Month: September 2013

You could say more, but why?

heidi08 Beavers September 10, 2013

In response to yesterdays article Melissa writes:

I hope you and your beavers are well. I had the pleasure of hearing you speak at the beaver conference this spring. I’m amazed our little Yakima paper caught your attention. We do really appreciate your comments to the editor and you really nailed what the article was lacking. Neither William Meyer, WDFW habitat biologist, nor myself were available for this interview so our crew did the best they could. Unfortunately, I think the reporter was more interested in the face value of our project instead of the big picture of what we are doing.

We always try to work with landowners to manage underappreciated beavers in place first. We’ve wrapped and painted countless trees, installed two deceivers, and three pond levelers over the last 3 years. Unfortunately our dwindling grant does not support these infrastructure supplies so unless we can convince the landowners to pony up a few bucks we resort to live trapping.

Most (if not all) of our trapping areas were lethally controlled prior to our project. We live in a primarily agricultural area where hay export is a major revenue. Changing the way beavers are viewed is a very slow process and will not happen overnight. We educate each landowner about the benefits of beaver and show them their furry neighbors up close trying to convince them to manage not eliminate the next colony that takes up residence (we’re seeing beavers move into areas in less than a year after trapping).

As was shown in the article we do still live trap and relocate which is beneficial for our headwater systems devoid of beaver. Beavers have been eradicated in many of our headwater systems which now lack the water storage or habitat essential to support endangered salmonids and wildlife. We are trying to take these underappreciated colonies that folks are not yet ready to manage and repurpose them to degraded headwater systems. We’ve seen amazing changes to headwater systems with the re-colonization of beaver.

If you are ever in the Ellensburg area please look us up we would love to give you the tour of what our beavers have done. Again, we appreciate you educating the world about the benefits of beaver.

Mel Babik

Melissa Babik

Project Manager

Mid-Columbia Fisheries Enhancement Group

421 N. Pearl Street, Suite 216

Ellensburg, WA 98926

Phone: (509)310-9274,

Nuisance redefined

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions September 9, 2013

Denise Stetson and Kevin Sutherland carry a beaver they’ve dubbed “Big Betty” to a Teanaway-area creek Aug. 29, 2013 in hopes that this beaver and its mate will help restore riparian habitat in the area. (SCOTT SANDSBERRY/Yakima Herald-Republic)

Project relocates beavers to be a help, not a nuisance

The innovative collaboration of state, federal, private and tribal interests captures beavers in the lowlands of Yakima and Kittitas counties and relocates them in the headwaters of upland streams, such as the upper Teanaway area in northwest Kittitas County, where their dam-building skills restore riparian areas and regulate creek flows.

Barnabas and Big Betty were captured a week apart at Yakima Sportsman State Park, and biologists Denise Stetson and Ben Carroll of the state Department of Fish and Wildlife took the calculated risk that the beavers were a couple. Or, at least, that they could become one, to produce future generations of beavers to work restorative wonders in whatever high-country creek into which they would be relocated.

“We are definitely matchmakers. We’re Realtors, too,” Carroll said. “We have to find good real estate for them, and we have to find matches for them.”

Carroll felt “actually bummed out” after capturing the aging male beaver that project officials dubbed Barnabas, “because he can pretty much see out of only one eye and his tail’s pretty beat up. Beavers mate for life, and (upon being removed from the park pond) he looked really sad.”

Goodness. I don’t blame Barnabas. After reading this article I feel pretty “bummed out” that two officials from Washington Fish and Wildlife actually think it’s better to MOVE beavers off a STATE PARK than install a flow device. Letting the hardworking interns of Yakima take on the burden after these animals were trapped a WEEK APART and stuffed together for their convenience.

Here’s the description of the park where they were a “nuisance.”

Yakima Sportsman State Park is a 247-acre camping park created in 1940 by the Yakima Sportsman’s Association to promote game management and the preservation of natural resources. The park is on the floodplain of the Yakima River and is an irrigated “green zone” in an otherwise desert area. The park has a variety of deciduous trees that shade camping and picnic areas. One hundred and forty bird species have been identified in the park. Ponds lure fishers to the river. The park is a popular stay-over spot for travelers and visitors to events in the Yakima area.

So what is it that these beavers do, exactly, that’s a nuisance? Create that “green zone”? Increase the fish population by changing the invertebrate community? Increase nesting habitat for migratory and songbirds? Feed waterfowl for all those duck hunters? Stimulate regrowth of the riparian border?

Honestly, this article has an awful lot of back-patting for such an exercise in myopia. I will write the reporter to remind them to keep it handy for next year when they have to do the same thing all over again.

The Yakima Beaver Project is modeled after the Methow Beaver Project, whose hearts are in mostly the right place. It is slightly better to relocate problem beavers than to kill them. But I can’t help looking at our urban beavers and remember that they were a “nuisance” once that we learned to live with, and see the benefit from waterfowl to fish to field trips. I’m very impatient with programs like this that imply that it is not the responsibility of any populated area with humans and water to figure out how (and why) to live with beavers.

Oh and just for the record, the reported success rate for the Methow project, on which this is based, is about 50%.

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Here are a few reasons why its a good idea to let beavers stick around.

Feathered Whirlwinds Head South in Massive Bunches

Tree swallows are one of the earlier songbirds to return in spring, arriving in parts of Vermont and New Hampshire as early as March. Their early arrival is related to the fact that they’re obligate cavity nesters, meaning that they don’t construct their own nests. Instead, they depend on woodpeckers and their ilk to provide tree cavities for nesting. Often, tree swallows are found in beaver habitat, moving in after woodpeckers excavate holes in dead or dying flooded trees. Tree swallows will also take readily to nest boxes. In some areas, the proliferation of nest box “bluebird trails” has been a boon to their populations.

One man’s “nuisance” means another man’s nest. So to speak.

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Now lets all wish rain from the Gods to our friends near Mt. Diablo, and our VP Cheryl who lives near its base.

Ignorance and Hope: Guess which one Texas is?

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Educational, Environmental, Who's Killing Beavers Now? September 8, 2013

This morning, Texas has some more staggeringly bad news for you. Houston again. Bad even by their standards. Brace yourselves. But don’t worry. After we’re done talking about how enormously stupid this was, I promise I’ll give you some good beaver cheer.

Animals in peril after TxDOT bulldozes beaver dam in West Houston drainage ditch

For three years, a roadside drainage pond at Interstate 10 and Barker Cypress Road has been a surprising home to West Houston wildlife, supporting countless fish, birds and turtles — not to mention an alligator or two.

But thanks to a TxDOT maintenance crew, the unlikely sanctuary met its end Wednesday morning when a bulldozer leveled a dam made by a family of beavers. Water quickly drained from the pond, leaving the unsuspecting creatures to fend for themselves.

On a Thursday visit to the site, Drew Karedes from KHOU Channel 11 discovered thousands of fish rotting in the sun, labeling the now muddy patch a “graveyard for animals.” leaving the unsuspecting creatures to fend for themselves.

“The beavers would walk right up to you,” Joe French, Ron Hoover general manager, explains. “You could pat them and everything. They didn’t have a care in the world. There are a lot of families that would come out here to spend family time.”

So the department of transportation didn’t like all that nature in their drainage channel and decided to kill everything in sight and rip out the dam. Remember this on CYPRESS RD and used to be connected to one of the last bayous in the state. But not any more. Now it is a rotting pile of dying fish. Which TxDOT has promised to come back and clean up.

(It took me nearly three hours to find the email of the man who was responsible for this decision yesterday. Apparently if you’re a state employee making 82,000 a year in taxpayer money and some monsterously bad decisions, you make sure people can’t send you email. He’s second from the right end in this picture.)

TxDOT breaks ground on Grand Parkway expansion
Among the elected officials and members of the Texas Department of Transportation conducting a ceremonial groundbreaking Tuesday morning on the Segment E expansion of State Highway 99/Grand Parkway are, from the left, Lance LaCour, Joan Huffman, Ned Holmes, Bill Callegori, John Barton, **Michael Alford** and Mary Evans. The highway will connect Interstate 10 to U.S. Highway 290.

The comments by the motor home and marine business next door are fairly heartening. They obviously appreciated their natural neighbors. Even their beavers. I assume the footage of the original habitat was theirs? Another mysterious place where alligators and beavers lived side by side. Maybe the news channel had visited before? Either way, now its a mud puddle.

(Just remember that way back when the city of Martinez wanted our beavers dead they paid Dave Scola to go on National Television and call the creek that John Muir’s wife named Alhambra a “Drainage channel”. That very creek that Italian families had earned their living on for a hundred years was part of their flood culverts. I have since learned that the rule book for wantonly destroying wildlife in creeks says that first you should just try and get away with it, and if you unfortunately get stopped, defend your action by saying it was just a “drainage channel.” The media usually doesn’t question that.)

Okay Heidi, where’s that good news you promised?

Last night 20 cub scouts and parents from troop 254 in Fairfield came to Martinez for a beaver viewing. Their scout leader works at Shell and had met Jon at the beaver dam before. Then got my info from Cathy Ivers and arranged a beaver tour. We passed out tattoos and information, talked about the ‘beavers building a neighborhood’ and then saw two kits, a yearling and mom. They even got a chance to hear some whining. Several other people just joined in to see what we were looking at. What a nice group of kids!

Worth A Dam: saving beavers one boyscout at a time.

Proteus Castor

heidi08 Beavers, History September 8, 2013

Here is what I have learned from beavers.
There is no God of Resilience.
We have gods for war and love and forgiveness and rebirth.
We are reminded to bear sorrows like Job or forgive wrongs like Budda.
But no church preaches that the greatest gift is redefinition.
To make something new out of something ruined.
Even Proteus had his limits.
He could not change shape if you held him tightly.

Beavers can

Here is the other thing I learned from beavers.
You did not listen to Dr. Wolh’s interview yesterday.
And I wanted to make sure you heard this.

There’s no ‘wrong reason’ to care about beavers

heidi08 Beavers September 11, 2013

A million years ago, when the earth and I were both younger, I started filming a family of beavers near my house because I thought they were ‘neat’. I didn’t know anything about them or their role in the environment, but I still climbed out of bed and went to spend the morning with them because I liked their tails, and the way they swam and dove, and especially their voices. I didn’t start out understanding why beavers were important, and even now I can get rankled when I realize that for the salmon lobby they are just an “means to an end” and not important in their own right.

But one of the things I have learned on this epic beaver campaign, is that a central tenent to finding support and making new friends is that there is no WRONG reason to support beavers. Even though there may be some that make me less thrilled. Duck hunting for example, does not appeal to me and generally makes me uncomfortable. But Ducks Unlimited does a massive amount of work for wetlands and when hunters are smart enough to appreciate beaver help improving duck population, I have to appreciate it.

Aiming beavers at the leviathan of Global Warming seems to me like throwing beans at a charging buffalo, but I’m very happy that Ellen Wohl’s study is making the rounds.

Busy Beavers Battle Climate Change

(WILDLIFE/ANIMAL SCIENCE) We all know beavers have heavy workloads. But scientists have found that beavers also play a prominent role in cutting carbon emissions. Approximately eight percent of carbon is reduced by the carefully crafted beaver dam, which is 18 percent less than the potential reduction rate if it were not for human disturbance to beaver environments. The recent study suggests these animals sufficiently help keep the environment resilient against climate change, drought, and wildfires. Read on for more on North American beaver populations and their significant impact on the ecosystem. — Global Animal

Beavers play an important role in keeping the ecosystem resilient against climate change, drought and wildfire, the study notes. Wohl found that the abandoned beaver dams she studied made up around 8 percent of the carbon storage in the landscape, and that if beavers were still actively maintaining those dams, the number would be closer to 23 percent.

I have to assume that Ellen Wohl is a not-so-secret beaver believer, shaping her research interests to let the world see how important these animals are. She is a fluvial-geomorphologist in the Warner College of Natural Resources at Colorado State. I would love to meet her and have invited her to the beaver conference but she was always too busy. When I see on article like this on Global Animal or CARE it kind of irks me that large, funded save-the-planet organizations who have entirely looked away from beaver effect on salmon, birds, water quality, wildlife, suddenly say OH NOW ITS IMPORTANT to save the beavers because of carbon, (before I was too busy protesting Mansanto or occupying Wall Street), but I remind myself that there is no wrong way to get to the right place. And this is another very powerful argument in our quiver. If a few new people notice that humans interfere too much with beaver habitat we’ve come to the right place. Period.