Month: December 2019

DECEIVING NO ONE

It’s the end of the year and folks are looking over their shoulders to sum up accomplishments and see what’s left to do on the list for 2020. I spent yesterday wading through our history for an end of the year post about beavers and Worth A Dam and am not at all surprised to see others doing it too.

Busy year for Nature Conservancy of Canada in the Red Deer region

Another productive year is in the books for the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC), which undertook several projects in the central Alberta region in 2019.

Team members put a bow on the calendar in Red Deer this month selling blue spruce trees uprooted from a property near Pine Lake. The species is not native, and therefore is unhealthy to have growing near the native white spruce.

“This summer, beavers established their lodge on a wetland along our south boundary causing undesirable flooding on our neighbour’s property,” Schlemko recalls. “We worked together with the help of Cows & Fish to come up with a solution to co-exist with the beavers, who are known as ‘ecosystem engineers.’”

Well that sounds great! Cows and Fish is very good at this and I can’t see anything going wrong with that decision.

Except this.

Words kind of fail me here. Wow Mike and Skip always make this work seem so hard. What were there no shopping carts available?

The team installed two exclusion fences, with further work needed to manage how many trees the beavers cut down, as they are along two boundary fence-lines which keep cattle in.

.I really hate that some rancher agreed to try coexisting with beaver and this is what he got. You can bet he’s not going to try again. I’m not going to say anything. Let’s just let the beavers tell them how well this pile of grating protects their culverts. I’m sure they can get the message across nicely.

Here’s hoping the photographer snapped the wrong image and this isn’t the exclusion fence they helped the rancher build

IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T WANT BEAVERS, FRY FRY FRY AGAIN

What will it take to change minds about beavers? I mean the saving water and fire prevention don’t see to be doing it. The biodiversity and red-legged frogs aren’t getting the message out. The trumpeter swans and trout unlimited studies aren’t turning the tide, The nitrogen removal isn’t winning votes. So what’s gonna be THE thing?

I’m still thinking maybe this.

Salmon lose diversity in managed rivers, reducing resilience to environmental change

The manipulation of rivers in California is jeopardizing the resilience of native Chinook salmon. It compresses their migration timing to the point that they crowd their habitats. They may miss the best window for entering the ocean and growing into adults, new research shows.

Fish that begin their migration in mid-spring are the ones that survive best and dominate adult salmon returns to rivers such as the Stanislaus. These results were cited in a study published this week in Global Change Biology. Flow alteration and habitat loss have in effect homogenized the survival opportunities of salmon in this highly managed river system, researchers wrote.

The good news is that even small steps to improve their access to habitat and restore natural flows could boost their survival.

Gosh I wonder what those small changes could entail. I mean if it was something easy to implement and cheap maybe those poor salmon would stand a fighting chance. But surely its a complex problem and there’s not some simple solution. That would be too good to be true. Right?

The trouble is, less than 3 percent of wetland habitat remains in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. This leaves the small, early migrating fry without the much needed feeding and rearing refuge they need to grow and thrive on their seaward journey.

The authors say that even minor steps to restore some of the natural fluctuations in river flow could benefit salmon by helping maintain some of their valuable diversity. Fry migrate early in such great numbers that even small improvements in their survival rates through the Delta could yield many more fish to help boost adult returns.

Gosh. Small safe ponds, Where fry can feed and get fat before they make the dangerous journey. Someplace where deep water is a sure thing. Where wetland habitat is expected and maintained. Plenty of little fish mean plenty of big fish. Who knew? Not a silver bullet, but a beaver bullet!

FIGHTING FIRE WITH EMILY AND BEAVERS

heidi08 Beavers and Fire Prevention, Beavers and Forests December 14, 2019

When you finish your dissertation and present the results at a conference of your peers it can be thrilling, affirming, daunting, terrifying. It can make all those late nights worth it, all the statistics and the slogging. You might get praised by someone you really respect, or get to shake the hand of a hero you referenced a million times in your lit review. You might get some crabby question from the competition who doesn’t agree with your findings. You might spill cheap coffee on your new suit and have to change in the car. You might get a million different outcomes.

You almost never get this.

Are Beavers Nature’s “Little Firefighters”?

It’s about dam time: Beavers are acknowledged for their firefighting skills in five recent blazes.

When a wildfire tears through a landscape, there can be little left behind.

A new study, though, suggests that beavers may be protecting life around streams, thanks to their signature dams. Satellite images from five major wildfires in the United States revealed that corridors around beaver habitat stayed green even after a wildfire.

Millions of beavers live in forests across North America, and they make their homes in a particular way: By stacking piles of branches and rocks in a river’s path, they slow its flow and create a pool of calm water to call home. They even dig little channels radiating out from their pools to create “little water highways,” said Emily Fairfax, an assistant professor at California State University Channel Islands who led the study.

Emily presented her research THREE DAYS AGO at the conference in San Francisco. Three DAYS!!! That’s how long it takes for star research to find its way into a front page article. Please tell me that someone is putting this on the governors desk with his coffee and making sure he pays attention.

Fairfax wondered whether beaver dams would insulate riparian vegetation, as well as the fish and amphibians that live there, from wildfire damage. Wildfires course through landscapes naturally, but blazes will become more frequent as climate change dries out forests.

Fairfax sifted through records of past fires in the U.S. Geological Survey’s database and chose five recent fires that occurred in beaver habitat. She then analyzed the “greenness” of vegetation before, during, and after the fires. She used measurements from NASA’s Landsat satellites, which use red and near-infrared light to detect the lushness of vegetation.

Fairfax found that vegetation along sections of a river without dams burned straight to the river’s edge. But for sections with a resident beaver, “essentially, the plants don’t know a fire is happening.” The channels dug by beavers acted like irrigation channels, said Fairfax, keeping vegetation too wet to burn, even during drought. In all, stretches of river without beavers lost 51% of their vegetation greenness, compared with a 19% reduction for sections with beavers.

EMILY you rising star of beavers! We knew you’d be making a difference. With your embrace of technology and your love of nature it was destiny. We never even doubted it for a moment.

But we never even hoped how quickly it would all happen.

URBAN BEAVERS GO TO PRESS

heidi08 Urban beavers December 13, 2019

My grandfather, who was no stranger to schemes and antiquated technology, had a massive printing press in Ross where he printed several local papers back in the day. My then unemployed father helped him buy it used for a song, move it across the bay and reassemble it in one piece. My father sometimes helped by laying the type for a while until he got a ‘real’ job. Think of it, trays and trays full of tiny letters that you had to place just right on the tray and cinch into place so it could make copies. Once my Dad famously dropped the arranged page so that my grandpa heatedly said he “pied the tray!” so it had to be redone.

Think about linguistically what’s involved in that phrasing. “Pied the tray”. We’ve never heard it before or sense.

A pied page was a true catastrophe in almost any newspaper printing shop, because of the work needed to put it all together again. Most of the time, everything had to be set over again

Printer’s Jargon

Well, printing has come a long way since those early days. The urban booklet is finally done and off to the printers who have explained it will only cost the equivalent of a small grandchild to be made into flesh. You can’t believe how lovely they’re going to look in book form. And you really shouldn’t believe it because they cost so much I can never give them away. Well, except for at the east coast beaver conference. That’s where they belong.

Until then we can savor it virtually. Thank you to everyone that contributed!

CUTE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN ENGINEERING?

heidi08 beavers and otters, Beavers and trout December 12, 2019

Sometimes you sing happy birthday to the wrong classmate. Sometimes the academy award goes to the lesser talent. Sometimes you thank the lady of the house for cooking the roast and the husband really did it all. It happens. We all make the occasional ‘acclaim’ error. Take this article for instance.

At park beaver pond, otters gorge on brook trout

Irene Greenberg had been roving around looking for something to photograph the Sunday before last when she came upon a brook trout bloodbath that’s the subject of Jackson Hole wildlife-watching legend.

It was a romp of otters that were responsible for the killing, which netted the mustelid family full guts of spawning fish. Greenberg, a semiprofessional wildlife photographer who’s got a soft spot for otters, was entranced and, for a while, watched on her own at a location she prefers not to reveal.

Hear that? A bunch of otters catch dinner at a BEAVER POND. And it’s ooh lets take photos of the atrocities! And be sure to canonize with our Cannon the 5 hungry culprits. Because they’re otters. And everything they do is adorable.

Even their murderous “gang” is called a “romp”.

Never mind that they owe their entire successful meal to the beavers who created that pond, and repaired the dams, Who wants to photograph those old things?

The brook trout are clearly spawning, with their ruddy undersides and yellow and red spotting easily visible in the shallow beaver-engineered ponds where they’re congregated.

The otters are “damn smart,” Mayo said. They faithfully show up to take advantage of the usually wary fish, which become easy pickings come the spawn.

“More or less every time they go under, they come up with a fish,” Greenberg said. “Sometimes they’ll come up and just eat them in the water, and sometimes they’ll come up on land and eat.”

“They are voracious,” she said. “And they eat a lot.”

Yes they do. Hey did you happen to notice in your frame-snapping frenzy, WHERE they’re eating a lot? My goodness it appears to be a beaver pond where all those brook trout are gathered. Gosh I wonder WHY they meet up there? I mean is it some kind of salmonid singles club?

Or could it be that beaver-engineered ponds make ideal habitat for babies to grow up? What with all those tastey invertebrates. And nice deep pools that don’t freeze solid in the winter where trout can thrive? Hey maybe you should be writing an article about THAT or photographing that doncha think?

But otters are cute. And you know how they sled in snow. It’s adorable! And so slinky. Lets write about them. Again and again instead of the brawny backed-engineers these ponds are made by. Because cute is more important than engineering.

Didn’t you know?