Month: September 2016

Is Rewildling good for England?

heidi08 Beavers and Insects, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Environmental September 5, 2016

Sometimes the messages that get the most listened to are the ones that come from people you don’t expect to send them. I mean if you read a column by me saying we should save beavers you’d think nothing of it and just toss on the pile of the nine million other articles I’ve written about the exact same thing. But if one day, quite unexpected, you opened the webpage and read my writing that beavers should be eliminated from streams because the cause cholera, you take notice. And actually stop and think, whoa maybe that’s true.

It’s not though. Beavers don’t cause cholera and I’ll never ever write that, but you get the point of the analogy right?

Mr. Cohen is is a columnist and political commentator for the Spectator and Observer. He’s one of those who supported the Iraq war and opposed Scottish independence. So it was pleasing to read this headline.

I’m sorry if rewilding hurts farmers, but we need it

Apart from crags and pockets of ancient woodland, the British uplands are manmade. Three thousand years before Christ, neolithic farmers felled the trees and gave us a landscape stripped to grassland by grazing sheep we take as “natural” today. Two thousand years after Christ, new forces are moulding the British uplands. They will bring back at least a part of what stone age men destroyed.

It’s hard to believe in an unequal country, where wealth and land are so unevenly distributed, but the ecology of the hills depends on popular approval. When public opinion moves, the hills move with it. However solid their drystone walls are, they will not be strong enough to hold back political change, climate change and changes in fashion, which affect the countryside as surely as they affect clothes and music.

Before the Romantic movement, most saw the Highlands as wastelands. Our love for them is a result of the romantic reaction against the Industrial Revolution, which in turn produced its own revolution in sensibility. Another revolution is upon us. It is easy to mock the rewilding movement just as it was easy to mock the Romantics. But I would keep the “Disneyland” jeers to a minimum if I wanted to get a hearing.

Rewilding the fells is not just townies forcing their naive fantasies on the countryside. It is a hard-headed policy: in a tiny way, it will help offset global warming; more tangibly, it will slow the floodwaters climate change is bringing. It will also be popular. If you doubt me, look at how many go to see the new beaver colonies in Scotland or the wetlands in East Anglia and Somerset. Or listen to the sympathetic hearings plans to reintroduce lynx to the Kielder Forest receive. Look even at the seeds on sale in supermarkets and notice how popular the wildflowers we once dismissed as weeds have become.

“Taxpayers should only pay public subsidy to farmers in return for things that the market won’t pay for, but are valued and needed by the public,” said the National Trust’s director general, Helen Ghosh, after the Brexit vote. Her shopping list included wildflowers, bees and butterflies, farmland birds, water meadows and meandering rivers, which themselves slow flood water.

You can mock her if you want, but your mockery won’t stop her. Romanticism was a reaction against industrialisation and rewilding is a reaction against global warming and the mass extinction of species. It is likely to be as uncontainable.

The notion that rewilding is a response to Global Warming and species extinction appeals to me. That it is rooted in the romanticism’s rejection of the industrial revolution gives it a prominence and a place in history. That our taxes should subsidize things that matter, and that wildflowers and beavers matter, that REALLY appeals to me.

That being said, I’m not convinced that increasing watershed or land complexity is bad for farmers. It’s good for water quality and it’s good for bees both things their work requires. Making the countryside into a quilt of matching patchworks reduces its ability to survive all the increasingly horrific things that mother nature will be throwing our way. Better to diversify our landscape portfolio and let diversity itself be our seatbelt for the bumpy ride ahead. I am reminded of Brock Dolman’s discussion of the watershed as the ‘Lifeboat’.

I’m not sure what will happen with the save-the-farmers movement in the UK but I can’t see they’re helping their case much meanwhile by resisting and shooting beavers.

But maybe that’s just me.

Save

Unsolved Beaver Mysteries

heidi08 Beaver Chewing, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Environmental, Who's blaming beavers now? September 4, 2016

I’m always fascinated when Florida writes about beaver. Of course you know the primary mystery associated with their existence, right?

Mike Adams: Rodents must gnaw to survive

Rodents are the largest family of mammals on the planet.

The name rodent, from Latin roots, means “gnawing animal” because of the rodents’ large front incisor teeth and the way they eat. Their incisors are used like chisels to gnaw and nibble on hard foods like nuts and wood. These incisors must grow continuously since they are worn down by gnawing, sometimes on bone or deer antler. Because they do not stop growing, the animal must gnaw to wear them down; otherwise, the teeth continue to grow and will eventually kill the animal.

Rodents have adapted to almost every terrestrial and freshwater wetland habitat, from cold tundra, where they can hibernate under snow, to hot deserts, where they seek shade during the extreme daytime temperatures.

Of course, this family comprises many species and habitats in our state. This includes muskrat, squirrels, pocket gopher, mice and rats.

The largest is the semiaquatic beaver, about 3 to 4 feet long weighing up to about 50 pounds, which lives more in the Panhandle region, although some have been documented around Gainesville. The smallest rodent is the white-footed mouse, about 2 to 4 inches long, weighing about an ounce, which can be found in many upland/wetland transitional and coastal habitats. The nutria, an introduced species from South America, is smaller than the beaver. This luxuriously furred muskrat-like creature that can be seen along the banks of the St. Johns River and tributaries.

Our largest rodent — the beaver — is considered an ecosystem engineer with its dams and lodges built of gnawed tree trunks and branches forming backwater reservoirs. These areas provide valuable habitat to other wetland-dependent species including aquatic birds and fish. Some rodents may play a role in maintaining healthy forests.

I think this article was updated to contain info on the nutria – whose photo adorns it. I’m sure someone originally posted it thinking it was a beaver and then got a letter and went oooohhhh. Not even from me this time, I promise. Nice that he mentions how beavers make habitat for other species and are considered ecosystem engineers. But no clue how the heroes exist alongside that toothy neighbor.

But they do somehow. Don’t ask me how.

Even if there is a reason for their constant chewing, folks still get upset with their target choice. I’ve been seeing this complaining article all over the internets the past few days. I guess Mr. beaver chewed the wrong tree.

Hungry beaver to blame for temporary power outage in Slippery Rock area

About 10,000 West Penn Power customers in the Slippery Rock area were without power for less than a minute Thursday night while crews made emergency repairs to a transmission structure, a utility spokesman said.

A beaver chewed through a large tree, which company officials feared might topple onto a transmission line and cause a longer outage, West Penn Power spokesman Todd Meyers said.

Slippery Rock University was impacted by the temporary outage.

There must be a standard memo power companies circulate in times like these. Maybe my dad even saw it.

Castor et Homo

heidi08 Beavers September 3, 2016

Our east coast friend Malcolm Kenton sent me a clip the other day that he discovered while listening to a podcast about forgotten mascots. Seems the famed old prep school in Connecticut Avon Old Farms, (costing upwards of 50,000 a year) has the famous motto “Aspirando et Perseverando” and the mascot of the winged beaver. Because obviously beavers dream big and we all know they persevere.

The school is best known for its winning hockeyteam and famous alumni are all NFL linebackers or kickers, with the notable exception of one Pete Seeger, who was one of its first graduates after his parents early divorce. (I’m sure to THIS DAY the school is scratching it’s head wondering what went wrong.)

But it works in our favor with a nice start to labor day weekend.

Restoring Neighborhood Streams with beavers

heidi08 Beaver Conference, Beaver News, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and Insects, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, Educational, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Who's saving beavers now? September 10, 2016

I had a nice surprise yesterday in the mail with the arrival of Ann Riley’s much awaited urban creek book. Her first one published 25 years ago and became the restoration bible. It is still a valuable asset and regarded as a necessary resource even though others on the subject have been published since. This second one is all about successful creek restoration stories – both labor intensive and natural. And guess who’s in it from page 171-179? That would be the story of the Martinez Beavers, who moved into an urban creek and transformed it all by themselves.

Riley has been a good friend of the beavers over the years but she wasn’t exactly forthcoming with this part of her book. It was strange and exciting to read our story told by an outsider and see myself consistently described as ‘Perryman’. Ha. The scan came out horrible but here are some wonderful segments worth sharing.

I love having this documented correctly in a book that will likely survive the next 25 years and beyond. Riley works for the SF waterboard and has done several trainings about planting trees out here. It’s through her that we were able to have the watershed stewards the last couple of years working with the conservation core. I particularly love how she cracks open the creek scientists pretend enviromental reports that the city paid for to have justification for their impulses. And of course I loved THIS.

How happy do you think the city will to be to read about that historic sheetpile? Maybe they’ll throw me a parade? That whole ordeal was such a nauseating bundle of tension that I have long repressed it: I was terrified every moment that the beavers would be killed. I can’t believe they survived. And I remain very partial to this video.

I am bursting with pride at this paragraph and you can certainly see why this reference made the wikipedia challenger disappear. Maybe its just me but I find it a little terrifying that many years ago in a panic I just happened to come across the 2005 ecological survey and made the decision to contrast it with the species we saw over time. I’m sure there were all kinds of reasons a well-trained person wouldn’t have done it. But I was right here when it all happened, and I remember how rare a thing it used to be to see a green heron or muskrat in the creek and how common it became.

Riley & Cory plan the attack! — *Ann Riley & WSP intern plan the tree planting*

More than anything else in the ENTIRE world I am wishing that some other city looks at this chapter and says hmmm, maybe we should try that. (And I’m looking at you, Mountain House). If allowing beavers to restore urban streams needed to be proven then I’m thrilled that Martinez was a testcase. I met Riley through Lisa Owens Vianni who I met through the SF bay Estuary project where she used to work. That got my foot in the proverbial door but it was my presentation at the Santa Barbra Salmonid Restoration Conference that impressed her.

She said it was might have been the best presentation they ever had.

There are a few picky things I would have changed about this chapter. The meeting wasn’t in chambers it was at the High School, and it was a Sacramento Splittail not a SPITTAIL and good lord I never want 5000 people at the beaver festival! But I’m so happy we’re in this very important book and the role our beavers played is documented forever. Thank you Ann Riley for bringing our story to the next level.

Anyone who cares about creeks and beavers should go buy a copy right now. It will pay for itself may times over.

Beaver Urban Sprawl?

heidi08 Beavers September 1, 2016

Monday night our toothy friends took down another tree, this time one that we actually planted in the ‘annex’ years ago.

It was fun to find this old movie of our 2008 planting with the then-enthusiastic city engineer. That little girl is Luiza Daberaku a million years ago who is now a starring LaCrosse player in her senior year. I spot Jean and Cheryl too, also some really helpful park rangers that unfortunately moved out of state. We’ve been at this a long time, haven’t we?

I started wondering if they were moving back towards their old haunts so we checked Ward street last night and saw nothing. Then went this morning to the annex to investigate. At 5:45 I was lucky enough to see a mud covered beaver squishing his or herway through low tide. There wasn’t enough water to cover them. I thought s/he’d head for the felled tree but s/he went straight up stream. We followed to Ward street and eventually saw two happy beavers chewing and swimming there. We assume mom is less than a month from having kits, and should want a dam and home to protect them. Both damlets seemed a little worked on but neither very well, so we are totally confused about their plan. Beaver urban sprawl?

I wish I could have taken a photo of that mud-crawl. It was too dark and there is no single image in the world that could come close to explaining. Afterwards and still there was a deep channel of stirred mud where he or she trudged through. Almost like those sad African documentaries where elephants sink trying to get to a shrinking water hole. It worried me when I saw it, because one frisky dog could end it all for a beaver that can’t get away.

But they know what to do if they want deep water. Ahem.

The founder and CEO of our fiscal sponsor, Loren Cole, will be on the radio this evening between 9-10 with Helaine Forte on her show “Now for some good news!” He’s really done good things for us a thousand nonprofits in the world, so tune in if you can.