Month: May 2021

VIRGINIA CLIMBS ABOARD THE BEAVER TRAIN

heidi08 Beavers May 31, 2021

I tagged this a week ago but there was too much beaver news to squeeze it in. It deserves sharing, because good beaver news from Virginia? It’s been a while!

Can humans and beavers resolve their conflicts?

Coexisting with nature in Rappahannock sometimes produces struggles for county residents. Take, for instance, the sometimes embroiled relationship between the landowner and the local beaver.

Although beaver behavior is seemingly destructive, it provides many environmental benefits. “What they’re doing is important for water quality,” says Claire Catlett, Rappahannock Field Representative for the Piedmont Environmental Council. “When they build a dam, they are essentially slowing water down but they’re also spreading water out.”

The redistribution of water allows for the growth of new trees, which in turn provides new food and lumber for the beavers. The new trees act as a natural water purifier, filtering toxins from the water. “Trees play an important part in ecosystems,” Catlett says. “Especially along streams, they filter pollution with their roots.”

Good job Claire! We like anyone who tells the truth about beavers. Especially a field representative from the environmental council!

Beaver dams also create wetland habitats that are vital to a variety of animals and plant life. In addition to allowing hundreds of plant and animal species to thrive, wetlands offer flood and erosion control and remove pollutants from surface water runoff. Because they slow runoff and protect surface water, dams have also proven to recharge aquifers deep underground.

Bill Fletcher is one Rappahannock landowner who has witnessed the positive influence of beavers returning to his property over the past year. “I’ve had a number of springs come back on the farm,” says Fletcher, who had the idea of implementing a government-funded program to install Beaver Dam Analogues (BDA) in the streams of Virginia farms.

Ooh we like Bill even better than Claire if that’s possible. A farmer who has appreciated what beavers are doing for his landscape; How exciting!

“It would revolutionize the ecology of the area,” Fletcher says. “And it would allow us to retain more water in the aquifers. It would help every individual farmer and it would also help the Chesapeake Bay and the Rappahannock River.”

Fletcher has been reaching out to various state conservation foundations in hopes of bringing his project to fruition. BDAs have been shown to work successfully in other areas to raise groundwater levels, create healthier downstream ecosystems and even turn some intermittent streams into perennial streams.

That’s it! Go preach the beaver gospel far and wee because god knows they need to hear it. Someones folk listen with different ears when farmers speak.

Still, sometimes the benefits of beavers aren’t enough to convince landowners to let them stay. But there are many programs designed to help resolve human-wildlife conflicts. The Clifton Institute in Warrenton is a nonprofit organization with a mission of conservation and restoration of natural habitat of plants and animals, and provides one such service. The institute also provides environmental education and performs ecological research in the Piedmont area.

Alison Zak, an education associate for the Clifton Institute, says there are two main categories of human-beaver conflicts. “One is tree chewing,” she says, “and the other is flooding, which is usually when beavers are clogging up a culvert.”

“If the landowner has a nice spot, killing one pair of beavers is just creating an opportunity for a new pair looking for habitat,” she explains. “There’s almost always a way to address a problem without killing the beavers.”

WOW! I’m not sure the last time I read an article from Virginia that hit EVERY beaver point. Maybe never? It even had a section about wrapping trees to prevent chewing. Pretty incredible. There aren’t even any good points they left out. I think I have to look up the Piedmont Environmental Council.

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INTRODUCING THE BEAVER APP

heidi08 Beavers May 30, 2021

Yesterday was a “Bring out your dead” dead kinda day reviewing depredation permits. A hell of a lot of people killing a hell of a lot of beavers. But I found a few tidbits among the wreckage to keep me interested. Our past winners our keeping up with their feverish pace, and there were 24 unlimited permits granted. So that’s still happening. But oddly there were 31 permits denied. Which we’ve never seen before. About half of them note the damage was not verified. But whether that means anything remotely responsible is anybody’s guess.In the meantime we should be thinking about LIVE BEAVERS. And I have just the article to get us hopping. How about a beaver app that you can download to your phone?

iBeaver: Crowd-sourcing data on North America’s Busy Beaver

Help us gather data with a new app!

A beaver dam, pond, and lodge in the mountains of Colorado

Beaver are the classic keystone species and ecosystem engineers. Their dams can alter landscapes in positive ways by creating, enhancing and maintaining wetland and riparian habitats for an array of species such as fishes, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, waterfowl, shorebirds, songbirds, plants and invertebrates. These wetlands also provide important ecological services that benefit humans, like groundwater filtration, carbon sequestration and flood attenuation.

Since then, beaver populations have rebounded in many U.S. rivers and streams, but they still haven’t re-inhabited their full historical range or are not present at the density that they were prior to trapping. There are lots of efforts currently working toward increasing our understanding of beaver distribution, but they are mostly specific to a certain region or project. Because of this, we saw an opportunity to develop a broader data collection app that could be used by almost any group or individual interested in beaver across the country. We then aimed to make the data publicly available

Well that certain would be useful. Nice to make it nationally available, although I might use a little caution in states like Idaho and Wyoming where there are plenty of fur trappers looking for a tip.

Defenders’ Center for Conservation Innovation (CCI) specializes in finding innovative applications of science, technology and policy for advancing wildlife conservation. So naturally, a collaboration between CCI’s mapping team and our beaver experts in our field conservation department seemed like a great place to start developing a nationwide beaver data collection tool. Our team decided to use Esri’s Survey123 platform to create iBeaver, a data collection tool that can record the location of a user’s observation and then prompt them to answer a series of survey-style questions to gather more information. This survey is relatively straightforward for the user, regardless of experience or skill level, with explanations and visuals to clarify what a user should be looking for. Over time, the information collected will fill in the knowledge gap of where beaver are, where there is and is not good beaver habitat and where there are beaver-human conflicts on the landscape that might need resolution.

iBeaver joins a myriad of other data collection platforms and software that promote community involvement in scientific data collection, often referred to as “community science”. Community science gathers data for scientists and nonscientists to use, which they otherwise wouldn’t have the time or capacity to gather individually, all while also getting people outside and connected to the natural world. It’s a great way for everyone to contribute to a larger effort, protecting the biodiversity of our planet, while also having some fun and learning along the way.

How cool is that. It almost makes me want a cell phone! HAHAHA. But still, pretty darn nifty to be able to hike along and use your phone to enter beaver data.

The whole thing is so cool and NEW I couldn’t resist entering the laurel creek beavers. A very complete process it is too, with lots of questions about other wildlife you may have observed in the area. The mapper showed another California entry on the border of Nevada What are the odds we know the woman who saw those beavers?

The data collected through this community-driven tool will inform our understanding of the current distribution of beaver. Plus, these data will be shared publicly and can be used to inform policy on wildlife and water use, identify areas where troublesome beaver can be relocated and find areas that don’t currently have beaver but do have wildlife and water that would benefit from their presence. These data would also give us a better sense of beaver populations as they change through space and time and provide lots of other fun, interesting and useful applications which help our natural world. You can check out the data collected with iBeaver in our web map, Castor Mapper.

We need your help to build up our dataset to do all these wonderful things! So take your smartphone and get outside! You can access the survey at this link, and you can fill it out in your web browser or through the Survey123 application that you can download wherever you get your apps. We thank you for your community science contribution and wish you happy trails as you search for beaver in your neck of the woods.

Go enter your local beavers RIGHT now! Let’s show them why the beaver population is worth paying attention too! Great Work Defenders of Wildlife and Center for Conservation Innovation!

CATALOGING THE SLAIN: EPISODE VII

heidi08 Beavers May 29, 2021

Just received the new listing of depredation permits for 2020. 210 permits in all. I’ll be wading through them morosely today, but this is one that stands out. For the Creekside park beavers in Brentwood.

WirId

IncidentDate

IncidentId

Initial Incident Category

BehaviorObserved

Permit Issued

Permit Issued Date

PermitStatus

NumberTakeAllowed

Inc Latitude

Inc Longitude

Zip Code

County

WIR-2020-000786

2020/03/02 00:00:00

29074

Depredation

Beaver/s have built dam across flood control channel/creek using trees planted for restoration in an urban interface area. We feel that pedestrian liability could also be an issue given nearby park and trails.

Yes

43930

Issued/Active

37.9824897

-121.6911668

NULL

Contra Costa

Yes

Yes definitely. Watch out for that pedestrian liability on trails. Beavers might attack someone. You never know. Or a tree could fall several hours after it was chewed and hit Timmy in the head. Better kill them all. It’s the only safe plan.

What I realize, looking at the entire list. Is that there are SO MANY CATAGORIES required to fill out for other species like bobcats or bears, like where it was killed or whether it had an ear tag or what gender it was, but with beavers, MEH, just kill it. We don’t care where. We don’t really care how. And some of the time we don’t even care how many. Just getting rid of problems. Who cares?

I can see I’m in for a VERY FUN DAY. The good news is that yours will be a whole lot better when you listen to Glynnis Hood on yesterday’s CBC’s “The Current” with Matthew Galloway. I took the liberty of clipping out her 7 minutes from this hour long report. Enjoy!

The Current with Matt Galloway

POETRY FOR BEAVERS

heidi08 Beaver Art, Beavers and climate change May 28, 2021

How are your muses feeling this fine Memorial day weekend? Maybe you can imaging spending some of it by a windowsill somewhere with pen in hand and writing about beavers? I sure can. The inimitable Beaver Trust is giving prizes for the best ecological beaver poem. I know you want to enter.

Nature and the Ecological Emergency International Poetry Competition 2021

Beaver Trust is delighted to announce its inaugural International Poetry Competition on the theme of “Nature and the Ecological Emergency”. We are continually inspired and moved by people’s creativity and love of nature. This competition is about exploring new ways to think about nature and our connection with it, whether through the engaging, humble beaver, the wide range of emotions brought about by the ecological emergency, our recovery and resilience building, or any other aspect of nature and ecology.

Beaver Trust is working in association with Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, who will print the winning entry and feature the other prize winning poems online.

Poems are invited that deal with any aspect of nature and the ecological emergency. These terms will be given a wide interpretation by our guest judge Terry Gifford.

Tempted yet? Winning entires are paid cash award. Here are the rules.

Rules of Entry:

The competition is open to all. International entries are welcome.
Poems should be on the theme of Nature and the Ecological Emergency. You may interpret this in any way you wish.
There will also be a special prize for the best poem that has the theme of beavers at its core.
Poems must be in English and not exceed 40 lines of text. There is no minimum length. Titles, epigraphs, dedications and blank lines are not included in the line count.
Poems must fit on a single side of A4 and must have a title
Poems are judged anonymously. Each poem must be on a separate page, which must not bear the author’s name or any other mark by which the author could be identified.
Online entries are preferred – please send a .doc or pdf document to poetry@beavertrust.org with competition entry as the subject header.
Please first pay your entry fee online at https://beavertrust.org/poetry.
Please accompany your entry with the following information: name of poet, title of poem, contact details including phone number and the Paypal reference number you received when you paid your entry.
If you are unable to enter online, you may send a Postal Entry. Two copies of each poem are required, accompanied by a covering letter with your name, address and phone number, a list of the poems submitted and where you heard about the competition.
Entries should be sent by normal post (NOT registered post) to: Poetry Competition, The Cornwall Beaver Project, Woodland Valley Farm, Ladock, Cornwall, TR2 4PT. Please quote your Paypal reference number if you have paid online, which is our preferred option. If you need to send a cheque these should be made payable to The Beaver Trust. If you require confirmation that your postal entry has arrived please enclose a stamped self-addressed postcard marked ‘Acknowledgement’.
There is no restriction on the number of poems that may be submitted, provided the appropriate entry fee is included.
Poems must be the original work of the entrant, unpublished and not accepted for publication in any medium. They must not have been awarded a prize in any other competition.
Winners will be notified by email or post. No person will be awarded more than one prize.
Poems entered will not be returned. Make sure you keep a copy for yourself.
Copyright will remain with the author, but the organisers reserve the right to publish any of the prizewinning poems as they deem appropriate.
Once entered, poems may not be amended.
Shortlisted poets will be informed on Tuesday 2nd August 2021.
Shortlisted poets will be invited to read their poems at a ceremony at the Quaker Meeting House in Bradford on Avon on Tuesday 28th September, at which there will be the opportunity to meet experts from the Beaver Trust. Results will be announced at the ceremony.
The full list of winners will be announced on our website, https://beavertrust.org shortly after the presentation.
The judge will read ALL the entries
The judges’ decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.
Beaver Trust reserves the right to change the judge if the need arises.
In exceptional circumstances the organisers reserve the right to return poems and entry fees.
The Competition is open to all, other than team members, trustees and staff of the Beaver Trust. There is no age limit to entries
ALL EMAIL ENTRIES MUST BE RECEIVED BY MIDNIGHT 31st MAY 2021. We will accept postal entries received by Saturday 5th June, provided they are post-marked no later than 31 May.

They are so good at this. English beavers are so lucky to have them. Here’s what you win. I am most jealous about the clay beaver made by the creators of Wallace and Grommet. But maybe I’m quirky that way.

1st prize – £150 and publication in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine
2nd prize – £50
3rd prize – £25

Additional prizes

- A further prize will be awarded for the best poem with a theme of beavers at its core – £100 – plus a plasticine beaver made by renowned model-maker Jim Parkyn, of Aardman and Shaun the Sheep fame.

Well sure, I already had my entry written, it doesn’t quite fit the theme of impending ecological doom, but sure describes the doom that already took place.

NATURAL SOLUTIONS WORK BETTER

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and climate change May 27, 2021

I set this aside to share with you last week but there was a clutter of news that got in the way. I’m sure it’s going to come as a huge shock.

Natural climate change solutions highly effective in the long term

Nature-based solutions (NbS) can contribute to the fight against climate change up to the end of our century, according to new Oxford research in the leading scientific journal Nature. The analysis suggests that, to limit global temperature rise, we must slash emissions and increase NbS investment to protect, manage and restore ecosystems and land for the future.

Wha-a-a-a? I can hear you saying. Natural solutions like beavers are the best for fixing the problems we cause? Well yes they are. Let me tell you more about it.

The Oxford team found NbS measures, including the protection and large-scale restoration of eco-systems and improved land management, could cut peak global warming by between 0.1°C for a 1.5°C peak warming target, to 0.3°C for a 2.0°C peak warming target.

This would be achieved by removing as much as 10 gigatons of CO₂ per year from 2025 onwards—more than the global transportation sector’s annual emissions, at a cost of less than US$100 per ton of CO₂.

According to the lead author Cécile A. J. Girardin, technical director of Oxford’s Nature Based Solutions Initiative, “The world must invest now in nature-based solutions that are ecologically sound, socially equitable, and designed to deliver multiple benefits to society over a century or more. Properly managed, the protection, restoration and sustainable management of our working lands could benefit many generations to come.”

I couldn’t agree more. And I know just the partner you’re looking for. She has a flat tail and likes to eat wood with her family.

But, the report warns, if global warming is not held in check, wildfires and other ecological damage could lessen the effectiveness of nature-based solutions. Therefore, close attention must be paid to their long-term carbon sink potential and their impacts on biodiversity, equity and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. It also means global warming must continue to be limited through other ways, from decarbonisation to geological storage of CO₂.

The authors call for increased investment combined with rigorous evaluation of activities undertaken, using metrics which consider the complex, long-term benefits that NbS provide.

“An ambitious scaling-up of nature-based solutions needs to be implemented fast but also carefully, in a way that supports biodiversity and local people’s rights, while keeping fossil fuels in the ground,” concludes co-author, Professor Nathalie Seddon, Founding Director of Oxford’s Nature-based Solutions Initiative.

“Nature-based solutions can help cool the planet—if we act now” has been published in Nature.

Pretty encouraging right? I heard a report on Maddow last night that did a lot to boost my climate mood. Just in case you missed it, here it is.