remnants of 148 beaver dams, and the other had 100). Then, she combined these data with results from previous research to estimate the carbon content of beaver meadows throughout the region. Altogether, beaver meadows occupied about one-quarter of the total length of major streams in these watersheds, she notes.
Because the water table is elevated behind an intact beaver dam, oxygen can’t get to much of the wood and other organic matter buried in sediments there, so it decomposes more slowly. In fact, Wohl says, wood buried in soggy beaver meadows can last about 600 years—longer than a typical log that falls in the forest. But when the water table drops and the soils dry out, decomposition begins to release carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
In work published last year, Wohl and her colleagues found that sediment upstream of active beaver dams in the park contained about 12% carbon by weight, most of it locked in wood. But in research to be published in a forthcoming issue of Geophysical Research Letters, Wohl reports that, on average, only 3.3% of the sediments in abandoned beaver meadows is carbon.
Hmm what’s the moral of the story? Beaver dams trap way more carbon than they release and KEEP THE BEAVERS THERE! I’m sure she meant to add at the end of her scholarly work. Come to think of it here’s an example of why,
John and Janice Collett were hiking up Thomas Creek early on the morning of July 4, stopping to admire the waterfall above the campground before setting out for the top of the canyon. “A main attraction of this hike for many is the huge beaver dam and pond about a half-hour up,” Janice Collett said.
“We stopped 15-20 minutes into our hike for a breather at a favorite swimming hole where the creek winds through granite walls and drops in a waterfall … “John and I were about to continue our hike when I heard an ominous roar and glanced upstream to see an exploding chocolatey wall of mud, entire trees and debris rushing toward us.”
I guess that washout released a lot of carbon, but I’m more worried about the beavers themselves. Being as we’re talking about eastern Nevada in July new water will be hard to come by. It’s a long walk on webbed feet to anyplace resembling home. Grimly best case scenario, those beavers were already predated by mountain lions or coyotes and that’s why the dam washed out in the first place. Sigh.
Beaver ponds can indeed be large sources of potent planet-warming greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide, says Jennifer Edmonds, an aquatic ecologist at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. (Over the course of a century, methane traps heat in Earth’s atmosphere about 25 times as effectively as carbon dioxide; nitrous oxide does so almost 300 times as effectively over the same interval.) But considering the whole landscape, she adds, “if I had to bet, I’d bet that [the beaver meadows] are storing more carbon than they’re producing.”
Last night was a pretty magical Night-at-the-museum kind of beaver presentation. The Randall Museum is in a lovely location on a hill in the middle of Victorian apartments in San Francisco towards golden gate park. The museum was a user friendly wonder who’s watchman asked me about the Belarus beaver attack. The theater was an actual lecture hall with raised audience and screen. And the hosts, Patrick and Jill Schlemmer have been running the naturalist talks for fifteen years and knew exactly how to do everything!
I had expected a handful of attendees but it was nearly full and the audience was attentive, intelligent, receptive and very pro beaver. A few old friends like Megan of the Otter Ecology Project showed up. They asked excellent questions about meadow succession and gestation period and I felt the blossoming of beaver seeds taking root in very fertile soil.
Afterwards a young woman from the audience came and introduced herself as the Senior Exhibit Content Developer for the California Academy of Sciences who said they were working on a beaver exhibit and were particularly interested in the Martinez Beaver story, and would I be willing to talk?
Go ahead, I’ll wait while you guess what I answered.
