Category: Attitudes towards beavers

HIGH DESERT MUSEUM WINS ORPHAN LOTTERY

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver Behavior, Beaver ecological impact November 18, 2023

The High Desert Museum in Oregon is one of the most respected museums in the world. It was my father’s favorite and has featured some truly breathtaking beaver exhibits including the interactive grapahic featured in the margin of this page. Once they even asked to use our ecosystem poster in a beaver exhibit.

And now they have this:

Baby beaver from John Day finds home at High Desert Museum

The High Desert Museum recently welcomed a new animal who happens to be an expert engineer, a keystone ecosystem species and the largest rodent in North America.

A baby beaver, called a kit, arrived at the Museum in May. Found in John Day alone in a parking lot, people had searched the area for her family but failed. The kit was then placed into the care of Museum wildlife staff by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Veterinarians estimated at the time that the animal was only a few weeks old. The beaver was very weak and dehydrated, weighing just 1.4 pounds. Wildlife staff spent the next several months working to formulate an appropriate diet and nurse the kit back to health.

“The Museum’s wildlife team was tireless in researching appropriate diet options and providing around-the-clock care,” says Museum Executive Director Dana Whitelaw, Ph.D. “Their dedication to providing the best care is exceptional.”

It took most of the summer for the beaver’s condition to improve, but the baby slowly began to gain weight and strength.

Six months later, the beaver is healthy and growing, now at almost 17 pounds. Staff have built a behind-the-scenes space to meet a beaver’s needs, complete with a pool for swimming. The kit eats a species-appropriate diet of native riparian browse such as willow, aspen and cottonwood, supplemented with vegetables and formulated zoological diets to ensure proper nutrition.

The plan is that when ready, the beaver will become an ambassador for her species by appearing in talks at the Museum that educate visitors about the High Desert landscape.

Just to be clear I HATE when orphans are raised in captivity to be ambassadors but of all the places to be kept on display this is probably the creme of the crop. And who knows, maybe he’ll get a companion one day.

“The beaver is doing well and learning behaviors that assist with her care,” says Curator of Wildlife Jon Nelson. “She is learning target training, how to sit on a scale to be weighed and to present her feet for voluntary inspections and nail trims. She also enjoys time playing in the Museum’s stream after hours.”

The beaver is believed to be female. It’s challenging to conclusively identify male or female beavers.

The opportunity to name the beaver was auctioned at the 2023 High Desert Rendezvous. The winning bidder has yet to select a name, which must be appropriate for the Museum and connected to the High Desert.

An estimated 60 million to 400 million beavers once lived in North America, creating wetlands and ponds. The dams built by these “ecosystem engineers” slow streamflow, raise the water table and reduce downstream flooding and erosion. Beavers also help birds, fish and other wildlife and native plants to thrive by creating habitat.

Beaver populations dropped dramatically in the last two centuries with demand for beaver pelts for clothing, most notably hats, in the mid-19th century. Their dam-building activities also at times prompt people to consider them a pest on their properties.

Today in the West, restoration of the beaver is underway and humans in some areas are mimicking its dam-building behavior in order to restore healthy High Desert riparian areas.

“The history of beavers in the High Desert is a profound one,” Whitelaw says. “We hope to be able to share the new beaver at the Museum with visitors soon to help tell the meaningful stories about the role these animals have to play in healthy ecosystems.”

The Museum cares for more than 120 animals, from otters to raptors. Many of the animals are nonreleasable, either due to injuries or because they became too familiar with humans. At the Museum, they serve as ambassadors that educate visitors about the conservation of High Desert species and landscapes.

I’m sure she’ll be called rattle snake or Justin soon. But remember, two years ago the museum dd the best exhibit ever for beavers and the difference they make so take heart little one, at least your among friends.

ALISON IS WORKING FOR BEAVERS

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beavers November 15, 2023

Last night at the conference was the lovely prime rib dinner and a keynote talk by Leila Philips. I’m told that the Martinez beavers were mentioned by both Mike and Brock and I’m sure many exciting things happened that we’ll hear about eventually. In the meantime there was a great article about Human Beaver Coexistence from Maryland that I know you want to see.

A beaver champion in Virginia and the need for more like her

Which brings me to Alison Zak, a Northern Virginia resident who operates, all by herself, the Human-Beaver Coexistence Fund, worthy of your interest and support. We need more like her throughout the 64,000-square-mile Chesapeake watershed facilitating beavers, the most charismatic link to water quality I know of.

“You can’t conserve wildlife without understanding and working with the people who will interact with that wildlife,” Zak said.

As she’s talking, we’re knee deep in the chilly swamp headwaters of Maryland’s Magothy River, a Bay tributary where she showed locals how to chew-proof an assortment of streamside maples, oaks and gums they didn’t want taken down by beavers.

An anthropologist by training, Zak, a Florida native, was living not so long ago on Sulawesi Island in Indonesia, studying seven endangered species of macaque monkeys. Having decided against years’ more research for a Ph.D., she migrated to environmental education work in Virginia’s Fauquier County.

There, she encountered wild beavers for the first time and became fascinated — or, she admits, “obsessed” with the animal. Landowners began to seek her advice on their beaver interactions.

“Most didn’t know much about them. They just knew this animal had shown up and [was] changing their property … flooding, chewing … that’s what beavers do.”

Alison is the coordinator of the beaver education group I meet with every month. She also just published a book on animal Yoga which fully proves there are all kinds of beaver supporters in the world.

In 2021, she founded the Human-Beaver effort, working on coexistence projects from West Virginia to the Magothy — “anywhere I can reasonably drive.”

She is close to becoming a bona fide “beaver professional,” a certification offered by the Beaver Institute in Southampton, MA. Tuition is $2,500 and requires roughly 60 hours of online coursework, plus completion of four field projects.

These mostly work on the flooding issues that result when beavers impound water, which they do for their own safety, avoiding predators in the depths of their pond. In more than 90% of cases, Zak said, there are viable nonlethal solutions.

Easily maintained low-tech “flow devices,” for instance, can keep water deep enough for the beavers while preventing flooding. Where beavers block road culverts, a common issue, the solution is either flow devices or “beaver dam analogs” — human-made dams that encourage the rodents to relocate their own dams away from the culvert.

Engaging landowners and highway departments (for culverts) depends a lot on education, Zak said. “Because beavers are just now slowly rebounding after being gone so long [trapped out of the Chesapeake by mid-1700s], there’s a sort of ecological amnesia … A true beaver wetland to most of us looks like chaos. Single-channel streams spreading out to multiple channels, dead and dying trees, unruly vegetation.”

Her work usually begins with relationship building, understanding the landowners’ values and points of view. As for trappers, “I don’t vilify them,” she said. “They know a lot about beavers.”

Well she’s young and idealistic. She should be. She has years before she turns into a gnarled and battle scarred old advocate like me, right?

“We’re on the right trajectory. Beaver consciousness is growing. There are several good books out there,” she said, referring to Ben Goldfarb’s Eager — the Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter (2018) and Leila Philip’s more recent Beaverland — How One Weird Rodent Made America (2022).

She says real promise lies in working with trappers, who are frequently a landowner’s go-to when beavers arrive. “How can we make it lucrative for them to offer nonlethal solutions?”

Promise also lies with highway departments who must deal (often harshly) with beavers blocking highway culverts. In both instances, coexistence is a cheaper solution than constantly trapping or tearing out dams every year.

Solutions also need to be more regional, she said, because as beaver populations grow, new generations move upstream or to other streams.

Where we wade in the upper Magothy exemplifies the need for a more comprehensive approach. The beaver dam there gets torn down every spring by fisheries biologists, worried that threatened yellow perch can’t migrate farther upstream to spawn.

A simple solution, Zak thinks, would be to induce the beavers to dam outside a concrete culvert there, allowing easier dam bypass for the perch.

The Beaver Institute has trained more than 80 people nationwide to do what Zak does and is looking for more recruits.

So how about this as a new Bay restoration goal: at least one trained beaver problem-solver in every government environmental and transportation agency, as well as every environmental nonprofit?

I would like 5 of you in

BEAVER STRIDES IN OREGON

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver Conference November 14, 2023

Yesterday was meet and greet day at the conference with a few pointed here is where we are talks by the heavy hitters. All I heard from our BC friend Judy Atkinson was that she was overwhelmed with information, flying from one thing to the next and so busy connecting with people that she had no time to eat and was faint with hunger. So I think we can assume things are going as planned. Have fun on day two guys!

This morning they’ll hear from Alexa Whipple, Suzanne Fouty, and Mike Callahan with a retrospective at 10:30 that I’m told will include my Enos Mills Film and worth a dam slides. So it’s like being there right?

By tomorrow morning I predict the part of the conference will start that I do not miss. Which is the buzzing overwhelm where it feels like if one more person mentions beavers they will get a chicken hurled at them. But hey, maybe that’s just me.

Have fun guys!

What am I supposed to do with this beaver shaped chip on my shoulder now?

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers November 10, 2023

Back when the beavers first came to Martinez I imagined all kinds of happy endings with cheerful cookouts where former adversaries drank a beer with me and smile about a job well done. I dreamed that some day this would all be over and I could stop fighting for beavers because everyone would be on the same side. We’d laugh over how crazy things had gotten, braid each other’s hair and talk like old friends. I even listened to this song over and over again:

But then the city wouldn’t vote to keep the beavers even though Skip’s device was obviously working, and then there was the sheetpile and the court case and the mother beaver became ill and staff pulled up all the trees we had permission to plant and then there was never a time for a victory party. Because there was never a “Victory” per se.

And I realized the beaver battle wasn’t something you won, it was just something you prevented losing if you were very lucky by using Endless Pressure Endlessly applied. Forever. Rinse and repeat.

So yesterday when I attended the zoom lecture of Ben’s new book with secretary of Natural Resources Wade Crowfoot I wondered if there’d be any mention of the battle or even a slight allusion to his first book. Did they even read it at CDFW? I used to fantasize about emailing every member a copy.

I mean we all know you can lead a horse to water. But you can’t make it think differently about beavers.

Or can you?

I literally started crying when I realized that the minds at CDFW had actually read and responded to Ben’s masterful book which meant that they were intimately acquainted with the story of the Martinez Beavers which meant that OUR beavers and the wonderful family they raised and the heroic original matriarch we lost were an essential ingredient in the very special recipe that changed California’s mind on beavers.

There is another such exchange about the book DIRECTLY WITH CHUCK BONHAM at the end. More crying. by me. It’s great interview and lots of information about connectivity which is important. You should watch. But I was watching because privately I wondered if they had been affected by Ben’s other book and I was not disappointed.

And at the days end I got a copy of this in the mail which is this issue of Outdoor the official CDFW magazine with a six page article about beavers and how good they are and I realized we had finally hit critical mass in California. There were so many people who knew the right things about beavers it was a different world forever.

Okay. Maybe we’re not in Kansas anymore. But I’m keeping the pressure on just in case.

A BEAVER-FUL OREGON

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers November 7, 2023

Hey guess what Columbia has to say about beavers?

Discover Beaver Power: Restoring Watersheds with Nature’s Engineers

From Sense of Place:

By Sarah Fox

Hood River, Ore. November 6, 2023 — Sense of Place, will feature Beaver Power: Teaming Up with Nature’s Engineers to Restore Our Watersheds on November, 15th, 2023. This event will be offered in person at the Columbia Center for the Arts in Hood River, Oregon, and via livestream.

The Pacific Northwest has long been a region where the coexistence of humans and beavers has shaped both the landscape and humans’ understanding of ecological systems, but the history is complicated. In Oregon, the Beaver State, beavers are considered a predatory species, and wide-scale trapping in the Pacific Northwest nearly extirpated them in the mid-1800s. In modern times, beavers can quickly wreak havoc by downing trees and flooding roads and property. However fresh research is revealing the ways that beavers can offer innovative solutions to pressing environmental challenges. From mitigating wildfires and addressing the impacts of climate change, to actively participating in landscape restoration and promoting biodiversity. Margaret Neuman and Jeanette Burkhardt will dig into this history and explore how these industrious creatures are emerging as unexpected partners in a more sustainable future.

So I guess Canyonville isn’t the only part of Oregon that will be buzzing with beaver benefits over the next week or so. Good, It is called the beaver state after all.

As the Executive Director of Mid-Columbia Fisheries, Margaret Neuman has been a key part of growing the organization from a small start-up to an important regional partner in salmon recovery in Central Washington. Under Margaret’s leadership, Mid-Columbia Fisheries has implemented more than 90 salmon habitat restoration projects since 2005. The group also reaches more than 2,000 school students annually with field-based conservation education programs. Margaret has more than 30 years of experience in watershed restoration, including organizational, grant, and program management. Margaret helped found the Wishpush Working Group in 2018 and is excited about the benefits beavers provide in improving watershed conditions for fish, wildlife, and people. Margaret loves being in nature and is grateful to call the Columbia River Gorge home.

Jeanette Burkhardt has been working in Fisheries and Natural Resources in the Columbia Gorge for 20 years, the last 18 as a watershed planner for the Yakama Nation at the intersection of policy, planning, restoration, and education. Since 2018, she has been involved in the Wishpush Working Group, working towards more beaver-ful and resilient watersheds in the Tribe’s Southern Territories. As a self-professed plant nerd and admirer of the natural world, she has a personal and professional passion for letting nature do the work—supporting natural processes as they help us recover our impaired ecosystems and the species that depend on them.

Beaverful. Now that’s a word I like. America the Beaverful.

Event Details:

Sense of Place

When – Wednesday, November 15, 2023. Doors open at 6 p.m., presentation begins at 7 p.m.

Where – Columbia Center for the Arts, 215 Cascade Avenue Hood River, OR 97031, or via live stream

Cost – $12 tickets, information at SenseOfPlaceGorge.org

* Advance purchase is encouraged as presentations often sell out. The event and will be followed by a Q&A moderated by Sense of Place host, Sarah Fox.

Sense of Place is a program of Mt. Adams Institute, a Gorge-based non-profit that seeks to strengthen the connection between people and the natural world through education, service, career development, and research.

Love this story and that underwater shot. We need more of these…