Category: Beavers and Frogs

In which British scientists discover gravity also works in the UK

heidi08 Beavers and Birds, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? November 14, 2015

To say the UK is ‘flirting’ with beaver reintroduction is a vast understatement. The relationship has moved way beyond the blushing sideline gaze phase and now moved to furtive groping under the table. We have an film crew coming from the UK to film beaver stories next week as evidence, and I wanted to share this little bit of excitement as well from New Scientist.

Should the UK bring back beavers to help manage floods?

It seems that beavers’ dams might help prevent flooding, cleanse water as well as help boost fish populations and wetland ecosystems.

The dams regulate the water flow both during heavy rains and droughts. “When it rains, more water gets stored in ponds behind the dams, and when it’s drier, water is gently released to keep rivers flowing,” says Richard Brazier of the University of Exeter, UK, head of the study of half-a-dozen beavers confined to an isolated woodland in Devon.

If reintroduced, they could be of most use in narrow tributaries and headwaters near the sources of major river systems where holding back water could potentially have most impact on preventing floods.

Brazier’s study, due to finish next March, also found that the staircase of dams filtered pollutants washed off farms. “We found that on average each litre coming in contains 150 milligrams of sediment, but only 40 milligrams on the way out,” he says. Likewise, nitrates arrived at average concentrations of 6 milligrams per litre, but left at less than a milligram per litre, and phosphorus levels dipped from 0.16 to 0.02 milligrams per litre.

Well, well, well. So beavers control water, help biodiversity and reduce toxins eh? You don’t say. I always suspected as much, but of course I wanted to be absolutely sure that things didn’t work completely differently in the UK than they do in every other country on the planet. You know, the way chips mean fries or having your landlord ‘knock you up’ in the morning doesn’t mean he impregnated you, – so you’re saying beavers might not destroy the ecosystem there?

Believe me, no one is more surprised to learn that the laws of nature operate the same way across the pond than the chief researcher himself who notes;

His preliminary findings compare brown trout populations from two similar streams that drain into a loch near Inverness, one with reintroduced beavers and one without. “There were more than double the number of trout on the ‘beaver stream’, and they were bigger,” says Kemp. He says that like beavers, trout prefer deep water so they luxuriate in beaver ponds.

Only Elaine can adequately express my shocked response to hearing that the habits of anglican fish parallel the habits of every other fish on the globe. I should send this to NOAA right away, because Michael Pollock is going to be so relieved that his decades of painstaking research haven’t been casually disproven in by a boy scout in Scotland.

Sheesh.

For something truly fresh and surprising, lets finish with this nice article from Illinois on beaver sculpture.

Good Natured: Sculpture in the Park: The Delnor Woods Edition

Sure enough, not far from the front pond at Delnor Woods, a 20-foot-tall elm tree lay by the asphalt path. A helpful visitor had come along and lugged it out of the main thoroughfare, but it still needed a little cutting to be completely out of the way.

As I dragged my trusty bow saw back and forth across the 5-inch diameter trunk, I once again, as I always do, marveled at how beavers can cut down trees using nothing more than their really strong jaw muscles and four sharp incisors.

I was bent, at a somewhat awkward angle, over the tree and saw and thoughts of beavers occupying much of my attention. But I happened to look up, for just a second. And that’s when I saw it. Delnor Woods’ answer to Sculpture in the Park.

Perhaps it was the way the sunlight was hitting it. Or maybe it was the fact that I was somewhat sleep deprived. At any rate, I positively was awestruck by the beauty of the creation before me.

Readers of this website should not be surprised to know that author of this charming speculation, Pam Otto, is not the first person to consider the idea that beaver chews were art. This topic has been much discussed over the years, and our beaver chews are among our most precious items for display. In fact one has even been stolen!

Pam’s right to be impressed, but that’s hardly the best we’ve ever seen. Check out this offering from a friend on the Beaver Management Forum a few years back.

I almost forgot, there are two gifts from friends that I wanted to share this morning, the first is chckle is from Napa’s Rusty Cohn:

And the second is from our old friend Ian Timothy, whose illustrious academic career at CalArts has clearly not dampened his beaverly Holiday Spirit:

11036076_10201035825455084_5227760135022604597_n — Gingerbread cookies by Ian Timothy

Beaver Marvels

heidi08 Beavers and Birds, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Who's saving beavers now? November 13, 2015

Several people were very kind about my happy little post yesterday, and I was excited to find this in my beaver wanderings. It seems almost fated find it now.

“Even in an area teeming with millions of people, the marvels wrought by this amazing animal can still unfold. On a forest preserve land in northern Cook County, beavers transformed what had been an ordinary field into a beautiful open water cattail marsh. In early April, hundreds of newly arrived tree swallows skimmed the smooth surface for insects. Painted turtles soaked in the spring sun, and chorus frogs filled the air with music. Yellow-headed blackbirds, pied-billed grebes, great blue herons, and other water-dependent birds nested or tarried during migration …. Then, after a few years, the beaver disappeared. There hasn’t been as much water or wildlife since, but some day a young beaver looking for a home of its own will come upon the site, find it hospitable and stay.”

Isn’t that a beautiful quote? I happened upon it when I found this nice article from The Illinois Steward, which immediately got my attention by leading with a quote from Enos Mills. The careful author, Susan Post, also read up on beavers with Dietland Muller-Swarze, so I was liking her even before she rewarded me with Greenberg. You can see why;

In a Place Called Illinois: Watchable Wildlife: Beaver

On a recent March visit to Heron Pond, a part of the Cache River State Natural Area, it was a duck-kind of day, gray and raining. There were no wildflowers blooming, and birds were hidden or silent. Yet there was a lot to see and ponder. I noticed an increase in beaver activity. Quite a few small cypress saplings had been cut; along the boardwalks, I noticed many debarked twigs and branches, several trees bore scars from gnawing, and some new raised mounds had appeared. Back in Champaign, I visited our library, where I discovered the book The Beaver, Nat-ural History of a Wetlands Engineer by Dietland Muller–Schwarze and Lixing Sun; and I talked with Illinois Natural History Survey mammalogist Joe Merrit. My observations took on new meaning; they were more than just visions of gnawed wood!

The work of beaver helps maintain a healthy hydrologic balance. Their dams help replenish the water table and store water. Stored water and a raised water table are helpful to plants and animals during a drought. The water-flow pattern is altered, reducing erosion. When they open up forests along the streams, they create new habitats—ponds, swamps, and meadows. New habitat attracts other organisms, and soon a complex community develops.

Can I get an amen? Nice work, Susan! We shouldn’t be surprised, because there has been, over the years, a fluttering of beaver advocacy from the state. Donald Hey, founder of the Wetlands Initiative, is a huge beaver believer, and the Lincoln Park beavers received pretty significant media attention and public backing. It is also the source of one of my favorite urban beaver photos. This is a fence at Lincoln Park with a beaver lodge behind it. Don’t you wonder what it sounded like when you walk by?

A week from now Worth A Dam will be doing a tree planting with the watershed steward intern, and the documentary crew from the UK might want to film it and visit. We’ll see. I was horrified to learn yesterday that I received a my first youtube STRIKE for sharing the recent video of the Devon beavers. I had to go to copy right school and everything. I am more mortified than I should probably be I guess. But lets just pause and remember how adorable that footage was of mom beaver moving the kits to the second lodge. Ahh. Maybe it was worth it.

Now I’m on probation for 6 months so you will get no more secret videos from me. Sorry!

On a clear day, you can see for beavers

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver News, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Who's saving beavers now? November 12, 2015

Here’s a nice article from last month’s Freshwater Magazine. It’s a sweet piece of writing with some delicious frosting added yesterday that I’ll tell you about later. Trust me, you won’t be disappointed.

When a group of five scientists in the Pacific Northwest began advertising for workshops on the science of beaver restoration, they didn’t anticipate a few things.

The workshops would be filled to capacity within a week. There was so much interest they needed to increase both the workshop size and the total number of workshops offered. There would be a waitlist, followed by phone calls and emails from people clamoring to get in.

“People are starting to see the value of beaver for more than just their pelts or more than just pests, but how we can work in concert with them to fix more rivers and streams.”

Regulatory agency staff, nonprofits, tribal representatives, private landowners, members of the general public and others paid the $50 fee for one-day intensives on the science behind how beaver restore streams.

But the sharing of knowledge and best practices would live beyond the day-long events. Workshop discussions were captured in an official guidebook on beaver restoration, published this past June.

“The publication is meant to be an accessible resource for anyone using beaver to restore waterways,” said Greg Lewallen, a master’s student at Portland State University and the research assistant for the project. “With enough educational outreach, the perception of these animals will start to change. That’s why it’s critical we continue to spread the word about the large role that these animals play in ecosystems.”

This article does a great job of emphasizing how thrilled they were by the response they got. Waiting lists are a reminder that the west was hungry for this information. You probably remember this publication from the delightful cover that featured Cheryl’s photo. People were really excited by this information. Now the crew was so estatic by the response they got that they want to work on volume II.

Only in this second version they want to include a chapter on the topic dearest to my heart. Are you sitting down? They want to include a chapter on this:

Did you know that 81% of all Americans live in urban settings? So if most of us are going to deal with beavers its going to be someplace next to sidewalks and parking meters. And if the fact that they were including a chapter on the topic was all the news for this morning, that would be enough. I’d be in heaven floating on a pink fluffy cloud.

But that is not all. No, that is not all.

Now if you want to study tortoises you go to the Galapagos, if you want to see the works of Michaelanglo you go to Rome, and apparently if you want to learn about Urban Beavers you contact Martinez. Greg wrote me this week and we arranged a fantastic phone call for yesterday, where I told him the long and winding story of our beavers and the tireless work the people of Martinez had done to save them.

I was so flattered to be asked, and thrilled to think that before our city the topic of Urban Beavers was never even discussed. (In fact the words were probably only paired as an obscure reference to leggy females that drank Manhattans and smoked black cigarettes.) But now the words actually existed. And Urban Beavers were a THING, like open space or two-way traffic. And they wanted to include them in the next edition!!!

My excitement could only be described with this video short.

So I was as excited as little Madeline here during our conversation, and kept missing words and skipping over myself. But, since this was a story I had told a thousand times before, I found my way well enough. And before the conversation was over, a little moth of a thought started fluttering wistfully in my mind. I shushed it away many times but it came only back stronger.

What if I could be a co-author on this chapter. Was it even possible?

All through the hour long conversation I waived the fluttering thought away and tried to imagine whether I was qualified for such an auspicious venture. It’s true I had already co-authored two papers on beavers that were published in scientific journals. And a few in my trained field of psychology, where I had even been sole author. So maybe it wasn’t a crazy idea. But was it impossible? This was NOAA, Fish and Wildlife and the USFS; did my scrabbling, back room beaver-tactics really belong there?

Well, some dreams never see the light of day, and some apples fall to the ground before they ripen.We can never know what would have happened if I had summoned the courage to ask Greg if I could be a co-author of the chapter.

Because HE ASKED ME FIRST.

Guess what I answered. Go ahead, guess, I can wait.

More Beaver Gospel from HCN

heidi08 Beaver News, Beavers, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Who's saving beavers now? November 9, 2015

In the beginning there was the word.

And the word was beaver.

The first truly exciting article I read about beaver was from High Country News in 2009. It described the way we had forgotten what watersheds were supposed to look like and introduced me to the dynamic character of Mary Obrien, describing her ‘long think rope of a gray braid.’ I was so excited to see her on the schedule at the first beaver conference that I peeked around looking for long gray hair, and was dissappointed that there were too many possibilities to guess. It was okay, she had cut her hair by then, but we met anyway, went to lunch and next year she came to the beaver festival. Remember?

Well this morning High Country News has done it again: celebrated beaver contribution on a grand scale with an article about the much beloved Methow Project and its guiding light Kent Woodruff. I feel obliged to say that the great headline was hijacked from the Canadian version of Jari Osborne’s game-changing documentary. But the rest of the text is golden.

The beaver whisperer

The lovers are wards of the Methow Valley Beaver Project, a partnership between the U.S. Forest Service, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Methow Salmon Recovery Foundation that, since 2008, has moved more than 300 beavers around the eastern Cascades. These beavers have damaged trees and irrigation infrastructure, and landowners want them gone. Rather than calling lethal trappers, a growing contingent notifies the Methow crew, which captures and relocates the offenders to the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest and state land.

Why would Washington invite ditch-clogging nuisances — so loathed that federal Wildlife Services killed 22,000 nationwide in 2014 — into its wildlands? To hear Methow project coordinator Kent Woodruff tell it, beavers are landscape miracle drugs. Need to enhance salmon runs? There’s a beaver for that. Want to recharge groundwater? Add a beaver. Hoping to adapt to climate change? Take two beavers and check back in a year.

Decades of research support Woodruff’s enthusiasm. Beaver wetlands filter sediments and pollutants from streams. They spread rivers across floodplains, allowing water to percolate into aquifers. They provide rearing grounds for young fish, limit flooding and keep ephemeral creeks flowing year-round.

“We want these guys everywhere,” says Woodruff, a white-stubbled Forest Service biologist with an evangelical gleam in his blue eyes. On this sweltering July morning, he watches as wildlife scientists Catherine Means and Katie Weber hoist Chomper and Sandy, now caged, into the truck that will convey them to the Okanogan-Wenatchee. “We want beavers up every stream, in all the headwaters.”

Yes we do. And mouth too. (Ahem). I’m so happy this is getting the attention of the higher-ups. Kent is a mild-mannered but passionate man who makes easy alliances across party lines. I’ve always been a little jealous of him. Compared to our hard scrabble here in Martinez, the Methow project has always lived a fairly charmed life because it has SO much agency support. Here’s the list of partners in 2014:

So you can see he’s very gifted at playing well with others. One thing I love about the article is getting the back story about Kent himself;

That’s where Woodruff came in. Since arriving in the Okanagan in 1989, he’d focused on birds, installing nesting platforms for owls. But he yearned to leave an enduring legacy, and in 2008 his opportunity -arrived. John Rohrer, Woodruff’s supervisor, had been relocating beavers on a small scale since 2001 — even digging a holding pool in his own backyard. Meanwhile, the Washington Department of Ecology wanted to improve regional water quality. Woodruff thought beavers could help. He offered to expand Rohrer’s endeavor.

I never knew he was a bird man! Cheryl will be happy to read that. Now I’m a purist and want there to be a sentence in here crediting Sherri Tippie for the realization that beaver families do better when they’re relocated as a unit. But I guess saving beavers is a bit like the story of Stone Soup if you’re lucky. Everyone contributes what they can without realizing it matters and in the end helps create something nourishing.

Anyway, its a great article. Go read the whole thing, and if you feel inclined leave a comment about the valuable role beavers can play in urban landscapes.

Here’s was my contribution yesterday, which is an timely response to the articles implication that the answer to our beaver problems is to take them out of the city and move them up country. (As you know, I believe the answer is to let them move wherever they dam well please and make adjustments accordingly.) Credit where its due, the play on words comes from our friend Tom Rusert in Sonoma. But I’m fairly happy with its application here. See if you can tell what city this is:

Painting the town – er trunk, in Fargo

heidi08 Beaver Chewing, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? November 8, 2015

Beaver Backers paint trees in Fargo to protect furry friends

Thief River Falls resident Nina Berg, a member of the Beaver Backers organization that sprung up to defend the Fargo beavers, said the large-scale tree painting Saturday will hopefully spare the beavers.

The board voted to cull beavers after hearing concerns from residents and staff about the animals destroying trees and costing the city thousands of dollars. Park District officials said later they were open to non-leathal options.

The painting is a solution that will appease beaver backers and those concerned with the trees, Berg said.

“(The mixture) will be very unappealing to the beavers, and they will avoid those trees that we’re trying to protect,” Berg said.

The group spent several hours on Saturday painting more than 1,300 trees on the Fargo side of the river. The group will paint about 75 percent of the trees in the park and save 25 percent of the trees for the beavers to munch on and build dams

Hurray for the sensible, compassionate folks of Fargo who held a kickstarter to raise funds for the project and got 30 volunteers out in November to sand paint trees! 1300 is A LOT of trees. They are officially the tree-painting capital of the world now. I’m thrilled that this was able to happen, but still a little confused about the color choice.? Why not match the trunk? We’ve certainly marched into Home Depot with willow branches for them to match. But heck, maybe mint green was on sale.

Michelle Peterson said the painting will save beavers and the trees and hopefully sway the Park District to allow the beavers stays of execution. “If they come out here and see that it’s working, then hopefully they’ll let us keep coming out and doing this every year,” Berg said, adding that the group had permission from the Park District to paint the trees.

Nina and Michelle ROCK! They got tons of media for this project and volunteer support. Fingers crossed they used enough mason sand to really discourage those beavers. Jon always found that by the end he was using his hands to really get the sand to stick.

And because remarkable stories like this deserve a treat, I’m sharing the stunning photo found by Ann Cameron Siegal on Creative Commons. It was taken by Elizabeth Haslam and posted yesterday on the US Fish and Wildlife Facebook page. And some lovely human said, “I just saw this fantastic documentary on all the great things beavers do”.

Guess what the nation’s wildlife experts commented. Go ahead, guess.

great mother kit beaver — Elizabeth Haslam: Creative Commons

“Awesome! Do you remember what it’s called? In case folks are interested.”

That’s right, even though all of America and parts of Canada watched Jari Osborne’s incredible documentary in 2014, and all of Canada watched it in 2013, even though it had the highest ratings of any Nature program on Public television that year and was the one that PBS sent for Emmy consideration, the experts at fish and wildlife didn’t even know about it. Because, I guess, busman’s holiday. They already know it all. Why learn more?

If they wanted to learn more they should come to the beaver festival this year. I spent yesterday finishing the grant application for this year’s children’s activity. It details how Mike at Wildbryde will design charms shaped like rail cars to for children to fashion into a bracelet. I can’t help being a little proud of this.