Category: Beavers elsewhere

BEAVER ZEAL

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere August 8, 2018

Am I a zealot?

I mean I’m obviously passionate about the water-stewards, but am I a puritan? Am I unreasonable? I don’t feel like a purist – but maybe that’s just how being a zealot is – you always think your crazy beliefs are reasonable and everyone else is just wrong.

Yesterday I found out a few things about the Napa project that helped me understand why no one had filled me in before hand. Seems the flow device is temporary while some bank work gets done. See the fancy new hotel being built wants stronger banks. But they can’t put in rip-rap or sheetpile or concrete because it’s Napatopia. And they can’t dig it up and replace it because its Wappo tribal land and protected. So they plan is to stabilize the land with a willow fascines and huge boulders to grab the bank, which I guess, environmentally speaking is better than sheetpile.

Only they can’t do it now because the pond has too much water.

So the plan is for Kevin to lower the water by 4 inches a day to give the beavers ‘time to adjust‘ and then when the water’s all gone drop in the huge boulders and do the planting and then have Kevin take OUT the flow device, let the water come back, and fix the dam a little until the beavers come back and fix it better.

Seriously.

The idea is that the beavers have an upstream bank lodge they’ll probably relocate to for the time being but if these were MY beavers I’d be freaked they might just relocate for ever. I certainly can’t imagine they’ve been included in the plans. Maybe the young wouldn’t be up to the change. Or there might be a dog attack when the water levels were down. Or the sudden change will bring curious raccoons and round worm parasite? OR OR OR.

You can see why no one talked to me about this. Supposedly they’ll be a wildlife biologist standing by on site. And a cultural heritage expert just in case. I’m told lots of care went into this plan. But if you ask me we might just need to change the city’s nickname from Napatopia.

Sigh.

More evidence of my unreasonable unpragmatic beaver purism came yesterday in an email from author Ben Goldfarb who sheepishly wrote to warn me that the Washington Post blog had wanted him to do a story on the South American beavers and it was coming out in a couple days. He had tried to talked about other subjects but they wanted the “bad-beavers-ruining-south-america” story because you know how people love a good invasive tale.

Another one? Ben’s our ringer. We don’t need him to help the enemy. They have plenty of their own team members to do their dirty work. I could have written back a number of things. But I think of Ben as a buddy so I just sent back this photo and figured he’d get the message.

I guess he did because later he sent back this:

I still enjoyed his interview on Mongabay this morning though. But what do I know?

I’m a zealot.

INSTITUTUM CASTOR – ANNUS PRIMUS

Guess who turns ONE today? Our friends at the Beaver Institute, that’s who!In honor of their first year Mike Callahan is offering his first ever professional training program for future beaver managers everywhere!

For the upcoming year we are excited to start training beaver specialists. Our goal is to train 100 professionals in 5 years to promote coexistence with beavers across North America. Beaver Institute course graduates will embrace the critical role that beavers play in creating vital and vibrant ecosystems and learn the technical skills needed to nonlethally resolve beaver conflicts. For more training course info go to: https://www.beaverinstitute.org/education/get-training/.

In recognition of both our one year anniversary and the launching of our training program, we are announcing a Matching Fund Drive for student scholarships. Your support can help a worthy student learn and implement nonlethal solutions to beaver issues.

Imagine a world with 100 new beaver specialists! If Mike gets his wish,2023 just might turn out to be the year of the beaver! Mike is looking for funding help to match scholarships. Dig deep into the couch cushions, because the heating planet thinks this is worth supporting!

If you act now, your donation will be matched, dollar for dollar (up to a total of $5,000), by one of our kind supporters. Please generously contribute to our efforts to train progressive beaver professionals via PayPal.

Donate now to double your donation, and imagine the satisfaction of learning which grateful student received your assistance and how many beavers and ecosystems they will preserve! Thank you.

Donate Here

BEAVERS ON STAGE

heidi08 Who's saving beavers now? August 5, 2018

Mike Settell and the Watershed guardians are doing the hero’s work of trying to teach about beaver benefits in Idaho. There are easier places to change hearts and minds, believe me.
Our friends in Idaho have been pulling this off long enough to be very impressed. But this year the event has been pushed back to September. I assume for all the usual reasons that might require a change of plans.

Watershed Guardians fifth annual Beaver Dam Jam rescheduled to Sept. 15

POCATELLO — The date of the fifth annual Beaver Dam Jam, a music event to support beaver conservation that will host an open jam competition, raffles and demonstrations, has been moved to Sept. 15.

The event was originally scheduled for July 28. It will now run from 4 to 10:30 p.m. Sept. 15 at the Mink Creek Pavilion.

The event includes food, a silent auction, raffles, a singer-songwriter contest and more. Headliners will be the Eclectics and Shawn and the Marauders. Watershed Guardians provides shuttle transportation to and from the event. On-site camping is available.

Think for a moment about the coordination needed to put this together every year. Shuttle? Campground? Ticket Sales? Publicity? Silent Auction? That’s some serious logistics involved in making this all happen.

Our beaver festival lasts exactly 5 hours once a year and I cannot imagine making it a millisecond longer. It’s a lot to take on.

I’m grateful every time I see that Mike and his merry men are up to the task!

Meanwhile I’ve been working to restore the ‘sightings page’ of the website. Even though our beavers aren’t visible at the moment, it’s a wealth of data that I wanted back. When you think about it, its a documentary of wildlife sightings, beaver behavior and observations over a decade. So I thought that was worth keeping. You can always access it through the ‘About us’ drop down menu, or go here.

There’s lots to love and hate about the new computer. My beaver decade saw three different cameras taking footage in three different formats, so it was a bit of a scramble to find everything. But I did find some very special footage I thought was lost early on. I had transferred it to my new mac at the time because I thought it would be safer, which turned out not to be true. I thought it was gone. But apparently it was just lurking.

Listen to our voices while I’m filming and you can see how early in our beaver career this happened. July 28, 2007. We practically know nothing. I even comment that some of the kits are ‘older’ than the others.

And Jon agrees with me! I’m not putting it on youtube because I don’t want to compress it. But click on the ‘four” to see it on this site. And turn your sound up to enjoy our beaver innocence!

four

BEAVER BENEFITS ON THE BIG STAGE

heidi08 Beaver Book, Who's saving beavers now? July 29, 2018

Let’s start with some local news. Readers of this website (both of you) will know instantly the name of the county in California that kills the most beavers. (Placer) And you’ll remember how doggedly I tried to persuade them differently, presenting to the board of supervisors and the fish and game commission, talking to the media. It was the 2013 depredation records that showed Placer County was killing beavers at a rate 7 times greater than the entire state – significant at the .02 level even when we controlled for things like population density and water acreage.

A dream of mine has always been to take some willing site with beaver issues in Placer county, install a flow device, and publicize the heck out of it. Worth A Dam would even help pay. Well now it looks like my dream might come true. On two sites, one in Lincoln and one in Auburn. Kevin Swift went out last week to assess them and there might even be funding for the projects through the fish and wildlife partners program. Fingers crossed! I’ll keep you posted as this moves forward. But this could be a big win for beavers!

Speaking of big wins for beavers, Ben’s book moved from the Science Blog to the Science Magazine now with another lovely review for all to see and an awesome photo. I thought I would share a little with you this morning.

Got an environmental problem? Beavers could be the solution

Most people probably don’t think of beavers until one has chewed through the trunk of a favorite tree or dammed up a nearby creek and flooded a yard or nearby road. Beavers are pests, in this view, on par with other members of the order Rodentia. But a growing number of scientists and citizens are recognizing the merits of these animals, science writer Ben Goldfarb explains in his new book Eager. Beavers are industrious architects, key engineers of healthy ecosystems and a potential solution to a host of environmental problems.

Beaver dams are more than just stoppages for waterways. “The structures come in an almost limitless range of shapes and sizes, from speed bumps the length of a human stride to a half-mile-long dike, visible from space,” Goldfarb writes. The lodges, dams, burrows and other structures offer the animals shelter from predators and weather, as well as storage for food. And the structures turn fast, narrow streams into swamps, wetlands and marshes that host a wide range of wildlife, from fish to insects to birds. These aren’t classically pretty ecosystems, but they are incredibly diverse and provide benefits such as water storage and pollution control.

Goldfarb’s writing shines with beautiful language and colorful stories — like that time dozens of beavers were air-dropped into Idaho in one of the most successful beaver restoration projects in history. That tale and others make Eager an especially pleasant read. The mountains of evidence of beavers’ ecological benefits provided within the book’s pages just might make a “Beaver Believer” out of you.

That’s a pretty fantastic review, aimed squarely at all our non-believing biologist friends. Yeah, I’m talking to you, CDFW officers who hand out depredation permits like they were candy. Lets hope some of these excellent reviews sink in among the powers that be.

On a related note, I noticed this week that a chapter of Ben’s book was posted in audio format at the publishers. It was the bracing, ‘buckle up’ introduction that describes where you’re going on this journey to better understand the beaver impact.. This morning it’s the Roosevelt chapter, which is also wonderful to behold so I thought I’d share it.

i found it a little disconcerting to have someone else reading his grand words, but Ben reassured a friend on facebook that his editor explained “He had a voice for writing books” – which is a pretty droll way to say he was not the man for the job. I don’t know about that.. I thought his reading at the festival was wonderful!

Anyway, enjoy.

BRACED FOR BEAVERS

heidi08 Who's blaming beavers now? July 20, 2018

I received an email from the engineer last night, asking about the beavers in their new location. It seems he was approached by someone about them recently. Hmm. Moses mentioned that the last time he visited the dam there were two thin slash marks in it, like someone wanted to let out the water. All of this gives me a braced, approaching-the-trenches feeling again, It was just barely a year ago that I learned the beavers were living next door. Things were going so well I had almost forgot to be worried about their fate.

It’s funny how quickly it all comes back to you.

I was comforted this morning by this, printed in the Rants and Raves section of the Seattle Times yesterday, and shared by Samantha Everette (who works with Ben Dittbrenner at (Beavers Northwest), What a fantastic letter!

Out of the mouths of babes, eh?

Yeah, why didn’t the owners just wrap the trees with wire instead of killing the beavers? Beats the hell out of me, I’m really not at all surprised by this. Even the children are smarter about beavers in Seattle than the adults in Martinez. I might have known.