Because the beaver isn't just an animal; it's an ecosystem!

Category: Beavers elsewhere


I know what you’re thinking.

Because of the last five glowing articles I posted about beavers you’re probably thinking, hey beavers have arrived! People everywhere understand how great they are! That woman can probably stop writing sad news about them every day and take up knitting or basketry!

But if you were thinking these things, you’d be wrong.

County works to trap, kill beavers in Lake Terrapin

The days are numbered for beavers that have made their homes in the Lake Terrapin neighborhood. Prince William County officials on Monday began getting ready to trap them.

“We know they’re in there, We just have to find them” Said once city official,

I would quote more but this morning the entire story is behind a paywall and I can’t find more details. Lake Terrapin is in Virginia. And the reporter believes that the beavers are living in the dam so I set him gently straight last night before the entire report disappeared. Never mind. We know what it says. We can imagine some woman says she doesn’t want them killed – just moved – and then someone from fish and game is quoted as saying beavers can’t be moved because it just moves the problem somewhere else.

This ain’t our first rodeo. We know the story. We know this story from CT too.

Complaints on the Rise, DEEP Offers Guidance on Beavers

The number of beaver-related nuisance complaints filed with the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) over the past three years rose from 113 in 2016 to 163 in 2018. Another 150 complaints have already been filed this year.

“Beaver complaints are definitely on the rise, and the damage they are causing can be severe,” said Chris Vann, a Nuisance Wildlife Biologist for the Wildlife Division of DEEP.

When a complaint is filed with DEEP, the affected landowner – whether a resident, town or other organization – can apply for a permit to trap the beaver or beavers. Before DEEP will issue a permit, the landowner must prove that the beavers are either causing severe damage or pose a threat to public health and safety. Photographic documentation can be used as evidence for claims of damage, but in the case of septic issues a report by a professional building or health inspector is required.

Now maybe if you were anyone else but a stats student and beaver advocate you’d see these numbers and say GOSH beaver problems are on the rise! Good think we’re killing so many. But come closer gentle reader because there’s a very interesting finding in these dead beaver charts that I want to point out to you.

The red line is beavers killed. And there are two places it rises sharply. In 2012 and 2016, see that?  Basically beaver take increased in those years by nearly 100%. And the following year beaver take declined by only 11 percent.

Meaning you have to do twice as much work to get only a 10% gain, Where else would this statistic be considered convincing? I mean if you increased your business expenses by 100% and then made only 1o percent back that would be a net 90 percent loss right? Most businesses would fold with numbers like these.

Except the beaver killing business. Which does well and is devoid of all goals but one. I mean it doesn’t matter if hiring a security guard makes you a more likely target for robbery next time. You’re not thinking about tomorrow. Just today. Just that one beaver family that is flooding your basement or carport.

Wikipedia tells me that the entire state of Connecticut is 5.567 square miles of which 12.6 is water. That means they get about 11 complaints a year for ever 1 square mile of water they have.  We can probably assume that some of those different complaints are about the same beavers. Since a beaver might eat Mrs. Landings maple tree one night and Mr. Todd’s crab apple the other.

“If beavers continue to cause problems residents are definitely allowed to apply for another permit. We have many landowners who apply multiple times,” Vann said.

In the state of Connecticut, there are several professional trappers, but also 35 licensed volunteers spread throughout the state that can help residents with a permit to trap beavers during the offseason. The closest volunteers to Old Lyme are located in Haddam and Clinton, according to Vann.

The offseason stretches from April 1 to November 30. During the other four months of the year it is trapping season for beavers. The fur trade is still big business in Connecticut, Vann said, and there is no limit to the number of beavers that can be trapped per person. According to Vann, each year between 880 and 1,000 beavers are trapped for their fur in Connecticut.

That’s right. We kill 1000 beavers for fur and a couple hundred because they bug us and we still have to pay a government agency to keep track of this for us. Killing beavers is big business. It’s the way things have always been done.  If we have more we just kill more. And if we have less we still kill more.

Think of it as ‘sustainable’.


We have entered a golden age of beaver reporting, where suddenly the list I keep of articles to write about is getting longer and longer even after I go through and ‘weed out’ all the depressing ones! I don’t know what could possibly account for this spate of good news unless it’s our festival, blowing beaver-goodwill pollen all across the nation and making people briefly smarter.

I can’t decide whether to talk about Alaska or Nevada this morning, so were doing both. Buckle up!

Nature Notes: Bringing a desert stream back to life

Surrounded by sagebrush covered hills, seeing flowing water is always good. When the small stream is surrounded by sedges and willows, and the air carries the sound of water tumbling over a beaver dam, it looks even better.

We are standing on a dirt road where Dixie Creek passes through a culvert beneath us. Carol Evans first saw this stream in 1988, when it carried no water, had no vegetation and no real streambed. She shows me the left photo above to emphasize what it looked like then.

You remember Carol Evans right? She’s the fisheries biologist advocating for beavers in Nevada that Ben Goldfarb’s book described as having the “Gentle voice of a painting instructor”.

(I believed he described me as “Not having the gentle voice of a painting instructor.” Fair enough.)

Earlier downcutting had dropped the stream between high banks. In a 1980 stream inventory, Dixie Creek was listed as an intermittent stream. But as willows and sedges returned to its banks, water flowed farther downstream and for longer periods. The water table along the stream rose and drowned out sagebrush, replacing it with more water-loving plants.

Today, the stream flows most of the year and even if it runs dry, water is still stored in the soil, among the dense, tall stands of willows. The high retaining walls of that old down cut remain, but between them is a healthy riparian area.

The biggest change came about with the return of beaver. As they dammed the stream, the impounded water collected sediment flowing downstream, sediment that raised the streambed and created deep pools. The water table rose even more, along with the streambed. Carol told me “it just takes backing off, giving it a chance, and it will grow.”

Ahh Carol, you patient wise woman, working over decades with ranchers and cattlemen in the desert to bring back healthy streams for your beloved cuttthroat trout, We salute you!

Beavers brought back other wildlife. During our visit, we saw a merganser adult swimming in front of a line of ducklings, a great blue heron and a chattering kingfisher. We listened to the call of a willow flycatcher perched in the willows. Dozens of bird species have been recorded here, species that would not be found on sagebrush flats. One survey recorded less than seven bird species in 1991, which grew to over 37 bird species in 2010. Several sensitive species have been seen here, including bats, sage-grouse, pygmy rabbits and California floaters (a species of freshwater mussel).

Whatever happens in the future, Carol will continue to come here, to walk the banks, check on beaver families, watch wildlife, and enjoy this healthy riparian area with its flowing water.

The reporter of this story, Larry Hyslop, has written about Carol’s amazing work for more than a decade. You can tell how much affection he feels for his subject matter knowing her stalwart spirit for so long. When you read an article like this it all seems peaceful, gentle and storybook-like.

Be assured that the battle to keep beaver on the landscape long enough to make a difference was a actual BATTLE and Carol just fought tooth and nail day in and day out armed with persuasion and the “the gentle voice of a painting instructor,”

Now lets go to Alaska where the similarly indomitable spirit of Mary Willson has been making a difference in Juneau since 2008.

The Beaver Patrol of Juneau helps maintain balance with wildlife and humans

They call themselves the Beaver Patrol, and they’re on a mission to ensure that beavers coexist in balance with people and salmon. Beavers, of course, intentionally dam streams to create their ponds. But when they block culverts in the wrong place it can cause problems, like flooding trails.

That’s what can happen in the Dredge Lake area near Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau — a network of trails and ponds connected by culverts.

One way to fix the problem is relocating or killing the offending beavers. That option was on the table well over a decade ago if other methods of managing them failed. (No one seems to remember it ever actually happening). But years ago, a group of volunteers stepped up with a plan to keep beaver dams from interfering with trails or salmon — without trapping any beavers.

Mary Willson is a long-time member of the Beaver Patrol. She said the group came together around the idea of balancing all the competing interests.

“We said, ‘Wait a minute, no — we can manage this, and we can try to find a compromise,’” she said. “We can keep the beavers, keep the habitat they make for the fish, allow the spawners to come up, decrease the trail flooding — let’s try to do it all. It’ll never be perfect, but it’ll be a whole lot better.

The trick is to let beavers keep building their dams, but make sure enough water is flowing to keep the trails from flooding and the salmon swimming through. In a natural environment, it’s easier for salmon to make their way through beaver dams — but when beavers jam sticks and logs into a narrow culvert, it can become impassable.r.”

 

You might remember Mary as the author of the awesome ‘Beavers of the Mendenhall Glacier book‘. She is a retired university professor of ecology that also does a trails column for the juneau paper. The book has amazing photographs by our friend Bob Armstrong – and one of these is STILL my wallpaper on the computer after more than a decade! When I share it you will understand why. I love it because of the color and the amount of hope it communicates – both in the glacial sunrise and in the sturdy nights effort by the beavers who must know FULL well that dam is going to be ‘beaver-patrolled’ by morning.

Armed with saws and gardening tools, the Beaver Patrol trudges along the trails in the Dredge Lake area, checking the dams. Here and there, they dig out parts of dams that are at risk of raising the water level too high. It’s an ongoing task — the beavers are constantly building, so they come out twice a week during the summer to keep things under control.

“We have proved ourselves to be at least as stubborn as the beavers,” Willson said with a laugh.

That’s what it takes to save beavers in this world. Patience. Good humor. And an appreciation of the stubborn.

Repeat as necessary.


A million years ago when I was employed I had a very popular bird feeder on my deck. It was visited by chickadees, nuthatches, woodpeckers and all manner of finches. When I describe it as ‘popular’ I mean by the birds of course. Not the humans. Not the aged curmudgeon did taxes in the office directly below me. He complained about the bird noises and droppings and leftover seed shells.

I wanted to keep him happy, and keep him from complaining to the landlord so for a period of time I was able to get Jon to clean his porch every week. Swept the seed away and rubbed off any droppings. It was a horrible job. The curmudgeon would fold his arms and watch angrily while Jon worked growling if he missed a spot.

One time the grumpy Gus pointed to a pile of pollen on the side of his porch and said. “Get that! All that green stuff, It was never here before!” Which of course it had been. Every May for as long as he rented that office and even before. Because it was from the pine trees who coned off pollen in the windy spring days and made everyone sneeze. He had never seen it before because he never looked at his porch until he started looking for the problems the birds were causing.

It was then that I realized he was looking with different eyes. The exact same kind of eyes people glare thru when beavers are being watched suspiciously on their property. Which is what I thought of when I read this article.

Bay Lake and Beavers: Coming to Terms with Wildlife

Living in a rural location inevitably means having a relationship with Mother Nature. And sometimes that relationship gets complicated. Bay Lake residents have been immersed, literally, in just how complicated it can be to live side by side with beavers.

Beavers have lived in the area for many years. Bud Ulsh, who was born in 1933 and has lived nearby his whole life, remembers hiking around Bay Lake and seeing evidence of beavers at least 20 years ago. Bruce Wagner, a division manager with Pierce County Planning and Public Works Maintenance and Operations, said that beavers began to cause significant problems at Bay Lake in 2011. That year the county placed a device known as a beaver deceiver to prevent beavers from blocking the culvert under Delano Road that allows outflow to Mayo Cove to prevent the road from flooding.

Resident Teresa Ives, who has lived on the lake for 15 years, said the device just seemed to encourage the beavers to build dams around it. The north end of the lake was once a narrow 20 feet across and now is close to 200 feet.

Oooh this is starting to get good. Settling in for a game of “Beaver Telephone”

A number of residents reported that the lake level has risen at least two and a half feet in the last few years. Docks that were above water are now submerged. Ives estimated that she has lost about an acre of her 7-acre property to rising water levels, and access to her floating dock was under water in mid-May.

Richard Miller has lived on Bay Lake since 2007. When he planned his dock, he kayaked around the lake to see what others had done. He built a floating structure with a stationary dock for access that was higher than any others on the lake. That dock, already replaced once, was under water in May.

Miller said there used to be some variation in the water level from summer to winter, with about 10 feet of beach in the summer. “I built stairs to get to the beach,” he said, “but now the beach is gone and the water meets the stairs.” He calculated the size of the lake at about 128 acres. Every foot of additional depth adds 400,000 gallons of water to the volume of the lake. “That’s at least one and a half million gallons more water now than a few years ago.”

Three complaining old biddies that blame beavers for EVERYTHING!!! Is tha all? Can’t you find anymore out there?

Reactions to the effects of the beavers have varied. Lee, whose house was most at risk, said, “Beaver need to be classified as nuisance animals. If they can hire a helicopter to shoot a wolf for killing cattle, they should help us get rid of the beavers. I am on the verge of losing my home.”

Yeah that’s what I’m talking about. A really outrageous request to be able to shoot them like wolves from helicopter! Why just shoot them? Why not hang them?

Ahh ain’t humanity great.

Stay tuned for our next installment when the creek dries up and they complain about all that stinking mud in their front yards!

The good part is that this complaining lake is in Washington state so if anyplace on god’s green earth is equipped to deal with these castor complaints from the peanut gallery, they are.


Let’s start by hopping out to Connecticut where a familiar story awaits our attention. It’s full of conflict and interesting points to ponder. How would you like to live in a town they named a disease after?

As Beavers Flood Properties Old Lyme Debates Need for Action

OLD LYME — Dave Berggren can’t do laundry in his house any longer. He keeps his showers brief and he worries that having guests will overtax the septic system.

Berggren’s septic system drains so slowly that if he washes a load of laundry or uses the bathroom too often the water backs up into his pipes. His leach field – and his lawn – have been inundated with water due to beaver activity which has raised the level of Black Hall Pond.

“I don’t dare put a charge of water that large [like laundry] and I use the bathroom gingerly,” Berggren said. “It is a good thing I live alone and there are no females here. My leach field is backing it up.”

???

Truly it’s a burden to have a leach field backing up because of beaver damming. But you think its good there aren’t women on the property in particular? You may have threatened your sympathy card Dave. Because you know how women are. Always flushing the toilet with their selfish, flushy womanly ways.

You know I’m suddenly not actually surprised Dave lives alone.

Not only have the beavers flooded Berggren’s property, his neighbors have all seen the flooding of lawns, as well as trees and shrubs chewed and felled by the beavers. The Ames Open Space Property has also had over 17 acres of land flooded due to beaver activity on Bucky Brook and in a culvert near Whippoorwill Road.

“The beavers took half my ornamental evergreens,” said Rick Humpage, another resident of Boughton Road. “Traditionally I could see two boards of my retaining wall, now there is just one.”

On June 19, Mark Wayland, a building official for the Town of Old Lyme, surveyed Berggren’s property, also on Boughton Road. Wayland wrote a letter, now filed in the building department records, summarizing the problem: “At the time I observed obvious high water of Black Hall Pond encroaching on the property caused by active beavers and beaver dam at the south end of the pond. The water table has risen to the point where it has affected the existing structure’s foundation bearing soils to an extent of causing the structure to be “sinking.”

Wayland wrote that “[i]t is the purpose of this letter that the condition be made and documented to the destructive nature of the beaver dam at this location in question. It is also in my observation with the rising ground water at this location the existing septic system may also be in jeopardy and/or damaged.”

Oh those rotten beavers, sinking property! Dave needs to trap that varmint fast! Trouble is this beaver is sneaky and avoids the law.

Last year, Berggren did reach out to DEEP and was granted a trapping permit. The permit, however, was only good for 21 days.

“I had 21 days to get a trapper to trap the beaver. I sent the permit to the trapper and it took three days to arrive. It arrived the Friday of a holiday weekend,” Berggren said. “My 21 days were shrinking fast.”

The beaver was never caught, and Berggren has instead been forced to tear down the dam every other day in an effort to keep the water level from rising further.

Why do people always think it’s ONE single beaver culprit? A beaver that builds and maintains a successful dam is keeping the water level up to protect his family. I must say you picked QUITE the trapper. Who doesn’t work on weekends and couldn’t find the beaver in question’s resident calling card. And only 21 days? That makes me actually wistful. Our CDFW issues permits for the year and is usually happy to extend it.

Never mind. Something tells me the article is about to get a whole lot better.

Evan Griswold, a member of the Open Space Commission, expressed support for the beavers at a recent meeting. “I’m on the beaver’s side. They are part of the natural environment,” said Evan Griswold. “Yes, they are changing it from woods to grassland, but so what? Let the beavers do what the beavers do best.

Regardless of jurisdiction, the commission strongly opposes trapping and killing the beaver. Instead, the commission is recommending that if the town were to take action, that the town consider a beaver deceiver — a device that blocks beavers from dam-building in protected areas.

A beaver deceiver would cost the town about $3,000 and has a 90 percent success rate for the lifetime of the device. Trapping is typically only a short-term solution.

The culvert under Whippoorwill Road “is definitely a site where a beaver deceiver would be effective,” said Michael Callahan, the founder of Beaver Solutions LLC which has installed more than 1,500 beaver deceivers in the past 20 years. “Beavers are smart and probably look at that road bed as a dam with a hole in it. With a little bit of work the whole road bed becomes a dam. They get the biggest pond for the smallest amount of work.”

Dave, Dave. Dave. You’re in very good hands. Mike will fix this problem for you way better than that stupid trapper who couldn’t find the beaver in the first place. Let him do his job and your toilets will be flushing so well you might be able to have an actual WOMAN over to the place once in a while.

Sheesh.

NOW YOU MUST CLICK ON THIS TWEET.

Maybe you’re very busy this morning and you have to get Janie to day camp and the cat to the vet. Maybe you just had a fight with your best friend and found out your mother is coming for the weekend. You MUST click on it anyway. If you do nothing else I ever advise, for the rest of your entire life, you MUST do this.  I’m not kidding. This is seriously, fatally, adorably, cute. Stupid baby pictures, cat videos or puppies don’t even comes close.


Sometimes people’s hearts are in the right place, but there simply aren’t fund to pay for a flow device. Well now if you live in the right place there might be a foundation to help.

Lauren R. Stevens: Living with our friend the beaver

Thanks to Nion Robert “Bob” Theriot’s Foundation, the MSPCA in Boston accepts requests for assistance from individuals or entities in the four western counties of Massachusetts “to humanely, non-lethally and ecologically mitigate beaver-related flooding.” The property owner is asked to share the cost. The local Conservation Commission must give permission.

Theriot, who died December 31, 1998, owned Tall Pine Farm in Monterey. He helped conserve many acres in Massachusetts and California, working here with the Berkshire Natural Resources Council and Monterey’s Preservation Land Trust, of which he was a founding member. Clearly he was also a friend of beavers. So may we all be.

This was a pretty surprising group of sentences to read. I never knew that there was a foundation that could help install flow devices. I had to go look up its benefactor. But I was pretty blown away by what I found.

Nion Thieriot — Conservationist

Nion Robert “Bob” Thieriot, a dedicated conservationist and a great-grandson of Chronicle co- founder Michael H. de Young, died yesterday at a hospital near his home in Massachusetts after a five- month battle with brain cancer.

Mr. Thieriot, 52, had a lifelong passion for the outdoors and for working with his hands, leading many efforts over the years to preserve open space and woodlands in Massachusetts and California.

Mr. Thieriot also helped create the Sonoma Land Trust in Sonoma County, dedicated to preserving open land and forests in the county. He ran a vegetable farm on more than 300 acres there, in Cazadero, in the 1970s. When it burned in a forest fire in 1978, he donated the land to the land trust.

So this man first formed a preserve and then when it was burned to the ground in the made one of the biggest donations to the Sonoma land trust asking that they continue to expand and preserve more land.

The Thieriots left their mark on geography and history by donating Little Black Mountain to Sonoma Land Trust, anchoring our conservation efforts on the Sonoma Coast and presence in the region. Their intent was to preserve Little Black Mountain as open space and dedicate it to the community. The grant agreement includes a request that SLT expand the preserve whenever possible, which we have since accomplished through our acquisition of the 5,630-acre Jenner Headlands property and recent 238-acre Pole Mountain purchase, creating a 6,368-acre protected landscape.

After the fire the couple move to the east coast and start a new foundation and historic farm and continued to focus on conservation.

From a young age, he was enamored of the forest and wild spaces,” said his brother, Peter E. Thieriot of San Francisco. In his conservation work, “he tried to move strategically just in advance of the developers” to preserve as much open land as possible.

This effort was so successful that through the Berkshire Natural Resources Council in Pittsfield, Mass., alone, Mr. Thieriot bought and either donated or restricted for preservation more than 4,500 acres of land. Mr. Thieriot was a director of the council as well as a founding member of the Monterey (Mass.) Preservation Land Trust. Through his estate, 3,600 more acres of land will be preserved, including his Tall Pine Farm.

He cultivated vegetables for sale on his 200-acre Tall Pine Farm in Monterey, Mass., living there in a historic 275-year-old farmhouse and specializing in craftsmanship with antique hand tools.

He also maintained a sawmill, and was so skilled in traditional carpentry that when he built a vegetable stand on his farm a decade ago he did the whole thing from scratch, handcrafting the boards out of trees and constructing the sturdy stand with pegs instead of nails and screws.

I’m guessing that MSPCA pursued a grant from the foundation for preserving habitat and wildlife by preserving beavers. I sure wish I could read about that story and how it happened.

WILLIAMSTOWN — It might not be a good idea to fool Mother Nature, but fooling beavers might be in their best interest. And, thanks to the generosity of a former Berkshire resident, financial help is available—for people and beavers.

In fact Bob never, ever stopped working to make things better. Before he died the governor of Massachusetts presented him with THE award for saving open space in the state.  Earlier in his life he started another foundation to help children called “Janet’s fund”.

His brother, Peter, said that at the time of his death, Mr. Thieriot was halfway through negotiating, in conjunction with the Berkshire council, for the preservation of a 430-acre milk farm in north Berkshire County. His family and the council intend to continue the negotiations, to buy development rights ensuring the farmland will have logging restrictions and protection from subdivision.

What a thrillingly fulfilled life that was stupidly cut short by brain cancer. How incredible to have a foundation that helps install flow devices. Have you ever noticed how all the wrong people seem to die of cancer? And the useless nasty ones survive to be president of bomb Iran?

And hey, if you are sitting back and feeling kind of useless like you’ve never done anything in your entire life even the tiniest fraction of good compared to Bob, you’re not alone.

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