Month: February 2020

WHEN YOU CAN’T SEE THE FOREST FOR THE TREES

You would think, wouldn’t you, that a city spitting distance from arguably the most famous beavers in Canada, just 7 miles away from Olympic village where beavers have gotten famous for pictures like the one you see, you would think any city so close to smart answers would be, well SMART, right?

But you’d be wrong. Because Burnaby just has no fricking idea what to do to live with beavers. And their loud whining can be heard all across her majesty’s Great White North.

Damn beavers from destroying Deer Lake forest

Beavers are one of Canada’s great creatures. They are on our money and in our hearts – unless they are cutting down certain types of trees in Burnaby.

The City of Burnaby has taken steps to stop beavers from gnawing down trees around Deer Lake. Fencing has been erected around trees in the area, including sequoias and purple beech, according to photos submitted by Burnaby nature photographer John Preissl.

Um. Guess which are bigger Burnaby. Beavers or Chickens? Do you think this measily wire unattached to a stake is going to keep a 50 lb beaver from just leaning on that fence until they can nibble? I sure don’t.

Preissl regularly photographs around Deer Lake and monitors the wildlife. He says some of the trees can be used by Eagles.

“The beavers got a few more of the trees under the Eagle perch tree overnight,” he said. “One of the downed trees is partially blocking the boardwalk near the Hart House (restaurant) … the brand new cedars and firs have almost all been taken down by the beavers. Maybe time for some fencing around the few remaining?”

Preissl said that he contacted the city and a staff member was immediately sent to take down the tree blocking the boardwalk around the lake and that had created a safety hazard.

Oh NO! The important eagle won’t have ANY where to land when those mean beavers take down that tree. Or anything to eat when all the animals thriving at a beaver pond stop getting a feast of insects or little fish.

Better kill the beaver to save the eagle. That sounds downright American! It’s what they’d do in Montana for sure.

Park Board continues discussion of beavers on Beaver Creek Park

Hill County Park Board met Monday and discussed beaver management options and beaver trapping reports, as well as group reports.

Fran Buell of Gildford provided a beaver damage control report for the board.

“The trappers are now going to concentrate on new areas where they feel, through observation of current beaver activities — i.e. lodge building, dam building, cut down trees and scent mounds — indicate the need to remove the beaveer before more extensive damage is done,” a report presented by Buell said.

Look just because it’s called beaver creek doesn’t mean we want beavers in our creek! Smack dab in the middle of the state, we have places for camping and fishing and NO PLACES for beavers. Do you hear me?

Buell said that in December and January only three beavers were removed due to the weather, lack of ice and other factors, such as previous beaver removal in the area, 2-year-old beavers leaving the colony and human presence, are more than likely the reason for the low number.

She added that the total number of beavers that have been removed by the Montana Trappers Association since the trapping started in October is 25.

Good lord. The area is kind of a highway for beavers. but 25 since October is a high number. Three families. That’s a grim thought. On the bright side the trappers might be exaggerating their success. That’s comforting.

The board also discussed possible alternative beaver management options with park board member Renelle Braaten. She said she has been in contact with the Humane Society of the United States Wildlife Response and Policy Senior Adviser Dave Pauli and provided a report that said he is working with some foundations and non-profits to come up with some plans to teach people in the community more about beavers.

His report said he has reached out to two beaver experts in Montana because they were excited to learn about opportunities to potentially have a co-existence demonstration project in Montana and the opportunity to have a regional workshop here as well.

“He’s pretty excited about it, and I’m pretty excited about it,” Braaten said. “I think it would be excellent for our park not only to do some things out there that would be good for the park, but also I know (board chair Steve Mariani) said at a meeting once it could be a viewing area and that’s a possibility is what it sounded like to me.”

Mariani was not at Monday’s meeting.

Pauli said groups like the Defenders of Wildlife and National Resources Defense Council, which also have employed the two beaver expert biologists, had quickly signed on to potentially provide a training conference in Havre for any state, federal, non-governmental organization and private parties that want to learn more about beavers.

Bratten added that nothing is written in stone, but she wanted to provide an update.

You mean actual wildlife for people to see in a park? Get out! What a novel idea! And great numbers of fish and birds because of the invertebrate changes beavers bring? Wow! That’s something,

It takes a steady soul like Dave Pauli to bring new ideas to Montana. I might just be whacking every one in the head with rolled up newspapers.

A HEYDAY FOR BEAVERS

Heyday Publishing that is.

Looks like artist and water guru Obi Kaufann just signed a 6 volume contract with California’s favorite publisher. The latest book looks very nice. But it’s the one that comes after that which got my attention.

Artist, author of ‘The California Field Atlas’ talks about Sonoma County’s ecology

Bestselling author, artist and adventurer Obi Kaufmann answers to an unusual calling: over the past few decades he’s explored vast tracts of California’s wild backcountry on foot, from the Siskiyou Mountains near the Oregon border to the Salton Sea near Mexico.

In the process, he’s acquired a unique firsthand view of the state’s diverse natural world and the complex workings of its deepest systems.

This coming Tuesday, Feb. 11, Kaufmann will be in Santa Rosa to introduce a slice of what he’s discovered and his new hand- illustrated book, “The State of Water,” along with perspective on what he sees as California’s unfolding ecological story.

Okay now that looks like it definitely belongs at the beaver festival. And Californians thirst for knowledge about their own water. But guess what he’s working on now?

“I am working on a series of what will ultimately be six books,” he said. “And two of the main characters in the next book (on forests) are Sonoma County locals — the salmon and the beaver.”

“Can you imagine, just 200 years ago, nearly every watershed on nearly every water course in Sonoma County held these two species,” he said. “We’re looking at thousands of beavers, a beaver population density of two or three per kilometer.”

“Beaver created cold, clear, clean water habitat for salmon. And at the end of their life cycle, when the fish returned to the headwaters of their birth, they laid their bodies down, depositing hundreds of thousands of metric tons of calcium, phosphorus and nitrogen, which came back down the Russian River in big floods to feed the forests the fertilizer they need.”

Kaufmann believes the two native animals offer modern Californians an ecological architecture for restoration.

I’m guessing Brock Dolman promoting beavers and salmon will be heavily featured in that book. I just hope it comes out FAST. California needs to get the beaver salmon point soon, or it will be too late. For the salmon I mean, beavers of course will stick around no matter what stupid stuff we do.

Plenty of people get on the beaver bandwagon eventually. Check out this article.

Polluted, damaged streams in Chesapeake region at center of debate over cleanup

A billion-dollar industry has emerged as local governments work to stay below EPA limits for urban runoff that allow them to qualify for stormwater permits and that help determine federal funding to states in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

But environmental scientists say it is unclear whether the high-cost projects are worth the investment. The work typically uses heavy machinery to clear old trees and plant new ones around re-engineered streams that contain boulders, wood and vegetation meant to absorb harmful pollutants.

In some cases, such projects may be hurting surrounding wildlife unnecessarily, some experts say.

“You modify the system so much that you risk transforming a stream ecosystem into something else. And the question becomes: Is that good?” said Solange Filoso, an aquatic biologist at the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science who advocates for smarter stream restoration designs and a greater focus on the sources of urban runoff.

Now we all know that. And we all know what would do it better. But I didn’t know Maryland knew that too.

Thomas Jordan, a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, said a fair amount of guesswork is involved in the effort. He cited a $1 million project on his center’s property in Anne Arundel County, Md., that initially caused the water to turn a rusty color — because of iron leaching out of rehydrated soil — and, later, appeared to be no more effective at removing pollutants than a beaver dam further downstream.

“And the beavers do that free,” he said.

Thomas Jordan at the Smithsonian Environental Research Center gets an email. Something tells me this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

IN FEBRUARY A YOUNG BEAVER HITS THE ROAD

heidi08 Beaver Chewing, Dispersal February 7, 2020

Guess what month it is? February. And what is it that happens in February from a strictly beaver point of view? Oh that’s right. Ten years of living with beavers teaches us what happens in the west: DISPERSAL!

Beaver holds up traffic for ten minutes on Princeton bridge

Groundhog Day was February 2.

However, for at least one local man, the first day of the month was The Day of The Beaver.

Jim Dixon, and several other motorists, were held up at Princeton’s Brown Bridge for approximately ten minutes Saturday morning by a beaver who was taking its sweet time crossing the river.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Dixon.

Well. maybe not Dixon, but we have. Thank goodness folks were content to slow down and snap photos. Beavers and roadways are a notoriously bad combination. Think about how annoyed that poor beaver will be when he realizes all this effort just brought him right back to the same dam river he thought he left behind.

You will recognize the presenter in this fine video from our Scottish friends.

All I can say is they have some DAM fine trees in Scotland! That is Louise Ramsay and her daughter, Sophie, singing at the end. I think this is on their estate in Bamff. What a beautiful slice of nature they steward!

A friend re-posted this recently and I thought I had died and went to heaven.

BEAVERS NEED US TO GET OUT OF THEIR WAY

heidi08 Beavers and climate change February 6, 2020

So we shipped off the package of booklets for the conference yesterday. They were heavy so we tried for ‘media mail’ but god knows the criteria is pretty hard to meet. They are clearly educational and not retail, but they do contain a staple and that might be too bound for the cheap seats. We’ll see, In the meantime to co-director of BeaverCon has a nice article with a snappy title. You are registered, aren’t you?

Of bivalves & beavers: Let’s leave our landscapes to these experts

They might seem an odd couple, Crassostrea virginica and Castor canadensis — the Eastern oyster and the North American beaver. But ecologically, for the Chesapeake Bay, the mollusk and the rodent are a lovely pairing, a compelling linkage of water and watershed.

Both were keystone species, the one’s dense reefs and the other’s ubiquitous damming and ponding create habitat and enhance water quality to the benefit of a host of other species.

A restored Chesapeake could use lots more oysters and beavers. Work on the former is well under way, with Maryland and Virginia creating sanctuaries where reef building can once again occur. Watermen, and to a point the Hogan administration, oppose this as a loss of fishing opportunity.

As your eyes and your brain adjust to what McGill has done to the Baltimore County gully, you begin to notice his “mess” is aflutter with butterflies, hopping with frogs and ablaze with the flowering of asters, daisies, Joe Pye weed and the new growth of willows.

I don’t really think of bi-valves as a keystone species. Do you think they get a festival? I bet they do. But one where people eat them, which isn’t nearly as educational. Shhh this is the good part:

McGill is an apostle for how to share the watershed with beavers, using “beaver deceiver” devices such as pipes placed in their dams to control flooding. He is organizing a major conference on beavers (BEAVERCON 2020) near Baltimore this March to spread the good word.

Ho Ho Ho! The conference gets a sliver of press! Let’s hope more follows! Excellent news and an excellent way to think about our natural systems. Often letting nature do its job and getting OUT OF ITS WAY is the most useful thing we can do for the planet.

Take climate change for instance.

Rewilding can help mitigate climate change, researchers highlight after conducting global assessment

A new study has shown that rewilding can help to mitigate climate change, delivering a diverse range of benefits to the environment with varied regional impacts.

Research led by the University of Sussex and published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, provides a global assessment of the potential for trophic rewilding to help mitigate climate change.

Trophic rewilding restores lost species to ecosystems, which can have cascading influences over the whole food web. This typically means reintroducing large herbivores (e.g. elephants) and top predators (e.g. wolves), or species known to engineer more diverse and complex habitats and benefit biodiversity (e.g. beavers).

Dr Chris Sandom , Senior Lecturer in Biology at the University of Sussex, said: “The key thing to remember here is that nature is complex and needs to be complex.

Agreed! A landscape with a single species isn’t a landscape. Lets let nature take her course and help her along to make up for the mistakes we made along the way.

NOT A ‘SHAPE-SHIFTER’ BUT A LANDSCAPE-SHIFTER

heidi08 Beavers and climate change February 5, 2020

Time for some serious beaver reporting. I feel like it’s been a while since we sliced through real information but this article from ajb at “The rugged Indivualist” offers some great perspective. It even brings a metaphor about beavers Ben Goldfarb missed. And that’s saying something.

Nature’s Underappreciated Ecosystem Architect

I was inspired to write this article when I took a walk along the river at the back of my property, through the domain of a woodland theriomorph. A mysterious shapeshifter, not of himself, but rather of land and water, wedding the two in a harmonious embrace. He is simultaneously a sculptor in soft earth and an architect of raw timber, masterfully designing and crafting his surroundings into a vision of his own. He creates a product that is naturally arresting by virtue of the tireless dedication, pragmatism, and ingenuity involved. His intuition is preternatural, creating opportunity with nothing but physical refinement and acute mental faculties.

Now I would argue that he probably had a little help being inspired by reading Ben’s book to get to this place, which he does not admit to but from which he posts photos from of Susie Creek’s grand transformation. There’s no time to quibble because its wonderful to read well written appreciation of our favorite subject.

Many would be surprised to realize that beavers, in the same family as mice and squirrels, create rich, biodiverse habitats unrivaled by any other creature on our planet. Beavers don’t just make themselves homes and blockade rivers; they create sanctuary for everything from tiny invertebrates up to our most iconic species such as deer, moose, and bear. In fact, the effects of their actions are so great that much contemporary research and thought revolves around these creatures being indispensable buffers in a world becoming ever more variable and inhospitable by the climate change we’ve manufactured.

An excellent start. Go on…

Where does one begin in their adulation of the almighty beaver? Well, let’s start with the most impressive thing that they do: create wetlands. Let me say that again: beavers create wetlands. A species consciously capable of changing the land’s form and function. This environment is rarely even created by the invisible grace of Mother Nature, making it even more impressive that it is frequently accomplished by a woolly rodent. But beavers, well, they make it look easy when they siphon water to make moats around their stick castles with ease. Whether wet climate or dry, beavers use the existing water in their environment to create hydro engineering marvels. Take a look at the pictures below of an area in the arid southwest of landscape before and after beaver introduction. You will be stunned by its transformation into an oasis.

You have all our attention. Consider this your chance to ‘preach to the choir’.

By constructing a dam and reducing the flow of waterways, beavers are able to collect and disperse water over a large surface area which heavily saturates the underlying soil, raising the water table in effect. This slowed water creates a pond of still or slightly flowing water that allows aquatic plants to take hold below and above the surface with shrubby vegetation establishing itself along the water’s edge. This leads to an overall richness of habitat complexity that draws in and supports burgeoning levels of biodiversity from birds to mammals and everything in between. This is the general process by which these beavers establish a wetland. But, the benefits to the environment are not over.

When beavers create their pond ecosystems, the newly formed body of water penetrates deep into the soil. This water leaches into underwater aquifers and recharges what is many times a parched groundwater supply. A benefit that many perennially dehydrated parts of this country could desperately use. Additionally, beaver dam impoundments help decontaminate water sources by reducing siltation and filtering out impurities. That’s right, beavers even make our most precious resource clearer and cleaner. So, not only do beavers alter hydrodynamics within the ecosystem to create new opportunities for flora and fauna, but they also make the environment more resilient by allowing for greater storage and spread of filtered water supplies. To put it simply, beavers fundamentally change the capacities of the land around them. They make an environment that can absorb increasingly unpredictable amounts of precipitation that prevents destructive run-off and flooding, while also preserving water when it is scarce. This is a major reason beavers are such powerful agents in preventing catastrophic effects from climate change.

Yup, Yup and yup. Beavers change things for the better. And they would do it a helluva a lot more often if we would just stop killing them. We sing that song every day. Anything else to add?

the work of beavers help keep our landscape and resources in equilibrium. It is now time to restore this competent creature back to its rightful place and allow them to clean up a mess we cannot contain.

Hear Hear! I’ll drink to that! And I bet you all will also! It’s like watching a great stadium wave across the nation, seeing other folk get the point of Ben’s gilded prose and appreciate what’s right in front of them. Sometimes I wish the wave went faster, or bigger, but I’m always grateful for it.

Monday night Radio1 in the UK had their own discussion of beavers which I’m sure you’ll enjoy.