Category: Beavers elsewhere

THE STONE SOUP BEAVER SUMMIT

heidi08 Who's saving beavers now? November 19, 2020

The story of the California beaver summit is changing. Day by day, conversation by conversation, email by email, it’s shifting from a retelling of the little red hen to an amazing pantomime production of stone soup.

You know the story right? A poor peddler comes into town begging for food and gets nothing from the impoverished villagers, then cleverly says he could actually make a delicious soup from a single stone if he only had a pot to do it.

Feeling curious and a little bit sorry for him the old woman gives him a pot in which he heats water, tosses his stone to the bottom and eagerly rubs his hands in anticipation. He tells her it’s going to be delicious and she is welcome to some. Then comments on how much better it would be if he only had an onion.

So the old woman gives him an onion and he cuts it up and tosses it in.

People gather around to see what he’s doing and he proudly exclaims he’s making the most delicious soup in the world from a single stone and everyone comments that its impossible but starting to smell delicious. He says he learned how to do it from a magician in the East and says the only thing that could possibly make it better is a potato.

So a farmer gives him a potato. And he cuts it up and tosses it into the bubbling pot and it smells even better.

He assures the gathering crowd that it’s going to be delicious and tells everyone to bring their bowls because they will all want to try it and maybe they should all sit together under the trees and celebrate. And promises that there is nothing like it in the world and the only thing that could possibly make it any better is a carrot.

So the merchant gives him a carrot.

You know this story. The peddler goes about getting ingredient donations from the village that told him they had nothing to donate and eventually winds up with a fine soup that has nothing at all to do with the stone. It has been said that the story is about what is best about community building and that the peddler is like the best quality in a politician, who organizes the efforts of everyone into an achievable goal that benefits the entire community equally.

Life has taught us there are plenty of peddlers who walk away with the delicious soup themselves and never share a drop or give back anything.

But when it actually works it’s pretty wonderful.

And that is how I feel about the beaver summit now. The origin of which – if truth be told – might have been a stone in a pot that the village comes too curiously see if it can really happen. I had nothing to offer but the idea and have no magical powers to make it happen. But some really important people with a everything to offer are climbing aboard. And each little bit of support is making the soup better and giving me courage to ask for more. This is the line up for our first steering committee meeting next week, all of whom who have expressed interest in presenting.

Initial planning meeting California Beaver Summit

Emily Fairfax – Cal State Channel Islands/Environmental studies
Karen Pope – USFS Pacific Southwest Station Research Aquatic Ecologist
Joe Wheaton – Watershed Sciences Utah State
Damion Ciotti – FWS Tribal program coordinator
Jeff Baldwin – Sonoma State/Geography Environment & Planning
Elizabeth Johnson – Biodiversity First & San Luis Obispo beaver brigade
Brock Dolman – OAEC Water Institute
Kate Lundquist -OAEC Bring back beaver campaign
Jackie Van Der Hout – California Urban Streams Partnership/Outreach & Education
Zane Eddy – Humboldt State Humans & Ecology Interaction MS candidate.
Rick Lanman – Historical Ecology Center
Jennifer Rippert – California Department Fish Wildlife – Habitat Conservation Scientist
Heidi Perryman – Worth A Dam

Wow. I honestly can’t believe it. Get ready for some delicious soup!

@beaverbabyfurrylove

Sometimes cute and playful. I enjoy while it lasts. He mostly just wants the nurturing feeling he would get from his family. #FamilyImpression #fyp

♬ original sound – Beave

WASHINGTON SHOWS US HOW IT’S DONE

This has been sitting on the shelf a few days waiting for JUST the right time to share it with you. I think the right time is now, and I’m so happy to be the bearer of good news.

Palouse landowner welcomes beavers, and their ecological wizardry, back to her land

Linda Jovanovich is no farmer. She had run a landscaping business for years in Pullman and then worked as an elementary school librarian. In a college geology course she’s become enamored with the natural world.

So, she started planting aspens, willows and other vegetation along the little no-name creek.

Two-and-a-half decades later that work has paid off. Her property is a wildlife oasis among rolling fields of wheat. Piles of tree limbs dot her land, providing shelter for rodents and birds, coyotes and raccoons.

So, when beavers showed up eight years ago, she had mixed emotions.

On one hand, she was thrilled. She knew streams slowed by beaver dams and lodges create better habitat for animals and insects, collect silt and store and cool water, among other things.

On the other, their ponds flooded her little creek and threatened to drown her beloved trees.

So of course Linda called the Lands Council which is something you can do if you live in Spokane, and they live trapped and relocated the beavers. Okay that works once or twice. But the when she called them back a few years later they had different ideas.

This time around, the Lands Council tried a different approach.

“The first question is always, can we keep the beaver here,” Bachman said. “Because usually when you find a place where you have beaver you have beaver there because it’s good beaver habitat.”

So, on Nov. 5, Bachman drove to Jovanovich’s home and started breaking small holes in the beavers’ dam. These breaches, over the course of an hour, dropped the water level about a foot. Then he built a cage out of chicken wire with the help of Ben Goldfarb, a journalist, Lands Council board member and the author of “Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter.”

Now THAT I’d pay to see. Ben in waders! I sure hope they didn’t build that cage out of chicken wire though, because it will never survive being in the water for any amount of time.

From the chicken wire cage, Bachman ran two 4-inch pipes, placed two cinder blocks at the bottom of the cage, dropped the entire thing into the pond and put the pipes through the beaver dam.

Voila, water rushed from the pipes.

In theory, the pipes will siphon enough water through the dam to keep the pond-level manageable. At the same time, the pond won’t drain completely, keeping the entrances to the beaver lodge submerged and the beavers defended from predators.

Well yes, that’s how it works. And if you do it right and DON’T USE CHICKENWIRE it can last for a decade like it did in Martinez. Hurray! Now just watch the wildlife that moves in, Linda!

Although the Lands Council has been working with beavers for a decade, using these types of tools, which are broadly known as flow-mitigation devices, is a new trick and reflects a shifting attitude toward coexistence in Washington.

Although Washington has a history of beaver tolerance, coexistence has relied mostly on keeping beavers and humans apart.

That’s partly because since 2019, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife has run a pilot beaver relocation project. Under the pilot, WDFW issues beaver relocation permits. The agency urges landowners to “take measures to tolerate or mitigate beaver activity whenever possible” before they move the creatures.

Well it’s Washington, so good ideas about beavers are nothing new. I’m glad they are getting down to the brass tacks of coexistence though. Because its the right way for things to be going better for everyone involved.

Jovanovich’s little slice of creek cuts its way through the Palouse’s rich and deep topsoil, the deposited effluent of the unimaginable Missoula Floods. While some of the most fertile soil in the world, it’s prone to erosion. In an intact ecosystem, trees and other plants grow alongside these streams, helping anchor the soil.

Beavers offer another complementary solution.

Sediment from their dams will, over time, fill in incised creeks, not to mention trap water. This in turn raises the water table, promotes growth along the stream banks and increases fish habitat, said Bachman.

While small, Jovanovich’s 7-acre experiment shows a possible future for stream restoration throughout Eastern Washington and North Idaho.

And, if nothing else, it provides her yet another chance to commune with the natural world.

“I’ve always wanted to attract birds and wildlife,” she said, adding “We just should find a better way to live with them.”

The reporter was clearly a little bit Ben-fatuated because he goes on to write about Lars beaver experiments and delights when Ben steps in the water to deep for his waders. But excellent. We need all kind of reasons to live with beavers. And there certainly are many to add to the list.

I GUESS TRAPPERS SHAPE STREAMS TOO. WHO KNEW?

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, beavers and wolves, Who's Killing Beavers Now? November 14, 2020

And the award for the most credit given to ridiculous helpers goes not, as you may have thought to Rudy Guiliani, but to everyones favorite pack-hunting predator: Wolves. Apparently when wolves kill beavers they make more streams.

Didn’t you know?

Wolves alter wetland creation and recolonization by killing ecosystem engineers

Beavers are some of the world’s most prolific ecosystem engineers, creating, maintaining and radically altering wetlands almost everywhere they live. But what, if anything, might control this engineering by beavers and influence the formation of North America’s wetlands?

In a paper to be published Friday in the journal Science Advances, researchers with the University of Minnesota’s Voyageurs Wolf Project and Voyageurs National Park observed and demonstrated that wolves affect wetland ecosystems by killing beavers leaving their colonies to create new ponds.

Beavers are important ecosystem engineers that create wetlands around the world, storing water and creating habitat for numerous other species. This study documents that wolves alter wetland creation when they kill beavers that have left home and created their own dams and ponds.

Juvenile beavers disperse alone and often create new ponds or fix up and recolonize existing, old ponds. By studying pond creation and recolonization patterns along with wolf predation on beavers, project biologists and co-authors Tom Gable and Austin Homkes found that 84% of newly-created and recolonized beaver ponds remained occupied by beavers for more than one year. But when a wolf kills the beaver that settles in a pond, no such ponds remain active.

This relationship between wolves and dispersing beavers shows how wolves are intimately connected to wetland creation across the boreal ecosystem and all the ecological processes that come from wetlands.

So the idea is that when wolves kill beavers who are making a new pond that pond doesn’t happen, and the new pond made by some lucky beaver who wasn’t killed by beavers will survive. See how wolves shape the streams?

Puleeze….that is like saying that a car hitting squirrels determines the rate of acorn production in the forest that year.

Of course the news is bouncing around the entire internet this morning. It even appeared on ABC. Because nothing says “Fun story” more than a beaver meal making streams.

Wolves preying on beavers in Minnesota reshape wetlands

Wolves preying on beavers profoundly affect northern Minnesota’s wetland ecosystems because dams built by individual beavers — those not associated with beaver colonies — quickly fall apart. The new research doesn’t show wolves reduced the total beaver population in Voyageurs National Park, but that they influenced where beavers were able to build and maintain dams and ponds

Hey, you know what else reshapes wetlands? A beaver Trapper! Depredation! Same logic. Different theme music. Not just in Minnesota but everyfuckingwhere.

Sheesh.

As predicted in my little red hen retelling a month ago the very smart voices who were too busy to take on the beaver summit have indicated they very much want to be part of the first planning meeting. Wonderful. Maybe we’ll get to eat some bread when all this is over! I spent yesterday working on this, which is much harder to do than it looks. At least for me. What do you think? Something like this but better.

TIME TO SEE BEAVERS IN A NEW LIGHT

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beavers and Scotland, Who's saving beavers now? November 1, 2020

Happy November.

Last night was a blue moon and coming up next is the Beaver Moon. So of course its a great time for organized walks and trips to the pond. In Massachusetts the trip will cost you a whopping 25 dollars!

A Twilight Walk Exploring the Wonderful World of Beavers at Stony Brook

It is so exciting to be at Stony Brook around sunset and during twilight. The fading light signals the start of the ‘day’ for many animals. Creatures such as beavers, foxes, raccoons and many others will become active, foraging and moving about. During this walk, you will learn more about beaver family life, lodge and dam maintenance, home range, and how they contribute to the biodiversity of open space. Bring your flashlight and we’ll cover the lens in red to preserve our night vision before we head out on the trails. A $25.00 registration fee is required for non members.

Beavers are not a cheap date. And getting a host out of their warm house isn’t easy on a wintry Massachusetts evening. Understood. Well it’s something to look forward to. And lord knows we need a collection of those in these troubled times.

Here;s another one for you. Hint: turn your volume UP.

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Doesn’t that look amazing? I recognized the faces of Derek Gow, Gerhard Schwab and Chris Jones in the clips, I’m assuming the other man is the researcher, but we’ll see. Here’s the media they released with their trailer.

We are SO excited to share this brand new teaser with you giving you a bit more of a glimpse into the incredible people, species and habitats Sophie Pavelle encountered this summer. From beavers within enclosures here in England to wild beavers in Scotland and Bavaria, join Sophie on a journey of discovery as she learns about what a future might look like with beavers living wild in our rivers and landscapes across Britain.

Oooh I can’t wait. The Beaver Trust in England has a VERY deep bench, and lots of talent just waiting in the wings to help them along. Expect great things. I do.

Finally a fine runner up from the people’s choice award for best photography from the Museum of Natural History.

Oliver Richter

Oliver has observed the European beavers near his home in Grimma, Saxony, Germany, for many years, watching as they redesign the landscape to create valuable habitats for many species of wildlife including kingfishers and dragonflies.

This family portrait is at the beavers’ favourite feeding place and, for Oliver, the image reflects the care and love the adult beavers show towards their young.

Beautiful Oliver, and welcome to our favorite photos beaver cannon. You’re among friends.

TOO DAM RARE

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact, Who's Killing Beavers Now? October 29, 2020

Now this is the perfect headline to flood my mailbox over and over. A girl could get used to this.

Restoring habitats could save a fifth of species from climate risks, says report

Nature group Rewilding Britain estimates the country’s “climate zones” – made up of the climatic conditions of an area – are shifting by up to 5km (3 miles) a year due to temperatures rises driven by human activity. That is far faster than many species of plants and animals which are adapted to live within those zones can shift their ranges, putting them at risk of population declines and even extinctions, it warns.

But restoring habitats across 30% of Britain’s land and sea by 2030 could help save a fifth of species from habitat loss, declines or extinctions, according to a report by the organisation that draws on existing research. It is calling for the creation of core “rewilding” areas covering 5% of Britain, which would mean large-scale restoration of natural processes and systems where nature can take care of itself.

Hmm. A fifth of species is a lot of species. Any particular recommendations for candidates that might help with that?

This could include allowing woodland to regenerate naturally, returning areas to a more natural state through removing dams on rivers or rewetting drained peatbogs and reintroducing key species such as beavers or birds of prey.

Well, yes. and duh. Get on it.

A first step is to improve the state of existing wildlife sites to ensure they have thriving wildlife populations that can withstand and adapt to changing conditions. But this is not enough on its own, the study said.

Oh and maybe stop frigging killing the beaver you have in Scotland.

The network of nature reserves and protected areas across Britain is too small and fragmented to support species on the move. And in the future they may no longer be in the right climate zone for some of the species they safeguard.

Are you sure it’s just a fifth they could help? That seems a little low to me.

But folks just keep right on killing them. There’s even a new TV program coming up about how to kill them better.

Local man to be featured on Pursuit Channel

Greenville native Doug Boswell will be featured in a television program for his talents as a trapper. The 2000 graduate of Greenville High School will appear in January on the Pursuit Channel’s “Trapping Across America” series.

Boswell said he will appear in episode three.

“I worked for the Butler County Road department when I got out of high school,” he said. “I was on the beaver control unit and busted up beaver houses. They build these dams in front of the pipes. It causes a lot of wear and tear on the pipes. I was introduced to the other aspect through that.”

Now, he specializing in trapping beavers and getting them out of the area to prevent them from building dams.

“It’s a more efficient way of allocating tax dollars,” he said.

To which the only obvious response is, “There is something called the PURSUIT channel?” I guess it’s probably not about dreams of community college, huh? Sure he specializes in beavers. But he never bothered to learn even the simplest fact that beaver dams aren’t HOUSES, because he’s an idiot. And in Alabama where we will never know any better.

Let’s wash that unpleasant taste out of our mouths with this fine article from our friends in Napa.

Busy Beavers! Unlikely Watershed Heroes on the Napa River

Have you heard about the beavers in Napa? Look closely and you might spot a beaver dam or lodge in our local waterway The hard work of beavers can be seen all along the Napa River and its tributaries. Scientists and biologists working in our local waterways estimate there to be at least 20 different colonies (families of beavers) spotted as far up the valley as St. Helena. In Napa, the Tulocay Creek colony has grown popular among locals; mama beaver and her kits (babies) are regularly featured in the Napa Valley Register.

It might seem novel to find these industrious builders in our downtown and neighborhood waterways, but beavers can be traced back to the Napa River for centuries. For many years, scientists were misinformed about the habitats and behaviors of beavers in Northern California and did not consider beavers native to the waterways that feed into the San Francisco Bay. Recently, historians and scientists with the California Department of Fish and Game presented evidence that challenged long held beliefs about where beavers belong, and ecologists are establishing important links between the presence of beavers and the health of our watersheds.

Hahahahahaha. You know how many historians there are in the department of fish and game? Oh right NONE. That exhaustive groundbreaking research was the unpaid work of a physician, a psychologist, a retired archeologist and some stream keepers. But sure. Just thank CDFW. I’m nothing if not practical. And it can’t hurt.

Beavers are a keystone species in the wetland ecosystem. They play a critical role in providing beneficial habitat and food for a wide range of species, who otherwise wouldn’t be able to thrive in the Napa River. Dams form reservoirs that provide food and shelter for creatures of all sizes, keep water temperatures cooler throughout the warm summer months, and filter fine sediment in water to improve water quality. This provides ideal conditions for the young of threatened species such as chinook salmon and steelhead trout to thrive. Visit a local beaver dam downtown or on Tulocay creek, and you can see a wide range of animals, including turtles, otters, mink, and birds. Beavers transform our waterways from channels prone to erosion to oases of ecological diversity.

Wow. That’s certainly nice to see. Credit where credit is due.

In Napa County, we recognize the valuable contribution of the beavers to our watershed; government organizations including the Flood Control and Water Conservation District as well as the Resource Conservation District work to help beavers and people coexist. Engineers, scientists, and biologists work to make sure development in the valley doesn’t drive the beavers away from their homes, and work with local residents and businesses to prevent and mitigate damages done by beavers as they chew down trees and raise water levels in creeks.

Gosh. That’s rare. An entire county that recognizes the valuable work beavers do. Rusty’s awesome photos and Robin’s tireless advovacy are responsible for a huge part of that. OAEC education onsight helped a lot, and I like to think we in Martinez played our little part in getting it started. And beavers themselves did the rest. Unfortunately seeing beavers as an ally is rare.

Too dam rare.