Month: August 2019

MONEY FOR BEAVERS AND YOUR FISH FOR FREE

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, BDA's, beaver myths, Beavers and Birds August 11, 2019

Well it looks like someone’s getting a nice fat grant from NOAA to help fish by helping beavers. Ain’t it funny how life works? I mean in Wisconsin you could probably get a grant for destroying beaver dams because you said it would help fish.

Location. Location. Location.

National Marine Fisheries Service grants $15 million for salmon habitat

SALEM — Oregon’s salmon and steelhead bearing streams will benefit from $15 million recently allocated by the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The Pacific Coast Salmon Recovery Fund money, along with Oregon Lottery proceeds, are granted to the state’s soil and water conservation districts and watershed councils by the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board to improve habitat for species listed on the federal Endangered Species List.

In Wheeler County, Chase Schultz, the soil and water conservation district manager, said the grants he’s received through the Watershed Enhancement Board are used to cool stream temperatures and improve water quality with streamside planting and fake beaver dams.

“Beaver dam analogs are a hot button topic,” Schultz said.

Built from untreated wooden posts driven perpendicularly into the stream and woven with willow whips, the analogs simulate a beaver dam by spreading a stream’s water out into the floodplain, benefiting adjacent wetlands, Schultz said. The analogs also increase stream flow later in the summer, slowing water down that is released longer into the summer and early fall.

The hope, Schultz said, is to create the habitat to attract beavers to move in and maintain the dams.

The best part, he said, is the dams quickly create desired results. Immediately following the 2017 installation of a dam on Bear Creek, a tributary to the lower stem of the John Day River, Schultz said water started backing up and extended a wetted reach almost 2 miles.

You know how it is. Everyone wants the popular kids to sit at their table. Sometimes you get lucky and a family of beavers moves right in and starts doing your work for free. It’s a pretty fine day when that happens, I can tell you.

<span style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" data-mce-type="bookmark" class="mce_SELRES_start"></span><span style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" data-mce-type="bookmark" class="mce_SELRES_start"></span>There’s more good news on the beaver bandwagon because our Idaho friends will be hosting their SIXTH beaver dam jam. Wonderful!

6th annual Beaver Dam Jam to raise Money for watershed guardians

POCATELLO — The 6th annual Watershed Guardians Beaver Dam Jam to support beaver conservation will present music and other activities from 4 to 8 p.m. Aug. 24 at the Mink Creek Pavilion.

The pavilion is located in the Caribou National Forest at the Mink Creek Group Camp Site on South Mink Creek Road outside of Pocatello.

Besides live music, the event features food, a silent auction and a super raffle featuring a boat and boating gear among other items. There will be games and demonstrations.

All of Idaho should thank the heavens for sending Mike Settell to Pocatello and getting this started. He had the vision to find friends and make this happen. It seems a very long time ago indeed that I first read about Mike getting a grant from Audubon to help in his beaver count. Now he does it with a team of volunteers in snowshoes every winter. And rocks out at the beaver dam jam every summer.

That’s a busy man!

“The event is in (a) great setting with great music and food,” said Mike Settell, founder of Watershed Guardians, the organization sponsoring this event. “We are doing this because beaver do more to help preserve healthy native fisheries than perhaps any other factor, and Watershed Guardians is the only beaver conservation organization in Idaho working to ensure they remain.”

See what I mean? Beavers seem to get the best champions.

Oh and lets throw out one more beaver shout to Jennalee Larson Naturalist Intern at Good Earth State Park in South Dakota. For some reason the Dakotas have always been smarter about beavers than lots of their neighbors. Well, mostly.

Just for Kids: SD Children in Nature

Beavers are known as ecosystem engineers. Ecosystem engineers are animals that create, change, and maintain a habitat. These animals strongly affect the other animals living there.

Beavers make small changes that can really impact their ecosystems. They create dams by removing living trees and using them as a part of the structure. Once they create their dam, a pond often forms which brings an abundant amount of new biodiversity (variety of life). Some birds are unaffected by the destruction of trees while other decline or increase in number. Because the dams create ponds, there is a wading area for birds to thrive in as well as a place to lay their eggs if a dam happened to be abandoned. Reptiles benefit as the beavers create a basking area for them on logs. They also benefit from the loss of trees because the forest then grows new early vegetation and the dam creates a slow moving water which some animals prefer. Invertebrates that prefer slow-moving water start to increase in number

Create a yummy dam out of pretzels for a snack: Use peanut butter spread, marshmallow, or chocolate spread depending on preference. Add stick pretzels to the spread of your choice. Once it is all mixed, give each kid a scoop and have them shape it into their own dam.

First let me praise your very fine attention to beavers and their impact on the environment. Good job, Jennalee. And sure, have the kids make a their own frosted dam or whatever. Mmmm disgusting. And now that we have established our support. um, can you maybe tell me more about your idea that birds can nest in abandoned beaver dams?

I assume this means you are thinking beavers live INSIDE the dam? And if they move out birds can move in? Or are you thinking that birds can lay their eggs directly on top of the sticks in a beaver dam? I’m not sure that would work out too well, even if they didn’t get predated or roll off into the water….

BEAVERS: SINS OF THE PAST

heidi08 Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Nitrates, Beavers and water August 10, 2019

Dr. Ellen Wohl.the accomplished fluvial geomorphologist and hydrologist didn’t go to graduate school to study beavers. She hasn’t spent her career sresearching them at Colorado State. Ellen studies rivers and knows more about them, their fluvial processes and history than maybe any human living.

But her research keeps bumping into one particular non-human over and over again,

The American Geophysical Union was formed in 1919 and is housed in Washington DC, (or was when I started this post- it may have been moved with the USDA by now to Kansas.) Their Centennial celebration invited scientists across the nation to show case important works in a field that is literally defining its own boundaries.

And one of those chosen scientists is Dr. Ellen Wohl, who wrote about our own forgotten impact on rivers and brought an old friend along to help her tell the story.

Forgotten Legacies: Understanding Human Influences on Rivers

Logging, urbanization, and dam building are a few ways people have significantly altered natural river ecosystems. Understanding that influence is a grand challenge of our time.

Rivers are fundamental landscape components that provide vital ecosystem services, including drinking water supplies, habitat, biodiversity, and attenuation of downstream fluxes of water, sediment, organic carbon, and nutrients. Extensive research has been devoted to quantifying and predicting river characteristics such as stream flow, sediment transport, and channel morphology and stability. However, scientists and society more broadly are often unaware of the long-standing effects of human activities on contemporary river ecosystems, particularly when those activities ceased long ago, and thus, the legacies of humans on rivers have been inadequately acknowledged and addressed

Her basic tenet? We have screwed up our rivers for so long that we don’t even remember what they’re supposed to look like. We need to look at historical clues to understand what we should be striving for in restoration. And you know what that means.

Legacies, in this context, are defined as persistent changes in natural systems resulting from human activities. Legacies that affect river ecosystems result from human alterations both outside river corridors, such as timber harvesting and urbanization, and within river corridors, including flow regulation, river engineering, and removal of large-wood debris and beaver dams.

The desecration we created was the result of no invasion. The damage was done by our own hands, for our own gain for hundreds of years. Centuries of trapping lead to centuries of broken river mechanisms, and if we’re going to fix that we need to strive to replace some semblance of what was stolen.

There are various approaches to accomplish this. One is to maintain or restore characteristics of a river corridor that create a desired process. This approach underlies, for example, the restoration of riparian vegetation as a buffer to retain upland inputs of nitrogen, phosphorus, and fine sediment. Another approach is to create a template of river corridor form that will facilitate desired processes. Examples include the emplacement of engineered logjams [Roni et al., 2014] or beaver dams [Bouwes et al., 2016] to mimic the function of natural features, setting back levees to restore channel-floodplain connectivity [Florsheim and Mount, 2002], and removing artificial barriers to allow high flows to return to abandoned channels [Nilsson et al., 2005b].

To fix our rivers bring back beavers. Don’t look at me, I didn’t say it. This is in a national publication striving for the health of our planet. I trust Dr. Woh’s judgment implicitly in these matters, don’t you?

Effectively addressing these questions requires that we understand how past human activities have modified river corridor process and form, as well as how those past alterations constrain river science and management going forward.

You have to know what was lost before you try and get it back. That seems obvious. And that means we have to recognize how much we devastated those streams by taking out beavers of them. Which means we have to admit that beavers are good for streams. It’s basic science. No one can argue with that?

Oh, wait. Never mind.

Speaking of government scientists I have a funny funny joke I’ve been saving to tell you.

Seems that all the new restrictions on beaver trapping for the USDA in Oregon and California have made wildlife services want to add some new tools to the rusty box. They are reportedly working on a brochure to give to landowners when they complain about beavers that talks about coexistence and all the good things they do. So of course they’re looking for photos and approached Michael Pollock to see if he had some.

So of course he asked me. If Worth A Dam might have a few good beaver photos worth sharing with wildlife services to teach folks to live with beavers.

Now that’s one place I never expected to be. So of course I gathered a collection of wonderful beaver photos and passed them along with the understanding that they’d credit Cheryl Reynolds of Worth A Dam if they used them. Stay tuned for more of the story because we might be in a wildlife services pamphlet.

Think about that.

AN OMISSION BY THE COMMISSION

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers August 9, 2019

Guess how many times the water portfolio discussion for California mentioned beavers?

I’ll give you a hint. It’s a round number. They of course discussed fish and high meadows and water retention and slow release during the summer months. But the B word was never spoken or even hinted in their efforts. They did talk about nutria being very bad. And mentioned that their killing efforts were hardly killy enough for all the killing they deserved,

But no one ever talked about beaver.

August 8th was also the day that NPS released their EIS plan for managment of the Tule Elk in pt Reyes National Seashore. The stately animals exist no where else in the world and were eliminated from our state by 1876. 10 elk were reintroduced at the very end of Tomales park in 1976. and they have taken hold and thrived. Some escaped their fencing and there are now two free range herds in the park which are causing hazards for the historic working farms in the area.

What should be done?

The EIR considers 6 alternatives, most of which involve killing some of the elk and protecting the ranch lands because they’re “integral to the park:” NPS prefers alternative B which means killing off the free range elk and keeping 120 adult elk at Tomales point to protect new ranching zones in the park. Plan C, D, and E involve some variation of that.

Alternative F involves letting the elk do their thing and has no ranching in the park – which they denote would improve soil, water and air quality.

NPS worries:

However, discontinuing dairy operations in alternative E would result in an adverse impact by removing the opportunity for visitors to observe and experience active dairy ranching in a historic district. Under alternative F, removing ranching operations would eliminate a unique experience for visitors to experience the role of coastal prairie ranching in California and in the historic districts, resulting in an adverse effect for visitors seeking those opportunities.”

Because you know how you take friends from out of state to point reyes to see all the historic ranching. And how you treasure those photographs that remind you of that magic moment when the fog parted and you saw your loved ones surrounded by dairy cows.

So the EIR and all its alternates are up for public review and you have 45 days to let them know exactly how important historic ranching in our National Parks is to you. They won’t accept letters or comments any other way than through their website. Where you can also read the full text of the EIR and each outlined alternative.

And if you’ve ever felt your pulse race because of an approaching Tule elk herd, you should let them know.

General Management Plan Amendment Draft Environmental Impact Statement

WATER-SAVERS PORTFOLIO

heidi08 Beavers and Fire Prevention, Beavers and water August 8, 2019

Today is water portfolio day in Capital Hill. When your own fish, wildlife and waterway experts gather together to brainstorm ways to keep water for a drying planet. Can you guess my suggestion? You can watch the entire presentation here.

Live stream of Commission meetings (when in session)

While the day gets started, I thought you might enjoy reading my added comments to the discussion. There is still time to send your own.

Beavers bring resilience to climate change

I’m hoping that whether the focus of the water portfolio is on drought resistance, fire resistance, biodiversity or water quality, it will remember the significant role that beavers and their dams can play. Research has demonstrated consistently that they dramatically increase water storage (both above and below ground) and that their persistent damming will filter water removing toxins and decrease nitrogen. Beaver wetlands create natural barriers to wildfire, and beaver forage reduces fuel and speeds recovery after fire. Salmon, trout, waterfowl, amphibians and all kinds of wildlife thrive because of their ponds and suffer without them.

Beavers are a tool in the water resilience tool box that California should take seriously.

For years CDFW has freely distributed depredation permits to landowners who complain of flooding or damage to landscape – they continue to do so DESPITE the fact that there are inexpensive, reliable tools for resolving problems. I know because my own city made the decision to coexist with beaver in our urban creek by installing a flow device to prevent flooding and wrapping trees to prevent damage. Because of our safe and beaver tended wetlands we observed more steelhead, heron, otters, woodduck and even mink!

It is time California makes a commitment to reward landowners who commit to allowing these important ecosystem engineers on their land. An environmental tax credit would be an excellent incentive to remind landowners to try letting these water engineers on their landscape. Education and resource distribution is important as well.

For far too long landowners have looked at beavers merely as a nuisance or helpful only in very remote locations. The truth is that anyplace that needs water needs beavers.
And California’s water portfolio should reflect that.

The photo attachments are relevant information regarding California’s new fire season showing beaver wetlands as protected oasis. Some great resources to read more about this are linked below, but I would be happy to connect you with other resources or information to get this conversation moving in the right direction.

I concluded by adding links to Ben’s book, Ellen’s book, and the beaver restoration guidebook. Then I included Emily’s fire video and these photos for good measure. I’m hoping they got the message.

Oh, look. Yesterday I found something very special for us to celebrate. Enjoy.

BEAVER CHAMPIONS POP UP IN THE MOST UNLIKELY PLACES

heidi08 Beavers, Who's saving beavers now? August 7, 2019

Things aren’t exactly looking up for beavers all over. They may have been casually welcomed in a National park in Canada – but it’s in that same suspicious way that a well-dressed black woman might be treated at the mall in Iowa. No one is telling them to leave, but eyes are strained and just waiting for trouble. Fundy Park is north west of Maine and sports the highest tides of in Canada at a whopping 50 feet. There are over 25 falls and miles of coastline and as many hiking trails.

Oh and beavers.

Beavers’ move into new area of Fundy National Park not a concern, park ecologist says

While the beavers haven’t posed a safety risk yet, staff at Fundy National Park are keeping a close eye on a new area some juvenile beavers have claimed as their own. The beavers have taken up residence in Dixon Brook, which runs through the park’s golf course.

“They have built dams there, created a lodge and have been an interesting thing for people to observe,” said park ecologist, Becky Graham.

Park officials think this group of beavers is made up of juveniles that left the MacLaren’s Pond area to set up a new home.

“When beavers are two years old they typically would leave their natal site, where they were raised, and branch out on their own.”

Hmmm good explaining Becky, the beavers did the right thing by hiring you as their counsel. Yes yearling do generally move on, unless they found a cushy golfcourse with a ready-made pond. Then they might just stick around a while.

Graham said the beavers have cut down some trees and vegetation along the brook to build dams and lodges, but she said that’s a natural process.

“That is beavers doing exactly what they’re designed to do in an ecosystem.”

Graham said that when beavers change the habitat and turn faster-flowing water into a pond, it can increase the biodiversity of the area.

This means native species will grow up in behind the trees that were cut and a natural succession process will start.While the water is higher in some areas, it hasn’t spilled over the banks of the brook yet, Graham said.

“Our main priority is always human safety and wildlife safety and there have been no issues so far and no threats to infrastructure so far.”

Becky is doing a good job spinning the news and calming ruffled feathers, but we’re talking 150 miles from Nova Scotia. Not a great place for progressive beaver management. I suppose it could work out fine, but I’m not holding my breath.

Graham said park staff will ontinue to monitor but haven’t seen anything that is too concerning so far. Staff are able to keep a close eye on what the beavers are doing on Dixon Brook because of its close proximity to park headquarters. A monitoring system is used to track other beavers throughout the park.

“We actually look for active food caches in the winter and the late fall, and that tells us how many sites the beavers are currently using.”

Moving or relocating beavers from one area to another is quite difficult, said Graham.”There would be nothing to stop another group of beavers from coming right in behind them.”

It’s also stressful on the animals to be trapped and relocated.

“Given that there’s no threat to human safety or species at risk or infrastructure or anything like that in this situation, that’s not our current approach.”

Becky! You are very highly qualified woman and must kind of a swan among the ducklings in that area. We think you’re wonderful! And of course you are right. Better to bear those beavers you have than to fly to others you know not of. Shakespeare said.