Month: March 2014

“Animal-watching meditation”

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Friends of Martinez Beavers March 31, 2014

There’s a new beaver watcher in the Scottish countryside, and since she’s a very nice writer I thought I would share what she wrote on her blog. This is Mandy Haggith of Cybercrofter.

We immediately saw willow trees at the lochside showing signs of beaver activity, some chewed right off, some partly gnawed. Across the loch was a huge lodge – a mound of sticks built out into the water.

We waited.

There is a special kind of animal-watching meditation. It took me years to learn it. As a child I was incapable of sitting still. My dad used to take me badger-watching, which involved sitting quietly by a sett at dusk until the badgers emerged. I would rustle and fidget, and the badgers would no doubt hear and use a different exit. The more frustrated I became by the wait, the noisier my scuffling and the less chance of seeing a badger, until eventually we would give up.

Somehow as an adult I have learned to wait quietly for animals. Attention is everything. Standing by that loch, I revelled in the cool breeze across the water, blowing gently in my face, perfect for not being smelled by the beavers. There was little sound except for the rippling water and the hush of breeze through twigs. It was good to know I was there, in the beaver’s habitat, experiencing their loch.

Don’t you love those passages? I am so jealous about going badger-watching! How true about the inner stillness you must cultivate to wait for wildlife to show itself to you. Except not in Martinez – where the train whistles, garbage trucks and swearing drunks all combine to create a hum that apparently relaxes our beavers. They seem to show themselves when they’re ready regardless of what you do. She had to work harder on the Tay.

As the light dimmed, details of the lodge became harder and harder to make out across the loch, and it became easier and easier to hallucinate brown furry bodies! I think I saw, faintly, movement at the fringe of the loch. I can’t be certain.

But what I can be certain of was the splash. And then the ‘pfffff’, closeby, a sound similar to that made by a seal surfacing. Only this was freshwater, so it couldn’t be a seal – it must have been a beaver!

Ahhh the inspiring detective work of a beaver spotter! Thanks Maggie for a lovely read. Our own Lory and Cheryl went on their own beaver trek last evening. They saw one of our kits! ( Now almost a yearling) working hard at the third dam. (You should trek down and see for yourself that it’s coming along nicely.) Cheryl writes:

Lory and I went down to beavers. Moses was there and had seen 3 beavers. We followed a kit (yearling now!) down to the third dam where he wrestled with another kit and then brought mud and sticks to the dam. They have a big hole upstream of that dam they brought a big branch into. I have a few pics I’ll get up tomorrow but they probably arent the best as it was getting dark.

And from Lory:

When Cheryl and I got to the secondary Moses was there and he said he saw three beavers. As Cheryl walked further down Moses and I spotted one beaver coming down the bank near the bank hole. One swam down and across the secondary. Cheryl and I followed him down to the third dam. It looks great. Lots of wood on it. Before we left we had two kits down there working. A man came by and wondered what we were looking at. He was from town but didn’t know there were beavers around. He watched with us. Let’s see what happens after these next few days of rain.

How wonderful that our youngsters are growing up together! Wrestling and carrying on in typical yearling fashion! I’m sorry we all weren’t there to see it, but I’m sure we remember what it looks like!

Sniff, they grow up so fast! Since this footage of the tiny fellow was taken on the evening of May 5 last year and then we didn’t see him again until June, I can’t imagine he was more than a month old. So almost Happy birthday to him or her and the siblings!

From the “say anything” beaver files…

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, History March 30, 2014

There were no news stories this morning about beaver so I went surfing the internet(s). I found a very inviting looking blog called “Natural Wild Life” and thought I’d settle in for a nice read about beavers with this lead photo. Wow, was I in for a surprise! The photos and content get even more surprising farther down the page.

Natural Wild Life | Beaver | The beaver (genus Castor) is a primarily nocturnal, large, semi-aquatic rodent. Beavers are most well known for their distinctive home-building that can be seen in rivers and streams. The beavers dam is built from twigs, sticks, leaves and mud and are surprisingly strong. Here the beavers can catch their fish and swim in the water.

I’ll grant that there are plenty of people taking up space on the planet that learned from some cartoon that beavers live in the dam. But how many will say aloud that they catch fish? Or write about it on a nature website which they have maintained for 3 years? I wonder if all the other articles are as interesting. This a good opportunity to revisit an old post on beaver myths. There are several posts on the subject – but this has to be my favorite. It’s from July 2008, (which reminds us all that I have been doing this for a dam long time).

Beaver myths throughout the ages

Quia cum vena torem se insequentem conovit, morsu testiculos sibi abscidit, et in faciem vena toris eos proicit et sic fugiens evadit

Turns out that complete misunderstanding of beaver behavior is nothing new. In fact the poor beaver has been miserably misunderstood since the middle ages and beyond. The above auspicious slander is taken from the Aberdeen Bestiary, which is a work documenting real and fictional creatures and their moral significance.The Bestiary goes back as far as the fourth century, although the addition of European animals like the beaver were added later.

To be fair, the bestiary was never intended as a “National Geographic of the Middle Ages”. It was a religious rather than a zoological text. But its pernicious misrepresentation of beavers lasted woefully to the Victorian era. Read for yourself:

Of the beaver There is an animal called the beaver, which is extremely gentle; its testicles are are highly suitable for medicine. Physiologus says of it that, when it knows that a hunter is pursuing it, it bites off its testicles and throws them in the hunter’s face and, taking flight, escapes.

So the story goes that the beaver is hunted for its castorum and decides to bite off its own testicles and throw them to the hunter rather than be killed. Check out the illustration of the same: (Yes that longlegged dog-looking thing is supposed to be a beaver)

This all comes about from mistaken entomology in which it is assumed that the beavers latin name (castor) is related to the root of castrate, and whimsy just takes over from there. The misconnection is untangled here.

Now I don’t know much about bestiaries and the middle ages, but I can only assume that every male of every species that has ever existed is partial to his own testicles and therefore unlikely to sacrifice them in favor of a protected aquatic life. I can’t fathom that anyone ever believed this, and can’t believe that it is quoted all the way up to 2008. Still the story served a particular need of a society that wanted to benefit from castoreum and fur and didn’t much care about accuracy. People were able to ignore their own perceptions and experience of the world in order to see the impossible story that fit their needs.

I sure am glad that doesn’t happen any more.

Oh and the blog post also says the Canadian beaver is the “most common” which makes me very curious indeed. What other beavers might there be in his neighborhood? As far as I know there are three species of beavers in the entire world, one basically extinct in Mongolia, castor Fiber in Europe and Castor Canadensis in North America. I’d love to hear about the other ones the author is familiar with.

“It’s an ugly creature. But it may kiss my ring if it likes”

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions April 12, 2014

Alberta and Saskatchewan have at least two of the smartest beaver researchers in the world, massive collective beaver intelligence, and easily the most beaver-dissertations generated anywhere. Still they hate beavers with a fiery passion. I’m not sure why. Maybe there was a nasty voyageur incident in their past. But Dr. Hood can prove that beavers dams are the only areas that have water during drought, Dr. Westbrook can prove that beaver dams are the only areas that don’t flood in heavy storms, and a student can film beavers tap dancing to the hallelujah chorus, and it doesn’t matter. Alberta and Saskatchewan still hate beavers.

Look to the beaver for flood prevention

When the rain hit Kananaskis Country, Alta., last June, unleashing a torrent of water and flooding dozens of communities, it washed out a large beaver dam being monitored down in the valley.

But several others remained intact and even stored water.

“For the majority of the event, we actually had a lot of storage in the system,” said Cherie Westbrook, an associate professor in wetland ecohydrology at the University of Saskatchewan who’s been studying beavers in the Sibbald area of Kananaskis since 2006. “There was actually quite a lot of ability to retain the flood waters and slow them down as they were moving down the valley bottom.”

Her team, including some university students, ended up getting trapped in the field when the deluge hit. But they learned a lot about how beavers could help in a flood.

“Beaver ponds were pretty empty prior to the event happening,” Westbrook said. “The larger one, the one most downstream, became overwhelmed with water and it ended up blowing a 10-metre section of it out so we had some flooding, but not massive flooding.” Flooding was much worse in other southern Alberta areas, making the 2013 event the worst natural disaster in Canadian history.

Oh my goodness, the area has been the site of research that proves beavers mitigate flooding AND drought. Hmm, the two things that we know will happen as our climate changes. I wonder if they’ll start to look at beaver differently – this multipurpose solution with paws. Will there be “Come to beavers” meeting soon?

Don’t hold your breath.

As the Alberta government looks at ways to mitigate against future floods, focusing on infrastructure such as diversion canals and dry dams, scientists suggest the province should also consider nature’s top engineer: the beaver.

But Nikki Booth, a spokeswoman for Alberta Environment, says the province isn’t considering any natural solutions.

“We’ve been focused on flood mitigation through infrastructure,” she said. “The nature piece and beavers specifically have not come up.”

No No No, says the minister of the environment. We don’t need beavers. We need bigger drains! Wider gutters! More concrete! Beavers are icky.

I’m starting to think we don’t need any more scientists or research to prove that beavers are good for water or salmon or birds. It’s been done. Well done. Stick-a-fork-in-it done. What we need is more ‘convincers’. People who can change minds one argument at a time, neighbor by neighbor by neighbor, fisherman by fisherman, one service club after another.

What we need is a million Worth A Dams.

In which Henry Ford walks to work…

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Who's Killing Beavers Now? March 28, 2014

UF wildlife club wins seven awards at Clemson University

Hunter Slade, a 21-year-old UF wildlife ecology and conservation senior, and Tiffany Oliver, a 20-year-old UF wildlife ecology and conservation senior, coordinated the event for the UF team.

Slade’s pottery sculpture of a turtle received first place in free-form art. “It was a pretty simple design, but it was painted well,” he said, attributing his success to his attention to lighting and detail in the glazing process.

If Clemson University sounds vaguely familiar to you, it should. It was the origin of the Clemson Pond Leveler, the most widely recognized flow device and the first to really make people think beavers could be managed without trapping. The Clemson was a rigid pipe with perforations that went under the dam – it was notorious for getting plugged, costing $$ and being a bear to install. But it was the FIRST and the easiest tool to find out about on the internet. In fact, a couple from Lafayette promised to donate one to Martinez when the beavers’ fate was in question.

Which makes it all the more stunning to read this next passage:

The highlight of Oliver’s experience, she said, was a field trip that displayed nuisance-animal trapping methods and solutions.

“We got to watch a beaver dam blow up,” she said.

Just so we’re clear, the Clemson inspired the more successful designs by Skip Lisle and Mike Callahan – and their pipes designs are much easier to install and more reliable, which is why we have successfully controlled dam height for 6 years.

Although, maybe not as reliable as dynamite.

Let’s not do it the easy way!

heidi08 City Reports, Creative Solutions, Earth Day, Environmental March 27, 2014

Sacramento County approves plan to restore channel to natural creek state

A graffiti-ridden drainage channel running through the American River Parkway in Rancho Cordova is poised for a major makeover that will transform it into a cleaner and greener creek where recreational and educational activities abound.

The Sacramento County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved a contract assessing the environmental impact of the Cordova Creek Naturalization Project – a rehabilitation effort that has been in the works for nearly a decade. The approval is a major milestone in a plan that involves breaking up and burying the channel’s concrete walls and rerouting its water through a new creek, which will be surrounded by native vegetation and walking trails.

The new creek will allow the soil around it to absorb the water, which comes from a runoff watershed in Rancho Cordova, ultimately creating a 15-acre riparian area where trees and wildflowers can flourish.

“It looks like a fallow field with a concrete ditch running through it,” said Gohring. “When we’re done, it will be a meandering stream which will provide an amazing amount of habitat diversity. … For those of us who do ecological restoration work, it’s like the holy grail.”

Honestly, at this point, do I even need to say it anymore? I’ve seen your Holy Grail Rancho Cordova and it looks like this.

Wanted to share Amelia Hunter’s fantastic new design for the seventh beaver festival. Don’t you love seeing the duality of a beaver’s life? Thank you Amelia for your lovely artwork, and I hope when our ad runs in Bay Nature paying customers with great big grants flock to you in droves.

Another beaver friend is working to organize a guided Amtrak journey from Oakland hosted by the Oakland Museum Docent Chris Richards. That would be a fun way to add watershed context to the festival. Fingers crossed it will really happen. I pulled together this graphic to celebrate!