Month: April 2023

THE PRAIRIE STATE SAVES BEAVERS?

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers April 30, 2023

Just in case you forgot, it was Illinois that gave us Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama and Ms Rachel Siegel, beaver advocate extraodinaire. Lest you think I exaggerate, check out this article.

Joyce Advances Bill to Protect Beavers, Regulate Wildlife Operators

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. – Illinois State Senator Patrick Joyce, D-Essex, has proposed a bill aimed at protecting beavers and regulating the activities of nuisance wildlife operators.

On Thursday, the Senate Agriculture Committee passed the measure.

The bill would prohibit the destruction or disturbance of dams, lodges, burrows, or feed beds of beavers while trapping them. It also requires that any person who acts as a nuisance wildlife control operator for a fee must obtain a permit.

Joyce stressed the importance of protecting beavers and trapping them correctly without destroying their homes. “Some people don’t realize that beavers provide benefits to humans, such as improved water quality and flood control,” he said.

How cool is this? In addition to going to school for environmental law, Rachel has worked literally nonstop at building the Illinois beaver alliance, building a team of allies and partners that would make your head spin. Looks like she made friends in all the right places.

The proposed legislation aims to ensure the beaver population thrives and provides important benefits to the environment. It also aims to ensure that only qualified and responsible operators are performing correct trapping services.

Joyce acknowledged that wildlife operators provide an important service by removing unwanted animals from homes and other properties. However, he emphasized that the bill aims to ensure that ethical practices are followed and that only necessary wildlife removal takes place.

House Bill 2461 passed the Senate Agriculture Committee and will now be heard before the full Senate.

Wooohoo team Beaver! We need everyone to sign and about million more of these measures out there, But things are slowly moving in the right direction.

CHINA CREEK COOPERATES WITH BEAVERS

This was a lovely article to come across this morning.

Device on China Creek Allows Beaver and Residents to ‘Coexist’

Centralian Owner of ‘Beaver Craftworks’ Installs Pond Leveler at Centralia College

By Isabel Vander Stoep / isabel@chronline.com

Luc Lamarche, of Beaver Craftworks, installs a pond leveler in China Creek along South King Street in Centralia as Centralia College Biology Professor Francis Bozzolo sets up a trail camera on Friday, April 21, 2023.

Poor academic performance aside, one Centralia College attendee has been causing grief for the school’s neighbors.

It’s a beaver. The creature has built its dam where China Creek runs through campus. With the rodent’s residence backing up water, businesses and homes in the area see an increased risk of flooding. However, trapping the beaver is a temporary solution, according to Luc Lamarche, of Centralia, owner of Beaver Craftworks.

“Some local beaver is going to notice, ‘Hey those digs are better than my digs. I’m going to move over there,’” Lamarche said. “It creates this black hole … (for the) landowner or the county or the public works department.”

Plus, Lamarche said, with Centralia in the flat, lush valley of the Chehalis River and its tributaries, “this whole area is beaver heaven.” Moving the creature simply makes it some other landowner’s problem.

Beavers are a keystone species, meaning they play an integral role in a healthy watershed. Lamarche’s business aims to create “beaver coexistence”: preventing flooding while letting the beaver stay in its chosen spot.

“Neighbors had voiced concerns like, ‘Well what’s up with this extra water?’ The college cares about that,” Lamarche said. “They’re excited to have a beaver, but they want to be good neighbors. And good fences make good neighbors, just like good boundaries make good relationships. … Anyone who’s married will understand that.”

This week, he installed one of a few coexistence contraptions at the Centralia College site. It’s called a pond leveler, which essentially runs a pipe through the dam so water continues to flow. The beaver will patch the holes from the pipe on its own. As the dam is built, more water will flow through the pipe.

The contraption also ensures the water level stays high enough for the beaver to swim down to their dam’s entryway, which protects them from predators.

Among other beaver coexistence devices Lamarche makes are culvert fences, as drainage pipes under roadways are destination getaways for beavers.

I just had to check and China creek is it in Washington state of course. I never heard of beaver craft before and didn’t know that Jakob was training people but that is wonderful news.

Living in Centralia since 2007, Lamarche studied as a civil engineer. Living in the rural area, he fell in love with nature.

“I started learning about beaver’s history and had this ‘Aha!’ moment,” he said. “(Beavers are) the animal kingdom’s civil engineer.”

He began learning more about North America’s largest rodent through classes and, in 2021, founded Beaver Craftworks.

While the devices are an “upfront investment,” he said, they can save time and money accrued by the permitting process and the execution of beaver trapping. The work is founded on decades worth of research preceding his business, Lamarche said.

Every beaver presents new challenges, he said. There are beavers in Canada with dams that stretch for more than 1 kilometer, which Lamarche referred to as “beaver New York City.” As much water is held back above ground by one beaver dam, it’s estimated that two to five times as much is stored underground.

This groundwater can be beneficial to plants and other species in an ecosystem. Beavers essentially create new wetland habitat, which can be critical for many other species’ survival.

Lamarche recommends anyone who’s interested to go online and research “beaver coexistence.” Check out more about the business and its work on Instagram at “beavercraftworks,” or the website https://www.beavercraft.works/.

Someday, cooperating with Beavers will be as common as planting tomatoes, without pesticides. And when that day comes, you know I’ll be there celebrating and I’ll invite you to celebrate too.

MO BEAVERS = MO BIRDS!

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and Birds April 28, 2023

Saturday June 24^th is the date of the 14^th beaver festival in down Martinez, celebrating the arrival of some uninvited engineers that turned out to be good news for the city ecologically and socially. When the beavers came to Alhambra creek their dam-building produced a cleaner stream, more invertebrates, more fish, more frogs and more birds. Visits from river otter, muskrat and mink became commonplace, and the stream that once dried up every summer became a year round oasis for wildlife. The beavers have since moved on but Martinez remains proud of its role in showing that coexistence is not only possible, but mutually beneficial.

Just this February a study published in Poland found beaver dams not only increase the number of birds over-wintering along the riparian corridor, but in fact boost bird species density and diversity in forests as far as 80 meters away! ”The greater species richness and abundance of both the entire assemblage and certain ecological groups of species in areas modified by beavers suggest that the presence of these animals rearranges the winter distribution of birds at the local scale.”

Join the beaver festival for is a day long celebration of these animals and their dramatic effects on ecosystems and stream health. There is live music, wildlife exhibits, a silent auction and children’s activities. A talented chalk artist highlights the day with a dramatic wildlife mural in the plaza. This year’s festival will focus on beaver role in helping us mitigate the effects of climate change showcasing how their dams reduce fire, combat drought, slow flooding and cool stream temperatures. You might have seen some of the many articles this year describing beavers as climate change superheroes. This is your chance to learn all about why that’s true.

The free festival is in Susana Park in downtown Martinez at the corner of Susana and Estudillo streets from 10:00-3:00. Join us for a dam good time!

BECAUSE A DAM IS A TERRIBLE THING TO WASTE

heidi08 Beavers April 27, 2023

Well this isn’t a story you read every day, although it SHOULD be as common as dirt. Seems this family loved the wetlands behind their vacation home and were heartbroken when the beaver dam maintaining it was breached and all the water drained away to nothing, taking their beautiful oasis with it.

Ontario family gutted after decades-old beaver dam breaks, draining massive pond on property

When Lorraine Fuller and her husband bought their Apsley, Ont. property over 15 years ago, it was brimming with wildlife thanks to the wetland that made up their backyard. But seemingly overnight, the pond was drained with no animal in sight.

Over the years they have owned this vacation home, located about 45 minutes north of Peterborough, Fuller said she has seen blue herons, a variety of ducks, turtles, otters, frogs, salamanders, and beavers.

Since it’s a 100-acre lot, Fuller said they bought an amphibious vehicle that could take them from one side of the property to the other out on the water. She adds they also recently built a bunkie in November – which set them back about $75,000 – at the top of the property overlooking the wetland.

About two weeks ago, on April 8, Fuller said her husband thought he noticed the water level looked extremely low, but adds the half-inch of snow and ice likely hid everything – so they left without investigating.

“We went up on the 22nd of April to discover no water, or something that appeared to look like a moon surface,” Fuller said, adding she felt “absolutely gutted.”

That’s how it feels to have beaver devastation in your backyard. No birds. No otters. No muskrats. Just miles and miles of mud as far as the eye can see. Maybe a few flailing fish flapping in a drying puddle. I feel your pain.

The formerly pristine wetland was held intact by a massive beaver dam on a neighbouring property that was constructed decades ago, according to Fuller – even long before she and her husband bought the property.

“It’s probably been the better part of 100 years that created this pond, so the actual dam that was compromised is huge,” she said, adding the dam was around six to eight feet high.

Now, it looks like about a six-foot chunk was taken out of that dam, Fuller said.

“There’s a little waterfall that’s emptied out the entire pond, and it’s still flowing today because there was quite a bit of water in that pond.”

How the dam was destroyed remains a mystery to Fuller.

“It’s very clearly been broken, but I don’t know how it was broken,” she said. “The forces of nature can be very, very strong […] So was it ice and water? Was it someone who did it? Was it the forces of nature? I don’t know.”

Did you talk to your neighbors and ask them about this? They might have been fed up with the beaver dam and taken matters into their own hands. You should find out.

But, Fuller is in the process of trying to figure out what exactly happened and to try and get it rebuilt as soon as possible, adding she has reached out to the municipality, Conservations Authority and the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry. She also plans to contact her neighbour to see what they know about what happened.

A spokesperson for the Conservation Authority in Crowe Valley (CVCA) told CTV News Toronto it is “difficult” to answer how they can investigate the cause of the damage, since the beaver dam could have failed due to natural occurrences or human intervention.

“I believe a biologist would be the best expert to make that determination. If it is deemed to have resulted from human activity, there is a possibility the CVCA could investigate with a follow-up site visit,” general manager Tim Pidduck said in a statement.

“However, that is complicated since there would potentially be limited access to the site if the landowner does not allow us onto the property. If this is the case, we would require a warrant to investigate what we would consider a violation of our regulation (Ont. Reg. 159/06). As well, there seems to be very little, if any, proof as to who would have potentially caused the dam to fail.”

If another beaver doesn’t take over the dam, it will be without maintenance, so it will degrade and eventually collapse, prompting the water to spill out.

“Of course, once the pond is drained, the area looks devastated and all of the flora and fauna that was dependent on the pond is now without a ‘home,’” Pidduck said. “Nature will jump into action though and the pond will turn into a beaver meadow as plants, grasses, small trees start to sprout and regenerate the area.”

Well people with money always think they can investigate what is going on and fix it. Once I was at a 250,000 person march in downtown SF to protest the start of the Iraq war and we were right behind a very white CEO-type and his very white wife who were upset we weren’t starting to move right away. He told his valet to “go on up ahead and find out what’s keeping us from moving“. And I wanted to say, that would be the other 248,000 people in front of us but of course it would have fallen on deaf ears.

Lessons learned.

PUBLIC EYES MATTER TO BEAVERS

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beavers, What's killing beavers now? April 26, 2023

Isn’t that a weird coincidence? Rob Schroeder was the mayor of Martinez since forEVER and during that time every single group and nonprofit and team and hobby was invited to display in the artifact case at city hall except for you know, Worth A Dam and those very famous Martinez Beavers. But now for the first time another nice lady is mayor and we’ve been invited to display items and photos for the beaver festival for the entire month of June.

Isn’t that just a weird coincidence?
I think we will have some great ‘artifacts’ to add along with this, maybe a lunch bag beaver puppet, a charm bracelet and our congressional record certificate?

The other bright spot in my day today was reading this gruesome article which gave me exhilarating domestic terrorism fantasies because if a few believers paid trappers to do this in a few more state parks all our troubles would be over.

New Hartford Town Board bans trapping in public parks after skinned beavers found

NEW HARTFORD — Members of the New Hartford Town Board engaged in a tense discussion about trapping and hunting in public parks after several skinned beaver carcasses were discovered on the Rayhill Trail in New Hartford.

The meeting room in New Hartford’s municipal building was filled with concerned and angry New Hartford residents who pushed the town board to pass a resolution to ban trapping in public parks at the town board meeting on Wednesday, April 19.

The board held the public comment period at the end of the meeting. Town Supervisor Paul Miscione wanted to postpone the discussion about the beavers until the next meeting, when council had time to review the report from the DEC investigation that has been closed.

Yup. Drop a few skinned beavers on a nice family trail near the kiddie park and get yourself some popcorn to sit back and watch the drama unfold before your eyes.

Attendees were unhappy with this, saying that they went to this night’s meeting to discuss the beavers, and that the board does not need to review the report to listen to how the attendees feel about the slaughter of the beavers.

“I understand your concern and I think it’s appalling,” Miscione said. “I spoke to other people that are trapping … and you don’t leave anything like that. There’s trapping, and then there’s that. Again, I agree, but there’s other people that’s going to be here, the state official will come to the next meeting.”

The board allowed Judy Cusworth, founder of the Woodhaven Wildlife Center, a nonprofit wildlife sanctuary in Chadwicks, to speak. Cusworth has been working with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and received the initial complaint about the beavers.

“Unless you take the initiative to post every park in the town of New Hartford, this can go on,” she added. “Do you want your kids to see this? To walk off the trail and step in a leg-hold trap?”

Cusworth had pictures of the dead beavers, and presented the graphic and upsetting images to the board.

If a few fliers and a video is upsetting, a family of dead skinned beavers has got to be be an alarm bell. Ohh and a few dead skinned kits laying along side their parents. Now that would be a five alarm fire.

“I’m not asking you to start saying, ‘No hunting, no trapping in the entire town. Listen, I’m not that stupid,” Cusworth said. “I understand that people who own property, who pay taxes, if they want to give somebody permission to hunt and trap, I’m not asking you to shut them down. I’m asking you to shut your parks down.”

Cusworth said that in the investigation, the DEC determined that this was not done by any government entity.

BOCES, which has property that closely borders the Rayhill Trail, is posting signs that ban hunting and trapping on its property.

Miscione said that none of the board members have experience in environmental conservation, so they would like to speak with a DEC representative to learn more before making any decisions. This led attendees to become upset and raise their voices at Miscione, urging the board to ban hunting and trapping in the parks that night.

Yes please. Go on. Tell me more about how this never happens and how its a very unprofessional mistake from a careless recreational trapper. I’m pretty sure dead beavers wind up looking the same where their carcasses are left in the trail or buried without a trace.

“The frustration is that it’s the will of the community, and we’re being overspoken repeatedly,” an attendee said.

“Why not make a motion tonight to post signs” Why not?” another attendee asked.

Town Attorney Herb Cully attributed his hesitance to the uncertainty of the legality of this decision.

“Normally there would be some kind of a public hearing, these parks are in part funded by state and federal funds, … these folks are asking this board, and no one has presented this that I’m aware of prior to today, saying ‘OK, you guys pass it right now.’ I’d like to make sure it’s done legally and properly,” he said.

Dave Liebig, executive director of the New York Trappers Association, said that he walked the trail that day, and that both sides of the Rayhill Trail are private property — only the trail itself is public property.

Liebig said that beavers are trapped in the water, and so they would not have been trapped on the walking path itself. The carcasses were left by the trail on BOCES property.

“Trappers do not condone dumping carcasses anywhere,” Liebig said. “We do not condone that. … the only other time that happens is if they have a long walk back, and say if it’s an elderly gentleman that’s trapping, so they can’t carry the beaver that distance.”

The board passed a motion to post signs on public park land that ban trapping, which garnered a round of applause from attendees. The meeting adjourned shortly after.

If the people lead then the leaders will follow. Here’s proof of that once again. These people were riled and spitting mad that their nice park was polluted with dead beaver carcasses and they were on display for all their children to see. I actually wonder who took them away eventually? Did some one step up or call public works to do the deed?

Who ever did I want to personally thank that family of dead beavers. They selflessly changed the world for beavers in that park for a good long time. People always say when they trap and eat beaver isn’t it good that they didn’t go to waste? Well these beavers definitely didn’t go to waste.

They changed the world.