THE BEST BITS AND PIECES

heidi08 Beavers, Video May 6, 2019

Many, many years ago. when Reagan was president, i had no degree of any kind, and Jon was unemployed, we were of course as poor as church mice and couldn’t afford a honeymoon at a fancy hotel. We packed up the champagne and the leftovers from the simple gathering and drove to my parents land in the sierras which at the time had only a tiny 1950-‘s trailer to sleep in. That night we sat outside by the fire pit until the snow drove us in, drinking champagne from the bottle and picking bits of rigatoni and cold chicken out of foil wrapped paper plates.

It was a smorgasboard of special leftovers. And that’s what you get this morning. Tasty leftover treats from our friends and family.

The first is from our friends at the Sierra Wildlife Coalition, which has been taking full advantage of their trail cams in this late ending winter season.

It’s it nice to see family members working side by side and getting about their business? Which at the moment includes getting ready for more mouths to feed. I can’t help it. After spending 10 years eagerly waiting for our first glimpse of kits I still get excited as we get closer to summer.

The second is from A new England facebook page made up of footage from different wildlife cams. This of a beaver making a scent mount.
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Scent marking remains the single beaver behavior we haven’t filmed in Martinez, which means they must be plenty careful about when and where they do it. We’ve filmed mating twice, but never scent marking OR chewing trees. I guess it has to do with the on land versus in the water thing.

The third appeared in yesterday’s Contra Costa Times and was sent by several beaver friends.

Heh, heh, heh.

This of course seems as good a time as any to report the highlight of my favorite Cinco de Mayo ever. Salud!

WATER AND SOIL ILLUSTRATION DISTRICT

heidi08 Beaver Art, Beaver ecological impact May 5, 2019

The other day I was looking for illustrations of beaver ponds and found this in a tweet from east Multnomah water and soil conservation district.

Beaver ponds help water and wildlife in a variety of ways! The ponds help clean, cool and slow water, and create habitat & food for insects, amphibians, birds and more! See more details in the replies to this thread! Illustration by our own Jon Wagner. #beavers #wildlife

I like these images very much so of course i looked him up. It turns out that when they say ‘one of our own’ they aren’t kidding. Jon Wagner is a freelance illustrator that also happens to work for the water and soil district – because, Portland. There’s a lot going on in this image. Lets take a closer look, shall we?

Hmmm I wonder if Mr. Wagner has ever done any urban beaver drawings, you know like the community gathering around to watch and the wildlife showing up near a concrete channel like we saw here in Martinez?

Excuse me, I have an email to send.

SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT

heidi08 Who's saving beavers now? May 4, 2019

Time for an article you are going to love. It’s so good I didn’t want to squeeze it in yesterday. It needs it’s own hallowed space and attention. This is from Connecticut where our good friend Steve Straight has been hard at work making sure the next beavers that come along have a better end,

Beavers are blamed for fallen trees and flooding, and authorities are euthanizing them. Is there a better way to fix the problem?

Last month, South Windsor officials trapped three beavers and had them euthanized. The beavers had caused safety issues at a town park by gnawing on trees near the trail system, which blocked a spillway to a pond and caused flooding issues.

The trapping and killing of the beavers, one of nature’s most industrious mammals, sparked outrage among residents, with some calling for more humane treatment. State officials say they have managed Connecticut’s beaver population this way for decades. But critics say there’s a less drastic, more cost-effective manner to deal with beavers.

He said a solution could have cost the town about $2,000, and volunteers, such as local scout troops, could have helped to wrap the trees. Straight hired Mike Callahan to investigate the beaver situation at Nevers Park.

You gotta love the East Coast, where you can bring in the expert from out of state for less than a tank of gas. Unlike Martinez where we had to fly Skip 3000 miles. Well, how did it go? What did he think?

Mike Callahan of Beaver Solutions LLC said his company has resolved more than 1,500 human and beaver conflicts since 1998 by using flow devices, such as culvert protective fences and beaver dam pipes. These methods allow the water to flow out of the pond created by beavers, in turn reducing flooding.

“In my experience, flow devices are the best beaver management method for approximately 75 percent of human-beaver conflicts. Where feasible, they offer the lowest overall cost, longest reliability, lowest labor and maximum environmental benefits,” Callahan said.

Callahan said a 12-inch pipe at Nevers Park would maintain a normal flow through the spillway, even if new beavers recolonize the pond and try to dam the spillway again. He said lightweight metal fencing could have been wrapped around the larger trees to prevent them from falling on the trails.

Callahan noted it would cost the town “far less to protect trees” along the trail with fencing than it would for town workers to continue to remove them. He believes beavers may recolonize the area within a year or two.

Ahhh you heard it yourself. Beavers are coming back and there are better, cheaper ways to fix things than by killing

“Fortunately, both the flooding and the tree felling concerns can be managed in a cost-effective, long-term, environmentally friendly and humane manner,” Callahan added, “which would allow the beavers to remain in the park providing environment benefits, public enjoyment and education values.”

South Windsor resident Steve Straight, who lives near the park, opposed the trapping from the start. He said the town should have investigated nonlethal methods first and needs to come up with a long-term solution.

Environment benefits, public enjoyment and education values. Let the beavers do their job. Game point. Set. Match. And the money shot?

“Let the citizens of South Windsor enjoy these fascinating creatures as they go about their work creating a tremendous ecosystem that harms no one. Let’s be clear — the beavers are not going away. And by the way, neither am I.”

How much do we love Steve? A very very lot of much, that’s how much. The best thing a beaver protector can do is be a stone in the river, making it more trouble to continue on the wrong path than it is to correct course and start on a better way. It’s of course good for the beavers, and the environment, But also for the entire community that gets to be part of a humane solution.

This is something we in Martinez particularly understand. If you haven’t seen this in a while I would just point out this is National news with Brit Hume at the end of the clip. And the flow device is already installed, You can see it in the shot over Dave’s shoulder. it’s just that no one believes it will work so the mayor of director of public works don’t even mention it.

ABOUT DAM TIME!

heidi08 Dispersal May 3, 2019

There have been so many slow beaver new days that I’m delighted to say today is BURSTING with beaver stories. Finally! And they hit all the right notes, from serious, to endearing to comical. Have I told you lately that I love you Google? Let’s start with this great piece about Torrey Ritter’s work.

Eager beavers: Biologists study what drives big rodents to colonize

It was looking for answers to the questions of how beavers select habitat, and what humans might do to encourage them to colonize, that earned Torrey Ritter his master’s degree from Montana State University last year. Now a nongame biologist for Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks, Ritter and others radio-tagged 55 beavers in southwest Montana to track their movements and learn more about what appeals to the animals when they search for new habitat.

“There were two main components: following them through the dispersal process, looking at new habitats they want, but also the trials and tribulations it takes to start a new colony,” he said. “There’s significant interest in using beavers in (wetland) restoration, establishing them in areas they’ve not been in, and we wanted to figure out how they select new sites in the wild.”

How do they pick a homeland? I’m curious! I mean how did our beavers decide to settle in brackish water next to a train, traffic and garbage trucks. I’d love to know.

While beavers removing trees and causing flooding may damage infrastructure in some cases, they play the role of habitat creators for a variety of wildlife while also altering streams to provide water storage and recharge groundwater.

“We were doing beaver surveys … and I started to realize there’s a huge number of species we were only seeing in beaver habitat,” Ritter said, which included varieties of waterfowl, songbirds, shore birds and amphibians. “They really create a diverse habitat and (create) all those little ecological niches.”

You’re kidding! You mean beavers make habitat for species that only congregate in beaver habitat? And so killing beavers is like killing all those other species too? It’s almost like you’re saying beaver lives matter. That’s incredible!

“There’s a lot of interest, and people’s first reaction is to start moving beaver everywhere, and that’s not the solution,” Inman said. “If the willows aren’t there, they’re going to move, and if the structures aren’t there to prevent flooding they’re likely to get removed. So the benefits that beaver can provide is not a matter of moving beaver, it’s a matter of preparing the habitat to have beaver come naturally.”

Ritter and others found through the research that when beavers do migrate from their home range they prefer to take up residence in areas already modified by beavers. In areas beavers have not previously occupied, building artificial structures such as lodges or dams can keep beavers from quickly leaving the area.

So they want to settle in suitable habitat. That’s a shocker! And when they see some other beaver has settled there they decide its suitable. Another shocker. Hmmm that gives me an idea, maybe we should build a beaver dam in Alhambra Creek right by a nice bridge. Do you think the mayor would mind?

The longest dispersal in the southwest Montana study was 27 miles while one of the tracked beavers made nearly 15-mile nightly journeys.

“The main takeaways are that beavers are really good at dispersing and finding habitat to occupy, and areas without beavers may not indicate there are not enough beavers but that habitat may not be readily available,” Ritter said

Which is why they move into Martinez. Excellent. Remind me to go hang an ‘occupant wanted sign” downtown, will you?

And now, at LONG LAST, you all knew this was coming.

The hilarious, extremely convincing proposal to make a beaver emoji.

You might not realize it, but there is a whole host of texting scenarios in which you might require a beaver emoji. A text to your friends in Canada, for example, to express your mutual admiration for their national animal. Or an invite to a fellow enthusiast of nocturnal semi-aquatic mammals to rendezvous at the nearest state park. (Alas, there is no dam emoji.) Or—why not?—a euphemistic missive to a consenting fellow sexter. Beaver emojis: probably very useful!

You’re kidding. There’s been NO beaver emoji all this time? What on earth do all you people text about?

If any of those examples apply to you, you’re in luck. Come October, the beaver emoji will be among this year’s class of new emojis, though it may take a whole year after that for the bucktoothed rodent to hit your phone. The proposal to include the beaver emoji comes thanks to a cadre of Canadians, lesbians, semi-aquatic mammal enthusiasts, and emoji specialists who wrote an extremely convincing and rather hilarious proposal, which in March was submitted to the Unicode Consortium, the nonprofit responsible for standardizing text and emoji across devices.

Just how much would you like to read that convincing and rather hilarious proposal? I dare say rather a lot. The important thing is that the beaver emoji is on its way. Coming soon to a phone near you.

BEAVER AT WORK

heidi08 Beavers and mud May 2, 2019

This is awesome footage, but I hate the idea that someone punctured a dam just so they’d have a place to install a night cam and watch it be rebuilt.

Finally we know how the mud feels when a beaver comes and stuffs it into holes in the dam! A heretofore misunderstood player in riparian restoration. I love how avid this beaver is – it isn’t enough for him to plug the leak, he has to actually fill in the space the link drains to!

I’m up to seven yard signs for the festival display, I still have to do bats, trout and nitrogen. But I think this makes an excellent showing so far. Wouldn’t these be awesome as a series of billboards on the freeway, like a mile apart as you were approaching Oregon on highway 5?