IT’S TIME THAT BEAVERS LAWYERED-UP

Maybe it’s time to stop asking.

When big things happen it’s usually because people made them happen. Erin Brockovich didn’t win by asking PGE to be please be nicer and stop putting chemicals in the soil. I say its high time beavers lawyered-up and sued the feds for failing the public trust over and over again. Beavers would help us and they’re not letting them even though scientist after scientist is proving why they matter.

This article just pushed me over the edge. What are we fucking waiting for?

Beavers are ecosystem engineers which are capable to facilitate many groups of organisms. However, their facilitation of mammals has been little studied. We applied two methods, camera trapping and snow track survey to investigate the facilitation of a mammalian community by the ecosystem engineering of the American beaver (Castor canadensis) in a boreal setting.

What an interesting study! These researchers used camera traps and tracks in the snow to see if their were more MAMMALS at beaver ponds. Gee aren’t you curious about what they found? Isn’t that a total STUMPER.

We found that both mammalian species richness (83% increase) and occurrence (12% increase) were significantly higher in beaver patches than in the controls. Of individual species, the moose (Alces alces) used beaver patches more during both the ice-free season and winter. The Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra), the pine marten (Martes martes) and the least weasel (Mustela nivalis) made more use of beaver sites during the winter. Our study highlights the role of ecosystem engineers in promoting species richness and abundance, especially in areas of relatively low productivity. Wetlands and their species have been in drastic decline during the past century, and promoting facilitative ecosystem engineering by beaver is feasible in habitat conservation or restoration. Beaver engineering may be especially valuable in landscapes artificially deficient in wetlands.

MORE MOOSE. MORE OTTER. MORE WEASELS. OF course there fucking were. Of course there was more activity at a beaver than at your beaverless control station. They came for food. They came because there were holes in the ice and they were looking for fish. They came because there was more vegetation. They came to eat all the other animals that came to the area.

OF COURSE THERE WERE.

From the aspect of habitat conservation or restoration, it is feasible to identify beavers as facilitators and to promote their populations (Byers et al., 2006), since restoration is especially needed in wetlands due to the loss of 60–90% of these habitats in Europe (Junk et al., 2013). Beavers can be especially valuable in landscapes artificially deficient of wetlands and lacking processes naturally driving heterogeneity (Willby et al., 2018). Many organisms have benefited from beaver-created productivity coupled with an increase of suitable habitat structures (Rosell et al., 2005; Stringer and Gaywood, 2016), both of which affected mammalian diversity and activity at the patch level in our study.

I’m done asking nice. We DESERVE beavers. We deserve water and salmon and wildlife and wood duck and otter. We deserve healthy streams free of nitrates and other pollutants. And we deserve to have access to good clean water all year long.

It’s time to stop asking.

PLEASE REMIND REPORTERS THAT BEAVERS DON’T EAT FISH

heidi08 Beaver Anatomy, beavers and otters, mistaken identities August 30, 2020

It’s time to RELEASE THE CRACKEN as they say. All the snark you’ve been saving up in those long conversations with elderly relatives may officially be unfurled now, Ridicule is called for and fully sanctioned.

The author of this fine vehicle for pointing fingers is Rita Rowand from Virginia.

More than one way to catch a fish in Fauquier County

Riverside Preserve in Northern Fauquier County offers a great place to put a line in the Rappahannock River. Nestled off Leeds Manor Road near Orlean, the preserve is donated land now managed by Fauquier Parks and Recreation and is the only county park with access to the Rappahannock.

The Rappahannock offers many species for the freshwater angler to enjoy, including blue catfish, largemouth bass, striped bass and more.

Okay, so it’s a good fishing spot in Virginia. Check. She hops onto a crag and throws in her line and guess what happens next? You’ll never guess.

Soon, movement caught my eye. Something was approaching in the water: a large beaver swimming toward me. His legs paddled quietly upriver while his tail swung back and forth under the water. No sooner had he passed when a second beaver glided past, presumably searching for fish.

Good Lord. Who lets you write a column in the paper? Does everyone in Virginia think that beavers eat fish or are you just uniquely wrong?

Equally sizable, this one was possibly the mate. Beavers live 90% of their lives in the water, and I was lucky to observe these two, as they can be reclusive.

I was feeling pretty horrified until I read those lines more closely, the part about the beaver swimming by with his “tail swinging back and forth” and realized she was actually talking about on otter. Beaver tails never go back and fourth.

So maybe it was looking for fish.

But it wasn’t a beaver. And it wasn’t with its mate. Otters do not hang with their partners like beavers. It’s strictly get some get gone with otters. Oh and, as Robin of Napa pointed out. Since both species sleep on land, neither species spends 90% of their life in the water.

Without disclosing our location (sorry, folks!), I can report we recently pulled a few bass, with David landing a whopping 22-inch largemouth weighing nearly 5 pounds, while I only landed a smaller version of bass.

As I walked back to the car, the frogs were singing their summer song, and the fireflies twinkled. There was no place else I’d rather be.

We can only assume those were actual frogs and fireflies and not crickets and streetlights. But okay. I get it. You had a nice morning fishing. Next time watch this video, okay?

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BEAVER TRAPPER HAD THE O.J. TRIAL OF HIS DAY

heidi08 beavers and otters, History February 3, 2023

Our beautiful website has a virus. Nothing fatal don’t worry. But the lovely colored background that used to offset the text disappeared yesterday and no one from BlueHost was in the office to help us get it back. I tried, I won’t say valiantly, but desperately to get it back, and am able to set the deep blue again and match frame it for a moment but alas, I cannot ‘save’ it. It can’t be done by the likes of me. So for now we will have white space.

Sigh.

Let’s hope its not just the beginning. There’s plenty more mischief to be had where that came from I can assure you. And lets be cheered with this lovely video from Roxanne Gunn new to the Beaver Management Forum from Massachusetts. I especially like the camera angle.

Looking for distractions I’ve been playing researcher looking for historic reference to beaver in the San Luis Obispo, where they are still claiming beavers don’t belong. Well I got started reading about Isaac Graham. the beaver trapper of great fame who settled in the region and was famously the subject of what is called ‘the first trial’ of California. Seems Graham lead the ‘coup’ that over threw the Mexican Governor at the time. His subsequent capture, trial and imprisonment were said to be the thing that drove Washington to annex California in the first place.

Graham was a curmudgeon who took two wives and started a distillery in Monterey and another in Santa Cruz. He was by all accounts a greedy and difficult man. And not likely the kind of man to make a fortune from a single species and then decide to settle in the one lone region of the state where that species didn’t exist.

One of Graham’s buds was father Luis Martinez who ran the local mission that everything seemed to hinged on in those days. It is so fascinating to spend any time at all among historians, but two things especially jumped out out me. Always history teaches us dismissively that the Spanish/Mexicans who owned our state before we did weren’t interested in the fur trade. And didn’t partake of the quest for pelts. That always sounded odd to me because honestly, who isn’t ‘interested’ in money? And pelts were basically 20 dollar bills lying around just waiting to be picked up.

So father Luiz taught his indian flock to trap otter and ran a trade up and down the coast from SLO to Santa Barbara. He even deal with HBC. And you might be thinking yes for SEA OTTER not beaver, but what we have seen over and over again is that the names used for pelts were pretty interchangeable. Russians were famously trapping what they called ‘sea beaver’ in Russian River. And we all know there were references to river otter described as beaver and visa versa.

Beaver just meant I want that fur. So the term ‘otter’ may not mean strictly otter as we know it. Remember that the word ‘Nutria’ is spanish for ‘otter’. It’s a tangled mess out there.

Anyway, since Isaac had the OJ Trial of his day there is LOTS written about him, both at the time and since. I will keep sniffing and let you know what I find.

RENDER UNTO CAESAR

heidi08 beavers and otters March 9, 2020

Whose is this image and superscription?
¹⁷And Jesus answering said unto them,
Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,
and to God the things that are God’s. Mark 12:17

No wonder people get it wrong all the time. Apparently the animals themselves are mistaken. This amazing photograph is from Ghostbear.

PUTTING BEAVERS ON THE RIVER ‘OTTER’ WASN’T THE BEST IDEA

heidi08 beavers and otters January 22, 2020

There are plenty of perfectly reasonable choices. Sides streams of the Thames, the Trent. the Severn. The Witham, the Avon, the Dee. But you had to pick the Otter. And you didn’t think that might cause a problem down the line?

The other day I was forwarded of an email from Megan at the River Otter Ecology Project. Seems a film crew had contacted her about wanting to do a segment on the beavers. She was rightly confused. So of course sent it to me thinking they had mixed up our names.

I realized right away that this email was, in fact, intended for NEITHER of us. But rather for the good folks on the River Otter working with Beavers. In Devon. They accidentally contacted the River Otter ecology Project when they wanted the beaver project on the river otter! So I contacted the producer and introduced them to Mark Elliot and the good folks at The Devon Land Trust beaver project. And they arranged with each other to set up an interview for valentine’s day.

You’re Welcome.

But if there wasn’t a Heidi who weirdly happened to know the woman saving otters in Marin and the people saving beavers in Devon, this might have never worked itself out. Think of it! The good people England might not get to watch a short segment about how beavers mate for life and prevent flooding on valentine’s day.

See what a bad idea it was to move famous beavers in to the river otter?