Month: December 2015

Going deep

Two recent stories have new information that I’m grimly going to share. To start with the mayor of “Tom’s River” who was going to “consider humane alternatives to trapping” turns out not to have considered them very long. Times up! Beaver trapping season is open and no one should be surprised at his conclusion.

Activists angered by decision to trap Toms River beavers

TOMS RIVER — A state-licensed trapper has been hired by the township to remove beavers whose dam-building activities have led to complaints from neighbors who live near Lake Placid.

The township’s decision to hire the trapper — who began working in the area Dec. 27 — frustrated representatives from Gloucester County’s Unexpected Wildlife Refuge, who met earlier this month with Toms River officials in an attempt to convince them to use nonlethal means to prevent the lake’s beaver population from building dams that have flooded neighboring properties.

“Trapping is the only viable, long-term solution to provide a practical and financial means of responding to the presence of beavers on town-owned and managed lands,” a statement issued by the township reads. “Trapping ensures that property damage and human health and safety risks are minimized and that quality of life is preserved for residents.:

Township officials said that in spite of their efforts, more beaver dams have appeared in Lake Placid in recent years. Moving the beavers is not an option since the state Division of Fish and Wildlife does not allow relocation of the aquatic rodents, officials said.

The township says the beaver dams “alter waterways, destroy forests and threaten homes and roads.” Beaver trapping in New Jersey runs from Dec. 26 to Feb. 9.

Ugh. I’ve highlighted your “Proceed governor“moment. That’s where I’d start my response.

If I were there I’d try saying something like “I’m relieved to hear it’s a long term solution, Mayor.” Then follow up with “How long?” Brightly cheerful. “How long did you say the trapper is guaranteeing his work?” Wait a second, and then “Because Mike Callahan guarantees his installation for five years, I’m assuming that trapper will come back and do whatever is necessary for that long too?” See if you can get them to acknowledge that when new beavers move in the city will have to pay again. See if you can get them to talk about the payment for the trapper and how long it usually takes beavers to recolonize adequate habitat.

I agree that its rotten the city said they were pretending to look for solutions while the press was there. And then did exactly what they had always planned the second their backs were turned. But stop recommending compassion, because no ones listening. Talk about saving money. Talk about hiring a trapper four times in five years versus letting you install the culvert fence for free. And ask the mayor which he thinks is a better use of taxpayer funds.

Van Hof, of Unexpected Wildlife Refuge, said her group offered to pay for installation and maintenance of a trapezoid-style fenced beaver deterrent that she said has been proven to have “98 percent effectiveness in historically badly flooded municipalities.” She said the trademarked beaver deterrents suggested by the group, called either “Beaver Deceivers” or “Culver Clear,” require almost no maintenance.

She said the group offered to visit the site weekly to monitor the effectiveness of the beaver deterrent device. The longer beaver deterrent devices lead the beavers farther away from the culvert or pipe and prevent them from successfully damming it, Van Hof said.

Great work offering to do it yourself. Now follow up with the statement that “Rather than allowing us to carry this cost you’re saying its better make tax-payers do it?” And see if you can get that covered by the papers. They are being weasels, and not the pretty kind. Let slip the watchdogs of war. (In a very polite way.)

cooper crane — **Cooper Crane posing in Worth A Dam shirts after our legal challenge failed to stop the sheetpile was installed thru the beaver lodge.**

More news about the firecracker beaver from our longtime German friend Alex Hiller (posing here for photo with Skip Lisle at the beaver symposium a few years back). He researched the local papers and found that the tragic death really did happen about a week ago. He highlights that fireworks are illegal in Germany and these were probably purchased in Poland. He writes,

It is a sad story you forwarded to me. Unfortunately the incident is being approved by necropsy. The corpse of the female beaver kid of 6 months age was being discovered at the bank of a lake besides the castle of Koenigs-Wusterhausen. The wife of the local hunter had witnessed teens throwing firecrackers into the lake the day before. The incident happened about a week ago.

What was being discovered by necropsy were ear drums on both sides destroyed and ripped open. Its liver and brain had clogged blood vessels resulting from shock. Death was caused from drowing, because lots of water was found in its lungs and stomach. It was assumed that firecrackers could have caused an underwater shockwave resulting in the beaver kid`s death.

Alex is a trusted beaver researcher with boots on the ground. He even found a grisly article from B.Z. showing the ruptured eardrums. (Because German papers are like just that.) So this means it really happened and that when people blow up dams they occasionally blow out beaver eardrums. . (Which is quite upsetting to think about.) It makes me worried for our little beavers in retrospect. And now I’m thinking that maybe that ‘mourning beaver’ recorded by Bernie Krause also had his own hearing loss and couldn’t tell how loud he was being?

You can watch that if you dare, I never will again because it is just too sad. The bright spot in this gloomy follow-up is that Worth A Dam still has a generous beaver friend in Germany who is willing to do some research and translating for us when needed. Thank you Alex, for your valuable aid, and hopefully the next story I ask you to sniff out will be a more beaver cheerful one!

Flooding is publicly subsidized

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Who's Killing Beavers Now?, Who's saving beavers now? December 30, 2015

What a great article about the flooding in England from George Monbiot. It could just as easily apply to the Missouri floods, or whatever comes next.

This flood was not only foretold – it was publicly subsidised

These floods were not just predictable; they were predicted. There were clear and specific warnings that the management of land upstream of the towns now featuring in the news would lead to disaster. By straightening, embanking and dredging rivers where they cut through fields, the boards accelerate the flow of water, making flooding downstream more likely. When heavy rain falls, some land must flood. We have a choice: fields or cities. And all over Britain, we have chosen badly.

Farm subsidies everywhere are conditional on the land being in “agricultural condition”. This does not mean any actual farming has to take place there – only that it looks like farmland. Any land covered by “permanent ineligible features” is disqualified. What does this mean? Wildlife habitat. If farmers don’t keep the hills bare, they don’t get their money. Scrub, regenerating woodland, forested gullies, ponds and other features that harbour wildlife and hold back water must be cleared. European rules insist that we pay farmers to help flood our homes.

Building higher walls will not, by itself, protect our towns. We need flood prevention as well as flood defence. This means woodland and functioning bogs on the hills. It means dead wood and gravel banks and other such obstructions in the upper reaches of the streams (beavers will do such work for nothing). It means pulling down embankments to reconnect rivers to their floodplains, flooding fields instead of towns. It means allowing rivers to meander and braid. It means creating buffer zones around their banks: places where trees, shrubs, reeds and long grass are allowed to grow, providing what engineers call hydraulic roughness. It means the opposite of the orgy of self-destruction that decades of government and European policy have encouraged: grazing, mowing, burning, draining, canalisation and dredging.

So nicely said, at exactly the right pitch and time. Thanks Mr. Monbiot. Now if only people were half as worried about what’s going on with their waterways as the are with their roadways, we might get somewhere. You know, like instead of traffic reports every 15 minutes they had watershed updates, and helicopters reporting on seepage? Go read the whole article and think about every straight creek you have ever seen as a terrible scar on the land or a horrifying dystopian view of the future. Beavers could help, if we let them.

Here’s yet another example of how we fail to let them.

Towns to discuss mosquito control budget

NORTHBOROUGH – Central Massachusetts Mosquito Control Project officials will meet with representatives from the program’s 40 member towns next month to discuss the organization’s proposed $2.1 million fiscal 2017 budget.

The project provides surveillance to determine the degree of a mosquito population in a community, spraying only after pre-determined thresholds are exceeded. The agency also maintains ditches to avoid stagnant water and has a new program to remove tires which can become breeding grounds.

The organization also runs a program to breach beaver dams, which cause rivers and streams to become stagnant and attract mosquitoes.

“They’ve been very helpful the past five to seven years with that,” Mark Oram, Ashland Board of Health director, said of the beaver dam program.

Holliston Health Agent Scott Moles characterized the town’s fiscal 2017 assessment of $53,701 as money well-spent.

Now I don’t know much about the mob, or how protection money works, but that sure sounds like a racket to me. “Lovely stream you got here, gentlemen. Shame if something were to happen to it, like a mosquito infestation for example“. Give us the cash or West Nile will kill your grand babies. Never mind that beaver ponds are notoriously FULL OF FISH that happily eat mosquito larvae for free. And that ponds are surrouded by birds and bats that will happily clean up any mosquitoes that survive to adulthood. The mosquito control takes money for destroying the dams and letting all the fish escape, so people keep forking over the cash and never know any better. Hmm.

Out with a bang

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, City Reports, Who's Killing Beavers Now? December 29, 2015

Beaver death sparks fear over festive fireworks

After some children killed a beaver with a firecracker near Berlin, animal protectionists called for people celebrate new year without using fireworks.

“Setting off fireworks is not only incredibly bad for the environment, it is also incredibly unsettling for animals,” Hubert Weiger from the Nature Protection Society said on Monday.

While he said he had every sympathy for people wanting to celebrate the New Year”, Weiger advised people “not to waste your money on fireworks.”

Saying that people would be better donating their money to refugees, the animals rights activist said “there are already enough explosions in the world”. The calls came after a six-month-old beaver was killed on the outskirts of Berlin at the weekend when a group of children threw a firecracker into a pond.

The protected animal’s eardrum was perforated by the underwater explosion and it then drowned after suffering from shock, the Nature Protection Society said.

I’m so conflicted about this article. I hate seeing the photo of the dead beaver. I love reading that beavers are protected in Berlin. I hate reading some animal rights activist being used as a mouth piece to prevent fireworks, which the government has already been asking for already because of terror scares. I actually don’t personally like fireworks, but honestly animal rights activists are pretty despised already. Adding ‘no fireworks’ to the list is not going to improve their standing.

The strongest feeling, though, is that something about this story just feels wrong. Do beavers even have eardrums? Why didn’t the other beavers in his family also die from the loud disorienting noise? How do they know children threw in fireworks? I can’t find any other articles about the rascals being caught red-handed. Was there a necropsy performed on that beaver to show its ruptured ear drum? The results are in really fast if these were new year’s fireworks?

I am, of course, particularly interested because our own kit 2 & 3 died right after the fourth of July. We did worry about fireworks, but more about the chemical residue they leave in the water washing upstream with the high tide. Our kits didn’t drown, and no one said anything about a ruptured ear drum. But I’m going to keep asking questions.

On a brighter note this video is making the rounds again this morning, and well worth sharing. I told Rusty to get up early in April and film that lodge in Napa because this is going to be happening there too.

Bring Back the Beavers!

heidi08 Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? December 28, 2015

Carlisle floods: bring back the trees, and the beavers!

The key to reducing the risk of more floods like those in Carlisle is to realise that conventional ‘flood defence’ can never provide security against the ever more extreme weather events that global warming will bring. We must embrace natural solutions to holding back flood waters: more trees; and bring back the beavers!

Trees are important for another reason too. They are food for beavers, and beavers use them to build their dams. And beavers will do all the work of damming up the streams and gullies for us, free of charge. And that’s absolutely key to restoring landcapes and making them water retentive.

We should therefore select water-loving species that are palatable to beavers – like poplars, willows, sallows and alders – and establish them along watercourses, ditches, streams, ponds and eroded upland gullies.

The dams would not just reduce flood risk: they would also prevent the summer droughts to which the area is also prone as a result of the rapid water drainage, and restore healthy river flows throughout the year.

I would not wish to pretend that every flooding event can be prevented by planting trees and restoring beavers. There will still be a role for orthodox ‘hard engineering’ in protecting vulnerable flood plain settlements. But that approach alone can never provide the protection we need, especially with the rising power and ferocity of the weather we must expect in a warming world.

It’s time for governments to move beyond the usual rhetoric of ‘flood defence’ and to move into a new era of rebuilding natural resilience to extreme climate events, using the gifts that nature herself has given us.

Can I get an amen?

Carlisle is across the Scottish border in Cumbria, which is just east of the Lake District of England. It was hit with severe storms causing the river to top its banks andmake flooding in December. Many, many families were forced to evacuate for the holidays. British soldiers were deployed to help out and keep peace. Damage to roads in Cumbria are already reported to cost upwards of 100 million pounds.

So, naturally, the Ecologist is writing about what nature could provide to prevent such damage. The author of the article happens to be the editor of the Ecologist, one Oliver Tickell, which explains the very positive press the Ecologist has been granting to beavers this year. I am mortally sombered at the damage, which we’ve heard very little about in the US. But grateful that folks are thinking about what ecosystem engineers could do to help.

ABC – A Beaver Cienega

heidi08 Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental December 27, 2015

New words alert! A Cienega is our friend at Flow Back in time describes as:

Cienega is typically translated as marsh, but this loses much specificity of meaning. They are found in the Mediterranean-climate zones of California and in the desert Southwest, where rainfall is highly episodic, and particularly in closed basins where stream channels lead to salt lakes or dry lakes. In these regions, rather than running all the way to the sea, creeks are likely to seep into alluvial fans as they emerge from the mountains. This water may resurface in the bottoms of canyons or other lowlands where the water table intersects the surface, but frequently there are not strong flows. A cienega is often a complex of individual springs, seeps, puddles, and wetlands.

The story behind a saved cienega in New Mexico

After Cole, a former Phoenix-area lawyer, retired in 2003, he and his wife, Cinda, searched for a patch of land to restore. They were tired of city life, and in a world threatened by climate change, they yearned for hope. They found what they were looking for in the 12,000-acre Pitchfork Ranch, which harbored remnants of a rare habitat: a sprawling, spring-fed desert wetland known as a cienega.

Cienegas used to be fairly common in Arizona and New Mexico; early Spanish explorers complained about the wide marshes, which festered with malaria and impeded travel. They didn’t realize that cienegas also mitigate flooding and encourage biodiversity, supporting all kinds of fish, birds and plants.

But since the 1880s, many Southwestern cienegas have disappeared. Dean Hendrickson, a fish biologist at the University of Texas-Austin and an expert on cienegas, believes that the most likely culprits are livestock grazing, groundwater depletion and erosion.

The Coles knew nothing about cienega restoration when they purchased their ranch. And the Burro Cienega had been transformed over the years by previous ranchers, who trenched and drained the land and evicted the resident beaver. The cienega now sliced deep into the landscape, more creek than meandering marsh, and much of the life it once supported was gone.

One day at a yard sale, a friend stumbled upon one of the first scientific papers devoted to cienegas and bought it for $1. According to the paper — which Hendrickson wrote — in order to restore the wetland, Cole needed to recreate the natural process that formed it, by trapping the thousands of tons of dirt that washed downstream with each heavy rain. If he could capture that dirt, the water would be forced to slow down and spread out, and aquatic species might move back in.

Employing his legal talent for argument and persuasion, he eventually obtained more than $600,000 in public conservation grants. “If I had a client in all of this, it would be the cienega,” he says. Now, instead of advocating to a judge or jury, “I advocate to members of the bureaucracy.”

The restoration struggled at first. Cienegas form naturally when a persistent source of water, like a spring, bubbles over a solid foundation of rock or clay. That attracts plants and animals, and over time, nutrient-rich sediment builds up and creates wide and biologically rich swamps.

But when the rains came, they blasted away the posts Cole had jammed into the stream to trap sediment. Rock structures crumbled. The creek and downstream flood channels kept deepening under the fast-moving water. But after a decade of work — organized by Cole, but carried out by graduate students, government employees, contractors and the Youth Conservation Corps — the wetland is coming back.

Yes that’s right, this hardy lawyer-turned steward received hundreds of thousands of dollars in grant money and countless hours of student labor to do what beavers do for free every day of every year in every place they’re allowed. And would have bravely continued to do for free if they weren’t killed outright. I am touched by Cole’s story but I can’t help being alarmed that an educated man, concerned by climate change, would need to stumble on an old paper which told him to SLOW IT. SINK IT . SPREAD IT. because otherwise he would have NO idea what was necessary to keep water on the land.

What are they teaching people in New Mexico?