Month: March 2019

BEAVER FESTIVITIES

heidi08 Beaver Art March 17, 2019

Let’s have another good news Sunday, shall we? Starting with the upcoming beaver festival which is shaping up in ever direction. Event Insurance, check. Folkmanis donation, check. Bay Nature ad, check. And this week I put together the children’s map that will help them find the “Key to the waters” for our treasure hunt, just in time for a special flash sale from Vista Print who made the cards for 50 percent less. The idea is that pieces of the map will be given at each participating exhibit, and when the kids get all 8 they can assemble them at the “map-making” booth and read the secret message on the back which will tell them where to find the key.

The participating exhibits will be marked with these signs:

We were happy to see our leftover tattoos worked excellently on those wood signs, one of the perks of doing this gig over and over for the past 12 years is that you have lots of supplies! I won’t show you the clue the kids decode just yet because there has to be a little surprise left over for the wedding night, right?

Anyway, we’ve been marching on with donations. And recently picked up a doozy. This comes all the way from Lutsk in the Ukraine. Ann Billit makes these striking decals with all kinds of images of wildlife, in fact we’ve seen some others driving around they’re so popular. So imagine how surprised I was to find this one:

Which of course was a shock not only because it was a beaver, but because it was OUR beaver, from Cheryl’s wonderful photo of or 2009 yearling.

Which when I cheerfully mentioned to Ann she generously donated a large number of decals in several sizes to the silent auction where you can pick up yours this June. If you can’t wait that long, or you want to check out her other wildlife options for your trunk, visit the Wawoo shop on Esty and see the other wonders she has to offer.

Thank you Ann!

I was also delighted to see recently on facebook a sketch that our good friend, scientist, farmer and beaver defender Derek Gow from Devon England had done for an upcoming activity. Apparently the plan was to let various child artists help him color it in. I had no idea he was such a talented artist, so I immediately asked him to think about donating something to the silent auction. To which he said it was the least he could do and he would be happy to. He’s working on it now, but here’s the sketch that caught my eye:

Thank you Derek and stay tuned!

A RAP FOR BEAVERS

heidi08 Beaver Art, Beaver Book March 16, 2019

Wait until you see this fun video beaver rap as poet Steve Schmidt of Connecticut serenades author Ben Goldfarb at a presentation of Eager. Wonderful poetry and some really fun gangly Ben rap appreciation that will start your weekend right. Steve had the odd fortune of reading “Eager” around the same time he happened to see the musical Hamilton, with delightful results. What everyone needs on a Saturday morning from our soon to be VERY GOOD new friend.

Rap for Castor

––for Ben Goldfarb, author of Eager

You got problems out west, you’re runnin’ out of water
Temperatures risin’ and the world’s gettin’ hotter
Tryin’ to mitigate floods and stop runaway fires
You got water in quantity but not where you want it to be

You gave us no respect, so what did you expect?
You thought a buck-toothed rodent would be better as a hat
So you trapped us and snapped us until you’re all that
Too stupid to see that you were fracking up your habitat

You exceeded your need until greed was your creed
Had a shizzle vision of your mission, to speed
a landscape raping you should have been arresting
Now I guess your destiny is manifesting

They call me The Beaver
No, not the one by Ward Cleaver
Castor canadensis
Genus? I’d say genius

We shaped the contents of the continents
Masters of geology, ecology, hydrology, topology
Our diligence, intelligence, experience, and innate sense
could handle any consequence

Now you need us more than ever, brother
If you want to last forever and recover
Looks like you could use a furry god mother
Give you pristine streams, replenish all your aquifers
A salmon run replacin’ all the damage done
Another keystone species where there isn’t one
Just keep in mind the beaver battle cry:
Wetlands Are the Best Lands, and that’s no lie

With us it’s just pond to wetland to meadow to forest
And day or night, oh, the concatenatin’ chorus
So we’ll find a dam spot just where you needed one
Now leave it to the beavers, man: We’ll get the job done

STRAIGHT FROM THE HORSES’ MOUTH

heidi08 Beavers and trout March 15, 2019

What the big boys had to say about Ted Williams article.

Ben Goldfarb

Here’s my own blurb, spoken from the heart as a graduate of the Yale School of Forestry (Aldo’s alma mater) and a former Leopold Writing Fellow. Feel free to share wherever:

Setting aside all the unscientific junk in this piece, here’s what bothers me most: the spurious invocation of Leopold’s “Thinking Like a Mountain,” which actually says precisely the opposite of what Williams thinks it does. The point of “Mountain” is that, by killing a native keystone species (wolves) to benefit a recreationally targeted game species (white-tailed deer), we inadvertently inflicted profound ecological harm upon the broader natural community. And yet Williams is advocating that we… kill a native keystone species (beaver) to benefit a recreationally targeted game species (brook trout)! In other words, he’s committing the exact mistake that Leopold cautioned against in his iconic essay — advocating for short-sighted, heavy-handed lethal management driven by recreational biases rather than ecology.

It’s a shame — I’m actually a big Ted Williams fan. Here’s hoping he goes back to defending public lands and holding corporate polluters to account, rather than misguidedly punching down at beavers.

Michael Poilock

I do think that we have created a lot of drainage ditches across this country, to drain “swamps” etc. and that beaver tend to restore these drainage ditches back into swamps or wetlands, when left alone. Another way of thinking about it is that in places like Wisconsin, there was a lot of wetlands, and that getting rid of beaver made it easy to drain these areas, or to convert wetlands into streams, or essentially, to extend the stream network into places where it didn’t previously exist. The same process has arguably gone on in the Sierra and elsewhere in the west, where erosion and incision has extended stream networks into areas that were once wet meadows with no discernible stream channel.

So if beaver are playing a role in zipping up drainage networks and reducing their extent, then yes, they will be reducing the amount of stream habitat, and increasing the amount of wetland or wet meadow habitat, and species that like streams, such as trout, will be less plentiful in those areas. I haven’t been to Wisconsin lately, but I speculate that something similar is going on and that the extent of the stream network is an artifact of land use practices from current and previous centuries. I also speculate that better land use management might reduce the extent of trout, but that on a watershed scale they would be more plentiful, since the increase in wetlands would improve water quality and quantity, as well as modulating hydrographs, creating more stable flows. If we think about streams as habitat networks, with different types of habitat in different parts of the network, rather than as drainage networks, with the implied goal of “draining” the landscapes, I think that helps point us in the right conceptual direction. We do better when we think about watershed restoration and process restoration and ecosystem restoration rather than focusing on the needs of a single species such as trout.

There you go. Expertly said by the real experts. I believe both brilliant minds think you’re WRONG and plenty of other brilliant minds wrote back that you’re very, very wrong but they hadn’t time that day to deal with your wrongness.

I just thought you’d want to hear from folks why are way, way smarter than me about this.

“OH NO YOU DIDN’T!”

heidi08 Beaver Chewing, Beavers and trout March 14, 2019

This morning’s title is the actual header of the mortified email sent to me yesterday by famed and familiar author Ben Goldfarb who had always considered Ted Williams a kind of conservation legend.

Ahh, how the mighty have fallen. Over beavers, of course.

Thinking Like a Trout Stream

A case in point is its inability to accept biological realities of beaver overpopulation.

The causes of ecological damage by deer and beaver are identical. Wolves, the major predator of both species, have been extirpated or severely reduced in most deer and beaver range. Heavy logging in deer and beaver range has replaced poorhabitat old growth with deer and beaver candy such as aspen and willow.

Beavers in natural abundance have usually been good for native ecosystems, trout included. In much of the Pacific Northwest, beavers are depleted, and managers are rightly attempting recovery.

You can see right away where this is going. The argument is that numbers of beavers when controlled by wolves and mt lions are helpful. But the number we have NOW! Oy vey! He starts by quoting the praise of beavers given by Oregon and Washington fisheries.

Beavers .. . create reservoirs of cool water that salmon need to survive,” report the Northwest Treaty Tribes of western Washington State in a news release titled “Beavers Relocated to Improve Salmon Habitat.”

Such assertions are accurate in Oregon, Idaho, and Washington, at least on most high-gradient streams. But when they’re cited as alleged evidence that all beaver populations are great for all species in all states, they’re flat wrong; and they hurt the cause of native ecosystems. Do a Google search for beavers and trout, and almost all you’ll find are effusions about the alleged value of beavers everywhere and excoriations of fisheries managers who attempt to modestly control gross irruptions.

Oh those little NOAA scientists and their crazy ILLUSIONS! Obviously what you do in the Pacific states doesn’t matter because they’re already insane anyway. But what here in Wisconsin or Massachusetts we’re OVERRUN with beavers.

BUT BEAVER BLIGHT IN THE EAST IS MILD COMPARED TO THAT IN THE MIDWEST. Angler/photographer Len Harris of Richland Center, Wisconsin, describes the pre-hangover high that comes with the discovery of a new beaver pond: “It’s smile-producing at first because of bigger trout. But the flooding cycle cleans out that dam and all the barren bank. The streams widen and increase in temperature. . . . My home waters have warmed by at least four degrees in the last twenty years. This is from a combination of beavers not being kept in check and climate change. Warmer water, resulting gill lice, and resulting competition from brown trout have stacked the deck against the natives. Humans need to limit beaver expansion near our brook trout streams. Thankfully, a new regime is in place in Wisconsin as of 2019. Science will be back on the books, and our DNR will once again be staffed with caretakers of the streams, not climate-change deniers.”

So wait a minute. You’re equating beaver believers with climate change deniers? Because they’re both on teams you dislike? That’s so entirely provoking I’m not even sure what to do with you. Ben says you’re revered and I’m sure [Brutus is an honorable man} so I won’t write what I’d like to. But maybe you could spend five minutes in an actual trout stream with an actual beaver dam before you accept funds to write something ridiculous like this again? Or hey maybe snorkel in it and see all the baby trout swimming around? He goes on to describe several “misguided” environmental groups that think beavers have any value. I’m just sorry he didn’t mention US.

“There are a lot of people in our organization who really value the beaver ponds as something that attracts wildlife and increases biodiversity,” the group’s chair, Corlis West, told the Lake County News Chronicle. “Not just beavers, but for moose and mink and waterfowl and frogs and turtles.”

“They [beaver ponds] provide special habitat,” added retired University of Minnesota Duluth geology professor John Green. “They’re wildlife magnets for breeding and migrating birds. All kinds of wildlife like them, and people enjoy those.”

Notice how he goes after the little guys like beaversprite not NOAA fisheries and their years of data. He knows exactly what he’s doing here. When a giant like Ted Williams writes a giant amount of BS like this, it’s going to take another giant to knock him down. David and her little GIFs aren’t going to do it. But good LORD this is irritating. Does he really truly believe that there are MORE beavers now than there were in 1730? Even knowing the numbers of pelts reported? Really? Even knowing all the economies they funded?

Does Ted secretly know a story about the great native american salmon famine of 1630 that all of us don’t?

SALMONIDS BENEFIT FROM BEAVERS IN MUCH OF THE WEST; but beaver irruptions are nuking lots of coldwater habitat even there.

Wildlife advocates need to keep two different thoughts about beavers in their heads simultaneously. Beavers in moderation can be good for coldwater species. What’s bad for coldwater species is not beavers; it is too many beavers—unnatural proliferations caused by human activity, such as clear-cutting and wolf eradication. “Letting nature take its course” doesn’t mean sitting on our hands after we’ve disrupted natural balances.

The funniest part of this ENTIRE article, and believe me there are several, is that he presents the “pro-beaver” lobby as if we were SO powerful. As if we had frightened Fish and WIldlife in Nevada and California so that they’re afraid to do all the killing that’s required. As if we had scared people away from killing all the beavers they need to kill!

As a woman with her toes on the very front lines of beaver defense allow me to offer a counterpoint after reviewing 10 years of depredation permits in California alone:

You’re so funny, Ted. I think maybe you and Ben are going to have a dynamic discussion some day soon. And maybe Michael Pollock will want in on it. Worth A Dam will pay for the beer. I’ll just be over here. Trying to get over the giggles.

“It’s unlikely that managers will ever be able to restore more than a tiny fraction of trout streams destroyed by beavers. But, as Leopold wrote in a 1946 letter to his friend Bill Vogt: “That [a] situation appears hopeless should not prevent us from doing our best.”

Just a final thought. The famous Leopold and his famous son who inspired this article was famously ignorant about the importance of beavers. Neither of them had any idea how important beavers are to streams or fish. And I’m quoting two of the most knowledgeable voices I know on this matter. Aldo was a visionary voice who knew and understood many, many things. But beavers wasn’t one of them.

So it’s perfect that you frame this entire argument around him,

A WILLING ALLY IN A DRYING WORLD

heidi08 Beavers and Wetlands March 13, 2019

How did we miss this story? Well, know how. I was just out of the hospital when it broke but still. I let you all down. I am so disappointed in myself. You will probably leave and read some other website about beavers that is updated daily. And you should.

Except there is no other website like that. In all the world. For better or worse I’m still the only person insane enough to do this every morning. So you’re stuck with me for now. Sorry and you’re welcome.

What a great title!

Beaver: A Willing Ally in a Drying World

Taos, New Mexico was once a vital link in the beaver fur trade, linking the streams of the Southwest to markets in St. Louis and further East. Today, however, beaver are not part of the local economy, though some landowners and other interest groups might be changing that.

Aaron recently visited Taos speaking to the Rio Fernando de Taos Revitalization Collaborative — a collective of elected officials, agencies, groups, and individuals working to bring a New Mexico river back to life — about living with beavers. Why? Because beaver are vital to healthy and resilient ecosystems. Where there are beaver, there are plenty of other native wildlife. Beaver, North America’s largest rodent, are truly an ecosystem engineer, creating wetlands, ponds, and meadows, filtering water, trapping sediment, and mediating flashy streams into more consistent flows. All they need is water, trees, and time to be busy, as the saying goes.

Well, well, well, so we talked to folk in New Mexico about living with beavers. A fine idea, how did it go? We all know places that need water are places that need beaver.

Fewer beavers on the landscape means a lot of things, but mostly it means fewer wetlands and habitats for other species, more boom and bust water flows, and lower water quality. There are countless studies showing us how beaver alter their world and benefit other species, including humans. For example, in the arid intermountain west, 80% of species depend on wetlands during their lives, even though wetlands cover only 2% of the landscape. With their numbers at a small fraction of historic abundance, the many benefits that beavers provide are dramatically reduced.

Ain’t that the truth.

Landowners in the Taos, NM area are realizing the potential benefit of beaver, but also know that there are possible downsides. Beaver are busy, and part of that busyness includes felling trees to use in their construction projects and as a winter food source. This also includes flooding areas which humans may or may not want to be flooded. This conflict is sometimes problematic and often results in beaver being killed and removed. Defenders’ goal is to work with interested groups, such as the Rio Fernando de Taos Revitalization Collaborative in Taos, to promote more beaver on the landscape through mitigating their impacts. Trees can be fenced, flow devices can be installed to minimize flooding, and education and outreach can help promote positive attitudes about beaver, water quality, water quantity, and habitat for other species such as fish and amphibians.

Sure, there are times that beaver come into conflict with the human-built world of tidiness and organization. They do not abide by our rules and regulations, they do not read our stormwater plans, review our landscaping designs, or give a second though about flooding a low-lying bike path. They are acting like beaver should act, modifying the environment to suit their needs, and in the process the needs of many other species. Our beaver work is a win-win, promoting the huge benefits of beaver and encouraging humans to learn to live with them!

If you, like me, wish you were a fly on the wall for Aaron’s talk for this presentation, we’re in luck because at least part of it is available on video.

This seems to stop early after talking about flooding but he does a nice job of describing how to protect trees and I’m glad Aaron’s on the case. I wonder what kind of officials were in attend

And a final hearty good luck to Mr. Jon Ridler who gets sworn in this morning as an AMERICAN citizen! Just in time to regret the grand democratic experiment and what we’ve become. Congratulations. Jon, we’re all lucky to have you. (I made this for him yesterday just before our power went out all evening.)