Month: September 2020

PANDEMIC ADVICE FROM A BEAVER REVISITED

heidi08 Beavers September 10, 2020

It is beyond unthinkable that 5 weeks before I originally posted this Trump was complaining to Bob Woodward that the virus was very serious and airborn. I just had to go back and try and remember what our life was like then. This post is from March 14, 195,ooo Americans ago.

PANDEMIC ADVICE FROM A BEAVER

Remember those days when we were washing our hands and not wearing masks because the CDC was telling us we didn’t need them? I was trying vainly to decide whether to cancel the beaver festival or keep planning for it, because there was a lot of work yet to do. People are saying Trump was foolish to say these things to Woodward and must have been oblivious to how important the taped interviews were.

I think he knew very well. He was just showing off.

Think about it, Trumps statements are shocking to us because we can hold in our mind the opposite things he was sayin aloud at the timee (It will go away, only 15 cases. more people die from the flu) at the same time we hold the news that he was alarmed (It’s really bad and it’s airborn). How could he lie to us when he knew the truth?

Being able to think two opposite things is a developmental accomplishment. A toddler or a cat never thinks that cookie looks really tasty but remembers he’s not supposed to take anything from the counter. A toddler never weighs opposite beliefs and considers the morality. He can’t.

Trump is aware of only one thought at a time. He thought this would make him sound presidential. Like he was dealing with serious things. He was proud of it.

THE BEAVER SUN ALSO RISES

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers September 9, 2020

Life is flammable and I think we need a sweet news day. Let’s start out with Vanessa Petro of OSU telling me I wasn’t wrong.

Vanessa Petro

You both are correct. Beavers in captivity can live up to 25 years of age (the Zhou et al. 2020 genome work is referring to this for the maximum lifespan) and beavers in the wild will average around 10-12 years based on results from several peer reviewed age structure, colony composition, and reproduction studies conducted across the U.S. Some have found 18-20 year old females in the wild, but this is rare. I believe the oldest beaver on record lived to be 30 years old in human care per the Smithsonian.

Thank you Vanessa! And thank you Emily for a very interesting couple of days! Don’t worry there’s more good news than that. How about the High Desert Museum?

My father was an avid traveler, mostly to far places you can never hope to name, but one of his favorite places to stop on his many trips up and down the pacific coast was the High Desert Museum in Bend Oregon. He was particularly enamored of the porcupine display – especially the adorable little noises he would emit in protest when one of the squirrels stole his carrot. Well recently we were approached by Louise Shirley who is working on a new exhibit for that VERY museum. An exhibit all about our favorite subject. I’ll let her explain,

I’m the curator of natural history for the High Desert Museum, a non-profit in Bend, Oregon, and I’m excited to be curating a temporary (8-9 month) exhibition called Dam It! Beavers and Us, about the beaver, our history with this remarkable rodent, and its ecological role. The primary aim is to foster a sense of appreciation and stewardship. Promoting coexistence, particularly in the arid West, feels vital.

I think your website is fantastic and I appreciate the updates you post to the beaver management Facebook group, too. Thank you so much for the great work you’re doing, and so tirelessly! I’m writing to ask if I might please be able to feature a few of your photos in the exhibition (with credit to you as the photographer, of course). I’d particularly appreciate any of beaver colonies or kits, for a display that will describe the life stages of an individual beaver. Thanks for your consideration!

So of course I chatted with Cheryl, who was in agreement that it was a great place to share our photos, and I sent Louise a palate to choose from. I also suggested she might use the Ecosystem poster I designed and she was very grateful and thought that was a PERFECT idea and a great way to get the idea across.

We really do have the most amazing photos. SO look for Worth A Dam in the High Desert Museum in the next year. Because beavers are Worth it! Maybe we can get some spies to check it out for us?

Now of course we aren’t the only beaver game in town anymore. So when folks want to talk about urban beavers they have other options to choose from. The documentary Return to Wild America was created by Sébastien Lafont & Guy Beauché and is headed for the Canadian Wildlife film festival. But I was able to sneak a preview and guess who was in it talking about urban beavers? Our good friends Jim and Judy Atkinson of Port Moody that’s who! Judy was soo excellent and politically delicate when describing the terrible fuckup that lead to one of the kits originally being drowned. And Jim is apragmatic beaver believer. It was originally produced in French, and I was surprised to see it also starred our friend Beth Pratt talking about her very special P-22 cougar in LA. Here’s the trailer in English. I’m sure you’ll be able to see the whole thing after their festival.

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On a very local level I heard a rumor yesterday that Vallejo Flood and Wastewater is thinking about installing a flow device to manage some beaver building instead of trapping or a change! They are in conversation with Kevin of Swiftwater Design and were checking with their friends at the Waterboad to see if these things actually worked which of course led them to Riley who of course sent them to me.

Fingers crossed, Vallejo may employ a long term solution soon!

Perfectly timed to coincide with the newest rescue patient at Suisun Wildlife which we’ve already talked about. There was a great article welcoming him recently in the Reporter and I knew you’d want to see.

Orphaned beaver embraced by Suisun Wildlife Center

The Beav was just 1-2 weeks old with no parents to be found.

Still, folks hoped to reunite the baby with its family and went to the place where they were told it was found. No beavers were found in the area.

The center reached out to beaver specialists at Worth A Dam in Martinez, who connected them with a beaver expert in New York state, who advised against another reunification

attempt.

When its ready, The Beav will begin exerting its need to build and center folks will help it. “It’s instinct,” Liguori pointed out. “You just need to give it the tools.”

Plans are in the works for the enclosure, and funding is being collected. “He’s going to be a costly little one, but so worth it,” Liguori said. “He’s a happy little beastie.”

The Beav and fellow critters being cared for at the Suisun Wildlife Center could use financial help. If you’d like to donate, go online to www.facebook.com/SuisunWildlife or www.suisunwildlife.org/, or call 429-4295.

Excellent! I’m sure a few well placed articles and photos like that could help a great deal with funding. Now if we could just get Vacaville to stop making SO MANY ORPHANS everything will be fine.

One last update on our goodnews-o-rama today. The scottish government wrote me back about the stolen photo. Donald Fraser, Head of Wildlife Management, NatureScot is looking into it and will get back to me.

BEAVER LONGEVITY

heidi08 Beaver Anatomy, Beaver Lifespan September 8, 2020

I’m so excited to tell you how wrong I’ve been.

For years now I’ve been following the data we had from the very beginning when we were told by so many experts that beavers live 10-15 years. I’ve been very devoted to that fact because I felt it made people less afraid of the beaver “breeding machine”. I remember friendly reporter Joe Eaton wrote in the article about Mom beaver’s death that the record of the longest living beaver was 19 years in captivity and of course we all considered that a fluke.

I assumed that our Dad beaver was around 11 and at the end of his life when he left us. I knew a colony had been studied at Mountain View Sanitation 10 years before our beavers came and always always figured that was ancient history and at least one of our beavers had descended from them.

I was WRONG.

Yesterday in Emily’s water interview she casually mentioned that beavers live up to 25 years. This was so outside our information that I wrote her to ask about it. She sent back a host of articles on the subject. Apparently beaver are study for LONGEVITY research because they live so long for a rodent.

In fact the only rodent that lives longer than the beaver is the Naked mole rat in Africa.

Now in addition to my wrongness, this is remarkable because we of course know that beavers are awesome for a host of other reasons. But to think that cancer researchers are amazed by their anti-aging abilities is wonderous in a hole new way. Apparently the Longevity of a beaver has been studied and attributed to three things:

Their ability to repair their own DNA when disease strikes, their ability to exert dynamic change on the atoms around them, and their enormous adaptability and capacity to resist stress. Beavers, and you know this but they know it on a cellular level, really don’t stress the small stuff.

Long-lived rodents have become an attractive model for the studies on aging. To understand evolutionary paths to long life, we prepare chromosome-level genome assemblies of the two longest-lived rodents, Canadian beaver (Castor canadensis) and naked mole rat (NMR, Heterocephalus glaber), which were scaffolded with in vitro proximity ligation and chromosome conformation capture data and complemented with long-read sequencing. Our comparative genomic analyses reveal that amino acid substitutions at “disease-causing” sites are widespread in the rodent genomes and that identical substitutions in long-lived rodents are associated with common adaptive phenotypes, e.g., enhanced resistance to DNA damage and cellular stress. By employing a newly developed substitution model and likelihood ratio test, we find that energy and fatty acid metabolism pathways are enriched for signals of positive selection in both long-lived rodents. Thus, the high-quality genome resource of long-lived rodents can assist in the discovery of genetic factors that control longevity and adaptive evolution.

I would point out that the beaver diet relies so greatly on willow which is known to be one of the most regrowing and to stimulate regrowth. In fact willow is used as a rooting compound and it clearly has passed on its magic over the years. Robin of Napa also pointed out that beavers have a surprising ability to not only resist pollutants (such as in Chernobyl) but to transform them! Making toxins into cleaner brighter less toxic versions of themselves.

To think about this momentous way in which I had misunderstood the beaver lifecycle was startling, But of course it also meant I had to rethink OUR beavers lifecycle. I had always thought our father beaver was descended from the nearby MVSD colony.

Now I think it was him the whole time. He came to Alhambra Creek for his second act, as it were. The study in MVSD took place in 1997, just a decade before dad showed up downtown. I thought he was a child when he came. but now I’m thinking that he was around 11 or 12.

To say that this blew all of my mind yesterday is an understatement. The idea that our father beaver had a family and home a decade before was every bit as shocking as if I had found out that my own father had had another wife, another family another life before I was born. This changes everything because it means that dad was so much larger because he was older than mom. And that mom was such a sweet young thing, which might explain why she was always more able to tolerate people than Dad, who valued his privacy.

Was mom from MVSD too? Was she a relative? Did they meet in his explorations? We cannot know. But we do know this:

Beavers live longer than >23 years. They are way cooler than mole rats. Dad’s first chapter was probably in MVSD and his second in Alhambra creek. And suggests that in his long life he was probably married three times.

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WOULD YOU SAY THAT BEAVERS ACTUALLY CREATE WETLANDS?

heidi08 Beavers September 7, 2020

This is a very fun interview and it has the very best interview question I’ve ever heard. A very cautious interviewer asking, “Would you say, do you think, that beavers actually create wetlands?

Water talk: Beaver hydrology and management

A conversation with California State University-Channel Islands Professor Emily Fairfax about her work studying the lives of beavers and their impacts on droughts, fires, and water quality as well as some strategies for beaver management. (Confidential to GS: This is for you!)

Well that’s very fun to listen to. Emily is doing SUCH a great job with her new beaver spokeswoman role! Like all young scientists she under emphasizes the Herculean work that has gone on up to now to make this work possible. She doesn’t credit Glynnis or Dietrich or Lixing-Sun or Wohl. But okay, history is in the past. A great deal of good work has been done to get us to this point, but we are ready to let you move us forward. Let’s go!

There was another fine article from National Wildlife Federation this month. We are getting such good press from Montana and Sarah Bates.

Re-watering the Prairie

Prairie streams—vital ribbons of water and riparian habitat for wildlife—graphically demonstrate the power of erosion. Once, numerous beaver dams slowed water flowing through these drainages, but beavers were nearly wiped out in the heyday of the fur trade. As a result, the water runs faster, forming narrowing stream channels that become disconnected from the surrounding lands. This reduces both water availability and the riparian habitat that is essential for the survival of many prairie species, including the iconic Greater Sage-grouse.

The National Wildlife Federation, in partnership with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, is taking steps to improve riparian conditions on prairie streams in north-central Montana, using low-tech methods that include beaver dam analogs (also known as BDAs) to imitate beaver activity and expand the diversity of flora and fauna. This approach to restoration is expanding around the western U.S., sometimes combined with relocation of beavers from other areas. In Montana, where relocation is not a favored management strategy, improving stream conditions with BDAs facilitates natural recolonization by beavers already living in the area.

Ahh the BDA and its beaver building cousins! Great to see both given equal praise in this very positive article!

In short, says ecologist Amy Chadwick of Great West Engineering, who is leading the project design and implementation, “we’re putting water back on the floodplain to keep green areas green for longer.”

One project site at Cottonwood Creek, a drainage on public lands north of the Missouri River, illustrates the power and promise of this deceptively simple restoration technique. A Montana Conservation Corps (MCC) young-adult crew camps on the ridge high above the creek bottom, and is joined early each morning by field staff and seasonal staff with the Bureau of Land Management as well as the National Wildlife Federation’s staff, contractors, and volunteers.

Hi Amy! It’s great to see you still doing fantastic work for beavers! We need more like you in every state.

Results are apparent almost immediately. After just one day of BDA construction, water that previously rushed down the narrow channel is already spreading onto the surrounding floodplain, glistening under bright yellow sunflowers and drawing leopard frogs out onto newly watered ground. As team members pack up to leave the site several days into the project installation, they watch from the hill as a muskrat wanders downstream and plops from the bank into a newly formed pool, swimming large circles in a channel that didn’t provided this habitat just a day earlier.

“It’s stacking up and spilling more water than we anticipated, after just three days,” Chadwick notes. “We’re pioneering low-tech restoration approaches proven effective in other parts of the West in a new landscape. It’s very exciting to try out a lot of different things to see what works and what doesn’t.”

Ahh it’s great to see this at work. Slowly doing the good work that will change hearts and minds. It makes me happy, but if you want to see what makes me even happier spend some time with this video from the St, Louis Aquarium using children’s art to fill the tank.

INTERNATIONAL COURT, COPYRIGHT LAW, AND BEAVERS

heidi08 Who's Killing Beavers Now?, Who's stealing photos now? September 7, 2020

You may recall that there are two sets of beavers in Scotland. One ‘official trial’ in Knapdale in a landmass they can basically never escape, and one “unofficial” in the Tayside where our friends the Ramsays live. And after much hemming and hawing they were both granted permission to stay in the country. But there was a catch. They could only stay if there could be a legal permitted way to kill them when they caused issues for farmers. Scottish National Heritage was put in charge of the process.

There has been a massive scandal in recent days as a hardworking reporter from the Ferret, Rob Edwards obtained a copy of the training slides Scottish National Heritage used to educate the chosen few. The slideshow so horrified thousands of countrymen that there have been more than 15000 signatures to a petition to stop the killing. Remember Scotland is a small country. They haven’t ever had that many people sign anything.

This is from the final slide and partially explains the alarm.

It took all my breath when I first saw it. Not because of the dead beaver, lord knows we’ve seen enough of them over the years. But because of the joyful children in juxtaposition. Obviously having a fun day out with Dad. Killing funny things with flat tails,

And when you’re a child and your dad is a racist or a trapper or a terrorist, you don’t know any better. How could you? When I was a child and my father used to spray chemicals into the elm tree to avert dutch elm disease. I didn’t know any better. I would sit on the stairs and collect all the dying caterpillars that dropped out in a little container with leaves, hoping to keep them as pets. Every year I was surprised that they stopped moving within hours. And I didn’t understand until much later that my father spraying chemicals had killed them.

So I went though the slide show grimly reading how to kill beavers by catching them where they lived or worked and getting entire family groups. I downloaded it for your education if your stomach is strong enough But it was the third slide that REALLY got my attention. Maybe you’ll see why.

If that picture in the lower right corner looks familiar it should. Because its the photo of one Cheryl Reynolds taken of our kit and dad beaver in 2013 in Martinez California.

Our beavers used to teach snipers how to shoot family groups.

Of course I was beyond incensed. I contacted the reporter who said that the slideshow was prepared by the Scottish government and that he would find out how they got our photo. In the meantime he was willing to mark it as stolen on their website where I found it. Even though for him it was the middle of the night.

I believe this entire slideshow and decision to train authorized beaver killers was, what we candidly would call in America, a royal clusterfuck. The idea that some perky intern sat down on their laptop and made a power point about how to kill every last beaver (don’t forget the little ones) is beyond horrific. And the idea that they would browse the internet(s) like looters and choose photos from OUR WEBSITE where we teach how to NOT kill beavers is outrageous.

I wrote the board of the Scottish Natural Heritage as much and will let you know if I or the reporter hear back. If they wanted to do this right they could have used any of the thinly respectable trappers organization or even the USDA. Obviously they didn’t take this job seriously or they would have been more careful in how it was presented and not finished with a photo of two little girls having a dead beaver tea party

Stay tuned. I think there will be more to this story.