Month: February 2016

Beaver trapping wins Oscar

heidi08 Beavers, Environmental, History, Who's Killing Beavers Now? February 29, 2016

Last night, Leonardo accepted an academy award to a standing ovation for his apparently unforgettable role as Hugh Glass, a member of the Andrew Henry fur brigade filling the coffers of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. When they weren’t busy abandoning one of their crew to a grizzly bear, the brigade trapped all the beavers on the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers. They even worked with the unfortunately named “Beaver Dick” out of Idaho. When they were no beaver left to trap, the enterprising Mr. Henry went into lead mining and bullet manufacture.

Because honestly, after you killed all the members of one species, why not try to eliminate the other?

When I try to imagine the ruthless arms race of the beaver industry, I am shocked until I remember the similar mad pursuit of gold in California, or coal in West Virginia, or oil and titanium everywhere. The American way is to use up all you can of a resource with no thought for your children or grandchildren. The only warning is to do it FAST before your fellow man gets it instead of you. The “explorers” of early America were basically children on a grand Easter egg hunt. I don’t believe that most had any grand curiosity or wish to map the west. The only reason they looked over that vale or up that river was because the ones closer to them were all trapped out.

I’m not sure anyone really believed it was possible to eliminate the beaver, even though their ancestors had already done it in Europe and England. Obviously, the idea that you could wipe out an entire species never mattered to the fur trade – and never mattered to America in general. It’s not like we were taught as children to find the Easter eggs as quickly as possible but not to make sure and leave two behind so they could grow up and foster the race of eggs for next year.

We were taught to get all the eggs, because there will always be more eggs, more trees, more water, more natural gas, more beavers. It’s the American Way. And when the last Grizzly was killed in California and the last Passenger pigeon was shot out of the sky no one really believed it was the last. Until ample time passed and people realized they could see no more. And by then – so much time had passed – that no one really believed they had ever existed in the first place.

It’s the American Way.

Bring Back the Conservationists!

heidi08 Beavers February 28, 2016

I mostly agree with our friends that the Scottish Government should get it’s act together and protect beavers BUT I’m just loving these headlines and positive news stories! Maybe they could just continue to be stubborn and drive this narrative a little longer?

Give beavers permanent British residence!

Beavers are Britain’s native aquatic engineers and their return to sites in Scotland and England is doing wonders for the local environment, write Nigel Willby & Alan Law: restoring wetlands, recreating natural river dynamics and ecology, filtering farm pollutants from water, and improving habitat for trout and other fish.

Should we let these beavers take up permanent residence? The Scottish government has first refusal. It is overdue to make a decision on the back of five years of scientific monitoring and other evidence.

While conservationists wait with bated breath, we think there’s only one sensible choice – beavers should be allowed back. None of this is about nostalgia. Beavers are often referred to as ‘ecosystem engineers‘ and herein lies much of the reasoning and controversy behind their reintroduction.

There is extensive evidence from Europe and North America that wetlands created by beaver dams benefit everything from water plants, dragonflies and amphibians to fish and ducks to song birds and bats. In Knapdale, damming by beavers transformed a small pond into a wetland of a type and complexity probably unseen in Britain for centuries.

Beavers can also restore habitats without the need for a bulldozer or planning permission. On the Bamff estate on Tayside, we found that grazing by beavers trebled the number of wetland plants over a nine-year period.

Where raised water levels saturated a meadow thanks to damming of ditches, the number of plant species increased by 49% and the multitude of habitats created increased the total diversity of aquatic invertebrates by almost 30%.

Indeed the benefits were even further reaching. We found that the beaver dams also acted as a sink for agricultural pollutants, and may also help to reduce the risk of flooding. Individually these findings are not that surprising, though it is unusual to demonstrate them all in parallel.

…We might incentivise this with subsidies to recognise the ecosystem services that species like beavers provide, while compensating inconvenienced landowners. And as well as mitigating against the impacts that reintroduced creatures can cause, we’ll need to think more about the wider risk of further divorcing people from nature by creating wilderness areas.

But be all that as it may, the positives greatly outweigh the negatives. When it comes to conservation, we have lacked ambition for too long. Saying yes to reintroducing beavers is the sort of bold and forward-looking move that would resurrect the UK’s conservation credentials.

Can I get an Amen? Well done Nigel Willby and Alan Law! Watching Scotland strive for what we have come to take for granted reminds me of an aspiring country planning its first democratic election. Yes democracies are messy and bring all kinds of problems with them. But I’m reminded of that famous quote attributed to Winston Churchill.

“Democracy is the worst form of government.
Except for all the other ones.”

Having beavers brings all kinds of challenges and lots of things could go wrong, I fully agree. But not having them on the landscape, storing water, making habitat, and enriching streams, is much, much worse. Take it from every single other country around the world who destroyed their beaver population and then regretted it and reintroduced them.

Like Us.

Yesterday I was playing around with an idea for our award at Earth Day, linking John Muir and beavers. I had to work hard to find the signatures of each man and am thinking about this as a shirt. Thoughts?

Make New Friends, but Keep the Old

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver Chewing, Beavers, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Tail slap, Who's saving beavers now? February 27, 2016

I noticed this winter that we had a new dove sound in the garden. The call has the quality of a regular mourning dove with a marching cadence. It was quite unmistakable.

Like all good mysteries the internet helped me solve it. I was hearing a “Eurasian Collared Dove”, which happened to be news worthy because the bird was introduced in Barbados in the late 1800’s and creeped to Florida and then across the United states. Apparently it got to the Bay Area around 2008, but I was busy with beavers so I didn’t notice then. Have you seen or heard this newcomer? He’s apparently well adapted to city life and folks are unsure whether he’s a competition to our other doves. It’s fun hear that new call though, like having a new kid move in across the street and wondering if they’ll be fun to play with.

Speaking of fun, Minnesota is about to have a tail-slapper.

‘Leave it To Beavers’ March 8 at Headwaters Center for Lifelong Learning

This 60-minute 2014 video from PBS will be shown on Armory Square’s 25-foot wide screen, with sound enhanced by a new wireless microphone. The stunning photography and important subject matter present an opportunity for the audiences to get a close up look at this once nearly extinct rodent at work.

“The beaver is nature’s original water conservationist and land and wildlife manager,” the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources explains. “Many biologists believe that the beaver pond supports a greater variety and abundance of wildlife than any other ecosystem in the forest. The ponds also control spring runoff, thus lessening the possibility of downstream flooding.”

While climate change, pollution and other negative impacts on ecosystems are much in the news these days, positive developments such as the useful work of the resurgent beaver population tend to receive less notice.

Ahh wonderful to hear such good praise out of MDNR And wonderful to see Jari Osborne’s well-crafted documentary continuing to do its job. You know, she just wrote the other day to congratulate us on our Conservation Education Award. Obviously she’s busy doing other things now that are not beaver related. But she’d be thrilled to know her work continues to entertain and educate.

Sigh. This remains one of my favorite parts of the documentary, I admit.

There goes the neighborhood!

heidi08 Beavers and Birds, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Friends of Martinez Beavers February 26, 2016

Poor France. They are too busy eating nice food and rejecting refugees that they haven’t any time left to finish a complete thought. The harried things can only have half-ideas and not carry them thru to their logical conclusions. Descartes would be so disappointed.

Beavers threaten water supply

A BEAVER colony is threatening the water supply of the 40,000 residents of a town in the Ardennes.The animals, who have lived in the area for two years, set up their first dam in November across the River Audry.

Since then they have added another six to their roster, across tributaries to the river.

Their work means that during heavy rain the rivers frequently burst their banks, taking detritus and pollution on a new course into the local reservoir – the water supply for the 40,000 people of Charleville-Mézières.

That’s right, those 6 dams block sediment and pollution from getting into the reservoir for most of the year – but when they wash out all that bad stuff whooshes down stream at once. What the article doesn’t say (because of their unfinished-thought-affliction) is that if only the beavers weren’t there the waterway could release gradual toxins all year long into the water supply. You know, like they’re supposed to.

Dam beavers!

Out in Napa the beavers are so busy ruining things that they are cramming the waterways with fish, which attracts other nuisances who gut and shit their fish into the water without any respect for the reservoirs. Take this photo from Rusty Cohn and this short video from Robin Ellison: classic examples of the many troubles beavers bring!

Mr and Mrs HM — Hooded Merganser pair: Rusty Cohn

And it gets worse. Yesterday, Dr. Ellen Wohl send me this video taken by her student documenting beaver activity at Crystal Creek in Yellowstone National Park. I know you’ll be SHOCKED to see all the riffraff beaver bring to that pristine wilderness! Thank goodness France, Martinez and Napa will probably be spared these particular visitors!

What John Muir thinks about beavers…

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Earth Day, Educational, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? February 25, 2016

I’m officially allowed to announce our good news today, so of course I’m thinking of John Muir’s friend Enos Mills, who was invited to his house and came to Martinez in 1908. One of the many books he wrote was the very famous “In Beaver World“, all about our favorite subject matter, and whose very last chapter is titled thusly.

I’m very very proud to imagine that Worth A Dam has possibly been considered as good a educational conservationist as the beaver is. Congratulations to everyone and all of Martinez who made Worth A Dam happen in the first place.

Speaking of the many species beavers assist in their award-winning Keystone capacity, here’s an awesome photo from the Tulocay Napa beaver pond taken yesterday by Rusty Cohn.

rusty turtle — *Turtles at Tulocay Beaver Pond: Rusty Cohn*

Now I think we should all write than you notes to the Scottish Goverment for being so enormously stubborn the world keeps getting headlines like this over and over again.

Give beavers permanent residence – we’d be dam stupid not to

Beaver benefits

None of this is about nostalgia. Beavers are often referred to as “ecosystem engineers” and herein lies much of the reasoning and controversy behind their reintroduction. There is extensive evidence from Europe and North America that wetlands created by beaver dams benefit everything from water plants, dragonflies and amphibians to fish and ducks to song birds and bats. In Knapdale, damming by beavers transformed a small pond into a wetland of a type and complexity probably unseen in Britain for centuries.

Beavers can also restore habitats without the need for a bulldozer or planning permission. On the Bamff estate on Tayside, we found that grazing by beavers trebled the number of wetland plants over a nine-year period. Where raised water levels saturated a meadow thanks to damming of ditches, the number of plant species increased by 49% and the multitude of habitats created increased the total diversity of aquatic invertebrates by almost 30%. Indeed the benefits were even further reaching. We found that the beaver dams also acted as a sink for agricultural pollutants, and may also help to reduce the risk of flooding. Individually these findings are not that surprising, though it is unusual to demonstrate them all in parallel.

Go read the whole thing. And thank the famously stubborn scots for needing a lot of convincing on the subject!