Month: September 2021

PROTECTING ROADS FROM BEAVERS

heidi08 Beavers and Roadways September 30, 2021

Yesterday Mike Callahan gave a VERY interesting presentation virtually at the International on Ecology and Transportation. No I didn’t know there was such a thing either, but I did know that Ben Goldfarb’s upcoming book is on road ecology, so I guess it’s a thing. I’m assuming we’ll get to see the recording soon but here’s Mike’s information.

Protecting Roads from Beavers

Technical Session 23: Good Things Come in Small Mammal Packages

Beaver dammed road culverts are a significant problem across North America, damaging road infrastructure, creating safety hazards for the motoring public, creating hazards for road crews, and diverting limited road maintenance resources. As the North American beaver population has increased so hasn’t the number of conflicts with our transportation infrastructure.

Historically nuisance beavers were trapped and killed when road flooding problems occurred, and road crews were left to clear the damming obstructions. This can be a heavy burden on a highway department’s manpower, machinery and budget.

In contrast, it is now widely accepted that the dams that beavers build can provide immense ecological benefits to wildlife, stream health, clean water, and reducing wildfire damage. So whenever possible it is desirable to keep beavers on the landscape.

Fortunately, we can now protect our infrastructure and coexist with beavers at the same time. Properly designed and installed water control devices (e.g. flow devices, Beaver Deceivers™) can protect nearly every road. They are cost-effective, long-term methods to prevent infrastructure damage by beavers. As a result, many State and Municipal Highway Departments are now utilizing these best management practices to protect infrastructure from damage, saving time, money, and improving road and worker safety in the most environmentally friendly manner possible.

The presenter Mike Callahan is the President of the Beaver Institute. Since 1998, as the owner of Beaver Solutions LLC he has nonlethally resolved over 1,750 beaver – human conflicts with these innovative devices. He will share his wealth of experience resolving beaver conflicts for local and state highway departments, and how audience members can learn to do it also.

The Beaver Institute offers extensive Self-Help instructional materials as well as a professional online course for those interested in doing this work professionally. Since 2019 Mike and Beaver Institute have been training professionals across North America how to be successful doing this work themselves.

Wonderful Mike! How did it go? How many attended? And who paid attention? I’ve had a few emails in the past work from shy CDFW workers who found the beaver summit online and are working their way through the presentations. Interesting they are frustrated with CDFW’s beaver posture overall and one even thought we were close to a tipping point.

I’ll believe it when I see it.

I worked yesterday on the last slide for the Colorado Beaver Summit. In it I am trying to show our goals for California’s future management of beavers. What do you think?

A NEW WAY SAVE WATER FOR CALIFORNIA

heidi08 Beaver Art, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and water September 29, 2021

You would think California would catch on, Eventually. I mean drought after drought. You would think all those almond growers would eventually wake up and smell the coffee so to speak. But you’d be wrong, California is robust in its capacity to remain ignorant.

Maybe not Oregon.

A unique way to conserve water

Rancher Jay Wilde shares how he uses man-made beaver dams to increase water availability on his ranch

PHOTO COURTESY OF BEAVERWORKS - Rancher Jay Wilde recently shared how he has used beaver dam analogues, human-made beaver dams, to conserve water on his ranch.

Rancher Jay Wilde recently shared how he has used beaver dam analogues, human-made beaver dams, to conserve water on his ranch.

As drought conditions persist locally, some members of the agriculture community were recently provided some unique water conservation tips.

Jay Wilde, a rancher in Preston, Idaho, presented “BDAs, Beavers and Bonanza on an Idaho Ranch” earlier this month at the Crook County High School auditorium. The event centered on his story of stream restoration using beaver dam analogues (BDAs) on his ranch. The event was provided by Crooked River Watershed Council and BeaverWorks Oregon.

Jay Wilde is the secret sauce on the beaver acceptability burger. If we had two of him in every state I could retire. I’m so impressed with how he talks to folks about the things they never believe me when I say them,

“This is a process that took Mr. Wilde about 15 years to finish and really implement,” Mercer said. “He had a vision of what it should be. He really felt like his land was broken, and it was his commitment and inspiration to really start healing the land.”

The Crooked River Watershed Council supports the land restoration method, highlighting several ways it could help the local watershed.

“The council believes bringing beavers back to their former and appropriate habitats increases the overall amount of water retained in the watershed, raises groundwater levels in areas associated with beaver ponds, and makes for a more resilient landscape,” said Chris Gannon, council coordinator for the Crook River Watershed Council. “Using tools such as BDAs to encourage beavers to set up a permanent presence may be necessary to create suitable conditions and bridge the time gap until they become established.”

I believe that too Jay! Let’s hope that a few people will follow your lead and convince their neighbors to do the same.

I have to end today with a cautionary tale about what happens when you have a beaver mural painted by your front door. Yesterday comcast had to come back a second time to activate the phone line they said they activated the day before. This much improved tech announced his presence using the beaver knocker which is always a good sign. And then asked about the beaver mural. And also expressed interest in the ones he had seen in town and mentioned Tim Hon and the illuminaries.

Because you see he was also a muralist. He just finished one in Antioch. And was starting one in Pittsburg, where on used to work. And no I’m not kidding. So we chatted about mural painting and beavers and keeping city leaders from interfering too much and he fixed our phone lines perfectly. Because sometimes what you love doing is not the thing that pays the bills.[wonderplugin_video iframe=”https://youtu.be/QK8fanIDBt8″ 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”]

OTTAWA IS A SLOW LEARNER

heidi08 Beavers September 28, 2021

Long ago and oh so far away one of the first “non-Martinez” beaver stories we followed on this website was the story of the Stittsville beavers in Ottawa. I guess we tagged along because at the time the story had a lot of the same elements as our own: public outcry, beavers that were easy to see, a mayor that was worried about flooding and a curious media. Following the story introduced me to some long friends in the are including Donna Debreuil of the Ottawa-Calton Wildlife Centre who really became a staunch defender of beavers because of that contact.

The artist who got us involved (Anita Utas) has since relocated and Donna is headed for a well deserved retirement but you will be surprised not one bit to learn that the city has gotten no smarter about beaver management.

City of Ottawa needs to stop killing beavers

The Ottawa-Carleton Wildlife Centre is calling on the City of Ottawa to finally put in place progressive practices to coexist with beavers.

The Centre has been working on this issue for many years. More than a decade ago, City Council directed staff to develop a Wildlife Strategy that “would facilitate and foster a more harmonious relationship with all wildlife. Council’s direction was motivated not only by general concerns for biodiversity and harmony with nature but by specific issues and complaints arising from the City’s policies and procedures for dealing humanely with individual animals or populations of animals.”

Yet, with respect to beavers, City staff continue to completely ignore that Council direction. For example, in 2011 invoices paid by the City of Ottawa to trappers amounted to $31,823. By 2017 invoices had increased to $45,019 and, by 2018, the trapper billed the City of Ottawa a whopping $156,710.

You may remember that the city said they were “relocating the beavers” and a month later sent supporters video of much older different beavers swimming happily in the pond. See? What a good job we did?

And if you believe that I have some news for you about that puppy your parents said “Went to live on the farm”

So why is Ottawa continuing the outdated, costly, environmentally destructive, and inhumane practice of killing beavers?

“As they say, follow the money”, said Donna DuBreuil, President of the Centre. The cost of the trapper is a very small portion of the overall beaver management cost. The real cost to taxpayers is buried in Ottawa’s Municipal Drainage, Road and Stormwater budgets. It involves continual inspection and the frequent cleaning of culverts and ditches using City equipment and manpower. It is the protection of this unnecessary work that is often behind the resistance to adopt cost-effective prevention measures.

“With the City ‘appropriating’ an ever-increasing number of natural creeks, ponds and wetlands for stormwater purposes to serve development, Ottawa must make the minor adjustments to work with nature and not against it. Beaver trapping must stop”, said DuBreuil.

Beavers are not being relocated as the City of Ottawa has stated. They are being killed. Public funds should never be used for unethical practices that the City has to hide and lie about.

Ahh my Stittsville friends. Good luck. Remember that the important battles take years to win. And these beavers need you.

HOW DID VERMONT MAKE THIS HAPPEN?

heidi08 Beavers September 27, 2021

I was realizing that I never really GOT the importance of the Vermont Fish and Wildlife installed flow devices before. I’ve been focusing on why they ignore Skip or call it something weird like a woman upset people are incorrectly using the salad fork to enjoy a feast of California Condor or Galapagos Turtle.

The cutlery isn’t important. The naming isn’t important. Even the design isn’t important. The important thing is that VERMONT FISH and WILDLIFE is installing flow devices. How did this happen?

Who made it happen?

When did it start?

Was it because the state had seen so many of Skip’s devices work for so long? Is it because Vermont is a crazy liberal state that was the first to recognize gay marriage? Did Bernie Sanders have anything to do with it? I don’t believe any other state wildlife agency does this. Even Utah and Washington don’t do this. California surely does not do this. How can we make it happen here?

State installing water control devices on beaver dams

MONTPELIER — To prevent flooding on nearby roads and private property, Vermont Fish & Wildlife staff have installed 11 water control devices on beaver dams this year throughout Vermont.

Known as “beaver baffles,” these devices allow some water to pass through the dam without breaching it and destroying the wetland.

With funds granted from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and generated by waterfowl hunters through the Duck Stamp Program, the Fish & Wildlife Department has installed more than 300 beaver baffles in Vermont protecting over 3,000 acres of wetland habitat since the program started in 2000.

I found this article referring to the funding for the program coming from the FWS duck stamp program. Smart duck hunters know why beavers matter so this makes perfect sense. I want names. I want phone numbers. I want to find the man or woman who thought up this crazy scheme and proposed it at some board luncheon where all the forks noisily clattered to the floor.

I want to shake their hand and buy them a beer. This is what we need in California.

How can we make it happen?

BAFFLED BY BEAVERS NO MORE

heidi08 Beavers, Flow Device Installed September 27, 2021

Well finally thanks to Ann Cameron Siegal who alerted me to this video I can see what they’re taking about.VDFW often installs beaver ‘baffles’ and I guess they trying to use a term without getting sued by Skip. Interesting this appears to copy Skip’s castor Master design like we had in Martinez AND Mike’s rounded top filter AND use Canada;s term :Baffle which is something totally different that protects culverts,

Stealing from several souces at once makes it less obvious?

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Oh and here’s a question for you. What do they call the device installed by the California Department of Fish and Game?
You’re right, Trick question.
They call it NOTHING.
Because that’s what they do to keep beavers on the landscape.