Month: July 2020

LET BEAVERS FIX FORESTS

heidi08 Beavers and Forests July 26, 2020

There are lots of minds that need changing about beavers. The farmers in Scotland who think they need shooting, their friends the anglers who think they eat fish The wardens at Fish and Game that classify them as a nuisance and their dam as ‘debris.’ But there are some people who don’t need to change one iota. Some folks have it down exactly right.

Like Sarah Hyden of New Mexico.

Let our forest heal

It’s changing by the year as the climate becomes warmer and dryer. Existing vegetation in many areas is becoming more marginal. Those of us who live by and with the forest can see it happening. Some years, we wonder if the trees will even make it, and then the rains come and they look healthy again. But they don’t seem to be able to tolerate even relatively small impacts

The forest is resilient in its own way when left free of human interventions. It’s evolving into the healthiest forest possible given current conditions, even if it doesn’t always look that way to us after such natural forest processes as wildfire and bark beetle outbreaks. There will likely be major shifts in vegetation types.

Sarah does a great job of talking about the danger Albequerque’s forest are in. She explains that they could pretty much recover from anything except US. And guess what she suggests might fix the problem?

Go ahead guess.

There are careful forest restoration projects we can undertake – to de-commission roads, restore riparian areas, build earthen dams to reduce flooding risk and to re-introduce beavers. Some very limited and light-handed thinning and burning may be needed, but only for strategic and site-specific reasons. This requires open-minded utilization of newer forest and fire ecology research. It also requires new local research that is not based on the assumption that widespread thinning and burning are necessarily a benefit in the cost/benefit analysis. And it requires just slowing down the process.

You break it we fix it. That’s what beaver picket signs would say if they carried them. We can repair pollution, extinction and damage. Just let us do what we can do and stop killing us before we do it.

It’s time to embrace a new paradigm for the forest. Instead of imposing the framework of our limited ecological understanding and perspective onto the forest, let’s be allies of the forest and help support its inevitable transformation. Let’s respect and honor life. First, do no harm.

Beavers are tireless protesters you know. Apparently there were some pretty rowdy beaver protests last night in the area.

[wonderplugin_video iframe=”https://youtu.be/o6Pn7Tim7Fc” lightbox=0 lightboxsize=1 lightboxwidth=960 lightboxheight=540 autoopen=0 autoopendelay=0 autoclose=0 lightboxtitle=”” lightboxgroup=”” lightboxshownavigation=0 showimage=”” lightboxoptions=”” videowidth=600 videoheight=400 keepaspectratio=1 autoplay=0 loop=0 videocss=”position:relative;display:block;background-color:#000;overflow:hidden;max-width:100%;margin:0 auto;” playbutton=”https://www.martinezbeavers.org/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wonderplugin-video-embed/engine/playvideo-64-64-0.png”]

OUR FRIENDS AT BLUE HERON PRESERVE GET BDA’S

heidi08 BDA's July 25, 2020

Well, that’s the thing. When you’ve been around as long as we have, you get to watch the evolution of your friends. It was way back in 2014 that I was contacted by Nancy Jones the founder and then director of the Blue Heron Preserve in Atlanta Georgia, because they had some beavers in the area and they wanted to know what to do about them. Nancy came out for a visit and attended a festival in a separate trip, and when she was ready to bring on another director they sent Kevin McCauley out for a visit as well!

Well, they are still doing Georgia’s share of the heavy beaver lifting.

Beaver dams a low-tech solution to stormwater management in Atlanta park

Manmade beaver dams have just been installed along a creek in Atlanta’s Blue Heron Nature Preserve and could offer a time-tested, natural method to manage stormwater runoff.A

The effect of the manmade beaver dams is the same as natural beaver dams – water backs up behind the dam and forms a pond, where some water can soak into the earth and groundwater. Water that does seep through the dam flows downstream at pace slow enough to not erode creek banks.

Beaver dams are a modest method to clean streams, according to Ed Castro, president of ECL, the company that installed the dams at the nature preserve.

They’re so smart they even got the state to pay for the project with a clean water grant. You know it’s a pretty great day for beavers when a bunch of bureaurocrats write a check for the work they would do for free. Now if we could just get them to stop writing the other kind of checks. You know, the ones they pay to BMP or USDA to kill them.

Blue Heron’s system of dams was built with locust trees harvested from Castro’s tree farm in Newton County. They were nuisance trees and he was pleased to find a good way to repurpose them. The tree trunks became the upright poles in the dam, and branches and underbrush were woven in a horizontal fashion among poles that had been installed in pairs. Each dam runs 12 or so poles wide, depending on the width of the creek at a given point.

“The idea was to mimic a natural approach that a beaver might have,” Castro said. “We’d weave the poplar, the box elder – the biomass – in between the logs, mimicking beavers as they cut it down and start adding material, like a bird building a nest. They’re using a collection of natural resources and building it their way.”

Hey if you’re REALLY LUCKY some local beavers will move in and take over. Their funding stream is more reliable and consistent. And they stick around on the job and make repairs for free.

Good Luck!

EMILY FAIRFAX WILL INHERIT BEAVERS

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact, Beavers, Who's saving beavers now? July 24, 2020

I got to thinking yesterday about how long I’ve been doing this. I really have lost all track of time when it comes to beavers. 365 articles about beavers a year for 12 years ads up. I just checked the stats and by the time we hit 2021 I will have written 5000 columns about beavers. That’s a lot of unpaid advertisement for the hero that never stops surprising.

I guess there are a few fruits to my labors. I at least have learned a lot. Even if no one else ever ever reads this. I have seen the beaver needle edge ever so slightly towards the plus column. I have even seen things change in California, to a minuscule degree, And I have seen a new wave of beaver heroes swing onto the horizon.

Emily Fairfax gave a knock-it-out-of-the-park podcast interview to Artemis that dropped yesterday. It’s an hour of the very best beaver discussion you are likely to hear this year or many others. She did a bang-up job, and has a delightfully engaging way of presenting science in an unscientific way. There are about three things I would quibble with if we up late comparing notes and swapping stories in the tavern somewhere. But this is must-isten radio. Some day I’ll hand in my keyboard and retire from the beaver stage. But I’m no longer worried.

Emily can inherit beavers.

OLD NEWS CONTINUES TO SURPRISE IN OREGON

heidi08 Beavers and salmon July 23, 2020

Yesterday Cheryl gave consent for a bunch of her photos to be used to Cascadia Wildlands who is undertaking a campaign to persuade people not to trap beavers in Eugene. They maintain a website called Protecting Ecosystem Engineers where Cheryl’s photos are soon to be shared. Because apparently no one ever thought of coexisting with beavers before for a decade.

Well may they do a lot of good and let folks see things clearer in Oregon. I’m not going to be condescending at all because California is way way worse. I’ve always said that beaver wisdom flows from Washington State and by the time it reaches us its a little tarnished.

Folks are having a heyday in Oregon though.

Beavers Could Be A Key Species For Endangered Salmon Recovery In Oregon

Recent guidance from the federal government is, for the first time, promoting the importance of beavers in the recovery of endangered salmon and steelhead in Oregon rivers.

A recently released biological opinion is encouraging landowners to use non-lethal means of dealing with beavers on private property.

“We know that they can provide important benefits that help support recovery of these fish that a lot of people are working toward,” says Michael Milstein, a spokesperson with the National Marine Fisheries Service. “But at the same time, it’s clear that they can cause conflict.”

It’s funny how the same decision our friends called a major break down and failure, NPR classifies as a major break through. Politics is the art of the possible. It’s more about public transportation not falling in love. Just because a deal doesn’t get you exactlt where you want to go, you don’t throw in the towel and pledge to just stay home. You go with whatever bus brings you CLOSEST to where you need to be.

I guess this is closer.

LOUISE LAYS IT ON THE LINE

heidi08 Beavers and Scotland July 22, 2020

One of the things I like best about the beaver world is that it’s small enough to break in and really be heard. The players are few enough that you can read an article written by a believer in say, Scotland, for instance and think, hey I know her! I was wondering how she was doing.

Which makes it a great time to visit this important article from Louise Ramsay.

Wild beavers in Scotland

by Louise Ramsay

87 Beavers have been shot under license in Scotland. What has gone wrong?

Beavers were finally given legal protection in Scotland on 1 May 2019, almost two decades after their return to Scotland. On the same day, the Scottish government issued licenses to certain landowners to allow them to kill beavers and remove their dams.

Up to the end of the year, 87 beavers are known to have been shot under this scheme not including the unknown number killed illegally. Many people believe that the actual figure may be double the official one. At the last count there were around 450 beavers in Scotland so we are talking about one to two fifths of the known population.

Meanwhile there are landowners and reintroduction projects across the UK who want beavers. These ecosystem engineers help with wetland restoration, flood prevention, nature and wellbeing and much more besides, and are in high demand.

It’s so helpful to settle in with an expert like Louise and really hear this story told all the way through. The great irony is that the key to making beavers protected was to allow them to be killed. That has been a tense bargaining chip since the very beginning. People needed an Offramp if things went wrong. But I’m not sure anyone ever decided that killing 20% of the population would be a good idea.

Beavers make complex wetlands by building and maintaining dams. The dams can be one hundred meters long or up to two meters high. In some landscapes, they can build several dozen dams in a couple of kilometres of waterway and have a really significant effect on the hydrology of an area, slowing the flow of water in times of flood and holding it on the land in times of drought.

They are agents of rewilding, creating abundant habitat for our beleaguered wildlife. Their dams and wetlands act as filters for agricultural run-off and other pollutants. They are both ecosystem engineers and a keystone species.

Beavers are trying to do the work for you, but they can’t do anything when you kill them.

45 licenses were issued to farmers and landowners in the course of 2019 and Scottish Natural Heritage, the public body responsible for our biodiversity, also ran short training courses which effectively encouraged numerous individuals to shoot beavers on land belonging to license holders. In an incredibly short-sighted process, they seemed to jump straight to the last resort of killing before trying any other options to deal with the reported problems.

So, given that there are some real problems with the beavers’ activities for these farmers, what could be done differently? The answer is that while it is difficult to accommodate these agents of rewilding in a highly artificial landscape, often it is not impossible and it is well worth the effort.

Are there any steps between letting a beaver do whatever they want and killing 87 of them?

There are a number of mitigation options, such as fencing, to keep the beavers out of particular areas. Dams can be adapted by having a pipe installed through them as a permanent leak or an electric fence run along them to limit their height. Where this works well it enables the beaver family to stay put and accept a smaller pond. Flood-banks can be protected with wire, and culverts can be protected with fencing boxes called beaver deceivers. Valued trees may be individually wrapped with wire or painted with a mixture of paint and glue, and sections of woodland can be fenced.

Mitigation can provide brilliant solutions that bring benefits to all concerned but as yet not many farmers have much faith in them. The government should be doing all they can to encourage mitigation before resorting to licensed shooting but instead they have approached this the other way around, by allowing widespread shooting first and then trying to retrofit some mitigation in a few places.

Louise goes through and lays it on the line stone by stone. There are things that can be done, there are reasons to do them.

Beavers, apart from bringing immense interest and joy, and attracting tourists, can save us humans vast amounts of money, although this is entirely over and above their intrinsic right to be here in their old territories – places from which our ancestors trapped them out for their pelts.

Well sure, beavers can help us if we stop hurting them. But that sounds kind of REASONABLE Louise, didn’t you know that with beavers people like to take the irrational solution?