Month: November 2022

FIGHTING OVER BEAVERS IN BOW NH

I’m sure you know that there is nothing I like better than an animated ticked off neighbor meeting about beavers. But beaver defenders pitted against snow mobilers? Well bring on the popcorn because I could listen to this all year. You’ll remember we covered the BOW story at the beginning of the month. Well this is a helluva epilogue.

Dam controversy: After Bow pond drained, some residents hope to leave the future up to beavers

On a Saturday afternoon walk, Kelly Schofield and her husband turned a corner onto a road near their house in Bow. They sensed something was wrong with the beaver pond before they saw it.

“You could smell it. It was pretty strong. And then when we got down to the pond where you could really see the pond, you could see it was gone,” she said.

The pond was drained. Left behind was a huge tract of mud, and creatures trying to survive. Neighbors took videos of fish floundering as the water receded.

Beavers are beloved by some and considered a nuisance by many. But Schofield and others who lived on the pond agreed: nature’s engineers made their property more valuable, and made their lives better. They took their kids down to the water to learn about frogs and turtles; watched ducks stop by as they migrated south.

In the winter, this beaver pond, technically known as an impoundment, was an ice skating spot for many, including Lisa Franklin’s family.

Are you reading this? You should stop reading and be listening to the clip. It’s SOOO GOOD.

Finally, I would like to point out that the pond lever lasted for five years with the beavers living there. How long do you think the excavator and trapping will last?

“IF YOU WANT TROUT, WORK FOR BEAVERS”

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and trout November 29, 2022

Things are looking up for beavers of the Rio Grande. At least their a hot commodity now.

Saving the #RioGrande Cutthroat Trout: Beavers show the way — @AlmosaCitizen

THE Rio Grande cutthroat trout is the Rio Grande National Forest’s only native trout. It needs help. Biologists from Colorado Parks and Wildlife and Rio Grande National Forest are trying to bring the cutthroat back to its full glory, but they need help, too. So who do the humans look to for help?

Easy answer: Beavers.

Jason Remshardt, wildlife and fisheries program manager for the Rio Grande National Forest, recently gave a presentation on the Rio Grande cutthroat trout. He is the only fish biologist in the RGNF. He talked about the effort to create and conserve habitat for the cutthroat, and how the answer might just come from nature’s finest engineers.

The Rio Grande cutthroat trout used to exist in just about every part of the Rio Grande basin, but due to a wide range of circumstances, these fish only occupy a fraction of the area they used to. Part of conservation and successful reintroduction is habitat restoration. Right now, the experts are looking at nature’s experts. These projects are imitating “what the beaver dams are doing,” said Remshardt.

These “Beaver Dam Analogues” or “Temporary Wood Grade Structures,” or TWGS, (pronounced like twigs), are designed to help back up water and create a lively wetland habitat that encourages healthy biodiversity not just for the cutthroat, but the entire ecosystem.

Now when I read an article like this I’m stroking my chin suspiciously and saying “Do you really just want an excuse to play in the mud? Or do you really want beavers?” I guess they are the real deal,

Beavers in the national forest are alive and thriving. Remshardt says that the RGNF is happy with current populations, but there is room for expansion and improvement. With that, the benefits of beaver dams create healthy, expansive wetlands. Beaver dams and habitats also make great fire breaks.

These animals, however, are considered a nuisance species to certain areas of the Valley. Beavers can be troublesome to infrastructure like irrigation canals and roads.

“There’s this stark contrast of existing as a pest species on the Valley floor while being highly beneficial up in the headwaters. The logical solution,” Born said, “is an efficient, legal, and humane way to translocate them to areas where their engineering is more appreciated and doesn’t impact infrastructure.”

Relocating the beavers pairs well with the restoration efforts. Born said that the structures may encourage beavers to stay in areas that “have habitat that would otherwise be too degraded.”

Remshardt says there’s plenty of space to relocate any problematic, or displaced wood-chopping rodents.

“We’re ready to take them and we have places all over the forest to take them. Plenty of places we can put them,” Remshardt said.

Identifying where beavers are and where beavers aren’t is a part of the job that requires a lot of work from a lot of people. Software like iNaturalist allows anyone to report animal sightings and tracks to help in identification. These reports can help biologists like Remshardt identify populations and locations to help further studies and surveys.

Helping the beavers help us really boils down to, Remshardt said, the fact that “beavers are the best at doing their own work.”

Yes well that’s a helluva lot better than some. But I’m a crazy optimist. I dream of a day when any beaver anywhere that decides to make a dam any old place makes folks stop and scratch their heads and think “WOW that beaver is really doing good things RIGHT HERE. For the watertable, and the fish and the fire potential. Maybe I should just cooperate with it and keep it around if possible”.

Yeah well I said I was an optimist.

Most of the streams and lakes are easy to access, but the Rio Grande Cutthroat Trout lives in the alpine, too. Remshardt said almost every drainage and lake in the Sangre de Cristo mountain range has cutthroat populations. So, in order to keep these high mountain lakes stocked and healthy, they conduct High Mountain Lake Airplane Stocking. A video from CPW shows just how these operations are done.

Conservation of the cutthroat, Remshardt said, remains the most intensive and expensive project. Ongoing research for more cutthroat introductions to expand them into their historic ranges is an ongoing and expansive effort. Currently, an effort to successfully reintroduce the cutthroat to the Sand Creek drainages at the Great Sand Dunes National Park is taking place. The project first started in 2005.

Well if you CARE about cuttthroat you better care about beavers. It’s really that simple.

‘SMELLY’ BAY AREA BEAVERS DAMMED WITH FAINT PRAISE

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver ecological impact, Beavers and climate change November 28, 2022

Well the fine article I was expecting from my chat with Lisa Kreiger finally dropped yesterday at 8 am so I couldn’t review it that morning which is fine. It gave me an entire day to wrap my head around why she ever felt she needed to soften her good news with words like “smelly” and “eat their own poop”. School yard taunts I guess to keep her from being called a beaver sissy?

The re-beavering of the Bay Area

Plump, smelly and paddle-tailed, this important rodent is making a comeback in San Francisco Bay creeks

PALO ALTO – In a deep muddy creek near Silicon Valley’s busiest freeway, a large furry head pokes up. And then quickly submerges.

The brief sighting, along with a growing collection of video footage, confirms something remarkable: After being hunted to extinction in the 1800s, the North American beaver is returning to the creeks of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Ecosystem explorers, beavers were re-introduced to Lexington Reservoir in Los Gatos about four decades ago, and made homes in upper Los Gatos Creek. Since then, they’ve expanded their range north along the edge of the Bay to the Guadalupe River, Coyote Creek, San Tomas Aquino Creek in the wetlands by Sunnyvale’s Water Pollution Control Plant – and, now, Palo Alto’s Matadero Creek.

”There’s a resilience that’s built into their DNA to find a location, set up shop, find a mate and go to work on increasing the population,” said naturalist Bill Leikam. This week, his trail cameras captured proof that a pair of beavers – male and female – enjoy evening strolls together along the creek, just two miles from the global headquarters of Intuit and Google.

Bill is the good friend from the beaver festival who hasn’t been able to come to the festival since we moved to Susana park because the timing conflicts with his annual backpacking trip in Wyoming. He runs the urban wildlife project and is also known as “The fox guy” for obvious reasons. He told me months ago about these beavers and has been watching them excitedly ever since.

Plump, smelly and paddle-tailed, beavers shaped the California landscape for thousands of years. Their dams built ponds, slowed runoff, cooled stream flow and re-charged aquifers, creating pockets of biodiversity in a hot and dry landscape.

They were eradicated by the 1840s, when fur trappers swept through the west in search of pelts for men’s beaver top hats, which were warm, waterproof and an essential part of a sophisticated wardrobe.

“They were little $20 bills swimming around,” said Heidi Perryman of Martinez, who founded the beaver advocacy group, Worth a Dam.

But conventional wisdom held that the rodents had never lived here in the Bay Area. In historic range maps published in 1937 by preeminent zoologist Joseph Grinnell, the first director of the Berkeley’s Museum of Zoology, they were nowhere to be found.

More recent research suggests that Grinnell got it wrong – and the Bay Area has always been a soggy beaver paradise.

While visiting the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C., Palo Alto-based physician and amateur ecologist Dr. Rick Lanman discovered a beaver skull from Saratoga Creek collected in 1855. A beaver tooth and some bones, dated back to A.D. 300-500, were found at Emeryville Shellmound, a sacred burial site of the Ohlone people located on historic Temescal Creek.

And of course you know Rick, and recognize our historic beaver paper. Well it’s nice to see things come to fruition. Only a decade after we published it. Nothing with beavers happens fast.

Now beavers are back, in a long-overdue homecoming.

They’re unlikely celebrities: they’re nearly blind, eat their poop, and have anal glands that emit musky yellow-tinged oil to mark their territory. Reclusive, they’re rarely seen in the wild because they tend to work in the dark, avoiding people.

But they’re increasingly cherished for their role as civil engineers, creating complexity in a landscape by building ponds that serve as safe habitats for fish, otters, herons and other wildlife. In celebration last April, supporters gathered for the first-ever California Beaver Summit. Every June, the town of Martinez hosts an annual Beaver Festival.

The Palo Alto beaver was first spotted one morning by a nature-lover who was meditating on the creek bank. Startled out of his reverie by the three-foot swimmer, he told Leikam about the sighting. Leikam set up a network of camouflaged trail cameras to confirm the animal’s presence.

Now, twice a day – at dawn and dusk — Leikam, 82, weaves through dense thickets of willow and fennel along the banks of Matadero Creek on a two-mile-long route to inspect his 14 cameras, memory cards and batteries.

Discarded plastic bottles, aerosol cans and other trash litter the ground. The nearby freeway creates a constant din. But the creek’s water, as dark and rich as chocolate cake, is clean.

Beaver signs are abundant: Gnaw marks are inscribed into small ash trees, and long-toed claw prints are jumbled through the mud. Bent grasses reveal the beavers’ routes.

What can I say? People love to be shocked by the poop-eating. I swear we didn’t discuss it and I truly doubt Rick or Bill did. It’s just something she saw that stuck.

They’re pretty hefty animals,” weighing up to 50 or 60 pounds, Leikam said. This is a second career for him: After teaching English for nearly four decades in Cupertino, he vowed to document the behaviors of the region’s wildlife. His Urban Wildlife Research Project, comprised of thousands of video files, is based at his Mountain View home.

“It’s exciting,” he said, pushing through the brambles with ease. “It’s been 160 years since there been any beavers along any of these creeks. It speaks of the health of the creeks.”

There’s not yet evidence of a beaver dam or a lodge, the “wooden igloo” that the animals sometimes build as homes. Instead, he said, the Palo Alto beavers likely live in burrows submerged along the creek bank.

Leikam gazes at the water, noting a sudden swirl of spherical ripples. A big brown head emerges, then vanishes.

Its forebears were “problem beavers,” who clogged up canals in the Central Valley, according to Lanman’s research. A California Department of Fish and Wildlife staffer told him that long-ago crews had surreptitiously released the animals in Los Gatos, rather than killing them, Lanman said.

Meanwhile, a different population was making its way west from Sacramento, eventually building homes in Alhambra Creek in Martinez.

Oh good. It’s about us now.

While freshwater dwellers, beavers can tolerate brackish or salty water during travel, Perryman said. Our Bay and Delta “is basically a big water highway.”

The Martinez colony has perished, but over the years they raised 27 kits, who have since dispersed. Now there’s a colony in Fairfield and Oakley. On the Napa River, there’s a colony next to the busy Hawthorne Suites Hotel. In Sonoma County, colonies in Sonoma Creek have expanded into the Santa Rosa Creek watershed.

“They’re pioneers,” said Perryman, capable of traveling 10 to 20 miles over land and 100 miles by water. Beavers have moved into the radioactive Chernobyl Exclusion Zone spanning the border of Belarus and Ukraine, reclaiming an area that’s empty of humans. They were killed by the 1980 explosion of Mount St. Helens in Washington, but have since returned.

Okay I said they were the FIRST ones back after Mt st Helen’s erupted, as in they came back and made it habitable for the rest of us eventually. But the best laid plans of mice and men…

They can’t live in creeks that have been turned into concrete flood control channels — but in natural settings, they find ways to survive. During the worst of our recent drought, a beaver was spotted inside a small pipe in Los Gatos Creek. It had built a little dam around a steady drip, and sat in the puddle.

As the nation’s beaver population makes a comeback, the animals are incurring the wrath of some farmers and city planners. That hasn’t happened here. And there are techniques to offset any harm from newly green, lush and flooded spaces, Perryman said.

We should enlist them as our ally in environmental restoration, she said.

Instead of just a few new locations, “let’s multiply that by 10 different cities, or 100 different cities,” she said. “Our urban spaces would look really different if we allowed beavers at the edges, where we could tolerate them.”

Well now that is good anyway. You finished strong Lisa! Smelly little fat poop-eating engineers that could save our planet. This article also has a link to the beaver festival. a link to Worth A Dam AND a link to the California Beaver Summit. I am incapable of complaining about that.

BRING BACK BEAVERS BIT BY BIT

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, BDA's, Beaver ecological impact November 27, 2022

This was a fine way to end the holiday weekend. The beavers won the civil war and a fantastic article appeared in Jefferson radio about restoring Vesper meadow near Ashland in the hopes of beavers returning to it.

Bringing back the beavers

For four years, Jeanine Moy has led programming to restore, monitor and explore Vesper Meadow, near Ashland. One of her prime objectives has been to restore Latgawa Creek and set the table for the beaver’s return.

In 2018, Moy was serving as outreach director for the nonprofit Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, but she wanted to create a program or organization of her own that reflected her holistic vision of conservation—one that elevated art along with science, educated people while building community, and restored cultures as well as ecosystems.

She met Ross while teaching a class for older adults at Southern Oregon University. Ross recalls how Moy described that healthy landscapes can act like sponges, slowing and soaking up water.

“That really spoke to me,” says Ross. “Water is so scarce now.”

Ross and Conaway were comfortably retired, and with money in the bank from a house sale in California, they wanted to give back. “We were looking at what we could do with climate change and community building that would be gratifying and open up opportunities for a lot of people,” says Ross, who is nearly 70. She and Moy decided to partner on a project: Ross would acquire a parcel of land ripe for restoration; Moy would live onsite, develop programming and raise funds.

That year, Ross and Conaway purchased 323 acres and worked with the Southern Oregon Land Conservancy to place all but seven in a conservation easement. They named it Vesper Meadow, after the vesper sparrow, a grassland bird discovered there during surveys.

Now that’s the way to do it. Retire and sell your home in California and move to Oregon to bring back beavers. Way to go team!

If you glimpse Vesper Meadow from the highway, you’ll likely see a lovely expanse of open space that’s dotted with wildflowers in early summer and blanketed in snow in winter. It’s hard to spot the degradation unless you know what you’re looking for.

Thanks in large part to beavers, Vesper Meadow was once a complex, wet meadow, says Sarah Koenigsberg, communications director for The Beaver Coalition, a nonprofit focused on promoting beavers as agents of conservation. “The water table was right near the surface, and there were lots of teeny tiny channels and rivulets and wet swampy areas,” she explains. Conifers, which don’t like “wet feet,” grew further upslope, but aspen, willows, and camas thrived in the meadow. Several groups of indigenous people, including Shasta, Latgawa, and Takelma, likely harvested camas and other foods, gathered seeds, and managed the land with fire.

To slow the erosion along Latgawa Creek, Moy and an army of volunteers immediately started planting willows. Willow planting is a time-honored restoration strategy, and you don’t need a permit to plant them.

But Moy wanted to do more.

“The waterway being so degraded and showcased with the highway running through it lends itself to being a restoration demonstration site,” she explains.

Moy quickly honed in on bringing beavers back to Vesper Meadow. Not only do beaver-managed landscapes support a variety of plants, animals, and pollinators, they also help buffer the land during droughts and can even slow down or stop a wildfire.

But you can’t just drop a bunch of beavers off in a dry meadow, says Koenigsberg. “There’s no food. They’d starve, or get eaten by predators.” First, you have to set the table.

As long as the highway is bringing people closer, you might as well educate them. Right?

After talking with experts from The Beaver Coalition and NOAA, Moy decided to use a low-tech strategy called process-based restoration. It doesn’t require heavy equipment or engineering degrees, just lots of human hands. She started planning the log structures in the summer of 2020.

Sheri Hagwood, Partners for Fish and Wildlife botanist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, suggested Moy apply for funding and technical assistance through the Partners for Fish and Wildlife program, which helps private landowners enhance their properties for wildlife.

Vesper Meadow received $36,000 through the Partners program (and matched it with over $37,000). Hagwood helped Moy with planning and permitting. To build the structures, she needed to obtain a host of permits from federal, state, and county agencies, which evaluate everything from water quality to the project’s impact on cultural resources.

Moy bumped into the FEMA requirement when applying to Jackson County for a floodplain development permit. Part of the meadow was a FEMA mapped flood zone. An engineering analysis showed that during a hypothetical “100-year” flood, her project would raise the water level in one part of this zone by 8 inches, which the county didn’t allow.

According to Moy, the flood map didn’t match what was actually on the ground. Her only course of action was to apply to FEMA to revise the map and show that no homes or other buildings would be threatened by her project.

“The whole FEMA process is in place to protect homeowners from flooding, but there are no other homes anywhere near this floodplain,” says Moy. “It just seemed excessive for us to be able to put some sticks in the creek.”

She used part of her budget to hire an engineer to map and analyze the creek. Finally, last November, they mailed the application to FEMA.

After a few months, she followed up. FEMA had never received her materials. She sent them again. For the next several months, the FEMA representative and her engineer went back and forth with requests and revisions. With the weather window for building the log structures closing, Moy planned Beaver Days.

First you build it and then get out of the way and then they will come. Let them be in charge of the process from there.

It’s humbling to admit that a rodent can do this work better than we can, says Koenigsburg. “This kind of restoration challenges human nature,” she adds. “We like control and we don’t like messy. But we’re at this turning point: Do we want control, or do we want water, biodiversity, and firebreaks?”

Moy’s plan is not to hand the meadow off to beavers and leave. A key part of her programming is to restore human presence to Vesper Meadow, using art, education, science, and hands-on work to draw people in. Vesper Meadow helped cofound the Indigenous Gardens Network and has invited Siletz and Grande Ronde tribal members to re-connect with a landscape their ancestors knew intimately.

“More and more I use the term bio-cultural restoration,” says Moy. “It’s not just humans visiting and restoring and measuring [Vesper Meadow] but rather building personal relationships with the land and tending it over time.”

And scene. Vesper meadows is in good hands because of the beavers work and your vision. Well done. Thanks to the beaver coalition for helping out.

WINNING HEARTS AND MINDS ABOUT BEAVERS

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver ecological impact, Beavers November 26, 2022

So I have been using the holiday weekend to buckle down on my upcoming presentation to the Alameda Fisheries Work group in December. They are eager to think about the new beaver rules about beaver introduction and whether they can be welcomed in the upper watershed there for their positive impact on fish. Of course Michael Pollock is the speaker they really want but they allowed me to tag along because they thought maybe I would have some insights on navigating alliances and persuading stakeholders about beaver benefits. This made me think about what worked and what didn’t work in Martinez.

And I have to say honestly that like any new student I went naively to the beaver library and came back with an armful of facts about why beavers are good for streams and fish and fires and watertables and birds and otters. And I was sure that with this great knowledge, a patient spirit, a dispassionate presentation, my formidable professional psychologist skills and some excellent graphics the whole thing would be a slam dunk. An easy win. After the fair hearing the court would be adjourned in my favor.

I really thought introducing people to the well researched facts would change their behavior.

Um.

What I found looked a lot more like this. A firm quarter of the committee members were persuaded by science. The watershed people and the flood control people were interested in what I was talking about. To persuade them I had to present it to them really cleanly and compellingly, connect them to alternate sources of information, and be willing to answer questions or present information at the drop of a hat. I couldn’t appear to care too much about the outcome. One night I filled in for an Audubon speaker and suddenly the next evening Alhambra watershed asked me to present. Another night the wildlife chair of the sierra club invited me at the last minute to their meeting in Alameda and I actually had to cancel patients to be there because I knew it was a deal-breaker, The science part was hard work. I had to talk about things outside my comfort zone to intimidating professionals that had lived their adult lives steeped in words like riparian and hydrology. But it was familiar dissertation-like doable work.

The rest required more subtle forms of persuasion and I had to figure that out on the fly. It took the form of massive public interest (in which media and children played a huge part) and correspondingly significant self-interest. To my great surprise, when people decided they cared about the beavers and couldn’t be talked out of it the city leaders decided they cared very much about their own careers and political futures and were willing to listen to information that might help. It reminded me of that horrible old joke about the donkey and bricks. First you really did have to get their attention.

I’ve since learned that the self-interest piece can take many forms, not just re-election: Salmon population. Amphibian population. Cattle forage. Climate Change. Fire risk, Waterfowl numbers. I consider it my job to find what my audience cares about and drive beaver lessons in that direction. Fortunately beavers are good for pretty much everything. Only rarely is their interest about the beavers themselves. Sometimes that bothers me. But mostly it’s okay.

If beavers are allowed to stick around, I find they will make their own impression.