Category: Beavers and climate change

Restoring Neighborhood Streams with beavers

heidi08 Beaver Conference, Beaver News, 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 or Social Ambasadors, Educational, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Who's saving beavers now? September 10, 2016

I had a nice surprise yesterday in the mail with the arrival of Ann Riley’s much awaited urban creek book. Her first one published 25 years ago and became the restoration bible. It is still a valuable asset and regarded as a necessary resource even though others on the subject have been published since. This second one is all about successful creek restoration stories – both labor intensive and natural. And guess who’s in it from page 171-179? That would be the story of the Martinez Beavers, who moved into an urban creek and transformed it all by themselves.

Riley has been a good friend of the beavers over the years but she wasn’t exactly forthcoming with this part of her book. It was strange and exciting to read our story told by an outsider and see myself consistently described as ‘Perryman’. Ha. The scan came out horrible but here are some wonderful segments worth sharing.

I love having this documented correctly in a book that will likely survive the next 25 years and beyond. Riley works for the SF waterboard and has done several trainings about planting trees out here. It’s through her that we were able to have the watershed stewards the last couple of years working with the conservation core. I particularly love how she cracks open the creek scientists pretend enviromental reports that the city paid for to have justification for their impulses. And of course I loved THIS.

How happy do you think the city will to be to read about that historic sheetpile? Maybe they’ll throw me a parade? That whole ordeal was such a nauseating bundle of tension that I have long repressed it: I was terrified every moment that the beavers would be killed. I can’t believe they survived. And I remain very partial to this video.

I am bursting with pride at this paragraph and you can certainly see why this reference made the wikipedia challenger disappear. Maybe its just me but I find it a little terrifying that many years ago in a panic I just happened to come across the 2005 ecological survey and made the decision to contrast it with the species we saw over time. I’m sure there were all kinds of reasons a well-trained person wouldn’t have done it. But I was right here when it all happened, and I remember how rare a thing it used to be to see a green heron or muskrat in the creek and how common it became.

Riley & Cory plan the attack! — *Ann Riley & WSP intern plan the tree planting*

More than anything else in the ENTIRE world I am wishing that some other city looks at this chapter and says hmmm, maybe we should try that. (And I’m looking at you, Mountain House). If allowing beavers to restore urban streams needed to be proven then I’m thrilled that Martinez was a testcase. I met Riley through Lisa Owens Vianni who I met through the SF bay Estuary project where she used to work. That got my foot in the proverbial door but it was my presentation at the Santa Barbra Salmonid Restoration Conference that impressed her.

She said it was might have been the best presentation they ever had.

There are a few picky things I would have changed about this chapter. The meeting wasn’t in chambers it was at the High School, and it was a Sacramento Splittail not a SPITTAIL and good lord I never want 5000 people at the beaver festival! But I’m so happy we’re in this very important book and the role our beavers played is documented forever. Thank you Ann Riley for bringing our story to the next level.

Anyone who cares about creeks and beavers should go buy a copy right now. It will pay for itself may times over.

State of the Beaver

heidi08 Beaver Conference, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and Insects, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? August 31, 2016

So what are you doing in February?

SOB-embellished‘

That stunning picture in the background is the remarkable artwork of Larry Duke who was commissioned by the WA ECY to do a Wetlands poster. If you go to the original it’s actually interactive – because, Washington. I’m sure I’ll be arrested for copyright violation any minute now, but I just felt like it wanted to help me promote the conference. Don’t you agree? Think of it as ‘quilting’ not stealing.

The first conference was in 2007 before Worth A Dam existed. The first one I attended was two years later, where the Martinez Beavers were treated like rock stars. I met Sherri Tippie and just streamed tears joyfully all through her talk. I met Mike Callahan for the first time when he picked me up from the airport, and was to afraid to talk to the famous Mary Obrien or Glynnis Hood because I was fan-struck. I later thankfully got stuck in the airport with Glynnis and we had a wonderful talk when her flight was delayed. I left that conference on so inspired, thinking beaver people were the best people in the world, which is true.

Leonard and Lois Houston work their collective butts off for this every two years and you should make a plan to go and personally thank them for providing a cataclysmic event that started an uncountable number of connections and liaisons. The beaver world would be a different place entirely without their very hard work, and if you can’t attend yourself, pass this along to someone who should.

Since the conference is only every other year, I figured they could have our old poster. Reduce, reuse, recycle, right?

A treasure box of beaver stories

heidi08 Beaver Chewing, Beaver Chewing, Beavers, 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, Who's saving beavers now? August 26, 2016

There are quite a few beaver treats to enjoy today. I guess we should start out with the ‘day off’ I gave myself after Placer. I had been waiting to try this and just needed the space between deadlines. From now on I’m officially working on the beaver mania clock, but this was pure enjoyment. Alert readers might recognize the audio from earlier in the year’s Scientific American podcast. But the graphics are all mine.

I sent this to Nick myself and Michael Pollock did told me he did too, but the champagne and thank you bouquet hasn’t arrived yet. I’ll let you know when it does.

Here’s another remarkable treat that arrived yesterday, this one completely without Heidi’s fingerprints. The funny thing is that my father worked for PGE all his life from the lowest oiler in Oakland to the coporate office on the 35th flood in San Francisco as General Manager of Operations. This is how he found a job for his shiftless immigrant son-in-law 30 years ago when the green card finally landed. Both men went on to retire from the company with generous pensions and mostly fond memories but maybe a little beaver intelligence survives in their absence?

Shasta County: PG&E Moves Gas Line to Prevent Beaver-Caused Leaks

ANDERSON — PG&E crews responded to a seemingly routine report of a gas odor on a rural residential road outside this Shasta County city. But what they found surprised them. PG&E crews recently relocated a gas line in Shasta County because of beavers chewing the line. They located the leak and dug to expose the gas line for repairs, revealing a void around the plastic line and chew marks on the pipe.

The void was a beaver den, which had likely been abandoned as the beaver came across the gas line and perhaps thinking it was a tree root, chewed away. As soon as the rodent punctured the line releasing gas, the beaver apparently gave up and left the unfinished den.

We knew the first time it happened it was a beaver,” said David Ferguson, a gas maintenance and construction supervisor in Redding. “We made the repair and thought it was an isolated incident,” he added. “But after it happened a few more times, about once every one or two years, we realized we needed to find a solution.”

Cherokee Drive on the road in southern Shasta County. The gas line lay next to the banks of Anderson Creek Overflow, which in recent years has had an incursion of beavers as the industrious rodent reclaims developed areas. On Wednesday (Aug. 24), PG&E crews finished the relocation job and began serving the four residential customers with the new gas line at a safe distance away from the beaver habitat.

And no I’m NOT making this up. I guess the explosions in San Bruno a few gave them so much trouble they are bending over backwards to show they’re nice guys? Maybe the decision was purely fiscal since sending someone out year year after year to fix the chewed pipe cost money. Whatever the reason I’m dam proud of PGE this morning!

Now, if you regretted not being a fly on the wall for the Placer presentation you’re in luck. I think this should be cued up right to watch on your own. There are only a few places where I flubbed up, but I’m still quite sure its the BEST beaver presentation Placer County as ever had.

(And I’m looking at you, Mary Tappel.)

Wide open beaver places

heidi08 Beavers and Birds, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Insects, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? August 19, 2016

There’s a slick new beaver-friendly article in the online world. This one is from “Sonoma County Wildlife” and features Cheryl’s photos (one with misattributed credit to me). It’s one of those very confusing articles to review, because I’m very very happy with the tone, and the resources, but predictably frustrated with the details about us.

Why we need beavers

Environmental improvements to the landscape

By felling trees and making ponds, beavers create diverse micro-habitats, adding wetlands and deep pools. According to the OAEC report, fish, insects, birds and amphibians and river otters proliferate in beaver-influenced landscapes. Beaver dams slow down streams, reduce erosion, and allow water to sink into the ground. The ponds they make are deep, cool places where young fish, like coho salmon smolt, can survive through the summer.

Beaver increase diversity in plant life as well. Shallow parts of the beaver pond become wetlands and eventually meadows where unusual plant species can flourish. Beaver ponds and marshes help to filter out sediment and pollutants, making the downstream water cleaner. Wetlands support greater plant growth and also wet decomposition of plants which removes 5 to 40% of nitrogen pollution from stream water.

Beaver activity even sequesters carbon. Recent research shows that meadows and wetlands created by beavers capture more carbon than the grassland or forest that they replaced. One estimate by geologist Ellen Wohl is that a beaver meadow contains 10 to 30 times the carbon of a dry grassland, depending on its size and age.

See this kind of article is exactly the cowpusher we need to get reluctant farmers off the tracks and keep them from standing in the way of beaver success: detailed and scientific listings of their benefits, which is great at encouraging folks to think about beaver in a new way. I’m guessing that most of this article was based on the ‘Beaver in California” report from OAEC recently released. Because they got very minor details about general Vallejo right, and very obvious details about Martinez wrong.

Learning to live with the urban beaver

Beaver seem to be slowly moving back to the North Bay. A nonprofit in Martinez called Worth a Dam just held its 9th annual Beaver Festival, celebrating the more or less continuous occupation of a pond on Alhambra Creek since 2007. When beaver first moved into Alhambra Creek, in downtown Martinez, the city made plans to have them trapped and killed. A group of residents persuaded the city council to try an intervention that would keep the pond from flooding and it was successful. Beaver also appeared in downtown Napa in 2014 and are still there.

In Sonoma County there is only one verified beaver pond, on Sonoma Creek in Maxwell Farms Regional Park just outside the city of Sonoma. This is the second recent attempt by beavers to repopulate Sonoma Creek. According to an article in the Bohemian, a beaver family moved up Sonoma Creek to Glen Ellen in the 1990s, but was soon caught eating grapevines and exterminated. Left to themselves though, they will slowly re-populate our streams. Young beavers naturally disperse to find their own territory as adults and move from one watershed to another, either overland or by water.

Getting these techniques right involves understanding how a beaver thinks. When the City of Martinez ran an underwater pipe through the beaver dam to keep the pond below a certain level and prevent flooding, they made sure that the ingress and outlet of the pipe were both placed underwater since the sound of running water will prompt the beavers to build their dam higher. Also necessary is a change of human attitude, regarding beaver as environmental friends rather than enemies.

The funny thing is that this links to OUR description of the flow device and still manages to get the details wrong. The pipe goes over the dam and the outflow was above water in every condition but high tide. People over focus on the noise detail because they love the story about Michel LeClare discovering that beavers covered the tape recorder with mud. But in reality there are other essential things beavers respond to that we have no way of observing. Like feeling the suction created by a leak on their very sensitive vibrissa or guard hairs.

But really, you’re just being picky Heidi. These are minor details in some really good advertising for beavers. Thanks, Sonoma Wildlife!

Beaver Power to the Rescue!

heidi08 Beavers and Birds, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? August 1, 2016

You gotta admit it’s nice when the bad dam system fails and the GOOD one moves in. Check out this story from Idaho where a hydroelectric company lost their permit and have to restore a creek. Things were going not so well until they got a certain flat-tailed helper.

Z. Tuana transformation

In 2004, when Idaho Power’s federal license for hydroelectric production at nearby Bliss Dam expired, the utility began an effort to restore the riparian habitat of Tuana Creek — a requirement of its Bliss Dam relicensing.

Past land use in Tuana Gulch had left a landscape with little value to wildlife, said Utz, the Idaho Power senior biologist who leads the company’s habitat mitigation from Milner Dam to Swan Falls.

“The bulk of what you’re looking at now is native,” Utz said, scanning the creek’s vegetation-lined beaver ponds from a footpath on the slope above its south bank. “This is a much more lush, green, useful area for wildlife. And they seem to be responding to it.”

Idaho Power didn’t accomplish this alone.

The company killed Russian olive trees and planted willows, cottonwoods and wildlife-friendly trees that produce fruits, berries and nuts. The plantings didn’t do well.

But a few isolated locations elsewhere on Tuana Creek had beavers, and beavers are territorial creatures whose young must disperse to colonize new areas. Finally, just enough of Idaho Power’s willow and cottonwood plantings survived to attract beavers.

Their dams impounded the creek, slowed it down, broadened the water’s zone of influence and created the conditions that allow native riparian plants to flourish.

“The beavers kind of did what we struggled to do,” Utz said.

Beaver ponds drowned many of the original willow plantings — “which is a nice problem to have,” Utz said — but new growth stretched up the reshaped banks.

“There’s a nice little cottonwood getting started,” Utz said, pointing to a sapling beside the creek. “See it? If it survives, it’ll be a 120-foot tree someday.”

Okay, now the cynic me has to point out that at least part of this story is about a power company fixing a problem with as little money as possible that they were quite content to spend a great deal of money to cause in the first place. But never mind that they’re doing this on the cheap. It’s Idaho and they could use a reminder of how much transformation beavers can bring. I’m sure they killed a peck of beavers back in the days of the hydro was running, but now they’re finding out what happens when you let them live.

Beavers can do this.

Beside a C-shaped beaver dam less than five years old, he watched dragonflies flit above the pond and named off the cattail, goldenrod, stinging nettle, common teasel, veronica, duckweed, sedges and bulrush. He pointed out the viceroy butterfly wings left behind after a bird’s meal and an empty duck eggshell left by a skunk, raccoon, snake or other hungry nighttime prowler.

“There’s a lot going on here that you can’t normally see,” he said.

Sure, you could build artificial ponds with berms and dikes and equipment. But that’s short-term and can be wrecked by flooding. Engineering can’t mimic the natural dynamic. Flood a beaver dam, he said, and the beavers just rebuild.