Month: August 2017

Nothing succeeds like beaver succession

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Educational, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? August 21, 2017

Pond succession is something you hear discussed a fair amount as pond bottoms become more rich with plant material and ultimately turn into forests – but it all happens better with beavers of course. Apparently Ducks unlimited is teaming up with USFS and Fish and Game to look at how it all plays out. Because studying something nine million times always produces different results, right?

Pacific Northwest – More Information

Background information on DU’s Pacific Northwest conservation priority area

Importance to waterbirds

These systems have traditionally been used as spring staging areas. Cook Inlet and the Copper River Delta are among the most important wetlands to the world’s populations of western sandpiper and dunlin. The Stikine is also a traditional fall staging area for Wrangel Island snow geese. Common wintering shorebirds include black oystercatchers, rock sandpipers, black turnstones, and surfbirds. Seabirds (murres, murrelets, auklets) are common breeders throughout Prince William Sound. Southeastern Alaska has over 2,800 important anadromous fish streams, and over 15,000 bald eagles use this habitat.

Goals

Complete successional vegetation modeling for the Copper River Delta and analyze pond succession related to beaver activity.

Now we both know that there are a lot of places where Ducks Unlimited does a lot of good in the world. Buying up habitat for duck hunters is useful in populated areas or areas that have been degraded by industry. But buying hunting grounds in Alaska is probably not high on the list of good deeds for the environment. And you can tell they’re clutching at any research straws hoping to justify it their presence – installing pit tags on salmon and measuring where molting is most likely to occur in geese.

But looking at the role beavers play in pond succession is soooo soooo reinventing the wheel the Alaska Parks department even has a unit on it for 4th graders. Hear that? Nine year olds know more than DU. Because it’s old news, baby.

4-6, Unit Four, Activity 5<br>”Beaver Succession Mural”

Students will discuss the concept of succession and describe beaver pond succession as one example of the process of change in natural environments. They will apply an understanding of the concept of succession by drawing a mural showing stages of beaver pond succession.

Grades: 4 – 6
Time: 1 – 2 hours
Life science, visual arts

When beavers dam a stream, they set in motion a form of succession. The resulting backwater floods lowland near the creek. Trees are soon killed, creating an opening in the forest canopy. Water-associated plants and shrubs quickly invade the pond and shoreline, creating favorable habitat for waterfowl, moose, blackbirds, amphibians, fish, insects, muskrats, wading birds, warblers, marsh hawks, and a score of other animals. After many years the water becomes shallow, filling in with silt and plant debris.

Stimulated by the nutrient-rich mud, grasses, sedges, and shrubs begin to choke the water with their accumulating debris. The ground begins to firm as more silt is trapped.

As years pass, the trees near the lodge are cut down by the beavers for use as food and shelter. The beavers must move on and find a new spot to support themselves. Without the beavers to keep it strong, the old dam collapses, draining the pond. The area becomes meadow, supporting grasses, sedges, and other flowering plants. Trees begin to re-invade the drier ground and eventually the meadow reverts to forest. Centuries may be required to see this process completed.

What can we expect next for the exciting research teams at Ducks Unlimited? One can only speculate they’ll be looking into what bears do in the woods and why ducks float instead of sink on water. The curious scientific community will have to be patient.

In the meanwhile we can respect the work that really teaches us about beavers habitat, mostly coming out of NOAA fisheries. This morning there is another lecture on beavers and salmon offered by the Alaska Public Radio station. KTNA. I promise if you listen to the easy three minutes you’ll soon know more than any duck hunter.

Beaver Solidarity

heidi08 Beaver Art, Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Who's saving beavers now? August 20, 2017

In Kingston Ontario, just across the border from New York, city Council member Lisa Osanic just made HISTORY by presenting arguments for no longer killing beavers but using flow devices instead in the entire city. She submitted a petition with 1000 signatures. No I’m not kidding.

Beaver Petition

Residents want Kingston to protect one of Canada’s national symbols.

Coun. Lisa Osanic presented a 1,000-name petition that urges the city to stop killing beavers, citing the practice as cruel and unnecessary. The industrious creatures are known for their dam-building abilities. The city currently hires a trapper to exterminate beavers through the use of underwater traps.

However, Coun. Osanic says there are other humane, non-lethal devices that can be used. She pointed to the City of London and Ontario’s use of flow devices to prevent beaver dam flooding. Coun. Osanic says an expert from Boston taught London city officials how the device works, and she wants local officials to be taught as well.

It was years ago that residents from Cornwall brought Mike Callahan out to install a flow device to save some beavers. This summer a petition was started to do the same in Kingston. This just goes to show the kind of RIPPLE effect that those earlier actions had. Hurray for everyone involved, and Hurray most of all to our newest beaver friend Counselor Lisa Osanic!

I heard this weekend from Kent Woodruff (USFS retired) who was in Oregon looking to connect with Suzanne Fouty (Also USFS not yet retired). Turns out now they’ll be taking a camping trip in the back woods to watch the eclipse together with friends! How beavery is that? Here in Martinez we don’t get a total but we’re still excited. This is a great resource if you want to see what to expect where you are. I don’t think the beavers have ever seen a total eclipse before but I’m assuming they’ll sleep through it. If you are looking for truly remarkable ways to record the experience or maybe keep your child curious, here’s what our good friend Jack Laws suggests.

Owls and Champions

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver Chewing, History August 19, 2017

Jon met a stranger on his hike in Franklin hills yesterday and they had friendly dogs so they chatted for a while. The two men talked about the trail, and talked about nature, and eventually got to the subject of Alhambra Creeks. The man brought up the beavers, which he had never seen. He thought he had heard that they had some kind of ‘Champion’ that lived in town, but he didn’t know who? Someone Perryman?

Heh heh heh. Beaver champion! I like it. Sometimes I feel like a champion. But definitely not the first or the foremost. One of the most famous beaver champions of all times is Grey Owl, (or Archie Bellamy). Who in addition to standing up for beavers made all of Canada feel foolish by convincing them he was was Apache, which he clearly was not. They haven’t recovered from the injury quite yet, but if you ask me they have no one to blame but themselves.

One look at the long frame and roman nose should have been enough to dispel any myths!

Grey Owl’s Cabin

On Ajawaan Lake in Canada’s Prince Albert National Park, a conservationist who called himself Grey Owl lived in a cabin with beavers from 1931 to 1938. He faked a First Nations identity; the former trapper was actually an Englishman named Archie Belaney, though these details didn’t emerge until after his death.

After working as a fur trapper, wilderness guide, and forest ranger, he eventually dove into the world of conservation. His third wife (he’d already had two overlapping, failed marriages by the age of 37), a Mohawk Iroquois woman named Anahereo, helped convince him to make the switch from trapping beavers to advocating on their behalf.

Anahereo had accompanied him one day as he set up a trap to catch a mother beaver. The cries of the kits (baby beavers), which supposedly resembled the wails of a human child, caused her to beg him to release the mother. Though Grey Owl failed to heed to her requests because the pelt would earn them much-needed income, he did go back and locate the abandoned kits the next day. He and his wife raised them in their cabin.

Grey Owl went on to write several books about nature conservation, focused largely around a central theme of the negative effects of the commodification of the natural world. Grey Owl and Anahereo were featured in documentaries about their environmental work and became fairly well known among 20th-century conservationists within the United States and Canada. After Grey Owl died of pneumonia in 1938, the details of his fabricated First Nations identity came to light and tarnished his reputation.

Tarnished reputation! He was a polygamist too, don’t forget to mention that. Of course what he said was true and insightful regardless of his parentage. The truly funny part of this is that Grey Owl, who was arguably the most famous beaver advocate in history, and certainly the only one during the end of the fur trade, lived in Saskatchewan, which is now won of the MOST famous beaver-killing provinces in the world.

Here’s a video I made using his speech in the movie by Richard Attenborough. I’m actually quite proud of how the 90 seconds came together, even slipping a little Beethoven in the background.

But maybe you are more old school, and want to see the real thing (er reel thing). Here’s the original 1936 documentary produced with National Parks Canada. As beaver Champions go, he really set the standard. I am sorry every day my living room doesn’t have a beaver pond in it. I can’t speak for Jon, though.

On a salmon roll!

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers and salmon, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? August 18, 2017

Don’t look now, but Andy Wallace and Jane Friedhoff are finishing off an Arcade game where two beavers carefully roll a salmon between them in such a way as to protect it from very hungry bears. No really. They call themselves “the upstream team”.

First off, I’d like to introduce you to Salmon Roll: The Upstream Team! Jane and I designed the game, with me taking on most of the programming and Jane handling the production. The amazing Diego E. Garcia is doing all of the art.

In Salmon Roll, two players take control of a beaver on either side of a wooden beam and must work together to guide the rolling salmon resting on the beam to its nest upstream all while avoiding the hungry bears along the way. The game is a collaborative, two-player, super-sized take on the early 80s arcade classic Ice Cold Beer (which itself was inspiration for the recent TumbleSeed). Its levels are designed specifically to utilize the architecture of the space, and players interact with it by using a 5-foot-long, wooden, custom two-player controller.

Here’s a peak at how it works. Oops! Watch out for that bear!

The controller for Salmon Roll is a 5 foot long wooden box held by players at either end and with joysticks sticking out of the sides. The joysticks move up and down, allowing the players to control their beavers, but the construction of the box requires players to hold it up together with their free hand. This ensures that it is impossible for any one person to control both joysticks at the same time: the size of the controller itself makes sure that this is a two-player game. The image of the two beavers holding a plank projected on the wall is mirrored by our players holding the controller in the real world!

Play NYC happens this weekend in NY and is being touted as the city’s first gamers convention where are the exhibits are 100% playable. Large companies and new startups will show off their newest creations. 25 dollars will get you through the door and access to three floors of adventure. But none, I’m sure, as fine as the salmon roll. Which cleverly demonstrates the very important fact that beaver help salmon.

And salmon need all the help they can get.

Now small world update, I just found out that one of the volunteers taking care of those two lucky beavers at AIWC was formerly one of our own Cheryl Reynold’s volunteers at IBRC! She just reminded us that there is a go fund me campaign for the two furry friends, and I thought you might want to help. Even if you don’t have funds to spare, watch the video just to appreciate how differently colored those two beavers are. Colors living in harmony.

Beaver Creation Myth

heidi08 Friends of Martinez Beavers, History December 30, 2017

Jules Howard is a freelance zoologist and author from the UK. His article in the guardian introduces a whimsical creation myth about beavers that is near and dear to my heart. It also answers the common question ‘why do beavers build dams?’. Get your coffee cup and settle in because the article is so good I’m posting it all.

Why do beavers build dams? You asked Google – here’s the answer

Here is a beaver-based creation myth. It begins thus. God so loved the world that He seeded it with diligent rodents able to do the hard work of habitat creation – damming streams and creating ponds and lakes in which amphibian larvae thrived, providing food for water beetles and dragonfly nymphs and a host of other invertebrates which fed the fish that early humans consumed. God gave us beavers to make the landscapes upon which we depended – that’s the myth I want you to imagine for the sake of this piece.

Ohhh! Was that a marriage proposal? If it was you had me at ‘habitat creation’. Sigh.

It goes on. My creation myth believes that the wetlands that these early creatures created washed away and purified humanity’s poisons. And that these holy creatures, The Beavers, saved us from Biblical floods by slowing the flow rate of sudden aggregations of water. Again and again, The Beavers saved us, but in time, predictably, things changed. We humans came to turn our backs on them. We forgot about Beavers, and God was not pleased about humankind’s insolence.

Like all good creation myths, this one features a gruesome twist. Like the rosy apple that hung from the tree in the Garden of Eden, in my creation myth God put things on beavers to tempt those first people into sinning. He covered them with thick fur that they would desire as clothing. He put their testicles on the inside, rather than the outside, and gave these mystical and elusive gonads properties that may (or may not) have provided medicinal properties. And, lastly, there beneath their tails, God hung a pair of anal glands that produced a smelly substance that the early humans found irresistible. Those early humans made a choice. They couldn’t help themselves. They committed original sin.

Upon discovering their unusual glands and delightfully thick fur we humans slaughtered them in their millions to make top hats and well-known perfumes that still sell today courtesy of a deft hint of anal glands that makes them more appealing than the competition. (Also ice-cream flavouring, but that’s another story). The rest, as they say, is history.

In less than 200 years, the North American beaver went from 90 million to between 10-15 million. In Europe and Asia, just 1,200 beavers remained by 1900. The beavers died, almost totally exterminated. In time, we forgot that they had ever been here.

How much are you loving Mr. Howard’s creation myth? I’m having a tingly feeling and smoking a cigarette. Wait, wasn’t he going to answer a question at some point?

The simple answer is that beavers build dams to deepen watercourses, so that they can create “lodges” that can be better defended from modern predators including bears, wildcats, otters and other mammalian forebears with whom the beavers shared prehistory. It seems that deep water is particularly important to beavers. Lakes and ponds allow for a kind of floating structure of sticks and branches that can be accessed from a secret hole beneath, a key real-estate feature that reduces the need for terrestrial entrances through which land-based predators can climb. Upon finding shallow watercourses, colonising beavers immediately begin damming, creating canals along which trunks and branches can be dragged along to add to this, their anti-predator superstructure. In these lodges, beavers rear their young and see out winter, safe and sound.

Why and how they hit upon this behaviour is of interest to those who study beavers and their family members, the Castoridae (nearly all of whom are now extinct). It may be an example of a behavioural trait that has “piggy-backed” upon an appetite for bark-gnawing. One imagines that their semi-aquatic ancestors were tree-gnawers that used their spoils for building riverside burrows, with some accidentally hitting upon damming rivers. The truth is we don’t yet know. The creation myth eroded, now a new mystery is being gradually exposed based by those that study comparative anatomy, fossils and DNA.

Got that? Beavers build dams to create deep water that protects their lodges. I especially like thinking about all the kinds of castoridae that used to exist. Surrounded by beaver cousins! What an interesting world that must have been!

One thing is clear. Our original sins now washed away by rushing floodwaters, we have an opportunity to bring beavers back into our lives. In recent years, almost every European country has made steps to re-introduce and restore their wild beaver populations. In Scotland, an introduced population of beavers is doing well – indeed, it is now considered a protected native species. There is a good chance that a small breeding population in England may be granted the same status.

After almost killing them off entirely, we may yet redeem ourselves from the sins of our ancestors. How delicious, therefore, that we should free ourselves from damnation by becoming, once more, a dam-nation.

Oh, that was awesome, Jules. I adore your creation myth, but I’m not sure it’s a myth at all. I truly believe beavers WERE put on this earth to give us habitat and store water and that when we reject them we are turning down a gift from the divine. But that’s just me. I know the world is full of athiests. I just had to look at my Sacred center video from So long ago. There wasn’t a part of making this video that wasn’t packed with wonder and curiosity. In fact in those days I was watching the beavers on Escobar street and had never even been as far as the dam!
I’m sure you want to know more about Jules. I’ll leave you with his TED talk just so you can see what a fine story teller he is. Let’s be thankful that he chose to tell one about beavers.