Month: April 2017

And they say one person can’t make a difference…

heidi08 Beaver Art, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Earth Day, Educational, Environmental, Tail slap, Who's saving beavers now? April 15, 2017

You know sometimes, your hard work gets ignored or something you wrote and really feel proud of gets tossed aside as “grey literature”, or a program you really hoped would say good things advises folks that flow devices never work and they should eat beavers, and you think, maybe this is just too hard. Maybe saving beavers is too much work. Maybe it can’t be done or if it can be, it needs some one better than me to do it. And you think about throwing in the beaver towel once and for all.

And then you see something like THIS and it changes your whole attitude.

Draper homeowners fight to preserve backyard wetlands despite flood risks

DRAPER — Dozens of students from Oakwood Elementary gathered in the backyard of a Draper residence Friday to see a beaver dam that may soon disappear.

Kris and Kelly McAdams are hoping their backyard wetlands ecosystem can stay, despite calls to remove the natural beaver dams behind their home. While the McAdams see the wetlands as a beautiful feature that adds value to their property, Salt Lake County Flood Control officials are concerned that a failed beaver dam could clog man-made drainage downstream.

The McAdamses received notice from flood control engineers on Christmas Eve, asking them to remove an “unauthorized deposit of materials,” the beaver dams that they say have been around for years.

“They say the beaver dams are unstable structures, although these have been here for at least 20 years and they have withstood hundreds of high-water events over that time,” Kelly McAdams said. “The dams are well-built here and rather than removing them, they could fortify them, and I suggested putting in a grate system downstream.”

Despite his assertions, county flood control officials worry that debris from the dams could flow down Willow Creek, clog a culvert and cause flooding to nearby homes.

Alyson Heyrend, communications director for Mayor Ben McAdams, said Salt Lake County’s Flood Control authorities have the responsibility of keeping streams and channels clear of any obstructions.

She said a compromise was offered to the property owners near the dams to support the wetland features while removing the dams, but Kris and Kelly McAdams have maintained their opposition to the removal.

They have appealed the notice to remove the dams and have rejected the compromise offer, taking their case before an administrative law judge, who will rule in early May on whether the beaver dams will be removed.

Rep. Carol Spackman-Moss, D-Holladay, also arrived to lend her support to the property owners.

“The county needs to look at the bigger picture, and see the effect that it would have on the wetlands,” Spackman-Moss said. “For these students to come out here and see what they have been studying and get a sense of the damage it would do and how this would all disappear, they would lose something so valuable.”Confe

Spackman-Moss said the county would need to address the issue, and said council members for Salt Lake County ought to come see the property for themselves as they address property and public issues.

Confession coming: either tears of joy are streaming down my face or I just climaxed twice. (Or possibly both). Oh my goodness! This is POWERFUL stuff. Spackman-Moss is a democrat from the 37th district, life long teacher and grandmother. And the class full of fourth graders are FOURTH graders who wrote save the beavers on their hats!

I need to sit down.

In my conversation with Kelly on Saturday I had lots of praise for what he was doing. And two learned-the-hard-way pieces of advice. Have his attorney talk to Mitch, and BRING CHILDREN. “We didn’t know it would be so powerful” I told him truthfully. But it always is. Kelly’s a father with grown sons. But I told him to find some youth. Boy scouts, kindergarten, daisy princesses, and have Allison work with them to draw pictures, make hats, what ever activity that looks cute enough for the media to take photos of.

And guess what?

Kelly you are doing an awesome, awesome job. I’m so impressed with your ability to pull this together, not get intimidated or overwhelmed and still seem so very reasonable. You are a credit to your state and a true kindred spirit of Martinez. I would only offer one criticism at all, and that is that last Earth day OUR hats were a little cuter. 🙂

Oh and for those who might be interested I sent these comments and corrections to the edible beaver program Outside/In yesterday. Felt good to get it off my chest and even if it changes no one’s mind, I dare say someone will definitely read it anyway.

proof

A Modest [beaver] Proposal

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, stupid solutions, What's killing beavers now?, Who's blaming beavers now? April 16, 2017

“A Modest Proposal” was published anonymously in 1729 by Jonathan Swift and shocked readers with the [satiric] suggestion that the problem of too many Irish poor children could be solved if their parents simply sold them as a food source to rich people.

A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout.”^[1]

Long before Trump said Mexicans were rapists and murderers, Swift hated the way people were treating the poor Irish and more particularly the way that people wrote about their plight as if one single solution could solve everything. One of the subtle victories of the pamphlet was that it shocked and enraged the reader so much that they ended up hating the narrator and feeling sorry instead for the Irish.

Let’s hope. Because yesterday New Hampshire NPR podcast on beavers from “Outside In” centered on a thoughtful retired mid-wife who solved her pesky beaver problem by deciding to eat them.

No really.

“For seven years I said, you can’t kill them, you have to outwit them. That’s back when I thought you could actually outwit a beaver, but you can’t.”

The paradigm under which we currently operate is called the American system of wildlife management, under which wildlife is a commonly owned resource, and through regulation we decide how many animals we will kill. Are deer eating the shoots off of too many saplings out in the forest? Increase the number of deer hunting permits issued. Are farmers complaining about losing livestock to coyotes? Relax limitations on hunting them. Are there so many beaver that they are expanding wetlands until they flood wells and roads? Call in trappers to reduce beaver populations in that location.

This ensures that the population stays below what is called the “biological carrying capacity” which is a fancy science-y way of saying “how many beaver the land can sustain.” Pat Tate is a big believer in keeping animal density low, because he believes it makes the animal’s lives better.

Pat said, “As I’ve reduced numbers in the wetlands, and went back subsequent years to trap, the amount of scarring and bite-marks on the beaver decreases. So the individual animal’s health increases.”

And trappers I’ve spoken to hear a lot of hypocrisy whenever they hear people call trapping immoral. For instance, a trapper from Southern New Hampshire, Jeff Traynor, points out there isn’t the same outrage at housing developments or highways or parking lots: forces that have just as much to do with keeping beaver populations low.

“We are the most invasive species on the planet, there’s no doubt about it,” he told me, “As we encroach more we’re pushing them. So where is that overflow going? There’s only so many places that they can go. It comes to a point where you can say, well let’s just let nature take its course, or you can say, as human beings can we manage this creature with moral wisdom?”

Two things I’m SURE trappers possess an abundance of: Morality and Wisdom. P-uleeze! If you have time go listen to the whole thing, because it is actually stunning how often it is incorrect. The story didn’t get any better when he talked to our friends Skip Lisle or Art Wolinsky either.

But this “moral wisdom” argument, just doesn’t do it for many beaver believers. Skip Lisle, founder of Beaver Deceivers International, has heard this argument for years in his line of work, and doesn’t buy it. “You know, you always hear, we have to kill the beavers so they don’t get hungry. And if you were an individual beaver, you can imagine which choice they would choose if they had one to make, right? Would you rather be hungry or dead?”

The proponents of restricting beaver trapping often point out that while some management decisions are based on ecosystems science—with government biologists going out and to try to estimate how many animals the land can sustain— other times, the decision is based on our willingness to tolerate animals. This is, almost euphemistically, what we call the “cultural carrying capacity.” And for beavers, it’s often that cultural limit, and not the actual limits of the habitat, that they bump up against.

Skip and his disciples argue they can increase society’s tolerance for beaver by keeping the two species from coming into conflict. Beavers’ damming instinct is triggered by running water, and by using a clever arrangements of grates, culverts, and drainage pipes, Skip keeps beaver far enough away from the running water that they don’t get the urge to start building a dam.

By putting in this type of “fixed protection” whenever a conflict arises, Skip argues we can have the best of both worlds: a growing beaver population and an infrastructure that isn’t submerged under beaver ponds. For him, the argument that trapping leads to a healthier population is beside the point.

Good for you Skip, I’m glad you tried valiantly to elevate this beaver HIT piece. But of course the narrator visits next the plight of Massachusetts where the mean compassion-isitas outlawed body crushing traps in 1996 and the beaver population exploded, because no trappers! (Never mind that no one IS or WAS counting the beaver population in MA or anywhere and any time threats to human property is at stake the same traps can be used anyway.)

Then he trots faithfully back to the beaver-eating midwife who bemoans that she tried installing a beaver deceiver AND a beaver baffler and they didn’t work! So the plucky gal picked up her fork and got to work.

Carol Leonard, who started off our story, spent seven-years trying to figure out how to fool the beavers on her property. “In my naivete I said oh well we’ll try these beaver deceivers and these beaver bafflers and all these do-hickers,” she recalled. But eventually she gave up and apprenticed with a trapper, and started to trap out the animals that threatened her property.

“We are meat eaters, you know, we are hunter gatherers, it’s part of who we are. And so to be able to turn a blind eye to that is just a blind eye,” she said. She applauds animal rights activists, but says she thinks their efforts are better spent protesting concentrated animal feeding operations, or other places where animals live short and miserable lives before heading to our plates. “I think the traditions of hunting and trapping in New England are good, healthy traditions. And I can’t talk against hunters… I can’t. I’m a meat-eater.”

Carol says she has trapped somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 beavers from her property, and while many still remain just downstream, the pond that was threatening her septic setback is no longer growing. In 2015, she and her husband were able to start construction and their home, now completed, is gorgeous, judging from a recent photo spread done by Down East Magazine.

That’s right, You know the old saying: if you can’t Beat ’em – Eat’em.

I don’t know about you but I’ve reached my CULTURAL CARRYING CAPACITY for stupid-ass reporters like this who repeat beaver bullshit even though they have the real answers RIGHT at their fingertips. A reporter with access to talk to experts like Skip Lisle or Ben Goldfarb but still clings to the bitter laments of trappers and fish and game instead. Ben told me in an email last night that in his interview with Sam Evans-Brown, the reporter said that he had been told “flow devices only work 10% of the time”. So of course, when midwife said it didn’t work, he believed it. Why would he read any of the articles citing their success OR interview Dr. Glynnis Hood who has been using them with great success OR talk to someone Skip had done an installation for a decade ago and ask whether it actually worked.

Details Details.

It’s all comes down to real estate. Beavers are in our WAY and we deserve to kill them, didn’t you realize? And besides who needs clean water anyway?

“I grant that this food will be very dear and therefore more proper for the landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have best title to the children.”

These are a few of my favorite beaver things!

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Dispersal, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? April 13, 2017

Homeowners, Salt Lake County battle over beaver dams

I heard from Kelly yesterday that they had received help from a local non-profit to access the media and knew this was coming. My my my this is a splendid report, that emphasizes the whole ‘home as castle’ argument that appeals to the manly provider heartstrings. Never mind the California saving habitat nancy-boy argument. If you haven’t watched it you should, and if you want to help their efforts you can donate and/or sign the petition here:

“We’re always watching ducks and geese come in for takeoffs and landings on the creek,” McAdams said. “It’s a beautiful thing to see and experience.”

“Striking the balance is the real challenge here,” Graham said. “We’ve had discussions. There are options. Beaver dams are not an option because they’re naturally made, they’re not secure, but there are options to create the same type of effects (behind McAdams and his neighbor’s houses).”

26172854 — Two homeowners are in a fight with Salt Lake County to keep the beaver dams behind their properties that have contributed to a rich wetland environment full of ducks, geese, birds, muskrats and other wildlife. (KSL TV)

McAdams said prior to the Dec. 24 notice, the county had made separate offers to deliver $500 and then $5,000 worth of rock to install around the creek, but he believes the delivery and installation would cause more harm to his property along with the wetland.

“To destroy nature like that with total disregard, it just frustrates me to no end,” McAdams said.

He said he could face fines amounting to roughly $750 per month if he does not agree to have the dams removed.

“(Salt Lake County) Flood Control intends to drain a jurisdictional wetland and displace all this wildlife when there are easy alternatives that can be performed on dams and downstream debris mitigation,” McAdams said.

“If I didn’t feel strongly, I would have given up a long time ago,” McAdams said. “I feel very strongly about this.”

Ahh Kelly, we know JUST how you feel. Way to go! You and Erin are fighting the good fight. The one that matters. And while you do it you are teaching your entire community why beaver dams matter. You have all our support, and anything else you need we’ll try and send your way!

Meanwhile I never tire of stories about brave dispersers or an opportunity to re-post THIS picture.

Ontario highway closed as wandering beaver refuses to leave

CAMBRIDGE, Ont. – A wandering beaver shut down part of a highway in southern Ontario on Wednesday as police worked to get the animal back to its natural habitat.

Ontario Provincial Police Sgt. Kerry Schmidt says the beaver was spotted sitting on a storm drain against a concrete dividing barrier on Highway 7/8 in Cambridge, Ont.

Schmidt says officers blocked part of the highway and tried to shoo the animal across the road to the ditch. But he says the beaver was having nothing of it and refused to move from the left side of the highway.

He says police had an officer stay with the beaver to ensure it was OK and called in wildlife control. Schmidt says wildlife control was able to capture the beaver and bring him back home.

“No one got hurt, and everybody’s happy,” Schmidt said.

And people wonder why everyone says Canadians are so nice. I’m not sure there’s anywhere else they’d close a highway for a beaver. (Although if I were emperor they ALL would). You know that beaver wasn’t impressed I’m sure. He didn’t want to go back on that side of the road. “That’s where I came from! If I go back home now they’ll all laugh at me!”

Urban beavers lead the way

heidi08 Educational, Environmental, Urban beavers, Who's saving beavers now? April 12, 2017

Yesterday was a hard day, but I’ve decided to spare you (and the many sponsors who helped achieve said hardness) by not discussing it. Let’s just say that by five pm there were not one but TWO musing articles titled whether ‘beavers are friend or foe?’ or ‘eco-heroes or eco-destroyers?’ from fairly key players. Which is exhausting in an of itself. Thank goodness this appeared later that night from Dan Protess, writer and producer of the series.

Getting over Purity

This is the WTTW nature series out of Chicago public radio that produced the program with Ann Riley I posted earlier. Over the episodes the producer has had a real education in what urban nature IS and why it matters. I appreciate his learning curve because it mirrors are own.

Somehow I never noticed that I work in a desert. Not an actual desert—those are filled with cacti, snakes, and other forms of life. My office is in a suburban-style neighborhood, surrounded by vast lawns, which, I recently discovered, are not good for much. Turf grass does not provide nectar to butterflies and bees, or perching spots for birds. In fact, just to be certain that our lawns are completely useless, we regularly burn fossil fuels to mow them.

All of this is painfully obvious to ecologists. But as a journalist who slept his way through high school biology class, the ecology of my suburban neighborhood did not come to my attention until a few months ago, when I started production on Urban Nature.

Urban Nature is a web video series, in which we look at coyotes, squirrels, migrating birds, monarch butterflies, and all of the charismatic creatures that we often like to celebrate. But in the series we also discover the unexpected ways in which unassuming species are eking out an existence at the fringes of cities.

On the side of the expressway are random patches of clover and dandelions, which are absorbing storm water and carbon dioxide. In vacant lots, there are non-native trees with dead branches, which are providing homes to squirrels and woodpeckers. And in the most polluted waterways, there are fish, water birds, and even the occasional beaver.

Got your attention yet? Definitely got mine, although for some reason the sight won’t let me post a comment and keeps erasing them when I try. But I have to believe he’s heard of our urban beavers and the lessons they taught.

I have come to understand that this ragtag bunch of urban wildlife and habitat is downright useful—way more useful than the lawns surrounding my office.

Although I have lived in Chicago my entire adult life, I have never appreciated the less-than-pristine forms of nature that you tend to encounter in cities. That is not to say that I did not appreciate nature. But my relationship with the natural world was fairly similar to my relationship with champagne: it was something I reserved for special occasions. I would fly to Arizona or Patagonia, hike and camp for a week, and then come back to Chicago and turn my attention back to my computer screen.

My love of nature did not extend to city parks, pigeons, or invasive plants. It was a love I reserved for the kind of “pure” nature that I saw on my trip to Alaska. Sure there were roads there, and sure the glaciers were melting because of the carbon dioxide I was emitting on my daily commute in Chicago, but I did my best to avert my eyes from the heavy hand of humankind. If I squinted hard enough, I could imagine the unspoiled wildernesses that the Native Americans must have seen; a people who, I imagined, walked so gently on the earth that they did not even leave footprints. The idea of pure nature was my fetish, and my vacation pictures from Alaska were my pornography.

Then I set out to produce the Urban Nature web series.

In a story about “daylighting” creeks in Berkeley, California, I learned about a centuries-old battle between humans and urban waterways. In the nineteenth century, we were so confident in our engineering might that we buried streams, which stood in the way of our development. For 100 years these waterways have flowed in culverts and sewers beneath our streets and homes, only to overflow occasionally during heavy storms. But now we are using bulldozers and modern science to bring these streams back aboveground, buoyed in part by a sense of nostalgia, and concerns for the increased flooding that has been brought on by climate change.

My previous vision of ecology included complex relationships between microbes, flora, herbivores and carnivores—pure systems into which Homo sapiens might occasionally intrude.

Now I find myself appreciating the equally intricate web of life that my neighbors and I have woven on our block.

Not only is the nature on your block equally complex (and why on earth would city nature be less complex when it has such a harder job?) but it is also the FIRST NATURE that babies and children will see and the one nearly all of us will see the most. Bear with the child psychologist in me for a moment, but we all start out life in a dark world where everything is part of us, so we are EVERYTHING and there is nothing that isn’t us. We spend the next year slowly learning that this isn’t true and our mother is OTHER and separate from ourselves. What a demotion! People don’t do or bring things just because we will it. No wonder babies cry a lot. We once were the entire universe and then we slowly begin to realize we aren’t even the center of it.

Awareness of the other is a huge job. (And some adults who happen to be president never master it.) Watching that crow fly over, collecting pine cones or poking a snails long eyes is part of the complex unfolding moment that awakes our awareness of yet another other.

And if we don’t care about that gritty, opportunistic, urban nature that’s right in front of us, if we don’t see the robin’s egg shell on the sidewalk or carpenter bee visit the dandylion, if we don’t hear the voices of excited raccoons chittering away to find new garbage, then we won’t be ready to embrace and defend the cheetahs, whales, and rhinos that will need us down the line.

Asphalt is the tundra most of us travel. And when we realize it, too, is where the Wild Things Are, we become part of everything and I would argue, more fully ourselves.

He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time.

Jack London
The Call of the Wild

Pioneers

heidi08 Beavers April 10, 2017

Yesterday’s interview went well but it must have tired me out. I slept until 7:15 which has almost never happened since beaver-watching changed my habits. Never mind, the grant application for the city is done, I heard from Alan Newport thanking me for sending Jon Greigg’s presentation at Tufts, and writer Ben Goldfarb says this morning he is going to contact the McAdams. I sent along his phone numbers and email and now it’s just coast and focus until earth day. A quiet beaver front today, so it’s a great day to talk about this article.

UK’s most talented architects are not human

In a green, idyllic corner of southwest England, the beaver – a once common, but now long-absent inhabitant – is making its mark again on the British countryside. After being hunted into extinction for its fur and meat in the United Kingdom some 400 years ago, locals discovered a small, wild population of Eurasian beavers living along the confusingly named River Otter in east Devon in 2008. The discovery delighted scientists.

“It’s a keystone species, an animal that manipulates its environment and benefits other species,” Mark Elliott of theDevon Wildlife Trust (DWT) told DW. “And we have some fantastic examples of things that have benefited.”

A team of scientists and conservationists from DWT and the University of Exeter are hoping to win over opponents by demonstrating the animal’s advantages, thus paving the way for reintroduction across the country.

The DWT is managing two beaver projects in Devon. One focuses on the population on the River Otter, where the animals are allowed to exist more or less naturally in what is the only licensed wild trial in England.

The other is further west, on an enclosed and well-fortified, isolated site near the quaint market town of Okehampton. It is at the enclosed site that the science happens, via a series of camera traps and state-of-the-art monitoring equipment.

“This is some of the leading research going on in the world about beaver hydrology,” says Elliot, a beaver aficionado and wetland ecologist who has been with the DWT for 10 years.

Since their introduction to the site five years ago, the beavers’ prodigious engineering skills have transformed a once densely wooded willow grassland into what Elliott describes as a “huge complex wetland.”

Nice article! For a moment reading this I imagined how very lucky a beaver would be to come back to a land they have been missing 500 years. Not that they know they’re the only ones or the first, but imagine what it’s like to have no competition for resources, no habitat to defend from intrusion, endless trees to choose from that haven’t been browsed in 500 years. Do they even scent mark? Because why bother? Do they still disperse? Or maybe they go off looking for a mate and come back when they find none?

I’m sure they behave just like they did in Bavaria or wherever they’re from. Maybe their world’s no different through a beavers eyes. But its a big wide world. No competition. Like being locked in a department store over night, or left behind on mars. They are the only ones there. And they have their run of it.