Month: December 2018

THE PERFECT BEN-TERVIEW

heidi08 Beaver Book December 5, 2018

By now, 6 months after its publication, I’ve heard Ben give a lot of interviews about his book, Eager: The surprising secret lives of beavers and why they matter. So many interviews, in fact, that while they still matter, nothing about a beaver’s life is secret OR surprising anymore. There is usually some part of the interview I wished he’d made clearer or some issue I wish he’d brought up. As somewhat of a connoiseur of the Ben-terview I have become his most adoring critic. But this interview with Tom Williams on Utah public radio yesterday was perfect.

I listened to the whole thing and couldn’t think of one negative thing to say. Or one thing to suggest he do different next time. It hit all the right notes. Other than never mentioning Martinez I have zero complaints.

I wrote Ben that this was exceptionally awesome and he said he’s had a wonderful week in Utah with the gang. Thanks! It’s been a really fun couple days with Joe Wheaton, Nick Bouwes, and the whole Utah State crew — for my money, the best beaver research team out there. They hooked up that radio spot. Which explains a lot. Urban beavers get the proper respect, and there are mercifully not even anal glands in this interview.

If you can only listen to one Ben-terview this winter, this is the one.

NOTCHING IS A NO-NO

heidi08 Beavers and salmon December 4, 2018

Busy beavers create salmon habitat in Kitsap

Beavers are busy throughout the soggy gully. Tidy stacks of gnawed sticks divert the flow of water in places, creating sprawling ponds. The stream banks are littered with fallen trees, and the trunks of still-standing cedars have been chewed nearly in half.

“We get tons of calls from people saying there’s a beaver dam and they’re concerned about the fish,” state Department of Fish and Wildlife habitat biologist Brittany Gordon said.

While dams can, in some instances, impede fish, Gordon said the rodents do more to help than hinder salmon.

And hey, you know those beavers don’t cost our taxpayers any money. So that’s a plus.

Structures engineered by beavers create complex habitat for fish and other wildlife by slowing water flow, funneling water into deep pools and fast-moving side channels, and connecting isolated wetlands. Such diverse habitat is especially critical for juvenile coho salmon, which will spend a year in freshwater before migrating into the ocean.

“They need places to hide, places to eat and places to get big,” Gordon said. “they need ponds and slower-moving areas.”

When there’s enough water in creeks for salmon to spawn, the returning fish are adept at getting over and around beaver dams, as they have for time immemorial. A series of small dams can make it easier for salmon to splash upstream by holding standing water.

Time immemorial. Read that. Will you just READ THAT. It’s on the friggin news.

Gordon said dams do sometimes impede fish during very dry periods and when they are built up against human infrastructure like culverts. Even when streams are low, it’s a bad idea to bust up dams, Suquamish Tribe biologist Jon Oleyar said.

Notching a dam during spawning season can send a sudden “pulse” of water downstream, giving salmon a false signal that it’s time to move upstream. Water levels will drop above the busted dam, potentially stranding fish.

Listen up Michigan and Wisconsin and DFO’s in British Columbia. We’re talking to you. Stop messing with beaver dams. Just stop it.

Gordon said the Department of Fish and Wildlife advocates keeping dams in place whenever possible.

“The habitat benefits that dams provide outweigh any temporary barriers,” she said.

Can we carve that in stone somewhere? Or maybe make it into a tattoo to put on the foreheads of every one everywhere? The article does go out to outline specific instance where a permit is given to notch a beaver dam in some rare conditions. But mostly it says DON’T DO IT.

Okay, I’m going to swear now. Brace yourselves. The situation just demands it. Ready?

Guess who decided pick up Ben Goldfarb’s biographic article? The would be the fucking Atlantic, Baby. Ohh yeah.

The Re-beavering of the American West

An industrious but finicky pest could be the key to restoring Washington State’s wetlands and salmon populations.

(Finicky? Beavers are finicky?)

MONTANA GETS IT

heidi08 Beavers and climate change December 3, 2018

If corporate America ever got it’s hands on you. you haven’t escaped the mandatory office ‘baby pool‘. Some secretary or project manager was having a baby and everyone chipped in to ‘sign up’ for their official prediction of sex or birth date The best ones include complex details like ‘where she’ll be when her water breaks’ or other assorted privacy intrusions. The winner of course gets all the pooled cash and feels very smug for an entire day.

I’m beginning to think we should do a similar pool – Only one that asks participants to predict which state will be the very last to proclaim that beavers are beneficial. Since we had beaver heroes in already Kentucky and even in Tennessee this year, and a prominent spokesman in Oklahoma last year, my money is still on South Carolina.

Or California.

I guess you can officially cross Montana off the list. This morning’s guest column in the Missoulian from retired forest service fisheries biologist Greg Munther makes that clear enough.

Beavers can mitigate climate change effects

The newly released National Climate Assessment should be a wake-up for even the ardent skeptics. Climate changes will negatively affect our well-being, economy and our natural resources. The warmer climate here in Montana will have less snowpack, and that diminished snowpack will be gone sooner each summer. Longer and hotter summers mean surface water temperatures will also dramatically increase. For irrigators, a longer, hotter summer with diminished water will reduce crop and pasture production. For cold-water fish, it means more streams going dry, and waters too warm and even lethal for trout, especially for threatened bull trout. These changes will adversely affect the agricultural economy as well as the fishing and tourism economy. It will affect why we live here.

One of the most cost effective, available mitigation tools is restoring beaver in all suitable headwater streams. For too long, we have often relegated this obscure rodent to nuisance status.

Greg! I’m liking where this article is headed. I can’t believe we aren’t already friends, but I know we’ll get along famously. You are in an excellent position to be heard and make a difference.

Where beaver are present, their dams moderate floods by holding water until it seeps into the streambanks as water storage. Beaver colonies can store 30 percent of floodwater in streambanks to return to the stream later in the summer when it is most beneficial. This water storage benefit is realized both to reduce peak flows, and later in the summer this stored water is slowly released back into the stream. This provides more summer water for both fish and irrigators. The bank stored water is also significantly colder so it reduces the trout bearing waters temperature for trout. A single beaver pond can make some difference, but collectively enhanced beaver activity across Montana can be a huge mitigation measure.

Here here! Imagine the good things beavers could do for any state if we just stopped killing them long enough to let them!

The dams and ponds the beaver build and maintain at no cost provide benefits to both man as well as wildlife. Moose, in serious decline across Montana, benefit from the enlarged waters and succulent riparian vegetation. Other furbearers, including otter and mink, benefit, as do waterfowl, songbirds and amphibians. Trout, including bull trout, overwinter in the quiet, deep beaver ponds and juvenile trout congregate in beaver ponds.

To ensure beaver can do their work to mitigate climate change, we need to modify trapping regulations and improved streamside vegetation management to assure beaver can occupy habitat. Let’s let beaver do their work.

Ho ho ho. Merry Christmas! This is just the article I asked Santa for, and from just the kind of place I like to see it best. Montana had the good sense to re-elect senator Tester and I see it has the wisdom to recognize a friend when it sees one.

DOES SCOTLAND KEEP PROMISES?

heidi08 Beavers and Scotland December 2, 2018

How to get rid of unwanted beavers? There are many schools of thought. There are people in Washington that advocate strongly for taking beavers away from problem areas and dropping them into the high country where they might do some good. In California we have decided in our golden and infinite wisdom that the best thing to do with unwanted beavers is to require a piece of paper that lets you crush them in a squeezing trap underwater. But other places have other ideas – from snares, to shotguns and everything in between,

Meanwhile, Scotland still can’t make up its mind.

Anger over delays in introducing laws to prevent shooting of beavers

CONSERVATIONISTS, welfare campaigners and the Scottish Greens have criticised delays in giving legal protection to wild beavers.

Some have blamed the Scottish Government and some have hit out at farmers, who have defended the hold-up despite fears it will mean more of the animals suffering and being shot.

Scottish Wildlife Trust (SWT) said farmers themselves are to blame, using delaying tactics to block new laws which would give European protected species status to the animals.

England, of course, is working hard to avoid being thought of as “European” but Scotland would like the title. So there is a boatload of pressure asking action on the promise that was made two years ago – namely for the free beavers to be treated as a protected species. Which officials keep dragging their feet about.

The trust said the Government must “stop pandering” to farmers, and fears continued unregulated culling of adult beavers by farmers will mean beaver young, or kits, being left to die.

But the National Farmers Union in Scotland (NFUS) said new rules for controlling beavers needed to be tried and tested before the introduction of protected status. “Any delay in timescales is justifiable,” NFUS environment and land use manager, Andrew Midgely, told The Ferret.

“Keep pandering! Our position is strongly in favor of more pandering!” Says the farmer’s union. I have to admit to being a little curious how a farmer’s union works. Who do they work for exactly? Dthey ever go on strike?

SNH would only licence culling using accredited and trained controllers, Davies said. “That would give us better information on numbers being taken out in the countryside and help inform animal welfare issues,” she added.

“Animal welfare is a really important consideration, in particular in terms of whether adults might be taken out and leave dependent young, for example. ‘‘If you bring in a new management approach there could be controls on the timing of when animals can be taken out.”

You know, call me old school, but at the end of the day it seems to me that whether you die from being squeezed underwater or die from being shot in the head, you are equally dead. We know licensed trappers leave kits stranded too. Where do you think all those cute “orphans” in rehab come from?

NFUS’s Midgley refused to be interviewed about the delay. Instead he issued a statement saying the union accepts beavers will remain in Tayside, and in places beavers and people can co-exist happily.

But in “highly productive agricultural areas” he said beavers undermine river banks and protective flood banks, and impede farmland drainage by burrowing and damming.

He said: “It is therefore essential that when beavers are formally protected, there is a comprehensive management framework in place to give farmers confidence that they will be able to deal with problems should they arise, or indeed prevent problems from arising in the first place.”

It’s the ‘preventing problems’ that I hate. It’s this accepted policy that the risk of problems one day happening is worth the death of an animal right now. Imagine how we would feel if this was applied to people. “You look like the sort of person that one day might rob a grocery store so we’ve decided to ‘cull’ you and prevent the problem”.

“There’s no rational reason for further delays to laying the statutory instrument before Parliament to secure protected species status. The process to secure protected species status must happen now, and the pandering to a handful of farmers must stop.”

She said it was no longer worth SNH’s Scottish Beaver Forum continuing to meet because it “just needs a decision from ministers” on legislation

‘‘We would urge the Scottish Government to bring in legal protection for this wonderful native animal as soon as possible before more Scottish beavers suffer the same fate.”

The Greens’ Ruskell, pictured below, said: “Nearly 10 years after wild beavers were reintroduced in Argyll it’s deeply frustrating that these iconic animals still lack legal protection – despite the Government agreeing to protect them back in 2016.

Did we say protect them? We meant we’d protect them from boring lives. This living in terror for two years has got to add spice to their otherwise work-laden lives, right? How long does it take to keep promises in Scotland?

Apparently a little longer than 2 years.

When I said I would die a

bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married.

Much Ado About Nothing 2:3

TILTING WINDMILLS FOR BEAVERS

heidi08 Who's saving beavers now? December 1, 2018

As if it wasn’t enough to be on national news, the Port Moody beavers and their hard-working champions have also made it into the local front page. Judy wrote that they had their first, three hour beaver management meeting yesterday with the city, and she is cautiously optimistic. (Given that she is truly Canadian, that I have to say that sounds pretty cautious.)

Can you have PTSD from city meetings? It gives me a total flashback to the tortured days on the beaver subcommittee – every week for ninety days I forced myself to endure three hours of gruelingly polite persuasion. I had to reschedule patients just to be there. Things started out downright genteel, but by the time the lawyer brought in the stuffed beaver wearing the sign that said “Help me go somewhere else” and the head of public works complained that Jon shouldn’t come anymore because he scowled too much, things had gotten pretty bleak indeed.

Let’s just say I sympathize with the job Jim and Judy have ahead of them,

I honestly can’t tell if I’m proud or jealous that as hard as their job is going to be, it’s certainly easier than ours was all those years ago. They get Adrien to come put in a flow device. 11 years ago there was no one trained to install flow devices at Furbearers because Mike Callahan hadn’t met Adrien at the State of the beaver conference yet. Because there was no State of the Beaver Conference yet. The first one happened the year after the sheetpile was installed. Skip Lisle attended that. There was no one who had gone through this before to talk to about it or offer advice about living with urban beavers. I called Sharon Brown of Beaver Wetlands and Wildlife once and Sherri Tippie once I think, In those dark days, there were in fact three web pages on the entire internet about how flow devices might work, but when I reached out to Beaver Solutions Mike was kind enough to write me back advice from time to time. I was excited to return the favor by offering video clips and encouragement for his DVD, which helped convince him to attend the next conference where he then met Adrien.

This truly is a brave new world. So many worked so hard to move us foreword. Saving beavers is never, ever easy, but its getting better. And I know they are up to the task.

A final note, today should have been my father’s 90th birthday. I just thought I should say that. Happy Birthday, Dad.