Month: August 2019

GOOFUS AND GALLANT: BEAVER VERSION

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact, Beavers and salmon, Festival August 16, 2019

You know how it is. Two steps forward, one step back. You know it as well as I do. Beaver progress is as closely woven with beaver failure that the seam between them isn’t visible anymore. Both just happen together.

So it occurs that National Geographic launches an issue with beaver benefits to salmon at the same time the Anne of Green Gables releases this pressing concern.

Beaver dam, debris cluttering up endangered salmon habitat in Cornwall, P.E.I.

“Most of our work has to do with rehabilitating salmon habitat in Watts Creek. Watts Creek is a very well-known salmon river,” said Karalee McAskill, co-ordinator for the watershed.

“Beavers tend to dam up the flow of the river and, as a consequence from that, any sediment that’s coming down from up above settles out into these large beaver pond impoundments,” she said.

“Sometimes it’s six- to seven-feet deep of silt and sediment and mud, it’s almost like quicksand if you’re stepping in it.”

Oh those darn beavers, trapping sediment and maintaining a tireless dam. I just hate when they do that. And boy does NOAA fisheries hate it too.

It there’s one thing that juvenile salmon don’t need its all those annoying deep pools rich with food where they can fatten before heading off to sea. They hate that.

Salmon can thrive in other provinces with deeper rivers and streams, she said, as they can leap up waterfalls and rapids.

But some of P.E.I.’s gentle, relatively shallow waters do not offer salmon the depth or swift currents they need to push past dams built by beavers. As a result, endangered Atlantic salmon will not spawn or they’ll find another area altogether, which is concerning for the watershed.

Our special water is too special for salmon to use if there are nasty beaver present. Where have I heard that before?

Beavers can drag their bellies and create “beautiful, magnificent channels that salmon love to cruise through.” Fish and other wildlife behind dams can also thrive because there’s more food.

“So the beavers are actually great in one sense, but the dam is the issue,” she said. “We can’t relocate that beaver because then it will become someone else’s problem.”

Drag their bellies? Drag their bellies? You think we construct all these complex channels by “dragging our bellies?”

Shorter Karalee McAskil: I mean I’d love to have the benefits of beavers, but you know. Those rotten dams. They just mess everything up for those fish that we mostly don’t actually have anymore. So screw the woodducks and the otters, because we just can’t have our imaginary fish jumping over rotten dams, Right?

Oh adorable, misinformed and neglected P.E.I. You are so plucky in your persistence to be wrong. It’s almost admirable. Don’t worry, information is trickling very slowly, we can tell. It won’t come as one big shock, You used to complain that beavers weren’t even native, and that they ruined habitat for everything. Now you’ve advanced three whole baby steps and say they CAN be good in some places, just not on the special unique water you have on the magic Anne island.

Sure, I guess, whatever.

Now let’s hurry up and get to the steps forward part. Guess what?

Come September ANOTHER beaver ~~festival~~ celebration kicks into gear. Seems our friends at the Methow project can’t wait to follow in our webbed footsteps.

Beaver celebration to be held Sept. 14

The Methow Beaver Project will hold its first Beaver Celebration on Sept. 14 and 15, 5-9:30 p.m. Come join in the fun at this free event, starting with a social in Mack Lloyd Park at 5 p.m. on Saturday the 14th. Mingle and share in the excitement around beaver ecology and restoration while sipping on Special Edition OSB Tail Slapper Ale or Sixknot Sawtooth Cider, available for purchase, and sampling “small bites” from Sunflower Catering.

At 6:30 p.m., the celebration will move into the Winthrop Barn for presentations by Ben Goldfarb, author of Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, and Sarah Koenigsberg, who will screen her feature film The Beaver Believers. Beaver restoration site tours will be offered on Sunday morning, the 15th, sign up at Saturday’s event and choose an easy, moderate, or more strenuous option.

Well, well, well. They’re offering beaver tours, a Ben presentation and A Film screening! Remember its Washington so I imagining it won’t be hard to get folks to come and enjoy your efforts. Maybe something for the kids to do while all those grownups are drinking and listening? And I might suggest some live music and a raffle?

We wish you every success!

HOP ON THE BEAVER TRAIN: SAN JOSE TO LONDON TO MARTINEZ

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? August 15, 2019

Again with the good news. You must find me redundant. I’m afraid I’m going to have to tell you three very good things today. Again. You’re going to think I exaggerate or make stuff up. I swear its all true.

And I swear the last one is the very very very best.

The first comes from the Estuary magazine and stars an article written by a very good beaver friend. Talk about bringing in the big guns!

Two long-scarce freshwater mammal species are staging a comeback in Bay Area waterways.

By Joe Wheaton

Beavers are expanding in Santa Clara County. Steve Holmes of the South Bay Clean Creeks Coalition found a pregnant beaver on the Guadalupe River in 2013; others have been spotted in San Jose, Campbell, and Sunnyvale, and this spring De Anza College student Ibrahim Ismail discovered a den on Los Gatos Creek.

Nineteenth-century records place beavers in the South Bay before their local extirpation, but CDFW does not issue permits for beaver relocation because of their nuisance potential. Although there are beaver colonies in Martinez and a few other Bay Area sites, the origins of the South Bay colonies are not known; the beavers may have moved downstream from Lexington Reservoir, where they were reportedly introduced in the 1990s under unclear circumstances.

Hurray! A shoutout for urban beavers, beaver nativity and the Martinez beavers in particular! I knew this was coming because Joe contacted me on the nativity angle a while ago. I’m happy the brought him in to write this, but not quite so happy about this paragraph.

Holmes welcomes the return of the furry ecosystem engineers, whose activities have been shown elsewhere to improve habitat for salmonids. However, Santa Clara Valley Water District biologists Doug Titus and Navroop Jassal note that those studies may not match South Bay conditions, and explain that dams could affect threatened steelhead by blocking migration, increasing water temperatures, and providing habitat for exotic predators. However, they say that so far no negative impacts from dam-building or other beaver work have been observed.

Say it with me now. “That research doesn’t apply to these very specialized special conditions”. “We’re the silicon valley for pete’s sake. Nothing in the world comes close. Google it! In our habitat beavers actually HARM steelhead. So we better kill them.”

Well Steve is watching out for them, and Rick is too on the RCD, I’m going to assume good things for now. As we found, by the time you make it into Estuary magazine you’re already home free.

Onto some great mews from London. No not THAT one. This one is in Ontario just across the water from detroit.

Conservation authority baffles beavers to save city infrastructure

Some call it a beaver baffler. Others prefer beaver deceiver. In the simplest terms, it’s a pond-levelling contraption, made up of a pipe and a cage, that not only controls unwanted flooding but also tricks a beaver into thinking everything is just fine.

On Wednesday, the Upper Thames River Conservation Authority installed one in the Pincombe Drain, a tributary of Dingman Creek near a subdivision at Southdale and Wharncliffe roads in London.

It’s true enough. Some people use the proper names for things and some just make them up as they go along. But heck, I shouldn’t criticize. Not only did they do the very right thing here, they also did it for the most very right reasons.

“As we encroach on the rural landscape and farmers take back more land and they make more drains rather than creeks, beavers are coming back to the city,” Williamson said. “We’re creating all these green spaces and the beavers come in and form these wetland niches.

“That’s a positive thing and it’s an amazing habitat. The only thing is the wildlife is competing with infrastructure and human activity — things like flooding on roads, culverts, storm water management ponds and hazard trees. Those are really the only issues we have with beavers.”

Okay then, we can all see you obviously are installing a pond leveler and were trained either by Mike’s visit to London a few years back or his videos, but you’re doing it right and for the right reasons. And we just love you for it!

Okay now for the really, really good news. This was filmed yesterday morning by Nancy Fleischauer at the Ward street bridge in Martinez. Can I get an Amen?

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BEAVER BENEFITS IN NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

heidi08 Beavers and salmon, saltwater August 14, 2019

Just when you were feeling like summer had gotten to that sleepy, not-much-happening stage, we find a glut of beaver news. Yesterday four prime articles dropped and they all deserve our attention but I’ll start at the top and let the others trickle out later. There are beavers again in National Geographic. Sadly not written by Ben Goldfarb, but quoting him. Does that count?

Beavers on the coast are helping salmon bounce back. Here’s how.

This tidally salty wetland might seem a strange place to search for beaver, which are known to settle in freshwater ponds, lakes, rivers, and wetlands throughout North America, but that’s what I had come for. The beavers’ presence is remarkable not just because they’re only typically found inland, but also because their ecosystem engineering is the suspected key to the remarkable Chinook salmon recovery that’s going on here.

These dam-created pools are one of numerous, well-documented ways beavers create advantages for fish. They provide havens during times of drought. They also create slower-water habitats that host many more insect larvae—which feed fish—than fast-moving channels. Beaver lodges offer physical refuge for young fish navigating the predator-rich waters.

Oh this is fun. Having the full force of NGO and its team of graphics specialists turned for the moment like a bright spotlight on the subject of beavers. Promise me you’ll go read the whole thing later, okay?

Got that? Before beaver very few salmon. After beaver very many more salmon. Are you even listening wildlife services?

In near-shore areas, where tides impact the lives of all animals daily or seasonally, low-tide pool habitats created by beaver dams allow juvenile fish to seek refuge from predation, says Greg Hood, a senior research scientist at Washington’s Skagit River System Cooperative, who has researched beavers there. “The pools beavers make are too shallow for diving predators like mergansers and kingfishers and bigger fish. But the pools are too deep for waders like great blue herons, and there’s too much shrub around the margins, so birds with big wings can’t get in there.”

In his research, Hood found that pools created by beaver dams in the tidal marshland channels tripled juvenile Chinook salmon habitat compared to similar marshlands without beavers.

I have a question. How do fish know to avoid predation from birds? What is their thought process? “A big beak comes when the waters deep sometimes and eats my friends so lets go somewhere shallow?” Do fish even know whether water is shallow or deep?

Despite this evidence, there has been resistance to beaver dams in salmon streams, the concern being that they might impede the salmon’s ability to swim upriver—after all, the reason human-made dams have been removed is to help salmon. “Beaver dams are nothing like human-built dams though—they are lower, semi-permeable, and due to their porous construction, fish can go over or around them,” says Ben Goldfarb, author of Eager: The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, who points out that beavers and salmon co-evolved in the same ecosystems.

HOORAY! A fine Ben-sert! Nicely done sir. And people who think beavers block salmon don’t do their homework. Everyone knows that.

Beavers have probably continuously lived in environments that are difficult for people to access, says Hood. Beavers in out-of-the-way places were protected from humans and other predators, so they were likely unknown—or forgotten. Hood blames “ecological amnesia” for some of our assumptions about where beavers are “supposed” to live. He found just as many beavers living in the tidal shrub marshlands at the mouth the Skagit River than in other non-tidal rivers.

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Back at the mouth of the Elwha, Shaffer shows me how the beavers here are trying different channel locations and building techniques for their dams, looking for just the right placement in this particular ecosystem. It’s this kind of adaptive flexibility to local environments that led to beaver’s widespread success in North America in the past—and is key to its survival in the future. Because beavers’ building naturally expands entire ecosystems, their triumphs are a boon for other animals too, including those in need of all the help they can get—like Chinook salmon.

Ooh lala. Beavers are adaptive ecological swiss army knives that get the job done. I love this article! And that video. Isn’t it amazing? NG doesn’t allow it to be embedded so I tried a workaround with a new tool. If a team of attorneys come lock me up and throw away the key just remember I tried to spread the beaver gospel.

Now go read the whole thing, and make sure it’s open in all the waiting room coffee tables later this month.

CITIZEN SCIENCE AND BEAVERS

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver ecological impact August 13, 2019

I don’t know about you but I’m exhausted.

Endangered Species Act gutted, salmon sold out, and the wrong criminals dead makes me tired before I even start the day. Good thing for us beavers aren’t endangered. And every single nasty thing they’re doing to the water and soil can only be improved by their presence,

At least their are still pockets where the federal government can do the right thing.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Citizen Science Competitive Funding Program—now in its second year—promotes community engagement and encourages partners and volunteers to work with the Forest Service to gather valuable data that furthers land management. The USDA Forest Service recently awarded funds to 13 diverse citizen science projects at three levels of development: Ideation, Development, and Implementation and Ongoing Projects.

“The projects are exciting because they are happening across diverse landscapes all over the country,” said Susan Stein, acting Assistant Director for Adaptive Management and Resource Information. “Citizen scientists of all ages will be exploring exciting topics such as eDNA techniques, beaver habitats, cemetery landscapes and traffic impacts on wildlife.”

Now that sounds great! Partnering with the community to help USFS get important things done for the environment. Tell me more about one of the winners. I’m interested in one in particular.

Implementing a Citizen Science Beaver Assessment Program & Protocol for Lolo National Forest

Location: Lolo National Forest, Montana
Partner Project Lead: Lily Haines, Education Clark Fork Coalition
Forest Service Project Lead: Traci Sylte, Soils/Water/Fisheries Program,
Funding Award: $25,000

This project engages volunteers in compelling conservation work centered around the charismatic beaver. Evidence indicates that beavers increase water storage, which could help decrease wildfire risks as valleys become water-saturated. A comprehensive beaver inventory and understanding can help inform wildlife management as well as improve timber stand resilience and restore streams. Land managers want to know where beavers are and why they are there, as well as where more populations can (or should) be established.

In 2018, the Clark Fork Coalition (CFC) teamed up with the Montana Conservation Corps (MCC) and the National Wildlife Federation to recruit middle schoolers as citizen scientists and address the lack of capacity for gathering this important data on beaver habitat in the Lolo Creek Watershed.

The program will expand in 2019 with funding from the CitSci Fund. Teams of youth and adult citizen scientists will document beaver presence, inventory current/historical beaver signs, and create high-resolution assessments of beaver habitat on priority streams on Lolo National Forest and adjacent lands.

Volunteer tasks are intentionally designed to involve them in multiple aspects of the scientific method (asking questions; collecting and interpreting data) and the application of knowledge (design review, identifying problems, discovering solutions) in order to develop the full spectrum of skills, knowledge, and attitudes that lead to deeply-meaningful engagement in the management of public lands and pathways to STEM careers.

Good work Montana! You have done a fantastic job of beaver education in the last five years, and folks are really catching on! I’m so happy to know that the forest service knows whats good for them and is actively seeking beavers on that land. And here’s hoping all those middle-schoolers grow up remembering why they matter so that when they show up on their farms or ranches or city creeks someday, they’ll remember.

And when we’re done helping with that citizen science project I want to sign up for this course, don’t you?

Blu Zoo: A weeklong workshop with art and animals

SARANAC LAKE – From Aug. 12-16, BluSeed Studios will offer a different creative experience combing art and science for children ages 8 to 12.

BluSeed Studios will be partnering with the Utica Zoo to bring area youth a hands-on art and science integration program. This year’s theme is all about water and the incredible journey from glacier to cloud. Campers will have the opportunity to create art and meet animals through projects that revolve around the water cycle.

Artist Carol Marie Vossler will offer instruction along with Utica Zoo’s Mary Hall. “It will be an amazing experience for the children to meet animals face to face and seamlessly integrate science and art through this unique learning experience,” Vossler said.

Nice. Check out the schedule for the week. Pay special attention to number three.

The BluZoo Camp Schedule at BluSeed Studios is as follows:

Day 1: “A drop in the bucket.” Art project: marbling.
Day 2: “All downstream from here.” Rivers and Streams. Art project: Forest in a jar — rock painting.
Day 3: “Dam! What is living in that Beaver Pond water!” Art project: Beaver Stick Sculpture.
Day 4: “Sea Urchins and Starfish!” Salt & Seawater. Art project: Watercolor.
Day 5: Tarantulas & Tortoises: Desert Oasis–Art Project: Desert sculpture

Well well well. That looks like a fine line up. It’s almost like the entire activity list could have fit into a beaver festival! I like the idea of a beaver stick sculpture. I’m pretty sure it won’t be actual beaver sticks though. That’s only in Martinez. As this fine photo of my neice demonstrates:

BEAVER MEMORY LANE

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Video August 12, 2019

Lately I’ve been browsing through some very old files trying to find what I can of my original beaver footage on the newish computer. I first filmed father beaver in January of 2007 when I accidentally got lucky enough to stumble upon him at the bridge. I could not believe what I’d seen and wanted desperately to share it. Just around the time I bought a new mac and thought it would be a great idea to store my beaver footage there. Eventually I used that footage in my very first video about the beavers, but sadly the original footage got corrupted and I have no actual record of seeing the beavers until May of that year.
It wasn’t without some labor that I managed to make a short video and stick it on youtube. I knew NOTHING about these things back then, In fact You Tube itself was barely two years old which should blow your mind. It was so little used that during the first year I actually received a couple ‘most watched animal video‘ notices, which thinking about in today’s standards was a complete impossibility.

Here was the maiden voyage.

Things happen, I realize that computers come with hazards, but I was especially sad to lose that original footage. In those days I was filming with a very very old camera so those movies were stored on .avi files which my windows 10 PC now is not friends with. I thought the best moment I ever shot was lost to the wind and only available on a squished youtube upload.

Yesterday I found out that wasn’t true

Please enjoy this footage taken June 15 2007. It will still be squished by Vimeo but not as much. Pay special attention to the narrators dialogue which indicates how very little Jon and I knew at the time about these foreign beavers who were just starting to introduce us to their lives. In those days I thought the kits might be born at different times. Like chickens apparently?

I guess I can sort of understand the confusion. One kit was filmed by itself a week earlier (also lost) and seemed to be fatter than the others. In hindsight I would say he just happened to be the most pushy. But the point is that we were completely smitten. And we that turned out to be a very good thing.

Hopefully I will turn down some dark corner one day and find the missing footage that I remember as vividly as my first day of school. For now I’m pretty grateful for this much.

And a special shout out to the man whose been my partner in beavering for more years than I even spent in college including graduate school and who’s voice you hear in the discovery. Happy birthday to the partner in all things beaver and otherwise.