Month: June 2019

BEAVERS SAVING THE CHESAPEAKE

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact June 15, 2019

More and more voices of Chesapeake bay are starting to get the idea about beavers. Why on earth does this matter? Because these brave souls of Maryland and Virginia are the commuters to Washington DC where policy is made. It’s not inconceivable to imagine that someday beaver smarts will actually find legal footing.

For now there’s articles like this wonderful jewel in the Bay Journal by Tom Horton.

Leave it to beavers: Species’ ability to alter land should be revisited

Success by 2025 is going to depend more and more on how well we can halt pollution running from the land — specifically the land that our population radically alters wherever it goes.

Stormwater controls from developed landscapes are better designed than ever, but expensive. It’s uncertain they will be deployed, maintained, inspected and enforced anywhere near 100 percent. Sediment control, for example, decades after it became law in places like Maryland, remains inadequate.

And while such greening of the Bay’s lands is good, we know that far better would be green and wet; and that’s where we need to reconsider and actively restore the

beaver.

No creature on Earth, save for modern humans, has more capacity to transform a landscape; and in designing a landscape that produces excellent water quality, the beaver has no equal.

Are you paying attention yet? This is a professor talking about beavers being the best hope for controlling runoff to his beloved bay. Or as I prefer to read it. Every Bay Ever.

Through damming and ponding, beavers stanched the shedding of water from the watershed, cleansed it, filtered it, held back floods, let rain soak in to keep water tables high and streams running even in drought. They created luxurious habitats for a stunning variety of amphibians, fish, waterfowl and mammals.

In recent decades, beavers have come back to the point where a solid body of science in Canada and the United States confirms they were this continent’s most important keystone species — a species whose functioning underpins a whole ecosystem.

Ho ho ho, Merry Christmas. I love when a source you don’t expect starts getting preachy about beavers, Don’t you?

My class this year listened to a young man in the stream-restoration business say that in many cases, the work that his company does might be done as well or better by just releasing beavers.

But it is illegal to do that, he said.

That’s a mindset that needs to change. It will take education to overcome prevailing views of beavers as tree-chewing, property-flooding nuisances. They can be, but there are technologies to help us coexist — piping that keeps beaver ponds deep enough for the animals without flooding, for example.

Be still my heart. We need to change the laws to make beaver reintroduction legal. Do you have a twin brother in California by any chance?

You will hear more about beavers in my future columns — and in the news, I hope. A good place to start: Should the Chesapeake restoration effort include a beaver goal?

YES! YES! YES!

We all vote yes! Excellent way to move the discussion in the right direction. Now it’s just up to us to spread your words around the world far and wide. Thanks so much for this excellent start to the conversation!

Another glorious East Coast addition to our morning comes from beaver buddy and retired science teacher extraordinaire Art Wolinsky of New Hampshire. Who very kindly laid that pesky beaver fever question to rest in a gloriously understandable way,

TAILS OF PERSUASION

One of my very favorite stories to tell about the beavers came after the famous meeting that forced the city’s hand. The very newly formed Worth A Dam wanted to do its part and plant willow trees to replace the ones the beavers had eaten – thus taking some of the burden and showing the city everything would be okay. We had volunteers lined up and had worked with a nursery to buy natives and arrange free delivery.

The city, having been pushed around long enough by the beaver masses responded by saying before any planting would be allowed we needed an advanced biological assessment of the creek showing the trees they had taken and the effect on the ecosystem of the trees we wanted to replace them with. Basically it is clear in retrospect that they knew we were poor as church mice and they hoped we’d go away and take our rotten beavers with us.

Undaunted I picked up the phone and started calling environmental firms in Contra Costa County, Then in Alameda County. They all said they could do it but they all wanted $$$ and none of them loved beavers and wanted to help us out of the goodness of their hearts. Sadly I started to think the entire plan to show that the beavers could ‘pay for themselves’ and add value to the city wasn’t going to work.

I must have sat around sadly for an hour, and then the phone rang. It was Wendy Dexter then the head of Condor Consulting in Martinez, one of the very first to turn me down. Her voice sounded different right off the bat,

“I have a daughter” she said. “She’s four years old..”

Intrigued, I listened closely and said nothing.

“She made a tail at your recent event and she loves to wear it. She loves the beavers so every Saturday night we have to take her down to the bridge so she can wear her tail and watch them in the creek.”

If I’m telling the story in a formal presentation I usually show this photo:

“So we’ll help you. I send our senior biologist to do the assessment and he can start monday. Will that be soon enough?”

We got our assessment and we the beavers got their trees and we also got a story that has charmed generations of advocates from Montclaire to Mt Diablo Audubon.

And that little four year old is at UCDavis now.

Because sometimes all you can do to combat horrific obstacles is to simply be persistently and vociferously adorable. Which I thought of this morning when I read this.

Just when will beavers find a home again among the waterways of Wales?

A frustrated biologist who has ditched plans to reintroduce beavers in Carmarthenshire says a proper management plan is needed because the animals are gaining a foothold further afield. Nick Fox, of wildlife management group the Bevis Trust, said he had hoped to release a small number of beavers on a trial basis in the Cowin and Cynnen rivers, west of Carmarthen.

But he said after three years of discussions with environment body Natural Resources Wales (NRW), he felt sufficient progress was not being made. “I ran out of patience,” he said. “The disease risk assessment (of the application) was £6,000, and they wanted us to do a hydrological survey of the whole river system.”

Ahh Nick, we understand. It is enormously frustrating to know in your head that if you could just do the thing you have planned it would work out fine and everyone would be happier and better off. But they won’t let you show that it will work so you have no way of proving your point to the world and they just want to sit at their desks and count up the number of things that could go wrong.

I don’t know the answer and I don’t have £6,000 to give you. But I have learned over the years something about this process of bending unwilling minds and I can see right now that the answer is going to have to contain lots and lots of tails.

And an army of these:

And a bunch of this:

Repeat as necessary.

TIME FOR A ROAD TRIP!

heidi08 Beaver Art, Who's blaming beavers now? June 13, 2019

Well okay, I guess that’s a bit of a problem. You got me.

Beaver dam breach causes washout of Phillips road

PHILLIPS — A beaver dam that gave way during Tuesday’s rainstorm in Franklin County caused two roads to wash out and closed a portion of Route 4 for about five hours, a Fire Department official said.

Beaver activity in Adley Pond has caused the pond to swell in size, and during a period of heavy rain Tuesday the dam gave way, Deputy Chief Jeremy O’Neil said.

Now there are plenty of public work crews and power companies that when they can’t explain things say “Oh the beaver did it” and we thumb our noses at them. But I looked up the area on google earth and did see an huge swelling pond and what might have been a beaver dam So okay. It’s a fair cop. These things happen.

Luckily Mainers seem to be taking things in stride.

The road was closed for about five hours Tuesday afternoon. It reopened around 6:15 p.m. and is safe to use, although further repairs will be needed, O’Neil said.

“(The beavers) don’t adhere to modern building codes, so when we had a significant amount of water in that body of water, the dam breached,” he said.

The Fire Department helped reroute traffic while the DOT and the Highway Department repaired the road.

I’m sure the beavers would say “Building codes are for sissies! We don’t need no stinking codes“. Or something to that effect,

Amelia is hard at work on the brochure for the festival and I just had to share her stellar map of the park, Don’t you want to go right away? Isn’t this amazing? We are so luck she has been kind enough to help us for a million years,

BELLADONA BEAVER ON THE MISSOURI

heidi08 History June 12, 2019

Exactly what kind of beaver reporter am I? I can’t believe I let you down and didn’t tell you what was happening right now on the missouri river where a dougout canoe called the Belladona Beaver is retracing the steps of Lewis and Clark in magnificent style.

The plucky adventure is the combined effort of author, historian and bush expert Thomas J. Elpel and the great-great-great-great-great grandson of Mr. Meriwether himself who spent a year hollowing out a canoe that from a massive tree (they couldn’t get a cottonwood big enough so used a douglas fur) and are now making their way down the missouri just the way their forefathers did.

Missouri River Corps of Rediscovery #1

Our little fleet consists of three modern canoes plus my dugout canoe, and six men to pilot them down the river—not so respectable as Columbus, Capt. Cook, or Lewis and Clark, but still viewed by us with equal pleasure as we embark on our own journey of discovery.

Scott, Chris, John, Josiah, Adam, and I launched from Missouri Headwaters State Park near Three Forks, Montana on June 1st to begin our six-month voyage downriver to St. Louis. Friends and well-wishers came to see us off, and seven other paddlers joined us for the day in their own canoes and kayaks.

Why??? You might ask when you see how darned much work it took to hollow out this log and get things this far, Why would men forsake their couch and cable TV just to paddle a journey in a tree.

But WHY NOT is a better question. To follow the footsteps of an ancestor that basically made America as we know it possible. To use your own hands to create a canoe from a tree as heavy as our history. Of course following the footsteps of the beaver. This time literally inside a beaver canoe.

The whole journey is being reported on their website which starts aptly with a quote from the famous Meriwether Lewis journal account. You can follow for yourself here. Not for the feint of heart or timid of hand. But fortune favors the brave and destiny waits for no man. June 11th they posted their third report from the river where they are boldly embracing their history by finding wild morels and catching trout after a full days paddle. Honestly you have to vibrate on a very rare frequency to commit 2 years of your life to this, but I am sure they will learn and see things we can never never understand.

As an example of the need to be made of sterner stuff to than we can hope for – just reading about their first portage getting around the Toston dam makes me queasy.

We never actually weighed Belladonna Beaver the dugout canoe, but optimistically claimed that it weighed 500 lbs. In actuality, four men cannot even lift the front of the canoe, and the total weight might be considerably more. By weighting down the back, lifting the front, and winching from a tree, we succeeded in getting her head out of the water and on the grass. Switching to the next tree, we pulled Belladonna across the grass on PVC pipes as rollers, then towed her forward with a rope from the truck and ultimately used a car jack to get her head high enough to load onto the canoe trailer.

One of the many disadvantages of not using the plentiful cottonwoods of their forefathers is that the wood dries more slowly and probably takes on more water, in addition to being full of knots and very hard to carve. No matter. They are more than men up to the challenge. Let’s hope they see some actual beavers on the journey to capture the spirit more firmly,

I’m sure we’ll be checking in on them again soon. Here is a video if their test run last year on the Maria river.

THIS JUST IN: BEAVERS DON’T EAT BUGS

heidi08 beaver myths June 11, 2019

I’m sure you all played the game of “Telephone” as a child, where one kid whispers a secret into the ear of a classmate seated in a ring and they pass it to the next one and it eventually makes its way all around the circle to the very last person who tells outloud what garbled message they heard.

Usually its transformed by them from something benign like “Emily is very smart” to something incomprehensible and outrageous like “He has manly farts” or something similarly hilarious. And everyone collapses in a heap of giggling.

Well, I think that might be how this article got written.

There are beaver myths that hardly raise an eyebrow, like saying they eat fish for instance or that they aren’t native to California. And then there are beaver myths that really get your attention – that stop the train in mid tracks and just make you scratch your head and go “huh?”.

This nice article from sonoma had one of those.

Threatened beavers return to Sonoma

When a Sonoma Valley woman saw a tree in her yard felled and chiseled by V-shaped gnaw marks, she was surprised and not quite sure what had caused the damage. Soon she learned it was the work of something she never expected to find near her home: a beaver.

“I really now understand the phrases ‘busy beaver’ and ‘eager beaver.’ We wake up in the morning and look out and think ‘wow’ look how much they did overnight,” she said. Every day that passed more of the tree disappeared developing into an hourglass shape where the beaver noshed, and late last week the tree was down.

The woman asked not to be identified by the Index-Tribune in order to protect the beaver and their habitat from the beaver-curious.

What a nice beginning to the article about our neighbors getting the very best kind of neighbors. I’m surprised she didn’t know what was eating her tree but I’m happy she is glad to have beavers back in Sonoma. So far so good. This is where it starts to get dicey.

Beaver are prey animals and easily spooked, said Richard Dale, executive director of the Sonoma Ecology Center. He said he’s seen beaver in the daytime, but as soon as they detect his presence they slap their tails and disappear.

Well I guess is some areas. They can also become habituated to human presence as we well know. I guess Richard will find that out soon enough.

Indication of their activities are usually more evident, such as the gnaw marks the local woman found. Dale said they make diagnostic V-shaped marks on trees, which they eat and use to build lodges where they hide for safety. They’ll use pretty much anything to build the lodge but typically they are made of sticks, rock and mud.

V shapes on trees? I mean I know they nibble trees before feasting and they sometimes make prominent V shapes in the water when they swim, but V shapes on trees? I guess if they try tilting their heads this way and then that way that would make a V?

It gets better. Brace yourselves.

They eat bugs, deciduous tree bark and cambium – the soft tissue under the bark – and are partial to willow, cottonwood, maple and a couple other tree species.

They eat BUGS?

Bugs and Cottonwood trees? What kind of Bugs exactly? Lady Bugs? Worms? Mosquito larvae?

I read that and thought maybe it’s a typo, maybe they meant to say “Buds” like new juicy flowers shooting up from the ground. I’m pretty sure there aren’t any animals that eat both bugs and the cambium layer of trees. Maybe honey badgers?

Sonoma clearly needs to come to the beaver festival and learn from the smart people who have been living with them for a decade. Oh and bring Mr. Dale along too. I can give some clues about talking to the media.

“They’ve been part of the ecosystems for thousands of years. Many systems are dependent on them,” said Dale, who has been studying them for about 25 years. Dale said beaver sightings in town are rare, but he recalls hearing of occasional sightings north of the city since the early 1990s.

“I was blown away when I saw them,” he said of the recent sightings.

While some people consider them a nuisance, beaver are called “keystone species” or “grassroots conservationists” and are considered vital to riparian habitats. They will build lodges in three different ways – open-water lodge, bank lodge or bank den, or burrow – and one colony may have several lodges scattered around their home range.

The lodges extend wetlands, elevate water tables and allow for recharging of aquifers and wells, and provide “habitat for other critters,” Dale said. In areas where there are beaver lodges vegetation and watersheds stabilize, and downstream flooding and silt runoff is reduced.

Well sure beavers are valuable to the landscape. They clean up all those BUGS no one else wants around. And their lodges extend wetlands. Because you know how beavers always build those LODGES to block the water.

Geez Perryman, cut them some slack. It’s not like there have been beavers on the landscape for the last 150 or there are any expertly maintained websites where they could learn better. Right?

For those times when a beaver is destroying valuable plants – such as vineyards – there is “beaver deceiver” technology out there, Lundquist and Dale said. Wrapping trees with wire will protect the bark, and if the lodge is in a place where too much water is backing up, there are simple cost-effective ways to release some of the water from the pond beavers have created.

You all know how a beaver deceiver protects trees and vineyard right?

Oy.