What do you know. Here I was proudly posting a single page of my urban beaver booklet yesterday when a friend let me know that The Fur-Bearers just released the finished product! This was undertaken with a grant from A seed of Change for the the British Columbia Union of Urban Municipalities Conference a couple weeks ago. Perfect timing to motivate our work don’t you think?
You can see they delve into all the nitty gritty details of keeping beaver on an urban landscape, dealing with all the problems they might cause and how to fix them. There are some excellent references at the conclusion for folks to go read more and a nice case study about our friends in Belleville Ontario,
To tell the truth, I’m a little dissatisfied by some of the effort. The discussion about beaver effects on the ecosystem is lackluster, it says their natural history is mysterious and there’s no real analysis of the cost-saving that comes with fixing the problem once. Only a single photo is sourced. But, as first strikes go, it hits a lot of the target. I especially like the last page which raises several issues I wish were discussed in more detail.
COEXISTENCE SUPPORTS YOUR COMMUNITY
Beavers are a natural part of our communities. Whether we’re in a big city, a mid-sized town, or a gathering of properties in a district, entire ecosystems are kept alive and healthy by the activities of our national animal.
The general public’s interest in environmental policy is growing alongside what will inevitably be conflict with nature as our communities continue to expand; even when one area isn’t growing, another is, causing changes that ripple out over property lines and boundaries. New solutions – ones that consider long-term consequence to ecosystems and the ethical quandaries of the past – must be found.
Municipalities and individual landowners are also facing increasing pressure from provincial (or state) and federal governments who download responsibility for managing issues related to the environment, wildlife and social programs. While this difficult change is a challenge, it is also an opportunity: necessity is the mother of invention.
Not every community will welcome change to traditional practices of wildlife and infrastructure management; not every community will accept staying with the status quo. Ultimately, this booklet was created to illustrate that innovation of non-lethal solutions is not only possible, but ecologically and economically responsible.
Basic fencing can protect individual trees, bushes, or crops from beaver activity; exclusion fences can prevent damming from starting on sensitive culverts or properties; and, with a little education and beaver-like hard work, entire ecosystems can be rebalanced to protect wildlife and infrastructure.
The Fur-Bearers are proud of the goals accomplished by working with municipalities and landowners in the past, and look forward to supporting your community through coexistence strategies.
If you’re like me, you read all the way to the very very end, checking every reference in the bibliography put together by Janice Wong. Is kind of a free for all with Ben’s new urban paper , Hood’s flow device study as well as Longcore’s “Management by Assertion”, but there is also a USDA article about keeping beavers out of culverts (?) and sadly zero mention of Pollock’s restoration Guidebook, which as we know has a very helpful section on urban beavers and their benefits.
It has the look of a reference section where you want your thesis advisor to sign off and are trying to make her think you read a great deal of material but aren’t exactly familiar with the quality of all of it. At the very end there’s some fancy lawyer speak says “Do not try this at home” or something to that effect.
Volunteer help saves beavers and highway
Beaver dams threatened to flood a section of Highway 101 in Egmont, but thanks to two days of volunteer efforts, the road is now safe – and the beavers are, too.
Members of the Furbearer Defenders group Lesley Fox, Jim Atkinson and Adrian Nelson and Friends of Animals member Dave Shishkoff travelled to Egmont on July 31 and Aug. 7 to install two pond levellers and some exclusion fencing to appease the beavers and protect the roadway.
Adrian was the face of beaver management but no longer is. Go ahead, if you don’t believe me and do a search at the top of this page for his name which will come up 25 times doing installations for furbearer defenders all across the region. Not any more. Which is too bad because he is a friend of this website and a friend of our friends and skilled at what he does. I also liked the fact that he was a young man and could keep doing this work long after Mike and Skip had retired.
All good things come to an end. I’ve heard through the grapevine that the separation wasn’t amicable and since the parting advice of this booklet is to hire an American if you want this done right I’m going to guess that things haven’t softened.
It makes the launch of the book a little bitter sweet. Saving wildlife would of course be so much easier if people and their personalities, egos and feelings weren’t involved. I know beavers themselves are very happy it’s published, They don’t much care who works with whom as long as they’re not killed outright, and we should strive to remember their happy pragmatism.
Congratulations TFB on the excellent new resource you have made available to muncipalities and beaver supporters everywhere. I’ve made a link at the sidebar for people to go explore.
