Category: Beaver Behavior

The Sound and the Parry

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and Ice, Beavers and Insects, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions March 13, 2017

Parry Sound is in Ontario Canada directly north of New York. It is famous for having the deepest freshwater seaport in the world and various hockey achievements. This morning it has decided to offer a pleasingly accurate beaver article with some very nice photos. Enjoy!

The industrious beaver is not afraid of hard work during the winter

PARRY SOUND SIDEROADS AND SHORELINES — Winter is the time of year when many wild animals living in the Parry Sound area have adapted to escape and wait out the heavy snowfalls and dropping temperatures. Bears hibernate in cosy dens, squirrels have built nests and stashed food away, and frogs have dug into the lake bottoms and drastically reduced their temperature. But the industrious beaver continues to be quite active during winter until the lakes freeze over completely, and even then this animal can be seen busily repairing any damage to its lodge or dam.

Beavers are completely adapted to an aquatic existence and look quite awkward when slowly waddling on land where they are vulnerable to coyotes and other predators. Their front paws contain claws that can easily manipulate twigs to chew the inner bark of branches – their primary food source. In the Parry Sound area, their favourite wood is the aspen tree but they will also eat ferns, mosses, dandelions, dogwood, and aquatic plants, to name a few.

The resulting dam sets in motion an entire alteration to the ecosystem. Hence, beavers are considered a “keystone species” (one that plays a unique and crucial role in the way an ecosystem functions. Without keystone species, the ecosystem would be dramatically different or cease to exist altogether). The building of dams modifies and creates a dramatic change to the surrounding environment. The backwater flooding from the dam floods the lowland near the creek; trees die creating an opening in the forest canopy; aquatic plants and shrubs soon develop, making a favourable habitat for waterfowl, herons, moose, amphibians, fish, insects, muskrats, otters and a score of bird species. Their activity purifies water and prevents large-scale flooding.

Over a period of time the food source runs out and the beavers move on; the dam breaks and eventually a meadow forms, creating habitat for an entirely new group of species. And thus, the vital chain of evolution around a beaver pond continues.

A few years ago, the television program The Nature of Things featured a show entitled “The Beaver Whisperer” outlining the efforts of a few Canadians who have studied and/or worked with beavers, giving an in-depth account of the beaver. The Parry Sound area is home to many beavers and if you are lucky enough to see one around twilight, watch and observe the complex behaviour of this fascinating animal.

Nice to read that Jari Osborne’s great documentary is still making an impact! (Although it was called the Beaver Whisperers as in more than ONE). And nice to see even a brief discussion of beaver benefits from that neck of the woods. They need all the allies they can get. I’m going to assume, that even though they’re very clever, the beaver in that photo isn’t balancing a aspen log on its back. I’m pretty sure the log is just laying in exactly the right place on the ground behind him. Although that would be quite a feat if it were possible. Think about it, how would the beaver even get the log there in the first place?

I think it’s one of those photo placement victories, like someone photographed pushing the tower of pizzaa over, or a baby holding up the moon. But it had me confused for a while, I admit. Thanks for the mystery!

Beaver Works

heidi08 Beaver Art, Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere March 11, 2017

Well, we didn’t find any beavers last night. It was beautiful weather but low tide and not the best time to see a wayward beaver. We did learn a few things, though. Like the fact that beavers might have used tunnels through the mud to get to the water at low tide. Night Herons wake up when the sun goes down. And wow, sitting at the Granger’s wharf bridge is a lot prettier than sitting at the footbridge. With no trains, homeless or traffic.

We’ll be back.

In the meantime, a reporter contacted me about doing a beaver retrospective 10 years after the story broke, and we have that arranged for Monday, so it’s like old times. And there’s another fine read about Henry Morgan:

Flat tails, beaver ponds and trout streams cited

There’s an old trout pond in Marquette County said to have years back held one monster fish, a true pole bender, a devilish delight caught just after sundown on a fluffy makeshift fly cast from a canoe.

At times, the culvert is clogged with sticks and other materials put there by working beaver intent on blocking the shallow, cold creek from flowing — from singing as it tumbles downstream over the black rocks.

These beavers continue their stick, log and mud works a good deal more than a century after the death of Lewis Henry Morgan, the namesake of the creek, the pond, the land around them and a nearby residential location.

His work sought evidence that all humankind descended from a single source, determined that family and social institutional structures develop following specific patterns and viewed kinship relationships as a foundation of society.

Morgan suggested matrilineal clans, rather than families headed by a patriarch, were the earliest human domestic foundations.

Well, duh. Just look at the beavers.

In pursuit of Michigan’s beautiful brook trout, Morgan became interested in the activities of beavers. He studied them intently for several years before producing his captivating 1868 natural history volume, “The American Beaver and His Works,” a book still available in reprint.

Irene Cheng, in a 2006 piece in Cabinet Magazine, said compared to Charles Darwin’s precise bees, with their mathematically perfect hives, Morgan’s beavers appeared “downright brute-like and their dams primitive.”

“Yet what Morgan admired about the beavers’ works was not the final form so much as the process of reasoning that allowed the animal architect to adapt its constructions intelligently,” Cheng wrote. “Unlike the bees, Morgan’s mutes built not out of base need, or driven by a ‘struggle for existence,’ but to further their own well-being and happiness. He believed that the beaver had a fundamental awareness of its own creation.”

Morgan wrote, “When a beaver stands for a moment and looks upon his work, evidently to see whether it is right, and whether anything else is needed, he shows himself capable of holding his thoughts before his beaver mind; in other words, he is conscious of his own mental processes.”

Well, I have watched enough beavers building a dam over years to know, like Enos Mills said himself, that not EVERY beaver thinks about his creation. Just like with people, there’s wit, and there’s half-wit. Some just place sticks or mud any old where and some never seem to learn from their mistakes. But SOME have a vision of how it should look. Like our father beaver who would patiently move sticks to better homes after the children put them in silly places. Or our tule artist Reed who refused to place logs on his dam at all and moved them OFF even when the patriarch put them on, preferring instead to weave his fortune with cattails.

Some beavers are listening to an inner beaver voice, and some are just dancing in the moonlight.

Ohio has beaver nostalgia!

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and Ice, Beavers and Insects, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Environmental, History March 9, 2017

What a pleasant surprise! An article from Ohio about beavers that isn’t discussing how to trap them! Richland County is in the middle of the state, down below Lake Eerie.

A living heritage: Beaver in Richland County

It has been more than two centuries since beaver shaped the rivers and creeks of Richland County, but at long last they are quietly reclaiming little pools of their ancestral wetlands.

When the first settlers came to the forested hills of Richland County in the early 1800s they encountered many wild animals we seldom or never find here today. Their letters and diaries and later reminiscences document the abundance of wolves and bears, otters and panthers.

But there is one common native of the American wilderness that was never listed in their memoirs because, by the time the pioneers arrived in the early 1800s, this critter had already been hunted out of these lands.

That was the beaver.

The last people who saw beaver in Richland County were Wyandot and Huron hunters, or French fur trappers. The Richland beaver clan gradually departed here through the decades of the 1700s: carried out bundle at a time as furry pelts.

The fur was toted to a frontier trading post; then made its way to the coast where it was loaded on a ship and sailed across the ocean. Somewhere in Europe the fur was processed into waterproof felt material, and then manufactured into hats.

You’ll note the date that Richland last saw beavers was about 100 years before California lost out. It’s funny to think about the cascading domino effect that swept the nation in slow motion, East to West, over many years ago as the loss of beavers back drove folks ever west to find more. Funny in an eerie kind of way, I mean, not at all amusing to think about the drought and wildlife devastation that followed the hunt.

There were a lot of people in Europe in those days and they all wore hats.

The best hats were made from beaver fur because these warm blooded animals evolved in chilly ponds so their skins are naturally designed to keep water out and heat in. If a hat was to shed rain it was well to be manufactured from the soft, dense under fur of a beaver.

When permanent residential villages were established along the Clear Fork and the Black Fork in the 1700s, they were peopled mostly with clans of diverse tribes who had been displaced from their homelands by Beaver War conflicts.

The other major impact that the Beaver Wars had on Richland County was the complete extermination of Mohican watershed beavers.

Richland County happens to be placed on the continent at a particularly generous confluence of influences—bedrock stratum and weather pattern—that produces a wealth of water resources. We have a ‘Spring field’ township precisely because water is so plentiful it cannot be contained under the ground.

So imagine what happened when these two dynamic natural elements—water and beaver—were free to interact in wild genius.

Back then every Richland stream, creek, and tributary was undoubtedly repurposed by beaver, and shaped by their dams. The image we have today, of meandering streams flowing through the bottom of carved creek beds, did not exist in the era of beaver. These same waterways 300 years ago would have been seen as a series of small beaver ponds.

True. And every single one of those ponds were filled with wood duck and otter and trout so thick a man could walk across them. But why dwell on the past. It was a great idea turning all those little furry engineers into gold, right? That’s why we’re still doing it every day – trading our clear streams for fracking waste water and letting oil wells tunnel into every public land. Because what good is the environment if you can’t spend it. Amirite?

Wetlands

Since the beaver disappeared 200 years ago Richland County has transformed: dried out, plowed and planted, and paved so dramatically the animals could hardly be expected to recognize the place. Yet, interestingly enough, when they made their way back here 20-30 years ago, one of the places they gravitated toward is a wetland that they may well have created themselves hundreds of years ago.

Almost like a homing instinct they have set up camp once again at the headwaters of the Clear Fork River.

It is marshland today, and seemingly created through construction of the Clear Fork Reservoir. Yet documents from engineers in the 1940s show that the area was already waterlogged before they built the dam.

In fact records from 200 years ago, when surveyors first paced off the wilderness of Richland County, indicate there was a backlogged stream in the place even then.

This marsh is situated within a stretch of landscape that is otherwise well drained. By the surface and subsurface evidence, a local geologist and forensic landscaper suggests that this bit of wetland may well have been first terraformed by beaver engineers hundreds or thousands of years ago in order to create a comfy neighborhood for their community.

Perhaps the beavers who navigate the marsh today are direct descendants of the ones who started the swamp long ago when they backed up the waters of the Clear Fork.

I think this author is having a wistful moment wondering what the watershed looked with a healthy beaver population. Good for him. I know I always am. I can’t imagine if it will ever get that way again, but if beavers have their way they will turn our ruined city waterways to wetlands the same way they have transformed Chernobyl. They won’t need our help or invitation either. I don’t know where the human race will be when that happens, but I suspect the beavers won’t miss it.

Timothy Brian McKee is a featured columnist on our site every Saturday with a column titled Native Son. Every Tuesday, he taps into his knowledge and collection of historical photos and bring us Then & Now, a brief glance at the way things were.

Beaver Roundup

heidi08 Beaver Art, Beaver Behavior, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Environmental, What's killing beavers now? March 8, 2017

Beaver Round-Up 2017

The great “Beaver Roundup” takes place in Dillingham Alaska at the northern edge of the Bering sea and the outer limit of the Tongiak Wildlife Refuge, ( (famous for walruses and herring). The Roundup started as the outgrowth of a kind of Rendezvous-like fur exchange where the trappers would meet up to compete for best price and swap stories. As the ice starts to break up beaver yearlings leave their family lodge to find a new home sand that’s a good time to get some nice winter pelts. Since the only transportation was by sled-dog, a sled-dog competition was the natural offspring of the gathering. There are still no roads in Dillingham, so the only access is by sea or air. Now the annual event is more than 70 years old and it’s a weekend-long much anticipated gathering of early March.

There’s a parade and a beauty contest, games and contests of all sorts. A highlight of the day is when a plane flies overhead and drops candy and ping pong balls which the many children gather. (I’m not sure what the appeal is of ping pong balls, since there doesn’t appear to be tournament – but I guess since they’re white on the white snow it presents a challenge to find them?) Think of it like a kind of an Easter egg hunt from the sky.

Except, it started by trapping beavers.

Maybe you can explain why the Tongiak Wildlife Refuge is a sponsor of the event? They took first place in the parade this year with their ‘snow goose’. I guess its a different world where protecting wildlife by saving it for hunters makes perfect sense. And plus its REALLY cold (13 today) and quite honestly, unless you’re a walrus, there’s not much else to do.

Baker City Goodies

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver Chewing, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Dispersal, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Who's saving beavers now? March 6, 2017

Baker City Oregon is in the upper right hand corner of the state on the Powder river, which flows into the Snake river. Like Martinez it was settled early when the Short line railroad made it a stop, and is the county seat. By 1900 it was THE stop between Salt Lake City and Portland. It’s Main street looks eerily similar to ours. It even had a large Catholic population and has Cathedral because of it. Let’s think of them as a ‘sister city’.

Baker has a smaller population now than Martinez, and hasn’t sprawled like we did. Probably because it’s bordered by the Wallowa mountains that don’t take kindly to freeways. As luck would have it, that means it isn’t too far from famed USFS District Hydrologist Dr. Suzanne Fouty. Who happened to get very interested because there were some urban beaver sightings reported in this historic town.

Suzanne contacted me this weekend because she wants to use my talk to help teachers get on board with a student project that would let the children “adopt” the beavers, learn about them and sand paint trees etc. We had a nice conversation about her wish to get folks as interested and excited about the beavers as they were in Martinez. I can’t think of a more magical combination for success than an interested hydrologist, some enthusiastic teachers and an army of child guardians. Can you? Then I found this article and realized the whole thing was already a done deal – with a sympathetic press to boot.

By JAYSON JACOBY

Beavers in Baker City

Homeowners along Powder River are learning to protect their trees from the nocturnal animals. Larry Pearson sacrificed a healthy quaking aspen last summer to their insatiable incisors, but he bears no real grudge against beavers.

“Personally I like seeing them around,” said Pearson, who has livedfor 33 years in a home beside the Powder River in north Baker City. Well, not exactly “seeing.” Pearson has seen several beavers outside the city limits, but he’s not yet spotted one of the rotund rodents near his home on Grandview Drive.

That’s to be expected, given that beavers are largely nocturnal. “I can tell when they’ve been in my yard, though,” Pearson said. Even when the animals don’t leave blatant evidence – it’s pretty hard not to notice when a 14-inch-diameter aspen in your backyard has been gnawed down – Pearson said he can usually find the muddy patch in his grass where the beavers climbed from the river’s bank.

Fortunately, protecting trees from beavers is no great ordeal, Pearson said.

“You have to put wire fencing around virtually everything,” he said.

A homeowner whose tree was chopped down by an unexpected beaver and his first comment to the press is “wire wrap it!” Have I fallen asleep? Am I dreaming? IMAGINE if the Contra Costa Times or the Gazette had a section about how to protect trees from beavers. Whoa, I’m getting dizzy, I need to sit down.

That’s what the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) recommends as well, in its “Living With Wildlife” pamphlet, which is available online at www.dfw.state.or.us/wildlife/living_with/beaver.asp

Actually, landowners have a few options with beaver-proofing, said Brian Ratliff, a wildlife biologist at the ODFW office in Baker City. Wrapping tree trunks with metal flashing is effective, he said.You can also use welded wire fencing, hardware cloth, or multiple layers of chicken wire.

Regardless of the material, you should wrap the tree to a height of at least 4 feet, Ratliff said.

“When beavers stand on their tails they can reach pretty high,” he said. If you choose chicken wire or fencing, you should leave a 6- to 12-inch space between the cage and the tree trunk, because beavers might try to wedge their teeth through gaps in the wire to get at the tree (this isn’t a problem, obviously, with metal flashing).

You should also reinforce the cage with rebar stakes or other supports, as beavers, which average 40 pounds at adulthood, are capable of collapsing flimsy wire barriers. To protect a large area rather than individual trees, ODFW recommends building a fence, at least 4-feet high, made of welded wire fence or other sturdy material (chicken wire is too flimsy).

I like to think of myself as a generous woman who only wants the best for others. But sometimes, when I read an article like THIS published a full 10 months before Suzanne even got interested and involved, before the school children even circled the wagons, or the town pushed back, I get crazy JEALOUS.

Some people have all the luck!

Baker city, you have started the footrace with a 10-mile lead. Already your papers are sympathetic and your affected citizens are cool-headed. You have interested scientists inches away that will help you move forward. And you of course, have us in your corner. With all the help you could possibly ask for.

I believe, Baker City, if you can’t save these beavers, no one can.

Pearson said he didn’t notice any signs of beaver activity on his property until a few years ago.That coincides with ODFW’s experience, Ratliff said. “In the past two years or so we’ve started to get more reports about beavers, and to see more signs of their presence here in town,” he said.That’s not especially surprising, Ratliff said.

Beavers live along the Powder River both upstream and downstream from Baker City.

“Beavers are very good at migrating both overland and along waterways,” he said. “And the Powder River in Baker City is pretty good habitat for them, minus the fact that it’s through town.”The river’s relatively flat gradient and low velocity are ideal for beavers, Ratliff said. (One reason the animals build the dams for which they are renowned is to slow fast-moving streams; deep ponds protect beavers from predators, and give the animals underwater entrances to their dens in the stream bank.)

Ratliff said it’s not clear why beavers have only recently colonized the river through town in significant numbers. His theory is that the beaver population in the river outside the city limits has grown enough that young beavers are dispersing to less-crowded habitat.

In any case, Ratliff believes beavers can co-exist, in relative harmony, with people.

For one thing, beavers don’t as a rule stray far from the river; they’re not going to start gnawing at your home’s siding, for instance.When, as in Pearson’s case, beavers do munch on trees on private property, the solution – wrapping or fencing trees – is neither complicated nor especially costly.

“It’s really a neat opportunity to have urban wildlife,” Ratliff said.

Pearson agrees. He would, though, prefer that private property owners have more flexibility in dealing with beavers that cause damage. City ordinances prohibit residents from trapping or shooting beavers. State law prohibits residents from live-trapping beavers and moving them elsewhere.

Okay, now things are going to get REALLY unbelievable. Are you sitting down? I just want you to be ready for the shock, because it could trigger a heart attack or something. Take a deep breath, and think of it as a Disney movie. Sweet and a little too idyllic to believe. Ready?

Tom Fisk, the city’s street supervisor, said workers have had to move several beaver-chewed trees that fell across the Adler Parkway over the past few years.Crews used to haul the trees away, but recently they’ve just sawed the tree into chunks and spread the pieces along the river’s bank.

“We figured if we took away the tree the beavers would just take down another one,” Fisk said.

“It hasn’t been such a big problem that we’re looking at other options,” he said.Protecting trees with fencing, for instance, would hardly be practical, considering the river runs for more than two miles through town.

“There’s a lot of trees,” Fisk said.

What kind of groovy, laid back, reasonable town administrator says ‘well, there’s a lot of trees?’ Here in Martinez we held their feet to the fire for 10 years, were on fricking national news and on TV in the UK and our city manager is STILL ripping out the willow stakes we plant because he doesn’t want to encourage them.

Dear Suzanne, something tells me you’re going to do just FINE on this project. Baker’s going to celebrate beavers, children are going to learn and classrooms are going to thrive. Your creek will be filled with otters, frogs and heron. And heyy, maybe a Baker Beaver Festival is in your future soon?