Category: Tail slap

The Importance of being Ernst

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver Chewing, Beaver-themed merchandise, Beavers, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers elsewhere, Tail slap, Who's saving beavers now? July 17, 2016

Sometimes even the back of the class earns a gold star. The Ernst trail in Meadville PA lies in the upper left hand corner of the state near Ohio. Neither state has been particularly progressive on beaver management issues in the past, so I was thrilled to see this. Remember the trapper who said he was only going to take the ‘soldier beavers’?

ON THE ERNST TRAIL: Importance of beaver pond outweighs potential flooding

In the spring of 2015 the water, in the wetland, just south of Bean’s, on the west side of the Ernst Trail, began to rise precipitously up toward the trail. The water was also rising on the east side of the trail. We were concerned that the water might flow over the trail and perhaps damage the trail surface.

A short investigation revealed that beavers had dammed up the two culverts that drain from the west side of the trail to the east side and that there were many small dams on the east side as well. The board of directors decided to act.

In the course of trying to figure out what to do I visited the trail one June day last year at lunch with Pennsylvania Game Commission Wildlife Conservation Officer Mark Allegro. He was busy with nuisance bear complaints and only had time at lunch to consider our beaver problem. Mark pointed out that there weren’t any good options; our best hope was to wait for trapping season and get a trapper to trap the beavers.

Since it was a nice noon-time, many people were on the trail, several of them recognized Mark, who was in uniform, and commented on wildlife they had seen along the trail. One person pointed out a huge snapping turtle on a log in the beaver pond, about 30 feet from the trail. Another showed me a couple of snakes alongside the trail that I had walked right by. Others noted birds they had seen, signs of beaver activity and so on. Our beaver pond was generating quite a bit of interest for trail users.

To better understand what a beaver pond had to offer, I talked to Scott Wissinger, an ecology professor at Allegheny College. Here’s what he said: “Because beaver ponds create so many different types of sub habitats of different shallow depths, flow regimes, plant communities and invertebrate communities, they are considered hot beds of biological diversity. Even if people don’t really care about invertebrate and plant diversity, they might care because the invertebrates and plants (especially their seeds) are magnets for charismatic animals that people do care about — fish, waterfowl, songbirds, amphibians and reptiles.”

With all this life attracted to the beaver pond, our board of directors decided to let the beavers alone. We’ll take our chances on the flooding.

Yes, if you need advice on trapping, go to the Game Warden, but if you need advice on BEAVERS go to college. I’m so hopeful about this article and will be working hard to get in touch with the author so he can see how to prevent flooding AND keep beavers. I can’t tell you how impressed I am that the people on the trail got you thinking about the enormous impact a beaver pond has on wildlife. And so glad that you listened, and kept asking questions because that isn’t easy to do when a man in a uniform tells you to give up.

Shout out to Janet Thew who posted on FB about the beaver totem skins offered by Decalgal. Of course I wrote her WRITE AWAY and she said she’d be delighted to donate to the silent auction. How much do you love this?

Final gift from Moses Silva filmed at the noisy crane work station by the beaver home. I guess not everyone is intimidated by progress.

–

Save

The Perfect Beaver in a Storm

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver Chewing, Beavers, Beavers and water, Tail slap, Who's saving beavers now? March 11, 2016

When that I was and a little tiny boy,

With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

A foolish thing was but a toy,

For the rain it raineth every day.

William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

The rain in Martinez has been weak but constant,. Our friends near by in Napa have endured a deluge. Poor Tulocay creek where the beavers reside has seen more water than ever before

and Rusty and Robin were out bravely trying to see if they made it through. The dam was quickly topped, and the lodge soon followed. This is what the lodge looked like by afternoon.

FSCN5841 — *Flooded lodge: Robin Ellison*

Fortunately their lodge is anchored to a tree, but I certainly remember when ours was entirely swept away. With conditions like this you could see why a beaver might decide to just be a bank dweller after all. Here’s footage Rusty caught of a beaver cautiously grooming on top of the lodge. I’m starting to think that beavers save that spot for the pregnant matriarchs because someone looks a little round even for a beaver!

Beavers are nothing if not practical. They groom in the face of adversity in exactly the same way as your neighbor makes you a casserole after a tornado narrowly misses your barn. Yes it’s terrible and disruptive, but you still need to eat (stay dry). Looking at the way beavers adaptivley use the top of their lodge I’m reminded of folks escaping to the attic during Katrina, or chapter 9 of Winnie the Pooh.

In which Piglet is Entirely Surrounded By Water

“Now then, Pooh,” said Christopher Robin, “where’s your boat?”
“I ought to say,” explained Pooh as they walked down to the shore of the island, “that it isn’t just an ordinary sort of boat. Sometimes it’s a Boat, and sometimes it’s more of an Accident. It all depends.”
“Depends on what?”
“On whether I’m on the top of it or underneath it.”

One could worry about all that rushing water sweeping the beavers away like it nearly did pooh, but I’d advice everyone to watch this beaver, powerfully swimming against the roaring current. He or she doesn’t even look like it requires effort.

Robin just wrote after a trip to the pond this morning. The waters has receded, the lodge is standing, and all the beavers tucked safely inside. Well, we started with this post with 12th night, we might as well end with Alls Well that Ends Well.

Tune in next storm!

________________________________________________

Okay, I’m slowly learning things about my new toy. Double click to see the whole thing. Did you know you can fold down the corner to preview what’s on the next page? This took me way too long to finish but I’m inordinately pleased with it. It even has links to the resources described. I used up every inch of my ‘free’ 15 pages. You should try one, it would make a great baby album!

Make New Friends, but Keep the Old

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver Chewing, Beavers, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Tail slap, Who's saving beavers now? February 27, 2016

I noticed this winter that we had a new dove sound in the garden. The call has the quality of a regular mourning dove with a marching cadence. It was quite unmistakable.

Like all good mysteries the internet helped me solve it. I was hearing a “Eurasian Collared Dove”, which happened to be news worthy because the bird was introduced in Barbados in the late 1800’s and creeped to Florida and then across the United states. Apparently it got to the Bay Area around 2008, but I was busy with beavers so I didn’t notice then. Have you seen or heard this newcomer? He’s apparently well adapted to city life and folks are unsure whether he’s a competition to our other doves. It’s fun hear that new call though, like having a new kid move in across the street and wondering if they’ll be fun to play with.

Speaking of fun, Minnesota is about to have a tail-slapper.

‘Leave it To Beavers’ March 8 at Headwaters Center for Lifelong Learning

This 60-minute 2014 video from PBS will be shown on Armory Square’s 25-foot wide screen, with sound enhanced by a new wireless microphone. The stunning photography and important subject matter present an opportunity for the audiences to get a close up look at this once nearly extinct rodent at work.

“The beaver is nature’s original water conservationist and land and wildlife manager,” the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources explains. “Many biologists believe that the beaver pond supports a greater variety and abundance of wildlife than any other ecosystem in the forest. The ponds also control spring runoff, thus lessening the possibility of downstream flooding.”

While climate change, pollution and other negative impacts on ecosystems are much in the news these days, positive developments such as the useful work of the resurgent beaver population tend to receive less notice.

Ahh wonderful to hear such good praise out of MDNR And wonderful to see Jari Osborne’s well-crafted documentary continuing to do its job. You know, she just wrote the other day to congratulate us on our Conservation Education Award. Obviously she’s busy doing other things now that are not beaver related. But she’d be thrilled to know her work continues to entertain and educate.

Sigh. This remains one of my favorite parts of the documentary, I admit.

Dam Builders: A review

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver Chewing, Educational, featured, Tail slap, Who's saving beavers now? July 19, 2015

It took longer to arrive than I had hoped. The publication was delayed several times and is still expected to be another 6 weeks for American readers. But this weighty record showing 30 years of beaver watching is definitely worth the wait.

I received my courtesy copy from the publisher Fitzhenry & Whiteside Ltd. last week, and have been engrossed ever since. Everything about this book is impressive: its stunning photographs, gripping account of little known beaver details, and its truly classy lay out, right down to the beaver silhouetted page number in the corner. (I had a good friend who was a copy editor at Random House and I know how much work pulling these details together can be.) I had prepared myself to be impressed, and was not disappointed.

What I hadn’t prepared for was to be surprised.

After nearly 10 years in the beaver biz, reading and writing about them daily, and viewing them regularly at very close quarters, I pretty much thought I had heard and seen it all. Michael Runtz book was still filled with gloriously unexpected treasures. From the amazing photograph of a beaver floating on its back (yes you read that right, not a sea otter, I swear, he speculates he might be picking a splinter from its teeth with its rear toe) to the exciting collection of facts about their lives, (did you know that when beavers breathe they replaces a whopping 75% of the oxygen in their lungs? Compared to the paltry human rate of 15%!) or that beaver tails in colder climates actually look different in the fall than the spring, depending on how much fat content they’ve lost from it over the winter? Something we’ll never see here in Martinez.

If some of the photos seem vaguely familiar they should, Runtz supplied his stills to Jari Osborne’s Beaver Documentary (Beaver Whisperer in Canada, and Nature’s “Leave it to Beaver” in America). My favorite chapters were those documenting beaver effects. First a lovely one showing the biodiversity that blooms in beaver ponds, with beautiful macro photography of gnats, insects, dragonflies, to featherlight photos of birds and water fowl, to richly-textured images of otter and moose you can practically feel. Then a beautifully solemn one about what happens to the trees beavers kill by flooding. (Showing excellent homes for a variety of woodpeckers, wood duck and blue heron). And finally a chapter on the pond’s “afterlife”, what happens when the pond silts up and beavers move on, as the flora take over and the fauna shift accordingly with the flourishing nutrient exchange. Honestly, I was almost in tears through these sections, feeling that they showed better than I ever could hope to explain how powerfully beavers impact biodiversity.

(I wanted to sit every contractor, public works crew, and politician down at the table and force them to look at every page. But that’s just me.)

Unlike this website, Runtz doesn’t “preach” the beaver gospel. He simply shows it and waits for readers to get the message. There is a short section covering beaver baffles, which is the Canadian flow device that has had good success. He doesn’t talk about the beaver deceiver or its offspring, but I was happy to see him acknowledge problems and explain their solution. A memorable passage describes the anticipation of sitting at a beaver pond before dawn and listening as it comes to life, comparing it to hearing a truly impressive symphony warm up in the darkness before a performance.

With over 200 pages containing stunning photos from one end to the other, this is a book you will look at again and again. I anticipated and missed a forward from some smart researcher like Glynnis Hood or Dietland Muller-Swarze, talking about why his photos are invaluable, but maybe this book isn’t trying to prove that beavers have value. It just shows you that they’re ‘worth a dam’ without ever saying it.

I was especially struck by the final paragraph, when he comments on how children’s minds would be enlivened by a beaver pond, if they could just put down their electronics long enough to get there. It made me think of these 100+ year-old words from my hero Enos Mills in his last chapter of “In Beaver World” where he calls beaver “the original conservationist”.

The works of the beaver have ever interested, the human mind. Beaver work may do for children what schools, sermons, companions and even home sometimes fail to do, – develop the power to think. No boy or girl can become intimately acquainted with the ways and works of these primitive folk without having the eyes of observation opened, and acquiring a permanent interest in the wide world in which we live.

The American version of this unforgettable book won’t be available until (hopefully) mid-september. If you can’t wait, there will be two copies available in the silent auction at our beaver festival. As far as I know they will be the only two copies on American soil in the entire country. I’m guessing that they will be very popular items, so get ready for the bidding war.

Tails in the City

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Tail slap May 23, 2015

I found this picture when hunting around for an underwater shot of a beaver dam and just couldn’t resist. (I actually just noticed there IS an actual beaver on the right, but it’s still fun.) Apparently there are sadly no split shots on the internet of beaver dams, so someone please fix that, okay?

Speaking of missing things our beavers were missing last night, we saw no one come from the footbridge, one from the old dam and last year’s kit blithely hanging around ward street like the old days. I have to think its tidal. But it made me wonder if mom hasn’t moved her kits again. And where would she move them? I guess the old lodge next to the creek monkey.

We know she likes to move them around. That’s why I was able to get this two years ago.

Beaver kits are like easter eggs. You have to hunt around and find them yourself!

I saw this video posted on Facebook by our Idaho beaver friends. I notice when I first watched it a little ‘caution float’ as the beaver seemed to sense the photographer. My observation was confirmed by the tail slap that followed. That and this photo got me thinking about tail slaps in general. It was posted by photographer Lee-Anne Carver in Canada and is a beautiful look at the windup. This is the poise before the actual slap surrounded by unbelievable colors. She’s a really talented photographer.

11231142_10153234796973467_1011237114097610208_n — Getting ready for the tail slap: Lee-Anne Carver

I was remembering when I filmed my first tail slap, a million years ago. It must have been this time of year in 2007, which means I knew nothing about beavers at the time. I went down to film the beavers in the morning and saw a huge otter sitting on the old lodge. I wasn’t even sure at the time what it was. A young beaver came and started slapping and slapping until that otter left. I remember I counted that he slapped 19 times, and was able to film the very last one, which is why you hear me say THAT, I GOT in this video.

It made me think that it was about time for Rusty to film his first tail slap in Napa. I guess my powers of beaver prediction are considered pretty honed in some circles, but even I was surprised to receive this from him last night.

It all happens so fast I thought a little slowing down would help. When you sail past the equator they give you a baptism with salt water. When you film your first tailslap you just get this. Congratulations Rusty!