Month: December 2023

BEAVERS BRING OUT THE BIG GUNS

heidi08 Beavers December 31, 2023

Sometimes people wonder about the dynamic response in Martinez and why their was such a public uprising for the beavers. Was it something I did or something social media did or something the spirit of John Muir made happen? But of course it was none of those tings.

It was the beavers themselves.

Seeing them. Hearing them. Observing them.. watching them every day interact with family members. Beavers are touching. Personable. Social. Familiar. Watching a beaver changes you. You cannot help it It changed the trapper Grey Owl. It changed Enos Mills. It changed a tough little pipe fitter from Shell Oil.

And now they’ve c hanged the heads of CDFW.

‘Shot Off Te Landscape,’ Beavers Get Historic 2nd Chance In CA Wild

PLUMAS COUNTY, CA — California Fish and Wildlife’s Chuck Bonham said he “got a little choked up and teary-eyed” but was also filled with hope for the planet as he watched seven beavers slide into a pond on the ancestral lands of the Mountain Maidu people.

The beavers were home, back where they belong. And they had been sorely missed.

“There’s a part of our history where we viewed a lot of animals as nuisance, varmint, and we shot them off the landscape, from bison all the way down to beaver and many things in between,” Bonham said in a video of the beaver release. “And when you bring them home, you’ll restore your ecology. You’ll get your healthy functioning again in your meadows, in your alpine streams, in your coastal estuaries.”

There are three things I have learned that are beaver superpowers. They have the unexpected and unmitigated power to change human nature on a dime from what it once thought about beavers to an open window that transforms old attitudes to new respect and admiration.

Those three things are hearing in person the sound a juvenile beaver makes. Seeing your own child or grandchild make and wear a beaver tail. And the third, the most powerful of all, the big guns watching a beaver carry a young beaver on its back or tail.

One of the beavers released,, a 2-month-old kit, stayed in his kennel until Valerie Cook, the beaver restoration program manager for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, gently lifted him out and placed him in the grass. After a time, one of the beaver’s siblings returned to shore, hoisted its younger sibling on its back, and together they explored their new home.

The young beaver knew exactly what he was doing and “was waiting for someone to give him a ride on their tail,” Cook told SFGate.

“You just saw this tiny brown furball, this little nugget, catch a ride on the back of his sibling’s tail, and it looked like he was surfing,” Cook told the news outlet. “I don’t think it set in for days afterward, but that moment will go down as one of the highlights of my entire career. I think we were very proud of what we had done, and really optimistic about the potential that this represents for us and the good we think we can do moving forward.”

Oh that’s it. You were treated to the beaver back ride. The first thing I filmed in Martinez and the most glorious thing that can bee witnessed in person. You are hooked now. Stamped. Chosen. Destined.

Within 20 minutes of their release, the orange-toothed mammals — unlike other rodents that have magnesium in their tooth enamel, beavers have iron, which strengthens their teeth — were already at working together on their new lodges, where they’ll spend the winter together.

Beavers are social animals who live in families and work cooperatively. Parents bond for life, and their offspring, the kits from the current breeding season and in some cases offspring of either sex from previous seasons, remaining together. A single mating pair can live to be about 16 years old and rear a litter of kits — usually just few, but as many as eight — a year once the female reaches maturity, at abut 2½ years.

The survival rate of kits is about 45 percent, which makes rebuilding the population a long and challenging process. But the architects of the historic beaver release are optimistic the beaver population will rise and, with it, the ecological health of the Tásmam Koyóm valley. With beaver in it, they believe, the valley will retain the spring snowpack melt for longer periods of time, creating healthier, more abundant rivers and streams in years to come and more habitat for other species that share the valley.

“There is a lot to be discouraged and alarmed about in our world, whether it’s climate change and the loss of plants and animals off our planet,” Wade Crowfoot, secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency, said during the beaver release. “But when we take action, we maintain our hope to restore, to regenerate our natural worlds.”

Oh you’re in it now buddy boy. If these seven live and if they aren’t predated or frozen out or starved out you are signed on for life. It’s more serious than a time share. More long term commitment than getting a southern 2nd pregnant. You are HOOKED. for good.

“They’re our little cousins, and we’re going to pray for them to be safe, to have a good life here in this beautiful environment,” Allen Lowry of the Maidu Summit Consortium said in the video. “And so, we’re so happy to be able to release them here. And we pray that they will find a good home, make a good home forever here.”

“Today just feels real good,” Bonham said in the video. “We’re bringing something back home. We’re returning an animal home.”

He added, “And this could be forever. And it’s the right thing to do.”

When I go to my death bed and I am laying in the hospital saying my last goodbyes just remember this moment. That for one day in one part of Plumas count7 we helped seven beavers make Chuck Bonham cry..

Let that be my legacy.

A BEAVER ADVOCATE IN FAIRFIELD

So on thursday of this week three very important things happened at once. The first was that I finished writing about American Prairies suggesting beavers live in the dam and got a few comments from kindly readers who thought they were well meaning and my post was too snarky and should be softened.

Well yes I am snarky about beavers not living in the dam. it’s a failing I cannot fix. Unless they fix it first I offered helpfully.

At at the same time I was reading Ben’s fantastic article about google and realizing what that meant for California and then the phone rang.

And it was Virginia Holsworth sitting in a tree in the beaver dam because the city contractor was trying to cut the willow out of the dams and what did I thmk she should do?

Because its the week between Christmas and New Years and if there is one thing I learned in my many years battle with the city over beavers is that this is the week city contractors are brought in to do squirrely bullshit to the beavers because staff will all be gone, people are sleepy with eggnog or visiting relatives and the city phone lines are going to voicemail.

I told Virginia to call some friends and send me a photo of herself in the tree.

Advocates for Laurel Creek beavers concerned with tree removal

FAIRFIELD — Virginia Holsworth had planned to go shopping on Thursday.

Instead, she found herself sitting on a willow stump – the remains of a tree the local Laurel Creek beavers had built a dam around – and watching the city’s contracted workers as they cut down a second tree that was not part of the dam structure.
I think it would have looked a lot different,” Holsworth said if she had not protested to keep the beaver dam from being compromised.

She said the workers told her they were just paid to do a job by the city, and she told them she was not moving until the Fairfield representatives came out to talk to her.

Sniff, I’m do proud of Virginia She is a beaver heroine! Better than that. A Willow heroine! See that tree was sitting smack dab in the middle of one of the largest dams. It was the dams anchor and without it, well things just might wash away, lowering the water level and uncovering the beavers lodge.

Holsworth has been advocating for the local beaver population since 2020.

“I came out, sat down and they stopped working. The city manager came out and talked to me and a few neighbors, and the end result is they stopped cutting down trees that could compromise the integrity of the dam,” Holsworth said.

She said over the years she has developed a pretty good relationship with Fairfield, and was very pleased with the response from City Manager David Gassaway and the offer from Public Works Manager Daniel Camara to continue the discussion at a later date.

One thing Virginia is excellent at is incorporating very polite smoothness into her resistance. She acts like a professional and like a mom and city leaders aren’t sure how to fight back.

City officials could not be reached for comment on Thursday.

ead out of Laurel Creek in Fairfield, Wednesday, Aug. 11, 2021. (Aaron Rosenblatt/Daily Republic)The offer to do a walking tour of the creek area and to talk about their differing perspectives on the creek and beaver issues came after another creek neighbor, David Pratt, started asking questions about the city’s rational for cutting down the trees and about why those particular trees were selected.>Holsworth said Pratt has a history in the forestry industry.

The dam is still up. We did stop them,” she said.

Hurray for tree roots that hold dams steady. Hurray for Virginia and all the residents of Laurel Creek that care about beavers and trees in their neighborhood. We are with them in spirit!

Heidi Perryman, leader of Worth A Dam, a beaver advocacy group out of Martinez, also was on site.

“Residents are concerned that the trees anchor the dams and their removal could cause a washout – threatening the beaver safety and wildlife that depends on the dams … Research has shown that willow trees actually increase flow and help prevent flooding,” Perryman noted in an email to the Daily Republic.

Ohhh well if we have any weight to toss around we are happy to do it to save beaver dams and beavers. To be fair I didn’;t actually say I was THERE but maybe in some sense I was.. I was on the phone. :Listening to Virginia and the contractor. I was on facebook., Posting about it so that folks in Fairfield could know what was happening. Maybe I’m like Elijah, The unseen guest at every water table..

“Where ever there’s a city taking out a dam and a woman sitting in a tree, look over your shoulder and I’ll be there”

WHEN BEAVERS COUNT YOU COUNT BEAVERS

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver ecological impact, Beaver Rehabilitation, Beavers December 29, 2023

Back in August of 2021 I wrote am ambitious little post called “Incent-a-beaver” saying that beavers were so important to the golden state it behooved the powers that be to pay landowners to keep them on their land. The idea was based on the incentives farmers are given to keep their fields wet during the flyway season.

Well I thought it made sense anyway and it must have been a little interesting because afterwards I got an email from Dan Ackerstein who worked with the sustainability team at Google and he said they were interested in how Google mapping technology could help beavers and could we talk.

I was about as excited as I could possibly have been to think that a big power like google could turn their skills to beavers but I was sworn to secrecy and could say nothing. (Which I’m sure as you can imagine was hard for me.) In the end I gave hm some other names and a photo of a beaver that had been taken on the Google Campus a few years back but helping eavers wasn’t the direction they wanted to go in. I thought that was it, an interesting blip on the radar and nothing else.

Until I saw this:

For the first time in four centuries, it’s good to be a beaver. Long persecuted for their pelts and reviled as pests, the dam-building rodents are today hailed by scientists as ecological saviors. Their ponds and wetlands store water in the face of drought, filter out pollutants, furnish habitat for endangered species, and fight wildfires. In California, Castor canadensis is so prized that the state recently committed millions to its restoration.

While beavers’ benefits are indisputable, however, our knowledge remains riddled with gaps. We don’t know how many are out there, or which direction their populations are trending, or which watersheds most desperately need a beaver infusion. Few states have systematically surveyed them; moreover, many beaver ponds are tucked into remote streams far from human settlements, where they’re near-impossible to count. “There’s so much we don’t understand about beavers, in part because we don’t have a baseline of where they are,” says Emily Fairfax, a beaver researcher at the University of Minnesota.

But that’s starting to change. Over the past several years, a team of beaver scientists and Google engineers have been teaching an algorithm to spot the rodents’ infrastructure on satellite images. Their creation has the potential to transform our understanding of these paddle-tailed engineers—and help climate-stressed states like California aid their comeback. And while the model hasn’t yet gone public, researchers are already salivating over its potential. “All of our efforts in the state should be taking advantage of this powerful mapping tool,” says Kristen Wilson, the lead forest scientist at the conservation organization the Nature Conservancy. “It’s really exciting.”

You got all that? Beavers are so important we need to know where they are and how many there are. And we can make a computer formula that tells us the answer.s, Oh and just for extra credit notice that the author of this article is Ben Goldfarb.

The beaver-mapping model is the brainchild of Eddie Corwin, a former member of Google’s real-estate sustainability group. Around 2018, Corwin began to contemplate how his company might become a better steward of water, particularly the many coastal creeks that run past its Bay Area offices. In the course of his research, Corwin read Water: A Natural History, by an author aptly named Alice Outwater. One chapter dealt with beavers, whose bountiful wetlands, Outwater wrote, “can hold millions of gallons of water” and “reduce flooding and erosion downstream.” Corwin, captivated, devoured other beaver books and articles, and soon started proselytizing to his friend Dan Ackerstein, a sustainability consultant who works with Google. “We both fell in love with beavers,” Corwin says.

Corwin’s beaver obsession met a receptive corporate culture. Google’s employees are famously encouraged to devote time to passion projects, the policy that produced Gmail; Corwin decided his passion was beavers. But how best to assist the buck-toothed architects? Corwin knew that beaver infrastructure—their sinuous dams, sprawling ponds, and spidery canals—is often so epic it can be seen from space. In 2010, a Canadian researcher discovered the world’s longest beaver dam, a stick-and-mud bulwark that stretches more than a half-mile across an Alberta park, by perusing Google Earth. Corwin and Ackerstein began to wonder whether they could contribute to beaver research by training a machine-learning algorithm to automatically detect beaver dams and ponds on satellite imagery—not one by one, but thousands at a time, across the surface of an entire state.

…So there it is. laid out and clear for us all. The origin story and the key players. So what happened? What is going to happen next?

After discussing the concept with Google’s engineers and programmers, Corwin and Ackerstein decided it was technically feasible. They reached out next to Fairfax, who’d gained renown for a landmark 2020 study showing that beaver ponds provide damp, fire-proof refuges in which other species can shelter during wildfires. In some cases, Fairfax found, beaver wetlands even stopped blazes in their tracks. The critters were such talented firefighters that she’d half-jokingly proposed that the US Forest Service change its mammal mascot—farewell, Smoky Bear, and hello, Smoky Beaver.

Fairfax was enthusiastic about the pond-mapping idea. She and her students already used Google Earth to find beaver dams to study within burned areas. But it was a laborious process, one that demanded endless hours of tracing alpine streams across screens in search of the bulbous signature of a beaver pond. An automated beaver-finding tool, she says, could “increase the number of fires I can analyze by an order of magnitude.”

With Fairfax’s blessing, Corwin, Ackerstein, and a team of programmers set about creating their model. The task, they decided, was best suited to a convolutional neural network, a type of algorithm that essentially tries to figure out whether a given chunk of geospatial data includes a particular object—whether a stretch of mountain stream contains a beaver dam, say. Fairfax and some obliging beaverologists from Utah State University submitted thousands of coordinates for confirmed dams, ponds, and canals, which the Googlers matched up with their own high-resolution images to teach the model to recognize the distinctive appearance of beaverworks. The team also fed the algorithm negative data—images of beaverless streams and wetlands—so that it would know what it wasn’t looking for. They dubbed their model the Earth Engine Automated Geospatial Elements Recognition, or EEAGER—yes, as in “eager beaver.”

Wow that’s a lot of work to come around to the acronym EEAGER but okay. I get it. Now for the icing on the cake.

It’s only appropriate, then, that California is where EEAGER is going to get its first major test. The Nature Conservancy and Google plan to run the model across the state sometime in 2024, a comprehensive search for every last beaver dam and pond. That should give the state’s wildlife department a good sense of where its beavers are living, roughly how many it has, and where it could use more. The model will also provide California with solid baseline data against which it can compare future populations, to see whether its new policies are helping beavers recover. “When you have imagery that’s repeated frequently, that gives you the opportunity to understand change through time,” says the Conservancy’s Kristen Wilson.

GOT THAT? California is first and sometime this year we are going to finally know how many beavers the are in the state. And not just be able to infer from depredation permits. This is big news. The biggest.

When beavers count you figure out how to count beavers.

CASHING IN ON BEAVERS

heidi08 Beavers December 28, 2023

One of the disadvantages of the beaver renaissance we are living in is that lots and lots of related groups seem to be hitching their wagon to the beaver star without appearing to know much about the animals themselves. Case in point:American Prairie non profit. Let me explain.

The Key to Restoring Riparian Areas? Beavers!

Beavers, our resident industrious builders, have a BIG impact on habitat while benefiting lots of other species — and thanks to you, they’re getting to work. Take a lok at this low-tech, high-impact solution that’s made possible by supporters like you:

Step 1: Find Riparian Areas in Need of Rehabilitation

Riparian areas are home to a diverse array of plant and animal species while also acting as a buffer to help improve water quality and control erosion. But many of these critical areas have been damaged over time and are in need of rehabilitation.

See how this works? Its their annual fundraiser pitch. Send your check to American Prairies so we can keep doing this valuable work. PS none of your check will go to save beavers or educate people about beavers because those things are rodents, we will never run out of them.

Step 2: Build Beaver Starter Homes

A key step to revitalizing riparian areas is to attract beavers that will build dams to slow down the flow of water just enough to benefit the surrounding habitat. To facilitate this process, we entice beavers to move in by building them “starter homes” — structures that resemble the early stages of a dam.

Starter Homes? Do you mean to protect them from predators while they are getting settled in their new locarion? No of course that’s not what you mean. Because you are so ignorant about any single thing b0eavers need that you think they live IN the dam. Because send us your check. Dammit.

Step 3: Revival of Riparian Areas

Beavers pick up right where we left off, and that’s when the magic happens. As they establish themselves along streams and get to work, their dams slow the water and facilitate flooding that will germinate cottonwoods and help revive the stream banks and surrounding landscape.

Gosh I sure hope they germinate cottonwoods like you say cuz they are going to need something to eat in your prairies assume they survive the mountain lions that greet them on arrival.

thanks to your support, American Prairie is rewilding habitat for the return of wildlife, and ensuring a healthy prairie ecosystem.

Send us money right now and we’ll spend it on new woody structures so that beavers can starve and die of predation in the prairie like god intended!

All donations are tax deductible.

MODERN FARMERS AND THEIR BEAVERS

heidi08 Beavers December 27, 2023

If the new year brings in a hailstorm of good news for beavers it will be because of folks like Carol Evans and Jon Grig in Nevada and articles like this in Modern Farmer:gs

The Solution to Water Woes Could Lie With Beavers

During the year, the cattle are moved to new grazing. In some pastures, Griggs must rely upon wells, some as deep as 800 feet, to water the livestock. Other pastures on the 200,000-acre ranch—an area larger than New York City’s five boroughs—are traversed by the Susie and Maggie creeks that, thankfully, provide a year-round source of water. This wasn’t always the case. For years, the creeks petered out into dusty gravel beds every summer. Then, beavers were reintroduced, and everything changed.

Thirty years ago, while still a young cowboy, Griggs, like most ranchers, regarded beavers as vermin that gnawed down trees and blocked irrigation ditches. The snaggle-toothed aquatic rodent was shot, trapped and its dams dynamited. By the 1990s, beavers were virtually gone from the ranch, due in part to cattle degrading the riparian (banks and wetlands) areas as they sought water and greener grass. Without beavers, ponds and creeks dried up. This happened not only on the Maggie Creek Ranch but the public lands where Griggs’s cattle grazed. Working with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), which oversees public lands, riparian restoration began.

Griggs collaborated with BLM biologist Carol Evans. First, cattle’s access to creek beds during the spring and summer growing periods was restricted, allowing brush and grasses to regrow. As a result, creeks began widening, cooling and deepening. Willows took root, creating an ecosystem that could support beavers, which consume such woody species. Initially, Griggs wasn’t enthused about reintroducing the industrious creatures. Let the beavers do their thing, Evans assured him.

Now any beaver believer worth his or her salt remembers that in the very beginning of the PBS documentary on beavers there was a kick ass scene where two men visit the Susie creek and take depth measurements/ That was hydrologist Suzanne Fouty and Fisheries Biologist Carol Evans. Ben described Carol in Eager as having “the patience of a painting instructor”, which you may observe is not a term he chose to apply to me. Go figure.

Carol Retired from the BLM a few years back but Nevada is still reaping the benefits from her beavery influence. Still.

Griggs watched as a new generation of Castor canadensis began to re-engineer the landscape by building dams, creating pools of water that preserved the snow melt and the dozen or so inches of annual rainfall. The moisture created green oases half a mile wide that emanated from the creeks. Grazing expanded. Cattle had more and better-quality drinking water. Trout flourished. The creeks flowed year round. Today, Griggs says proudly, Susie and Maggie creeks are home to about 150 pairs of beavers, with one “major complex” of about 15 families. Now, he’s changed his tune, speaking at conferences across the United States and Canada about climate change and the benefits of introducing beavers to agricultural lands.

Beaver-engineered lands also provide a bulwark against drought-sparked wildfires that have consumed vast tracts—about one million acres in two conflagrations—in Nevada, says Griggs. Evans, who has since retired from the BLM, adds that healthy streams with beavers “work like a firebreak. And even if it’s burned, it comes back really fast.”

Well. well well. Nevada may be the beaver gift that keeps on giving. I don’t think there have been active beavers on Susie creek for a decade.; But they can remember how different it was.

If floods and fires are to be tackled, agriculturists need to adjust negative attitudes towards beavers, says Boucher. “For a rancher or farmer out west, he’s thinking, ‘oh, they’re cutting my trees down.’ If he recognizes that they’re going to keep a lot more water on his landscape, he’s going to have better water quality, he’s going to have more forage. It’s thinking of them as an asset or a blessing as opposed to a nuisance, pest or vermin. That’s the shift of coexistence that’s necessary.”

If you would appreciate not being scorched or burned in the next hundred years then you should shut your objections up and just welcome beavers where ever you are lucky enough tieo find them. Let them fix this and stop being such a baby about. That;s what Modern Farmer says.

Jay Wilde is the owner of Diamondback W Ranch in Preston, Idaho, a 10,000-acre spread that includes national forest that has been in his family since 1933. Back then, Birch Creek, the main source of water for his 200 head of cattle, flowed year-round through the property. Decades later, as summers became hotter, the creek dried up by July, then early June. Without water, the cows couldn’t graze many of the pastures. Wilde was forced to pipe water in. A smarter idea, mused Wilde, might be to bring back beavers, which had once flourished but had since vanished, due to being “either trapped or shot.” He tried releasing beavers into the creek area, but they disappeared: “Maybe predators got ‘em; I don’t know.” Wilde connected with Utah State University Professor Joseph Wheaton, an expert in river restoration, who suggested constructing beaver dam analogs, or BDAs, a manmade beaver dam. This created ponds deep enough for beavers in which to hide. Six more beavers were released, which went on to build their own dams and lodges. Beaver habitat was nurtured. Cattle weren’t allowed near the riparian areas until the beginning of September, after wetland plants had gone to seed. This allowed new willows and rushes to grow for beaver food. “It’s management of the cattle. You got to get that right before the beaver deal is going to work,” says Wilde.

Work it did. Birch Creek, which is about five miles long, now burbles year round, thanks to about 250 beaver dams and “my guess would be 20 to 30 animals,” says Wilde. Even though there is now richer grass and plentiful water, Wilde has shifted his thinking: The bovines are permanently restricted from entering riparian areas, which now host wilderness creatures.

As a keystone species—an animal critical to the health of an ecosystem—beaver ponds support aquatic creatures such as muskrats and river otters. They also attract a variety of reptiles, water fowl, insects, plants and mammals. This year, a pair of mallards raised ducklings in one beaver pond, says Wilde. Deer frequent the wetland areas, as do black bears. “The one thing I really notice is the moose. The moose just love those wet areas,” says Wilde. “There’s a bull moose, and he grazes the bottom of a pond, gets his head down in the water and picks stuff up from the bottom.”

Being a rancher, says Wilde, doesn’t solely mean growing livestock for human consumption, it also means being a steward of nature. “If we make things good for our animals, well then they’re good for all animals.”

This is a fantastic article. It came out about the same time as California was relocating beavers so I couldn;t write as much as I wanted. But if you are looking for a good after Christmas read, this is the one you need. Get a cup of coffee and some leftover stollen and settle in.

Human-caused climate change set another heat record in 2023, with the planet enduring what is likely the hottest year in 125,000 years, according to Climate Central. If landscapes weren’t fried under the scorching sun, floods washed away homes, farms, livelihoods and even lives. This summer, a record 46 million acres of tinder dry Canadian forests ignited, smothering the East Coast in choking smoke. The US also experienced a record number of billion-dollar climate-change disasters. According to the Joint Economic Committee Democrats, US wildfires cause damages from $394 billion to $893 billion annually, or from two to four percent of annual GDP.

The Bureau of Land Management views the beaver as a critical weapon of climate change mitigation. It works closely with state partners to promote the reintroduction of beavers across the US, believing the animals will have a significant impact on drought-stricken areas by “slowing the flow of water, increasing the retention of water, especially through those really hot dry summer months,” says Scott Miller, director of the National Aquatic Monitoring Center, a joint partnership between BLM and Utah State University. What is needed, says Miller, is to “capture hearts and minds” about this winsome and industrious creature.

With North America nearing a tipping point for environmental catastrophes, wisdom dictates that collaboration with beavers could bring us back from the brink.

Yes well you’re welcome. You people messed this up pretty badly. Good thing we’re still here to help.