Month: September 2019

CALIFORNIA’S SLEIGHT OF HAND

heidi08 What's killing beavers now? September 5, 2019

Time for another victorious defeat for California beavers. We seem to be having these pretentious affairs every couple of months. And usually with credit given to a certain well known conservation group that seems to follow the spotlight.

I’m talking of course about the ban on fur-trapping.

California bans fur trapping for recreation, commerce

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California on Wednesday became the first state to ban commercial fur trapping, ending the practice nearly 200 years after animals like beavers and otters introduced the American West to international trade.

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday he had signed a bill into law making it illegal to trap animals for the purposes of recreation or to sell their fur. It is still legal to trap animals for other purposes, including pest control and public health.

Now if you were anyone off the street just tuning in you might say “Hurray no more fur trade in the golden state!” But of course you and I know that the fur trade hasn’t been the primary cause of beaver death for 30 years or longer. And all of the MANY beavers that still die every day in conibear traps and by gunshot wound die because of DEPREDATION which remains very much legal. In fact when you depredate beavers you don’t have to even count how many you kill. Isn’t that convenient? No one can report it because no one knows.

A good way to avoid those pesky AP articles.

But in recent years, California licenses for fur trappers have declined considerably. In 2018, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife said it sold 133 licenses, leading to the harvest of 1,568 animals and the sale of 1,241 pelts. A legislative analysis of the bill noted most furs are sold outside of California, with data suggesting there have been no fur sales in the state for the past three years.

Meanwhile, the state has issued about 500 trapping licenses a year for pest control and other uses. People who trap animals for those purposes are not required to report how many animals they capture.

Hey here’s a funny funny joke. OF those 500 permits issued to kill nuisance animals in 2018. 210 of them were for beavers. Because what seems like good news is never good news for them.

I guess that won’t be a headline anytime soon.

Newsom’s office announced the bill signing on Twitter by referencing the governor’s childhood pet, an otter he named “Potter.” The announcement included a photo of what appeared to be an otter puppet exclaiming: “My friends & I should not have to live in fear of being trapped & our fur being sold!”

Of course. Of course he did.

The real surprise of the day doesn’t come from silly pretend news that doesn’t matter to beavers at all. But from very very local and REAL news that matters a great deal.

Consider it another verse of “It’s a small world, afterall”.

Yesterday Robin of Napa confirmed that the mother of famed beaver researcher Joe Wheaton lives in the city currently. Which lead me to hunt about on google and LOOK what I dredgged up.

Joe Wheaton: studying his hometown creek

St. Helena High School graduate Joe Wheaton has turned his hometown creek into an international waterway. As a PhD candidate in physical geography at the University of Southampton, England, he chose to do his doctoral research and dissertation on Sulphur Creek.

In the process, he has brought distinguished geographers and geomorphologists to the study the creek; and to share with the community and the world the working of a geological wonder, one that was ignored and hidden in the back streets of town for more than a century.

This amazing article is dated 2006, one year before the beavers showed up in Martinez, So none of this was on my radar. Napa was just a nearby city, and creeks were just things that other people studied while I was busily working to make children a little less unhappy.But there is not now, in all the world, a single more well-known and well respected beaver researcher than Dr, Joe Wheaton who apparently went to Napa high school before he literally put beaver benefits on the map and became their foremost authority.

The mind reels. The jaw drops. Do you think if he had landed a job at UCB California would have been the premiere state where the forest service protected beavers and the BRAT tool was invented? Do you think Mary Obrien would have ended up working for the Sonoma Land Trust instead?

I’m getting dizzy. I need to sit down.

Add to this fact that our dispersing beavers might have settled down in Napa, that Rusty and Robin became friends of those beavers and friends of Worth A Dam and that the County Supervisor Brad Wagenknecht came to our beaver festival. Twice.

Twenty-eight-year-old Wheaton was born in Napa, lived on Dry Creek Road but attended school in St. Helena. When he was 13, his parents moved to their present home on Inglewood Avenue.

He received both his BS and MS degrees at UC-Davis. Wanting to continue studies in fluvial geomorphology and ecohydraulics, he entered the University of Southampton, in Hampshire, England, where he will complete his PhD requirements this year.

Lets make the circle comp[ete. Any other famous beaver supporters from Napa?

Amy Gallaher Hall creating chalk art centerpiece in the Park at 12th Annual Martinez Beaver Festival 2019. Photo by Cheryl Reynolds 6/29/19.

I guess what they say is true. Beavers really do make the world go around

IT’S THE ARIDITY, STUPID

heidi08 Beavers and climate change September 4, 2019

Time then for another rousing article that doesn’t mention beavers but SHOULD from Phys.org.

New feedback phenomenon found to drive increasing drought and aridity

A new Columbia Engineering study indicates that the world will experience more frequent and more extreme drought and aridity than currently experienced in the coming century, exacerbated by both climate change and land-atmosphere processes. The researchers demonstrate that concurrent soil drought and atmospheric aridity are largely driven by a series of land-atmosphere processes and feedback loops. They also found that land-atmosphere feedbacks would further intensify concurrent soil drought and atmospheric aridity in a warmer climate. The study was published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Are you following this? What they found is that DRY soil leads to the kind of conditions that cause MORE dry soil.

Soil drought, represented by very low soil moisture, and atmospheric aridity, represented by very high vapor pressure deficit, a combination of high temperature and low atmospheric humidity, are the two main stressors that drive widespread vegetation mortality and reduced terrestrial carbon uptake. Concurrent soil drought and atmospheric aridity is a time period when soil moisture is extremely low and vapor pressure deficit is extremely high.

Guess what makes the opposite of arid soil? Changing the quality of the soil where they live, around their home and under the home?

“Concurrent soil drought and atmospheric aridity have dramatic impacts on natural vegetation, agriculture, industry, and public health,” says Pierre Gentine, associate professor of earth and environmental engineering and affiliated with the Earth Institute. “Future intensification of concurrent soil drought and atmospheric aridity would be disastrous for ecosystems and greatly impact all aspects of our lives.”

It turns out that dry soil is more important to climate change than DROUGHT. More important than heatwaves. Letting the soil dry out starts all these other balls rolling towards disaster. Too bad there isn’t some free rodent that we could put to work all across America to keep the soil moist.

The PNAS study highlights the importance of soil moisture variability in enabling a series of processes and feedback loops affecting the Earth’s near-surface climate.

Add this to the list of things beavers could be doing for us everyday, everywhere if we would just be so kind as to stop killing them. Let’s not call it kindness. Hell. Let’s call it “Self-Interest”. I’m getting more and more convinced that this is our only truly renewable resource.

Yesterday it occurred to me that in all of the internet there should be a photo like this. There wasn’t. I thought that should change. Take my word for it and whatever you do don’t look for photos of beavers by candelight anywhere else.

RESPECTFUL SPITE FOR BEAVERS

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Flow Device Installed September 3, 2019

You knew it would happen. One day, someday a state fish and wildlife agency would pay to install a flow device. It was inevitable. But what state? When?

The question challenges regular readers of this website to pub their thinking caps on. Jon did a good job guessing first Utah (NO) and then Washington (Also No). But think about it. If you’re a state agency and you’re agreeing to do something a beaver advocate has been riding you for YEARS to do, you have to find a subtle way to agree with them and piss them off at the same time.

It’s got to tell them you thought of it ALL by yourself – without their help.

Like if the city of Martinez said they were going to save the beavers better and differently before Heidi Perryman and all those meddling people got involved. They had it all worked out.

If you agree with my petulant premise them the answer is obvious. The State where the inventor of the Beaver deceiver has lived all his life. It can only be Vermont.

State installing water control devices on beaver dams

MONTPELIER — To prevent flooding on nearby roads and private property, Vermont Fish & Wildlife staff have installed 11 water control devices on beaver dams this year throughout Vermont.

Known as “beaver baffles,” these devices allow some water to pass through the dam without breaching it and destroying the wetland.

Fish & Wildlife staff expect to continue to install additional beaver baffles throughout the state this year. The baffles are one of many techniques employed or recommended to landowners to minimize beaver damage to property or trees. Other techniques include using fences to protect culverts, or placing wire mesh or special paint around the base of trees to prevent gnawing.

“The wetlands that beavers create provide critical habitat for a variety of wildlife such as waterfowl, songbirds, frogs, turtles, otters, and moose. These areas can also absorb extra water during rain events and clean pollutants from water, so we work hard to preserve these wetlands,” said Kim Royar, wildlife biologist with Vermont Fish & Wildlife.

Oh that’s right. We’re using Skip Lisle’s knowledge and experience, and even his techniques, but we’re calling it our OWN name. We’re BAFFLING those beavers = not deceiving them.

Never mind that the term beaver baffle is already used for a flow device in Canada with a completely different design. Never mind that beaver deceiver is a PERFECTLY good name and you have a local man who invented for pete’s sake. JUST NEVER MIND.

With funds granted from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and generated by waterfowl hunters through the Duck Stamp Program, the Fish & Wildlife Department has installed more than 300 beaver baffles in Vermont protecting over 3,000 acres of wetland habitat since the program started in 2000.

“We receive roughly 200 beaver complaints a year,” said Royar. “Several staff members respond to these complaints, and one technician is dedicated solely to addressing beaver conflicts from spring through fall. Despite these efforts, other management techniques must be used. We also rely on regulated, in-season trapping to maintain a stable beaver population so Vermonters continue to view beavers as a valued member of the local ecosystem and not as a nuisance.”

Landowners with beaver problems can contact the Fish & Wildlife Department for assistance at www.vtfishandwildlife.com. They can also contact private contractor Skip Lisle at www.beaverdeceivers.com.

Money from duck stamps to pay for beavers! What? That makes sense. Are you sure its what you meant to do because it is absolutely logical. And state agencies controlling wildlife are so rarely that?

What I love the utmost MOST about this article is that even though fish and wildlife is pointedly ignoring Skip, and the project itself ignores Skip, the reporter doesn’t. His or her very last line mentions his name refers you to his website. There is no byline on the article. So whoever you want to angrily call and complain it can’t be done. But it ends as it should with Skip’s information. So fucking there.

Well god bless the stubborn little green mountain state for doing this. And god bless stubborn little Skip Lisle for making it unavoidable, It had to happen and it’s only fitting that it SHOULD BE VERMONT. We should all have some maple syrup, cheddar cheese and Ben and Jerry’s today to celebrate.

Oh and if one day California wants to piss me off by installing flow devices and calling them Worth A Darns they can be my guest!

Finally Robin of Napa forwarded this amazingly urban beaver tweet from Hinge park in Vancouver. I can’t embed it but follow the link. I swear its worth your while.

A break from our regularly scheduled programming this morning to bring you this Canadian beaver stopping to smell the…bushes ??❤️
Hinge Park, Vancouver pic.twitter.com/wU8BHPj4OD

— Kelly Canuck? (@KellyCanuckTO) October 21, 2018

BEAVERS GET ANOTHER FINE BEN-TERVIEW

heidi08 Beaver Book September 2, 2019

Happy Labor Day. Happy September by the way. It has always been by far my favorite month. It used to be back-to-school, new notebooks, when leaves would change, acorns would drop, everyone would try and wear new sweaters before they need them in California, and my birthday looms on the horizon. I love the entire feel of September.

Perfect timing then for another big Ben-terview and event.

Author Ben Goldfarb brings his message of beaver admiration to Northwest Passages stage

Ben Goldfarb is many things. Award-winning author. Environmentalist. Journalist. Devoted fly fisherman. What he definitely isn’t? A beaver. No matter – he’s the next best thing. A beaver’s best friend. A “Beaver Believer,” in the Cult of Beaver.

“Like most people who grew up hiking and camping and fishing and canoeing, I’ve certainly been around beavers,” Goldfarb said Tuesday. “I had a baseline appreciation for how cool they are, and how they modify the environment. But I didn’t become a true Beaver Believer, as the people in the beaver cult call ourselves, until five years ago.”

Ahh yes. He means people like US. Like anyone fool enough to read this website. Ben came to our last beaver festival at the old park in 2016, and our first festival at the new park the following year. He published his book sometime in between, famously calling me “candid” and Jon a “genial fellow” – which, to this day, when he gets crabby or tired I still remind him of, Saying helpfully, “Wow, that sure wasn’t very genial.”

(It’s those kind of delicately candid observations that keep me so very popular around here, I can tell you.)

“Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter,” was released by Chelsea Green Publishing in June last year, about the same time Goldfarb and his wife Elise moved to Spokane from Connecticut.

Among its accolades, including being named one of the Washington Post 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction and Best Outdoor Book of 2018 by Outside Magazine, earlier this year it won one of the nation’s top literary prizes: The E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing from PEN America.

It truly couldn’t happen to a better subject or a nicer guy. The beavers chose their champion, and Ben’s doing a great job.

I especially liked this exchange.

Who first realized the beavers were so important?

It goes back a long way. There were people, there’s a great book called the “The American Beaver and His Works,” written in the 1800s. There was another great book called “In Beaver World,” in 1913. It seems like every couple of generations society rediscovers just how important this creature is. I think that the thing that has catalyzed this latest round of interest in beavers is climate change. We know that the West is getting hotter and drier. As it does, our water resources are increasingly under stress. A lot of our precipitation is falling as rain rather than snow. And we’ve begun to recognize that this animal that builds thousands of little reservoirs essentially up in the high country, up in the headwaters, has a really important role to play in helping us keep our streams hydrated, even through the summer and fall. It’s really climate change that has caused beavers to reenter the zeitgeist.

And the flurry of isolated beaver success all across the planet. Like Scotland. Vancouver. And Martinez. Don’t forget that. Ahem.

In your book you propose using beavers like medics, dropping them onto the front lines of climate change. Does Eastern Washington need this type of treatment?

One of the reasons that I was actually excited to move to Spokane when the opportunity arose, this is a city with a great beaver consciousness and culture already. There’s the Lands Council, which has had a very active beaver program for at least a decade, and has done lots of beaver relocation across Eastern Washington. There’s the fact that when you walk along the Spokane River, along the riverfront, you see half the trees down there have been wrapped with wire to prevent beavers from chewing them down. In a lot of cities those tree-chewing beavers would be killed. But in Spokane, there’s a great commitment to managing those impacts nonlethally. I think there’s already a lot of good beaver work happening in this area.

But certainly there’s the need for more. Hiking and camping around Eastern Washington, all the time I see streams that would have historically had a very abundant beaver population, where they just don’t seem to occur. One great example is Hangman Creek. Here’s this watershed that’s fantastic beaver habitat, and I think they are in there, but in very low abundance. Every spring it’s just dumping huge amounts of agricultural runoff into the Spokane River. Beavers would be one potential solution to that problem, by building dams, slowing water down, causing all of that sediment to settle out of the water column. They really have an important role to play in mitigating some of that agricultural pollution.

FANNING THE FLAMES OF BEAVER BELIEVERS

heidi08 Beavers and Fire Prevention September 1, 2019

The world is a hurdling snowball of beaver news lately. Every day I think I’m getting caught up on the latest and every day three new stories break that we need to read. I assume we can thank Ben Goldfarb’s book for this happy state of affairs. But maybe the slow trickle of beaver stories for years and years from this website has a cumulative effect. At least it would be nice to think so.

Lets start with the excitement in Tuscon.

River restoration group is eager for beavers to return to Tucson watershed

The Bureau of Land Management and the Arizona Game and Fish Department are currently studying whether to introduce beavers into Las Cienegas National Conservation Area, about 50 miles southeast of Tucson.

The proposal is the latest in a growing trend across the West to restore beaver populations and let these unique rodents do what comes naturally: build dams that slow the flow of creeks and streams, creating crucial wetland habitat while curbing erosion and storing water for plants, animals and people.

The nonprofit Watershed Management Group recently launched a summer fundraising campaign seeking $90,000 to support efforts to reintroduce the aquatic rodents in Southern Arizona.

That’s on top of the roughly $400,000 in state and federal grant money the group has already secured to help restore riparian habitat along Cienega Creek and elsewhere — work not specifically for the benefit of beavers but that could one day lure the “keystone species” back to the Tucson area to stay, according to conservationists.

Did you catch that? Ninety thousand dollars to bring back beavers on top of the 400,000 they spent planting willows and cottonwood to make it beaver friendly. You see how lucky Martinez was to get them for free?

Tell that to the mayor.

“They’re nature’s river engineers,” said Trevor Hare, river restoration biologist for the Watershed Management Group.

“And they’ve got the skills and the know-how to work directly in the creek,” Shipek added. “I think it’s really exciting to think about the future of river restoration partnering with a creature like the American beaver

You bet your beaver-loving sand they are. They’ll know what to do. It’s just that you need to stop killing them first, Can you do that?

Since Cienega Creek connects to the Tucson Basin by way of Pantano Wash, beavers could conceivably make their way downstream and into the city. And if there is suitable habitat to support them along Tucson’s rivers and creeks, they just might find lodging here, Hare said.

“I’m in my 50s, and I’d like to see that in my lifetime,” he said.

Bringing back the beaver is just one long-range goal for Watershed Management Group, which also promotes urban rainwater harvesting and “green street” projects aimed at conserving water, beautifying neighborhoods and improving the environment.

I’m with you. In my fifties and dreaming that one day beaver will be back to its rightful place on the landscape. In California and Arizona too. All over the west and beyond. Lets let them do what they do better than anybody in the world. And let’s just stop killing them when they try.

Deal?

I have to apologize that this story escaped my attention last week. It’s written by the CEO if Trout Unlimited Chris Jones, and appeared in the Las Vegas Press Standard. It’s the article we’ve all been waiting for and deserves far more attention than it received.

The best way to prevent wildfires

Nearly everyone agrees that Western rangelands will produce even larger and more frequent wildfires in the future. But are engineered fuel breaks the best answer?

Jack Williams, a scientist who worked for multiple federal agencies and Trout Unlimited says, “The primary culprit for larger fires in the Great Basin is cheatgrass, but warming temps compound the problem. Creating periodic firebreaks would help by breaking up and slowing down the flames. We can do that in a way that benefits the natural systems by expanding riparian and wet meadows along our small streams.”

The answer may be a small dose of much less expensive firebreaks and, surprisingly, strategies involving cows and beavers. Ranchers who fence streamside areas and/or rotate cows to rest pastures occasionally and allow streamside vegetation to grow back help re-establish natural firebreaks of lush green vegetation.

Hmm, little firebreaks along the riparian. Whatever can he mean? I just can’t put my finger on something that could help with that,

Consider the case of Susie Creek near Elko, where the Heguy family runs a large ranch. Over 25 years, they changed grazing practices so that the cows were moved more frequently, especially away from the streams. An evaluation by Trout Unlimited scientists showed riparian vegetation in the entire Susie Creek Basin increased by more than 100 acres. Equally important is that 25 years ago no beavers lived on Susie Creek; about 140 beaver dams cross the creek today, slowing runoff and keeping more water upstream.

When Trout Unlimited evaluated the effects of this type of “conservation grazing” and beaver at larger scales, across several Great Basin watersheds including Susie Creek, the increased wet streamside habitat was equivalent to the effects of adding 10 inches of annual precipitation. That’s nearly double the current precipitation at some sites — a big deal in this semi-arid desert.

The more water retained in the streams, the more drought and fire-resistant the land around it becomes, plain and simple.

Wait, is the CEO of Trout Unlimited saying what I think he’s saying?

The basic functions of a healthy watershed are to catch, store and slowly release water over time. Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service, once testified before Congress by pouring a glass of water over a wooden desk and watching as it all ran on the floor. He said this represents an unhealthy watershed.

Pinchot then put the desks’s ink blotter — something designed to absorb the ink of pens — on the desk and poured another glass of water. The water absorbed into the blotter and only a few drops hit the floor. This is how a healthy watershed functions, he said.

Beaver dams are akin to Pinchot’s blotter. Their dams keep water from running off downstream. Water can then percolate into the groundwater around the stream. Green vegetation grows. Trees provide more shade and structure to the stream. Sedges begin to crawl upslope. The beaver dams facilitate late-season flows, which is good for fish — and people, too. Improved flows and wider wetland vegetation translate to strong fuel breaks from wildfire.

Hurray! Hurray! Hurray! Please call Governor Newsome right now and show him this article. Heck lets call ALL the governors. And CDFG. And the current head of the forest service where the author, Chris Jones, used to work. I can’t believe this article slipped past me. I would never have seen it but that it attracted ANOTHER letter to the editor in support. This one from Charles Parish in Las Vegas.

LETTER: Commentary on beating Western wildfires was right on target

Who would have thought that removing beavers from the land and putting cows on it would encourage wildfires? But that is the crux of the excellent commentary “The best way to prevent wildfires” (Sunday Review-Journal).

Cows tend to congregate at water sources, disrupting stream banks, polluting the water and eating the surrounding vegetation needed to retain stream water over time. As the article points out, a better way to control wildfires — rather than building and maintaining many acres of expensive bulldozer roads, as the Trump administration is proposing — is to mostly keep cows away from natural streams and waterways and let beavers return to build their dams, turning the steams into greenbelts and natural firebreaks that improve the storage of water in the parts of our country that are too dry to farm without irrigation.

When will people learn that they can’t best Mother Nature and instead must work with her?

Can I get an Amen? Let’s have a rousing cheer for this letter and Chris’ original article. Now if only all this information translated into actual action in terms of important changes in the way we treat beavers. (And cows).

We are reaching critical mass. We may not be there yet but we’re well on our way. Let’s celebrate with a wonderful photo of the beaver family from Napa by our good friend Rusty Cohn, How many family members can you count? Is it just me or doesn’t that little kit face in the front look almost like a muppet?