Month: October 2013

Nothing Succeeds like Success – (Beaver Edition)

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Environmental October 16, 2013

I’m guessing you recognize the hardworking smile on the left, which belongs to Mike Callahan of Beaver Solutions in Massachusetts. The one with the shovel is Kevin Swift, of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center who is working with Mike to learn the trade and eventually apply it in California. Kevin came to this year’s beaver festival with Kate Lundquist of the OAEC and we couldn’t be happier that solutions will be closer to home. Great start, men! Apparently yesterday’s job was ripping out a Clemson and replacing it with a Flex pipe. How symbolic is that? Here’s Mike’s rundown:

Good news. Kevin Swift arrived here in Massachusetts today to learn how to start his own business installing effective flow devices in his home state of California. Here he is performing maintenance on a Flexible Pond Leveler pipe. This is the site of my first flow device installation in 1998. The original Clemson Pond Leveler was eventually replaced with a Flexible Pond Leveler, and the fencing on that pipe was replaced last week. Beavers are still there and continue to maintain the dam. We’re doing three new flow device installations the next three days. We’ll keep you posted!

But wait, Heidi, maybe you’re saying. That’s not enough good news of people living with beavers. California and Massachusetts are crazy liberal states with campuses full of tree-huggers and tofu! Who cares what they do? This just isn’t enough to float my beaver boat, so to speak.

Well, then, how about Idaho?This is Mike Settell who you might recognize as the man from Pocatello who got the local chapter of Audubon to fund his beaver count a few years back because the animals affect bird population so significantly. He came to the state of the beaver conference last year, met the gang, and presented on his hard work in the granite state. Like all the attendees he was graciously given a copy of Mike’s DVD, and after reading and watching and learning went on to do his first install this weekend. I am very happy that Idaho is willing in this instance to apply a long-term solution instead of a short term (trapping) bandaid. Congratulations Mike!

There was a bundle of good news yesterday, I can barely keep up. We’re off to the Boys and Girls club today to talk beavers, which should be fun. And I just got an email from Jari Osborne of the Beaver Whispers that her excellent documentary (which you will see on PBS next year) is up for a digi award for Best in cross-platform nonfiction. GO VOTE RIGHT NOW. I know you haven’t seen it yet, but trust me, it should win. It will save the planet. You can help. GO VOTE

And my all-time favorite news I can’t share just yet but I just found out last night and it has to do with a a topic that rhymes with “weavers in postal quivers.”

Beam.

Beavers on Aljazeera?

heidi08 Beaver News, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Earth Day, Educational October 15, 2013

You bet your sweet alif they are! Check out the episode four of Earthrise.

Earthrise: Beaver Farmer

An English farmer sets out to restore the country’s wetlands, with help from nature’s most experienced engineers.

Wetlands are one of the world’s most valuable ecosystems; as well as providing a rich habitat for plants and animals, they also store carbon and help reduce floods by soaking up excess rain. But around the world, vast swathes of them are being destroyed, and in England alone, 90 percent of wetlands have disappeared in the last 400 years.

Now English farmer Derek Gow has a novel plan to restore these precious habitats – bring back beavers, the massive semi-aquatic rodents that once played a crucial role in shaping the British countryside. Using their sharp teeth, beavers chop down small trees and branches to build dams across streams, creating a large network of pools and channels to live in, which form a brand new wetland.

Sylvia Rowley travels to Devon, UK, to see what nature’s construction workers can do, and to help release a pair of beavers into their new home on Derek’s farm.

I hope this particular episode is available on the web once it airs, because this is definately news we can use. I’ll be excited to see it in person. You will remember that Derek is the farmer in Devon (Southwest England) that has been pretty outspoken for beavers. I found out he and Duncan Ramsay (Free beavers on the Tay in Scotland) are old friends so we are working the country from both ends, (so to speak). I can’t wait to see this particular work from the beaver lobby and am excited to see this making the rounds.

And just to show you I’m a trustworthy source, here’s some feedback about yesterday’s Clemson Calamity:

Mike Callahan Heidi is right on about the historic importance of the Clemson Pond Leveler and that it rightfully has been relegated to the proverbial shelf as had her original personal computer or the Model T. Flexible Pond Levelers and Castor Masters work so much better, last longer, and are much cheaper and easier to install. Coincidentally today I am going back to the Norwottuck Rail Trail, the site of my first and only Clemson Pond Leveler installation in 1998 to adjust a Flexible Pond Leveler pipe that successfully replaced that CPL.

People Deceivers (Part II)

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Environmental October 14, 2013

The very first computer we ever owned was so expensive we had to take out a car loan. The year was somewhere around 1989 and because I was working on a dissertation we paid an enormous amount of money to add on 20 MB. (Yes, megabytes). It had a floppy disk drive and a CD-Rom drive. When you turned it on the screen greeted you with this welcome C:\>. We were so nervous setting it up that we didn’t use it at all for the first few weeks. Years of laptops and PC’s later, I have never spent so much for a computer since. Still, for a woman who was using whole bottles of white-out in an afternoon it was an amazing invention that allowed me to change what I was editing without type writer ribbon.

Just a year later we could have bought the whole thing with three times as much memory for a third as much money.

I mention this because the Clemson Pond leveler was state of the art once too. It was a monumental achievement that changed the way we thought forever, and we can’t possibly go backwards to a time when solving beaver problems wasn’t at least theoretically possible. It was invented by Dr. Greg Yarrow at Clemson University in South Carolina, around the same time as we purchased that computer. It remains the most widely recognized tool for beaver management, at least in name. It was as important to the later development of the beaver deceiver and the flexible leveler as my first computer was to the ones that followed it.

And, not surprisingly, it works about as well.

So you can imagine my mixed feelings when I saw this:

Busy as beavers

Members of the Student Conservation Association install a “Beaver Deceiver” at the Willie Wildlife Marsh in the town of Johnstown on Thursday. The construction aims to quiet the water flow, which reduces beaver activity. Beaver dams have caused flooding damage to the marsh. (Photo by Bill Trojan/The Leader-Herald)

The crew will clean out the clogged pipe and install a “beaver deceiver” – a device developed by Clemson University in the early 1990s that’s used to dissuade beavers from blocking currents. It makes the flow of water harder for the animals to detect, counteracting their instinct to dam up any moving water near their lodges.

Willie Marsh was set aside in the 60s to make a haven for wood ducks. It was built with a long ramp across the marsh and a duck blind for photographers.

Beaver may have raised the water level but I don’t think the fact that the park slid into disrepair had much to do with them.

(Everyone knows they mostly drink imported.)

Barbara Conner is the retired teacher who wrote about and shared photos from the group’s Willie Marsh visit in a Sept. 5 post on her blog. There is so much about this story that I want to admire. I love the idea of repairing damaged wetlands. I love getting kids involved. I love bloggers getting written about in the daily news.

But Willie Marsh is about 25 miles away from the sanctuary of Beavers:Wetlands and Wildlife. That’s like Mecca or MIT for beaver information. The idea that the DEC couldn’t think of any better solution than having children install a Clemson is baffling. Do they also beat their uniforms on rocks to wash them and ride mules to the office?

The Department of Environmental Conservation is a busy bureau and doesn’t have a lot of time for park or beaver management. Bill Ackerman is a reporter for the Leader-Herald who got interested in this story and must have scared the living daylights out of them when he printed Barbara’s photos. He did a great job in tracking down the story too. One of the driving forces behind the Marsh retired and moved away and surprsingly no one much has cared about the area until it found its way into the news.

Dick Spinks, who retired from DEC in 1992, said he and Jack and Jim Harnish of Gloversville did most of the work on the marsh site, with some help from other DEC employees based in Northville. Spinks said he personally built and installed the nesting boxes that have served so many birds over the years at Willie Marsh. Until he retired, he live-trapped beavers at the marsh and released them farther north, but that work hasn’t been done in years.

Never mind for the moment that live-trapping and relocating beavers is ILLEGAL in New York state. Let’s focus instead on the fact that someone who cared about this park retired, and some of the other folk who cared about this park died. Now the DEC has delegated it to the ‘circular file’. This is a place that no one in the current DEC cares about and no one wants to care about and (beavers or no beavers) no one would have cared about if the press hadn’t shamed them in the first place. So their solution is to have children install something they know full well won’t work and offer a gleaming promise that “Once it works we’ll fix the trails.”

Which of course will never happen so they can get back to the hard work of ignoring the park soon. The whole thing makes me mad enough to write a letter. To the reporter. To the DEC. To Beavers:Wetlands and Wildlife. To the retired teacher who took these photos. To the teacher of the students environmental alliance.

That will do for starters. Did I leave any one out?

Get ready for a new holiday special!

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Creek Seekers Poetry Contest October 13, 2013

Town disturbs wetland

The Town of Perry in Wyoming County is facing a fine from the DEC and the cost of the lots of man hours to restore what it damaged. Several acres of protected wetland were drained dry off of Beardsley Road when highway crews opened up a beaver dam while working on a road project.

Why not show this every Christmas? Seems the town of Perry in Wyoming county New York had a road that needed some repairs in a protected wetland. They wanted to get into the culvert to fix it but some hard working beavers had raised the water level and they didn’t want to get wet or install a diversion dam so the highway superintendent just ripped out the dam, killing thousands of fish and destroying the wetland with out ever getting a permit because it would take too long. Trust me, the story gets better. Now Perry has negotiated to pay a smaller fine and if they REBUILD THE DAM and fix what they ruined.

I don’t know about you but when I think of Dave Scola and the Martinez public works crew repairing a beaver dam after it has been ripped out I can’t stop smiling for the rest of the hour. Let’s hope this cautionary tale makes folks afraid of ripping out beaver dams next time.

Need more good news? How about a golf course that appreciates its beavers? Mind you this is in the Yukon where they cheerfully go out of their way to kil them.

Beaver family calls Yukon golf course home

Golf course owner Jeff Luehmann has welcomed a beaver family. (CBC)

A golf course in Whitehorse has a new group of visitors, and they’re not the types to just putter around.

“Well there’s at least four that we know of. There’s two dominant ones, a male and female that have been here on and off on the property,” Meadow Lakes Golf Course owner Jeff Luehmann says. The guests? Beavers. A family has built a dam in one of his ponds and now calls the water hazard home. The beavers moved in several years ago, and now there’s an entire brood.

Normally, the practice is for them to destroy problem animals. But Luehmann says the critters are doing him a favour.

“What I do is put poplar,” he says. “They feed on that. I also put metal mesh on the trees I want to keep.” “We just took the initiative,” he says.

Quick, somebody get 100 scouts to send Jeff thank you cards right away. I’m sure there are people in the enormity of the Yukon who appreciate beavers, but on a GOLF COURSE??? Wow. Just. Wow.

Only good news today from the Northern Hemisphere, so far covering about 5000 miles from the Yukon to New York, and now to the Bay Area adding another 3000. This is from the Beaver Restoration Toolbox which is being perfected by Karl Malcolm of USFWS. Or would be if the federal government would let people go back to work so he could make final adjustments. I can’t share the whole thing until its official but we were asked for input and I gave him lots of info and the Martinez plug. Ask how happy was I to see this on page 8.

Whew! That’s a lot of good news for one day. I will just end by saying some of the greatest beaver friends are out of work at the moment and living on savings. Michael Pollock of NOAA fisheries, Suzanne Fouty USFS, Jimmy Taylor USDA, Carol Evans BLM. There are a about a million more that have gone 12 days now without a paycheck.

Bad news for beavers. And humans.

Staying On-Beaver-Message

heidi08 Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental October 12, 2013

This is Keenan, one of the students of the Semester in the West group who are working on the “Beaver Believer” documentary. He is editing some of the miles of footage they shot this year with beaver professionals around the country (including here in Martinez). Oh, look what they posted on Facebook he’s editing now. He even dressed for the occasion. Gosh, I hope he doesn’t take out all the swear words. It won’t be the same story without it.

Let’s be candid, and you may not be at all surprised. I am not the kind of person who does well with being edited. (Think of me like that plant that doesn’t blossom when pruned, but does best when completely ignored and left alone to grow in the sidewalk.) Because I forced myself to travel through the howling caves of graduate school I have learned to appear to cooperate with the process, but all I ever really manage is to “endure” it. I hate it when someone snips out one word or inserts another. Hate it when that red pencil slashes its way through my carefully planted word garden.

Learning that they were editing my footage yesterday was much, much more disturbing. Like being a recently sketched comic book character chased by a giant eraser. Keenan was very gallant, and said that I was so eloquent theren’t were very many “ums” or swear words to edit. But I can do the math. This is supposed to be a 30 minute documentary. And they filmed heavy weights like Mary O’brien, Suzanne Fouty, and Sherri Tippie. That leaves about 1.5 minutes for Heidi, half of which will be the beaver festival and 45 seconds will be of me talking.

And what pithy one liner did I manage in an hour interview that was worth including? I can’t imagine. You see my dilemma.

Well, I did ask for the cutting-room floor leftovers and Sarah the producer said no problem, so maybe I’ll find use for the bulk of the interview yet. In the meantime another very fun thing happened to take my mind off the digital amputation. A student from UCB contacted me when I was on vacation because she needed to do a paper for a class called “Environmental Problem Solving” and thought of the Martinez Beavers as her topic. Brita came yesterday for an interview with me and to meet some Worth A Dam folks while watching beavers on the footbridge.

Earlier she had been invited to the Alhambra Watershed Meeting and met Mitch Avalon and Igor Skaredoff from the beaver subcommittee. Now I love Igor and Mitch but the beavers made sure we were wayyy more interesting. She got to see all three kits, Junior and Mom before the uncle paid a visit. You could see that this particular term paper research was the most fun research she had ever done, and we filled her with beaver good news before she left. She is a senior finishing up a double major in the field and hoping to head to graduate School in the fall.

The future for beavers just got a little brighter.

ESPM 100 Environmental Problem Solving

Analysis of contrasting approaches to understanding and solving environmental and resource management problems. Case studies and hands-on problem solving that integrate concepts, principles, and practices from physical, biological, social, and economic disciplines. Their use in environmental policies and resource and management plans.

Don’t you just love that this class exists in the world? Let’s read the syllabus. There should be a whole section on beavers.