Author: Bob Kobres

Heidi & Mitch tell the tale of the Martinez Beavers!

Bob Kobres Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver Behavior, Beaver News, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Friends of Martinez Beavers, History, In the News, Urban beavers March 16, 2023

Linksploration – Bay Area

Exploring the many paths to a greener future

Beavers! They’re baaack! Beavers are amazing animals. Hear about their incredible physiology, Heidi Perryman and Mitch Avalon relate the story of the Martinez beavers, and what’s next for them in the Bay Area.

Click to listen in a new tab.

Show notes

Moving in on Motor City.

Beavers reclaim land in southeast Michigan

Marina Johnson, Detroit Free Press

Over the past decade, beaver populations have returned to southeast Michigan in places such as Belle Isle, Stony Island, the Conner Creek Power Plant and other places along the Detroit River.

Why did beaver populations decline?
When settlers moved into metro Detroit, beaver trapping for the fur trade was plentiful, eliminating much of the population. The existence of this species was almost wiped out due to 300 years of trapping and trading. Along with trapping, industrialization and habitat loss pushed beavers out of the area and they were last reported in 1877 as a result, said Great Lakes Now.

When did beavers return to the area?
Beavers were first reported back in the area in 2008, according to Friends of the Rouge. For the first time in over 100 years, beavers gnawed away at trees and built damns near Conners Creek Power Plant. Since then, beaver sightings in the Detroit and Rouge Rivers aren’t uncommon and continues to increase.

But not necessarily welcome throughout.

Are beavers good for urbanized areas?
The DNR has beavers categorized as nuisance wildlife due to damage caused in urban and industrialized areas. They often gnaw on trees and their damns cause flooding and problems for homeowners. The DNR does offer trapping services and permits for those impacted in certain areas.

Cooley wrote the DNR is given a difficult hand because they want beavers around but not at the expense of someone’s property.

“Beaver in residential areas typically lead to problems, it’s their nature to back up and flood a waterway to create a pond,” he wrote. “Up North or out in the country, they can do that and it doesn’t impact anyone, most people would never even know it happened. However, down here in southeast Michigan if they back up a drain or a river, it is eventually going to flood someone’s yard and possibly impact their house.”

Read the whole article here.

Better acceptance in Cropton:

Cropton Forest beaver project by Forestry England proving successful

A trial project that’s re-introduced beavers to a forest in North Yorkshire is going from strength to strength as it enters its final year.

By Leigh Jones, The Northern Echo

The Cropton Forest beaver project, which saw two beavers released on enclosed land upstream of Sinnington in April 2019, has been credited with helping to reduce the flood risk for the village and for transforming the ecology of the area for the good.

The five year project, which is overseen by Forestry England, hopes to examine the impact of re-introducing beavers to the wild in England after they were hunted to extinction in the sixteenth century. It’s one of a number of pilots across the UK which have support from a number of organisations including the RSPB.

Ecologist Cath Bashforth next to a beaver dam at Cropton Forest in North Yorkshire. The beavers in the pilot scheme at the enclosure have “far exceeded” her expectations. (Image: Forestry England)

At the centre of the North Yorkshire beavers’ habitat is an enormous 70m long dam that the original beavers have built over the years alongside the kits that they’ve had since being re-introduced to the area four years ago.

Ecologist Cath Bashforth, who leads the project, said that the pilot has “far exceeded what we expected.

“We never expected such a dramatic impact in such a short space of time.”

In terms of the dramatic impact, the slowing of water flow through the site helps protect downstream areas from flooding, however the beavers’ presence has a knock on effect in many areas surrounding their habitat.

“At the start of the trial we had some fantastic volunteers who helped us take a baseline biodiversity survey to examine what impact the beavers would have,” says Cath.

The view of the enormous beaver dam in Cropton Forest from above. (Image: Forestry England)

Having built their enormous dam along with five or six smaller ones Cath is optimistic that the beavers will be able to stay in North Yorkshire on conclusion of the pilot scheme.

As the project looks to reach its conclusion in a little over a year, the fate of the beavers presently on site remains undecided.

Read the whole article here.

And you might want to add this to your calendar:

Posted on The Ukiah Daily Journal

Peregrine Audubon Society to present The Beaver Believers program

Peregrine Audubon Society Program will be hosting a zoom presentation on Tuesday, March 21 at 7 p.m. featuring The Beaver Believers hosted by Sarah Koenigsberg of the Beaver Coalition.

In this film, we follow our Beaver Believers out into some truly spectacular landscapes of the interior West, from the east slopes of the Cascade mountains in Washington to the Rockies in Colorado, from the parched red rock deserts of southern Utah to an urban park in central California.

We take you to places where beaver have already begun to transform damaged watersheds, and we learn of the many challenges that stand in the way of larger scale efforts to use beaver as a restoration tool, including trapping, which is tragically still legal in most states.

Perhaps most importantly, we meet incredible people who, undaunted by climate change, are working tirelessly to protect and restore beaver out on the landscape, who embody the spirit and joy that comes from “thinking like a beaver,” who show us that collaboration and watershed restoration truly are possible. All we have to do is let the beaver come home.

The coalition is dedicated to strategically advancing a paradigm shift in society’s relationship with beaver. Learn more at beavercoalition.org

Lastly, from Unofficial Networks:

The cute video that the image above is taken from is by nature photographer Nick Sulzer.

Bob

Not surprisingly, Beavers shown to preserve biodiversity in Poland as well! Plus a new annual Beaver Festival!

Bob Kobres Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver Art, Beaver economics, Beaver News, Beavers, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Culvert Protection, Beavers and Flooding, Eager: book review, Festival March 14, 2023

From: The Revelator

Nature’s Supermarket: How Beavers Help Birds — And Other Species

New research shows that these ecosystem engineers can be an “ally in stopping the decline of biodiversity.”

by Tara Lohan

Researchers in Poland have found another reason to love beavers: They benefit wintering birds.

The rodents, once maligned as destructive pests, have been getting a lot of positive press lately. And for good reason. Beavers are ecosystem engineers. As they gather trees and dam waterways, they create wetlands, increase soil moisture, and allow more light to reach the ground. That drives the growth of herbaceous and shrubby vegetation, which benefits numerous animals.

Bats, who enjoy the buffet of insects found along beaver ponds, are among the beneficiaries. So too are butterflies who come for the diversity of flowering plants in the meadows beavers create.

Some previous research has found that this helping hand also extends to birds. For example, a 2008 study in the western United States showed that the vegetation that grows along beaver-influenced streams provided needed habitat for migratory songbirds, many of whom are in decline.

Pile of branches of beaver dam in green wetland. — A beaver dam in Bierbza Marshes, Poland. Photo: Francesco Veronesi (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The new study published in the journal Forest Ecology and Management found further evidence by focusing on birds in winter. The researchers looked at assemblages of wintering birds on 65 beaver sites and 65 reference sites in a range of temperate forest habitat across Poland. Winter can be a challenging time for birds in that environment, as they need to reduce energy expenditures in the cold weather and find habitat that has high-quality food and roosting sites.

Wintering birds, it turns out, find those qualities near beaver habitat.

The researchers found a greater abundance of birds and more species richness near areas where beavers had modified waterways. Both were highest closest to the shores of beaver ponds.

“All beaver-induced modifications of the existing habitat may have influence on bird assemblage,” says Michal Ciach, a study co-author and a professor in the department of Forest Biodiversity at the University of Agriculture in Krakow, Poland. “But different bird species may rely on different habitat traits that emerge due to beaver activity. It’s like a supermarket.”

Beaver crouched by water's edge. — The Eurasian beaver. Photo: Per Harald Olsen/NTNU (CC BY 2.0)

The growing research about beavers suggests a greater need to protect their habitat and understand their important role in the ecosystem.

“Beaver sites should be treated as small nature reserves,” says Ciach. “The beaver, like no other species, is our ally in stopping the decline of biodiversity.”

Read the whole article here.

A more practical and peaceful strategy emerging in the land know for beaver!/?

Dam nuisance: St. Albert explores beaver-habitat flood mitigation

The City of St. Albert is upping its engineering-ante in an ongoing duel with the local beaver population by installing some new water infrastructure safeguards over the next few years.

By Jack Farrell at the St. Albert Gazette

The City of St. Albert plans to add a couple of new tools to its water-management tool belt over the next few years to counteract problems caused by the local beaver population.

Melissa Logan, the city’s environmental coordinator, said staff will install pond levellers in high-priority spots throughout Carrot Creek and the Sturgeon River, starting this summer.

Unbeknownst to the estimated 16 individual beavers who call these rivers home, pond levellers allow water to flow through dams to prevent flooding, Logan said.

“The pond levellers you can put right in the middle of a dam and it will keep the water flowing through so that we don’t get flooding, but still allow the beaver to create some of the habitat that it needs,” she said.

“It’s just a method of coexisting with beavers on the landscape instead of getting rid of them entirely.”

0903-beaver-management — City staff are getting some new tools to counteract regular infrastructure damage caused by the estimated 16 local beavers. FILE/Photo

“Best-case scenario is that beavers are still able to be active on the landscape and do their natural water management,” Logan said of what she hopes the new tools will accomplish.

“Protection of our infrastructure in the long term is really what we’re looking for.”

Logan said staff will install the tools in high-priority areas this summer, and in lower priority areas over the next few years.

Major cost savings

Glynnis Hood, an environmental biology and ecology professor at the University of Alberta’s Augustana campus in Camrose and author of The Beaver Manifesto (2011), told The Gazette she has seen pond levellers save municipalities thousands of dollars.

“There’s cost savings, there’s ecological advantages, (and) there’s infrastructure advantages for reducing maintenance needs,” said Hood.

“For instance, in Cooking Lake-Blackfoot, we installed about 13 (pond levellers) and then we monitored them over seven years. The maintenance that was required … was maybe pull a few sticks out here and there and they worked really well,” she said.

“The cost savings was in the tens of thousands of dollars, and if we added on some other economic drivers … it could even be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars of cost savings just for those 13 sites that otherwise have been chronically flooded for over 10 years.”

Hood said pond levellers, culvert protectors, and other beaver-damage mitigation can improve how people in the community view their neighbourhood beavers.

Beavers as extreme-weather mitigators

As part of an ongoing five-year project, Hood and Dr. Cherie Westbrook from the University of Saskatchewan are studying how beavers and their dams might help mitigate extreme climate events, such as floods and droughts.

“Over 60 per cent of the beaver dams actually held even in the 2013 flood that devastated Calgary and downstream areas,” she said. “Many of the beaver dams were only partially breached or didn’t breach at all.”

“They actually played a role in holding back some of that floodwater or at least delayed or slowed its downstream flow.”

Hood said it’s too early to say definitively if beaver dams could be a significant tool during extreme-weather events in Alberta, but current data and modelling looks promising.

“In climate change, you’re going to get more extreme-weather events, like these big rainfall events, but you’re also going to get drought, and beavers (might) play a role in a natural and nature-based solution for some of these things.”

To learn more about beavers and, as Logan described, their unmatched water management engineering ability, Hood was recently featured in a TED-Talk YouTube video.

Read the whole article here.

Sadly, sometimes beaver fall victim to flooding as well:

Winter storms hurt Central Coast beaver populations

KCBX | By Gabriela Fernandez, Benjamin Purper

The recent winter storms on the Central Coast didn’t just affect humans — they’ve also damaged the habitat of the local beaver population.

Audrey Taub is the Executive Director of the SLO Beaver Brigade, who describe themselves as “beaver advocates.” It’s a group of local biologists, science enthusiasts and community members who educate people about the rodents and the role they play in our ecosystem.

While talking and teaching about beavers is often a joyful experience, Taub said there has been some sad news recently about local beaver populations.

“The big rains pretty much washed everything out. This particular storm definitely displaced them,” Taub said.

“We found one dead juvenile. So they really can’t live on their own until they’re at least two. So these one-year-olds just didn’t have a chance.”

The SLO Beaver Brigade helped paint, “The Beaver Mural” on a local coffee shop they meet at once a week.

Taub said after the heavy rain, local beavers will have to rebuild their dams in places like streams and ponds. She said it’s not clear how long that will take, but she’s “excited for the whole community to watch the ponds develop,” Taub said.

Beavers play a major role in fighting climate change by building dams, which helps create and restore wetlands.

That’s important, because it’s estimated that globally, wetlands can store about 190 million cars’ worth of emissions every year.

Cooper Lienhart is the SLO Beaver Brigade’s Restorations Director.

“I used to think we would engineer our way out of the problem and make synthetic trees to suck CO2 back out of the atmosphere. But yeah, I learned that wetlands are [the] most efficient land ecosystem at absorbing and storing CO2,” Lienhart said.

Last week the SLO Beaver Brigade received the California Coastal Commission’s WHALE TAIL grant. Taub and Lienhart said the money will be used to offer educational tours, river cleanups, and translations for Spanish-speakers interested in learning about beavers.

More information on the emissions-fighting rodents is online at slobeaverbrigade.com.

Read the whole article here.
And there is more news from the SLO Beaver Brigade: The First Annual SLO County Beaver Festival!

Beaver Festival Info:
The SLO Beaver Brigade invites eager beavers of all ages to the First Annual SLO County Beaver Festival on Saturday April 1 in SLO Mission Plaza from 10 am to 3 pm. Kids are welcome and encouraged to come learn about beavers with us! The festival will be a celebration of our local beavers with live music, speakers, food and drink, educational displays, crafts and games, and local booths
Why do we celebrate beavers? Because we see them as climate change superheroes! Beavers build dams in our creeks and rivers, turning them into lush wetlands. This SLOWS the water down, allowing it to SPREAD out and SINK into our aquifers (slow it, spread it, sink it)! Not only does this help us in droughts, but their wetlands also create refuge from wildfires. Come join us on April 1st to learn about all this and more at our first ever SLO Beaver Festival.

And for the last bit of news, there is a very lively and informative interview with Ben Goldfarb by Taya Jae at The Pen and The Sword.

Bob

BDAs to correct a century old problem

Bob Kobres Attitudes towards beavers, BDA's, Beaver ecological impact, Beavers, Beavers and water March 12, 2023

Leave it to Beaver: Partners Collaborate on Beaver Dam Analog Project

Mimicking Mother Nature for Maximum Impact with Minimal Financial and Environmental Cost

By Amanda Smith

“One plus one plus one equals six on this project,” said Kat Hall, restoration manager for The Lands Council, an environmental non-profit organization that seeks to preserve and restore Northwest ecosystems through partnerships.

The excitement is evident in Hall’s voice as she speaks about an innovative and collaborative effort to reconnect and restore aquatic habitat in Thompson Creek, a primary tributary to Newman Lake located northeast of Spokane, Washington. For the past 3 years, Hall has been part of what she calls “a dream team” of federal, state, and local partners to design, implement, and monitor beaver dam analogs (BDAs), human made structures inspired by nature’s busiest builder that efficiently improve the health of aquatic ecosystems.

Historically, Thompson Creek meandered through the lower watershed; but over a century ago, it was straightened to accommodate for agriculture, helping to reduce flooding for farmers. While the straightened channel was beneficial to the farmers, it had less desirable impacts on watershed health. The straighter, less natural flow path increased the speed of the water, led to the erosion of the bank, and transported more sediment and pollutants downstream into Newman Lake. This incision of the creek has also caused a disconnection between the creek and its surrounding floodplains, which has allowed for the dominance of reed canary grass in the area, a non-native species that outcompetes more diverse and beneficial vegetation.

Drone footage of a artificially straightened creek passing through an agricultural field. — Aerial photos taken of Thompson Creek before the completion of the beaver dam analog structures.

Drone footage of a creek beginning to widen and meander after the construction of a beaver dam analog. — Aerial photos taken of Thompson Creek after the completion of the beaver dam analog structures.

There doesn’t seem to be much food to entice beavers yet and that might be good for awhile due to the current poor water quality!:

“One of the primary concerns about straightening the channel and disconnecting it from its floodplain is the increased phosphorous levels we are seeing as a result,” explained Brian Walker, a private lands biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service). “Phosphorous travels with the sediment through Thompson Creek and ends up downstream in Newman Lake, which really impacts the water quality in the lake.”

While phosphorus is a naturally occurring and essential nutrient for plants and animals, too much of it can cause explosive growth of aquatic plants and algae. This can lead to a variety of water quality problems, including low dissolved oxygen concentrations, which can cause fish kills and harm other aquatic life. The major concern with phosphorus in Newman Lake is a toxic blue-green algae bloom that can cause the lake to be closed to recreation and private landowners (see a write-up from USGS on phosphorus and water quality).

“High levels of phosphorous are detrimental to both people and wildlife — just a couple licks of contaminated water can be lethal for pets; it’s pretty bad stuff,” said Walker. “But thankfully, we people are learning how to mimic wildlife to come up with a solution for us all!”

Phosphorous-laden sediment plume flowing into a waterway. — Phosphorous-laden sediment plume flowing from Thompson Creek

Improving Thompson Creek has long been a goal, and several time consuming and costly measures have been implemented in the past with varying degrees of success.

“We weren’t getting the results we hoped for from other projects and we needed to go in a different direction; we needed to get creative,” said Walker.

Inspiration struck in the form of brown fur and bucked teeth — beavers. Like ecosystem engineers, beavers manipulate their environment by building dams that slow the passage of water through a river and can act as a natural filter that cleans the water supply. Beaver dam analogs aim to do the same thing through creating roughness — think speed bumps — to slow water velocity and allow sediment and pollutants to settle. The beaver dam analogs will also raise the water level of Thompson Creek, reconnecting it to its floodplain and allowing for the growth of more natural vegetation to create a healthier ecosystem.

A completed beaver dam analog structure obstructing the flow of a creek. — A completed beaver dam analog structure on Thompson Creek.

“The Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program has had success with at least 20 BDAs in other Washington watersheds and, with the help of our “dream team,” we knew our odds of making positive change in Thompson Creek were high,” Walker said.

The “dream team,” compromised of partners from every level — The Lands Council, Partners for Fish & Wildlife Program at Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge, Gonzaga University, Spokane Conservation District, Newman Lake Property Owners Association, and Spokane County — got to work in 2019 and began making the beaver dam analogs in Thompson Creek a reality.

A group of people stands in a marsh near a beaver dam analog structure. — Engineering students from Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington share the work with staff from the Service and The Lands Council during the implementation phase of the beaver dam analog project which involves pounding posts into the ground.

Read the entire piece here and there is an earlier report from The Spokesman-Review that includes this informative video on BDAs from Life on the Range below.

Heidi is still on the mend but hopes to be back to posting soon.

Bob

From Valley of the Beavers to Methow Valley Beavers

Bob Kobres Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver ecological impact, Beaver News, Beaver ponds, Beavers, Beavers and Bobcats, Beavers and Ice, History March 10, 2023

Methow Valley beavers are the stars in Wild Kingdom episode

BY MARCY STAMPER

The film crew from Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom visited three sites in the Methow Valley to highlight the role of beavers in restoring a healthy ecosystem. Local beavers — and work by the Methow Beaver Project (MBP) to create a healthy ecosystem — are starring in an upcoming episode of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. The “Eager Beavers” episode on the long-running nature show features three sites in the Methow Valley — a Twisp River side channel and the Bear Creek and Texas Creek watersheds. The program also highlights beaver-restoration work in Oregon and California. Eager Beavers, part of the Protecting the Wild series, premiers this month at WildKingdom.com. The beaver project is hosting a free screening on March 17. The episode showcases the role beavers play in creating a sustainable future across the country and, in particular, in the arid West, MBP Restoration and Outreach Assistant Willie Duguay said. The Wild Kingdom crew went to the Bear Creek watershed where beavers are helping reclaim an area that burned in the 2014 Carlton Complex Fire. The crew also looked at the connections between beavers and salmon habitat. Eager Beavers chronicles changing attitudes toward beavers. After widespread trapping, beavers had been extirpated from the West by the early 19th century. With few beavers on the landscape, people settled along rivers and took advantage of fertile soil in former floodplains, according to MBP.“ Long thought to be a nuisance animal, beavers have been waiting for their time to shine. Now as climate change, drought and other damaging ecological factors severely impact groundwater and wetland habitats, science is finally understanding the importance of these natural engineers for the health of our planet,” Wild Kingdom said.

Also, if you’re in the vicinity of Methow Valley, there will be a free screening:

The Methow Beaver Project is screening “Eager Beavers” on Friday, March 17, at 6 p.m. at the Methow Valley Community Center in Twisp. There will be beaver-themed trivia and a Q&A session. Admission is free. Beverages for adults and children will be available for purchase.
The episode will also be screened that same night at 6 p.m. at the Community Cultural Center in Tonasket.

Eager Beavers can be viewed on WildKingdom.com starting March 19.

Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, one of the earliest TV shows to feature nature and adventure, broadcast its first show 60 years ago. The Protecting the Wild series will be hosted by Peter Gros, co-host of the original series.

Eager Beavers is the sixth episode in the 10-part series.

More at the Methow Valley News.

In the meantime you can travel back in time to the early 1980s when Wild Kingdom aired Valley of the Beavers, which was shot in Canada. Probably due to the difficulty of finding healthy beaver habitat in the US at that time.

Valley of the Beavers, Part I

Valley of the Beavers, Part II

They’re each around twenty minutes long with some very good photography. Single mom raising her kits story.

Bob

Progress Report on the beavers’ work at Bandelier National Monument

Bob Kobres Beaver ecological impact, Beaver News, Beaver relocation, Beavers, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Wetlands March 8, 2023

PEEC Presents Program On Reintroduction Of Beavers At Bandelier National Monument

Bandelier National Monument’s Biological Science Technician Priscilla Hare will discuss the Beaver Reintroduction Program at Bandelier National Monument this evening. Attend in-person at the Nature Center or via Zoom at 6 p.m. Wednesday, March 8. Learn more at https://peecnature.org/events/details/?id=45397. Photo Courtesy PEEC

Heidi posted on this project in November of last year. It looks like it will be an informative talk and the ticket price is reasonable — FREE! More about the project is here:

Under the Willows | Beavers Return To Bandelier National Monument

Beavers are working to restore Bandelier National Monument’s Frijoles River watershed/NPS

More good press on the petition to Biden on the WildEarth Guardians site:

Large coalition of nonprofit organizations, scientists, and advocates call on President Biden to protect beaver on federal lands

Beavers have been touted as an efficient and natural climate change mitigator

I’d say that beavers are PROVEN to be excellent at repairing riparian systems that we have damaged and if we work along with them and decide not to keep doing things that harm the environment, the climate will soon began to improve for all.

Great talk by Ecologist Mark Beardsley on process based river restoration on Sarah Koenigsberg’s Vimeo site:

Restoring Rocky Mountain beaver wetland landscapes

And another excellent presentation by Geologist Ellen Wohl:

In thinking about rivers

Hoping that Heidi will be back to posting soon!!

Bob