Month: December 2014

Beaver Adventures

heidi08 Beaver News, Beavers, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere December 22, 2014

Guess who’s holding next beaver conference?

The Scottish Wild Beaver Group is off and running, and ready to teach beaver benefits to all.

An exciting conference hosted by the Scottish Wild Beaver Group will be held in the heart of Scotland in March 2015 exploring the history and ecology of the beaver, their role in biodiversity and wetland management and how they can help us in flood prevention and ecotourism.

2015 will be a landmark year for the Scottish wild beaver as following the five year Scottish Beaver Trial the Scottish Government will make its decision later in 2015 on the reintroduction of this iconic species which was hunted to extinction some 400 years ago.

A range of speakers will be talking at the conference on the history of the beaver, their ecology and wetland management, ecosystem services that beavers provide and rewilding/flood catchment management.

We will look at lessons learned from managing beavers and farming in the Netherlands, the benefits that beavers have brought to ecotourism in Perthshire, and hear from delegates from both the Welsh Beaver Project and the Devon Wildlife Trust on their local beaver campaigns.

Maybe some day they’ll be beaver conferences and festivals all over? And you can plan you vacation around them. I’m not afraid to dream. Good luck to our Scottish cousins, and congratulations on this important next step.

Last night we did a beaver tour with Perla, Mike and their boys who drove up from Menlo Park. The beavers were no where to be seen on this longest night of the year, but the kids excitedly spotted a turtle and an egret. They were referred by Rick Lanman. It turns out Perla is the CEO and founder of this organization reviewing non profits so that funds and volunteer hours can be better applied.

The entire family had just watched the PBS documentary and were full of stories about Sherri Tippie and beavers being attracted to the sound of running water. We talked about the story and the benefits of beavers and did our best to get them excited about the beaver festival. But it is worth noting that GNP, by the way, has zero information at all about Worth A Dam, which is under the non-profit Inquiring Systems Inc, which also has zero reviews.

Maybe you can help?

Beavers with Benefits

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Who's saving beavers now? December 21, 2014

Someone has finally got the beavers and water story right. And it’s about time.

Leave it to beavers: California joins other states in embracing the rodent

AR-141229981.jpg&maxh=400&maxw=667 — A beaver dam spans the length of Los Gatos Creek. (Thomas Mendoza — Santa Cruz Sentinel)

LOS GATOS >> Californians are crossing their fingers for more rain after three punishing years of drought have left streams, rivers and wetland parched.

One animal has the potential to restore these dry landscapes.

Go ahead, guess which one. I’ll wait.

Isn’t this a fabulous start to an article? Before you do anything click on the link so they get to count hits for the report. It will convince them that this interests people. We met the reporter Samantha Clark before when she covered the beavers in San Jose for the campus paper. Now she has landed a gig with the Santa Crus Sentinel. Turns out she used to go to school with my neice so maybe osmosis has something to do with her remarkably being the first reporter in the state to get the water story right.

“This state has lost more of its wetlands than all other states, and beavers can rebuild those wetlands,” said Rick Lanman of the Institute for Historical Ecology in Los Altos. “Knowing that it is native should help guide restoration efforts.”

This article reads like a who’s who in beaver doxology honestly, just wait.

Beaver dams bestow benefits to the environment that we humans can’t easily copy. They turn land into a sponge for water. Their gnawing and nesting promotes richer soil and slows down water, improving imperiled fish habitat. Their dams raise water tables, nourishing shrubbery alongside streams that stabilize eroding banks and add habitat for birds and deer. They also help the endangered California Red-legged frog.

“There’s a growing interest in using beaver as a habitat restoration tool,” said Michael M. Pollock, an ecosystems analyst with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle. “They create good wetland habitat much more cheaply than other restoration methods.”

Samantha did her homework, tracking down Rick, and Michael. They are busy men but the generally make time to talk about beavers, I’ve been very impressed.

“It would be great if we could recognize the benefit of the beaver and to resolve conflict nonlethally and manage them to continue receiving those benefits,” said Kate Lundquist, director of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center’s Water Institute, a group that is drafting beaver policy recommendations for state Fish and Wildlife.

I am so happy to read an article that’s actually promoting beaver benefits in California! (And not complaining about methane emissions.) But there seems to be one voice missing. Rick, Michael, Kate, hmmm now who could it be?

Since beavers moved to the Alhambra Creek in downtown Martinez, the area has seen new species flourish. By moving mud, the beavers create a haven for bugs.

“Because we have an insect bloom, we have a bloom of all the different fish and animals up the food chain,” said Heidi Perryman, founder of the beaver advocacy group Worth a Dam and who led the effort to save a Martinez beaver family from extermination. “We’ve identified three new species of fish and seven species of bird. And we see more otter and mink than we ever saw before.”

Ohhh that’s who was missing! Someone whose learned how to live with beavers and seen it first hand! Not bad. Samantha doesn’t do enough to talk about HOW to live with beavers, but she nails WHY.

In San Jose, a beaver has taken refuge in the dry Guadalupe River. The critter’s dam outside a dripping storm drain created a tiny oasis.

“They can get by with very little,” Pollock said. “In a number of cases, they’ve built on streams that have run dry and because they have built the dams, water flows again.”

Because beavers are so good at recharging ground water, they can make streams flow when they would otherwise run dry such as during the summer months.

If I were a state facing drought for the past 3 three years, I’d be thinking about this article and these plucky rodents and re-examing my policies. Wouldn’t you?

Happy Solstice Everyone! Beavers get easier to see after today!

Mendenhall of Fame

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Who's saving beavers now? December 20, 2014

I first became aware of Bob Armstrong of Juneau, Alaska when I read about his ‘beaver team’ back in 2008. He was using volunteers to wipe out the troublesome beaver dams that flooded the trails at the state park so the beavers wouldn’t need to be trapped. (Very frustrated but lucky beavers!) I was able to introduce Bob to Mike and he was able to get the rangers to pay for him to come out and do a complete assessment of the situation. Along the way Bob and his colleague Mary Wilson published a beautiful book of the Mendenhall Glacier Beavers, which he was kind enough to donate to the auction at the festival many times.

Suffice to say that because of Mike’s advice Bob’s beaver team finally got a break, the trails were protected and those hard working beavers finally got to have a dam. Lory actually met Bob when she went to Alaska and we’ve been in touch all along. Yesterday he sent me word that his book was going up online as a pdf and sent me the link. You can imagine how excited I was to hear it! I put a permanent link on the left margin but you should really go check it out now.

Screen shot 2014-12-19 at 3.08.14 PM — Click to view

We were eager to study all the details like what the beavers ate and how they lived. I love his photo of the beaver dam at the glacier so much it has been my screen saver for 5 years, and I don’t think I will part with it ever. It looks to me like those beavers know even when things are hard that with a little effort anything is possible.

mendenhall — Mendenhall Glaciar Beaver Dam – Bob Armstrong

He also has been working with an underwater cam and recently found the perfect spot to install it. This is a beaver entering the lodge under the ice. Just think how lucky our beavers are!

Beaver Entering Lodge Under the Ice from Bob Armstrong on Vimeo.

Ottawa Sun Shines above the rest

heidi08 Beavers December 19, 2014

Give it up for the Ottawa Sun, who is the ONLY paper on the entire planet to put the methane emissions nonsense in context. Just look at this:

Beavers make a comeback, study finds

“We found global beaver numbers have grown dramatically on the three continents they currently inhabit, North America, Eurasia and South America, to a population of over 10 million,” researcher Colin Whitfield said.

But could all these beavers be bad for the environment? Beaver activities contribute some 800 million kg of methane to the atmosphere each year. That’s 200 times more than they produced in 1900.

Fear not, Whitfield said.

“The magnitude of this methane source is lower than many other natural sources and unlikely to be a dominant climate-change driver,” Whitfield said.

Plus, he said, the beavers’ handiwork provides habitat for birds and other creatures, fostering increased biodiversity.

About friggin time is all I can say, Colin.

Now I’m off to the mountains where I hope I’ll have internet but if the site’s dark tomorrow you’ll know why. Wish me snow.

Burocrat Beaver Believers

heidi08 Beavers December 18, 2014

Yesterday’s important feel started with the airport security we had to go through to reach our towering destination. Riley lead us to the 15th floor conference room, where I set up the presentation, some books and our brochures and water-saver stickers. Members trickled in from three doors at corners of the room, starting with two young environmental scientists who had come just for the talk, a woman from the SF EPA who wanted to catch it, the woman who reviewed all the huge water grants for the northern rivers, the woman next to me who handled all the mercury work for the streams, a man who worked with Napa flood control and new all about their beavers, and a woman who was especially interested in species predation at the pond and wondered whether all the wildlife we drew meant the fish were unprotected because of the beaver dams. There were about 20 in all and they took up the entire table and were a rapt audience, bursting at the seams with questions that I could barely contain to get through my material.

I knew things were going our way though, when the fellow involved with Napa Flood Control interrupted after the part about Skip installing a flow device that has controlled pond height since 2008 and said “how much did it cost?” I answered at that time there were no experts trained in this on the west coast, no DVD’s or books to teach us how to do it, so we had to pay to bring in an expert from Vermont which was costly. But that materials cost us around 500 dollars. He loudly scoffed, that’s NOTHING! and clearly meant, why doesn’t every city do this? Which I took as a very good sign so early in the presentation.

There was laughter in the right places and awwws where we’ve come to expect them. And more questions when the whole thing was over. One question in particular about my child psychology background and did that play out in our work at the festival. Whose clever idea was the Keystone Charm Bracelet for instance? (beam) The mood was very appreciative and the talk well-received. They spoke among themselves that they needed to add beaver policy to their new stream plan for the area, so that when beavers arrived they would already have policy in place. There was special interest in the depredation map and what it could tell us about population in general. Someone suggested if growth rate could be analyzed so that the time of their expansion into San Francisco could be predicted. Afterwards Riley said privately it was the best presentation they had had all year, but more importantly she could see the folks she knew to be skeptics at the beginning were smiling beaver believers at the end. She said it was exactly what she hoped for.

It was a very successful day. Jon stalwartly carried materials and shuttled the car back and forth in downtown Oakland. He defended us in the downpour, and gallantly gave me champagne at the end of the day. He said it felt like the most important talk I had given yet.

News in the broader beaver world seems impervious to our success: a mountain of articles saying beavers (and ground squirrels, seriously?) cause global warming, another tail bounty offered in North Carolina, and a New Jersey man on the water who wants the city to pay to wrap his trees because all that nature is ruining his view. But lets not get bogged down in these relatively unimportant stories. And less focus instead on success at spreading the beaver gospel to particularly powerful ears.

Great footage this morning from beaver friends in Holland. If you don’t think beaver lives are dangerous just watch this narrow escape.