Month: November 2018

COLORADO CARRIES OUR BEAVER MESSAGE

Last week we reported on a beaver issue in in Manitou Springs Colorado that had encouraged enough support to bring out Sherri Tippie to consult. Sadly the property owner brought in a trapper before a solution could be found. But there was enough of a fuss created that I wrote the city council and paper thinking it could be different next time around.

This is the paper’s follow-up today.

Manny the beaver’ lives: Video captures evidence

Our Nov. 14 cover story (Beavers drive a wedge between Manitou Springs environmentalists, business owners) drew responses from readers empathetic to both the plight of Manitou’s euthanized beavers, and to the decision of a motel owner to protect her property.

Two readers’ letters are printed below. But perhaps the most intriguing development since we published the story is this video from Roy Chaney, director of aquatics and fitness at the Manitou Pool and Fitness Center.

Nice to see one beaver family member remains. Prior conversations with Sherri Tippie suggest that this might be mom since she’s usually the last to be caught. Let’s hope that she has a bit of a food cache somewhere and can build up the dam before the freeze sets in.

They published my letter in full with links to our website and the beaver institute so I’m happy.

I was sorry to read about the difficulties with beavers in Manitou Springs this morning, beaver challenges have become more common and many cities struggle to find resolution. Unfortunately, trapping is a short-term solution since population recovery means beavers will return to adequate habitat often within the year. In my city of Martinez California we faced a similar issue when beavers moved into our city creek in 2007. There were concerns from local business and residents about the potential for flooding and damage to trees. While the initial plan was to trap the beavers, residents protested this plan and recommended an alternative solution. We weren’t lucky to have an experienced woman like Sherri Tippie near by – so we had to bring in expert Skip Lisle (Sherri’s colleague) 3000 miles from Vermont to solve the problem.

That was a long time ago, the Castor Master Skip installed controlled flooding in our city for a decade which allowed the beavers to safely remain, bringing birds, wildlife, steelhead and tourism to the creek. We wrapped established trees and planted new ones. We even celebrate with a yearly beaver festival, and were featured in National Geographic and Ranger Rick Magazine this year.

Luckily for you, it is MUCH easier to solve beaver problems than it was a decade ago. There are now books, websites and even videos to teach you how. There are plenty of reasons even businesses should appreciate beaver, including drought and fire protection. I am hopeful that you can work together to make a plan on how to solve this issue next time. We would be happy to consult along the way.

Our motto is, any city smarter than a beaver, can keep a beaver – and knows why they should.

Heidi Perryman, Ph.D.

Our story told in just the right places! But I especially loved the other letter from a local educator whose class room had been persuaded that beavers matter by Jari’s outstanding documentary.

As a current educator and former landscape business owner, I was both sickened and exhilarated after reading “Leave It To Beavers.”

In September, my students studied beavers with vigor, and enjoyed a field trip to view a beautiful beaver lodge and scout out beaver “signs.” They are still talking about beavers to this day. The children embraced a beaver’s place in our ecosystem, and after viewing the PBS Nature film Leave It to Beavers, they realized that awareness and education allows for all of us to coexist peacefully.

I sympathize with Evelyn Waggoner when the beavers felled trees and shrubs on her property. That is devastating! For 25 years, I attempted to manage voles, deer, and bunnies in residential gardens. The damage caused was monumental, frustrating and costly. However, the very best control I found was barrier methods. Live and let live! If they can’t get to the plants, they will move on.

I believe that education and awareness will help protect these amazing creatures!

Stacey Kaye
Lake George, CO

I also got a nice response back from the mayor and city council woman supportive of the beavers, so something tells me there might be a better resolution in their not too distant future. Fingers crossed.

Finally, reader Sheri Hartstein requested this yesterday to comfort our battered-by-the-camp fire hearts. Of course I had to oblige. In case you haven’t seen the meme the hat says “Rake America great again”.

BEAVER WAYS MAKE WATERWAYS

heidi08 Beavers and Flooding, Beavers and water November 20, 2018

What do you know! Two days ago the US forest service published a collection of articles about riparian restoration, and guess what number seven was? The summary of Suzanne Fouty’s very beavery dissertation. You can download the whole thing online but I’m going to give you some highlights here to whet your appetite for the original.

Chapter 7. Euro-American Beaver Trapping and Its Long-Term Impact on Drainage Network Form and Function,Water Abundance, Delivery, and System Stability

Suzanne Fouty, Ph.D.

Euro-American (EA) beaver trapping was a regional and watershed-scale disturbance that occurred across the North American continent. This concentrated removal of beavers altered drainages by creating thousands of localized base-level drops as beaver dams failed and were not repaired. These base-level drops led to the development of channels as ponds drained and water eroded the fine sediment trapped behind the dams
(Dobyns 1981; Fouty 1996, 2003; Parker et al. 1985). The speed at which drainages transformed from beaver-dominated to channel-dominated varied as a function of climate, upland and riparian vegetation, and the subsequent land uses. As the drainage network pattern changed, flood magnitudes and frequencies increased and base flows decreased, creating stream systems much more sensitive to climatic variability.

Using current research and historic observations, I developed a conceptual model describing the geomorphic and hydrologic response of a drainage basin to the entry of beavers and then their removal or abandonment (Fouty 2003).

Now there are lots of parts of this research that are way over our heads, but the gist is the Suzanne used a model to systematically determine how much water was lost in parts of the US when beavers were eliminated. She challenged the work of those who said had said for years that the effect of their loss was minimal.

You know me, I can only understand the pictures to understand. This is an excellent break down of why beavers matter on the landscape. Use it to convince your hydrological skeptics. Suffice it to say that from a surface and ground water perspective beavers make things a lot more habitable and life supporting.

She finishises with a big bang of course.

Separating out cause-and-effect relationships in fluvial systems is challenging because changes to their form and function are the result of many factors interacting over time and space. This chapter explored some of those factors in its examination of how EA beaver trapping altered the appearance and hydrologic behavior of stream systems and why the influence of beavers and beaver trapping were missed in the discipline of fluvial geomorphology until recently. It also examined how information gaps led to the development of relationships of process and form based on observations and measurements
of channelized drainages and altered uplands that created conditions whereby water was rapidly shed from the landscape rather than stored and released slowly.

Given the magnitude of the historic changes and their hydrologic consequences, the scale of restoration and the rate at which it must occur is enormous if the impact of climate change on water availability, and the systems that depend on water, are to be minimized. Partnering with beavers to restore the water-holding capability of our stream corridors would rapidly dampen fluctuations in the abundance and scarcity of water and leave wild and human communities less vulnerable. Efforts will require broad public support and an integrated approach by State and Federal agencies given their respective areas of influence and impact. Scientists are in a position to help inform the discussions by sharing what we have learned about how past and current land uses affect the ability of the landscape to naturally store water for future use; however, our effectiveness will first require that we change the lens we have been looking through. Because the discipline of fluvial geomorphology has internalized and codified degraded systems as normal, our stream restoration efforts fall short. By placing these fluvial geomorphic relationships within their historic disturbance context, one that includes EA beaver trapping, new strategies, approaches, and partnerships emerge that are essential for restoration to successfully occur. This new lens reveals the essential role beavers play in this recovery process.

Basically the paper concludes with “you were all WRONG (And I’m looking at you Aldo & Luna) because you assumed a landscape stripped of beavers was the norm. Listen to what I’m saying because climate change is gonna knock the spit out of all of us. And beavers can help.”

I hope she doesn’t mind the paraphrase. But go read the original. And pass it on.

MISSI PICOUTAU AMISCOU

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and trout November 18, 2018

Sunday must be beaver day, because this morning we get beaver stories from two nations. The first is a little morbid, but the second will leave you smiling. Let’s start morbid and cheer ourselves with the thought thought of natives pulling a missionary’s leg.

Can there be a more obvious symbol of Canada than the beaver? No other animal, except for humans, is credited with the creation of the country. (Historically, the cod fish might have had something to say, but no one is listening to it.) “The beaver makes everything,” said an Innu hunter to Jesuit missionary Paul Le Jeune in the seventeenth century: Its valuable pelt could be traded for whatever people desired. Maybe the beaver could even make Canada.

If you think, like HBC and so many trappers did, that he was talking about the beaver pelt having many uses. you’d be wrong. You and I know very well that what he meant was literally “THE BEAVER MAKES EVERYTHING”. Because the beaver builds the dam and stores the water which grows the trees which feeds the wildlife which shapes the soil which grows the crops which brings the settlers which make the country.

“The beaver makes everything.”

Of course the missionary took it like Johnny in the movie Airplane and thought “I can make a hat, a coat, a vest, a blanket…”

I’m sure he knew the priest would take it that way, but we know that’s not what he meant. Heck, maybe he even knew destroying the beaver would destroy the land and thought, if you’re going to steal my home then hey, I’m at least going to ruin it.

*Cree artist Kent Monkman captures the ambiguity of the beaver as a national symbol in his 2016 painting Les Castors du Roi.*

But Cree artist Kent Monkman captured the essence of the ambiguity of the beaver as a national symbol. In a parody of, and ironic commentary on, different genres of art, Monkman’s 2016 painting Les Castors du Roi riffs off relevant images, including fanciful historical depictions, of the beaver. French and Indigenous hunters savagely murder the beaver with spears, daggers, leg-hold traps and guns, while church representatives stand idly by. On the right of the canvas, an anthropomorphized beaver prays to a Christian God, while beaver spirits ascend toward heaven.

Of course we know that beavers hold their hands together like they are praying or saying grace when they eat, but other than that I appreciate the art analysis. This is a complex painting, and I like it better when I realize it’s ironic. Do you think we could get Kent to do one of the beavers slaughtering the fur-traders? Because that would really interest me.

On to a story which knows full what what that native meant when he said “the beaver makes everything“.

Iroquois Confederacy Timeline

“The Savages say the beaver is the animal well-beloved by the Europeans. I heard my Native host say one day jokingly, ‘Missi picoutau amiscou. The Beaver does everything perfectly well: it makes kettles, hatchets, swords, knives, bread. In short it makes everything.’ He was making sport of us Europeans. The English have no sense; they give us twenty knives like this for one Beaver skin.”

– Father Paul Le Jeune, French Jesuit missionary in New France

Your Watershed column: A story of ecological restoration

Butler Creek is located in the White River National Forest at the headwaters of Rifle Creek. It is directly north of Rifle by about 16 miles, and “if you look at pictures from decades ago, Butler Creek was a mess,” said Clay Ramey of the U.S. Forest Service.

“The management practice back then was to actually spray herbicide down onto the willows along the stream so that there would be more water for grazing,” he recalled.

The Butler Creek grazing pasture, one of many pastures in a massive allotment, was modified to allow grazing only in the early summer when the willows don’t taste as sweet to the cattle as they do in the fall. Colorado Parks & Wildlife made a donation as well: the East Branch of Parachute Creek had plenty of beavers, and they figured they could gift some to the cause.

When the cows away, the beavers will – well think of something that rhymes with away but means build dams and store water and save fish.

“It’s really all about the beavers,” said Ramey. The entirety of Butler Creek used to be a series of beaver dams, and when they were chased away and died off, the dams broke, and the gradient of the creek changed to increase erosion.

“The dams of the beavers also keep water around for longer and raise the water table,” he said. The beaver dams will catch the sediment that suffocates downstream native fish populations.

“We plant the willows to give the beavers something to feed on and to build their dams out of. The willows are great anyways for their purpose of stabilizing the streambanks, but we’re hoping it’s the beavers that truly fix up the mess and bring ecological health back to Butler Creek.”

Yes it is. Because beavers make everything. An Innu hunter knew that 300 years ago, but it’s nice to see one branch of the federal government finally getting the message.

Recovery takes time, but within a year, positive changes are already happening.

“The beaver population is thriving, and the willows we transplanted have had a great survival rate, despite the dry summer,” said Nate Higginson, watershed specialist for the Middle Colorado Watershed Council. “We’ve seen Colorado River cutthroat trout spawning in the creek. Time will tell if they flourish, but at least they’re still there, and the entire ecology, from the grazing cattle to wildlife, benefit from this return to balance along Butler Creek.”

Move over and let the beaver do the work. Seems right to me.

THERE BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD

heidi08 Beavers and salmon, Who's Killing Beavers Now? November 17, 2018

Another day of unbreatheable air for us while rescue workers in Paradise sift through the unimaginable looking for victims of the camp fire. There are 1000 people still missing and we know what that means. In the mean time there are beaver stories that merit our attention. It’s winter in many parts of the US that aren’t currently on fire. And that’s never good news for beavers.

Traps poised for sharp-toothed wanderers

Beavers are being trapped along the Alaska Highway across from the Meadow Lakes Golf Club as a precaution, says conservation officer David Bakica.

The Department of Highways and Public Works (DPW) is afraid the buildup of water behind the dam the beavers have created could push against the gravel road bed and compromise its strength, Bakica explained recently.

The water is already inside the right-of-way, he pointed out.

The devices installed a couple of years ago at the mouth of the highway culvert to prevent the beavers from damming the culvert is working well, Bakica told the Star. The beavers have, however, decided to block the creek upstream from the culvert, within the highway right-of-way, he said.

So the culvert protection you used a couple years ago is working, but the beavers have dammed upstream and rather that build on the success of a couple years ago and install a flow device, you are choosing to kill them in winter.

As it was explained to him by Highway staff, when water sits against a roadbed, every time a vehicle passes over it, the roadbed acts as sponge, pulling in water and heightening the risk of failure, he said.

To date, five have been trapped, though they’re still not certain if all the beavers have been removed, Bakica said Thursday.

Waiting for ice cover not only increases the safety aspect, but it’s also easier to target the entrances and exits of the beaver lodge, he explained.

DPW wants to pull down the dam, but to do so while the beavers are still in there would be inhumane, as the animals would eventually freeze to death without water or become easy prey, he said.

In other words DPW thinks beaver live IN the dam because DPW is almost always stupid.

Bakica said relocating beavers really isn’t feasible in most cases. It’s costly, and can simply mean moving a problem from one area to another, he pointed out.

DPW’s Doris Wurfbaum said the intent is to break down the dam this winter so that the water is free-flowing come spring.

I’m going to assume that the fact that you installed culvert protection 2 years ago at all means that public pressure cared about these beavers and forced your hand. Hey killing after the freeze has another benefit of keeping the beaver-lovers away so they won’t complain too much!

You know there’s another way to do this, right?

North American Beaver
Castor canadensis
Eating willow
Martinez, CA by Suzi Eszterhas

We need to remember that beaver stupid still exists everywhere and its not all hearts and Ben’s book out there. I was stunned to see this complaint whine its way across my news feed the other day.

Salmon Runs in the Columbia River system are being systematically ruined by the pseudo science ecologist/ environmentalists who are incharge.

If it was not for the pseudo science of ecology we could have infinitely more fish in northwest rivers and beyond. The environmentalists actually are the real cause of fish declines.

Wow. Ecology is a pseudo-science and environmentalists cause fish decline. The mind boggles. The jaw drops.

The Indian tribes controlled the salmon at these points of difficult uphill cascades passage in the gorge for several thousand years. The river was much more polluted than it is today when salmon runs were much larger. The Indian populations along the Columbia river were higher per square mile concentrated along the river than anywhere else in north America at the time in pre Columbian times. Beavers had everything dammed and were so numerous the river was fouled by Beaver feces and from the Indian populations along the rivers and streams. Those nutrients fed the salmon runs.

Got that? The rivers used to be more polluted because of all the beaver poop. And all that poop fed the salmon. So now that there is less pollution there are less salmon. Because of the stupid ecologists.

In some ways today the rivers are too clean for fish to thrive as much as they can and fish hatcheries can also be placed further down stream to more tidal areas of the river system like in the Willamette river itself right downtown. There is horrible missed opportunity in developing the ‘resource’ and worst of all the fisheries selected the best salmon for the hatchery fish and the eco environmental flakes designate those as unnatural fish which is helping to destroy river and ocean survival traits of various species. The truth is absolutely not allowed . Ensured are stupid jobs for idiot people and the salmon and the economic value of these salmon is suffering as a result

If we were to substitute the word pollution for the words ‘nutrient-rich’ I could almost agree. Of course you can’t conflate what beaver do to rivers with what industrial or chemical companies do to rivers. There is zero comparison. The author is onto something though about lots of beavers resulting in lots of salmon, but he misunderstands the role that ecologists want to play in restoring rivers. Correlation isn’t causation. Just because they showed up when the salmon population started to fall apart doesn’t mean they caused it. Just like going to the hospital isn’t the cause of death.

I posted a comment in response and surprisingly he approved it and its still there. I’m not sure what that means, but I’m going to assume its a good sign. At least anyone else that visits the sight can see it.

BEAVER TROUBLE IN PARADISE

heidi08 Beavers and Fire Prevention November 16, 2018

A couple days ago I got into a bit of an argument with someone on the Beaver Management Facebook Page, which almost never happens because the group is fairly self-selected. It started when someone commented about the terrible fire in Paradise and suggested that it could have been helped by beavers. A newcomer to the group piped in (the founder of the group Animals 24-7) that there was no adequate beaver habitat in coastal california, and I said, well there used to be and gave a link to our paper. Predictable hi-jinx ensued.

Well, that argument must have jarred something lose because today there is a new post on Animals 24-7.

Could beavers have saved Paradise?

The Camp Fire in Butte County, the Woolsey Fire in Ventura County, the earlier Carr Fire in Shasta and Trinity Counties, the Mendocino Complex Fire, and many of the other 7,575 wildfires that have cumulatively burned at least 1,667,855 acres of California in 2018 might have been prevented or at least lessened if the California Department of Fish & Wildlife had authorized a raft of beaver restoration projects proposed years earlier.

Much animal suffering might have been alleviated, meanwhile, had the California Department of Fish & Wildlife distributed better advice about what people could do to help wildlife fleeing through their property.

You know that feeling you get when someone takes your side in an argument but misstates what you said in the first place? It’s like “HURRAY someone agrees with me” and then “Uh-oh that’s a picture of a nutria” and “Ahem, there are plenty of beaver in Butte county already – we don’t need to introduce more, we just need to stop killing them.”

(In 2016 depredation permits in Butte County were issued for 50 beavers, as well as 5 permits issued for an unlimited number of beavers). Let that sink in for a moment. That’s for a county that has just 41 square miles of water.

But sure, we need to talk about this, so thanks for getting this out there.

Beaver never allowed to recover

The bigger California Department of Fish & Wildlife policy issue, a probable factor in most California wildfires over the past 200 years, is that the once plentiful beaver population was trapped out between 1785 and 1841, and has never been allowed to recover to even a fraction of previous abundance.

The prolonged absence of beavers, meanwhile, has contributed to desertification in the dryer parts of California, exacerbating the effects of global warming and drought in forested regions.

“Beavers aren’t actually creating more water, but they are altering how it flows, which creates benefits through the ecosystem,” explained National Marine Fisheries Service Northwest Science Center beaver specialist Michael Pollock in 2015 to Alastair Bland of Water Deeply, a project of the online periodical News Deeply.

I like so much of this, but I’m sure Dr, Pollock would be very surprised to find himself described as a “Beaver specialist“. Just to be clear, he’s a fish research biologist. Beavers are just a means to an end.

Recharging aquifers

Elaborated Bland, “By gnawing down trees and building dams, beavers create small reservoirs. What follows, scientists say, is a series of trickle-down benefits. Water that might otherwise have raced downstream to the sea, tearing apart creek gullies and washing away fish, instead gets holed up for months behind the jumbles of twigs and branches. In this cool, calm water, fish — like juvenile salmon — thrive. Meanwhile, the water percolates slowly into the ground, recharging near-surface aquifers and keeping soils hydrated through the dry season.

“Entire streamside meadows,” [Sonoma County beaver restoration advocate Brock] Dolman says, may remain green all summer if beavers are at work nearby. Downstream of a beaver pond, some of the percolated water may eventually resurface, helping keep small streams flowing and fish alive,” and enabling shoreline trees such as willow and alder to soak up and store water.

The article follows up with comments from Brock about beavers benefiting salmon, which they do. And how beaver dams could eek out the missing snow pack in california. but quotes CDFW saying they never stay put.

They won’t stay”

California Department of Fish & Wildlife fisheries biologist Kevin Shaffer acknowledged to Bland that “Beavers can have benefits for a watershed that is temporarily deprived of rainfall,” but argued that “beavers cannot cancel out the effects of long-term drought or climate change.

“As the drought gets worse, their ponds will dry up and the animals will just move somewhere else,” Shaffer told Bland. “They won’t stay because there is no more water.”

Yet the cooling effect of thousands of acres of beaver pond surface can help to stimulate precipitation, helping to break prolonged droughts and slowing the effects of climate change.

Yes it could. And I very much appreciate you saying so. Next it launches into a discussion of beaver nativity in California through the lens of Alison Hawkes great article in Bay Nature.

Bland wrote about a year after Bay Nature writer Alison Hawkes in June 2014 traced the California Department of Fish & Wildlife antipathy toward beaver restoration to flagrant historical errors by Joseph Grinnell (1877-1939) in a 1937 monograph entitled Fur Bearing Mammals of California, and by another biologist, Donald Tappe, in a 1942 follow-up.

Grinnell and Tappe believed, in gist, that because they found few beaver in California in the early to mid-20th century, other than some who were known to have recently been reintroduced, California must never have had many beaver––and that made beaver officially “non-native” anywhere that Grinnell and Tappe failed to recognize as beaver habitat.

The playright Tom Stoppard wrote “All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it’s like being ambushed by a grotesque.” Yup, that sounds about right.

Since 2007, Hawkes recounted, when beaver advocate Heidi Perryman “founded the beaver advocacy group, Worth a Dam, to save from extermination a beaver family that had moved into a highly-visible pond outside a Starbucks coffee shop in downtown Martinez,” a growing army of ecologists, biologists, archeologists, anthropologists, and historians have “compiled evidence,” Hawkes wrote, “from a wide range of digital and paper archives to show that beavers were once prevalent throughout most of California, including the entire San Francisco Bay Area.”

It never stops being surprising to see my name dropped in an article I knew nothing about, but okay. Sure. Tell everyone that this can be done and that beavers can help. I’ll just be over here.

“In 2012,” continued Hawkes, “Perryman, Lanman and Brock published their first paper reviewing the evidence for beavers in the Sierra Nevadas.”

Explained Dolman, “We had to step in and address this assumption that beavers are not native, therefore we can consider them to be a danger, a nuisance, and then lethal management is justifiable.”

“The group cast a wide net,” narrated Hawkes, “searching for specimens in museums and archaeological sites, and examining historical fur-trapping records, historical newspaper accounts, geographic place names, and Native American tribal names for ‘beaver.’”

Yes we did. A very wide net indeed. Such a wide net in fact that we found evidence of beaver all over this burning state. I’m glad that people are thinking about this. They should be.

To this day the California Department of Fish & Wildlife issues depredation permits allowing hundreds of beavers to be trapped and killed each year. Ignored is the potential use of those beavers to rebuild habitat––and water resources––in areas vulnerable to wildfire, which on maps interestingly parallel historical but now sparsely occupied beaver habitat.

Water doesn’t burn. And beavers save water.

Agrees Perryman, “People need to be thinking about the animal who keeps water on the land as a resource.”

What if Paradise had been situated on a ridge surrounded in part by beaver ponds, instead of wholly surrounded by drought-dried forest?

Had the California Department of Fish & Wildlife been thinking about fire prevention, instead of possible complaints about localized flooding, enough beavers might have occupied the habitat to have kept the Camp Fire from becoming a fast-moving firestorm.

Had we all been thinking about that, maybe it would have made a difference. I don’t blame CDFW. It is very strange to read all this in an unfamiliar place after an argument on facebook, but very nice to see it sprinkled more freely into public discourse. I won’t even comment on the fact that the article ends with a request for donations “to continue their important work” because of course it does.

But I have to comment on the nutria. What’s up with the nutria?