Category: Beavers and salmon

Christmas for Beavers

heidi08 Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and Ice, Beavers and Insects, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water December 25, 2016

Merry Christmas! The present I got you is one-of-a-kind and really hard to find. It’s a nice article from a property-owner who enjoys the beavers in his pond and is having fun watching them. No need to thank me. The look on your face is thanks enough.

A crash course in beaver denizenery

When three beavers in our Back 50 pond whacked their tales – in unison, no less – I was smitten.

***Beavers on the pond: When three beavers in Denis Grignon’s Back 50 pond whacked their tales – in unison, no less – he was smitten***

From my lawn chair on shore, they’re always entertaining. Industrious. Patient. Determined. Funny.

Hey, the internet is spotty in our parts and this is 4D TV – without the cumbersome pick-and-pay contract.

My recent fascination with them coincided with what would become our worst drought in decades. Our pond’s about the length of a football field – the larger Canadian field, fittingly, given its inhabitants, eh.

As the water level dropped drastically, it resembled a large puddle dotted with what appeared to be about a dozen beaver lodges. But were there really more lodges than in previous years? Or had the receding water simply made them more visible?

Ahh, Denis! I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to read about someone actually watching beavers instead of just trapping them because they’re a nuisance. He’s located in Peterborough, across Lake Ontario from New York. Maybe he has benefited from our friends in the area? I myself started watching beavers a million years ago because they were ‘cool’ to watch and I was curious about them. It opened the door for learning and helped me be forever hooked.

Seems Denis is watching them during a drought year, while the pond shrinks. This makes several other lodges visible that he hadn’t noticed before. He wonders whether more beavers move into a pond in drought and whether there will be competition.What he doesn’t realize, is that beavers don’t ‘go’ where there’s water, they more or less make water wherever they ‘go’. Beaver ponds in drought contained 9 times more water than equivalent ponds without beaver according to Dr. Glynnis Hood’s Alberta research. For the most part, the strange thing is he asks people who tell him the right answer. Go figure.

“You probably already know that beavers are territorial,” Lisa Soloman, a management biologist with the Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR), told me.

Uh, no. I didn’t. But go on, I pleaded.

“All beavers in a pond are related,” she continued, explaining that a pair will breed, keep their three to five “kits” nearby for about two years, then send them off to university or to teach English overseas.

So my pond is not overcrowded. And those additional lodges I thought I saw are, according a friend and hunter, merely failed construction attempts.

Is there anything, then, I can do to ensure a second season of my backyard reality TV?

“I would say nothing!” says Soloman. “This is how nature works. If the conditions aren’t good for them, they may not survive or they may disperse…But if it’s good habitat, new beavers can move in and claim the unoccupied territory.”

Wow, not only is Denis enjoying them now, he wants them to stay next year. I appreciate Lisa Solomon’s mostly accurate advice. But I disagree with one part. ‘Nature’ is no longer the thing that decides whether beavers will stick around or not. Human interest is. And if you’re happy to have those little flat-tails as your neighbors I would say the odds of them sticking around are very, very good.

You might also plant a little willow from cuttings around the pond’s edge. Good for the pond anyway and the beavers will help keep it thriving. Happy watching!

Speaking of beaver lodges, I thought this was a great photo of the one Suzi Eszterhas took in Napatopia. How’s that for ‘Nature in the City’? Happy Christmas!

Three states of why beavers matter

heidi08 Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and Ice, Beavers and Insects, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, City Reports, Environmental, Who's Killing Beavers Now? December 19, 2016

Sometimes we get the faintest whiff of beaver benefits and actual solutions from sources you’d never expect. I think I’m a little like a mother who knows that her middle child isn’t the brightest bulb in the box and so reacts with extra praise when he gets the simple problems right. We want to encourage them, right?

Discover Nature and Evidence of Beavers in Your Area

This is the Missouri chapter of public radio, not an area usually known for progressive beaver solutions. So this quote at the end got my attention:

Beavers play a valuable role by damming backed up silt-laden waters and subsequently forming many of the fertile valley floors in the wooded areas of our continent. Beaver dams stabilize stream flow, slow down run-off, and create ponds which influence fish, muskrats, minks and waterfowl.

However, some landowners wish to protect certain trees from potential damage from beaver cutting. This can be done by enclosing the target trees with wire netting up to a height of three feet.

It must be the season. This article from North Carolina actually focuses on the benefits of joining BAMP (their beaver-killing club), but look at what it also finds time to include;

Rodent causes problems for farmers, residents and roadways

Beaver aren’t all bad. In fact, they can be responsible for some very diverse ecosystems. A 2015 PBS article titled, “Leave it to Beavers,” explains beaver dams as “Earth’s Kidneys.”

“Beaver dams and the ponds they produce act as filters, generating cleaner water downstream.”

One pond observed in Greene County, known as good duck hunting grounds, has a beaver family to thank. The dam extends several hundred feet across the mouth of a swamp creating a large, shallow home to waterfowl.

You heard it here, folks. Beavers aren’t ALL bad! Spoken like the most educated ecological mind in the entire state. Over the years I’ve become accustomed to the annual justification for BMAP printed in local papers. Usually they say something about how bad beavers are and what a cost-saving deal it is for the unlucky counties that are suckered into it.

Seeing the need for the management for the ever-increasing damage caused by the growing beaver population, State Legislative action created the North Carolina Beaver Management Assistance Program in 1992.

BMAP is a cost share program to aid landowners having problems with beaver damage. As of 2016, the cost share is a $4,000 per county contribution for annual membership.

The BMAP cooperative endeavor also receives funding from the NC Wildlife Resources Commission, NC DOT, USDA Wildlife Services and others.

Participation in BMAP is a county-by-county decision. Locally, Lenoir and Greene County participate, Jones County does not.

The total $21,800 set aside in Lenoir County for control and management (between BMAP membership and specialist) is an investment that pays dividends. Per the BMAP 2015 annual report, from June 2015-June 2016, beaver control prevented the loss of, or damage to, $262,140 in resources, including over $140,000 to roads and bridges alone. Efforts resolved beaver damage problems at 28 sites in the county, 13 were private landowners and 15 were Department of Transportation sites.

Of course, the more you use BMAP the more you NEED BMAP because of things like population rebound and short term solutions. Its a racket. Guess how much money BMAP spends on flow devices and solutions that will last longer than a season? I’ll give you a it, it’s a ROUND number.

One thing that confuses me in the article is this:

Also in the budget are funds to support a percentage of a Wildlife Beaver Specialist.

What percentage of the guy did you get? The part that goes over the fence last? Because I’d ask for my money back.

Hey, speaking of actual beaver specialists, and beaver benefits, NOAA just released its offical Oregon coast Coho Recovery plan. Which mentions beaver lots of times (by my count 227 times). Lots like this:

It even had time for the honorable mention of our noble friends in South Umpqua.

If you want to grind your teeth in envy that California is so remarkably backward that we just can’t have nice things, go read the report. It’s beaver-licious, and someday we might be too!

Riparian Ecology 101 and Beavers

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and Ice, Beavers and Insects, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental, Who's blaming beavers now? December 18, 2016

It’s hard to appreciate beavers in South Carolina. Even if you’re an environmentalist and teach riparian ecology, apparently. Sigh.

ECOVIEWS: A beaver dam could test your environmental conscience

Whit Gibbons

My first evidence of something unusual happening came in autumn after a month of no rain when I measured the water level. I do this at least once a week downstream from our cabin and was surprised to find that instead of dropping an inch or so, it had actually risen 2 inches. I attributed it to mismeasurement until I took my walk.

Beavers are unquestionably keystone species in a region with small to moderate-size streams. They not only modify the habitat but can also change the environment in ways that dramatically influence the lives of animals, including people, and plants.

Beaver activity can result in big trees dying from flooding and smaller ones being debarked for food or cut down for dam construction. A mile downstream from my incipient beaver dam a larger one has flooded several acres, leaving tall, lifeless sweetgum and pine trees that began life in a terrestrial habitat and cannot persist in an aquatic one.

Animals are affected, too. Large aquatic salamanders called sirens thrive and become more abundant in pools of a stream created by beaver dams. We once observed more than 500 sirens along the margins of a small stream when a dam was removed and the water level dropped.

Cottonmouths, watersnakes and turtles are more apparent, and maybe even more abundant, around beaver dams, which create areas for basking on sunny days. Waterfowl, such as wood ducks, are attracted to the pond created above the dam. Clearly, beavers and their dams set the tone of the neighborhood for many wildlife species.

So close. So very close. I feel we are standing at the very threshold of almost discussing beaver benefits – peering through the keyhole at the verdant green garden on the other side. But Whit isn’t wild about beavers. And he’s surrounded by UGA buddies who feed him bad information.

Beavers live 35 to 50 years in zoos and more than 20 years in the wild.

One of the conundrums with beavers is that their positive traits – being chubby, cute, industrious pioneers – aren’t always enough to outweigh less desirable traits. I know folks who have had beavers cut down a beautiful dogwood tree, flood an area intended for a garden not a fish pond and dismantle a wooden boathouse to build the beaver lodge. The predicament is how to keep beavers for outdoor show-and-tell yet not have them misbehave, from a human’s point of view.

An ecofriendly society will always face perplexing wildlife problems and environmental dilemmas. Entertaining, yet potentially destructive, beavers are a good example of the complexity inherent in environmental preservation, with no simple solution as to how to handle the issue. A range of responses are available for dealing with nuisance wildlife. Which solution people choose will depend in part on their environmental conscience.

Whit is a reflective and thoughtful man with an ecological conscience. He wants to appreciate the inherent coolness of beavers because it’s fun to see wildlife in his creek, but he doesn’t want to be flooded out for 50 years. What’s a good man to do?

When information fails you its time to get better information. I’m glad you asked. First of all beavers don’t live for 50 years. Who ever wrote that down was wrong and should have their credentials surgically removed. I did read a scientific report that identified one as 19 once, but in the wild 10-15 years is an astoundingly good run.

Secondly, if beavers are flooding an area you can’t live with then you install a flow device and make the water a height you can tolerate. Here’s a video that will teach you how to do it cheaply yourself. I know these things work because they solved our problem for a decade. The first flow device was invented in your own state! But this works better and is cheaper to install. Oh, and if the bad beaver is eating your dogwoods try wrapping the trees with wire or painting them with sand.

Beavers do cause problems. True. And cars get flat tires. We can fix them.

Why not just trap the beavers and get rid of them instead of fixing the problem? First of all you can’t, because more beavers will return to adequate habitat and you’ll be in this fix all over again in a year or a season. But more importantly all the wildlife that depends on the beaver dam will be lost if you remove the beaver. Meanwhile, that dam is removing nitrogen, letting trout fatten, filtering toxins, and regulating water flow which god knows you need in South Carolina and Georgia!

The article concludes by saying Whit teaches at the University of Georgia’s Savannah River Ecology Laboratory. I can’t think of a more useful place to start a conversation. Our retired UGA librarian friend needs to have coffee with him and nudge some useful information his way. Hey, maybe you could take this image into your classroom?

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Another glimpse of beaver life in Nebraska from wildlife photographer Michael Forsberg. Enjoy.

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

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.