Category: Beavers and Birds

Beavers and Heraclitus

heidi08 Beaver Chewing, Beavers, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and Ice, Beavers and Insects, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? October 30, 2017

Another savory dish Rob Rich sent my way was this essay by author Ginny Battson. It is a splendid, thoughtful and thought-provoking read perfectly designed for a sunday afternoon by the seaside or a cup of coffee and the first snow in your uncle’s cabin. Which means it deserves much broader thinking than I can summon, but the beaver parts are really, really good so I’m going to share them.

Beavers are Fluminists

I learn from rivers, as do the beavers. I spend time in and around them, observing and sensing. Two and a half thousand years ago, the ancient philosopher Heraclitus also wrote on the profound things he learned from rivers. In an age before science, he looked for guiding principles in nature. What he found in rivers was a permanence in a reality of apparent change. All is flux, a matrix of matter and movement. The river is an analogy for an elemental cosmos, yet materially effervescent. Rivers are also life systems ~ complex and dynamic.

Beavers, the river keepers, have evolved to be more than the sum of themselves. Beavers live in the life-flow, interrupt and send it in multiple directions. Known to ecologists as ‘keystone,’ First Nationers instead call them ‘sacred centres’ of the land. For they are whirling hubs of life-diffluence and life-confluence, integral to the flow just as mind cannot be separated from body. They are dam and bridge builders, storing water at times of plenty for times of drought. They sequester carbon by trapping it in fluvial muds that eventually become rich soils. They are coppicers; the trees they fell to feed upon and rear their young will regenerate, beaver-cuts catalysing a diversity of plant and animal life. They are also wildlife protectors ~ during winter, woody debris left trapped behind dams are buried beneath deep snow, and provide shelter for a host of smaller mammals and reptiles during the bitter cold. And then, when the northern hemisphere tips nearer to the Sun, melt water forms reservoirs and a rising water table, creating habitat for amphibians and a plethora of bird species, including waterfowl ~ wood duck and heron, migratory waders and passerines. New lentic deeps amongst woody debris provide fish fry safe passage to grow to adulthood. Majestic osprey take the adults. In lotic flows downstream, clouds of black fly larvae lay submerged, attached to substrate with silk, to emerge in spring and breed, then feed the bats that hunt on the wing above the beaver-cuts. The dams may eventually blow-out by flood, and the beavers will find new territory. Upstream, moose rear youngon regenerating meadow grasses years after dams are abandoned. This really is rich habitat; the smell of river, wood and beaver is intoxicating.

If beavers could speak human, they may also say: Into the same rivers we step and do not step, we are and are not.

(Heraclitus Homericus B49a)

Ginny introduces the word Fluminism to explain the interconnected dynamics of the universe flowing forwards, connecting and enriching and says it’s what beavers do best. She even goes so far as to call it a kind of love, or the doing and caring parts of loving. Her essay is filled with the richest imagery and most fluid prose. You should really tuck away the link and read it sometime when you have time to reflect. For now I will just say that she GETS beavers. I remember Skip Lisle similarly said the principal of beavers is dynamism, meaning change. They change things, things change them, the things that are changed by them change other things. Maybe after 10 years of watching beavers I can see how they changed me, how my life has rearranged itself because of their work.

Back to the Maine woods, and it’s getting late. I’m a little bit edgy because the light is falling. As I hurry back with my baby over the bridge towards Gilbert, we hear the slap of a scaly, flat tail hitting the water ~ splash. I stop and turn us around to follow the sound. My eyes adjust to the watery scene. And there is the beaver, Fluminist, swimming, with a wet, brown head visible for a moment and shiny eyes, before diving beneath the inky reflections of a darkening sky. She’s warning others we are here. Though we’d never harm her, others might. I feel at peace knowing she is here, knowing she has a rich intrinsically valuable life, full of love for this world in the river she understands so intimately. I point her out to my baby who instinctively feels both the joy and excitement. Formative moments, for sure. There is so much yet to learn from Ahmik, Fluminist, and I walk us home full of awe and gratitude.

North American Beaver Castor canadensis Martinez, CA — North American Beaver
Castor canadensis
Martinez, CA

Beavers: Past, Present and Future

heidi08 Beaver Chewing, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and Insects, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers, History, Who's saving beavers now? October 20, 2017

Whew, I was relieved to hear that Mike Callahan (whose WIFE is a trapper) had never heard about using a cross-bow either to shoot unwanted beavers either. So that means this is just a one-off until we hear otherwise. (A horrible one-off but better than a common occurrence.)

Meanwhile, I received a note from author Ben Goldfarb yesterday that his writing retreat is going well and that he will have the first draft of his beaver book in November! How exciting! And I heard from Tom Rusert that their home didn’t burn down, their beloved bulldog Daisy is recovering from smoke inhalation, and things are moving forward. There was an excellent article in the East Bay Times and Fire Rescue about our good friend Luigi feeding the first responders last week, which surprises me not at all. That man has been incredibly community-oriented since before he even had a community.

Calif. deli owner feeds first responders in Calif. wildfires

MARTINEZ, Calif. —Luigi Daberdaku has been making sandwiches at his downtown deli for years, but never this many all at once.

Since Thursday, there’s been an assembly line set up in his shop, right near the shelves with the specialty sodas. “Cutting the meat, cheese, lettuce, onions, cucumbers, I need volunteers… plus I need more meat; we ran out of meat today after 275 sandwiches,” Daberdaku said Monday.

By that afternoon, as he prepared to make his fifth delivery trip, he and his assembled teams had made almost 1,500 sandwiches. It started Thursday, Oct. 12, when he and volunteers made 150 sandwiches by midday. He took them to Fairfield that first day for further distribution; since then, he has gone straight to the hard-hit areas, mostly in Napa, himself.

Dear, sweet Luigi, you deserve all the credit you get. I recall he had barely set up shop downtown at the November 2007 beaver meeting ten years ago, when he stood up with his very thick Albanian accent and said “When I first come to Martinez there was no one downtown. It was like a ghost town! And now that the beavers have come there are many, many people every day!” He has been our friend since the beginning, and his wonderful daughter Louisa planted trees, worked the festival and brought us sandwiches every year. Helping first responders is just the kind of thing he’d do.

(Let’s hope that sweet steady rain we got last night helped them too.)

Yesterday the National Geographic Blog called Cool Green Science decided that beavers deserve a little credit also. Of course they couldn’t resist reminiscing on Idaho throwing them from planes – but this is a pretty nice summary. Watch the video all the way through.

Restoring Beavers by Plane and Automobile

“Beavers are really nature’s engineers and they do a really good job at what they do,” says James Brower, Idaho Department of Fish and Game volunteer services coordinator. “We love beaver and we love what beaver do.”

“We really want them to set up shop and transform that habitat and make it a little better for everything,” Brower says. “Beaver create habitat for not only fish but also for deer, elk, moose and bear. Pretty much everything needs water and places to drink. There’s no doubt in my mind this benefits everybody.”

I like what Mr. Brower has to say. I think I will try and make contact. But I’m never a fan of the beaver-flinging story – as I’m sure you all know by now.

BDAs in NWF is a BFD

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and Ice, Beavers and Insects, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Creative Solutions, Who's saving beavers now? October 14, 2017

They made good progress on the fires yesterday (thank god), and were bracing themselves for the winds last night. The death toll has climbed to 36 this morning, with 5700 structures leveled. WP says 90,000 people are displaced and I bet the numbers are even higher. We’ll be coming to terms with the scale of these fires for many, many months and years to come.

In the mean time beavers have been the subject of attention by the National Wildlife Federation. I was contacted by the Vermont office rrequesting use of some photos for an upcoming event they are publicizing with Amy Chadwick in Montana about coexisting with beavers. (Which is just the right message delivered by just the right girl!) They thought Cheryl’s great photos would help promote it and Cheryl was kind enough to share. The announcement would link to this story in the August-September magazine which had escaped my attention entirely:

Beavers as Ecopartners

THE SUGAR CREEK RANCH FLY FISHING CLUB sits at the confluence of Sugar Creek and Scott River in northern California. The river’s cold water feeds the ranch’s eight ponds and lakes stocked full of fat trout and other fish that draw hordes of anglers. But the more important action is happening at the ranch’s unassuming beaver ponds. There, two beaver dams have helped save threatened coho salmon that were struggling to find enough water in the river just two years ago at the height of the state’s record drought. Today, the coho are thriving along with bear, fox, deer and hundreds of birds. “It is kind of a paradise,” says ranch manager Jerry Lewis.

The ranch’s beaver pond is one of many that the Scott River Watershed Council and its partners have encouraged property owners to create in the Scott River Valley to help restore water reserves while creating vital habitat for juvenile steelhead trout, coho and Chinook salmon. The trout and coho grow in the ponds’ still, cold water before swimming down to the ocean to fully mature and then return again several months later to spawn.

The ponds began with beaver dam analogues, or BDAs. Landowners can build these by pounding a series of vertical posts into a stream or river, interweaving branches through the posts then packing on vegetation and mud to create a dam that pools water. Enticed by the ponds, beavers often move in to build lodges and raise young and will increase the dam’s size and subsequent water retention.

To date, the Scott River Watershed Council has helped ranchers and farmers install eight BDAs in the watershed, and beavers have moved into six of their ponds. “Beavers have greatly enhanced the structures we’ve put in,” says Betsy Stapleton, the council’s board chair. “It has been a really cooperative relationship.”

Hurray for our Scotts River beaver friends!

A Beneficial Coexistence

“Farmers need to irrigate their land, but beavers can plug up a head gate where water comes off a stream in just 12 hours,” says Stapleton. “They can also dam up a creek near a home or field, which can flood them. And they chew down trees that people enjoy. When we started, we would barely mention the word ‘beaver’ in public. Then the drought hit. That really changed the conversation.”

California’s drought from 2011 to 2016 severely depleted water reserves across the state. When in 2014 segments of the Scott River dried up, the California Fish and Wildlife Department trucked thousands of juvenile coho to areas of the river that had adequate flows and habitat.

Since 2015, salmon and trout are thriving with the help of the new beaver ponds, which expand surface water, recharge groundwater reserves and improve water quality by filtering and trapping sediments and recycling nutrients. Their shaded, deep pools also provide cool refuge for fish and support a wide diversity of wildlife.

NOAA Fisheries biologist Michael Pollock is monitoring the region’s BDAs and found that they have raised water tables up to 3 feet as far as 1,500 feet from the dams. In addition, the BDAs have kept water flowing through fish-filled, downstream side channels all summer long, habitat that previously dried up during that time. Pollock says the positive impacts of the BDAs have reached far further than anticipated. “We didn’t expect that,” he says.

Federal and state agencies, including in California, are considering beavers as conservation partners to restore habitat and bolster its resilience to climate change. Not only do the dams build up water reserves but a series of dams can act as speed bumps to slow flooding, and they can even sequester carbon.

Several western states, including Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Colorado, are using BDAs or reintroducing beavers to help restore local ecosystems. For Montana’s Lolo National Forest, the National Wildlife Federation and its affiliate Montana Wildlife Federation are working with the Clark Fork Coalition to help the U.S. Forest Service craft a plan to build BDAs and restore beavers. This would help boost water reserves in riparian habitats at risk from reduced snowpack and increased droughts, which would restore habitat for threatened bull trout and other wildlife. “Beaver are low-cost workers, but they can provide huge benefits,” says Traci Sylte, the forest’s soil, water and fisheries program manager.

Hurray for beavers! It’s wonderful to read this rose-colored a collection of sentences like that but we all know that there is plenty of resistance still from the all kinds of agencies and property owners towards beavers. It’m always impressed with the work being done with BDA’s, and Michael Pollock is the very best kind of cheer leader to have on this team. In fact, I just got word that he’ll be opening the lecture series on tuesday evening at BioJams at the Olympic National Resource Center at the University of Washington.

ONRC Evening Talk: BIOJAMS Tuesday, Oct. 17, 7 p.m.

Dr. Pollock has been studying forest, stream and wetland ecosystems for over a decade. During this time he has engaged in a diverse set of scientific studies including: the influence of disturbance and productivity on biodiversity patterns in riparian corridors, the influence of beaver habitat on Coho smolt production and ecosystem function, the historical patterns of riparian forest conditions in the Pacific Northwest, and the importance of riparian forest to maintain stream habitat. Dr. Pollock will be speaking to us about his current research on the use of BIOJAMS — Working with beavers to restore salmon habitat.

How much do you wish you could be there? I’m just thrilled that all those students and professors will be inspired by the beaver gospel delivered by the very best teacher. We sent Michael a beaver tie after they were donated to us for the auction one year. I wrote him that this would be an excellent time to wear it.

Send Review Copy Here, please.

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver-themed merchandise, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Fire Prevention, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and Ice, Beavers and Insects, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? October 6, 2017

I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about this new text book, which was slated for release in August of this year. Dr. Carol Johnston is the professor from South Dakota who recently used those historic maps from Morgan to show that beavers build in the same areas for 150 years. The book looks very interesting. Minnesota Ag just reviewed their copy but where is mine?

Beavers Shape Northern Minnesota Ecosystem.

Beavers have probably been more influential than humans in altering the Kabetogama Peninsula ecosystem in northern Minnesota, writes South Dakota State University Professor Carol Johnston. She examined how beavers have impacted the peninsula which is home to Voyageurs National Park near International Falls, Minn., in her newly released book, “Beavers: Boreal Ecosystem Engineers.”

“This book is about a place and the science of how beavers shaped it,” said Johnston, who has been conducting research on beavers for 30 years. She wrote eight of the book’s 10 chapters based on her National Science Foundation-funded beaver research.

The text book is listed as a pricey 137.00 at Amazon, but shows the following drool-worthy pages of contents. It takes a second to load but trust me it’s worth it. There isn’t a single chapter I’m not eager to read. It’s maddening to think of all the text books I shelled out major cash for and never really read more than I needed to, (or frankly, even that) and this one that is sooo delightful-looking now that I’m not a student!

Beavers_Boreal-Ecosystem-Engineers_Table-of-Contents

Guardian Beavers

heidi08 Beaver-themed merchandise, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and Insects, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? September 17, 2017

Time for some UK praise of beaver gifts. I’ll be so wistful when they finally make the right decision. It’s wonderful to see articles like this in the Guardian.

Meet the latest recruit to the UK flood defence team: the beaver

Beavers could be put to work building dams to stop a village from flooding in the Forest of Dean, in what would be the first such scheme on government land.

The Forestry Commission has been an enthusiastic advocate for the release of a family of beavers into a large fenced area surrounding Greathough brook above the village of Lydbrook, on land owned by the commission.

Experts predict that the beavers will rapidly create dams, canals and ponds, slowing the stream’s flow and potentially holding back 6,000 cubic metres of water to prevent huge floods inundating Lydbrook, a village that suffered badly from flooding in 2012.

Villagers are mostly supportive, hoping the scheme will not only protect the village but boost local wildlife and tourism. “It’s a brilliant idea,” said Stuart Aken. “There were about 100 people in the village hall when they made the announcement and there wasn’t a single dissenting voice. People are in favour because of the potential to help against flooding and most are interested in the increase in wildlife that it will bring to the area.”

Everyone seems excited about the day, what’s the hold up?

But despite the beaver scheme not costing the taxpayer a penny – it would be funded by landfill taxes – it was abruptly postponed last month. A source close to the project said it had been blocked by a minister in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs – and the Forestry Commission was “hopping mad”.

A spokesperson for Defra denied that the scheme had been blocked by a government minister and said that the Forestry Commission would announce the next steps in the coming weeks.

Derek Gow, a beaver expert who has worked on reintroductions in Scotland and England, said: “This is a tremendous opportunity. The science suggests these animals will hold back 6,000 cubic metres of water.

“This has the potential to prevent a once-in-30-years flood event. These animals will also open the forest canopy to light and create a biodiversity jewel in this forest.”

This “natural” flood defence works only in small streams in upland areas. In deeper rivers, beavers do not need to rapidly create dams. In lowland areas, beaver activity can also cause flooding.

But those in favour of their reintroduction to England and Wales say beavers can be returned to western river systems and will not spread to low-lying eastern areas, such as the Fens, where their activity could cause valuable agricultural land to flood.

Ahhh what a fine article! Where to begin? You have such great beaver advocates in the UK. But did someone really say that beavers would not spread and populate themselves into low-lying areas? I hate to break it to you but (ahem) beavers are very good at finding their way into new territory. It’s what they do. Their raison d’être , so to speak. I just don’t think it’s a great idea to tuck in the unsuspecting British population with cozy dreams of beavers who always stay where you put them. I agree about flooding. And I agree 100% with the lovely statement that “they’ll make a biodiversity jewel in the forest”.

But I wouldn’t say they won’t relocate. Never make promises beavers can’t keep.

I’m sure whoever said that it wasn’t Derek Gow, who is as fine an advocate as beavers could ever hope for. Looks like he’s giving a talk soon to spread the beaver gospel even farther.

Cheshire Wildlife Trust to stage beaver talk at Bickley Hall Farm

National beaver expert Derek Gow will be in Cheshire to give a talk on the how the animal’s re-introduction could impact the countryside. Cheshire Wildlife Trust is hosting the one-off talk at its headquarters at Bickley Hall Farm, between Malpas and Nantwich.

Several reintroductions of beavers are now either underway or being researched across the UK including in Scotland, Dorset and Wales.

A growing body of evidence suggests beavers have a key role to play in restoring nature in our countryside. They are a native species, which was hunted to extinction in the UK 400 years ago. They are a keystone wetland species, known for their dam building and tree-felling activity. This not only creates their home, but also provides the ideal habitat for many other plant and animal species and can play a role in flood prevention.

Derek Gow is at the forefront of beaver re-introduction and will be joining us to tell the story of the beaver comeback in the UK, sharing his experiences of the projects he has worked on along the way. His talk ‘The Return of the Beaver to the UK’ will be held at 7.30pm on Thursday September 28 at Bickley Hall Farm, Malpas, Cheshire, SY14 8EF.

Don’t you wish you could be there? I sure do! Derek is as fine a spokesmen as beavers could ask for and I know they have ever confidence in his work. Why just yesterday I found an awesome wetland illustration and was confused by one creature in the bottom right hand corner. He clarified helpfully that it was a water vole, and very common in England. Oh, and of course you know he came to Martinez after the beaver conference right? Because it turns out we are a kind of beaver Mecca too.