Category: Beavers elsewhere

SOBERING FOOD FOR THOUGHT

This is Carmen Sosa.

She is the president of the Farm and Food Coalition in Tyler Texas which is east of Dallas. She is responsible for the wonderful farmers market in Rose city and works to connect sustainable growers with restaurants and their community.

Carmen contacted me a few weeks ago regarding the beavers near her home on Placid lake. In the past the corporate association who handles their properties has regularly trapped out beavers and otters. (Otters because they’ll eat up all the fish, and beavers just because.) In addition to trapping she says they destroy lodges using the common in Texas ‘kerosene in a mason jar’ method.

(!)

Carmen wanted something different for these beavers and asked if we could help.

I introduced her to a fairly well connected beaver friend near by, and gave her lots of information. She was able to read up, confer and even consult some GIS water table maps. We were both hopeful that this could make a difference and that these beavers would have the chance that so few beavers in Texas have.

Yesterday was the big meeting. And even though she came armed with cheerful information and intention they voted to do the same thing they always do. This morning they would call the trapper out and the home owner nearest the lodge would burn it out.

Carmen wrote me in despair last night. She had kayaked out to see the beavers and was desperate to do something rather than let them be killed in their sleep. I didn’t really know what to tell her, but I shared her sorrow and alarm.

Mostly I thought about our beavers. And how lucky it was that things turned out differently for them. We don’t like to think it but it was a razor thin path to victory and for such a long time it could easily have gone either way.

For Carmen, who surrounds herself with green and growing things, this calamity of death is more than a hardship. What comfort I can offer is that she can use this lost effort to form a coalition of like minds for the future, so that the next beavers, or maybe the ones after that, are luckier than these,

The arc of ecology is long indeed, but it bends towards beavers.

COMING BACK TO REALITY

heidi08 Who's Killing Beavers Now? July 4, 2018

Happy Independence day! You know, that important celebration of our country’s birth that came when we severed all ties with the tyrant that cruelly ruled us with his constant barbaric tweeting and insistence on locking up babies. Oops! Wrong tyrant! (You gotta admit, the pirates we have now make the tea tax seem pretty quaint by comparison).

I’ve been hard at work finishing up silent auction items and trying to fix the website, which seems to have lost its cool little share-on-facebook gizmo on July 1st. All I can think is that the since the gizmo upgraded that day, it can no longer talk to our existing website, so it doesn’t work like it used to. I’m still hoping for a fix any time soon.

I don’t know in what kind of beaver-saving bubble you’ve been since the festival. but I woke up today with three emails in my inbox from a homeowner in Nevada I wrote about at the end of 2016. The emails were titled “Your Ignorant Post” so of course they peaked my curiosity because I was eager to see to which of my ignorant posts she was referring.

Turns out it was the one where I commented that beavers were saving water against the will of the homeowner and NDOW gave her a permit to trap them.

Given her worries we’re surprised by nothing in this article but THIS:

Jessica Heitt, the Nevada Department of Wildlife Urban Wildlife Coordinator, said the only option to remove beavers is to hire a professional to trap them. It’s open season from Oct. 1 through April 30.

“If it’s outside of the season they have to apply for a depredation permit,” Heitt said.

“We would usually go out and investigate the area and go and make sure there’s a significant amount of damage before we ever issue a permit.”

Can that possibly be true? Did Jessica make a mistake? Does Napa REALLY send a NDOW worker out to see whether a depredation permit is warranted? How oh how did that policy get started and when can California adopt it please? I’m pretty sure all you have to do to get a depredation permit in California is check a box or pick up the phone. Could nevada really go out for every request?

It’s true I wrote a few lines at the beginning about the homeowner, but the real point of this post was the fact that NDOW sends someone out to SEE if a depredation permit is needed. I was fully impressed and wondered how we could implement such a practice in California.

Let’s just say the home owner wasn’t impressed with my impression, and wrote me that they had been infested by mosquitoes and the trapper had taken out 300 beavers from her little creek. And my type really makes her sick, You can imagine the rest. This isn’t out first rodeo..

Since hoards of angry animal rights activists are not in fact reading this site every day or standing by with torches and pitchforks awaiting their marching orders, the nearest I can think is that her story was also on the local news, (which is how I learned about it) and riled some folks. I guess she is still getting glared at in the grocery store because of it to this day.

Really, when you think about it, it’s kind of sweet that she thinks I did that. And that I’m a ‘type’ at all. Wouldn’t it be awesome if there were more of me?

I’m working on it.

BLAME THE BEAVER (PART XMXIIC)

heidi08 Who's blaming beavers now? June 24, 2018

Ahhh, that was fun. Author Ben Goldfarb and his wife Elise stopped by yesterday for the books on their way to the upcoming events in Healdsburg. They were excited because they had never Sarah Gilman’s great print and even more excited because they had never seen the hard0=cover published version of all his hard work. It was kind of delightful towatch their giddy recognition of the dawning reality: This is really happening! There were clouds of proud feelings emitting from them when they reviewed what was vitually a boxfull of Bens.

Today there is time to share a fun beaver tale and some more adorable kit photos from Rusty Cohn at the Napa Creek dam downtown. Here’s one of my favorites to get us started. The beaver nose to my mind is one of the hallmarks of beaverness and marks it distinctly from nutria, muskrat or otter, The button-nose of childhood is one of my favorite sites in all the world.

And, honestly, can you blame me?

Native Insight: A hole in the Great Beaver myth

The Pocumtuck Range is the site of the giant Pleistocene beaver and the super-human Eastern Algonquian earth-shaper or transformer figure Hobomock, who’s known by other names among various related Northeastern dialects. What’s constantly changing is the motive for killing the beast and the lesson to be learned from the act that left behind a distinctive range, which to this day from many directions resembles the carcass of the petrified giant beaver of indigenous lore. Though the genesis and 19th-century resurrection of this well-known story can be loosely tracked, it remains difficult to make sense of at times.

This popular, colonial version of the tale was retold with attribution to Field by Edward P. Pressey, author of the 1910 “History of Montague.” By this time, the Montague historian slightly embellished the tale by being more specific than either Field or Sheldon. Pressey wrote: “The great beaver preyed upon the fish of the long river. And when other food became scarce, he took to eating men out of the river villages.”

This is a particularly striking reconstruction of history and myth. When you read Ben’s book it will be very very clear to you how decimated the streams, fish and fauna were after the devastation of the fur trade. There were indeed fewer fish to catch. Not because of the beaver mind you, but definitely because of the beaver trade! Turning that around and blaming the victim is the height of atrocity and very familiar to us todayl

Now, right here and now, it must be said that beavers are not and never have been meat- or fish-eaters. They are herbivores, eating tree bark and plants, not pond critters such as fish, frogs, snakes, salamanders, ducklings or any other wetland creatures. They are plant-eaters, plain and simple, and so, according to cursory online research, were their giant Pleistocene beaver cousins.

I find it odd that I have never seen this potential myth-dispelling fact stated anywhere in print associated with the Great Beaver Tale. And to be honest, me myself, an outdoor columnist for nearly 40 years and an outdoorsman, hunter and fisherman for even longer, wasn’t sure of that fact and never checked until my naturalist brother-in-law from Maine raised the issue over the weekend. Just one simple query by him really got my wheels spinning. Told the details of the tale, the professor emeritus suggested that it made no sense because, “I don’t think beavers eat meat or fish, and the Indians surely would have known that.” Though quite sure, even he, an astute observer and nature lover for almost all of his 73 years, didn’t know that beavers ate no fish or meat.

People are always surprised when they learn that they’ve been told lies about beavers. It happens all the time and should surprise no one anymore. This article did make me curious about the Pocmutuck Range. Does it really look like a giant sleeping beaver? Maybe a little.

One last photo from Rusty Cohn’s adventure downtown last night in Napa. The kit is getting brave enough to come out on his own. I love to see those clear eyes looking so healthy and alert.

LET THE COUNTDOWN BEGIN

heidi08 What's killing beavers now? June 20, 2018

Where do the days go? Yesterday we redesigned the stage musician sign and made 53 place cards so the exhibitors know where they set up camp. Oh and checked on Luigi to make sure sandwiches can be delivered to the park for our volunteers. Done, done and done.

Meanwhile I’m just stunned it took 11 long years for me to finally find the perfect ‘tagline’ for the festival. It finally just came to me while I was promoting yesterday’s article on facebook. I think this is beer commercial, madison avenue good. I played around with it a little yesterday, but I’m sure they could do something awesome with it.

I mean I suppose monkey festivals or rat festivals have a tail too, but they’re not here to defend themselves so I win! I never heard of a rat festival anyway but I bet there is a monkey one. Don’t you? I saw several species in Costa Rica but what I remember most about monkeys comes from a badly tended large cage when I was a teen on a spring trip to Mexico. There was a friendly adult and young monkey that would wrap their arms around you tightly if entered the cage, holding on for dear life. I guess it was boring in that cage. Or maybe they just knew that if they held on tight they had a better chance of bolting once the gate was open again,

All I know is that I quickly learned the only way OUT of the monkey cage was to get some other poor sap to come in and receive the eager primate hug so you yourself could make a break for it. It turns out there are many situations like that in life, and I remember the lesson well.

Just so we remember it’s not all sunshine and roses in a beaver life, lets take a fast visit to South Dakota.

South Dakota battles problems with beavers

MITCHELL (AP) – In the spring, Randy Becker’s workload gets busy. Busy as a beaver, you might say.

Becker is wildlife damage specialist for the South Dakota Game Fish & Parks Department. His job, otherwise known as “state trapper,” involves ridding nuisance animals like coyotes and beavers for South Dakota landowners. Yes, beavers – those little semi-aquatic rodents that can cause “a world of headaches” – are a big problem here.

“They’re an amazing animal, but they get themselves in a lot of trouble,” said Becker, who’s worked for GF&P for just shy of a decade.

In the past five years, GF&P’s Animal Damage Control program has received an average of 370 beaver calls annually statewide, The Daily Republic reported. The total funding spent removing beavers has climbed, too, and reached a peak in 2017 of $213,800. Since 2013, GF&P has spent nearly $1 million on removing beavers in South Dakota.

214,000 to kill 370 beavers? Wait, that’s like 60 dollars per beaver. Who gets paid 60 dollars a tail? If you consider 5-7 beavers per family then killing off a single colony is nearly 500 dollars a pop! You know what else South Dakota could do with 500 dollars? I mean besides open health care clinics, provide childcare and fix all the potholes. They could install flow devices that fix beaver problems for a decade, fire Mr.Becker (who will certainly never be able to take vacation in England with a name like Randy Becker) and do something useful with that million dollars every 5 years.

But hey, why FIX a problem that pays so well to stay broken?

WE DON’T KNOW WHAT BEAVERS LOOK LIKE, BUT WE HATE THEM ANYWAY

heidi08 What's killing beavers now? June 9, 2018

Winnipeg is the largest city in Manitoba Canada, just northeast of North Dakota. Being so near Saskatchewan their beaver IQs are predictably not the highest – although things are slowly moving from the lower registers. At least this article discusses wrapping trees. But.check out the muskrat photo they chose to tell their brave woes recently.

Winnipeg should stop killing problem beavers, St. James resident says

After sending a city-hired trapper off his property, a St. James homeowner is demanding Winnipeg change its policy on killing problem beavers.

Chad Hepp came home on June 1 to find a contractor setting up a lethal trap on the small beaver lodge abutting his backyard.

Complaints about beavers in the area started in 2012, said City of Winnipeg spokesperson Ken Allen in an email. The city responded by wrapping trees with wire mesh, to keep beavers from chewing on the trees, on both sides of the Assiniboine River every year since.

This is the first time since the complaints were made that the city set kill traps in the area to prevent further damage, Allen said. “The homeowner who requested assistance with trapping also wrapped all of the larger trees in their backyard; however, the beavers started taking down trees in their front yard,” Allen said.

Hepp, who lives on the river side of Assiniboine Avenue, said no one from the city asked for his permission before setting up the traps. The hunter and fisherman believes two beavers live in the lodge — a mother and kit.

“I’m concerned some general contractor that works part time for the city can come onto somebody’s property and make a call like that,” he said. “I had to ask him to leave, politely.”

Mr. Hepp is a rare breed among men. He is upset that beavers would be lethally trapped (an objection of which we approve) and has wrapped trees in his own back yard, (a precaution which we applaud). So far so good. However, his shall we say romantic notion of the lodge containing only a beaver mother and kit pair begs a little education.

“A single beaver is able to damage hundreds of trees each year. Beavers are only removed when there are no other options available to mitigate the damage they are causing.”

Winnipeg opts to kill beavers because the rodents can spread diseases if they are moved. Beavers are also territorial and if they are moved, will come into conflict with any beavers already living in the new location.

“Removal of beavers, when necessary, is conducted by a licensed trapper under approved provincial regulations utilizing humane trapping techniques,” said Allen.

Beavers will cause diseases if moved? You mean spread whatever they already have to other beavers? Or you mean like the plague, like make humans sick? Regardless of the ridiculous notion, Martinez doesn’t deserve to laugh at this because when CDFG agreed to relocate two of our beavers after much refusing they said they would first need to complete 6 weeks of quarantine. Which Lindsey Wildlife generously offered to be responsible for.

Of course the two beavers they agreed to relocate after quickly dispatching their family members would have probably died in that time anyway, so let’s just be thankful that never happened.

For Hepp, who lives closest to the lodge, the beavers have never posed a problem aside from an esthetic one — the jumble of sticks and tree limbs isn’t exactly pretty to look at.

“I get that they’ve probably chewed down the odd sapling, somebody was trying to grow an apple tree a few years ago or whatever but hey, that’s the cost of living on the river,” Hepp said.

Beaver lodges cause an aesthetic problem? You mean they’re not pretty to look at?