I have very few talents at the moment and am still working up to be able to limp successfully on my formerly broken foot, but this made me very very happy.
I was thinking of this song I must have learned in choir and thought how wonderful it would be to have a beaver song that worked as a round because all those good things happen at once in a beaver pond.
Godeamus: Beavers
By Heidi Perryman
Beavers working; beavers building dams Water saved for you and me Helping streams and making habitat Let them be
Frogs and salmon Birds and Otters come to see
We help flooding We slow fires We clean waters And we do it for free.
Now practice this because I’d like us all to sing it in round at the CDFW beaver restoration meeting today at 2:00. No? Well here’s the link: I was thinking we present it during public comment?
The informational meeting will provide a broad overview of CDFW’s Beaver Restoration Program, including its purpose, objectives, tasks, and timelines. Additionally, the meeting will address the implementation of pilot and future beaver translocation projects, development of a beaver co-existence toolkit, and policy updates. The meeting will conclude with a public question and answer session. Future public workshops will be scheduled to discuss human-beaver coexistence strategies and the process for developing and requesting beaver translocation projects.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Well that was fun. My circulation of the TWS removing beaver dams to rescue trout article raised some hackles among the fish savvy academics. Bob Boucher of the area already wrote them the night before when the article was scheduled to air. I wrote the president of the North West chapter and got a fairly thoughtful response although they did say things are that the topography of the great lakes is different than everywhere else so the research I cited may not apply. This morning I heard from Rick who wrote a response article and is asking Pollock to sign on. Pass the popcorn I say. This could get good. At the very least be ever so slightly more cautious before posting such an article next time.
Amelia sent this yesterday…very comicbook superhero,,,what do you think? I’m a big fan of the old timey watercolors but the word SHAZAM springs immediately to mind. You shouldn’t throw around the term superhero unless you’re prepared to go all the way, right?
What if there was just one beaver festival in all the world every summer for fourteen years. And then, suddenly there were two!
This graphic was dropped yesterday by the San Luis Obispo Beaver Brigade. It’s the creation of Terre Dunivant, the artist who helped with our flyer last year when Amelia could not. I love the language “Habitat Creator”. It’s like the term job creator for wildlife.
Isn’t that marvelous? Turns out Wes and Margie the two helpers who came to our festival last year will come up in March and get whatever materials we can share, like our beaver lawn signs and some larger artwork so that we can be there in spirit, showing them 14 years of support and cheering them on.
California needs a cascade of beaver festivals. Don’t you think?
The great news is that I heard from EBRP last wee that they want to come and bring their mobile fish tank to the festival again this year! Remember how cool that was? Whoo hoo!
Things are in the crazy planning stage for the festival. I was sad to hear that the Alhambra Valley Band isn’t going to be joining us again this year. There was a generous offer from Hope Savage for her new trio “Savage Bond” to join us, and the UnConcord will of course finish the day. I did a bit of begging and got Extended Roots to play in the middle.
Dave Kwinter will kindly bag pipe us again through the children’s parade.
But how to start? I was in a quandary until I thought about asking the dynamo that is Voena. A famous children’ chorus from Benicia, they have performed at the Whitehouse and at the 2012 Olympics. I thought for sure they should visit a beaver festival. I dusted off my manners and pitched my best volley and guess what? The visionary director Annabelle Marie wants the children to be there! So for the first time in our history they will start the day.
So far so good, but I still hadn’t heard from our sound guru John Koss that he could be there again. Since there’s so many things to set into motion at the same time that there’s a part of organizing a festival that is a bit like the story of “Stone Soup”. You ask people for things based on the promise of other things coming that haven’t actually been secured yet. And if that doesn’t work you just ask for something else until it does work. Just between us. The pessimist in me thought wouldn’t be ironic if I got the full day of music lined up and then we had no audio? hahaha.
But of course he called the other night and wants very much to join us. So there art thou happy!
Here they are singing for Dr. Maya Angelou…
Meanwhile are valiant artist FRogard Schmidt is back after knee surgery and ready and willing to help, We schemed about the idea of having children water color the INSIDE of beaver lodges for the art project and when I suggested making the outline of the lodge for kids to fill in she roared with laughter and insisted no no no they would tear the paper themselves just like beavers into the correct shape.
She just sent these that some students did last week to practice.
Something tells me that part is going to come out just fine…
Something tells me that part is going to come out just fine…
