Category: Attitudes towards beavers

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

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.

SEVEN BEAVERS FOR THE MAIDU

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers December 14, 2023

Yesterday was he real deal. Proof positive that CDFW ha s finally changed its tune for good or for a while anyway, . Even my gloomy perspective was lightened. just ;look what happened:

CDFW Releases Beavers Into the Wild for First Time in Nearly 75 Years

Beaver Reintroduction Conducted in Cooperation with Local Tribes

Media Note: A link to download photos and video of the beaver release is available at the bottom of the news release.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) has launched the initial phase of its beaver translocation activities, recently conducting the first beaver conservation release in nearly 75 years. Working with the Maidu Summit Consortium, CDFW released a family of seven beavers into Plumas County, in a location that is known to the tribal community as Tásmam Koyóm.

The new family group of beavers join a single resident beaver in the valley with the ultimate objective of re-establishing a breeding population that will maintain the mountain meadow ecosystem, its processes and the habitat it provides for numerous other species.

Humans have so admired the skilled work of beavers they have spent millions of dollars trying to replicate the benefits they create. Thanks to Governor Gavin Newsom’s leadership and the State Legislature for supporting that leadership with funding in the state budget, beaver restoration is now part of a larger effort to help mitigate the impacts of wildfires, climate change and drought.

Seven beavers. SEVEN I’m generally not very supportive of beaver relocation and it often doesn’t work out like you’d hope but SEVEN is respectable. That means they really took time to get the whole family. It means they didn’t do what was easy. They did what was right.

“Thanks to the leadership of our tribal partners and years of preparation, beavers are returning to their original homeland around the state,” said Governor Gavin Newsom. “California is restoring wildlife and critical habitat by working hand-in-hand with the tribes who have stewarded these lands.”

The historic release represents the first phase of CDFW’s North American beaver (Castor canadensis) restoration project, releasing beavers into the waters on the ancestral lands of the Mountain Maidu people. Soon to follow is a beaver reintroduction effort on the Tule River Reservation in the southern Sierra Nevada.

“Beavers help retain water on the landscape, which increases groundwater recharge, improves summer baseflows, extends seasonal flows and increases fuel moisture during wildfire season, effectively creating green belts that can serve as wildfire buffers or breaks and provide refugia for wildlife,” said CDFW Director Charlton H. Bonham, who joined the historic beaver release. “We look forward to duplicating these efforts on the Tule River Reservation in the southern Sierra Nevada mountains this spring.”

“This is the first time in decades our state agencies have reintroduced beaver into its original homelands with the leadership of our tribal partners at the Maidu Summit Consortium,” said California Natural Resource Agency Secretary Wade Crowfoot who also attended the beaver release. “Beaver relocation will help both to restore the environment and preserve traditional culture of our tribal partners who have stewarded these lands since time immemorial. I’m excited to watch how beaver will improve the health of landscapes in coming decades and support traditional lifeways for our diverse tribal communities.”

Someone from OAEC shared some photos of the operation. I have no idea what endangered species the beavers were threatening in Sutter but we know hay county is in the top 3 od beaver trapping so I guess its better they have a chance.

The translocation follows multiple years of site preparation that ensured adequate beaver habitat that provides protection from predators and can support beaver population establishment. These preliminary efforts were conducted through Maidu Summit Consortium’s collaboration with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Occidental Arts & Ecology Center’s WATER Institute, Lassen National Forest, Plumas Corporation, Swift Water Design, Symbiotic Restoration, Feather River Land Trust, The Sierra Fund, CalPBR Network and several others.

“Getting to this moment of our first reintroduction really is a product of so much leadership from so many people. We would not be here without the Tule River Tribe of California who have been out front advocating for these actions for years, tribes around the state like Karuk, and, of course, Maidu Summit Consortium leaders. The future looks much better because of these leaders,” Bonham said.

In alignment with CDFW’s new beaver depredation policy, the translocated beaver family was relocated from Sutter County, where their activity was damaging lands supporting several threatened or endangered species. To date, the entire family group, which consists of a breeding pair and their offspring, has survived. After exploring miles of habitat throughout the valley and locating the resident beaver’s territory, the family settled into the release area and has established shelter for the impending winter. The translocated beavers and receiving ecosystems will be monitored for multiple years following their release to assess the population, movement, habitat utilization, behavior and activity, potential conflicts, mortalities and the need for additional translocations, as well as the ecological changes that result from beaver engineering on the landscape.

I’m so old I can remember when CDFW said that beaver weren’t native to Plumas county and didn’t belong to the landscape. I guess those days are gone for good, or for at least another century.

THIS JUST IN: WETLAND DON’T CAUSE FLOODING

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beavers and Wetlands December 9, 2023

The stupidest headline I’ve ever read on phys.org.

Are wetlands really a flood risk? Experts debunk most common myths around these precious ecosystems

See wetlands must cause flooding because places with big wetlands like the bayou and the everglade are always flooded. AmIrite?

Why do myths and legends surround wetlands?

From mangroves and seagrass beds to peatlands, reedbeds and grasslands, wetlands are not only inundated with water, but also mystery.

Bog bodies—naturally mummified human cadavers—have been getting dragged out of peatlands for decades, spreading fear among Europeans.

Dr. Alexandra Barthelmes is a senior researcher at the University of Greifswald and Greifswald Mire Center in Germany. She works alongside more than 50 passionate peatland scientists, many of whom are also involved in WET HORIZONS. Her team provides geographic information on Europe’s peatlands for the project.

“Many people believe it is dangerous to go to peatlands as they are worried that they will get there and just sink—but this is not true. You may sink in up to your knees, but you would have to work very hard to bury yourself.”

“Of the bog bodies found, many have had injuries and it seems others were sacrificed in some way,” she adds. “All the evidence indicates that most of the people were taken there on purpose as they simply didn’t ‘belong’—so peatlands being these places of danger really is an age-old myth.”

Really? Watch out for wetlands because you might sink in them?

The danger of sinking to your death is just one of myriad myths that European wetland experts are now racing to dispel as they strive to restore these ecosystems.

“We’ve been able to spread shredded pieces of peat moss in formerly drained peatlands, with a lot of success,” she says. “And if Sphagnum is successfully reintroduced and the water table kept stable, we find that many other specific bog species return.”

Once established, the Sphagnum stores carbon, reducing carbon dioxide emissions, and also helps to prevent the release of pollutants into ground and surface water.

Meanwhile habitats for threatened species can be created. And if harvested the moss serves as a perfect substitute for the peat-based substrates still used by large- and small-scale farmers to grow vegetables.

This critical source of agricultural revenue also dispels a third common myth: that wetlands are doomed to become economic wastelands.

n each case farmers can earn money from the sale of the biomass, the saved CO2 emissions and also from agricultural subsidies they may receive. For many paludiculture projects, the production chains are ready, making large-scale implementation the next critical step.

Huh this is a shock! Wetlands aren’t useless and you won’t sink in them. Apparently some English people are very very stupid. (Now don’t be alarmed. I am married to one and can say for a fact that is without a doubt true…)

Are wetlands a flood risk?

Revenues aside, many perceive wetlands to be a flood risk, whereas the opposite is actually true.

Whaaaatt?

Nature’s wetlands store flood water during storms, acting like natural sponges that soak up surface run-off and slowly release it later.

But once wetlands are drained to create farming land, with grassland replaced by crops such as wheat and maize, flooding risk rises. Factor in how fields are left bare over winter—drastically increasing surface water run-off—and drained regions can pose a real problem.

“Wetlands are only a flood-risk after they have been drained for [agricultural] use,” says Barthelmes.

Well good luck to you, Barthelmes. you have your work cut out for you myth busting among the beavers-eat-fish crowd. Maybe this sagely illustrative graphic will help. Let me know if you think it’s too advanced for folks up there to understand:

CALGARY JUST CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers December 7, 2023

Residents of Calgary has joined the number of cities that would very much like to stop killing beavers please. City officials just aren’t so sure the can quit.

Calgary urged to adopt better co-existence program with beavers after animals killed

Over the summer, a pair of beavers were an attraction for people walking by a storm water pond just north of Country Hills Boulevard. However, in October, the City of Calgary hired a contractor to set traps that killed two beavers.

“When we found out they killed two beavers that we had been watching all summer, it was a lot for everybody to take in,” said Andrew Yule, president of the Nose Creek Preservation Society.

The city says the beavers had to be removed because they created a dam that was blocking an outlet that controls water levels in a storm water pond east of the community of Coventry Hills by Coving Road N. E. It resulted in high water levels in the pond, posing an increased risk of flooding in the area.

You know how it is. Beavers build dams and that just naturally leads to killing. It’s nothing personal you know.

“It was really neat to watch how beavers help wetlands but at the same time you don’t want that in your infrastructure … Understandably, something had to be done.”

He’s concerned that since the beavers were destroyed, it may make people reluctant to report them to the city or to citizen science apps, which help with conservation work.

“Having the concern that if you report a beaver, it’s going to get killed is counterintuitive to what we want people to do,” Yule said.

What do they know anyway! People want to save everything if you put a hastag by it. These things have to be done by grownups.

The city says relocating beavers to other areas is not an option.

Alberta Environment and Protected Areas does not support moving beavers because there is a low rate of beaver survival and an increased risk of the transfer of diseases. Relocation can also upset the balance of ecological functions and can potentially create future human-beaver conflicts, a City of Calgary spokesperson explained.

Lets hope they get a few hundred residents like the one in the video a solid dozen of them know how to use the internet to look up tools for coexistence.

Because you know if they have to wait for city officials to figure it out there may not be any wetlands left.