MURAL BEAVERS: DOING THEIR JOB

heidi08 Beaver Art May 6, 2024

This happened recently through the hard work of our friends at the Beaver Brigade.

Beaver Mural Unveiling Sat April 20 2024 at Charles Paddock Zoo Atascadero John Khus
with SLO Beaver Brigade Audrey Taub
California Coastal Commission WHALE TAIL® grants program &the San Luis Obispo Beaver Brigade
in collaboration with the Charles Paddock Zoo & the City of Atascadero. The Coastal Commission WHALE TAIL® grants support experiential education & stewardship of the California coast and its watersheds.

Chumash artist John Khus, who created the mural, will reveals it in video below.. at the Charles Paddock Zoo at 9100 Morro Road in Atascadero This mural has been made possible through the California Coastal Commission WHALE TAIL® grants program and the San Luis Obispo Beaver Brigade in collaboration with the Charles Paddock Zoo and the City of Atascadero.

The art of John Khus has been recognized by Chumash leaders as “striking, beautiful, unique, carrying the voices of our ancestral artists with whom he has walked all his life.” He has exhibited in galleries throughout the Central Coast and taught art and cultural heritage at the 2023 inaugural Chumash Heritage and Marine Science Camp in Oceano. His original artwork resulted in the “Tomol Rides Wishtoyo” mural in Cambria, which was recently presented with a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition.

“The Beaver are my relatives, as are all the animals, plants, land, water, and air,” Khus said. “So, the importance of this mural is the same as someone might give to a family portrait or ancestral painting.”

The mural unveiling will include remarks by representatives from the SLO Beaver Brigade, and the artist. “The mural represents the beavers tending the waters from the Salinas River all the way to the ocean in Monterey Bay,” said Audrey Taub of the SLO Beaver Brigade. “I love the representation of all of the life forms that depend on the beavers. The three young beavers in the center of it all are just innocently doing their job of being beavers, unaware that all of the other critters around the ponds need them in order to live.”

MEJOR CASTORES QUE TRACTORES

heidi08 Beavers May 5, 2024

I thought our cinco de mayo celebrations could be improved with some thought about the beaver in Mexico. This fun video from our friends at the San Pedo watershed shows the grand beaver benefits from both sides of the border.

SD CHANGES SUBJECT TO SAVING BEAVERS

heidi08 Beavers May 4, 2024

South Dakota and its governor are having a horrible no good very bad week and they will do anything to change the subject away from shooting Cricket in the gravel pit.

Even discuss the previously taboo topic of saving beavers.

Might South Dakota beavers receive some protections?

CUSTER STATE PARK, S.D. (KELO) — Nancy Hilding saw her three petitions seeking various levels of restrictions against hunting and trapping beavers set aside by the South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks Commission on Thursday.

But one of the commissioners said something needs to change. Another wants the conversation to continue. And a third said she disagreed at least one of the changes taking effect statewide.

State law allows citizens to petition the commission for rule changes. The commission meets on a near-monthly schedule and it’s become rare for a meeting to not have at least one petition to consider. The commission went through four of them on Thursday.

Speaking for the Prairie Hills Audubon Society, Hilding, who’s from Black Hawk, suggested a three-year moratorium on hunting and trapping beavers in the Black Hills. She also called for scaling back the year-round season to five months, having hunters and trappers report the locations where they’ve taken beavers from public lands, and relocating beavers to new areas rather than killing them.

Wha-a-a-t? Stop killing beavers? It’s in our DNA. I know you are allowed to make suggestions but that’s a crazy one. Or maybe its not. Lets talk a little more.

The state Wildlife Division found that beaver caches were down 73% from 2011 to 2023. Commissioner Travis Bies said he recently went looking for beavers around his ranch in the Fairburn area of Custer County and was disappointed by how little sign he found.

“I think it’s time we do something,” Bies said.

He didn’t support the petitions from Hilding but, he added, “There’s a lot of good stuff in there we could put in a management plan of our own.”

For example, Bies said, he doesn’t agree with allowing 12-month trapping of beavers in his area — “I really do think we should shut the trapping down in the Black Hills for now” — and liked the idea of relocating them.

For commissioner Julie Bartling of Gregory, who’s from the center of South Dakota along the Missouri River, the statewide season concept caught her eye. She said there was severe flooding throughout South Dakota in spring 2019 and, in some places, beaver caches on federal land are still affecting repairs.

In the not so distant past. before governor’s were shooting puppies SD has actually been fairly smart about beavers for a good ;long time. Carol Johnson’s beaver research has lead the way for moments where fish and game actually wrapped trees to prevent beaver chewing so that they wouldn’t need to be killed.

I know its shocking. But the Dakotas have been a beaver island of better understanding for a while.

Commission chair Stephanie Rissler, who lives in Vermillion on the state’s east side about 400 miles from Fairburn, said she wanted to hear from people in western South Dakota. She said “a handful” have been in contact with her.

“I don’t know that these three petitions are the way to go,” Rissler said. But she thanked Hilding for bringing them forward and called for more conversation about whether more needs to be done.

“I just think we need to have some more dialogue about what we’re seeing,” Rissler said.

By all means. Talk about it some more if you need to. I understand why your state REALLY wants to change the subject at the moment.

TIGER BEAT ON THE WILAMETTE

heidi08 Beavers May 6, 2024

A strapping young lad and his beavers gets a life magazine type portrait from the Oregon press…

Western Innovator: Helping landowners, beavers coexist

With their penchant for transforming their surroundings, humans and beavers tend not to see eye-to-eye as neighbors.

When their proximity becomes too close for comfort, Jakob Shockey aims to “help the monkeys outsmart the rodents” without resorting to traditional lethal methods.We’re pretty good at it if we put our minds to it,” he said.

As executive director of the Project Beaver nonprofit, Shockey has found both species can benefit from nonviolent approaches to resolving conflicts over territory.

I have to say Jakob, you get yourself and beavers some mighty good press. Something about the “Sorry he’s married, ladies” tone of this piece reminds me of the admiring tones we used to only see in certain trapper profiles. You have become the healthy outdoor face of co-existence, and thats saying something.

By using peaceful strategies, humans can mitigate the damage beavers cause while directing their energy toward improving stream health and wildfire resilience, he said.

In his experience, Shockey has found beavers can restore watersheds more effectively and less expensively than humans.

“I quickly realized beavers are doing a better job and doing it for free,” he said. “The most effective thing I can do is defer to the professionals. Beavers are professionals at moving water around.”

Even among landowners who entirely lack affection for the furry engineers, conciliatory methods provide more long-term stability than deadly ones, he said.

Such rosy tones are usually reserved for rugged outdoor trappers. Good work Jakob you’ve cornered the market.

“They’re just ready to get off this treadmill of trapping every year,” he said.

If a landscape appeals to beavers, sooner or later, new ones will be drawn to the area vacated by those that were removed, so trapping isn’t a permanent solution, Shockey said.

“You’ll just get more beavers moving in,” he said. “If they come in once, they will come in the next year and the next year.”

When beavers are attracted to a site where they’re repeatedly killed, it also acts as “population sink,” or “black hole” for the species, Shockey said.

Beavers aren’t in jeopardy of extinction, but their numbers remain too small to provide ecological services everywhere they’re needed, including areas where friction with humans is unlikely, he said.

“We need to stop killing just so many of them,” Shockey said.

A good.looking young young man gets a lot of permission to talk, I’m just saying.,

With the exception of irrigation canals, where any blockages are intolerable, most waterways can support beavers without endangering human dwellings or structures, he said.

If a beaver dam backs up enough water to threaten private property, landowners can deploy a device called a pond leveler to reduce flooding.

A pond lever consists of a flexible plastic pipe, which is inserted into the pond while the other end is placed downstream of the beaver dam. Water will then flow through the pipe and decrease the pond’s level to the elevation of the outflow.

“You’ve capped how much flooding a beaver can do at that site,” Shockey said.

The beaver will search for a breach in its dam without realizing it’s actually the tube that’s reducing the pond’s size. A cage around the pipe’s intake prevents beavers from getting close enough to detect the leak’s true source.

“They will tolerate it. I can’t claim they’re happy about it,” Shockey said.

The trick is to shrink the pond enough to prevent excessive flooding but not so low that beavers can’t hide underwater from predators, he said.

If the dam’s entrance is uncovered, for example, that will make a beaver feel vulnerable and compel it to build another dam downstream, which just recreates the problem, he said.

Are you thinking I’m exaggerating about the “crushy” tones of this article? How about the stats at the end,:

CDFW LEARNS THE IMPORTANCE OF BEAVERS

heidi08 Beavers May 2, 2024

Look what happened yesterday! I keep saying that it’s a new world for California beavers but I’m never sure I believe it until something like this happens.

California Natural Resources hosted award-winning conservation journalist Ben Goldfarb for a Campus Connect event during Earth Week. He is the author of Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet and Eager and The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. CDFW Director Chuck Bonham Interviewed Goldfarb covering topics from road ecology to beavers as nature-based solutions for climate change. He has written for publications such as The Atlantic, Science, The Washington Post, National Geographic, The New York Times, Mother Jones and many other outlets. Watch this video to learn more about the importance of beavers to the landscape.