Because the beaver isn't just an animal; it's an ecosystem!

Category: Beaver Conference


They say no good deed ever goes unpunished. Well no good deed ever goes uncopied either. Look what’s coming  together in the fall.

At the moment there are only place holders and topic ideas but it’s pretty clearly going to happen. Ellen Wohl introduced me to Jackie Corday who is a former student and now a water resources manager for Montrose. I made sure she knew Jerry Mallett who runs Colorado Headwaters and they assured me they are already hard at work making this happen. Apparently it’s true.

The plan is for it to be two  days wednesday and friday just like ours with the first devoted to education and the second politics. Of course they are thinking post Covid so they are planning to go in person but it’s pretty dam exciting to think that there is a cascade of beaver education falling like dominoes across the west.

In the mean time we will keep beavering away on the Caifornia Summit. We have our last steering committee tomorrow and hopefully a final run tech walkthrough after that.

Oh and they other thing they say is that is that “Failure is an orphan but success has many parents” and I have to agree because look what I found from a website called “Ecologistics”  taking credit for our summit already! I’m so glad I’m not in charge of it because it means I might finally get some rest.

The beavers are coming!

The SLO Beaver Brigade is putting on its first major event, a Virtual Beaver Summit on April 7th and 9th, from 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm each day.

Um no, and no. BB is speaking for 15 minutes at the tail end of a single day of the beaver summit. They are a guest at the table. They didn’t set it.

Hrmph.

Jon and I got our first shots yesterday, and are feeling might cheerful about it. Kaiser was unbelievably organized and we couldn’t believe how smoothly the whole thing went. We were even given a timer for our mandatory waiting period and a second appointment. I’ll leave you with this glimpse of how Yo Yo Ma celebrated his second shot mandatory 15 minute waiting period. Apparently he couldn’t leave his cello in his car at the center for insurance reasons. So he just thought, why the cello not?

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Yesterday we got the registration update for the summit. And I am happy as I can be about the direction this is going. 607 registered in all and nearly a hundred CDFW. I have been hounding the state parks too and finally connected with someone who is going to share with their wildlife team so I expect these numbers to get better very soon.

All in all it’s turning out to be a dam fine list of attendees! Plus this morning I registered Jon for both his pfizer shots at CVS Napa! Light at the end of the tunnel baby.

Here’s how to celebrate by tuning in monday or listening here now.

Beaver Taught Salmon To Jump

 

On this episode of Locus Focus, we talk with Dr. Suzanne Fouty, a retired U.S. Forest Service hydrologist, about the importance of protecting the beaver who are still doing their best to survive in our forests and wetlands, despite harassing, trapping and hunting by people who do not appreciate the vast benefits they provide. Suzanne is a co-author of House Bill 2843 that would close recreational and commercial trapping of beaver on federally-managed public lands in Oregon.

I could listen to Suzanne Fouty all day and so should you.

 

Beavers have been called “Nature’s Engineers.” In fact, the Army of Corps of Engineers could learn a lot from beavers. Instead of re-engineering nature to serve narrow human interests, beavers engineer the natural environment to serve not just their own needs, but the needs of entire ecosystems. Before beavers were nearly extirpated from the Pacific Northwest over a hundred years ago, stream corridors were filled with beavers creating and maintaining complex, water-rich habitats that provided homes and food for a diverse array of fish and mammals, as well as humans.

Oh I wish every state had one or more Suzanne’s and say after April 9th maybe more of them will. be.  Did I mention that there are now 25 states signed up for the summit? 10 in Alabama. Think about that for a moment.

Oregon Representative Brad Witt is chair of the committee that will determine by March 19 whether or not House Bill 2843 gets voted on this session. You can contact him at Rep.BradWitt@oregonlegislature.gov or call his office – 503-986-1431 – to share your concerns about protecting beavers in Oregon.

Suzanne joyfully wrote me that she got her first shot yesterday. Here we are after dinner after the State of the Beaver Conference which has been waiting for its shot too. As are all waiting in line now for our permission to disembark from HMS Covid.

Our turn is coming soon.

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There’s an outstanding article in the Chesapeake magazine this month. Exactly one year after the east coast beaver conference things are finally catching on. It’s a nice feature for our newest convert Scott McGill who definitely believes. Too bad they got Mike Callahan’s name wrong!

Beaver Believers

Although we don’t see Mr. or Mrs. Beaver this day (beavers are nocturnal by nature), their infrastructure is evident, and their neighbors are active. During our trek, we hear small birds chatter, startle several great blue herons and flush a flock of wood ducks. Hawks soar above us. Reaching deeper water, we watch small circles dimple the surface where brown trout are rising to feed on insects. Trout are one of several fish species—including dace, chubs and sculpins—that consume bugs and aquatic plants living in the impoundment’s cool, clear, nutrient-rich water. 

McGill points out the resident beaver colony’s nearly six-foot-tall dam and the rambling, domed main lodge they’re constantly remodeling with sticks and mud. I stumble, literally, on one of their transportation networks, accidentally plunging one leg into a deep, beaver-dug channel the animals use to reach distant food sources. 

In the mid-1990s, as a volunteer with Trout Unlimited, McGill worked on a stream improvement project along this very stretch of Long Green Creek, a Gunpowder River tributary that meanders through the forests and fields of Baltimore County. The landowners wanted to improve habitat for trout, a coldwater-loving species, in the stream that flowed through their pasture. They agreed to fence off a portion of the creek and have trees planted to shade the stream. 

Nothing starts out better than a good beaver story. I’m sitting down and pouring another cup of coffee. Aren’t you?

By the time the landowners summoned McGill back to the site 12 years later to address a beaver-landowner conflict (the former’s dam was flooding the latter’s access to a back cornfield), he had had a “beaver epiphany.” Instead of trapping the relentless rodents, as the landowners were doing reluctantly, why not incorporate beavers’ natural construction inclinations into Ecotone’s stream restoration projects? In other words, allow the beavers to build upon and maintain—at minimal cost—work the company had begun.

Some environmental professionals had been preaching the practice in the West for years. McGill says he scoffed at their “nutty” notion initially, then became curious. He attended beaver-focused stream restoration workshops by experts such as Utah State University fluvial scientist Joe Wheaton and ecosystems analyst Michael Pollack, co-author of the Beaver Restoration Guidebook. 

He became an eager reader of beaver books. From Frances Backhouse’s pithily titled Once They Were Hats, he learned that before beavers were nearly wiped from the land in the name of fashion more than a century ago, they performed instinctively the work that companies like his do when they “repair” today’s compromised natural landscapes. Now that the animals are returning in greater numbers, McGill figured, why not work with them? 

Why not indeed? A question we often ask ourselves here at beaver central.

Thanks to the beavers, Ecotone’s 10-acre, seasonal wetland has become a larger, deep-water mosaic of wetlands that supports a diverse array of fauna and flora, and also serves as a natural filtration system for Long Green Creek, whose waters ultimately reach the Chesapeake Bay. “This is like a huge multimillion-dollar storm management pond—for free,” McGill says of the waterscape around us.

Runoff sediment tends to settle here harmlessly. Dissolved nutrients such as nitrogen are taken up by plant roots and bottom soils. When storm waters rage, the beaver pond holds and then slowly releases them, diminishing downstream flooding, damage to infrastructure and stream bank erosion.

As for the landowners’ drowned farm lane, Ecotone installed flow devices, manmade beaver-flummoxing gadgets that permit water to flow freely through beaver dams and reduce the surface elevation of beaver ponds. Two flow devices were all it took to allow the beavers and the farmer to coexist, albeit tenuously.

The right flow device in the right place makes all the difference, Just ask Martinez.

Beaver advocates—they are many and quite passionate—maintain that beavers are, and always have been, far more valuable alive than they ever were as the stuff of hats, fragrances or Roaring Twenties outerwear. Beaver, both Castor canadensis and Eurasian Castor fiber, are widely regarded as a keystone species, animals whose preternatural ability to alter and enhance their environment greatly exceeds their numbers.

McGill and others are trying to spread the beaver gospel. Last March, just before the coronavirus shut down such gatherings, Ecotone co-hosted BeaverCON, the East Coast’s first conference for beaver practitioners, researchers and journalists. It’s where I was introduced to McGill. Part business convention, part fan fest, the three-day event attracted several hundred attendees from the United States, and a handful from Canada and Europe. 

I can’t believe this importance conference is finally getting credit. Unfortunately the reporter forgot Mike Callahan’s name and calls him “Bill”. That’s gratitude for you, He made the thing happen in the first place!

The gathering was held in a Marriott hotel just north of Baltimore. But it wasn’t your standard business conference. Most attendees were dressed for a day in the field (flannel shirts, fleece vests, the occasional Maryland DNR uniform) rather than a conference hall. An Ecotone employee in a caped beaver costume popped in and out of the proceedings. And as conference-goers filed into the Valley Ballroom the first morning, they were greeted by an editorial tableau: a beaver diorama, the kind you’d see in a nature center. But this taxidermy Castor, permanently poised to chomp on a sapling, seemed to be glaring at the object next to it on a display table—a vintage felted-beaver top hat.

Attendees embraced varied stages of beaver belief, from mildly curious to devoted apostle. They were welcomed by co-hosts Bill Callahan, a beaver practitioner, educator and founder of a management best-practices organization called the Beaver Institute, and by the ebullient McGill, who opened the event with a hearty, “Goooood morning, Beaver—CON!” In lectures over the next few days, a who’s who of beaver cognoscenti advanced the argument that an environment imperiled by climate change and human habitation urgently needs more beaver-enhanced Narnias. Castor’s habits can be bothersome, believers concede, but they are eminently manageable and well worth the effort. 

Isn’t that always the way. You spend months planning and days of your life making it happen and they forget your name before it’s over. Been there. Done that.

Enter the Beaver Deceiver, the invention of New England biologist and entrepreneur Skip Lisle. When introduced at BeaverCON, Lisle received celebrity-status applause when he mentioned his popular creation. If there’s a Thomas Edison of beaver exclusion technology, it’s probably Lisle, who didn’t so much conceive of beaver barriers as build a better, trademarked one. Deceivers and other flow devices of differing design—Castor Masters, beaver bafflers, pond levelers, culvert fences and diversion dams—are engineered to outwit beaver, a task more complicated than you
might think.

HA! Well at least the reporter remembered Skip’s name right.

Back at Narnia, McGill has another, nearby, restoration project he wants to show me. It’s a far different landscape, a scruffy, open field bisected by a meandering stream. Ecotone began planting vegetation along Bear Cabin Branch in Harford County in 2018. Several months ago, three beaver families moved in. Since McGill lasted visited here five days ago, one of their rudimentary dams has raised the water level a full foot in a portion of the creek. That will allow the flood plain to widen, he says, mitigating downstream flooding and trapping more sediment. 

“I can’t get a permit to do this,” McGill says of the impoundment. “But a beaver can do the work for free, and the water quality benefits are much better.” It’s a natural partnership, he says, “We’re restoring the Bay one beaver at a time.”

Isn’t that wonderful? Go read the whole delightful thing and remember Mike Callahan’s name when you do. Covid ruined a lot of things in 2020 but it decided to let the first days of March see its first beaver conference on the east coast a success.

That’s plenty lucky.

 


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Yesterday was a day for the ages, I can’t even tell you the weirdest part yet but trust me it’s weird. I was exhausted by 11:30. And then I thought to myself maybe the best way to lure more CDFW folk to the summit was to ask someone on the inside how its done. So I wrote such a person and was told to contact the scientist in charge of their list-serve, which I did and voila!

Invitations to the conference went all across CDFW emails. And now we within 20 minutes we had 50 scientists registered instead of 11. Plus 400 registrants overall. And I thought WOW. This could make a real difference. It’s a little bit wonderful they leapt on board and also a little bit horrible.

It means that these state scientists have been WAITING for beaver education hungrily. And with all their resources and brain power at their disposal the state thought “Nyahh, It’s not worth it. Let’s wait for some crazy nonprofit to do it. instead”

Thank goodness we did.

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312 people have signed up for the beaver summit so far. It has made the BWWW newsletter and is going in the Montana Wildlife Federation newsletter soon. I have an interview with Estuary magazine about it tomorrow. That’s kind of amazing. Registrants come from USDA, CDFW, NOAA and FWS. California state parks and National Parks are there. There are even attendees from the out of the country. I’ve been  scanning email addresses with very wide eyes. Noticing one registrant from the power company and another from NPR.

Wow. We’re in it now. The conference that started as Stone Soup is going to feed a lot of people.

I can’t even really believe California will get any smarter but it’s about dam time they did, don’t you think? Meanwhile a township in Massachusetts called New Natick is about to get a whole lot smarter as well.

New Natick Group Revamping Town Trails (And Deceiving Beavers)

Over the past few months, the committee has come up with a list of projects to tackle this spring. The group has received funding for new trailhead signs, trail markings and kiosks at trail heads. Interpretive signs will also be installed near Pickerel Pond to describe beaver habitat and a device installed by the town known as a “beaver deceiver” — it keeps water flowing under dams so the critters don’t flood trails.

The committee also plans to launch a trail steward program: a team of volunteers that would identify and help fix problems on local trails, whether it’s a downed tree or a guerilla BMX bike obstacle. Drenick said the committee may begin looking for volunteers as soon as April.

I assume they’re hiring Mike to do this? He’s about an a  hour and a half away so its not impossible. I’m glad they have decided to do the right thing and  am sure it will reap rewards many times over the cost to install. Good for them and good for those beavers.

Today it has been eight years since my fathers death. My mom is getting her second vaccine shot and I like to think he is making sure she is taken care of once again.

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