Attentive readers might remember the ongoing saga of Taylor Creek in South Lake Tahoe. It is off highway 89 between Lake Tahoe and Fallen Leaf Lake. It was the subject of one of the best beaver dissertations, pointing out how beaver dams in the creek were helpful for preventing silt from getting to the lake. It was also the site of the well-attended Kokanee salmon festival, in which the non-native salmon is famously celebrated. And the naturally occurring beaver dams are removed to protect the unnaturally occurring pretend salmon.
When this was repeatedly pointed out to the good folks of USDA and mentioned in Tom Knudson’s 2012 article, the name was mysteriously changed to the “Fall Fish Festival” and refocused on small native species like that live in Lake Tahoe and its rivers. “In addition to the Kokanee, these species include the federally threatened Lahontan cutthroat trout and little-known smaller fish, such as speckled dace.”Since this coincided with the publication of our beaver nativity papers for the Sierra Nevadas, the issue had some heft and was read written and discussed in all the local papers.
Things have proceeded at a glacial pace of supposed progress with their attitude towards beavers, allowing for some conversations with our beaver friends in the area. Trees have been wrapped but flow devices have been resisted. Dams were originally removed because they ruined things for the pretend salmon, and now they’re removed because the say they’re worried about the trails. All offers of help installing a flow device to control pond height have been soundly rebuffed.
Sherry Guzzi of the Sierra Wildlife Coalition wrote me the following this December:
I went down the day before, to check out parking and access, and found the beaver dam intact (photo, 12-11-13). When we met the next day the dam had been removed completely (12-12-13). I went back yesterday and the beaver was seen by several people as early as 3pm, and came back out and let me watch him/her for an hour between 4 and 5, while he/she rolled and carried rocks with his/her front paws to start to rebuild a small dam on a side channel. (The FS had destroyed both the main dam and a smaller one on the man-made channel that comes back into the creek from their display.)
Are we surprised that they waited to do this until the park was snowed in and closed for the season? Of course not. Are we surprised the they waited to do this until the river was iced and the beavers food source was frozen entirely? Sadly less so. Here’s what that little beaver was facing. Sherry checked with team beaver about what to do. The ‘change from inside the system’ champions were less alarmed but said they would continue to pressure them. The ‘change from outside the system’ (Worth A Dam et al) were alarmed and recommended keeping an eye on the beaver and pushing public response in spring, since they seemed unlikely to do more until the thaw.
Yesterday Sherry sent me these. Not only does the beaver have a partner helping him. He has a family.
Here are some reasons why this is a very bad idea for their fall fish friends. To summarize: a shallow streams means ponds freeze solid and the fish you are celebrating, die.
I would consider these a very powerful set of arguments. Heart string-tugging photos to move public opinion and a full quiver of science to begin to change minds. Good work. Keep us posted. Thanks Sherry and team beaver!
Some 950 people read this website every day. For free because we decided a long time ago not to charge members for a newsletter. We wanted beaver education to be free for everyone all the time. Several advocacy groups that do collect membership for their newsletter gather their stories from our website. As a result this website shows up on the first page of just about every google search for beaver information. Cheryl’s lovely photos are represented and reprinted across the nation and from Canada to Norway. In addition to the beaver festival with about 2000 people this year, we gave 10 lectures, five exhibits, seven children’s projects and 39 tours of the beaver habitat for curious visitors in 2013. We were consulted in a dozen beaver articles and three films.Won’t you think about ending the year with a donation to Worth A Dam?
Celebrate our transition to a new fiscal sponsor with a donation before the year ends. And keep showing your support for beavers who support fish, fresh water, birdlife and wildlife. Be part of the Worth A Dam team!
Worth A Dam is a fiscally sponsored project of Inquiring Systems, Inc. (ISI), a tax-exempt 501 (c) (3) nonprofit corporation with EIN: 94-2524840. Your donation will help provide:
Willow Replacement: Ultimately the beavers behavior of “coppicing trees” will encourage bushy dense growth, but in the meantime food sources can be augmented by replanting trees along the bank. These can gradually replace other trees that have been wire-wrapped for protection.
Beaver Festival: Teaches other cities how and why to lives with beavers and celebrate their impact on our creek. The first beaver festival was held in 2008. Our last one had 2000 attendees.
Beaver Management Scholarship: In 2010 Worth A Dam decided to use a portion of these donations each year as a grant for deserving cities investing in a flow device as humane beaver management. The grant requires funds be matched locally and used specifically for this purpose.
Community and Scientific Education: Teaching others about our beavers and the impact they’ve had on Alhambra Creek. This includes outreach projects, profession lectures, and the website.
They nearly were hunted to extinction, only to be brought back from the precipice.Today, beavers are hunted once again, typically by trappers who captured and killed more than 9,000 a year ago.It’s just not often you see one during the day, and so amenable to posing for photographs while munching on small twigs and limbs.
Not just once, but twice, after it was discovered a camera setting was askew and a fast return to the beaver’s site was in order.That’s when a passerby said the lone beaver was one of a group of three he had spotted in the area near the boat ramp at Webster Reservoir. It was the smallest of the three, he said.
It wasn’t in a hurry to go anywhere, providing a good look at all it had to offer. It rarely even paused from stripping away the bark on the limbs from a series of trees that recently had been felled by the beaver and its family.
Beavers are the largest rodent in North America, typically weighing somewhere between 40 and 60 pounds.They nearly were hunted out of existence in quest for the animal’s dense fur, used to make the felt hats fashionable at the time in Europe.
The beaver ideally is suited for water. Its webbed hind feet are ideal for swimming, and it can close off its ears and nose underwater. It has a membrane on its eyes, allowing it to see while swimming underwater.
Beavers typically are nocturnal, making the daytime sighting unusual.
Uh-oh. It’s dispersal ignorance season again! Brace yourselves for three months of bewildered articles when beavers are spotted wandering on the road. I must have written an editor in every state about the entirely predictable phenomena now. I have tried and tried again to explain it’s occurrennce and at this time I can only conclude beaver behavior is cloaked in a shroud of willful human ignorance.
Just remember this is Kansas and I’m thinking we’re lucky the entire article isn’t about the price for pelts.
Wikipedia tells us that the Gray Fossil Site is a Late Miocene-epoch assemblage of fossils located near the unincorporated town of Gray in Washington County, Northeast Tennessee, and dates from 7 to 4.5 million years BCE). The Gray Fossil Site was discovered by geologists in May 2000. They were investigating unusual clay deposits turned up during the course of a Tennessee Department of Transportation highway project to widen State Route 75 south of its intersection with Interstate 26.
Apparently the freeway path was redesigned by governor’s order so the site could be protected. It contained such unexpected Tennessee inhabitants as tapir and red panda. And now two kinds of beaver.
“We have dug probably less than 2 percent of the entire site,” he said. “When you think of how big the site is, and how deep the site is, and all of these little pits that we’ve dug here and there … we’ve dug so little, yet we’ve found so many cool things.”
Wallace said a second type of beaver was also uncovered this year.
“We do have beavers at the site, and for a long time we only had one kind. It was about the size of a muskrat,” he said. “This last summer out on the spoil piles, which were from the original construction of the museum itself, one of our workers actually found a foot bone that’s basically a modern-sized beaver.
“It looks like we have two different species of beaver at this site. My guess is the one that’s the size of the modern beaver was probably living a lot like a modern beaver, but the smaller one probably was filling the modern role of a muskrat or something along those lines.”
Now there’s something you don’t see every day. Folks in Tennessee excited about beaver! That’s pretty cool. When I bought my castoroides skull copy at the Bone Room in Berkeley, the owner suggested I also look at the pricey fossilized beaver tooth. My pocket book was very happy he couldn’t find it amongst the million treasures he showed that day so I got to preserve some dollars in their natural habitat. Whew.
Let’s have some more recent history, shall we?
Lahontan, Louis Armand de Lom d’Arce, baron de. New voyages to North-America: containing an account of the several nations […]. Vol. 1. London: H. Bomwicke et al., 1703. FC71 L313 1703. P. 106.The 1703 copper engraving of the beaver by Louis Armand Lohontan, (with it’s amputated ear and vampire teeth) was bad enough, but I was much more troubled by the action sketches beneath it, claiming to be of a “beeve” who was caught by his horns. First a unibeaver and now this? I was relieved to eventually find out that a “beeve” is an an old french canadian word for buffalo, which thankfully makes an ounce of sense.
Now some 300 years later…
The beavers are back in our north meadow. They made their first dam there some 30 years ago, but like prudent farmers, they leave at intervals to let the area regenerate. Their return improves the human neighborhood. In fact, having beavers next door is like visiting Switzerland; they’re so sensible and they have their affairs so well in hand that it can be embarrassing to those of us who are neither Swiss nor beavers.” — Nicholas Howe, “The Comfort of beavers”.
These were sent by beaver-friend Malcolm Kenton during his Christmas vacation to North Carolina. They are from the April 1996 issue of Yankee magazine in his old archive at his mother’s.
On our last days of 2013 remember to make some important beaver history of our own!
