Category: Beavers elsewhere

BARRIE BARELY UNDERSTANDS BEAVERS

It’s amazing the lengths some cities will go to explain why they can’t learn to solve problems. It’s almost as if they think not learning excuses them in some way. Take Barrie for instance. It’s at the edge of lake Huron north of New York in Canada.

Busy beavers cause lots of dam problems in Barrie

About 30 times a year, one of Canada’s national animals becomes a pest in Barrie and needs removing.

Beavers like to down trees, move them around, build dams and block waterways – even in urban environments – and sometimes the only option is to trap them.

“The problem is city wide and occurs regularly from spring to fall,” said Dave Friary, the city’s operations director, of beavers. “The damage ranges from tree removal to the blocking of pond outlets, which results in a flooding risk to adjacent neighbourhoods and properties which expands to properties downstream of the pond.

Obviously not one account sits them down and says, wow you throw money at this problem every two weeks and it never goes away? Are you paying hushmoney or a hitman?

The cost to trap a beaver depends on the number of times the trapper must visit the site, Friary said, but the average is approximately $300, about 30 times annually in Barrie.

I’m sorry. Could you explain that again? So every trip out to kill some beavers makes you three hundred dollars and the more it fails the more money you make? Hmm. I think I’m seeing a problem with your incentive scheme here. Why not give ONE lump sum every year and the more they have to come out and earn it because they failed the first time is incentive not to fail?

Oh right. Your couzin Vinnie is the trapper you hire. And needs the ten grand every year. Sorry, I forgot.

Beavers in stormwater pond locations can also be relocated, but sometimes the city is unable to successfully relocate the beavers so they don’t return to the same spot, Friary said. And Ontario’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act only allows them to be moved as far as one kilometre away.

“The relocation of beavers is regulated under Ontario’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act,” said Jolanta Kowalski, who is with Ontario’s Ministry of Northern Development, Mines, Natural Resource and Forestry.

“It is not encouraged as an option because relocating the beaver to another area can move the problem elsewhere, can transmit disease among beaver colonies and can introduce a beaver into established beaver colonies which could result in the beaver’s death,” said Kowalski.

See if we transmit disease by moving the beaver he might die. Or if he gets attacked by another beaver in the area he might die. So it’s better if he dies for sure. You can understand that. right?

“Legally trapped beavers can be killed,” Kowalski said. “The Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act (FWCA) provides for the protection of beaver dams and makes it illegal to intentionally destroy them unless specifically exempted by the FWCA or authorized by our ministry.”

You can kill the beavers of course, but get your bloody hands off those dams. Those things can be damn useful!

And there are other options. The city has at times used small wire structures called ‘beaver bafflers’, which are placed around the outlet pipes in stormwater ponds – allowing the water to properly flow through the pond without causing flooding in the nearby neighbourhood, and does not disturb the beavers, Friary said.

But when beavers cannot be relocated so they can’t return, or the beaver baffler doesn’t solve flooding issues, a trapper is called.

Ahh so you admit there are alternatives but you have no idea what they’re for. Got it.

“When this occurs the city has exhausted all actions and cannot properly protect public and private property from flooding and the city has the duty and authorization from the province through the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act, to hire a trapper and manage the beavers accordingly,” Friary said.

“We contract the service out to a provincially approved trapper who uses a variety of methods of removal that can be found on the provincial website,” he said. “We indicate as part of the contract that methods used need to be humane and within provincial guidelines. Each circumstance may be unique and up to the trapper.”

Exhausted all actions? You mean to tell me that 30 times a year the city exhausts all actions. installs a baffle, wrings it hands and has to call Vinnie to trap again. You are freakin kidding me. The city doesn’t EXHAUST all its options every decade, let alone every other week. You barely wash your hands every other week.

“The killing of beaver often causes a great deal of controversy within the city that’s really difficult for people to deal with,” she said.

I really, really believe that.

She said most municipalities, when they have a beaver issue, call the Ministry of Natural Resources, which provides phone numbers for a number of trappers, and the trapper removes the beaver.

“And that sounds like a pretty easy way to deal with the situation, but the fact of the matter is when you look at the situation in total, the cost of doing that plus removing the dams and blockage of drainage ditches and all sorts of different areas where beavers might cause conflict, the cost to the city is significantly greater than dealing with things like beaver bafflers, different types of flow devices, including in stormwater management ponds, that allows the beaver to stay, that allows the municipality to deal with the diversity that the beaver brings, while preventing flooding,” White said.

Wait just a dog-gone minute here, this article is starting to make sense. Better end it RIGHT NOW. Don’t start telling me that the 10 grand they pay to kill beavers every year is just PART of the cost. If you keep explaining how this works people will start learning, and you don’t want that do you?

I didn’t think so.

BEAVER MURAL FOR SLO

heidi08 BDA's, Beaver Art, Who's saving beavers now? July 19, 2021

There’s a new beaver mural in San Luis Obisbo thanks to the hardworking beaver brigade and inspiring artist Victoria Carranza. Victoria uses community engagement to bring murals to life. She is especially interested in highlighting local nature, so you know this beaver wetland was a natural choice. Members of the brigade and their children and families came and did the painting, prepping the surface priming and working at night when it got too hot.

I’m not sure the beaver is CENTRAL enough for my tastes but it’s a beautiful tribute nonetheless. Audrey Taub has done a fantastic job of engaging her community and really getting beavers the attention they deserve. Cooper Lienhart explains things very welll in this is a nice film made by an appreciative pilgrim to the site. He does a good job profiling the word the Beaver Brigade is d[wonderplugin_video iframe=”https://vimeo.com/575017115″ lightbox=0 lightboxsize=1 lightboxwidth=960 lightboxheight=540 autoopen=0 autoopendelay=0 autoclose=0 lightboxtitle=”” lightboxgroup=”” lightboxshownavigation=0 showimage=”” lightboxoptions=”” videowidth=600 videoheight=400 keepaspectratio=1 autoplay=0 loop=0 videocss=”position:relative;display:block;background-color:#000;overflow:hidden;max-width:100%;margin:0 auto;” playbutton=”https://www.martinezbeavers.org/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wonderplugin-video-embed/engine/playvideo-64-64-0.png”]oing and why it matters.

BEAVERS IN THE BBC

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact, Beavers and climate change, Who's saving beavers now? July 14, 2021

Beavers Used To Restore Wildlife Habitat In Lincoln

Who would believe over the last ten years Lincoln has been issued the single most depredation permits for beavers? Well this story couldn’t happen to a nicer town. Great work Damion Ciotti who talked them into it and all the people who are taking credit for the idea they resisted on camera.

Another great news story from Lucy Sherriff in the BBC today. You’ll remember she’s the one that wrote the fantastic piece recently in the Smithsonian and that great one in the Sierra Club. I knew she was working on something about beavers and deserts and connected her with Carol Evans of Nevada, but this is wayy better than I expected.

One small, plucky animal has an outsized ability to transform its environment, helping to replenish river ecosystems even in the desert.

Getting these beaver populations to thrive in Utah’s desert landscape has been a challenging task for Emma Doden, a masters student in translocated beaver ecology at Utah State University. Doden and several other researchers set out to reintroduce beavers to the drought and fire-stricken land. Water shortages are severe here, and much of the river ecosystem is degraded. Doden’s primary goal is to restore the quantity and quality of water in eastern Utah, whose waterways sustain an array of wildlife, riverbank vegetation and endangered fish species.

“In desert environments, water can be very limiting, but it serves as the lifeline to so many species that live out there, including livestock,” she says.

Ahh Emma Doden is getting plenty of mileage out of her beaver thesis. Let’s hope it leaves a mark.

The animals are best known for their skill at building dams in rivers, which create wetlands and standing ponds. These changes in the watershed contribute to a number of improvements in the environment, including better stream quality, leading to healthier fish populations; carbon capture via the shallow ponds which hold back silt and sequester the gas; increasing resistance against wildfires; and providing a habitat for other animals. All this contributes to their status as a “keystone” species, essentially defined as an animal that multiple other species rely on within an ecosystem.

As the world heats up and extreme weather becomes more frequent, scientists have been rushing to reintegrate beavers into struggling ecosystems and dry landscapes.

Emma’s finishing her master’s and handing the work to another beaver disciple. Good Lets keep the good news coming. All the way to California. Cue Emily Fairfax,

If beavers can be persuaded to stay put, their impacts can be wide-reaching. Just one beaver dam can improve water quality, as well as acting as a firebreaker for the surrounding land.

North America is facing an intense battle against wildfires, which raged across the American West in 2020 – including in Utah – burning 8.8 million acres (3.6 million hectares) of land, and could be even worse this year.

Beavers, some scientists believe, could provide the key to reviving watersheds and mitigating wildfire risks. In a paper published last year, Emily Fairfax found that areas where beaver dams were present were better at surviving wildfires than regions without beavers.

“I thought that beaver dams would work sometimes,” Fairfax says of the creatures’ impact on wildfire-ravaged regions. “But in every one of the sites I studied, if there was a dam, the land was protected from fire.”

Nice. Can someone please shout this from the mountain top? Now let’s hear it for Castor Fiber too.

“We do have farmers – and fishermen – who are very keen to see beavers coming back, who recognise they are great for fish and the livestock and irrigation,” Brazier says. “But there is a group who doesn’t want to see beavers back in the landscape, and one of the key things has been knowing where farmers are coming from, knowing what their concerns are, and engaging with them. It’s an ongoing process and we’re working with them to manage any negative impacts.

“It’s about learning to live with these animals again in a renewed co-existence.”

Beavers might well incur costs to landowners, but Brazier believes they can be addressed by providing adequate compensation for any flooded fields higher in the watershed. He believes it’s a small cost in comparison to that of other flooding prevention, or the value of the other benefits that beavers bring such as water quality improvement, carbon storage and enhanced biodiversity.

That’s the way with spreading the beaver gospel. First your the only one. Then there are two lone voices in the wilderness. And suddenly you can barely pick up a copy of Teen Monthly without reading another great story about how much they matter. Good.

With beaver releases happening in South Downs, Wales, Cornwall and Cheshire, across the pond in Utah, Idaho and on Indian Reservations in California, Washington and Oregon, and even more on the horizon, many more of us could soon be feeling the effects of beavers flourishing in the wild.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd scene. Who will be writing about the good things beavers do tomorrow? I can’t wait to read all about it.

I BET YOU DIDN’T KNOW BEAVERS CAUSED PLAGUE

heidi08 Who's blaming beavers now? July 1, 2021

When you’ve been in the beaver biz as long as I have you’ve pretty much seen it all. Beavers blamed for fires, floods bridge collapses, even hospital medical records loss. But this? This I had not expected. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before.

Earliest known strain of plague could have come from a beaver bite

Scientists have found the earliest known strain of plague in the remains of a 5000-year-old hunter gatherer.

The “astonishing” discovery pushes back the first appearance of the plague bacterium (Yersina Pestis) by more than 2,000 years, study senior author Ben Krause-Kyora, a biochemist and archaeologist at the University of Kiel in Germany said in a statement. This date is probably close to when the bacteria first evolved, he added.

The plague-carrying hunter-gatherer, dubbed “RV 2039”, was a 20- to 30-year-old man and one of four people whose remains were excavated from a burial site near the Baltic Sea in Latvia. An analysis of samples from the man’s teeth and bones revealed that he was likely the only one among those buried with the disease. Researchers reconstructed the bacteria’s genome using genome sequencing, and believe the bacteria was likely a part of a lineage that emerged roughly 7,000 years ago, not long after Yersina Pestis split from a predecessor, Yersina pseudotuberculosis.

You see before the plague was carried by fleas it was delivered in a more cumbersome way. An animal bite to a human. And what animal should be blamed that always comes in handy?

The beaver of course. Is there any other?

But the switch to fleas as a means of transmission required the disease to kill its host: an old host’s death encourages fleas to move to a new host and pass on the disease. The researchers speculate that this new gene was responsible for driving the plague to become deadlier.

Because this early strain of Y. pestis was not yet flea-borne, the scientists think that the bacteria originally entered the hunter-gatherer’s body through a rodent bite, possibly from a beaver, a common carrier of the plague predecessor Y. pseudotuberculosis and the species with the most remains recorded at the site. Once there, the course of the disease was fairly slow, with bacteria slowly accumulating in high quantities in the man’s bloodstream until he died.

Now now. Don’t argue your CSI complaints to me. There was circumstantial evidence! The beaver remains were in the area. He was bitten by the castor plague! Don’t argue that maybe beaver bones were scattered around because he fricken’ ATE them. Or that the most likely rodent bite came from a RAT who’s tiny little remains blew away,

It was the beavers fault. There can be no other possible explanation. That’s only too obvious.

The three pandemics the bacteria would go on to cause are among the deadliest biological events in human history. The first pandemic, the Justinian Plague (which occurred roughly between A.D. 542 and 750), may have caused the Mediterranean population to decline by 40% by the end of the sixth century. The second, and most infamous, pandemic caused by the disease was the 14th century European Black Death, which killed approximately 25 million people — between 33 to 50% of Europe’s population. A third, lesser known, pandemic began in 1855 in China’s Yunnan province and killed more than 12 million people in India and China alone.

Look what that rotten beaver started. Covid is a frickin walk in the park compared to the beaver plague!

The people buried around RV 2039 were not infected and he was carefully placed in his grave, two indications that he didn’t carry the later, highly-contagious version of the disease. But because of its presence in his blood, scientists still think the plague bacteria could have killed him.

Rotten Beaver.

The idea that this ancient bacteria replicated slowly and was passed from rodent to human is bolstered by the fact that scientists have found other ancient skeletons infected with Y. pestis at other sites, where people lived very different lifestyles. “Isolated cases of transmission from animals to people could explain the different social environments where these ancient diseased humans are discovered. We see it in societies that are herders in the steppe, hunter-gatherers who are fishing, and in farmer communities — totally different social settings but always spontaneous occurrences of Y. pestis cases,” Krause-Kyora said.

You know how beavers always go around BITING people. And how we read stories about it happening all the time. I mean people strolling innocently down to the creek and and beavers leaping out and biting them to spread pandemics.

It’s amazing anyone in Martinez survived at all.

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WHAT CALIFORNIA DOES NOT ALLOW

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and Wetlands, Educational, Who's saving beavers now? June 18, 2021

The Beaver Bash is going very well, last night was Ben Dittbrenner’s debut which will be shareable on video soon, but this is Amanda Keasberry’s presentation beaver relocation – the mysterious stewardship that takes place in every single western state in the US EXCEPT california. SHerry Guzzi wanted me to verify that it’s allowed in Nevada and yes, I heard back from Fish and Game that in some situtations it is.

Of course Washington has been doing the smart thing forever. Cascade Forest is one of the partners approved for the “Pilot Project” which nearly two decades old. I especially love how they use students to assess potential release sites and really thought the eDNA studies they are working on to track how beavers move around afterwords was fascinating!

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