Category: Beaver Behavior

WHEN BEAVERS ARE GREETED WITH OPEN ARMS

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver Chewing, Beaver ecological impact January 17, 2023

In the 15-year history of this website I have written very few stories of Pennsylvania. Maybe a couple here and there,with beavers being trapped for chewing trees or causing flooding but this is the first WELCOME BEAVER! article I’ve read that I can recall. It’s not brimming with accurate information but we are soo darn happy it’s there at all I won’t complain. Say hello to Frick park.

What Frick Park’s resident beaver means for the health of the restored Nine Mile Run

Frick Park’s newest resident is causing quite a stir. Wildlife fans and hikers have come to the park in the weeks since park rangers first spotted a beaver in late December, with hopes of stealing a glance.

But like many others who came before, resident Jane Bernstein returned to the parking lot just off the Nine Mile Run trail unsuccessful. Since the flat-tailed mammal is nocturnal, Bernstein got to the park before 8 a.m. on a snowy Friday this January.

This wasn’t the first time she had gone to look for him, either.

“I went on a beaver walk with somebody from Nine Mile Run — a group — and that was great,” Bernstein said. “We learned a lot about how excited they are about the beaver, despite the fact that the beavers do gnaw down trees.”

Excited about the beaver! Imagine! Frick park is in an oasis of wooded steep trails in the middle of the city of Pittsburgh. It was a large estate bequeathed for a park in the early 1900’s by Henry Clay Frick an early founder of the Coke industry which was a treatment for coal that fueled iron smelting.

So I guess it’s kind of nice a fossil fuel’s founders tax write-off is happy to see beavers?

While elusive, the beaver, aptly nicknamed Castor — the North American beaver’s scientific name is Castor canadensis — leaves a pretty clear trail of pointed, jagged little sticks behind him.

“You can see he’s been out munching around,” park ranger Erica Heide points out as she walks down a path parallel to the stream.

Castor is the second beaver to be spotted in the park in recent years, according to Heide. The first one appeared in Nine Mile Run in 2019, likely having migrated up from the Monongahela River, the waterway that sits at the mouth of the stream.

Heide said that the beaver stayed in the area for about a year, but no mates or kits (the term for baby beavers) were spotted with him.

“He moved on, we assume, for mating season,” Heide said.

So far, Castor has appeared alone at Nine Mile Run, too. Heide said while beavers are friendly within their family units, they’re territorial creatures, with just one family inhabiting a single section of a waterway at a time.

In any number, though, Heide said the presence of beavers is a sign of a healthy ecosystem where sewage and industrial waste once dominated.

“They are known as nature’s engineers,” she said enthusiastically. “They’re the only one of the only species that can change their environment and alter the hydrology.”

I would say the hardy beaver is a BRINGER of a healthy ecosystem – not exactly a sign of one. I mean there are beavers in Chernobyl and I’m pretty sure that’s not healthy. But still I get your point. They can do good things for the hydrology.

This years-long effort to detoxify the stream, led by the City of Pittsburgh and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, included rerouting the stream channel by adding curves and ripple rocks to slow down the water and the rate of flooding.

A decade and a half later, fish and beavers have continued the work of improving the surrounding wetland environment. For instance, beavers’ chomping habits can be useful in shaping a climate-resilient landscape.

“See how clustered and how tight they are,” Heide said pointing to a group of streamside willow branches. “That’s actually really bad. They’re even starting to uproot themselves because of how heavy they are.”

But beavers love to eat willows, which grow back once cut down.

“It will cut those down and then they can regenerate into like a healthier cluster,” she explained.

Doing so helps protect the stream bank from erosion. Heide said the parks plan to plant more willows this spring and will hold several willow staking events where residents can get involved.

To protect the trees they want Castor to stay away from, park rangers and conservation groups put protective cages around nearby trunks, prioritizing those that are young and native to the northeast, like oaks, aspens and maples.

Well I would rather have a team of beavers working on that stream than the army core of engineers, but honestly, I’m not sure about your statement that FISH helped the stream, That’s like saying cars help roads?

Heide said it’s unlikely beavers will ever build a successful dam on Nine Mile Run. During storm surges, the area is susceptible to intense flooding that dams would likely not withstand.

Still, if Castor or any other beaver in the park was able to complete a dam, Heide said it would be another step toward successful environmental restoration. For one thing, it can cause flooding that brings up nutrients and seeds from the water into the soil, sparking a surge in vegetation for wildlife to eat.

At the same time, dams can further reduce the rate of flooding by slowing down floodwaters while filtering out pollutants that travel downstream.

Well that’s no more than the truth. I think I like having a beaver welcoming committee strew their path with good news. And hey the name can’t hurt. “Heide” (Hmm even if she spells it wrong…)

Hiller said the organization hopes to continue that work to protect the health of habitats throughout the watershed and restore other parts of the park, like the Fern Hollow Valley.

The presence of a beaver, he added, is a sign that they are headed in the right direction. For those who want to see the beaver, Heide advises people not to get their hopes up.

“He’ll probably become more and more elusive as we get into the colder and colder weather,” she said. “Just like us, we don’t want to be out in the cold. Neither does he.”

In the event he is spotted, Heide stresses that people give him space, and keep any dogs in the park on leash.

“That will ensure that this beaver is safe for future years to hopefully come back.”

Gosh. I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop. But I guess it’s darn cool that a industry giant’s park can be somewhere that is happy to have beavers. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t always the case.

CDFW: EMBRACE CALIFORNIA BEAVERS

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, BDA's, Beaver ecological impact January 8, 2023

Yesterday someone asked me about coming to Martinez to see the beavers and mentioned in passing that it was a great article in this issue of Outdoors California, the magazine of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. I said we did not have beavers anymore but I would introduce her to a friend in Fairfield if she wanted to visit theirs and I went hunting for the article which I knew nothing about,

I asked all my beaver buddies including the ones that hired the beaver lobbyist that pushed for the funding and they knew nothing about it either. So I wrote the editor and asked if he might share the article with me. Apparently its in the current issue because I heard from other wildlife buddies too. At the days close I had my prize. And what a prize it is. You are not going to believe this. Sit down. Back away from high windows. Put down anything sharp. Brace every part of yourself that might need bracing.

Trust me.

We Agree: Time to Embrace California Beavers

Beavers are having a well-deserved moment in the discussion around climate solutions. Healthy beaver populations improve their environment in so many ways—from reducing wildfire risks, to making water conditions more hospitable for our native salmon and trout.

In fact, humans have so admired the skilled work of beavers they have spent millions of dollars trying to replicate the benefits they create. As managers of the state’s natural resources, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) is embracing the opportunity to elevate beaver restoration as part of a larger effort to help mitigate the impacts of wildfires, climate change and drought. Thanks to Governor Gavin Newsom’s leadership and the State Legislature, funding for beaver restoration is now part of our playbook, with funds approved in this year’s budget.

Are you crying yet? You will be when you have read this. My arm is turning color because I keep pinching myself over and over to see if I’m dreaming. I wish our original mom beaver was sitting here right now so I could read it to her because I never would have walked this path if it hadn’t been for her implacable courage.

The program funds dedicated scientists who, once hired by CDFW, will begin working on projects that help the environment by bringing beavers back to California rivers where they once thrived.

Beaver dams raise groundwater levels and slow water flow. Slowing down the flow allows water to pool and seep, creating riparian wetlands that support plant, wildlife and habitat growth. Another benefit of beaver dams is the rejuvenation of river habitat for salmon and aquatic insects. The dams also improve water quality because they capture sediment, resulting in clearer water downstream.

Additionally, beaver dams help keep groundwater tables high which can help mitigate drought impacts by keeping vegetation green. This effect can also help fires burn less intensely in riparian areas, which, in the long run, can aid streams and habitats in recovering from fires more quickly. These positive ecosystem benefits are especially true in areas where there are intermittent streams or where streams can disconnect. Once beavers build dams in those areas, the habitat tends to hold water more effectively and allows it to percolate into soils.

BOOM BOOM BOOM!!! We’ve only been pounding this into the table over and over and over at every roomful of people who were fool enough to listen. Some rooms that were more hostile than others. How wonderful to see it trickled in through the hard cracked soil of agricultural management. Did I ever think this day would come?

Shh this is has my favorite part:

Unfortunately, beavers were eliminated from much of their range by the late 1800s due to unregulated trapping and habitat loss. Environmental scientists have tried to duplicate the effectiveness of beaver dams utilizing human-engineered structures called beaver dam analogues. Through this, we have learned that human-created beaver dams can achieve similar carbon sequestration and habitat benefits to that of real beaver dams, but at a much higher cost. Nothing’s better than the real thing, and that means bringing beavers back to their historic habitat and teaching Californians how to coexist with the scientifically named Castor canadensis.

NOTHING IS BETTER THAN THE REAL THING! Be still my heart. Do you hear that Enos Mills and Grey Owl and Hope Ryden? Do you hear that momma beaver who was brave enough to move right into the middle of town and start a family even though dad thought it was a crazy idea?

California’s next step is to expand partnerships with California native tribes, non-governmental organizations, private landowners, state and federal agencies, and restoration practitioners to lay the groundwork for implementing beaver restoration projects. The new funding will help develop a framework for these beaver relocation efforts. CDFW and its partners are looking at the feasibility of taking beavers from areas where they are causing conflict and relocating them to areas where they would have ecosystem benefits. CDFW’s new beaver restoration program allows California to advance on all these fronts—we’re continuing collaboration with partners and stakeholders, continuing to work on restoration sites where we’ve funded beaver dam analogues and continuing to lay the groundwork for re-introduction of beavers in areas where such a move will benefit the ecosystem.

And we’re going to teach people how to live with beavers. The money is for education too. I’d lead with that. It’s the most important part.

Scientists are confident that beaver restoration has the potential to be a nature-based strategy that can aid in reducing wildfire risk, mitigating drought and combating climate change. It’s another piece in the puzzle as CDFW works to implement solutions to some of our greatest environmental concerns.

Allow me to say that it was in October of 2020 that I first dreamed we could possibly even HAVE a California beaver summit and it was in September of 2011 that I really started to pay attention to the crazy idea of the fish and game saying that beavers in California weren’t Native and it was in 2007 that the city of Martinez nearly split itself at the seams to find out of a city could live with beavers and here we are today with the head of fish and wildlife writing WE AGREE! It’s way past time to Embrace Beavers!

NO TREE-WRAP RAP FOR PENNSYLVANIA

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver Chewing, Beavers December 10, 2022

Isn’t that sweet! Beavers in Clearfield Pennsylvania get a housing makeover! Of course the temperature this morning is 25 so they’ll probably die alone separated from their food cache and family members but still, isn’t that sweet?

Bye bye beavers: Clearfield’s beavers to be re-homed

Beavers destroying expensive trees in downtown Clearfield are getting a new home, Street Commissioner Todd Kling reported at Thursday night’s committee meetings of the Clearfield Borough Council.

Beavers have moved into downtown Clearfield and are reportedly living in the West Branch of the Susquehanna River near the Market Street Bridge.

The beavers have removed several recently planted saplings and significantly damaged several fully grown trees on both sides of the riverbank near the bridge. The recently planted saplings cost roughly $150 a piece.

That’s right. The trees cost us MONEY. And we couldn’t possibly spend more money affording wire to wrap them in to protect our investment from these beavers or the NEXT beavers that come along. Instead we had to pay a trapper to pretend to move them. We hired “Wildlife Deceivers: We pretend so you don’t have to” just for this.

At first the beavers were destroying the trees near the Joseph and Elizabeth Shaw Public Library, so the borough put up fencing to protect the remaining trees. The beavers then started cutting trees on the west side of the river.

We tried doing the right thing, but it was hard and we decided to give up and do the other thing instead which was a lot easier.

Kling said the state Game Commission has stepped in and begun trapping the beavers alive and relocating them to a safe location. The beavers won’t be harmed.

He said the Game Commission has already caught one beaver, but it is believed there are more beavers left. Kling said now that they have professionals involved, he hopes private citizens don’t try to trap the beavers.

Borough Operations Manager Leslie Stott said residents have reported seeing three beavers.

We only saw three that one time so we know that’s how many there are every other time. I’m sure we won’t leave any orphans alone to die. As long as those pesky citizens don’t but in and start messing things up. They always get in the way.

Kling said the borough is planning to remove the dead trees and replant new trees using grant funds next year.

That’s my favorite part. Obviously next year there won’t be any more beavers because they only come ever other year or during el nino or whatever magical reason you want to make up. We have decided as a county it’s too hard to fix the problem, so we’re just going to move it.

Year after year.

TREE WRAP RAP

When the beaver starts a’chewing

There’s a thing you should be doing

If you want to save your treeline

Better go and make a beeline

For the wire

Get a plier

It’s not dire

I’m no liar

Do the tree-wrap, rap

In the yard and in the garden

Wrap it up and beg their pardon

Not too tight, the tree will widen

And it the wire it will tighten

Wire thicken

Not for chicken

Paint with sandy

Comes in handy

Do the tree-wrap, rap

Save your maple and your aspen

Here’s the point that needed graspen’

Come protect the plants that need you

And the fruit trees that will feed you

I’m not crazy

Don’t be lazy

Stop your trappin’

And start wrappin

Do the tree-wrap, rap

Do the tree-wrap, rap!

It was March 21 2015 when I wrote these lyrics. Whew, People have gotten sooo much smarter since then.

HA!

BRING BACK BEAVERS BIT BY BIT

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, BDA's, Beaver ecological impact November 27, 2022

This was a fine way to end the holiday weekend. The beavers won the civil war and a fantastic article appeared in Jefferson radio about restoring Vesper meadow near Ashland in the hopes of beavers returning to it.

Bringing back the beavers

For four years, Jeanine Moy has led programming to restore, monitor and explore Vesper Meadow, near Ashland. One of her prime objectives has been to restore Latgawa Creek and set the table for the beaver’s return.

In 2018, Moy was serving as outreach director for the nonprofit Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center, but she wanted to create a program or organization of her own that reflected her holistic vision of conservation—one that elevated art along with science, educated people while building community, and restored cultures as well as ecosystems.

She met Ross while teaching a class for older adults at Southern Oregon University. Ross recalls how Moy described that healthy landscapes can act like sponges, slowing and soaking up water.

“That really spoke to me,” says Ross. “Water is so scarce now.”

Ross and Conaway were comfortably retired, and with money in the bank from a house sale in California, they wanted to give back. “We were looking at what we could do with climate change and community building that would be gratifying and open up opportunities for a lot of people,” says Ross, who is nearly 70. She and Moy decided to partner on a project: Ross would acquire a parcel of land ripe for restoration; Moy would live onsite, develop programming and raise funds.

That year, Ross and Conaway purchased 323 acres and worked with the Southern Oregon Land Conservancy to place all but seven in a conservation easement. They named it Vesper Meadow, after the vesper sparrow, a grassland bird discovered there during surveys.

Now that’s the way to do it. Retire and sell your home in California and move to Oregon to bring back beavers. Way to go team!

If you glimpse Vesper Meadow from the highway, you’ll likely see a lovely expanse of open space that’s dotted with wildflowers in early summer and blanketed in snow in winter. It’s hard to spot the degradation unless you know what you’re looking for.

Thanks in large part to beavers, Vesper Meadow was once a complex, wet meadow, says Sarah Koenigsberg, communications director for The Beaver Coalition, a nonprofit focused on promoting beavers as agents of conservation. “The water table was right near the surface, and there were lots of teeny tiny channels and rivulets and wet swampy areas,” she explains. Conifers, which don’t like “wet feet,” grew further upslope, but aspen, willows, and camas thrived in the meadow. Several groups of indigenous people, including Shasta, Latgawa, and Takelma, likely harvested camas and other foods, gathered seeds, and managed the land with fire.

To slow the erosion along Latgawa Creek, Moy and an army of volunteers immediately started planting willows. Willow planting is a time-honored restoration strategy, and you don’t need a permit to plant them.

But Moy wanted to do more.

“The waterway being so degraded and showcased with the highway running through it lends itself to being a restoration demonstration site,” she explains.

Moy quickly honed in on bringing beavers back to Vesper Meadow. Not only do beaver-managed landscapes support a variety of plants, animals, and pollinators, they also help buffer the land during droughts and can even slow down or stop a wildfire.

But you can’t just drop a bunch of beavers off in a dry meadow, says Koenigsberg. “There’s no food. They’d starve, or get eaten by predators.” First, you have to set the table.

As long as the highway is bringing people closer, you might as well educate them. Right?

After talking with experts from The Beaver Coalition and NOAA, Moy decided to use a low-tech strategy called process-based restoration. It doesn’t require heavy equipment or engineering degrees, just lots of human hands. She started planning the log structures in the summer of 2020.

Sheri Hagwood, Partners for Fish and Wildlife botanist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, suggested Moy apply for funding and technical assistance through the Partners for Fish and Wildlife program, which helps private landowners enhance their properties for wildlife.

Vesper Meadow received $36,000 through the Partners program (and matched it with over $37,000). Hagwood helped Moy with planning and permitting. To build the structures, she needed to obtain a host of permits from federal, state, and county agencies, which evaluate everything from water quality to the project’s impact on cultural resources.

Moy bumped into the FEMA requirement when applying to Jackson County for a floodplain development permit. Part of the meadow was a FEMA mapped flood zone. An engineering analysis showed that during a hypothetical “100-year” flood, her project would raise the water level in one part of this zone by 8 inches, which the county didn’t allow.

According to Moy, the flood map didn’t match what was actually on the ground. Her only course of action was to apply to FEMA to revise the map and show that no homes or other buildings would be threatened by her project.

“The whole FEMA process is in place to protect homeowners from flooding, but there are no other homes anywhere near this floodplain,” says Moy. “It just seemed excessive for us to be able to put some sticks in the creek.”

She used part of her budget to hire an engineer to map and analyze the creek. Finally, last November, they mailed the application to FEMA.

After a few months, she followed up. FEMA had never received her materials. She sent them again. For the next several months, the FEMA representative and her engineer went back and forth with requests and revisions. With the weather window for building the log structures closing, Moy planned Beaver Days.

First you build it and then get out of the way and then they will come. Let them be in charge of the process from there.

It’s humbling to admit that a rodent can do this work better than we can, says Koenigsburg. “This kind of restoration challenges human nature,” she adds. “We like control and we don’t like messy. But we’re at this turning point: Do we want control, or do we want water, biodiversity, and firebreaks?”

Moy’s plan is not to hand the meadow off to beavers and leave. A key part of her programming is to restore human presence to Vesper Meadow, using art, education, science, and hands-on work to draw people in. Vesper Meadow helped cofound the Indigenous Gardens Network and has invited Siletz and Grande Ronde tribal members to re-connect with a landscape their ancestors knew intimately.

“More and more I use the term bio-cultural restoration,” says Moy. “It’s not just humans visiting and restoring and measuring [Vesper Meadow] but rather building personal relationships with the land and tending it over time.”

And scene. Vesper meadows is in good hands because of the beavers work and your vision. Well done. Thanks to the beaver coalition for helping out.

PERSISTENT IS BETTER THAN SMART

heidi08 Beaver Behavior October 18, 2022

There was one question from Leila’s beaver interview yesterday that I didn’t post. It was the “How smart are beavers?” trope. I thought that was a bigger conversation and wasn’t ready to get into it yesterday. Today there is a new article in The scientist about how creative they are. So I guess we’ll make time.

Opinion: Biodiversity Loss Worsened by Extinguishing Animal Innovators

To some people—road engineers, for instance—beavers and their dams may seem like the ultimate foe of human progress. But to the scientists who study them, beavers exemplify animal creativity. In a recent study on methods for rewilding freshwater wetlands, researchers found that the reintroduction of beavers as ecosystem engineers often creates unique habitats that benefit biodiversity at numerous spatial scales. Importantly, beavers actively creating and maintaining their ponds also produces aquatic habitats superior to those that are human-made. In other words, by exercising their unequaled creativity, beavers benefit not only themselves, but myriad other species, large and small, that share their ecosystems in ways humans simply cannot accomplish.

Allow me to be the first to say that beavers are wonderful and perfect and I love them very much. Beavers are better than otters and better than border collies and they are excellent at what they do.

But they are not creative. They are not smart.

The beaver, at once a potential solution to biodiversity loss and a troublesome force acting against the goals of human development, illuminates our conflicted relationship with the approximately 2.1 million other animal species who share our planet. If we understand that nonhuman animals—and not only beavers—also have inherently valuable skills, unique to individuals and to species, might we widen our tunnel vision to see them as collaborators and guides in conserving their habitats and biodiversity?

Remember that once upon a time I was an actual psychologist who administered actual intelligence tests and routinely commented on the capacity for things like set shifting and recall memory. Even though I have long since melted down all my Stanford Binets and Weschler’s into Beaver belt buckles It is fair to say I still know something about intelligence.

Intelligence is about shortcuts. Saving time. Accomplishing the same thing with less work. Facing problems with new solutions. Creativity is about trying new things in new ways and creating solutions no one ever considered before.

Beavers never look at a stream and think, “Wait just this once I’ll try building my dam on the bank”. Beavers never invent tools for building dams faster. They also never realize “All this building is kind of pointless, its just going to wash out anyway and I’ll just have to do it again.”

Beavers are BETTER than smart or creative. Yes. I’ve said it. Creativity and intelligence are only useful when the problems keep changing or have new challenges or you are super busy and have to fix it in a very short amount of time before you move on to the next problem.

Beavers don’t have anywhere to be and water has been flowing pretty much the same way since the big bang. They don’t need any new skills. There completely prepared for their environmental challenges. Because they are not burdened by being ‘smart’ they never look at their last years work and think “I GIVE UP!” They just keep trying. Sometimes they decide to try somewhere else.

Growing interest within the humanities and sciences in how the creative impulse works across many domains, not only in the arts, has fostered a reluctance to limit creative license to only a few special human individuals. The idea that creativity may be a common thread that runs throughout human activity has become accepted throughout the academy just as ideas about animal creativity are gaining traction in the biological sciences. Appreciating beavers for their contributions to biodiversity is not a hard sell among many biologists. But being open to the possibility that creativity exists across species requires open minds, a willingness to see behaviors in a new way, and a comfort with complexity. These qualities, the same ones often associated with creative behaviors, will assist humans in understanding that the creative agency of animals is a foundation of biodiversity. The world loses their genomes when species disappear, but what also disappears are creative pathways to saving ecosystems and habitats for all on this planet.

You saw it first hand in your own life I’m sure. You went to high school with off the chart smart or creative people that never amounted to much. I’m here to tell you the secret your guidance counselor never shared. And it’s a secret beavers taught me. Being persistent is more important being smart or being an innovator or being the best. Keeping at something is more important than having talent at it.

They say writing a novel is about 10% Inspiration and 90% perspiration. Beavers don’t write novels. And I’m not even sure they perspire.

They work.