Category: Beavers elsewhere

BEAVERS AND THEIR SOLUTIONS

heidi08 Who's saving beavers now? July 17, 2018

I was invited last night to be part of a radio discussion about beavers on KPFA’s Terra Verde this week, The producer had lined up Ben Goldfarb and Rick Lanman for the show as well. I’m heading to the Sierras today so it wasn’t possible, but it reminded of that foggy day of yore back in 2008 when they asked for a show on the beaver story in Martinez. In those days I was afraid to talk to reporters and had a full time job so I encoraged others to go to the studio (Linda Meza then of Worth A Dam, Mitch Avalon of CCC Flood Control and Lisa Owens Vianni of Estuaries magazine). They very pleasantly sat for an hour a did a nice job discussing the controversy and I was mortified that no one ever once mentioned the flow device or how we solved our problem. In my mind thus making sure that no one in the state would know that beaver problems could be solved by anything other than forbearance.

I swore it would never happen again, that I would get over myself and step up to the mike next time and was thrilled to be invited, but timing makes it impossible and in this new renaissance climant I know Ben will bring them up!

Meanwhile there’s a great letter (from Vermont of course) that’s worth taking time to appreciate.

Letter: Embrace coexistence over killing

Last year Protect Our Wildlife (POW) launched a statewide Living With Wildlife campaign to help towns pursue nonlethal methods to address human-wildlife conflicts. Good news is that POW recently partnered with the Town of Marlboro to help prevent beavers from being trapped in leghold and body-gripping traps, while also preventing beaver-related flooding and subsequent road damage. With grant funding, POW provided financial support to install three culvert protective water flow devices, called Beaver Deceivers, on Grant Road in Marlboro. This site is one of three that the town will have protected with such devices to save the wetlands and maintain these rich ecosystems for beavers and many other species of wildlife.

Water flow control devices are the most efficient and cost-effective tools to prevent beaver-related flooding and road damage and also to protect these keystone species. Traditional methods of removing beavers usually involve shooting or using leghold or body gripping traps, both of which are not only cruel, but offer only a temporary “solution”; good wetland habitat will host beavers – we can learn to live with them. Also, beavers have tightly knit family units with the kits living in the lodge with their mother, father, brothers and sisters until they are about two years old, at which point they are not yet mature enough to mate, but independent enough to leave the area and start building their own lodge, using the skills they learned from their family. Trapping and killing leaves kits orphaned and results in a futile loop of trapping and killing with no long-term benefits.

As our planet continues to face the real effects of climate change, including drought, we should learn to value these invaluable environmental allies and embrace coexistence over killing.

Brenna Galdenzi, president
Protect Our Wildlife POW

Nice letter! I thought Patti Smith’s remarkable sketches belonged with it. If Vermont doesn’t have a higher beaver IQ than the rest of the world I’d be very surprised, Thanks Brenna for making this happen. Do you think Skip installed the flow devices? I wonder.

In the meantime I’m stalling for the City Creatures Blog to go live with our story. Nothing yet. I’m pretty sure it’s going to happen because my name is listed in the author section. Maybe there are people in the world who don’t wake up as early as I do?

Is that even possible?

It’s up! Go hear to read what I write like when I’m not in my pajamas.

Is Your City Smarter than a Beaver?

Here;s the teaser paragraph to get you to read the whole thing, please post comments on the article so Gavin thinks beavers are worth writing about again!

In 2007, Martinez, California, had some unusual visitors. In those days you could drop by the local Starbucks, pick up your morning latte, and step right outside to watch some fluffy beaver kits munch down willow leaves, twigs, and scraps before they ducked off to sleep in the nearby lodge for the day. If you listened closely enough you could even hear them. Their vocalizations sounded eerily like the protesting complaint of a child who was told to stop playing and get to bed.

ONLY-THINGS-I-LIKE DAY

It’s Sunday,our beavers are safe for the moment, the silent auction items are all delivered and paid for, and Jon made corn ravioli’s last night. I think we should celebrate with an only good news sunday, don’t you? Let’s start with a lovely letter to the editor from Minnesota.

READER LETTER: Killing beavers is not the only answer

I was dismayed to read the article in the July 1 Leader regarding the beavers in a local pond.

A family of beavers built a dam that caused the water level of the pond to rise. The response of Hutchinson city employees was to set traps to kill the beavers.

I immediately called Wildwoods Wildlife Rehabilitation in Duluth to find out if there were other options for this situation. I was told that it is an established practice to live-trap beavers and re-home them, and there is a Minnesota organization that advocates for beavers and wetland restoration called The Beaver Project: Living in Harmony with Nature’s Eco-Engineers. It offers “innovative, cost-effective, and humane strategies and services to persons and communities to help protect and maintain property, roadways, and shorelines from beaver activities.”

I contacted the organization and they are seeking a beaver family for a particular lake right now. From them, I learned about a device called a beaver pond leveler developed at Clemson University in 1992. Instructions to construct the device are posted on the Minnesota DNR website or it can be purchased from the Minnesota non-profit, MINNCOR Industries. It took me 10 minutes on a Saturday to speak to these people and get this information.

I have spoken with the mayor of Hutchinson and he supports an investigation into an alternative solution and I left a message for John Paulson, the city’s environmentalist. I would be happy to coordinate a project to install a pond leveler or relocate these beavers. If these animals have already been needlessly killed, I hope I can educate the city of Hutchinson and others that killing beavers is not the only answer.

By Denise Luke Richfield

Ahh nicely said Dennis! I think things got a little muddled with the idea of the ‘pond leveler’ being invented by Clemson but never mind, you got the gist. There’s a way to solve this and good reasons to try. So it’s worth a shot, Minnesota would be a fine place to save beavers!

The second story comes from Wisconsin and isn’t really about beavers, but the headline made me smile very broadly.

Leftist Woodchucks #Resist Paul Ryan by Eating His Car

Activists have been making the private lives of Trump allies as difficult as possible lately, protesting at their houses, ruining their meals, and berating them in their hometowns. And it looks like the guerrilla faction of the #Resistance just welcomed some unlikely compatriots to their cause: woodchucks.

A family of the bushy-tailed, chisel-toothed mammals sabotaged Paul Ryan’s Chevy Suburban recently, chewing through the wiring and leaving his SUV totaled, NPR reports. During a Q&A Thursday at the Economic Club in Washington, DC, the House Speaker explained that his car had mysteriously died after he’d left it parked at his mom’s house in Wisconsin through the winter. When a mechanic put it up on a lift to see what was wrong, he said, “they realized that a family of woodchucks lived in the underbody of my Suburban.”

Sure, the woodchucks—also known as groundhogs, whistle-pigs, or land-beavers—might’ve just been looking for a dry, protective shelter where they could ride out the brutal Wisconsin cold. Or maybe, like the anti-Trump dogs who came before them, they were looking to stick it to the Republicans the best way their animal selves knew how.

Welcome to the Resistance.

HA! It was fun to stumble across this interview in my daily beaver search. It’s honestly amazing speaker Ryan can find time to comment on this tragedy, since he’s usually so busy taking away health care or eyeing granny’s social security! Well here’s wishing him lots of time to ponder whistle-pigs in the future.

Finally I think you deserve to see something of Rusty Cohn’s wonderful Saturday morning with the beavers. He was lucky enough to watch some animated hard work at the beaver dam near the fire-fighter’s museum. You’re going to like these. Click on the thumbnail to see it larger, and thanks Rusty!

SPEECISM

heidi08 Who's blaming beavers now? July 13, 2018

If there’s one thing that really annoys me, (and lord knows there are several) it’s a conservation commission that doesn’t like beavers. You know the drill: too much nature or the WRONG KIND of nature in our natural area. Apparently certain people like the otters and the baby ducks, but dammit a beaver just doesn’t belong!

Amy the artist at the festival commented how the intolerance for beavers is almost like a kind of racism.And I had to agree. It’s speecism – pure and simple. Apparently Rhode Island suffers badly from it.

Losing battle at Cedar Swamp

NORTH SMITHFIELD – Paul Soares is on a mission. He has a bone to pick with local wildlife, but it’s not squirrels eating from the birdfeeder or mice in the attic he’s worried about. Instead, the resident and chairman of the North Smithfield Conservation Commission is determined to do something about the beavers that moved into a section of public land near Rte. 146 a few years ago and quietly staked their claim, keeping it all but inaccessible to the humans who live nearby.

Once each week, Soares climbs into his red Toyota 4Runner and heads to Cedar Swamp, a 69.5-acre town property donated from the estate of Philip Silva in 2010. The property includes about 30 acres of swampland and another 40 acres of forested highlands and stretches from Rte. 146 to the power substation, ending just shy of Greenville Road at its eastern edge.

Once used as a hunting preserve, the property is home to dragonflies, deer and wood ducks and offers an oasis of wildlife just beyond the border with Woonsocket. It’s an area Soares and other members of the Conservation Commission hope to make accessible to members of the public for hiking and other activities, but a number of challenges stand in their way.

Guess what’s in their way! Just what is that is ruining their plans for a nature preserve? Go ahead guess!

“We’re trying to get this to the point where the public can have some decent access. It’s been a long struggle, and so far the beavers are winning,” said Soares.

Those dam rodents! I knew it!

“When the flooding is at its worst, this is all underwater,” Soares explained. “People can’t walk through here, and there’s 40-some acres of beautiful highlands you can’t get to.”

When The Valley Breeze first checked in on the property in 2016, Soares was supervising the installation of one of two “beaver deceivers,” water diversion systems costing about $1,200 apiece. Since then, the beavers have built another dam downstream, raising water levels beyond the systems’ ability to lower them. Conservation Commission members have tried other methods to control the flooding over the years, breaking up dams and building a bridge of logs that was washed away in the rising waters, but the beavers continue to rebuild.

Ooh how you’ve suffered! Can I just pause here to say that I think a beaver lodge among cypress trees is just about the most beautiful thing I know?

Beavers are very invested little rodents and they just continue to cut things down and build dams and there’s really nothing you can do to stop them,” he said.

There is one solution the Conservation Commission hasn’t tried yet. State law allows the trapping of nuisance beavers with a permit, provided they are not moved to another location where they could cause problems for someone else. Instead, the beavers must be killed, a measure Soares said the Conservation Commission is trying to avoid.

Mighty white of you.

For now, he and other members access the back section of the property by unlocking a gated area normally closed to vehicles and driving straight through the half-foot puddle to where an old logging road climbs out of the swamp on the other side. After passing a marker where Soares buried his Jack Russell terrier, Lucy, when she died in 2016, the road winds off into the woods, looping through 40 acres of heavy forest. It’s land that’s rarely seen except by members of the Conservation Commission who maintain the road and the occasional ATV rider trespassing on town property.

“They just keep expanding their range and causing problems,” he said.

I would say it’s a good thing you’re not killing the beavers, because four of the five comments on this article are defending them, and assuming you really want this land for hunting I would think you’d like to have more (not less) game species? Ever wonder what happens to your swamp and precious cypress when beavers leave the area?

Trust me, it isn’t pretty.

JOHNNY BEAVERSEED

heidi08 Who's saving beavers now? July 12, 2018

It’s been so quiet on the beaver front. Days have passed since the last review of Ben Goldfarb’s book. I know he’s headed to Toronto for the NACCB conference next week, but I expected we’d hear something on the way.

Looks like the dry spell is over. Good. I like this part.

FERN Q&A:

Beaver-created wetlands could be a farmer’s best friend

Ben Goldfarb is one of the most eloquent and powerful storytellers writing today about environmental issues in America. His two stories for FERN, The Codfather, a rollicking tale of fraud and regulatory breakdown in the New England commercial fishery, and The Endling, about the final days of the vaquita, a shy porpoise that lives only in the Gulf of California, were among the best pieces we’ve published. In his new book, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, he makes the case that this widely vilified rodent, which was trapped nearly out of existence in the U.S., is not only making a comeback but could play a major role in mitigating the effects of climate change. Brent Cunningham, FERN’s executive editor, interviewed him about the book via email.

Given how thoroughly erased they’ve been from modern America, I would bet that most people’s idea of the beaver is connected to various cartoons. How big an obstacle is this disconnect to the larger effort of not only restoring the beaver but embracing its multifaceted environmental reclamation work?

We’re an increasingly urban nation, often disconnected from the rural areas where our food is produced and our wildlife, beavers included, dwells. To some extent, though, that’s changing. Just as the slow food movement has reconnected Americans with farmers’ markets and urban farms, beavers are gradually reentering our consciousness. They’re hardy critters, after all, capable of thriving in some pretty developed landscapes so long as we don’t actively kill them. Some of my favorite stories in the book are about urban beavers: the colony that moved into a wetland next to a Walmart in Logan, Utah, for instance, or the rodents’ return to the Bronx River — New York City’s first beavers in 200 years! We’re a country with a growing beaver population and, I think, a growing beaver awareness.

And with that awareness, I’d like to imagine, comes an appreciation for how important beavers are to our ecosystems. When beavers built dams and created ponds in a stream in downtown Martinez, California, wildlife from otters to herons quickly rode in on their coattails. Spend a few minutes at a beaver pond, and you can’t fail to appreciate how much life these creatures support.

I love reading what Ben has to say about beavers, but finding little mentions of Martinez is like discovering an unopened Christmas present with your name on it under the tree in January. A little something extra to you didn’t expect. Aww thanks Ben.

Related to both these previous questions, isn’t part of the implication of your book that we — humans — will need to reimagine certain ideas about the “outdoors” if the beaver is to return in a significant way? Like what a great trout stream looks like? Maybe even what a ranch or a farm looks like?

Incorporating beavers in agricultural landscapes is, to my mind, one of the most exciting frontiers in water management. Take James Rogers, the manager of the Winecup-Gamble Ranch in northeast Nevada. For decades, the ranch’s irrigation water was supplied from a reservoir behind a giant human-built dam — the kind of centralized water infrastructure solution that pervades the American West. Last winter, though, the dam washed out and the reservoir drained.

Most ranchers would have ordered it rebuilt, but James is a savvy, progressive guy, and he recognized that the ranch’s sizable beaver population could be part of the answer. Instead of rebuilding a single enormous (and risky) dam, he’s hiring a consulting firm to construct a number of smaller wetlands all over the property that will be populated and maintained by the resident beavers. Rather than putting all his eggs in a single basket, he’s diversifying his approach to water storage — with the help of a rodent. I so admire that humility and vision, that willingness to work with, rather than against, the natural world.

This is a good article that hits a lot of high points Click on the title to go read the whole thing for yourself. Ben sure knows what he’s doing.

If you were speaking to a room of ranchers and farmers, what would say to convince them the stop viewing the beaver as “irrigation-clogging, tree-felling, field-flooding menaces”?

Rather than doing the talking myself (after all, I’m just a lowly journalist), I’d introduce them to someone whose experience they’d respect: say, Jon Griggs, another brilliant Nevada rancher. Griggs is a former beaver skeptic. When the critters turned up in Susie Creek, the stream that runs through his grazing allotment, in 2003, his inclination was to kill them. But he let them live, and was soon happy he did. Beavers, and their dams, turned his stream into a sprawling cattail marsh, creating 20 additional acres of open water, raising water tables two feet, and increasing plant production by more than 30 percent. That wasn’t just good for the ecosystem, it was great for his bottom line. When drought hit in 2012, nearby ranchers had to pay a bunch of money to truck water to their thirsty livestock. But thanks largely to beavers, and the ponds and marshes they’d created, Griggs was able to water his livestock without expensive trucks. He’s become a great spokesman for the power of beavers, and he’s convinced neighboring ranchers to embrace these animals, too. If anyone’s going to change the fate of beavers in America, it’s guys like Jon Griggs — authentic agricultural community members with hard-won experience.

Ahh deft choice, although it literally makes me shudder to read Griggs name without at least a mention of the patient BLM fish biologist Carol Evans who painstakingly nurtured his curiosity before a single beaver even dreamed of moving in. Still, Jon is a convincing voice. Kudos for broadcasting him.

Nitrate runoff from ag operations is a huge problem, contaminating drinking water, killing aquatic life, and creating algal blooms and dead zones. You have a short passage about how wetlands, like those created by beavers, filter out nitrates and other runoff from agricultural operations. How realistic is it, given the current state of affairs in our country, that a beaver-based strategy for dealing with runoff can get a foothold and grow?

Well, I’m a congenital optimist, but I think it’s entirely realistic! We already know that wetlands capture runoff, and that beavers create wetlands; according to one study, beaver ponds are capable of filtering out as much as 45 percent of nitrates in southern New England watersheds. The limiting factor for wetlands restoration in this country is obvious: money. But beavers, of course, conduct wetlands restoration for free (and, even better, without requiring permits). Why not, then, learn to better coexist with a creature who will contribute unpaid labor to our greatest water quality crisis? Once more for the people in the back: Let the rodent do the work!

Ahh!

Do you know the story of Johnny Appleseed? He was a pioneer hero who famously walked all of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Ontario and Illinois bearing apple seeds and a shovel to spread the crisp good news. Never mind that he was more interested in boosting the alcohol production than feeding anyone, he was still regarded as a hero who cheerfully got the ecological message out.

Well I’m formally dubbing Ben “Johnny Beaver-seed” Because he’s traveling the countryside sewing appreciate for this curious flat-tailed crop, and I, for one, couldn’t be happier.

Oh the dam is good to me!
And so I thank the dam!
For giving me, the things I wish
The duck and the frog and the well and the fish
the dam is good to me!

AMBASSADORS TO ALBERTA

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere July 10, 2018

One of the many things I like about the new website is that I can switch out the banners and margin whenever I want. Yesterday I thought we needed some coolunderwater shots. For the first time I”m not using our photos because we didn’t do any underwater photography with our beavers, but I like them anyway. I’m sure that’s how they would have looked if we had!

Another example of sudden praise for beavers came from this article, which is full of the kind of ‘almost nice’ things you say about a cousin that really gets on your nerves, bless her heart,

Industrious, creative beavers a perfect Alberta ambassador

Fort Saskatchewan’s beaver families are keeping busy this summer doing what comes naturally – raising their young, chewing trees and generally trying to keep out of everyone’s way.

Signs of beaver activity, including felled trees and gnawed stumps, are a common sight in riverside towns and cities across Alberta. The large rodents—at up to 77 pounds, the largest in Canada—make themselves at home anywhere there is suitable water and food.

“There are beautiful tall trees along the river that would be very attractive for dam and lodge building material and food supplies for beavers,” Mark Heckbert, provincial wildlife conflict specialist with Alberta Environment and Parks, said of the local river valley.

“And so like many river communities in Alberta, you can expect beavers to be found throughout the open water periods in the community, probably coming up into the areas that are closest to the river foraging for food and bringing those building materials back into the river.”

Ahh beaver ambassadors! That’s a nice thought. Our beavers were Martinez ambassadors for years. Of course people don’t usually kill their own ambassadors, but I’m sure it sometimes happens.

Beavers also have a reputation for making a pest of themselves, sometimes taking down significant numbers of trees and damming up waterways.

“For the most part, beavers go about living their life and don’t cause too much grief. Although on occasion their actions of creating their habitat of deeper water by damming up streams causes localized flooding,” Heckbert said.

“Beavers are quite fascinating creatures,” Heckbert added. “They really are a perfect Alberta ambassador. They are industrious, creative, and persistent. And those are all qualities that Albertans are known for.”

Hrmph. “Dammed with feint praise” I’d say: Although the article does finish with a nice tail slap. Take that, Heckbert.