Category: Beaver Behavior

THEY FORGOT ONE OF THE “B’s”

heidi08 BDA's, Beavers March 6, 2021

This is almost a very nice story about a bay area couple moving to Oregon and buying some land to do the right thing. You see that picture and think maybe they’re putting in fascines of willow to encourage beavers! See if you can spot where they went wrong.

Western Innovator: Couple restores wetland prairie, improving fire resiliency

As a couple of self-described “tree hugging dirt worshippers,” Jolliff and Peterman were loathe to cut down any trees on their small woodland property near Scio, Ore., which they have affectionately named “Bogwood.”

But to enhance and restore Bogwood’s namesake wet prairie, Peterman said they had no choice except to remove all invasive species such as English hawthorn, Himalayan blackberry and Scotch broom.

Then they would need to thin the overstocked groves of hardwoods and conifers, allowing native plants to thrive while opening habitat for a rich diversity of wildlife including owls, hawks, bald eagles, coyotes, deer and possibly even a prowling bobcat.

“Our goal, we call it the five B’s: birds, bats, bees, butterflies and Bambi,” Peterman said. “There is so little native habitat for critters … we can’t save the world, but we can do a little bit in this little part, and do what we can.”

Yup. If you want those five you should really be working towards the sixth. Well not even the sixth. Let’s call it “Species A” Since you really need it before everything else falls into place. They almost got there by putting in some BDA’s but since the article never mentions beavers I’m pretty sure that when they show up they’ll be unwelcome.

Before they arrived, however, the property had been extensively logged, altering its natural character. Peterman said they knew they wanted to restore the ecosystem, but admitted they had no idea where to start.

They joined the Oregon Small Woodlands Association in 2014, which Peterman said unlocked a wealth of information. “It was like opening a book for the first time,” he said.

The couple also built a series of beaver dam analogs along a seasonal creek to hold back water, allowing it to remain on the property a little longer for the benefit of plants and animals.

The couple have reused branches and limbs to build the beaver dam analogs, as well as “bio-dens” scattered around the property, offering refuge to birds and deer. EQIP grants also paid for essential equipment, including a 5-horsepower electric sawmill and electric chainsaw, which Peterman has used to fashion wooden fencing and bird boxes.

So close you can almost taste it. Since they’re in Oregon and interested in fire resilience and restoring the land I can’t believe the subject of beavers hasn’t come up.

For several years, Jolliff and Peterman have also provided sturdy hardwood branches to an artisan in Eugene, Ore. who makes 19th-century style brooms. The broomsticks are especially popular with people who play Quidditch, a fictional-turned-real sport from the Harry Potter universe.

You love books so much? I have a great one you should read.

BEAVERS: FREAKS OF NATURE

heidi08 Beaver Chewing March 5, 2021

Once in a while it’s fun to visit an article about beavers written by someone who is surprised to find themselves writing about beavers. Kind of like “Oh I missed the moose this morning so I might as well write about beavers.. It’s not how they expected to spend their day, but it’s nothing new to us. Joan Herrmann is so surprised by their adaptions she never gets around to their true gifts.

Where I Wander – Extraordinary Rodent

Whereiwander – perhaps when you hear the word rodent the mammal which may come to mind first might be mouse or rat or even squirrel. Today’s column is about one of my favorite rodents which is one of the largest too. A memorable encounter with one was first hearing then seeing, the flat-tailed rodent (Castor canadensis) known as an American Beaver.

I have learned that the beaver’s body is ideal for both underwater and land maneuvering. Beavers have very dense, soft, waterproof “under fur” that traps air, insulates, and also keeps them buoyant. Their broad scaly tail in addition to sounding alarms; works as a rudder in the water and as a prop, for balancing them on their hind legs, when cutting down a tree or standing. In the summer heat, their tail works as a heat exchanger allowing them to eliminate as much as twenty-five percent of their body heat. Their hind feet are webbed helping them to swim. They have a split toenail which aids in grooming their fur acting like a comb. The split toenail also assists them when they apply waterproofing oil from their oil gland and when they need to remove parasites and other debris from their fur. The forefeet are not webbed and are kept “balled up” against their chest when they swim. The forefeet are able to carry mud and sticks and are also used to dig, handle food, and for grooming. Beavers have an excellent sense of smell and can easily identify their favorite food tree just by its smell.

I can identify a favorite food by smell too. Not such a big deal.

Beaver are engineers extraordinaire; they dam up streams that are too shallow to hide them from predators and to make their lodges and routes of travel safe as they move to and from feeding areas. Most active from dusk to dawn a beaver is able to take down a three-inch diameter tree in less than ten minutes and a five-inch tree in about a half-hour. One beaver will fell the tree and the rest of the family will help with the removal of twigs and branches. In climates like ours where the water freezes, caching food begins in the fall. Tree branches of their favorite foods are secured in the mud below the water near their lodge entrance. The caches may be extremely large since a family of seven can consume about one ton of food over the winter.

Uh huh. What’s surprising about articles like this is that they spend so much time marveling at beaver attributes “ooh orange teeth! Oooh third eyelid” but they never get around too the frigging most impressive things about beavers. “ooh climate change! “Ooh waterstorage” “Ooh biodiversity!”

They just like writing about the part where they’re freaks of nature,

I hope that this column may have sparked an interest in learning more about these intriguing rodents.

I hope when they do they actually find out the truth.

HOW MANY BEAVERS ARE IN YOUR STATE?

heidi08 Beaver population, Dispersal March 1, 2021

How many beavers are in your state?

No one knows because no one counts them anymore. We just know there are ‘enough’ for the population to carry on if we allow trapping, And that’s about as far as the calculations go. And that’s pretty much true for every state.

Think about how crazy it is we don’t count populations.. It’s like a mother saying she doesn’t know how many children she actually has,, but arguing that even if a kidnapper tooka few it would still be more than she wanted. It’s like a bank saying, “We don’t need to count how much money we have. We just know that even if we were robbed we’d still be rich”.

Rhode Island is going to change all that.

URI scientists investigate distribution of muskrats, beavers, otters in R.I.

Traveling via kayak, John Crockett will search for evidence of muskrats, beavers and river otters in waterways of southwestern Rhode Island this winter before expanding his search to other areas of the state in the coming years.

“The main goal of the study is to get a good sense of the distribution of each species across the state,” said Crockett, a native of Fort Collins, Colorado, who is collaborating on the study with URI Assistant Professor Brian Gerber. “To do that, we’re conducting an occupancy analysis, which means we’re going out looking for signs of tracks, scat, chewed sticks, lodges and sightings of the animals.”

All three species have been the target of trappers in Rhode Island for many years — though the state legislature banned the trapping of river otters in the 1970s — and most of what state wildlife officials know about the animals is derived from trapping data. But since trapping has been decreasing in popularity in recent years, less and less data about the animals is being collected.

Hmm. That’s pretty interesting and pretty much a dream job for some recent graduate. No hiding at the bottom of the swimming pool in scuba gear needed for him to avoid the standard “what are you planning to do with your life now” questions.

“We want to make sure we have a good assessment of where these mammals are found,” Gerber said. “It’s been 10 or 15 years since anyone has spent much time looking for them, and we want to see if we find any changes in their distribution since those earlier surveys.”

Beavers are believed to have recovered well after being extirpated from the area due to unregulated trapping and forest clearing in the 1800s.

“Now they are creating conflicts with their dams causing flooding in some places,” Gerber said. “We’d like to be able to identify the habitat features where beavers are doing well and those areas where they are likely to cause conflict. To do that, we need distribution data.”

Crockett expects to conduct his surveys from December through March for the next three years, as well as periodic summer surveys. He eventually hopes to be able to estimate the probability that any of the three species will be found in a given habitat.

Well I can tell you right now that if beavers are in one area the other two will be seen there. Does R.I. Want to hire me now? And every place without beavers will be less likely to have the other two.

Hey it’s almost like trappers should leave beavers on the landscape so there’s more to for them to trap! I guess that’s just considered crazy talk.

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AS IF WASHINGTON DC DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH PROBLEMS ALREADY

heidi08 Beaver Chewing February 28, 2021

Beavers nibble on cherry tree at Tidal Basin

A cherry tree became a meal for a local beaver along the Tidal Basin in D.C.
The National Park Service said staff found a Yoshino cherry tree that had been chewed on in October, and quickly narrowed down the list of suspects to a North American Beaver.

Beavers are active in the Potomac year-round, but are most often spotted in the area in the spring and fall. “Sometimes beavers chew on branches and trees to get material for building a dam, but most of the time, they’re just eating wood and bark; the majority of their diet,” the National Park Service said on Friday.

To prevent another tree from getting chowed down, park staff made the area “as uninviting as possible to beavers.”

The National Park Service put up fencing around the base of the healthy trees and around the nearby sea wall on the Tidal Basin that not only stops debris from washing ashore, but deters beavers from getting up on the bank.

Well I was happy to see that last paragraph anyway. Apparently they have some idea how to handles these things besides trapping.

The park service natural resource team and arborists decided to leave the tall stump in place as habitat for woodpeckers, sapsuckers and other wildlife.They removed the top of the tree and the branches so the tree wouldn’t be a falling hazard.

Okay then,

Out friend Virginia of Fairfield is keeping watch over her beavers there and posted this fun video on FB a couple days ago. Apparently the beaver is startled by something, It looks like a cobra but maybe is a frog with a shadow. What do you think?

Isn’t that a hoot? Here is the thing that made me feel even better.

377 total enrolled
42 USDA
36 CDFW
10 RCD
6 DOT
5 BLM
3 NOAA
3 FWS
3 NPS+Ca state parks

Total Agency 109

Total California 181

3 AK
4 AL
2 AZ
10 CO
1 FL
1 ID
2 MA
1 MD
1 MN
1 NC
2 NV
1 NY
10 OR
1 PA
1 TX
2 Utah
1 VA
5 WA
1 WY

1 Spain
6 UK
2 Canada

Never say we’re hiding our light under a bushel!

PSST…BEAVERS MATTER. PASS IT ON!

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver Chewing, Tree-Wrap Rap February 25, 2021

Oh lets read an article about someone who enjoins seeing beavers coming back to their city for a change. Anyone?

Natural Selections: News flash: Beavers in Roxborough!

One of the feel-good stories on the environmental scene is the rewilding of large cities like Philadelphia, where suddenly peregrine falcons nest in church steeples and on Delaware River bridges, bald eagles pull large fish out of the Schuylkill River, and coyotes amble down Domino Lane.

In that vein, members of the Roxborough-Manayunk Conservancy were somewhat startled to discover that the restoration plantings they’ve doggedly placed along the Schuylkill River have been devoured by… beavers! Wait, beavers in Roxborough?

Once extirpated– a fancy word meaning locally extinct – across Pennsylvania, hunted because their fur was remarkably valuable and because we did not appreciate their ability to rearrange landscapes to their own ends. But beavers have been returning to our state over the last century, and have been seen along Tacony and Pennypack Creeks since about 2008. And now they have taken up residence in the Schuylkill River and Manayunk Canal around Flat Rock Dam.

Now that’s what I’m talking about. Beaver perserverance and recovery where nobody would have suspected.And here they are, washing up on the Schuylkill River. Just in case you didn’t know lots of East Coast river names end in ‘kill’ because Kille is middle dutch for river. Got that?

“I first noticed beavers and their lodge in the winter of 2018,” observed Suzanne Hagner, Roxborough resident and member of the Roxborough-Manayunk Conservancy, “as I rode out the Schuylkill River Trail towards Shawmont. I could see where they had worn down a path into the woods on the far side of the trail and I guessed that was where they were going for food.” The lodge was near Flat Rock Dam, and they have been spotted– and photographed – as far down as Lock Street and as far up as past Shawmont Avenue, both in the canal and along the river.

Suzanne has become a regular reader and poster on this very blog. She recently met up with our other PA beaver friend to learn about protecting those trees the group is replanting. Because all roads lead to Rome.

They famously cut down saplings and trees with their chisel-like teeth, building dams and lodges with the branches, chewing the inner bark of trees as their favored food source. That tree-cutting, of course, can sometimes interfere with our own good work.

“Beavers have good taste in trees,” Tom added, tongue in cheek. “They ate over 60 trees we planted along the canal last year. But we adjusted. Last spring, we painted the uneaten trees with latex paint mixed with a lot of sand,” the grit distasteful to the large rodents. “Many of the damaged trees grew out again this summer,” he continued. “We wrapped those trees in cages this fall. We installed 130 cages along the canal near both sides of Fountain Street.”

Yup. That’s what happens. Someone who cares about the trees plants trees and someone who tends the creek eats them. It’s the way of the world.

The Conservancy recently hosted a walk-through of the area with a self-described “beaver believer” they brought in from central PA, and their takeaway was similar. “The other approach which I believe we will have to do,” continued Kay, “is to rethink our plantings. We need to put in more herbaceous plants on the impacted banks and see if we can add things like willows to the upper wetland areas to keep them in that area, which is better suited for them and for us.”

Yes please. Bring in willow. Because they are used to regrowing after beaver nibbles. And have done so for centuries.

Suzanne Hagner has been reading up on beaver, passing books along to Conservancy members. “They are amazingly skilled at creating waterways and irrigation systems that lead to ecological health,” she said. “Our consultant offered that the return of the beavers was a very good sign in our area, as the beaver is an ecological system in itself. I had lived in Washington state, and had heard that beavers were being reintroduced in eastern Washington to help curb the arid areas that are prone to wildfires.”

Anything else you’re reading, ahem, Suzanne? That helps you learn why beavers matter? I’m happy that there are more believers in Mayayunk and am looking forward to the people they persuade and educate in tern.

Pass it on.