The wonderful favors of friends! I know you didn’t watch this before. So watch it now. It’s short and really excellent!
Last nights meeting was small and successful thanks to some amazing helpers. Let’s call it a Churchill meeting:
Month: June 2017
There’s great news from three nations today just in time for our Suday funnies. First there’s the fantastic announcement that Frances Backhouse (author of Once they were Hats) will be doing a lecture in 2 weeks for idea city (which is the canadian equivalent of TED talks). If you live near Toronto and have a spare 300 you might consider being in the audience. Us poor California folks will have to wait for the vide0,
Award-winning Canadian author Frances Backhouse is a former biologist whose curiosity about the world enticed her into a writing career. Her 2015 book Once They Were Hats: In Search of the Mighty Beaver, was heralded by The Globe and Mail as one of the “20 books you’ll be reading – and talking about – for the rest of the year.”
Speaking the morning of Friday, June 16th – buy your tickets now!
Frances was kind enough to donate another copy of her beloved book for our silent auction, and we are eager to see how the dynamic ideacity event success. Hopefully it will remind folks, like Glynnis talk back in the day, that beavers really matter.
Lots of good work in this country too, where beaver friend and Geology Student Erin Poor just posted about the project she’s working on in tualatin. Remind me again, how many people were talking about the Pros and Cons of Urban beaver before Martinez and Worth A Dam? Oh that’s right. Zero!
Beavers are known as environmental engineers because of their ability to change the landscape to fit their needs. Beaver activity, such as dam building, can increase stream and floodplain complexity, which may create a more diverse habitat for wildlife in the area.
Many scientists are curious to discover how beavers affect impaired urban streams. The USGS recently began studying the effect of beaver populations on urban streams in Tualatin River basin, located in the Portland, OR, metropolitan area. Scientists are studying whether beaver activity can improve the health of city streams. Insights from this study will provide a good foundation of the “pros and cons” of beavers in urban areas, thereby allowing local agencies to make management decisions based on science. This research is a collaboration between the USGS Oregon Water Science Center and Clean Water Services of Washington County, Oregon.
Tualatin_beaver_study_WithinOurReachPoster_2016Bring back beavers to fight flooding and pollution, expert claims
Further proof that one person can make a difference? Here’s a slapdash beaver article from one of the silly English rags that will steal any story and photo off the internet and call it ‘news’. Case in point? How about my photo that I mocked up before Brexit? This was on USA news today along with an assortment of dimly related beaver images from around the globe, including the shop lifting beaver at Christmas in Maryland. Never mind, at least folks are talking about it.
We have some wonderful new auction items to mention this fine sunday morning, and I’m thinking we should start with Jennifer Lovett’s smart book for teens and tweens “Beavers away“. It’s a great way to look at the issue and she does an excellent job talking about the importance of beaver to biodiversity. I especially like this graphic. I met Jennifer on the beaver management forum on Facebook set up by Mike Callahan in Massachusetts. (It’s a good place to hear about beaver work and if you aren’t a member you should be.) She is a big supporter of all things beaver and became a good beaver buddy.
Thanks Jennifer!
Beavers-AwayFinally we have a much anticipated donation from Marcella Henkles in Corvalis Oregon. You will remember she was the amazing raku tile artist who featured two lovely beaver tiles to the Beaver tales art exhibit both of which sold almost immediately. I’m 
sure she was surprised to hear from me begging at her door but she generously agreed to send me one of the works she had recently fired. The complex technique demands carving the image on wet clay then glazing it into color. You really have to see it in person to understand how the colors, textures and rough barn wood all work together. It’s gorgeous. Doesn’t this need to be on your wall immediately?
And just because beavers like to look their Sunday best, here’s a fun video from Robin of Napa showing some excellent back footed grooming.
This has been a fairly auspicious week for beavers. Their benefits have been touted in the CA wine country, Illinois and now the UK. I hope all this good press doesn’t go to their heads. This fine offering is from science writer Roger Harrabin
Beaver return ‘benefits environment’
Beavers should be re-introduced to England to improve water supplies, prevent floods and tackle soil loss, a researcher says. New results from a trial in Devon show muddy water entering a beaver wetland is three times cleaner when it leaves.
The farmers’ union, NFU, warns that beavers brought back to Scotland have damaged fields and forestry. But Prof Richard Brazier, who runs the Devon trial, says farmers should thank beavers for cleaning up farm pollution.
Unpublished preliminary results from his tests for Exeter University showed that a pair of beavers introduced six years ago have created 13 ponds on 183m of a stream. The ponds trapped a total of 16 tonnes of carbon and one tonne of nitrogen – a fertiliser that in large quantities harms water supplies.
During heavy rains, water monitored entering the site has been thick with run-off soil from farm fields – but the soil and fertilisers have been filtered out of the water by the network of dams.
“We see quite a lot of soil erosion from agricultural land round here (near Okehampton),” he told BBC News.
“Our trial has shown that the beavers are able to dam our streams in a way that keeps soil in the headwaters of our catchment so it doesn’t clog up rivers downstream and pollute our drinking and bathing waters. “Farmers should be happy that beavers are solving some of the problems that intensive farming creates.
“If we bring beavers back it’s just one tool we need to solve Britain’s crisis of soil loss and diffuse agricultural pollution of waterways, but it’s a useful tool.”
16 tons of carbon and 1 ton of nitrogen! That’s pretty impressive, even if they do spell it with an E. It refers to the metric ton, which is actually bigger than ours. So that small trial beaver population is making a HUGE difference. It’s startling that they’re maintaining 13 dams, because that’s so much work. I assume the idea is diffusing the water force over many dams makes the threat to any single one less, and the repairs needed smaller. I wonder what our beavers would have done if they were given the run of the place and endless supplies of trees. The most we ever had was 5, but I’m sure if they had been allowed to flood out escobar street they might have advanced.
Of course it’s a ‘both sides’ article so it interviews Dr. Negative Nellie from pain in the arse university, too.
Another soil expert, Professor Jane Rickson from Cranfield University, is yet to be convinced about the multiple benefits of these hard-working, continental night workers.
She told BBC News any beaver dams must be “leaky” – so they don’t hold back large volumes of water that might be released all at once in an extreme flood event.
She agreed that in some places the UK was suffering a crisis of soil loss, and said new policies were urgently needed.
But, she said, beavers might reduce the river channel, increasing the risk of flooding – or, in areas of poor cover, they might remove vegetation, expose soil and thus increase erosion.
A spokesperson from the Environment Agency was also lukewarm about beavers, saying: “Natural and hard flood defences both have an important role in keeping communities safe – though introducing beavers does not form part of our approach.”
The authorities are wary of mass beaver re-colonisation of England, following the controversy over beaver re-introduction in Scotland – where they are now protected species after a trial by the Scottish government.
In Tayside, some land owners have angrily complained about beaver damage to commercial forests and fields, and others objected to the £2m cost of the trial.
Yes yes, beaver dams are leaky. It’s one of their great benefits since the water that passes through them comes out cleaner on the other side. And you are doing a very good job as the “might” patrol; thinking of all the harm that beavers might cause. There’s a really fun video on the site that I don’t think I can share here, although I’m still trying. Go watch it because it’s that good and short.
And of course a photo of a nutria/coypu instead of a beaver because hey, why the hell not?
Meanwhile we received word that we got our grants from both Kiwanis and the Martinez Community Foundation yesterday, so thank you both so very much and we are looking prepared for beaver festival 10. Planning meeting tomorrow and all is right on schedule!
It’s time to honor the beaver trapper again, at least somebody thinks it is. This glitzy article out of Canada at least has the presence of mind to pose it as a question. And to interview Leslie Fox of Fur-bearer Defenders also. I guess that’s a little progress in 150 years? It also features some interactive graphics and a 360 video of trapping a beaver because there’s no end to the money HBC will spend glorifying the sport, apparently.
The title of this glitzy article is too clever by half. Not the trappers life of course…the trap line. Get it?
Life on the line
Are fur trappers stuck in the past or a vital piece of Canada’s living heritage?
“That’s good, that’s what we need,” Henschell answers, as Kotowich heaves up a water-logged beaver that’s been dead since the trap snapped shut. The pudgy creature thuds on the ice. Like generations of fur-bearing animals before it, this buck-toothed symbol of Canadian sovereignty met its end in a trap.
With 100 years of experience between them, Henschell and Kotowich say they trap because they love the wilderness and its solitude. They trap to connect with something powerful and elusive that they feel some smartphone-addicted young people are losing sight of in the internet age.
“It’s like going home,” says Henschell, who comes from a family of trappers and says he was conceived in a remote log cabin in the fall of 1938, not long after his parents married.
Canada marks 150 years of nationhood on July 1, 2017. Much of what led to the country’s birth revolved around the trapping and trading of furs, but while the commerce and conflicts of the trade are central to Canada’s history, there is pressure to envision a future without fur.
Some argue there’s no longer a need for the industry.
Lesley Fox, the B.C.-based executive director of the Association for the Protection of Fur-Bearing Animals, says Canada’s historic connection to the fur trade makes it difficult to challenge the industry.
“There is a lot of nostalgia, a lot of Canadiana, and the media hypes that up,” she says.”The modern-day fur trade is very, very different than the fur trade I think we know from our history books.”
The fur trade is inherently cruel and the range of affordable synthetic alternatives have rendered wild fur unnecessary, Fox says.
Sales by the global fur farm industry dwarf those of the wild fur trade year over year; Fox says that illustrates how trapping in 2017 is akin to a frivolous leisure activity like trophy hunting.
“There is a lot of talk about ‘living off the land,’ ‘stewards of the land,’ the word Indigenous gets thrown around a lot, ‘people’s livelihoods,’ and in my opinion that’s all rhetoric. It’s actually not true,” she says.
The province also helped pay for eight “beaver deceivers” — one of several non-lethal flow devices to prevent beaver damming — last year. Animal rights activist Fox says the non-lethal methods are more effective long-term solutions, and trappers should start using their skills to deploy beaver deceivers and other flow devices instead of killing the creatures.
Hooray for Leslie. And hooray for actually mentioning long-term solutions. But we need more talk about what all those beavers that were taken away once gave to Canada! Mind you, there is a lot of sanctimonious tripe about how important trapping is to indigenous people and how tragic it is that an entire way of life (not beaver life, mind you) is forgotten. I suppose with July 1st looming that’s unavoidable. What I object to is that there is ZERO mention that when a trapper turns an animal into fur it takes away the ecosystem services from ALL OF US.
Rather than complain anymore I will just post the lovely finished design that was painted for us by Coyote Brush Studios, and let you admire something truly beautiful. I’m pretty sure this makes the point better than I can hope too. Thank you Tina Curiel and Lindsey Moore for your stunning work!
Even though there seems to be a beaver benefits renaissance in the Bay Area of sorts at the moment, there are still plenty of places where they aren’t welcome.Regarded as a pesky nuisance to be pushed gotten rid of whenever possible, beavers are woefully misunderstood in much of the country. My in box is literally flooded every morning with stories why trapping is necessary. No one seems to mind that this is kit season and they’ll be leaving behind lots of orphans, either. Take Alabama for instance.
Madison County Commission District 3 taking steps to fix a beaver problem
This sentence strikes me as particularly problematic. But maybe I’m being too literal.
That’s why at Wednesday’s commission meeting district three partnered with the USDA to have them come in and dismantle the dams, and eradicate and relocate the beavers.
I’m curious. Do you think the eradicate them first? And then relocate the bodies? Or the other way around?
On to Michigan where beavers are blamed for flooding as well.
Busy beavers causing flood of problems
“We have to pay for the trappers to go out there, set up costs, and then so much per beaver per trap,” he said. There’s also a cost for work crews and specialized equipment.
I’m really not sure why a county has to ‘pay’ for beaver trapping for every landowner? They aren’t require to pay for termites or mice in your house? And they don’t think they have to pay for health insurance? I would love to know what shred of municipal doctrine from the middle ages explains why a governing body is responsible for a beaver on your land? Call it morbid curiosity.
Things get a little better as we head toward Illinois, where Donald Hey has been preaching the beaver gospel for 25 years or more.
Dam Animals
The dry spell we’re experiencing this spring may have an upside: it will limit run-ins between man and beaver.
Beavers made Chicago. Beaver skins were the reason Chicago became a trading center. Until the 1970s, when antifur consciousness soared and area trapping stopped, beaver dams were just a rural problem. Since then, the populations have grown and moved down the I & I Canal, the Chicago River, and the Des Plaines River. They’ve been spotted downtown on the north branch of the Chicago River near Wolf Point, farther north near the Green Dolphin Street nightclub at Ashland and Webster, and near Ping Tom Park in Chinatown.
What’s the problem? Beavers eat bark, and prefer some tree species over others, including those $400 aspens suburbanites like to plant. Their dams plug up culverts and cause floods. And they’re often blamed for the dispersal of the intestinal parasite Giardia lamblia, which causes nausea and diarrhea in humans. Some call it beaver fever, but deer, muskrats, dogs and cats, and even humans can carry the parasite.
This article makes me apprehensive but not entirely uncomfortable. Maybe we have to make allowances because its Illinois? I’m just happy the ever try ANYTHING else except trapping.
In the suburbs, the problem’s more widespread and the solutions more varied. In Lake County, most of the beavers live along the creeks feeding the Des Plaines River. It’s up to Jim Anderson, natural resource manager for the Lake County Forest Preserve, to solve beaver problems on the county’s 24,000 forest preserve acres. Anderson says they tend to leave the animals in place unless the dams cause flooding on adjacent roads or private property–for instance, at the Wadsworth Savanna site this past week, a beaver that’s been clogging culverts for two years elicited a complaint from a neighbor whose backyard was flooding. “We’ll have to go out and take a look at it,” Anderson says.
To alleviate flooding, Anderson and his crew often run pipes through the dams to try to lower the upstream water levels. Or they tear out the dam altogether and see if the beavers relocate on their own. A couple times in the last two years Anderson has tried hiring licensed private trappers to move beavers to other areas in Lake County, but one of the beavers died. Anderson says the transfer stresses the animals out, and besides, there aren’t many places to take them where they don’t just cause problems for someone else.
Erickson says he’s never had a beaver die in 30 years of planned live trapping. “They’re very hardy animals,” he says. “That trapper just doesn’t know what he’s doing.” Erickson’s preferred no-kill method is a galvanized-cable snare that catches the beaver behind its front legs. Once caught, the beavers can surface safely and leave or enter the water as needed, and Erickson says they’re in fair shape when he returns to remove them, which can be up to 12 hours later.
Anderson says killing beavers, or “removing them from the natural world,” as he puts it, is a last resort in Lake County; when it comes to that, again, a licensed trapper is called in. Anderson says he believes the captured animals are shot in the head with a .22, but he doesn’t know for sure. Another method involves trapping them underwater, where they die of carbon dioxide narcosis. (Beavers have valves in their noses that keep water out and prevent them from simply drowning.)
Let’s hear a little from the biggest beaver advocate the state has to offer, shall we?”
Donald Hey, one of the project’s heads, is a great admirer of the beaver–he credits it, in no modest terms, for the entire North American drainage system. Glaciers carved deep cuts in the earth, he explains; then prehistoric beavers slowed the raging rivers with dams. The rivers widened, occasionally flooding and moving silt and effluvia over the banks to make rich meadowlands.
In 1985, with support from environmental groups, Chicago corporations, and the state and federal governments, Hey and others acquired 550 acres from the Lake County Forest Preserve and turned a series of gravel pits off Highway 41 into a patchwork of ponds, marshes and wetlands. The beavers came, of their own accord, from the Des Plaines River. In 1992, Hey helped start the not-for-profit Wetlands Initiative, which now administers 17 other restoration sites in the Illinois River watershed as well.
Hey, an affable 63-year-old Missouri native who got his doctorate in hydrology from Northwestern, says giant Pleistocene-epoch beavers (Castoroides ohioensis) as big as black bears roamed the Great Lakes about 10,000 years ago. By the time of Columbus, according to paleontological and archaeological estimates, there were more than 400 million modern beavers (Castor canadensis) on the North American landscape. Hey walks me past a site at the Wadsworth project where in the mid-90s remains of 8,500-year-old trees with gnaw marks were found by University of Illinois and Illinois State Museum archaeologists.
Donald was the keynote speaker at the very first state of the beaver conference I attended. More than this, he was an expert witness in the Riverside appellate beaver case argued by our friend Mitch Wagner. He has been trying to explain why beavers are useful for his damaged state as long as anyone can remember. This article suggests he’s getting a little traction.
So, to summarize: Beavers shaped the land we live on. We hunted them to near extinction for commerce. Then we protected their fur and allowed the populations to grow. Now we’re moving them or killing them because they’re encroaching on our habitat, which used to be theirs.
“I think all the bird watchers should be put in a cage, not the beavers,” says Erickson. “What have the birds done for us?”
Um, I really didn’t say that. Honestly. And I won’t of course next week. But my my my what a way to end an article!
Rusty Cohn in Napa is getting impatient for the new kits to make themselves known. But I’m guessing he has a week of waiting ahead or more. Meanwhile he’s visiting the pond most nights and getting great photos to satisfy our beaver-watching craving. Just look.
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