Category: Beavers and Insects

Beaver friends you didn’t know you had!

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and Ice, Beavers and Insects, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? December 12, 2016

There is a charming column this morning from a NY forester who grudgingly appreciates his beaver neighbors. The author is Paul Hetzler. Thank goodness!

North Country scofflaw beavers don’t ask DEC to okay their dams

Among the myriad blessings in my life are the neighbors. In the decade I’ve lived at my current address they have come through with everything from a jump-start on a cold morning to a cup of sugar in the midst of pie-making. They’ve even delivered and stacked firewood when I was ill for an extended time.

A couple of years ago I became concerned when a new family built a house next door, just threw it together without so much as a building permit or a civil “hello.” They were hard-workers, to be sure, and could fell timber like there was no tomorrow, but were very stand-offish, and I began to eye them with suspicion. After it was brought to my attention they were beavers, we got along much better.

This population rebound is great for improved water quality and groundwater storage, healthier fisheries, habitat diversification, and more migratory waterfowl. It is not such good news when beaver engineering clashes with human engineering, as happened one morning when I found that a stream, usually directed under my dirt road, was suddenly flowing over it and washing away the roadbed at quite a clip.

Exemplars of family values, beavers are monogamous for life, which translates to maybe a 10-year marriage between first mating at two to three years and death at the ripe age of 10 to 15. This is better than the 8.2-year average length of marriage in the U.S. And both male and female beavers help raise their offspring.

Social bonds are strong, with three generations often living together. Older siblings frequently pitch in to groom or babysit the young kits. Beavers of all ages, especially yearlings and kits, have been observed engaging in play. This is one of the reasons many Native American peoples refer to beavers as “Little People,” and hold them in high esteem.

Even though they may have the moral high ground when it comes to social issues, beavers can be annoying neighbors. I had to protect the trunks of young fruit trees from beaver teeth, and “adjust” their dam so the yard did not flood. Solutions can be simple, like an “over-under” pipe that lets them build the dam as tall as they want while leaving the water level where you want it.

Accurate and amusing? I guess years of living down the street from Beavers: Wetlands and Wildlife has paid off, Paul. You have achieved a fairly rare accomplishment by reviewing beaver attributes in a new way that I actually enjoy reading. Thanks for this and the light-hearted willingness to wrap trees.

Trust me. Your new neighbors will give back, too.

This was posted on Facebook by Michael Foseberg of last night at the Platte River. We are going to be fast friends, I can tell.

There was quite a bit of nighttime activity at the beaver dam recently near the Platte River. And it’s obvious that between the river otter, mama beaver and raccoon that amazingly all make appearances in this 15 second remote video clip, that the mama beaver rules. Beaver dams don’t just hold back water, but provide travel corridors and create habitat for myriad wildlife species that rely on the beaver’s water engineering skills to survive. With the help of remote cameras and technologies developed with Jeff Dale of TRLcam.com, I am trying to document a year in the life of a beaver dam complex near the banks of the Platte River and see what we can discover as part of the ongoing work for our Platte Basin Timelapse project.

Save

This just in: beavers build dams!

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers and Insects, Beavers and trout, Environmental December 10, 2016

For those of us who have done our homework Don Maclean’s column is kind of a non-story. But recognizing that this columnist is writing from Nova Scotia makes us pretty excited. We’re grading on a curve and that side of Canada is notoriously slow to acknowledge beaver benefits. Nearby PEI once argued adamantly with Rickipedia that beavers weren’t even native. So, given that background, this is a pretty exciting article.

COLUMN: Beaver dams have effect on trout location

I recently spent some time looking at a beaver dam on a small stream near my house.

While beavers often do some damage with their dams they also play an important role in maintaining healthy aquatic ecosystems. Most people are familiar with beavers, and beaver dams. They are often a nuisance when they dam bridges and culverts and many anglers feel their dams also serve as a barrier to fish migration in small streams. This may be the case during low flows but usually in the fall, when fish are moving upstream to spawn, water flows are higher and most fish manage to get over or through them.

Beaver dams actually benefit the environment by stabilizing stream flows, reducing silt and providing habitat for fish and other wildlife.

Beavers build dams to provide more water for them to build their houses and to store feed for the winter. I find beaver dams very interesting as they use local materials to build structures which are incredibly effective at holding water.

Ponds created by the dams are often deep. This depth provides protection for fish as well as a refuge from warm stream temperatures. In my experience many of these ponds also tend to have good populations of aquatic insects and leeches, all great sources of food for fish.

Yes, beaver dams have increased invertebrates to feed fish. And the water is deeper so it doesn’t freeze solid. This article sounds like something written by a man surrounded by nonbelievers and should actually be titled “No wait, hear me out!” Obviously Nova Scotia is thick with fishermen and bureaucrats who think beaver dams are bad for fish (even though we and NOAA know better). I can practically see him with his hands raised to protect his head from all the tomatoes getting thrown. He ends with a hurried reference to Giardiasis just to show he is still one of the boys.

We understand, Don. It is hard to be the first one in the cave who sees the benefits of fire. But someday they’ll all want it. Trust me.

Surrounded by riches and treasures

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver Rehabilitation, 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, Creative Solutions, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? December 5, 2016

It’s Monday, you have tons of Christmas wrapping and decorating to do, so you need this. Really.

Back when famed wildlife photographer was photographing our ill-fated baby beavers, she would have to leave occasionally to go to Washington where Sarvey rehab facility had a very small baby beaver that she needed to include with the photos for the beaver story for Ranger Rick. I remember because in the beginning she talked about filming him in a ghillie suit because he shouldn’t learn to trust humans. The timing is right and I think this little guy was it.

Never A Dull Bling

I work at Sarvey Wildlife Care Center, a rescue and rehab facility for wildlife.

In May 2015, this baby beaver was discovered by some campers. He was without his mother and too young to survive on his own, so the campers brought him to us. We actually already had a female beaver with us who was rehabbing from an animal attack, and the two beavers were eventually put together. The older female became a surrogate to the baby male. The two beavers spent a year with us. This past spring they were both released, together, in a secluded area with lots of access to trees, water, and natural habitat.

Beavers play a crucial role in biodiversity. Many species rely on beaver-created habitat, and a lot of these species who rely on beavers are threatened or endangered. This year, the baby American beaver was made Patient of the Year at Sarvey. Ornaments and cards were made to celebrate this particular animal.

BENEFITS OF BEAVER PONDS

Decrease damaging floods
Recharge drinking water aquifers
Remove pollutants from surface and ground water
Drought protection
Decreased erosion

Sarvey does excellent rehab work and has earned a reputation throughout the world for their wildlife care. Aside from having the very cutest kit photo I have ever seen, they understand why beavers matter, which isn’t always the case. If you want to send them some love donate here because they deserve it.

Now there’s something that I’m even more excited to talk about. It’s an article in the very respected magazine Natural History that a beaver buddy alerted me to yesterday. The article is by Katy Spence and she obviously spent some quality time with our beaver friends in Alberta with Dr. Glynnis Hood and Lorne Fitch of Cows and Fish. You can’t believe how great this article is. Guess what the title is. Go ahead, guess.

Ding! Ding! Ding! That’s the title I have been waiting for a decade to read! Somebody give Katy a Worth A Dam t shirt! Unfortunately the very impressive article isn’t online and doesn’t want to be shared with the likes of people who haven’t purchased a subscription, so it required stealth to obtain and sharing it with you requires stealth as well. I figured I’d put the cute baby photo on the top and all the copyright police would walk on by saying ohh, just some cute animal loving website; nothing to see here, move along.

Are they gone? Shhh. It starts with the account of Pierre Buldoc, who wanted to use beaver on is private land.

Sometimes called “nature’s engineers,” the North American beaver (Castor canadensis) is one of the few mammals — including humans — that substantially alters the landscape to suit its own needs. In fact, ecologists consider beavers to be a keystone species because their presence or absence will drastically change an ecosystem. With increasingly extreme weather events, ever-growing human populations, and declining freshwater sources, some beaver advocates believe the animals offer a vital, natural solution for retaining water in ponds and mitigating floods in other riparian ecosystems.

When Bolduc first proposed reintroducing beavers to the landscape, his neighbors — not to mention county officials — were not happy. Beavers had previously clogged a nearby culvert, which, in turn, often washed out the road. They were a nuisance, so the county removed them. Property values, crops, and roads in many rural areas have suffered damage from beaver construction sites. Sometimes, the territorial rodents will cut a favorite tree or even kill curious pets.

Yet, the rodents have had a tremendous impact on Bolduc’s pond. After approaching each of his neighbors individually about the beavers to convince them to try his reintroduction experiment, they eventually agreed. He even suggested an alternate solution for the county road: beaver-proof culverts. Unlike standard culverts, which run parallel to the water, these culverts are perpendicular — letting water rise into them like a straw in a glass. If the water gets high enough, it will drain through a connected horizontal pipe that runs underneath the road, preventing floods. Even when the beavers’ dam breached in May 2016 and drained hundreds of thousands of gallons of water, the culvert prevented a flood.

As climate change increases the risk of extreme weather events, some scientists are eyeing beavers as a tool for maintaining volatile watersheds. In 2008, Glynnis Hood, an environmental scientist at the University of Alberta-Augustana who specializes in wetland ecology and the impact of beavers, published a paper describing beavers’ unprecedented ability to mitigate drought. She and her team analyzed fifty-four years of drought data from Elk Island National Park in Alberta and found that where beaver dams were present, there was more water-up to nine times that of a pond or water source without beavers. Because beaver ponds are so much deeper than other ponds, water lasts longer, even in times of drought.

Hood has continued to examine the nuanced effect beavers have on a landscape, as well as how humans respond to them. She’s completing a study that compares costs of different beaver management efforts. The study will contribute to a larger project, called Leave it to Beavers, which aims to reduce human-beaver conflict. The Alberta-based, inter-agency effort uses citizen science to gather information about the long-term effects beavers can have on a landscape. The project is composed of several agencies, including the Alberta Riparian Habitat Management Society, a non-government agency informally known as “Cows and Fish.” Cows and Fish works with landowners and stakeholders to clarify how water flows through different landscapes, especially agricultural areas.

A riparian specialist for Cows and Fish, Lome Fitch, is trying to spark discussions about living with beavers. He offers a voluntary workshop on how beavers affect the landscape and how humans can peacefully coexist with them. He isn’t interested in pushing people to accept beavers, necessarily. He’s simply holding the door open. “You don’t bring people to the middle,” Fitch said. “You just start them thinking about where their position is and, hopefully, use that and expand their information sources. Maybe they’ll continue to migrate towards the middle.”

Fitch developed a ten-step list of goals, the first of which is building tolerance. Perhaps the most formidable step will be to change government policy in Alberta. The province has no clear policy concerning beavers, leaving confusion over what is permitted and what is not when it comes to relocation and rehabilitation.

The article goes into a full description of flow devices and how they work, and talks about how Glynnis and her students are using them effectively and teaching others how to use them. It even talks about how polarizing beavers are, Rachel Haddock of the Miitakis Institute calls them the ‘Wolves of the watershed’ because people either love them or hate them. Ahh! Sounds familiar!

Then it ends on this POWERFUL note.

If people are willing to compromise with beavers now, the result could be a new narrative in which humans and wildlife co-engineer a healthier, more resilient landscape. The big unknown is whether or not we can move past old assumptions.

That sure is the big unknown alright. But wowowow! What a fantastically public place to put this out there. We can only hope it gets read and circulated in all the right places. Lets hope someone leaves it on the governor’s desk right away. And decorates the halls of congress with it. And forces everyone waiting in line trying to get a depredation permit to read it. And if, btw, you work somewhere someone needs to read it email me, and we’ll see what we can do.

And a child shall lead them…

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, 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, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? November 24, 2016

Mike Callahan posted these photos on the Beaver Management Forum page. This is a first year robotics team called the “Greenheads” with a leader that employed Mike recently to install a flow device and unflood a trail in Massachusetts. Vance the leader blogged about it nicely which I’ve excerpted. You can read about the whole project here:

This fall The Greenheads are taking on the Animal Allies Challenge. The challenge is composed of Core Values, Project and Robot Game components. For The Project, they were tasked with:

Identifying a problem when people and animals interact.
Designing a solution that makes the interaction better for animals, people, or both.
Sharing the problem and solution with others.

The team began by conducting some online research. This led them to consult with beaver expert Mike Callahan from Beaver Solutions. During their interview, Mike explained that beavers are a Keystone species and their work is critical for biodiversity. He did a great job describing how the work that beavers do can be a nuisance for people but how simple solutions can be deployed to remediate common problems seen when people and beavers interact. The kids proposed their idea of building a bridge to replace the current planks on trail 75 and Mike offered feedback on the pros and cons of such a bridge, along with the materials that could be used.

I couldn’t be more proud of The Greenheads. Their teamwork was first-class, they had a lot of fun, and they learned a great deal about the importance of human and beaver interaction. Their solution is certainly an improvement over the previous one and hopefully their efforts will improve the alliance between people and beavers by allowing the beavers to continue to improve biodiversity and water quality in the area while permitting people full access to the trails throughout the year. The team is now sharing their work with the community and preparing for their upcoming robotics event later this month. Go Greenheads!!!

They went on to teach other teams and their class mates what they did and why beavers matter. Look closely at their lovely folded beaver display because you might recognize one of the photos. (And no, I didn’t photo shop it in!)

From Vance G. in Ipswich, MA: “Just a quick update. Thought you’d like to see some pictures from their event this past weekend. They did a great job educating the judges and other teams about beavers.”

That’s right, with a decade of blogging and designing, we’ve created a trickle down beaver economy that will keep pollinating itself long after we’ve gone! That’s my graphic in the middle using Scott Stolsenberg of Ohio’s awesome photo and about 20 other artists silhouettes because creation requires collaboration.

Even without beavers in residence I guess there’s still lots to be thankful for this year. Have a wonderfully thankful day!

MORE TO BE THANKFUL FOR! This just in: Beavers approved in Scotland!

Beavers to remain in Scotland

The Scottish Government is minded to allow beavers to remain in Scotland, Environment Secretary Roseanna Cunningham has announced.

Ms Cunningham has said the species will have to be actively managed, in line with practices in other European countries.

Work has now begun to ensure beavers can be added to Scotland’s list of protected species as soon as possible. It will be the first time a mammal has been officially reintroduced to the UK.

Scottish Ministers have agreed that:

Beaver populations in Argyll and Tayside can remain
The species will receive legal protection, in accordance with the EU Habitats Directive
Beavers will be allowed to expand their range naturally
Beavers should be actively managed to minimise adverse impacts on farmers and other land owners

It will remain an offence for beavers to be released without a licence, punishable by up to 2 years imprisonment and an unlimited fine

Research has shown beavers, which were native to Scotland before being hunted to extinction in the 16^th century, provide important biodiversity benefits.

Environment Secretary Roseanna Cunningham said:

“I have been determined to find a pragmatic approach, which balances the biodiversity benefits of reintroducing beavers with the obvious need to limit difficulties for our farmers.

We are soo SOOO happy for our Scottish beaver friends. I know for a fact it was a heck of a lot of working protecting them in a single city. Imagine how much harder it was to protect them in the entire COUNTRY!!!! Congratulations Paul and Louse et al al al!!!!

Colorado Callings

heidi08 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, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Who's saving beavers now? November 3, 2016

You really should watch this. It was a piece of work to put together, I can promise. But I’m fairly cheered with the result, and with the tech help from Powtoon who for some reason answer questions IMMEDIATELY and at night even if I’m using the free version. Thank you.

Now that you’re informed, maybe you’re looking to share what you know? How about a career in beaver education? Beaver Ponds in Colorado is looking for a new executive director.

Job Description:

Beaver Ponds – www.beaverponds.org – is a young, 501c3 non-profit that began operations in October 2012.

Beaver Ponds mission is to provide environmental education that gives individuals of all ages the tools and knowledge to become better stewards of the earth. Its vision is to become a leading environmental education center inspiring action to protect and improve the environment.

Beaver Ponds serves individuals of all ages in its experiential field-classroom setting. A significant portion of Beaver Ponds’ initiatives are developing programs that will educate young people on how to be better stewards of the earth. Schools visit Beaver Ponds to enhance science lessons through hands-on experiences in ways that strive to meet Colorado State Education Standards.

Beaver Ponds focuses on 6 program areas:
1. Beaver Ecology
2. Watershed Ecology & Stewardship
3. Sustainable Agriculture, Greenhouses & Gardening
4. Medicinal & Native Plants
5. Renewable Energy Systems
6. Healthy Forest Management

That’s right. You could get PAID for doing what I do every day for free. Who knew? The job is is in Park Co Colorado between Fairway and Alma and the center is at a cool 10,200 feet elevation. Altitude sickness might be a issue. When I was in Cuzco, Peru (11,200) a million years ago I was sick as a dog for a while. But hey, its for beavers. You can do it for beavers, right?

Of course the added bonus is that Sherri Tippie is 90 minutes away! Wouldn’t it be fun to do donuts and coffee every saturday?

This morning I’m off to meet with the Junior High principal to talk about his new neighbors. Flashbacks to 7th grade might be an issue. But hey, its for beavers. I can do it for beavers. right?