Month: January 2020

JUDGING BEAVERS HARSHLY IN KENTUCKY

It’s a funny thing. You make a fancy ravioli dinner for 12 of your closest beaver friends and you spend the evening chatting about the first East Coast beaver conference or repeated train rides to sacramento to get the governor to back the right legislation or countless meetings with the watershed association and fish and game to replant creek or remastering the renaissance style of painting directly with eggshell and you feel like the world is pretty close to getting it right. It’s all within reach, and you are sitting with the right group of people to reach it.

And then you get up in the morning and read an article like this, and realize how far we truly have left to travel.

Beavers create travel headache for southeast Muhlenberg residents

MUHLENBERG COUNTY, Ky. (1/3/20) — The beaver population in southeastern Muhlenberg County has created a dam issue along Mud River Union Road.

There are approximately 50 residents who live at the end of the county road, where a nearby creek flows into Mud River. It appears water is across a section of the road about a half-mile leading to the homes, which makes travel difficult.

Muhlenberg County Judge-Executive Curtis McGehee said this week that the issue was brought to his attention during his tenure as sheriff a few months ago. He is speaking to road department officials and magistrates about hiring a beaver trapping expert to help remedy the issue.

Until the beavers are under control in that area, there’s not a whole lot officials can do.

It takes a judge to kill a beaver in Kentucky?

Well, I guess a flow device is right out then, your honor? I mean if you’re going to falsely incarcerate thousands, bemoan the closing coal plants and shut down all the women’s clinics, then progressively managing beavers is impossible. Right?

Too bad for Muhlenberg. Because this whole flooding this is going to happen again. Soon.

BEAVER ADVICE FALLS ON THE OPPOSITE OF DEAF EARS

Good morning! I’m late today because we were kind of busy yesterday. Cookies made. House completely rearranged. Shouting occurred. Let’s just say the chocolate wasn’t the only thing that was “tempered”. ba-dum-dum. But now its beautiful and we have the whole morning together. Let’s share and tell our way to victory, shall we?

This one from Portland, Maine.

Letter to the editor: Trapping not the only way to manage beavers

I’m writing in response to the Dec. 27 letter about wildlife populations and self-regulation, specifically beavers. The letter caught my attention because I’ve been reading “Eager: The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter” by Ben Goldfarb.

Hey we know him! What did you learn when you read our friends manifesto?

The book also discusses the idea of cultural carrying capacity, which is the number of animals that humans can tolerate. The level of tolerance comes from how much conflict arises between people and the animal, in this case beavers.

No one wants their property flooded or water contaminated, but is trapping the only answer?

I’m sure hoping you say it isn’t.

According to Skip Lisle, the answer is no. Lisle has a master’s degree in Wildlife Management from the University of Maine, and he worked with the Penobscot Nation to find ways of peaceful co-existence with beavers.

Lisle discovered, as have many others, that killing beavers is not an effective long-term solution. It’s better to find non-lethal ways of ending conflicts with beavers, which led to his company Beaver Deceivers LLC (https://beaverdeceivers.com). He provides flow devices and has invented other tools to prevent beavers from damaging private and public property.

This is a helpful reminder that instead of trying to get rid of animals, we should be looking for ways to live peacefully with them.

Erica Bartlett

Wonderful Erica! Well said and well read, as the saying goes. Now we ourselves in Martinez hired Mr. Lisle to put in one of them there contraptions and it solved our issue for 10 years. That was ten years we didn’t have to pay trappers or think about flooding in our creek. Ten years of more wildlife and better fish in our creek. Ten years of no new beavers moving into our creek.

Hey, that sounds almost like a solution!

DEGREES OF BEAVER FREEDOM

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver Grooming, Beavers January 4, 2020

I think I mentioned before that I was horrific at math and oddly skilled at statistics. I’m sure there’s some kind of left brain/right brain distinction to explain some of it but for what ever reason one made sense and the other made me panic. No matter who taught it, No matter how much I tried.

One of my favorite concepts used in statistics was always “Degrees of Freedom“, Usually calculated as N=1, it basically it refers to how many chances you might have to achieve those same exact results given the number of times you tried or how many people you tried with. As the degrees of freedom go up the odds of it happening again also go up so the rarity of the results go down. As the degrees of freedom go down, the odds of it happening just like this ever again go down and it becomes very ulikely. Until there is zero chance.

I mention this because in the back of my mind I tend to think of the days before the annual Worth A Dam ravioli feed as Degrees of Freedom. As in “There are this many chances to get it wrong or forget a detail or have to take someone to the ER and still achieve the desired result.” The closer we get to day, the room for error gets lower and lower. As of this morning there is one day left before our 5 course dinner for 13 people. That means one day to get the house set up and make sauces ready and dip the cookies in chocolate. If we were visited by unexpected relatives today, or broke someones toe or had a power outage – tomorrow would become nearly impossible.

In other words, we are down to 1 Degree of Freedom.

Today is a day for Chinese takeout from the cartons in the living room so we don’t mess up the silverware or the table setting. And it’s a great day to read this cozy column by Patti Smith from Vermont which we always enjoy.

Remember when last we heard from Patti she was mourning the death of her beloved beaver Willow, who after a very long life had been unable to escape a bear.

The View from Heifer Hill: Finding an old friend on the river of life

During the last week of December, I skied down to look for the beaver that recently moved into the brook below my house. Beavers do not relocate in December unless calamity strikes. I suspected that a raging torrent from rain and snowmelt had destroyed this beaver’s dam and washed its food cache downstream. While this new location offers good foraging, the rocky stream bottom provides little mud for sealing a dam. Without a deep pond, ice can seal the entrance to a beaver’s lodge, trapping the beaver inside.

I had tried hollering on several occasions to entice this beaver to appear. Since that technique hadn’t worked, I decided that on this visit I would use the stealth approach — sitting quietly and waiting for the beaver to reveal itself. Once I settled myself by the brook, I noticed that the beaver had been building a lodge directly across from my seat. After a few minutes, I heard the gurgle that announced the emergence of the occupant. The beaver that surfaced paddled quickly over and swam back and forth a few times before lunging up the icy bank and onto the snow beside me. I was so pleased to see the notch in the tail that identified this beaver as Dew.

I first met Dew eight or nine years ago. The uncertainty stems from not knowing if she is Dewberry, born in 2010, or Sundew, born the following year. Either way, I met her shortly after she was born to that champion of beaver survivors, Willow. “Survivor” might seem a strange thing to call a beaver who was just eaten by a bear, but she lived to near the maximum lifespan for a beaver (about 20 years). I have not yet determined her exact age, but the teeth I recovered will allow me to.

Isn’t it wonderful that after losing her friends and matriarch of so many years she would run into one of her children who just moved in after losing her old house in storm? Mother nature can be pretty dam sweet sometimes. When she’s not busy doing the other thing.

Dew is the only one of her offspring known to survive, aside from the yearling Gentian. I concluded last month’s column with the hope that Gentian would inherit her mother’s penchant for longevity. Given that I could not find any of her siblings, I didn’t hold out a great deal of hope. Yet here was Dew — approaching her ninth or tenth year! Dew, who seems to have survived her first mate, Ilex, and is now wintering alone in this unlikely location. Given her heritage, I give her much higher odds of surviving this challenging winter than other beavers. I have seen her mother survive as bad.

Patti is such a delightful mix of science, heresy and affection. She pretty much breaks all the rules about not naming or feeding the animals you’re studying. But she also seems to learn more about their lives than anyone who follows the rules ever will. Ever time we get to visit Patti in Vermont my heart swells with the deepest fondness and I am reminded of my own days watching beavers.

Patti is a kindred spirit.

On New Year’s Eve, I took a few friends out to visit her. Along the way, a dark shape was spotted hustling away into the shadows. When I hailed the beast, it stopped, then turned and came toward us. There was Quirinus, one of the porcupines I have been studying. He paused on his travels to eat an apple with us.

The forest, glazed in a mix of ice and snow, shone bright in moonlight. Once we settled by the brook, Dew arrived and began opening up channels in the slushy ice. She took an apple and swam to her lodge to eat it before reappearing and clambering up on the opposite bank. There she spent 15 minutes in elaborate ablutions, scrubbing and combing every bit of her corpulent physique. One of my friends had a blazing headlamp that lit up the scene like stage lights. Dew seemed to be preening for her audience. Why not? Beavers are social animals, and she had been on her own for at least several weeks.

I am so glad that she gets to spend quality time with the beaver after losing his or her mother. I remain completely mystified about how she tells them apart. We only ever had a few beavers whose identities I could spot on sight. Mom with her chinked tail. Dad with his size. GQ with his good loos. Mom II with her red fur. That’s about it.

Maybe you do better? I have a touch of prosopagnosia. I can barely tell humans apart.

When Dew finally swam off, we headed upstream a bit and built a fire. There in the snowy forest, we enjoyed the rising sparks, and a very localized rain shower caused by the melting ice on branch overhead. I couldn’t imagine a more beautiful transition from one year to the next. I was warmed by the fire and by knowing that a new beaver ambassador would carry on the work of my old friend Willow. May the new year bring such joy to you.

And to you Patti!

And may the new year bring joy to any and all reading this site. Wish us luck dipping the tails today. I would invite you all for dinner but consider yourself lucky to escape it. We are not at all generous hosts who do this out of the goodness of our hearts and a love to entertain. We actually do this to compensate for demanding terribly exhausting days of service at the beaver festival and the willingness to resist saying “NO” when being asked for the millionth time. You know what they say, To those whom much has been given, much will be asked.

It’s one free dinner that actually costs the attendees a lot. It dam well better be delicious!

New Years Ravioli Feast-20

BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A BEAVER?

heidi08 Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Fire Prevention January 3, 2020

Good morning. It’s he last official day of vacation, we’re getting ready for the annual ravioli feast and making cookies today, which is always pleasant in a slightly terrifying way. The fires in Australia are notching up the panic about climate change and lots of folks are pinning their hopes on beavers. Which is okay by me. Better late than never, I always say. Here are some thoughts from Steve Jones of the UK who maintains the Natural Areas Blog.

Re-wetting the countryside

As I write this, parts of Australia are gripped by what seems like a perpetual drought and, with its forests and shrublands tinder-dry, forest fires are raging across some coastal areas.

Climate scientists project increasing summer heat in the UK, as the Mediterranean climate space shifts progressively north. We can expect our average summers to be warmer, and more frequent, on average hotter, summer droughts.

So, to help to mitigate the fire risks posed by the warming we’re already locked into, we need to re-wet floodplain corridors and re-moisten whole farmed landscapes. Here’s how:

A how-to ;list on avoiding wildfires. Now this is useful. Are you paying attention?

River-floodplain corridors should be formally designated as Critical Natural Infrastructure, and managed as integrated wholes. Management should be restricted to enabling natural system recovery, in an expansion of natural coastal management into fluvial systems.

Beavers should be reintroduced at key sites to provide strategic source populations for progressive re-colonisation of all river systems across the UK.

Did you catch that? Beavers are the answer to a drying planet. Also a flooding plane. Also a burning planet. Also a species deprived planet, There are few more suggestions on the list regarding not building in flood plains, but that seems like a DAM good start to me.

In the absence of beavers or pending their return, all surface field edge drains and streams should have leaky dams and small wetland features installed, across entire catchments.

BDA’s for everyone waiting in long lines for beavers. It should stretch for miles. There should barely be enough beavers to go around. You know is coming. In a few short years everyone will want theirs.

THIS BEAVER BEAT REPORTER ADMITS SHE IS BEAT

heidi08 Beavers and climate change January 2, 2020

I’m going to be honest with you. I’m a terrible beaver reporter. And the years on the beaver beat have clearly made me lose what’s left of my mind. I admit it. Yesterday I wrote like a fool about not knowing Rob Walton and I didn’t follow my own CARDINAL rule. Which is to always use the search bar on the right hand top of the page to see if I ever mentioned him before.

(That search bar is the MOST important thing on this website. Various click bait will come and go, Lassie and self promotion and ideas that seemed irresistible at the time, but the search bar should ALWAYS be there. And it should ALWAYS be used. By me at least. Before I say I never heard about something.)

Here’s the headline I wrote about Rob on June 27th, 2019. To be fair. It was the day before the beaver festival. My circuits were a little – shall we say – occupied.

BEST BEAVER ARTICLE OF 2019

There now. With the fun stuff out of the way we have some serious work to do. In the form of appreciating the excellent, fantastic, wonderful article by retired NOAA expert Rob Walton. Who is going to write this article for California next? It MUST happen soon.

His opinion piece was called “The Beaver Conundrum“? Ringing any bells. Oh yeah I thought so.

Oregon’s law and policies allow private landowners, licensed trappers and pest-control companies to kill beavers. Only some of these activities are reported. The result is that there isn’t a reliable record of how many beavers are killed each year here in the Beaver State, and there isn’t an effective way to protect beavers, even when they are busy providing a low-cost, effective way to restore critical habitat for salmon and other protected species.

Be still my heart. This is everything I’ve been shouting for the last 5 years we’ve been reviewing dastardly depredation permits. It’s so comforting to read someone else write this about Oregon. I can’t believe it has taken this long.

A better approach is possible – one that allows and encourages beavers to help recover salmon runs, increase biodiversity and create more groundwater recharge and storage – while protecting private property.

When beaver-human conflicts do happen, it’s important that landowners – large and small, public and private – agencies and water and wildlife advocates work together to address and resolve these conflicts.

My experience suggests that Oregon’s Legislature and agencies have not been able to deal with this politically charged issue. But through a collaborative beaver management approach, we can protect and manage private property, allow beavers to help improve salmon and bird habitat quality, and allow legal, regulated trapping.

Here are steps that Oregon can take to address the state’s beaver conundrum:

· The Legislature should mandate that state fish and wildlife, agriculture, forestry, environmental quality and water resources agencies develop a beaver management plan, as Utah has. Oregon Consensus or Oregon Solutions could help bring interest groups on board.

· Develop an effective network of nonprofit and for-profit companies, tribes and local, state and federal agency staff trained in non-lethal solutions that can respond to complaints. This approach has a proven track record elsewhere, such as with Massachusetts-based Beaver Solutions and Seattle-based Beavers Northwest.

· Implement a statewide public relations and education effort to provide information about the benefits provided by Oregon’s state animal and how to responsibly address conflicts.

These low-cost steps could help us restore the high regard we have for that golden emblem on our flag.

So you see, of all the articles to ever forget, this is the very worst possible one. Rob wrote an op-ed saying exactly what I’ve been saying for years, only in a smarter, more convincing way. And I was as adoring of his wisdom as I have ever been about anything, Ever.

But the next day was the Beaver Festival. And pulling off an event like that is like taking your socks off over your head while being run over by a train. Twice. I’m not surprised I didn’t remember.

But I am very ashamed didn’t SEARCH.

Before I let you down again I thought you’d like to see a little news from the January 1st Telegraph.

Reintroduction of beavers could protect land against floods and climate change

The reintroduction of beavers into Britain’ streams and rivers could help protect land and communities from flooding and the impact of climate change, trials have shown.

Dams built by the creature, which died out 300 years ago through culling and hunting for pelts before being reintroduced in key areas over the past decade, are found to significantly slow the flow of water downstream and reduce peak flows after heavy rain.

This has the effect of protecting nearby land from flooding as well as retaining water in streams during droughts.

Research carried out during the five year trial on the River Otter, in Devon, has also found that the beavers’ dams prevent sediment and inorganic fertilisers being washed from farmland, causing plant life to flourish and boosting other types of wildlife.

Professor Richard Brazier, from the University of Exeter, said: “It’s an amazing story, it’s far more change than we expected.”

Ahh now that’s the way to start the new year! Go get another cup of coffee and come back and read the whole thing. It will make your spirit light and your step jaunty.