Category: Beaver population

LEGISLATING BEAVERS TAKES TIME

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver ecological impact, Beaver population April 25, 2023

The Beaver Bill AB 64 came up for review in today’s California Assembly this morning. I was particularly interested in some of the changes and additions they made and thought you might be too. I missed the hearing but believe it may be online tomorrow.

(i) Beaver restoration includes coexistence, habitat enhancement and expansion, process-based mimicry, and relocation.

That right there is a Major addition. Restoration doesn’t just mean moving nuisance beavers. It means MARTINEZ and FAIRFIELD and SONOMA and DODY RESERVE and TAHOE every that flow devices have been installed and trees have been wrapped. Everywhere that BDAs have been installed.

(d) (1) If a wild beaver that is released onto public lands pursuant to this section migrates naturally onto private property, the private landowner of the property where the beaver now resides may request that the department relocate the beaver. The department shall comply with the landowner’s request determine whether relocation is necessary and feasible in a timely manner.

(b) (1) If, for the purpose of preventing damage to private or public lands, structures, or other improvements of value, a landowner needs to remove, breach, or modify a beaver dam that is utilized by the wild beaver relocated pursuant to subdivision (a) and that is located on the landowner’s property, the landowner shall submit a request for alteration to the department at least 48 72 hours prior to altering the dam.

(2) (A) If the department finds that the beaver dam poses no risk to private or public lands, structures, or other improvements of value, or is found to be providing critical habitat for any listed species pursuant to the California Endangered Species Act (Chapter 1.5 (commencing with Section 2050) of Division 3), then the request for alteration may be denied. The department shall provide to the landowner, in writing and in a timely manner, the reasons why the department denied that landowner’s request for alteration. These reasons shall include a justification on behalf of the department as to why the dam does not need or warrant alteration.

You asked for these beavers. Now it’s your job to either deal with the issues that arise or save all the frickin fish in the stream that are threatened if we give you permission to mess with the dam.

(B) If the request for alteration is approved, the landowner shall be responsible for monitoring the parts of the upstream and downstream that reside of the altered beaver dam on their property for stranded fish in isolated pools. The department shall provide guidance to the landowner regarding monitoring requirements. The landowner shall make a good-faith good faith effort to capture and safely move all stranded or isolated fish to the nearest free-flowing water.

So There.

4030. (a) The department shall, through consultation with beaver restoration program partners, develop a program to promote beaver restoration across California by revising policies and guidelines relating to beavers, coordinating restoration efforts, proactively mitigating human-beaver conflict, and relocating beavers into watersheds.

(b) No later than January 1, 2025, the department shall expand the program described in subdivision (a) to do both of the following:

(1) Develop a required training for the capture, handling, transport, and release of beavers on public and private lands.

(2) Develop a licensing scheme that includes the issuance and administration of permits for the capture, handling, transport, and release of beavers on public and private lands. Any costs imposed shall not exceed the reasonable costs to the department for the implementation and administration of the licensing scheme.

(c) Nothing in this article shall be interpreted to imply that federally recognized tribes shall be required to obtain training or a permit to capture, handle, transport, or release beavers on lands held in federal trust for a tribe’s benefit.

(d) As used in this article, “beaver restoration program partners” means federal agencies, nonprofit organizations, federally recognized tribes, nonfederally recognized California Native American tribes included on the contact list maintained by the Native American Heritage Commission, academic programs, and other entities.

Get on it already, It’s practically May.

This remains my VERY FAVORITE PART of this bill because I am proud for my own kittle role in proving it to their satisfaction”

(a) The North American Beaver (Castor canadensis) is a keystone species that is native to California and was once prevalent in watersheds throughout the state.

OVERESTIMATING BEAVER POPULATIONS

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver population, Beavers, Who's blaming beavers now? August 10, 2021

Well this jaunty column will hold your attention. The writing is clever even if the beaver management is…er…not.

Robert Ducharme: Mr. Busy and Peter Rabbit

If you live or have lived in a condominium association, nothing gets the dander of owners to rise faster than fights over pets. Some love them; some hate them. Everyone has an opinion.

But dogs and cats are not the only critters that have raised concerns at associations. There are others, sometimes not with the result you would think. And frequently not pets. In 2018 in rural North Carolina an association had a problem with beavers. Yes, beavers. (Mr. Busy is from Lady and the Tramp.) Seems local beaver dams were blocking Pokeberry Creek, causing water to rise and threatening the association’s boardwalks and bridges. (They have 24 miles of trails, so it’s large, rural and wildlife invested.)

Okay, we remember the beavers of Pokeberry Creek, in fact the people who cared about them still have a website. But this is the fun part.

It takes a lot of beavers to create such a problem and the association estimated it had three dozen beavers creating its perceived problem. The board of directors was stumped (no pun intended), and looked at alternatives such as raising or replacing the boardwalks and bridges, but deemed that solution more expensive than necessary, so it called the authorities. The U.S Department of Agriculture came, poked around, evaluated the site, and informed the board of directors that if the board wanted to go forward and solve the problem by removing the beavers, it could be done, but the beavers could not be trapped and relocated, but would have to be killed.

Three dozen beavers on a 7 mile creek? Why only three dozen. Why not a MILLION. If you’re going to pull random numbers out of your ass you may as well pick a bigger one.?

Of course a single family of beavers can build an awful lot of dams to cause condo-chaos. It’s not that hard. A single lilac mailbox can cause condo-chaos on most days. What I HATE about this is that some “experts” came in and cited that number. and everyone just believed it.

The truth is that BEAVERS ARE TERRITORIAL. There is zero way that 36 beavers worked together like furry mischief communists to cause you problems.

I’m sure the numbers were just inflated to make it seem like moving them was too hard.

Why killed and not moved? It seems in North Carolina beavers are, by law, considered a nuisance, and as such the law prohibits trapping and moving them. So they had to be killed; the board of directors was OK with that solution; and it so informed its fellow owners. But the board of directors did not expect the reaction of fellow homeowners and neighbors in the larger community. Outrage would be considered mild. So, two days later the board noted it was going to take a step back and consider other alternatives.

Ahh when the people lead the leaders will follow…they say. It worked in Martinez. Not sure whether it actually works in North Carolina condominiums, but it’s worth a shot.

Unfortunately, try as I might, I cannot find anything that details whether the beavers lived or died. The association’s website doesn’t mention anything about the beavers, though there is a picture of a new boardwalk. So, perhaps the unnamed solution was to pay to raise the bridges and boardwalks. If not, it would seem the board simply decided the beavers weren’t worth a dam. (No word on whether fur sales rose in the community.)

Let me guess what happened. I’m good at these.

There is one amusing side note to this story. Wikipedia tells me that Pokeberry Creek is a tributary to the Haw river. Which interests me because way back 15 years ago when I was frantically trying to find information about coexisting with beavers there were THREE helpful sites on the entire universe of google (imagine that!). One was Beavers: wetlands and wildlife, one was the old beaver solutions website, and the other was the Haw River Assembly.

I just thought you’d want to know.

HOW DID ALL THESE BEAVERS GET HERE ANYWAY?

heidi08 Beaver population, Beavers and saltwater, Beavers elsewhere April 2, 2021

Bowen Island in BC would like to know where all these darned beavers come from? Obviously, they say, they weren’t here before the nineties so who brought in all these beavers?

Inquiring minds need to know. This article by Alan Whitehead of the nature club demands answers.

How long have beavers been on Bowen Island?

There were no beavers on Bowen Island / Nex̱wlélex̱m when my young family and I moved here in the early spring of 1988. Beavers first appeared, if memory serves me, in the early 1990s in the Lagoon and soon moved upstream all the way to Killarney Lake. Long-time residents told me there had been muskrats, which had been trapped out in the first half of the 20th century, but told no similar stories of beaver. Fast-forward a few decades and beavers, their dams, lodges and cut vegetation can be found in many places, especially though not exclusively in the Killarney-Terminal watershed.

There were no beavers when we got here. And the old timers who were here since the 1900’s say there were none in their lifetimes, so where how did they get here? Never mind that the fur trade wiped most of them off the face of the earth in the 1830’s and they’ve been slowly clawing their way back into existence since then. In fact Bowen Island might even have been the upper edges of the ‘fur desert’ HBC helped create to keep the nasty foreigners from settling in.

Bowen Island is a metro of Vancouver and located about 1.9 miles off the shore. Gee how long does it take a beaver to swim 1.9 miles?

The beavers’ arrival in the 1990s was on the east side of Bowen via Deep Bay. It is, therefore, very likely that they must have come from the Fraser valley lowlands, where beaver populations have been increasing over the past century as a result of the decline in trapping, construction of drainage canals, and other changing land uses. Beavers are strong swimmers. Although they live in fresh and brackish water, they are known to cross significant spans of saltwater; this happens particularly when the young adults are dispersing away from their birth habitat after their second year. Beavers have no trouble navigating the waters between the mouth of the Fraser River and Bowen Island and beyond.

A beaver has to find his own space in the world, don’t you know. You can’t just stay in your parents front yard forever.

Are the beavers now here to stay? Yes, but only in the best habitats. Judging from the large girth of some of the cedars that have been gnawed as a source of bark for food, I suspect that life is not easy for the young beavers that, during their dispersal, try out the more remote locations. In these areas, the preferred forage plants are scarce, and streams and wetlands tend to go dry during the late summer and early fall, leaving beaver dams temporarily useless. In the prime habitats, however, such as Crippen Regional Park, the new municipal park at Grafton Lake, and possibly other existing and future protected areas, beavers will likely endure thanks to the continuing abundance of year-round food and shelter habitat and a connection to Howe Sound for dispersal and recruitment of mates to maintain genetic diversity.

Gee I don’t know. You don’t have any willow on that island? Any aspen or dogwood or birch? I’m sure skunk cabbage and ferns will do in a pinch. Obviously there’s something to eat or there wouldn’t be beavers eating it.

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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MAKING A MOUNTAIN OUT OF A MOLL-MAP

heidi08 Beaver population January 27, 2020

There are more concerns from Pennsylvania about the dam that may or may not cause problems on Mather road (still complaining and no smarter a week later)

Rick Campbell of Mather said he’s captured images of a big beaver and three smaller ones on his trail cam at the reservoir seven different times, usually in the evening.

“There’s no telling how many there might be,” Bence said. “Usually beavers don’t live in large numbers. It’s mostly a male and female with this year’s pups. After a year, the pups disperse to look around for a mate.”

God knows how many. There are probably a MILLION. Maybe even a GAZILLION. Because you know how beavers are always teaming up with other families to form communes and ruin roads.

Rushing around in zombie work lines. Just like that ancient Moll map.

A view of Industry of beavers of Canada in making dams to stop Course of Rivulet, in order to form a great lake about which they build their habitations. To effect this they fall large trees with their teeth in such a manner to make them come crofs and rivul to lay foundations of dam. They make Mortar. work up and finish whole with great order and wonderfull dexterity. The beavers have two doors to their lodges. One to the water and the other to the landside. According to french accounts.

It is all pretty amazing when you think about it.