Category: Beaver relocation

THE SECRET WEAPON OF DISTASTE

Now that the story of beavers is being told on a broader scale, it is more common than ever to cross paths with new believers who are staunch advocates of relocation. If beavers are causing problems in one place why not just move them to another place where they can do some good? Problem solved, right?

And since I am allegedly a staunch defender of the beaver I should be the biggest fan of that argument. Theoretically. So our biggest fight with CDFW should be over the RIGHT to relocate beavers. Shouldn’t it? California is the only western state that never allows it. So shouldn’t that be the front where all our battle equipment is directed?

I say no. And before your sensibilities are offended hear me out.

Aside from the fact that beaver relocation is a complicated and risky process that even when it works, and is only likely to produce temporary relief for the landowner, aside from the fact that beavers don’t obediently stay put after we move them, aside from the fact that it is never a guarantee lives will be saved, aside from all that…

Beaver relocation removes our most powerful weapon in the fight against beaver ignorance. The deadly weapon of distaste.

This recently crystalized in my mind when I was talking to a very high powered individual about beavers. It would be fair to say I talk about beavers a lot. A lot. I talk about beavers to people who are staunch believers. people who read Ben’s book and are ‘beaver-curious’, people who have just learned about the good things they do and people who have never in their life had more than a 2 minute conversation about wildlife in general. When I talk about depredation my dearest wish is that they would realize what a wasted resource a dead beaver is, a missed opportunity for biodiversity and water storage in a state that desperately needs both.

But if I’m lucky, the biggest reaction I invariably get is “DISTASTE”.

People don’t like the idea of killing beavers. Mothers and CEOs and Firemen and shop clerks share the same aversion. Killing beavers is icky. Not as bad as drowning puppies or clubbing baby seals but it leaves a bad flavor on one’s tongue and if there was a way to get rid of the problem and NOT have the bad taste they’d much rather do that.

And that’s what give me the space to talk about flow devices or culvert fences or wrapping trees. That little “Ew” is what makes the entire conversation possible. It turns out “Ew” is our best friend. It is the pause that allows solutions to be considered. It is a speed bump on the convenience highway which slows down traffic enough that people don’t just kill their way our of every problem without a second thought.

(Which is not to say that there aren’t people without any speed bumps whatsoever, or where killing beavers causes zero distaste or is even god forbid pleasant, but there is little hope for these types and I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about them.)

I focus more energy on the casual beaver beholders, folks who only have a little bit of time for the subject before they move on to something much more important, like the grocery list or profit margins or EIR reports, folks who don’t really care about beavers but who don’t like the idea of killing them because its “ookey”.

That moment of DISTASTE is the ticking doorway which is begrudgingly opened through which I can carry flow devices or arguments and ecological discussions. Like the windmill hole in miniature golf its a fast moving opening. One of those revolving monstrosities in big city department stores. Or a portcullis dropping down to seal a caste. Time is limited. Tick Tick Tick. And if you’re lucky you can just block the doorway as closes with something DISTASTEFUL.

Like a dead beaver.

And If that wasn’t there – if the average person didn’t have to be even slightly uncomfortable with the idea of killing to get rid of an inconvenience – if the band-aid of relocation could be carelessly placed over every bump and contusion – if a dead beaver never even cluttered their busy thoughts, there would be no way to slow the door at all. Which means no reason to think about beaver benefits. Or lost opportunities for biodiversity or climate change.

There would be No story of Martinez and no joyful discovery of all the wildlife we saw in our urban creek.

And shh, don’t tell anyone, if I were the cigar smoking, boots on the desk head of CDFW and I really wanted to keep beavers out of public awareness, I would dearly want relocation. Because even if I secretly hated beavers, it would mostly still be lethal anyway and it would keep people from complaining about them all the time. Because preventing distaste and letting them get what they want without ever considering that beavers matter might just be safer in the long run than forcing them to really consider what we have lost every time a beaver family is removed and what CDFW permits have allowed to be stolen from our state for the past century.

But for now, we have DISTASTE. And it’s not enough to stop a train or turn the tide. But it’s not without its value, It’s the only precious brake we have on the out-of-control vehicle of unstoppable progress and rampant greed. It’s woefully inadequate, But it’s more powerful than we realize.

So this moment in time, uniquely flawed and inadequate, a moment where people are starting to learn why beavers matter and it is still slightly distasteful to get rid of them is a strike-while-the-iron-is-hot moment. It’s our best possible chance to make as much of an impact as we can and teach our state about flow devices and how they work and why beaver are worth the trouble. It might be out only between-a-rock and a hard-place stage where we can promote long term solutions.

And we should make the most of it.

EXTREME MAKEOVER: BEAVER EDITION

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact, Beaver relocation January 28, 2022

The press loves itself some beaver reintroduction. I’m not sure what exactly about it grabs their fancy. Any easily photographable moment they don’t have to wait for I guess, or a classic story of redemption, but from the Lands Council to Molly Alves and the Tulalip tribes, we’ve seen it again and again. In the New York Times. In the Washington Post. In the Smithsonian, Even in the Wall Street Journal. The Press loves stories about releasing beavers.

Even the ones that got away.

Re-Beavering a Monument

In 2019, a small group of biologists trekked to a shallow pond in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument carrying heavy burlap bags. Jacob Shockey, executive director of the Beaver Coalition, set his bag on the ground, and out popped a beaver. Docile, soft brown, and surprisingly large, it waddled toward an opening in the reeds and slid into the water, suddenly graceful. The group watched hopefully as the beavers, all rescued from the same suburban field in Medford, explored their new home.

The pond, one of the Parsnip Lakes, is also home to a rare amphibian called the Oregon spotted frog. The frog needs open water to lay its eggs, but since beavers were trapped out over a decade ago, the pond had been leaking water, and cattails were taking over. The biologists hoped this relocated beaver family would reverse those trends.

It’s hard to believe that such an unassuming creature can shape entire watersheds. Beavers and their constructions impound, clean, and slow the flow of water; fix eroded banks; create habitat for fish, birds, and bugs; and even mitigate climate change.

Unassuming? Who you calling unassuming! Beavers are so import they deserve to be plenty assuming. We should throw a fricking party whenever anyone spots them on their land. It’s like winning the beaver lottery to have them on your property.

With the Beaver Coalition, Shockey and his partners hope to drive this message home, in part through storytelling and demonstration projects on a variety of lands—private and public, urban and rural, ranch and forest.

“Our goal is to help facilitate a paradigm shift in how people interact with beaver,” says Shockey.

Thanks to a cooperative agreement between the Beaver Coalition and the Bureau of Land Management, Shockey is working with ecologist Charlie Schelz on a plan to “re-beaver” the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in southwestern Oregon. A convergence of three mountain ranges has created a tapestry of landscapes in the region, from cool north-slope forests and sunny oak savannas to spring-fed meadows and rocky scarps. Although the monument is biologically diverse, its lands are not pristine. Beavers, once abundant, now persist only at the fringes, and as a result, many wetlands have dried and degraded.

Paradigm shift. I like that. I never use that word but I like it. I guess the story of Martinez happened backwards. We felt differently about our beavers and that caused us to learn new things and try something different that happened to work and make a big difference in our town. In Oregon Jakob is hoping that people learn new things and that will cause them to feel differently about beavers.

It’s worth a shot.

The beavers Schelz and Shockey relocated to Parsnip Lakes in 2019 didn’t stay. Maybe they were trapped (Schelz is lobbying for a monument-wide beaver trapping ban). Maybe they were eaten by cougars. Maybe the early snow shocked them downstream. But that same year, Schelz and Dr. Michael Parker, the biologist who first discovered Oregon spotted frogs in the pond, built some low-tech structures there. They cut willows and dogwood branches and drove them into the ground at the pond’s outlets. They wove more branches around the posts. The branches sprouted and grew. The water level came up and stayed up, even during last summer’s soul-crushing drought.

Schelz is optimistic that beavers will eventually thrive there. He says, “If we create the right conditions, the beavers will come.”

The beavers will create the right conditions. You just need to provide the tools so their hard work can pay off. Enough willow, No trapping. A workable amount of water. Every place they live they view as a starter home. A fixer upper that they will need to repair day after day.

Beavers invest in real estate and home restoration. Extreme makeover. Beaver edition.

WYOMING KNOWS WHY

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact, Beaver relocation November 11, 2021

Hmm yesterday was just fine, but the internet played games with beavers and kept making us log back on. Annoying but not hopeless. I do miss hearing laughter in the audience because of the limitations of zoom. But there was one guy that lives near the golf course and says that when a beaver nibbled his willows he decided to wrap them with wire and they’ve stayed away ever since. I swear he wasn’t a ‘plant’ but he could of been. Afterwards I had three moments of very good news which was so good it kind of freaked me out a bit. I’ll tell you about that later.

Meanwhile Wyoming has been doing a heck of a job on the beaver front. This was sent to me by beaver friend Bob Kobres of Georgia who was quick on the uptake.

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CRANBROOK HATES NATURE IN ITS NATURE PARK

heidi08 Beaver ponds, Beaver relocation, Urban beavers October 19, 2021

Now I may have been watching too many westerns, but this story leaves me “PLUMB CONFUSED”. I thought relocation wasn’t allowed in Canada? You know I can remember when Martinez was fairly unusual for rallying around its beavers. Now we’re surrounded.

Cranbrook beavers in city park to be relocated, but some citizens want them to stay

The City of Cranbrook, B.C., will delay the relocation of a family of beavers in a city park until the spring of next year, but some citizens say staff is ignoring alternatives to ensure the family can stay where they are. Beavers had set up a dam in Idlewild Lake, within the city’s Idlewild Park, in spring of this year. Stephanie Lacey, a mother of two pre-schoolers, said her children had noticed the dam getting bigger and bigger all year.

But recently, she was alerted to live traps that the city had placed in order to relocate the beavers. She then set up a petition asking the city to consider alternatives. The petition says relocating the beaver family in the winter “does not give the beavers enough time” to find food and create a new lodge, and that the city had refused to work with citizens on the matter.

Cranbrook is in the bottom middle of Canada, right above Montana, I’m pretty sure that them minister of never moving beavers told all our beaver friends that such a thing was illegal. Do you suppose there’s been an exemption granted? Or maybe just a baldfaced lie? That sure doesn’t look like any live beaver trap I’ve ever seen.

In a statement on Monday, a spokesperson for the city said the relocation would be put off until spring next year, and that Idlewild Lake is not a traditional, natural habitat for beavers. Lacey says that is untrue.

“Beavers are very intelligent animals, and they don’t build a lodge and a dam in a place that would run out of food sources for them,” she told CBC News. “There’s tons of trees and vegetation around Idlewild. So it’s the perfect location for beavers.”

“It definitely feels to me like it’s more about the monetary loss of [trees] the city has put into the park already for, like, their own beautification of it.”

I had no idea I was such a type. The little lady that causes such a fuss in the city when they try to get rid of beavers. You know how it is. You think you’re the only one. Apparently I’m a dime a dozen.

The city says the relocation is being done due to the risk of flooding upstream, and to protect the bigger Idlewild Dam set up on the lake.

“The City understands and appreciates the very positive draw this beaver family has created around Idlewild,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “The relocation will be done but not until the spring.”

Colleen Bailey, a certified technical wildlife rescuer and rehabilitator living in Cranbrook, calls the decision to relocate the beavers foolish.

She says the latest reasons provided by the city for the relocation are among numerous “excuses” provided in the past few weeks alone, including that the beavers would allegedly pollute the lake.

“The City of Cranbrook’s own master plan for this park was to increase biodiversity, ecology, and natural interaction,” she said.

“I know they don’t like [the beavers] because nature is actually doing what nature does. So it’s ridiculous. It’s almost comical.”

Ohhh we just HATE nature showing up in nature parks. Nothing makes cities madder. A nature park is supposed to have a bird or two and maybe a squirrel. Not a huge great rodent building dams and flooding the pathways. Sheesh.

Bailey says the beaver dams can increase the risk of flooding or damage to planted trees, but that the city has refused to install pond levellers or employ other mitigation strategies used in other cities. She says a non-profit group presented the city a report about beaver mitigation strategies, but officials have not yet tried them.

“These mitigation efforts would permit the beavers to do what they do naturally,” she said. “If there wasn’t enough food sources, the family would move along on their own.”

Bailey thinks the beavers are an opportunity for Cranbrook to prove to the rest of the province that they can coexist with wildlife. She said she has a “team of people” willing to volunteer to help the beavers survive.

She and Lacey have promised to continue to ask the city questions about the relocation, including making use of freedom-of-information requests.

Your move Cranbrook. Do you want to shine even more of a spotlight on the illegal act your claiming you’re going to commit when the media awakens all of its cousins and objects to this? Or will you sit down with your citizens and make a plan to coexist?

We’ll wait while you think it over. You might want to have a chat with our mayor and city manager before you decide.

BEAVER BENEFITS IN THE SMITHSONIAN

heidi08 Beaver relocation, Beavers and salmon May 3, 2021

Well the beaver coho story is only 30 years old. Don’t you think its time for the Smithsonian to act like they discovered it? Me too.

Scientists Are Relocating Nuisance Beavers to Help Salmon

Alves helped launch the Tulalip Beaver Project in 2014 with the aim of using beavers to boost declining salmon numbers. Since the low-cost project began, scientists have relocated more than 200 “nuisance” beavers, as they are called, and created dozens of salmon-friendly beaver ponds. While scientists don’t have statistics on salmon population changes after beaver reintroductions, they say anecdotal evidence shows the rodents reshape the landscape in a way that’s fostering more fish. Now they’re set to expand their easily scalable work into new watersheds in western Washington, and other groups in the Pacific Northwest are picking up on their successful tactics too. “I’ve heard multiple people say that Washington is kind of a leader in beaver projects,” says Kodi Jo Jaspers, a Trout Unlimited employee and manager of the recently-launched Wenatchee Beaver Project on the other side of the Cascades.

Just so you know. There are no “Nuisance beavers”. Only property-owners that can solve problems. And property owners who can’t.

The reintroductions are important because the outlook for wild salmon is dire, especially in the Pacific Northwest. About a third Tof salmon and steelhead populations on the West Coast have already gone extinct according to a 2007 study in Conservation Biology. Today, 14 more populations out of 131 remaining are at risk of extinction in Washington alone, according to a 2020 report produced by the governor’s salmon recovery office. In the heavily populated Puget Sound area, only one of 22 different populations of chinook salmon—the largest species—has exceeded population goals set by NOAA in 2007.

These declines have led to a flurry of funding for salmon recovery projects. Many of those projects are costly and logistically complex; they include tearing down man-made dams that block fish passages, removing pollutants from contaminated waters and installing new salmon-friendly bridges over spawning grounds. The salmon recovery office estimates that only 22 percent of the funding needed for these projects has been met—after $1 billion has been pumped into salmon recovery efforts.

Moving beavers for fun and profit! That sounds like a book that needs to be written. Everyone loves a good ‘moving beavers’ story. Molly has been in the New York times. The Washington Post. And now the Smithsonian.

I wonder if any of these folks ever think about the problems that COULD be solved by installing a flow device and letting beavers stay put?

Salmon need icy cold, clear water year-round, and that’s exactly what beavers provide. A 2019 study by Benjamin Dittbrenner, the executive director of Beavers Northwest, showed that each beaver relocated by the Tulalip Beaver Project created a swimming-pool sized pond of water for every 328 feet of stream. The beavers also slowed the stream down, causing more water to soak into the ground. The dams cooled downstream water by more than two degrees Celsius because the deeper water was harder for the sun to heat. And the ponds increase the amount of water available throughout the dry summer months by 20 percent because of the small reservoirs created behind the beaver dams. All of these new conditions add up to ideal habitat for salmon fry, as the baby fish are called.

I’ve been dooint this so long I have the graphic all ready for every occasion. Fancy that. This is the paragraph I like the most.

“If you have beavers in conflict with people and they will be killed if they’re not moved, then yeah. We’re gonna move them,” says Alexa Whipple. “But we’re trying to create more programs for coexistence strategies.” Biologists use tools that homeowners might not be aware of to mitigate damage. For example, scientists install pond leveling devices that prevent flooding and wrap the base of trees in beaver-proof fencing.

Now that is worth the price of admission. Hey I wonder when the Smithsonian is going to write an article about the harm people do to salmon when they trap beavers. Any time soon?

Don’t hold your breath.

Despite the success of beaver relocation programs, quantifying the projects’ impacts on salmon is tricky. Limited funding means projects don’t have the resources to count salmon numbers in the streams. Instead, biologists measure easier-to-collect data like water temperature, the number of new ponds and the size of those ponds. “Our metric of success is just whether they have impacted their environment somehow, in some way, by some structure,” says Jaspers, with the assumption that building better habitat equals more salmon.

Even though the biologists don’t have the written numbers to show it, they have witnessed direct benefits to the fish. “We’ve seen sites just completely transform to these massive beaver complexes of like 12, 13 dams and ponds everywhere,” says Alves. “Now there’s hundreds of salmon fry swimming in these ponds.”

Or you know. You could leave the beavers where they are. Solve any issues they cause with about 2 hrs of work. And have salmon populations explode across the pacific coast.

Your call.