Month: May 2023

ALL OF A SUDDEN: BEAVERS

heidi08 Beavers May 5, 2023

You know how it is. You drift along with nothing much to do but keep some PT appointments while you’re broken foot heals and then all of a sudden there are a MILLION things for you to do all at once. And they start NOW please.

Just yesterday I learned that the festival is on the calendar for the Parks, Recreation, Marina and Cultural Commission week after next and could I turn my powerpoint in by the 11th? And today I was told the the CCC Fish and Wildlife Committee would like a presentation on beavers and May 19th would be ideal. Um, okay. I have wanted to preach the gospel to them since forever, but life is still a little discombobulated at the moment, bones being what they are and all.

Anyway of course I said yes to both and yes to the Diablo Gazette publisher I implored to put something in about the beaver festival. He remembered Amy’s photo on the cover and I assured him we had great new stuff for him to choose from.

So let’s hope. I also sent him this;

Martinez led the way for Sacramento

Back when the now-famous beavers moved into Martinez in 2007, there presence was literally an anomaly. There were no other cities working to live with beavers, and no articles in the New York or LA times praising their environmental contributions, or noting that their dams can alleviates droughts, reduce fires, and mitigate flooding. The world was a different place when hundred’s of local residents forced the city to try coexisting with the popular rodents instead of trapping them. This success allowed Martinez to see firsthand how beaver habitat created more birds, more frogs, more muskrats and otters and provided a vibrant creek that stayed lush year round.

Launched by the advocacy group Worth A Dam as a way to reinforce local support, the beaver festival used to be the only one of its kind in North America, but there have since been others in Utah, and Oregon, a second beaver festival in San Luis Obispo this year and, the first of its kind in Minnesota. More importantly, the California Budget introduced a 1.44 million dollar addition for beaver restoration and CDFW has been given the hard job of teaching more people to coexist with beaver like Martinez to benefit our fragile waterways.The 14^th festival will include live music, children’s activities, a silent auction and the dynamic chalk artist Amy G. Hall of Napa creating a focal mural that shows off the beavers prowess. Environmental displays will include Native Birds, Nor Cal Bats, Save the Snakes, Lindsey Wildlife and a huge mobile fish aquarium from East Bay Regional Park.

The event is free, with free parking in Susana Park downtown Martinez from 10-3. It’s true that the little city doesn’t deserve credit for all the good things that have happened to beavers over the years, but events like this surely got the ball rolling. Come join us for a dam good time and find out why beavers are being called climate change superheroes!

Well I can feel my leg getting stronger most days, let’s just hope my brain gets more focused and attentive too because I don’t want to waste any chances!

ANOTHER BEAVER MAVEN

Maven’s notebook is a website that has been fairly excited about beavers for a while. But now they really have something to celebrate.

As evidence for the wide-ranging environmental benefits of beavers has mounted, champions of these 40-to-70-pound rodents have increasingly clamored for restoring them in California. Now, the state has finally joined others, including Oregon, Washington and Utah, that are putting these furry ecosystem engineers to work. This year marks the launch of a $1.44 million per year California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) program to bring beavers back to watersheds throughout their historic range in the state.

“We agree: time for California to embrace beavers,” CFDW director Chuck Bonham wrote in a January 2023 op-ed in Outdoor California.

Well well well, the beaver chicken comes home to roost. We are grateful he finally saw the light. Now lets just hope it catches onto the whole department.

The agency is in the process of working out the details of its new beaver restoration program. Goals include moving beavers from places where they cause harm, such as flooding on farms or roads, to places where they can do good, such as mountain watersheds. “The program funds dedicated scientists who, once hired by CDFW, will begin working on projects that help the environment by bringing beavers back to California rivers where they once thrived,” Bonham wrote.

Another goal is to “identify and support non-lethal deterrent methods to help mitigate human-beaver conflict,” CFDW staff wrote in an email. Under current regulations, the agency issues permits for killing beavers provided that “all alternatives are exhausted and beavers are continuing to damage or threaten to damage land or property.”

This is the best goal. Solving problems instead of killing problems. Putting beavers in the sierras is okay and good for us I guess, but moving beavers out of problem areas is pretty much a waste of time. And probably only slightly better than being killed from the beavers point of view.

Best practices honed over the years include catching and relocating entire families. Beavers are monogamous and mate for life, and young typically stay with their parents for two years to help maintain the living quarters and raise the next generation of kits.

Utah’s program has expanded the traps used to include both live clamshell traps, which completely enclose beavers, as well as humane snares, which allow some freedom of movement. “We used to use clamshell traps exclusively but changing water levels can pose a danger to beavers,” DeBloois says. “Utah State researchers showed you can use snares that are long enough to accommodate rising and falling water levels.”

The next step is quarantining the trapped beavers on site to reduce the risk that they will carry fish pathogens like whirling disease—which causes spinal deformities in trout and salmon that make them swim in circles—to their new home. Whirling disease is spread by worms living in mud, and beavers scoop up mud when making and maintaining dams.

To see if relocated beavers stay where they’re put, veterinarians fit the tails of some with radio tags. Picking the right release location makes them less likely to stray. “Beavers need willows and slow-running streams with reliable water running year round,” DeBloois says. “The streams can’t dry up in the summer.”

Demand for beavers is high. Other federal and state agencies “are really excited about it but our folks are more aware of the possible conflicts,” DeBloois says. “The biggest hurdle is that you need to make sure beavers won’t cause a problem—you need to check the release site, and what’s upstream and downstream.”

Hmm I’m less excited about the Utah program than Methow, is that really who california will be modelling themselves after? Is that where this whirling nonsense comes from? I wrote they author and she said no, CDFW never called her back, she reached out to Utah on her own.

Julie Fair, Director of California Headwaters Conservation for the nonprofit American Rivers, is thrilled at California’s change of heart on beavers. “It’s going to be awesome,” she says. “It’s a super fundamental change.”

Fair is helping to lead the charge to restore meadows in Sierra Nevada watersheds, which provide much of California’s drinking water in the form of snowmelt. Beavers could be key to this effort. About half of these high elevation meadows are degraded by historical grazing, roads, and stream channelization. Beaver dams slow stream flows and reconnect them with meadows.

Healthy meadows are a priority because they are biodiversity hotspots that attract an abundance of wildlife, and they serve as natural reservoirs. Meadows spread and slow snowmelt, soaking it up like sponges and releasing it gradually. Meadow restoration will likely become even more vital as the world warms, shrinking the snowpack and making it more critical to pace the release of snowmelt over the dry season.

“They’re a pretty important form of alternative water storage in the upper watershed,” Fair says.

It’s DAM important. In fact it was a forest service worker years ago who promoted the work that spurred the archeologist from BLM to actually carbon test that wood in the old beaver dam which inspired us to do the paper and allowed CDFW to stop lying to themselves about where beavers should be in the first place.

Beavers could also be key to restoring meadows in headwaters of the Colorado River, which begins in the Rocky Mountains and is a major source of drinking water for Southern California. “They can help us recreate meadows faster than we can do it artificially,” says Felicia Marcus, a former California State Water Resources Control Board chair who is now a fellow at Stanford University’s Water in the West Program. “The more meadows the better.”

The Rocky Mountains have even more potential for meadow revitalization than the Sierra Nevada due to differences in terrain. “The Sierra are steep with small but important spots of meadows, while the Rockies have massive sweeps of meadows,” Marcus explains. “The scale for restoration is astonishing, it’s a huge opportunity to slow down and store water.”

“Beavers are the ultimate nature based solution,” she continues. “They do all the work—it’s free help.”

Let’s hear it for the beave!

ONE TRAPPER IN MASSACHUSETTS THINKS BEAVERS ARE LIKE JESUS

heidi08 Beavers May 4, 2023

Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.” Gal. 3:13

I had no idea beaver trappers in Massachusetts were so steeped in religious symbolism. Clearly this was a communication that beavers are just like Christ in that they are ruthlessly persecuted while trying selflessly to make lives better for their neighbors and no one stands up for them until it is too late.

Or that’s what I’m deciding to think this all means.

Residents Feel ‘Awful’ After Beaver Tail Found Nailed To Tree In Sterling

Residents are angry and horrified after a severed beaver tail was found nailed to a tree near a pond in one Central Massachusetts town last month.

Sterling Police found the tail nailed to the “Beavers No Gnawing” sign on a tree along Justice Hill Cutoff at Stuart Pond on Thursday, April 27, Animal Control Officer Kelly Jones told Daily Voice.

Jones determined the tail was nailed sometime between 1:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 20 and 7:15 a.m. on Friday, April 21 after getting footage from a Princeton resident.

After confirming that it was a real tail, officers removed and disposed of the tail.

Well isn’t that a nice surprise for your walk in the park. I just love that there seems to be more trappers really to piss everyone off in the most horrible way imaginable. This should do wonders for the animal rights movement.

The incident sparked outrage among the community, with many residents commenting on a Facebook post from Newhouse Wildlife Rescue.

Newhouse Wildlife Rescue is

I can not post the picture that was sent to me today, because it is too upsetting, but I would like to use this platform to help find the culprit.

I apologize for posting something like this, but I feel it’s necessary.

On public property at Stuart Pond in Sterling Massachusetts, a beaver was…I can’t even write it….

This creature was used as an example and left beside a large sign that said “Beaver No Knawing” tacked to a large tree.

If ANYONE has any knowledge regarding who mutilated this animal and put up this sign, please contact the environmental police. This poor creature did not deserve this. No animal does.

There is a news story about the incident which is getting so much attention its been picked up by Yahoo news. I can’t embed it but you can go HERE TO WATCH.

Beavers are like Jesus. Everyone knows that. The word beavers even sounds a little like the word Jesus. Beavers are selfless and they work miracles, Obviously this trapper understood that.

Or maybe he was just an asshole.

THE SECOND BEST BEAVER ARTICLE IN POPULAR SCIENCE

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver ecological impact May 2, 2023

Once upon a time, a long, long, time ago, positive beaver articles used to be few and far between. One dropped every other year or so, and I was powerfully happy to see them. Now everybody and his mother seems to have something nice to say about beavers. Even Popular Science wants a seat at the willow table.

Beavers, snails, and elephants are top grads from nature’s college of engineering

Beavers, like humans, shape their ecosystems not just by eating or excreting, but also by building and tearing down. And because of those similarities, the rodents have become North America’s best-known “ecosystem engineers.”

But the scientific idea of ecosystem engineering wasn’t born in a beaver lodge—it came from Israel’s Negev Desert. The pea-size rock-eating snail sticks to the underside of limestone boulders and has a peculiar means of accessing food: It chews through stone to get the lichen living inside. The tiny mollusks then poop out so much of the rock that they literally build the desert soil. Measurements taken by ecologists in the 1980s showed that their gritty feces add as much sediment in the course of a year as windblown dust.

When one of those ecologists, Clive Jones of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York, visited the desert in 1987, he saw that snails weren’t the only animals shaping the landscape. Most of its organisms, from animals down to bacteria, changed how water flowed in the arid environment. Porcupine pits and anthills trapped runoff. Bulbed plants broke up hard-packed earth, trapping moisture. Colonies of microbes covered slopes in waterproof sheets.

And beavers! Don’t forget the beavers, Doing their part to keep North America Green and lush. I mean snails and oysters are cool and all, but I don’t see any one rushing to form the nonprofit “Worth A Shell” any time soon.

Jones and his colleagues coined the term ecosystem engineering in 1994 to connect the processes they saw in that desert to similar ones all over the world. Kelp forests create calm nurseries for fish and crabs on coasts. Terrestrial forests collect water. In all these cases, the actions, or even the body of an organism itself is reshaping the world—and not as part of a food chain. An elephant eating leaves isn’t engineering—but as soon as it rips down a tree, it is.

Since the idea entered the scientific mainstream, ecologists have debated what counts as an engineer, given that almost any organism could conceivably qualify for the definition. Does an action have to be intentional, as beavers’ dam-building appears to be? Does it need to shape the lives of other organisms immensely?

Jones says no to both. From the perspective of an ecologist, it doesn’t matter whether an elephant means to rip up a bush or eat a specific plant—the fact is that it does. And the effect doesn’t need to be earth-shattering. An animal’s shadow is the most trivial example of engineering. “No other organism cares about the ephemeral shadow caused by the cat walking outside my window,” Jones says. But the shadow has the same type of effect as a beaver’s dam in that they both change the heat, light, water, and air that other organisms depend on.

Well I believe it was Frances Backhouse who first called beavers “unintentional philanthropists”

“To understand how an ecosystem works, you need to take all those things into account,” Jones says. If you think about beavers’ eating habits—consuming the leaves and soft inner tissue of wetland trees—you’d assume they were an engine of environmental destruction, leaving clear-cuts in their wake. Instead, studies show that these rodents create stunningly biodiverse wetland habitats. Similarly, tens of millions of bison once roamed from what is now Louisiana to the Canadian boreal forest, engineering the plains differently from the cattle that replaced them. Bison, unlike cattle, plow snow on the winter prairie and wallow up huge sand pits in the summer, helping create grasslands that support more birds and native plants.

Understanding how species alter landscapes isn’t just an intellectual exercise—it’s critical for figuring out how to preserve fast-disappearing habitats, or how to restore lost ones. “Humans can imitate the way in which ecosystem engineers do their work,” Jones says. “Of course, why bother to build a wetland when you can conserve beavers, and they’ll do it for you?”

Of course beavers need most for us to get out of their way and stop bothering them. They need for us to appreciate the changes they make and stop complaining all the time. Still, as nice as it is to read this article in popular science it is still only my second favorite.

CAN YOU BELIEVE WE GET THIS AGAIN?

heidi08 Beavers May 1, 2023

Back in March I got the very sad news that artist Amy Hall was not going to be able to join us this year‘s festival as she had guests coming from another country and she needed to make them welcome. I was heartbroken, I couldn’t believe it. It felt like the rug had been pulled out from under me.

And then a couple days later I fell and broke my foot, and I realized that was what it feels like when the rug is pulled out from under you. I was barely thinking about it in the skilled nursing facility when Amy sent me a meek email and she said, do you still want chalk art? am I still welcome? Because my guests have changed our plans and I love to come again.

And even with a broken foot I said, are you kidding we would be crazy happy if you got t join us.

So she is.