Month: October 2020

BEAVER BEGINNINGS BEGUN

heidi08 Beavers October 21, 2020

Do you know the story of the little red hen? How she found some grain and asked all her barnyard friends who among them would help her plant it, tend it. water it, harvest it? And one by one they all answer that they were too busy, “Not I,” said the cow moo moo….”Not I” said the sheep, baa baa….So she ends up doing it all by herself.

Until it comes time to take the delicious smelling bread out of the oven and she asks “Who will help me eat the bread?” And then EVERYONE has time for that and wants a thick slice. But the little red hen wisely points out that she found the wheat and tended it and harvested it, and made the bread by herself, so she will EAT it herself.

And she did.

The story was on my mind this week as I approached beaver friends about my Cal-Beaver summit idea this week. Everyone said it was a good idea, and they’d love to present at it. They’d love to attend it. But as for taking a lead role or approaching their institutions for help they’re schedules were too busy to help in that regard. They had too much going on to help make it happen, but they liked the idea and I should let them know when it came to pass.

Frustrating but not surprising. Remember this has never happened in California before so even a tiny half-assed attempt would be a very big deal and the exciting news. This is how I comforted myself about the first beaver festival – even if it was horribly attendeded and a complete flop it would still be the biggest beaver festival Martinez had ever had. And what does it hurt to ask over and over? I’m talking today with wildlife defenders about what was involved in their production, to see what I can learn from them and I might have found an institution to help… So stay tuned. Because obviously I can’t eat the bread myself. Even if I can find helpers along the way yet. It’s a colloquy.

All the barnyard animals will need to be involved at some point.

This is one of the contenders for the UK Natural History Museum wildlife photo of the year. It didn’t win, but it’s pretty lovely.

Oliver Richter’s Image

Oliver has observed the European beavers near his home in Grimma, Saxony, Germany, for many years, watching as they redesign the landscape to create valuable habitats for many species of wildlife including kingfishers and dragonflies.

This family portrait is at the beavers’ favourite feeding place and, for Oliver, the image reflects the care and love the adult beavers show towards their young.

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BIRTHDAY BEAVERS FROM BORIS

Christmas is just around the corner. Maybe you’re wondering what to get that special person in your life? Wonder no more.

A dam good gift: Boris Johnson gives his father Stanley BEAVERS as a present for his 80th birthday

Most men are happy receiving a good book or a nice bottle of whisky for their birthday. But rather than an ordinary present, Boris Johnson gifted his father, Stanley, a group of beavers on his 80th birthday.

According to the Telegraph, the Prime Minister and his siblings clubbed together to get a licence to allow their father to have beavers in the river of his Exmoor estate

The Prime Minister met with the UK’s top rewilder, Derek Gow, to ensure the paperwork was arranged and the land suitably converted into a good beaver habitat.

Stanley Johnson was said to be ‘delighted’ at the gift.

Now there is precious little I like about Boris but goodness gracious this does go into the plus column. Why don’t I have an estate with beavers on it? One with a boardwalk and a nice viewing platform across from the dam?

Ben Goldsmith, brother of cabinet minister Zac Goldsmith and a friend of the Johnsons, is an investor in Derek Gow’s rewilding project.

Mr Gow told The Telegraph he is ‘deeply grateful’ to Boris Johnson for his ‘help in returning beavers to England’. Mr Gow said that he has been flooded with requests from people who want to introduce beavers to their estates.

Well sure. Everyone wants a beaver on their estate. I mean everyone who has an estate. A beaver in every creek. A chicken in every pot. You know the saying.

Meanwhile in America the Beaver Believers film has been making the rounds and received a very glowing review in Santa Barbara the other day. Mind you this is a town that could use more beavers to keep it from drying out and burning up.

Film Review: The Beaver Believers

The award-winning feature documentary directed by Sarah Koenigsberg follows the work and passion of five scientists and one quirky hairdresser turned beaver rescuer. Independently they’re all working to restore the North American Beaver, nature’s most hard-working engineer, to watersheds of the American West.

Beavers are a keystone species, meaning they have a disproportionately large effect on their natural environment relative to its abundance. They enrich their ecosystems, creating the biodiversity, complexity, and resiliency our watersheds need to absorb the impacts of climate change.

Ahh it’s nice to see the little ripples Sarah’s film is casting about the pond as it moves from state to state. Covid prevented her from having the film festival debut she deserved but it’s impressing anyway.

The film creatively used an unassuming animal to share the reality of how Earth is changing, how everything is interconnected, and how we need to make changes now before it’s too late.

Audiences have agreed by honoring “The Beaver Believers” with the 2019 Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour, winner of the Green Spark Award at the American Conservation Film Festival, winner of the Eco-Hero Award at the Portland Eco-Film Festival, and a finalist at both the London Eco-Film Festival and the Vancouver International Mountain Film Festival.

You can see the success its generating. I am not at all surprised it was the audience favorite. It’s certainly my favorite. Sarah recently started selling the DVD’s for individual viewing. If you’d like your very own copy click here:

Meanwhile it’s getting plenty cold for our friends and Mike Digout in Saskatchewan. How cold you ask? Well I can’t imagine this much ice at the end of October. But something tells me beavers can handle it.

NEW MEXICO BEAVER SUMMIT

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver Conference, Beaver ecological impact October 19, 2020

New Mexico is about to get a whole lot smarter about beavers, and you can listen in. I signed up yesterday for all four sessions because I am, as you know, a total beaver nerd. But look around and see what interests you.

In recent decades, the mounting impacts of climate change like smaller snowpacks, declining monsoon seasons, large and unnatural wildfires, higher temperatures and more severe droughts have engendered a new appreciation for the ecological benefits that beaver dams have for water conservation, wildfire mitigation and creating habitat for wildlife and forage for livestock.

Over the course of four separate sessions, the New Mexico Beaver Summit will explore these questions with expert panelists discussing the importance of beavers from historical, cultural and ecological perspectives, the challenges of living with beavers, tools that allow humans and beavers to coexist, and how to promote the recovery and repatriation of beavers through habitat restoration and reintroduction.

Yep that sound like a very good reason to hold a conference. We’ve been hearing mostly good things from New Mexico about beaver from Wild Earth Guardians and Wildlife Defenders and they are both involved with this conference. And it looks like they brought on some pretty good hitters to boot.

Aaron Hall

Aaron Hall works to protect species in aquatic and riparian habitats. He is responsible for identifying species and habitats for which Defenders can have a positive impact, and finding scientifically sound and pragmatic solutions to these threats to biodiversity.

Ben Goldfarb

Ben is the author of Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, winner of the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and named one of the best books of 2018 by the Washington Post.

Mary O’Brien

Mary joined the Grand Canyon Trust in 2003 to work with other conservation organizations to propose alternatives for forest plans for the Dixie, Fishlake, and Manti-La Sal national forests and other public lands.

Joe Wheaton

Joe Wheaton is an Assistant Professor at USU and a fluvial geomorphologist with over a decade of experience in river restoration. Joe runs the Ecogeomorphology & Topographic Analysis Lab in USU’s department of Watershed Science and is a leader in the monitoring and modeling of riverine habitats and watersheds.

There are other local voices as well but I thought these names would be the most likely to snag your attention. Mary is giving the keynote address and will turn 75 this year AND retire. Although she will continue to function as a guiding light for GCLT.

You just have to sign up. We have to reward good behavior.

You know I just had a thought about why, in these covid times, there isn’t a beaver conference in California. Starring Emily and her fire research, Jeff Baldwin and his excellent hydrology mapping, the beaver friendly habitat division of fish and wildlife’s Jennifer Rippert, Brock and Kate, Eric from San Diego, A friend from NOAA talking about dwindling salmon and a friend or two from audubon…our friends at CUSP or the waterboard…

Hmm…there ought to be…maybe there should be….maybe there will be…

Go here to sign up.

This lovely footage is from the underside of a beaver release by the Wenatchee beaver project in Washington. I snagged it off the beaver forum and thought it was lovely. I especially like how you see the beaver use his front paws for minor adjustments while swimming. I always suspected but didn’t know…

BEAVERS ARE CARVING A NAME FOR THEMSELVES

heidi08 Beaver Art, Beaver ecological impact, Beavers and Fire Prevention October 18, 2020

Time for an awesome letter to the editor from our friend author Judith K. Berg, You might remember she is the author of Otter Spirit and Conversations with a beaver and donated copies to our last silent auction. This was published in the Register-Guard in Eugene Oregon.

Well well well, she reads he national geographic too!

Smokey Beaver?

As devastating fires sweep across the American West, we thank firefighters for their diligent work. However, among them emerges an unsung non-human firefighter to which we also pay tribute — the American beaver.

Science, reflected in natural history, is on the move. A recent, timely publication by Emily Fairfax, in Ecological Applications, explains how our family-oriented ecosystem engineer adds another attribute to its vast repertoire. Fairfax’s results show that beavers’ canal-digging, dam-building and pond-creating endeavors irrigate extensive stream corridors, which, in turn, create fireproof refuges for plants and animals. In some cases, their engineered landscapes can even stop fires in their tracks. Wow!

Judith explained once that she was amazed how rich beaver habitat was and how much we owe them for their many good works. I couldn’t agree more, and am glad she published this letter locally. Maybe we all should be doing that.

With climate change upon us, the future holds more wildfire devastation. However, our willing beavers present us with a natural-based solution in areas where they‘ve developed enhanced waterways.

Yet humans continue to kill this special species to solve a few flood-control issues caused by beaver behaviors, even though there are proven non-lethal flood-prevention devices, such as “Beaver Deceivers,” that can be used.

Science continues to discover the many contributions bestowed on planet Earth by beavers. Now, we can add firefighting! Let’s thank them for that.

Oh my goodness. Let’s follow her lead and publish something similar in Napa and Sonoma and Santa Clara and LA. We are going to need a beaver army to fight this.

Looking for more accomplishments? How about carving the oldest wood idol in the world? Circa 11,000 it has held up to the test of time. On display in a museum in western siberia:

Beaver’s teeth ‘used to carve the oldest wooden statue in the world’

Dating back 11,000 years – with a coded message left by ancient man from the Mesolithic Age – the Shigir Idol is almost three times as old as the Egyptian pyramids.

New scientific findings suggest that images and hieroglyphics on the wooden statue were carved with the jaw of a beaver, its teeth intact.

Originally dug out of a peat bog by gold miners in the Ural Mountains in 1890, the remarkable seven-faced Idol is now on display in a glass sarcophagus in a museum in Yekaterinburg.

The faces were ‘the last to be carved because apart from chisels, some very interesting tools – made of halves of beaver lower jaws – were used’.

It’s not that remote of a history, because local tribes in Brentwood and Antioch were burried with beaver mandibles. Beavers change things. Its what they do.

This dropped yesterday and is my new favorite thing in the world.

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BEAVERS GET IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver ecological impact October 17, 2020

It’s rare enough in the beaver biz to come across the good beaver article. I’ve done this every day for a decade so I know how rare. Even rarer to get a great one. When those happen they are usually written be someone we know and love OR they are made palatable to the editor with a luke-warm headline.

This is because the author of the article usually isn’t who writes the headline. That’s the job for some underling whose work is more about selling stories than saving beavers, So when the perfect beaver article also has a PERFECT HEADLINE that is very, very rare indeed.

Unicorn rare.

To engineer is human; doing it right might require beavers

Duck behind a seniors’ apartment complex and enter lush expanses of ponds, wetlands and forested creek bottoms that sponsor natural diversity, slow stormwater runoff so it can soak into underground aquifers, allow natural processes time to cleanse and clarify the discharge, and reduce downstream flooding.

One side of the road represents the worst of human engineering, maximizing one thing, water removal, to the ruin of all else. The other maximizes nothing, except life in all of its buzzy, croaky, splashy, winged wonder — water as resource. The latter represents a most hopeful collaboration between humans and beavers, the animals that once engineered the Chesapeake watershed with a thoroughness unmatched even by today’s 18 million people.

Guess who made it? Who am I kidding. You know who made it.

Beavers are coming back, even to the inimical conurbation that is most of northern Anne Arundel County. Michelsen, acting deputy director of the county’s Bureau of Watershed Protection and Restoration, is my guide to what is no less than a demonstration project, with beavers themselves doing much of the construction.

For Michelsen, it was good news around 2015 when beavers started showing up on the county restoration project that enhanced the north branch of Cypress Creek here. It drains to the Magothy River and then the Chesapeake Bay. What humans began, the beavers enhanced, impounding the whole stream with a series of dams and ponds.

Until recently, the beavers would not have been embraced for their ecosystem contributions. They’d have been removed, meaning trapped and killed. That’s still too common around much of the Bay watershed.

Beavers are compelled to chew, to control their marvelous, self-sharpening teeth that never stop growing; compelled also to dam, annoyed by the sound of flowing water.

The beaver dams here were raising water levels, with a potential to flood Ritchie Highway. The county responded by installing a simple, low-tech device called a pond leveler. A sturdy metal cage toward the lower end of the pond protects one end of an 18-inch diameter plastic drainpipe.

Be still my heart. This article has the perfect content, the perfect headline AND it mentions a successful flow device? Is such a thing even possible. I need to sit down. I’m feeling faint.

Michelsen estimates there are hundreds of beavers now in Anne Arundel County.

Complaints about beavers typically run about “50/50, flooding and chewing down peoples’ trees,” said Peter Bendel, with the Wildlife and Heritage division of the state Department of Natural Resources.

“So now it’s a matter of education, teaching co-existence, offering solutions, explaining beavers’ benefits,” Michelsen said.

More fainting! Teaching coexistence and emphasizing education! Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness.

The shift toward an ecological beaver ethic remains slow and uneven across the watershed. Tools like pond levelers, abrasive paint and other techniques to protect trees are available, notably from Mike Callahan’s Beaver Solutions in Massachusetts. Callahan’s companion Beaver Institute provides both hands-on and do-it-yourself training for organizations or individuals working for a peaceful coexistence with the beavers.

We’ve scarcely begun to plumb the potential of beavers to restore water’s rightful way throughout Bay landscapes. But Michelsen has high hopes. “I am convinced that, even in a highly urban watershed, they can do wonders,” he said, “if we just allow them to work.”

Erik Michelsen is the acting deputy director of the county’s Bureau of Watershed Protection and Restoration and my new favorite human. Just imagine if such a thing existed in every county; In every watershed.

I’m getting faint again.