Category: Beavers and water

IT’S A SMALL BEAVER WORLD

heidi08 Beavers and water May 1, 2019

Good news from beaver friend and Windswept films on Doug Knutson tonight, who posted that Skip Lisle has arrived in his Ontario city tonight to train city workers about installing beaver deceivers.

Excited that Belleville is about to get training in installing a Beaver Deceiver from Skip Lisle! Joe Reid (City of Belleville), Skip Lisle, Susan Finkle, Doug and Carolyn Knutson (Beaver rescue squad) and Mike Howie (The Fur Bearers).

Good luck all and study hard Belleville so you can pass your beaver test next time!

Yesterday was the first official day of safety for beavers in Scotland, which were granted protected status as of 2019. Now you can’t just shoot any one you see on site and must get permission from authorities, which is a tiny baby-step forward. And a reminder to say nice things about them.

How beavers could help solve the threats of droughts and flooding

With their capacity to transform the landscape by building dams and creating ponds beavers could simultaneously provide an unlikely solution to both of the major threats to Britain’s water system – flooding and drought. That’s the view of Exeter University’s Alan Puttock, one of the country’s foremost experts on beaver behaviour.

Not long after the Environment Agency warned that England was likely to run short of water within 25 years, due to increased demand from a growing population and falling supply due to climate change, Dr Puttock told i: “Beavers might not be the silver bullet but they could definitely play an important role.”

Nicely done. That is a sentence that should be in EVERY newspaper, and not just the UK.

And during summer droughts, the leaky dams slowly release water, helping to prevent water shortages. As well as regulating the flow, beaver dams can also help with water quality, filtering out pesticide-infected sediment running of farmland from the water, Dr Puttock said. After several years spent observing the impact of their presence in Devon, Cornwall, the Forest of Dean and Scotland Dr Puttock is arguably the biggest expert on their impact in the country.

Because they feel much safer in water than on land they always like to make sure there is a pond or canal at hand to dive into when a predator strikes, he explained.
That often means turning slow-running streams into a series of ponds surrounded by wetlands by building dams from sediment and branches and carving out mini canals. Their industry can often involve felling trees with trunks up to 15 centimetres in diameter.

One of the things I love about the high-stakes beaver reintroduction happening in the UK is that they get a perfect baseline to from which to study changes. Research like this helps ALL beavers, not just theirs. We are all grateful for Alan’s excellent work.

It also is a good time to show my most recent efforts at educational signs.

I don’t know, what do you think, too subtle?

BEAVER DETECTIVES

heidi08 Beavers and water January 27, 2019

Did I mention that beavers are really, really amazing? The old saying ‘where there’s a will, there’s a way‘ must have been inspired by them. Because beavers always seem to find a way. They just do.

Eric R. contacted me thru the website a while ago. after being sold on Ben’s book and thinking beavers could make a difference in San Diego county where he lives. He was very bummed to learn that California doesn’t allow reintroduction and wanted to teach about how beavers could affect groundwater. He recently went looking for beavers at their last known location in temecula but saw nothing. So he decided to look closer to home.

Guess what he found in Fallbrook?

Fallbrook is in San Diego County at the very bottom of our state, This is in Sandia creek where it crosses the Santa Margarita trail. This makes it farther south in California than any beavers we currently know about. Just in case you aren’t sure this is a beaver dam, he took more photos just to be safe side.

Well, will you look at that! Fresh beaver chew in San Diego county! The first time he goes looking for beaver he find it! Eric R. was blessed on his first beaver-searching trek. Either there are so few creeks in the area it was easy to know where to look or he just really has a feel for these things.

Searching around on google I can see that there’s been sign of beavers on the Santa Margarita going back for decades of longer.. They show up, are trapped, and somehow show up again.

The Santa Margarita River begins at the confluence of Temecula Creek and Murietta creek which is not too far from Lake Skinner where the trapping of beavers lead to the huge appellate suit and the Management by Assertion paper.

These are likely the great great grandchildren of the beavers that our attorney friend saved all those years ago. Which is nice to think about and I sent Mitch the photos this morning.

Every so often we encounter a new voice that wants to reintroduce beaver in to Southern California. But they are already there. We just need to stop trapping them and let them do their jobs.

And now they have a new champion.

“THUNDER BEAVER WOMAN”

heidi08 Beavers and water January 16, 2019

All the good names are taken. Is my fault that I was born to the wrong family at the wrong time and missed my chance at this glory? Jaylene obviously didn’t.

‘Essential to our way of living’: N.W.T. woman launches Water is Life photo project

Tyra Moses is creating a photo series, “Water Is Life,” which will profile supporters of Wet’suwet’en First Nation members who oppose the pipeline.

The wind on Great Slave Lake is brisk, adding a chill as the temperature falls past -20 C. Jaylene Delorme-Buggins lies down on the ice in a traditional skirt. Moses holds the shutter and

fires off a few bursts of images, totally focused on her shot.

“I don’t want to be smiling,” Delorme-Buggins said as they reviewed the photos. “What they’re doing to our people and taking our land — it’s not a happy time.”

Good point. I’m glad they’re doing this project. I wish them all success.Gee, what would be the perfect native name for a woman protecting water in the northwest territories. Hmm can you guess?

At her traditional naming ceremony last year, an elder told her she was destined to be a water protector. So when she heard about what Moses wanted to do, she jumped on board — bringing the dramatic makeup, traditional clothing and eagle feather.

Delorme-Buggins’s traditional name is Thunder Beaver Woman. Her two protectors are the beaver and the snake, which are water animals.

There it is again. That double pang of deep respect and vibrant envy. I wanna be a thunder-beaver-woman-woman. So very jealous. Well, except for this one small detail.

Jaylene Delorme-Buggins added, laughing.

“I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat if it was minus 50.”

BEAVERS AND FLOODING

heidi08 Beavers and Flooding January 7, 2019

It rained, and rained for forty dayses dayses
rained and rained for forty dayses dayses
Nearly drove those poor animals crazy crazy
Children of the lord.

I’ve been in the beaver biz for so long I’ve used this very song to describe my alarm at how beavers manage in high flooding. Lord knows we saw some glory days and some fire and brimstone days in our decade with the beavs. One year their lodge washed away entirely. And recently the little secondary dam was topped.

Now Tulocay creek in Napa is worrying about the same thing.

Tulocay Creek Beaver lodge flooded Sunday This morning Rusty forwarded me an email from a concerned neighbor who asked worriedly if beavers could survive in such flooding? I replied of course and much. much worse but I’m glad to know there are folks worrying about them and grateful Rusty braved the storm and took these photos.

In case you can’t make that out that’s their little island lodge flooded to the rafters in the background. Here’s a closer look.

A wise woman once said to me that the human vagina is a potential (rather than an actual) space. And that must be true for beaver lodges too. I remember after the great flood of 2011 we were so worried where our beavers would sleep when their lodge was flattened. The next morning we went anxiously to look and saw footprints in the mud where the youngsters had walked back and forth searching for their cozy home that was no more.

But beavers find a way. That’s what they do.

What I learned in my decade as a beaver guardian is that if there is a way to be found then beavers will find it. This too shall pass.

BEAVER WAYS MAKE WATERWAYS

heidi08 Beavers and Flooding, Beavers and water November 20, 2018

What do you know! Two days ago the US forest service published a collection of articles about riparian restoration, and guess what number seven was? The summary of Suzanne Fouty’s very beavery dissertation. You can download the whole thing online but I’m going to give you some highlights here to whet your appetite for the original.

Chapter 7. Euro-American Beaver Trapping and Its Long-Term Impact on Drainage Network Form and Function,Water Abundance, Delivery, and System Stability

Suzanne Fouty, Ph.D.

Euro-American (EA) beaver trapping was a regional and watershed-scale disturbance that occurred across the North American continent. This concentrated removal of beavers altered drainages by creating thousands of localized base-level drops as beaver dams failed and were not repaired. These base-level drops led to the development of channels as ponds drained and water eroded the fine sediment trapped behind the dams
(Dobyns 1981; Fouty 1996, 2003; Parker et al. 1985). The speed at which drainages transformed from beaver-dominated to channel-dominated varied as a function of climate, upland and riparian vegetation, and the subsequent land uses. As the drainage network pattern changed, flood magnitudes and frequencies increased and base flows decreased, creating stream systems much more sensitive to climatic variability.

Using current research and historic observations, I developed a conceptual model describing the geomorphic and hydrologic response of a drainage basin to the entry of beavers and then their removal or abandonment (Fouty 2003).

Now there are lots of parts of this research that are way over our heads, but the gist is the Suzanne used a model to systematically determine how much water was lost in parts of the US when beavers were eliminated. She challenged the work of those who said had said for years that the effect of their loss was minimal.

You know me, I can only understand the pictures to understand. This is an excellent break down of why beavers matter on the landscape. Use it to convince your hydrological skeptics. Suffice it to say that from a surface and ground water perspective beavers make things a lot more habitable and life supporting.

She finishises with a big bang of course.

Separating out cause-and-effect relationships in fluvial systems is challenging because changes to their form and function are the result of many factors interacting over time and space. This chapter explored some of those factors in its examination of how EA beaver trapping altered the appearance and hydrologic behavior of stream systems and why the influence of beavers and beaver trapping were missed in the discipline of fluvial geomorphology until recently. It also examined how information gaps led to the development of relationships of process and form based on observations and measurements
of channelized drainages and altered uplands that created conditions whereby water was rapidly shed from the landscape rather than stored and released slowly.

Given the magnitude of the historic changes and their hydrologic consequences, the scale of restoration and the rate at which it must occur is enormous if the impact of climate change on water availability, and the systems that depend on water, are to be minimized. Partnering with beavers to restore the water-holding capability of our stream corridors would rapidly dampen fluctuations in the abundance and scarcity of water and leave wild and human communities less vulnerable. Efforts will require broad public support and an integrated approach by State and Federal agencies given their respective areas of influence and impact. Scientists are in a position to help inform the discussions by sharing what we have learned about how past and current land uses affect the ability of the landscape to naturally store water for future use; however, our effectiveness will first require that we change the lens we have been looking through. Because the discipline of fluvial geomorphology has internalized and codified degraded systems as normal, our stream restoration efforts fall short. By placing these fluvial geomorphic relationships within their historic disturbance context, one that includes EA beaver trapping, new strategies, approaches, and partnerships emerge that are essential for restoration to successfully occur. This new lens reveals the essential role beavers play in this recovery process.

Basically the paper concludes with “you were all WRONG (And I’m looking at you Aldo & Luna) because you assumed a landscape stripped of beavers was the norm. Listen to what I’m saying because climate change is gonna knock the spit out of all of us. And beavers can help.”

I hope she doesn’t mind the paraphrase. But go read the original. And pass it on.