Category: Beavers and Forests

WATER-SAVERS PORTFOLIO

Today is water portfolio day in Capital Hill. When your own fish, wildlife and waterway experts gather together to brainstorm ways to keep water for a drying planet. Can you guess my suggestion? You can watch the entire presentation here.

Live stream of Commission meetings (when in session)

While the day gets started, I thought you might enjoy reading my added comments to the discussion. There is still time to send your own.

Beavers bring resilience to climate change

I’m hoping that whether the focus of the water portfolio is on drought resistance, fire resistance, biodiversity or water quality, it will remember the significant role that beavers and their dams can play. Research has demonstrated consistently that they dramatically increase water storage (both above and below ground) and that their persistent damming will filter water removing toxins and decrease nitrogen. Beaver wetlands create natural barriers to wildfire, and beaver forage reduces fuel and speeds recovery after fire. Salmon, trout, waterfowl, amphibians and all kinds of wildlife thrive because of their ponds and suffer without them.

Beavers are a tool in the water resilience tool box that California should take seriously.

For years CDFW has freely distributed depredation permits to landowners who complain of flooding or damage to landscape – they continue to do so DESPITE the fact that there are inexpensive, reliable tools for resolving problems. I know because my own city made the decision to coexist with beaver in our urban creek by installing a flow device to prevent flooding and wrapping trees to prevent damage. Because of our safe and beaver tended wetlands we observed more steelhead, heron, otters, woodduck and even mink!

It is time California makes a commitment to reward landowners who commit to allowing these important ecosystem engineers on their land. An environmental tax credit would be an excellent incentive to remind landowners to try letting these water engineers on their landscape. Education and resource distribution is important as well.

For far too long landowners have looked at beavers merely as a nuisance or helpful only in very remote locations. The truth is that anyplace that needs water needs beavers.
And California’s water portfolio should reflect that.

The photo attachments are relevant information regarding California’s new fire season showing beaver wetlands as protected oasis. Some great resources to read more about this are linked below, but I would be happy to connect you with other resources or information to get this conversation moving in the right direction.

I concluded by adding links to Ben’s book, Ellen’s book, and the beaver restoration guidebook. Then I included Emily’s fire video and these photos for good measure. I’m hoping they got the message.

Oh, look. Yesterday I found something very special for us to celebrate. Enjoy.

I SEE BEAVER PEOPLE

Guess who’s whose stop motion made it on the Verge?

‘Dam good’ video shows how beavers could fight fires

An adorable video that shows how beavers can fight wildfires is making the rounds on Twitter, and it’s everything science communication should be: short, compelling, clear, and about beavers.

The stop-motion video is the work of Emily Fairfax, a graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder. It shows a beaver building a dam and transforming the forest upstream into a marshy wetland filled with splotches of vegetation in shades of green. When a fire rages through the forest, the ponds of water and healthy plants protect the area above the beaver dam from the flames. That includes the beaver, which holds up a little flag that says “I’m okay!”

So far, the video has more than ~~180,000~~ 292000 views on Twitter, and it’s getting the delighted reactions it deserves. Conservation experts, teachers, and beaver advocates have all asked Fairfax for her permission to share the video. Others want to know how she made it, and, as it turns out, it’s pretty low-tech: Fairfax set up a beaver dam in her kitchen, snapped photos on her iPhone, and used an app to turn them into a stop-motion video.

Ohhh it makes me so happy that Emily gets a fitting rollout for her efforts! Think of ALL those people delightfully forced to make the connection between beavers and fire prevention! Think of how powerful broadcast this is while you’re basically looking for a job, to do a little wonderful thing that makes headlines in a field your ground-breaking research pretty much invented!

The whole thing started because Fairfax is wrapping up her PhD and is studying the ways that beavers can help their habitat withstand hazards like fire and drought. Now that she’s applying to jobs, she’s spending a lot of time trying to explain her research, and she realized she kept reaching for a visual aid. “I’m trying to talk with my hands, and I want to pull up all these pictures on my phone,” she tells The Verge. So she made a video instead.

She set the scene on a cork board at her kitchen table with construction paper, rocks from her garden, and leftover fake plants from her wedding. She made the stream, beaver dam, pond, wetland, vegetation, and the fire out of felt. The beaver was the easy part. “I already had a bunch of little beaver toys because people give me beaver stuff for the holidays every year,” she says.

HAHAHAHAHA when Jon and I read that article aloud we laughed and laughed. Ohh little phd beaver girl just starting out, there’s such a decorated road ahead of you! I still resent a little Ben’s description of our home in the book Eager, but it’s a fair cop. See what your house looks after doing this work for a decade,

To my knowledge, the world’s largest collection of beaver-themed tchotchkes, knickknacks, and memorabilia is housed in an oak-shaded street in Martinez, California. To enter, you must pass beneath the mural that hangs over the front porch — a reddish beaver, stick grasped in forepaws, tail raised in salutation. The dim interior has the feel of a shrine. Beaver magnets cling to the refrigerator; plush beavers perch atop the bureaus; a gallery’s worth of beaver paintings, prints, and posters stare down from every wall. Gnawed stumps rest next to the fireplace. Embroidered beaver napkins hang in the kitchen. In the backyard, a clay beaver crouches in the birdbath. If I’d come during Christmas, I would have seen a cardboard beaver cut-out, roughly the size of a black bear, strung with lights on the front lawn.

Ben Goldfarb, Eager: The surprising secret lives of beavers and why they Matter.

Don’t feel bad, Emily. You’re off to an AWESOME start! I just know that someday soon National Geographic will describe you too as “Colorful”!

It took her a few tries to snap about 300 photos on her phone, which she stitched together with the Stop Motion Pro app. Then she added sound effects in iMovie — including a banjo soundtrack. The music is a nod to documentaries about beavers, Fairfax told The Verge. “There’s always banjo music playing when they’re building, and I don’t know why,” she says. “I can’t break tradition!”

She tweeted the video on Sunday, not expecting it to have much reach beyond what Fairfax calls her “beaver people” — a small community of people interested in beaver science. She went on a hike, and when she came back, the tweet had blown up. “I’m getting comments from K-12 educators, I’m getting comments from land managers,” she says. “Ultimately that’s the goal of something like this, to make people interested who wouldn’t otherwise read my papers, or come to my conference presentations.”

I love being called “beaver people”. In fact I love it with a fiery passion. Thank you Emily for naming the fantastic club I worked so hard to join.

Fairfax thinks part of the video’s appeal is its brevity. “Scientists have great tendency to ramble on — myself included — when we’re talking about things we really like,” she says. This video, by contrast, is less than a minute long. And the best part is that it doesn’t use any of the jargon that can make science so impenetrable because it doesn’t have any words.

Ahh what a sweet way to graduate into beaver life. Emily I an SO happy for you and all the exciting beaver places you’re going to go and all the exciting beaver people you’re going to meet and inspire. In the meantime I’m going to believe that that some cousin or college roomate of some kind of lower aid to Gavin Newsome is going to see this and the conversation about California’s monster fire season is being helped by beavers is going to come up!

Maybe as soon as tomorrow. What a perfect way to start beaver conference week. Even though we can’t be there we get to celebrate your wonderful addition to the conversation. Congratulations Emily!

PAY ATTENTION IF YOU ARE FLAMMABLE

heidi08 Beavers and Fire Prevention February 18, 2019

So yesterday the hardy PhD candidate in ecohydrology, Emily Fairfax, launched an amazing stop-motion video that basically retells her entire dissertation. Emily is at the final stages of her degree, trying to secure the post-graduate job, and already earned a double major in physics and chemistry. This woman is no slouch. And she loves beaver dams. We first talked about the 360 beaver dam project she was working on a few years back. I know that lives are busy and you don’t always have time to watch a video but this is all of 43 seconds long and it will blow your mind. So WATCH this one.

Emily introduced it by saying, “As a scientist I’ve had an “elevator speech” prepared for a few years now. This year I made an “elevator video” & let me tell you: people enjoy seeing my research way more than just hearing about it!”

So what do #beavers have to do with #wildfire? Watch (with sound) & find out!

Isn’t that incredible? Yesterday when Ben sent it to me it had 11 views, so I’ve done what I could to change that. Now I’m just working on getting it seen by our new governor. Something tells me he’d take more than a passing interest. Hmm maybe cities and ranchers with active beaver dams get a fire-buffer-zone tax credit? Sure makes sense to me.

Meanwhile I was contacted last week by a reporter in Philadelphia about the rebounding beaver population and i made sure to explain that it wasn’t nearly as big as it once was. I’m glad to see that the story that follows lacks the customary alarm bells.

Is there a beaver resurgence in Philadelphia?

Witmer said there was almost no beaver activity 20 years ago in the city. But parks employees have seen more signs of beaver activity in the last decade — though it’s unclear just when it started. According to Witmer, the department has put a lot of effort to restore wildlife in this stretch of Haddington Woods. The beaver activity is proof that their efforts are working.

Sharon T. Brown has studied beavers for about 30 years, and she’s one of the founders of Beavers: Wetlands and Wildlife, an educational nonprofit. She said taking a census of beavers is hard, but the highest estimates from experts put their U.S. population at 20 million, a fraction of their population before the fur trade and farming exploded.

“By no way are they surging somehow out of control, if the habitat no longer can support them, you know so many of our cities and towns are built around waterways,” said Brown.

Where does that population estimate even come from? i can’t think that anyone’s counting. That’s like 40,000 a state. Roughly 8000 beaver families. Knowing the numbers of beavers that are killed each year in our state that seems very ambitious. That would mean that a beavers chance of being depredated in California was under one percent? That just can’t be true.

i’m sure it’s got to be more dangerous to be a beaver.

BETTER THAN GOATS

heidi08 Beavers and Fire Prevention January 14, 2019

There are lots of reasons California should be caring more about beavers. Salmon for one. Groundwater and drought area another. But the most recent issue to fuel interest in our flat-tailed friends lit up the sky a few months ago and is fresh on all our minds. I was reminded of it vividly by this clever campaign.

To Prevent Fires, One California Town Says ‘Goat Fund Me’

Nestled in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains is the quaint Gold Rush town of Nevada City. Surrounded by unkempt brush, the old, highly flammable city is in danger: With California’s wildfires raging with unprecedented ferocity in recent years, one spark could doom Nevada City to the same fate that neighboring Paradise met in November.

But not if the goats get there first. Realizing its predicament, Nevada City has launched a crowdfunding campaign to pay goats (or, more accurately, their herders) to clear brush at the edges of town. It’s called, yes, Goat Fund Me. And it’s part of an ungulate awakening: All across the state, business is booming for herders as panicked homeowners and towns reckon with the wildfire menace.

Heh heh heh. “Goat fund me“, Now that’s clever. some one gets points for that. And it’s a smart way to get some media behind a solid idea. Thinking about the brush everyone has stopped seeing and some realistic solutions for getting rid of it.

On their own, goats only do part of the job; they’re more of an advance party. They get in there and strip out the brush enough for human crews to come in with chainsaws to cart away the bigger branches and such. Of particular convenience is the fact that goats will happily eat poison oak. “They’re cute little things, but it’s only one little piece,” says Senum. “Who doesn’t love a goat?

Still, the firefighting ruminant business is booming in California, beyond Nevada City. “It seems like everybody kind of woke up with these big fires,” says Fowler. “And I tell you what, there’s a huge opportunity. If somebody wants to get into the business, now would be a good time.”

You know what would be an even better idea? Of course you do. To bring in beavers. They would get rid of the fuel and increase the water content in the soil all around them to boot. Now we just need a catchy name.

Any suggestions?

Lisa Hodge is a reader of this website and a Wildlife Rehabilitator at Valley Wildlife Care, Inc. of Virginia She recently launched this campaign to raise money for the group. I thought the beaver was so sweet and the message so fitting that our readers might want to help out a bit.

Lisa’s message on facebook read:

I hope you all will be as supportive as you have been in the past. This shirt is extra special because my good friend Michele Sommers of Sommers End Originals did the design. She made the idea I had inside my head come to life for us and I am so very grateful.

Click here to purchase your own and support the good work done by these wildlife friends. I ‘met’ Lisa after she rehabbed a beaver and fell deeply in love with the kit in her care. She has been devoted to the animals in her care and of course that kind of behavior deserves your support.

LOOK WHAT THE CLIMATE CHANGE REPORT DRAGGED IN!

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact, Beavers and Fire Prevention, Beavers and Forests November 27, 2018

Today’s beaver news is brought to you by “RELOCATION” because for some crazy reason people think letting beavers make their own decisions usually doesn’t work out. We’ll start with relocation for the Tulalip tribe.

To fix salmon streams, leave it to beavers

The Tulalip Tribes came up with a a plan to relocate aquatic troublemakers to rivers in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. Now, these brilliant ecosystem engineers are doing more than just finding a new home: They’re mitigating some of the impacts of climate change for Washington’s threatened salmon. Relocated beavers dam up natural streams with such efficiency that they create the deep, cool pools salmon need to thrive.

Join us to watch how scientists trap, rehabilitate and relocate beavers from suburban pond to mountain stream — and discover the strange technique used to tell a male beaver from a female.

Now if you’ve been here before you’ve probably heard my usual riff about moving beavers – while it’s dimly better than killing them it still fails to recognize the basic challenge which is we need to change the humans, not the animals. Especially since new beavers will just move back soon anyway and do the whole thing all over again.

But still, its a step in the right direction to say that beavers have some good points and are worth keeping around for those reasons. And its a nice film.

It’s good to see folks working hard to fix what we’re breaking at a great rate. Speaking of breaking things, Ben pointed out something really astonishing yesterday. We all heard something about the horrific climate change report released Friday, but since he’s a real journalist and scholar he actually read it. Which lead to his finding something very, very interesting in the section 6 on forests.

The upshot of the report is that we’re fucked, and your children, (if you were fool-hardy enough to have them) are really, really fucked. The report does a good job of stressing how expensive the changes already are to the economy – showing how changes causing drought, the pine beetle epidemic, a smaller snow pack and terrible hotter fires, And I guess when things are already ruined and hopeless they are ready to try any crazy scheme to fix the problem. Ergo this:

Well, well, well. Will you look at that, The stone which has been rejected shall become the corner stone indeed!

I always knew that when beavers benefits finally got a voice in the federal government it would come from the Forest Service. Of course I had assumed it would have happened years ago, or be a full five pages in the chapter not a few lines in a random inset, but still. Still. Some how, some way, the right people got the right message. Baby steps? I guess we just had to be so screwed that folks were ready to try even the craziest idea they could think of and then they’d finally believe it!

Yay?

Which is a lovely video about relocation, and mighty inspiring. I was surprised when I hunted for it on you tube to find this one. I don’t even remember making it. And I obviously didn’t even know yet that the offer was to move TWO family members only and kill the rest. You can see why I was never a fan.