And so the Shortest Day came and the year died And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world Came people singing, dancing, To drive the dark away. They lighted candles in the winter trees; They hung their homes with evergreen; They burned beseeching fires all night long To keep the year alive. And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake They shouted, reveling. Through all the frosty ages you can hear them Echoing behind us—listen! All the long echoes, sing the same delight, This Shortest Day, As promise wakens in the sleeping land: They carol, feast, give thanks, And dearly love their friends, And hope for peace. And now so do we, here, now, This year and every year. Welcome, Yule!
The Beaver Coalition in Oregon has just released a fantastic guidebook on using and installing pond levelers and culvert fences. This is an clearly laid out step-by-step guide to pass along to interested landowners and slightly less interested public works directors.
It is an honor to present the best management practices (BMPs) for coexisting with beavers using flow devices. This document is intended to empower the landowners, organizations, municipalities, and wildlife professionals who are interested in finding solutions to ongoing conflicts between human infrastructure and beaver habitat while still retaining the beavers and their benefits. If you would like to install a pond leveler or culvert protection system, use these standards to guide your planning, design, installation, monitoring, and maintenance. If you don’t have the capacity to implement these BMPs, there are an increasing number of trained professionals who can assist in your project. Drop us a line and we will help connect you to someone in your area.
The excellent and very hand on guide goes through how to manage specific sites and even describes what to do with very narrow channels or a second dams build after the first one that floods the flow device. I will put a permanent link on the website but you should go check it out and be appreciate all their hard work.
I particularly like their decision tree recommended how to handle a culvert problem where large fish passage might be an issue. Thanks Jason et al!
Turns out I am not the only one anymore who has mixed feelings about relocating beavers. It’s a hard slog getting housed and released into some new neighborhood with minimal resources. The survival rate isn’t great, but it’s better than the survival rate of being trapped in a conibear. Most of this article sounds fairly sensitive to a beavers needs, which is better than I’ve come to expect.
A growing number of land managers and ranchers are noting the perks of having a beaver-in-residence, and are inviting the animals to find a home on their property — with the help of the team at the Relocation Center. The group traps nuisance beavers, evaluates them at the facility’s “beaver bunkhouse” and releases them again into the wild, by invitation only.
First-year Wildlife Ecology and Management student Hailey Simko attended a release in the high Uintas of a recently-trapped beaver family — two adults and two kits. She accompanied the team from the beaver bunkhouse on a 3½ hour drive into the backcountry, with the animals carefully bermed by ice and their cages covered in wet towels to keep them cool and to minimize stress.
“It was awesome to see what this kind of interaction with animals was like in the field,” Simko said. “They were treated with a lot of care and attention and released in what seems an ideal location.” “They seemed so calm and at home it was actually a bit anticlimactic to see them swim away after the release,”she said.
Well I think they added that paragraph just for me. Good job. Yes beavers are calm. They take things very much in stride. You know what’s NOT calm? People worried about beavers. Could you maybe pack them in ice blocks? They are way not calm.
The center offers landowners grappling with problem animals an alternative to lethal trapping. At their new home, beavers have the chance to create wetland habitat, increase biodiversity, improve water quality and even store water to minimize the impacts of droughts, floods and wildfire.
“It’s a win-win-win,” said Becky Yeager, volunteer coordinator at the Relocation Center. “We are saving the beavers, keeping their family intact as much as possible, and putting them in an area where they can restore habitat.”
A Beaver swims upstream after being released into the West Fork of the Blacks Fork River in Northern Utah. This Beaver was one of four that were released on Sept. 3 by USU’s Beaver Ecology and Relocation Center. (Photo Credit: USU/Taylor Emerson) Volunteers from USU’s Beaver Ecology and Relocation Center help transport two cages of Beavers to the bank of the West Fork of the Blacks Fork River in Northern Utah. The Beavers were relocated from the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge after they were trapped there by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. (Photo Credit: USU/Taylor Emerson)
As much as possible? What does that mean? We tried for a night to catch everyone but if we left someone behind that’s on you? What is “as much as possible”. Who decides what’s as much as possible? I have a chem test on Monday so that’s all I can do. Is their a manual where I can read what that means? I thought Utah was full of Mormons. I don’t think their religion says people should follow God’s rules as much as possible.
Yesterday the world erupted with mourning the death of P-22 the moutain lion trapped in Hollywood without a mate that had been championed by our good friend Beth Pratt for all these years. A heroic effort was underway to build a wildlife overpass crossing the 405 so that he and other wildlide could safely cross the 8 lanes of traffic, Beth tirelessly implored officials, stars, politicians and anyone who would listen for the better part of a decade to step up and contribute. In doing so she and the lion raised awareness of the plight of urban wildlife and Pumas in general. P-22 achieved the impossible with her help. But he will not be alive to enjoy it.
The mountain lion P-22, who lived in the heart of Los Angeles for more than a decade and became the face of an international campaign to save Southern California’s threatened pumas, was euthanized Saturday because of several long-term health concerns and injuries that likely stemmed from being hit by a car, officials said.
In a tearful news conference, wildlife biologists described multiple chronic illnesses that may have contributed to the mountain lion’s recent uncharacteristic behavior. The big cat of Griffith Park was “compassionately euthanized” at about 9 a.m., officials said.
“This really hurts, and I know that,” said Chuck Bonham, director of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. “It’s been an incredibly difficult several days. And for myself, I’ve felt the entire weight of the city of Los Angeles.”
It is no stretch of the imagination to say that P-22 with Beth’s help did what could not be done. He crossed 8 lanes of traffic twice eeking out a long life in the middle of a terrifying city AND more impossible still he made Chuck Bonham cry, which I would never have thought likely. Beth posted a beautiful Eulogy yesterday on facebook about being allowed to sit with him before it happened and what it was like to love and lose him. The reaction to his loss not only makes me like Los Angelos more – it makes softens my heart to CDFW in general, and that’s saying a lot.
Before I said goodbye, I sat in a conference room with team members from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the team of doctors at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. …As the agency folks and veterinarians relayed these sobering facts to me, tissue boxes were passed around the table and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. This team cares just as much for this cat as we all do. They did everything they could for P-22 and deserve our gratitude.
Yesterday I could not help think about momma beaver and how I felt personally standing by her orphans the night of her death. It is a staggering and lonesome grief to lose the thing that you have given your life too. And it touched me, more than words can even say, to see the amazing outpouring of feeling people had for this wild cat that had come to represent our own quest for wildness in urban spaces. Beth you were the best possible champion for this hero. We are grateful for you and P-22,
I’m sure after that tearful news we all need some Christmas cheer. And I have JUST THE TREAT. This from a Vancouver dance studio that is reinterpreting the timeless Nutcracker with some very special editions.
Becky Moore, the director of the dance school Columbia Dance in Vancouver, Washington, loves Tchaikovsky’s classic holiday ballet “The Nutcracker” but she worries it hasn’t aged gracefully.
“You had folks coming over the Oregon Trail. You had the Indigenous populations here. You had people coming down from French Canada to trap beavers, people coming from the Hawaiian Islands to trap beavers,” she says. “The main character dreams of getting outside of her normal world and exploring something she’s never been to before. So why not have her explore this world of 1840s Fort Vancouver?”
Moore changed the main character from a European daughter of aristocrats to an American daughter of James Douglas, the real life chief trader at Fort Vancouver.
She turned the iconic nutcracker into a fur trapper and the mice into beavers.
“I fell in love with the beavers,” she says. “I’ve never been a fan of mice and they’re in every Nutcracker. I thought let’s choose a new rodent and this one is so Pacific Northwest centric.”
OF COURSE the mice should be beavers and of COURSE the soldiers should be trappers. That makes perfect sense to me now, but Clara should maybe change who she wants to win, okay?
I LOVE the look of these costumes. I think you will too.
Gee those costumes look really detailed. They must have taken a lot of work. I wonder what the company might possibly do with those beaver costumes after the performance is over? I mean I’m sure the ballet company doesn’t need a bunch just lying around to perform “Beaver Lake” next. Maybe they would donate one to a festival of some kind? I mean if someone else who loved beavers asked them really, really nice?
There was an diesel spill a few weeks ago in Sacramento. I heard from Cheryl that a few female beavers were rescued and one died. They were treated by the oil drs, rubbed and scrubbed and ready for release yesterday. Cheryl was there to observe them go back to the scrubby little park they came from
Sacramento is a hard place for a beaver. Even a rescued beaver. Their depredation rate for the last few years as exceeded Placer. I guess now they’re free to be killed with a permit some time at their leisure? Anyway it’s good to see them go back home.
Three beavers are back home at a pond in Tanzanite Community Park in Sacramento. The animals spent weeks in rehabilitation after a “malfunction” caused diesel to be released onto a concrete loading dock and then into a storm drain.
On Thursday afternoon, officials with the Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Office of Spill Prevention and Response and the Oiled Wildlife Care Network were on hand for the homecoming.
The three female beavers were released from blanketed crates and – much to the delight to the caregivers on hand for the release – quickly made their way back into the water.
“We always joke, we wish they’d wave back at you, but no, they’re ready to get away from us and ultimately, that’s really what you want from them is to be back, back in their home,” said Dr. Jamie Sherman, a veterinarian with the Oiled Wildlife Care Network.
I can’t figure out how to embed the video but go watch the little clip of the release by clicking on the headline. It’s sweet. For now I’ll just make due with those photos of beavers we have in towels from that rehab in Utah 9 years ago. They are still some of my all time favorites.
Sherman said once the beavers were taken into their care, they were sedated and given a full physical examination to evaluate their health and to begin the process of removing diesel from their fur. Over the next few weeks, she said, they focused on cleaning the coats, helping the animals rehydrate and gain weight and prepare to be released back to their home.
“(It’s) one of the best parts of this, and to bring all these people together who have invested so much time, so much effort, and so much care to be able to see these animals go back to the wild is incredible,” Sherman said.
After the spill, six beavers were taken into rehabilitation, according to Greg McGowan, of the Office of Spill Prevention and Response, within the Department of Fish and Wildlife. McGowan said two beavers are still being treated, and one died.
McGowan said after a spill, the challenge is not only to get the oil off the fur but to get the animals warm and able to regulate their own temperatures again.
“Anytime we’re out here doing our jobs, we feel like we’re fighting the good fight, but there is a part of it that’s less exciting, less positive when you’re dealing with animals that are suffering and struggling,” he said. “This is the good part, seeing them clean and happy, and return to their house.”
Well, we’re glad that you can do this job and take care of our beavers and wildlife. But I’d be happier if there weren’t diesel spills in the middle of town that ran straight into our creeks. That would make me REAL happy.
