Category: Beavers elsewhere

MARTINEZ BEAVERS IN RANGER RICK MAGAZINE

heidi08 In the News, Who's saving beavers now? December 22, 2023

It finally happened. After 11 years and ten festivals the Martinez beavers just went national.

Guess what was delivered to children all across the United States and beyond yesterday? The May issue of Ranger Rick in which our beavers are a major story. The entire issue is online as well here.

Leave it to Beavers

Believe it or not, many people think beavers, especially the ones that live in cities or towns, are pests.

That’s because beavers can make big changes to the places they live. For one thing, they cut down trees. They eat the leaves and tender twigs. And they use the trunks and branches to build dams that block the flow of water in rivers and streams. Those dams form ponds where beaver families can live safely in their lodges—partly underwater dens built of rocks, sticks, and mud.

Unfortunately, a beaver dam may cause the water to rise so high that it floods nearby streets. So for many years, people tried to keep beavers out of their towns and away from their homes.

But now, some people are working to make sure beavers can live happily in their communities. Turn the page to learn more about North America’s largest rodent— including why it makes a great neighbor!

That would be us.

Robin was quick to spot the little curly tailed kits of Tulocay creek.

Good Neighbors
Eventually, scientists started to realize that beavers and their dams actually keep waterways healthy. Dams help prevent the soil around creeks from eroding, or crumbling. The pools created by dams make great homes for fish, birds, and other wildlife. And the dams help filter pollution out of the water.

So some people decided to figure out ways to live side by side with beavers. They discovered they could protect certain trees by wrapping them with wire or painting them with a rough, sandy mixture. (Beavers don’t like the feeling of sand on their teeth, so they move on to other trees.) And they invented a device sometimes called a “Beaver Deceiver.” When the water level in a beaver pond gets too high, this special pipe lets some water flow back out into the creek. That way, the beavers get a lodge that is safely surrounded by water— and the nearby streets and buildings stay nice and dry.

A few towns have installed Beaver Deceivers or similar systems. But the people of Martinez, California, go even further to welcome beavers to their town. They plant beavers’ favorite food trees along the banks of the local creek! For 10 years, a beaver family has made its home in the creek.

“We found that when we helped the beavers, they helped us,” says Heidi Perryman, who started the Martinez group. “They attracted new kinds of wildlife and turned our little creek into a nature preserve.”

Each year, Perryman’s group throws a party for their busy friends: the Beaver Festival! People there—especially local kids—make beaver art, learn about beavers, and may even spot the local beaver family in the nearby creek.

Ahh this feels so right! Thank you Ranger Rick for making our town sound like they welcomed beavers with open arms instead of with clenched teeth. It’s a great article too, author Hanna Schardt let me check the copy back in winter and I was impressed with her cheerful child-proof accuracy. I won’t even sigh wistfully about what the fact that Worth A Dam doesn’t get mentioned (because its a bad word) and we lost our 8-page cover story status when our beaver kits all died that year. Now the cover belongs to some lucky zebras and we don’t even get a link to the website. (Sigh)

But still, many many families will learn that this can be done differently, and we get to keep Suzi’s awesome photos forever. So I think we’re pretty ‘dam’ lucky.

CONSERVANCY FOR ME, BUT NOT FOR THEE

heidi08 Who's Killing Beavers Now? April 15, 2018

See this pretty logo with the grasses blooming inside the ‘O’? It is for a marsh conservancy in Sacramento called the Natomas Basin Conservancy. Yes, I had never heard of them either Natomas is a Maidu word meaning “North place or Upstream of the people”

The Natomas Basin Conservancy is on the Sacramento river at the edge of the city, and “The purpose of the NBHCP is to promote biological conservation along with economic development and the continuation of agriculture within the Natomas Basin. ” As such they engage in species mitigation and replant native trees for bird use. They have a glossy. top dollar website that implores you on every page to DONATE NOW. They have a host of friends and landowning partners including folks at CDFW USDA and FWS.

And what they can’t stand is those dam beavers.

Here’s a blog post where they complain that the dam beavers are forcing them to wire wra0 replanted trees, and another where they complain that the beavers are eating the trees they planted for the Swainson’s hawk to nest.

Them pesky beavers

These are planted to serve as future nesting trees for Swainson’s hawk, and we are directed to plant them in the NBHCP. But the rate at which they have been felled by beavers is awe inspiring. So we replant. Note in the accompanying photo the security with which we have planted this replacement seedling. DOUBLE fencing, double staking. The stakes are necessary so the beavers don’t tear up the fencing or push it over. The Conservancy hired Sopwith Farms to do this replanting, and its crews have done an excellent job. Let’s see if we can be as persistent in preserving the trees for later Swainson’s hawk nesting as the beavers have been for cutting (gnawing?) them down for purposes of congesting the flow of water in the marsh complexes.

Those pesky beavers. I was warned by USFWS.

NBHCP knows that beavers are such pests that they manage them the only way folks can. In my recent stack of 149 beaver depredation permits I came across theirs issued for 99 beavers and promptly looked them up. The idea that a preserve that values marsh wildlife and kills beavers dropped my jaw a bit. So I looked at our prior PRA’s from past years.

They got a permit to kill an unlimited number of beavers last year too.

I’m sure their heart’s are in the right place, right? Surely they understand the ecology and know what they’re doing, don’t they? I mean it’s not like bunch of biologists and volunteers would kill beavers for no reason.

Here’s a photo of one of these destructive “beavers” from their executive director’s blog.

You would think, if you had been preaching the beaver gospel for a decade now, that SOME of it had penetrated the nether regions, wouldn’t you? That news about fish and salmon and nitrogen removal would sink into some of their hardened ears. Speaking of hardened ears, let’s talk about another permit I came across good for the take of 99 beavers in 2016. This one you might even recognize.

The Cosumnes River Preserve consists of over 50,000 acres of wildlife habitat and agricultural lands owned by seven land-owning Partners. The Partners include The Nature Conservancy, Bureau of Land Management, California Department of Fish & Wildlife, Sacramento County Regional Parks, Department of Water Resources, Ducks Unlimited, and the California State Lands Commission.

You might even have gone hiking or birdwatching on their nice boardwalk there. Here’s their mission

The Partners will utilize stewardship and compatible ranching and farming activities as methods to sustain native plant and wildlife communities and the processes that perpetuate adynamic mosaic of habitats

You would assume if the primary owner was the NATURE CONSERVANCY they would undertake to, you know, conserve nature, Well if you assumed that you’d be sadly mistaken. Because apparently not all nature deserves conserving. Some of them deserve to be issued depredation permits good for take of 99 beavers.

Oh yeah, and last year too,. And the year before that,.

So the next time you hang that glossy Nature Conservancy calendar on your bathroom wall think about the number of beavers they kill every year and the ecosystem services they destroy on purpose so that they can make their preserve look just the way they think the donors want.

I admit, this news upset me a bit. I had to sit on it for two days before I was ready to write about it. In the mean time I touched base with some beaver friends to ask if they knew anyone that worked there. I was given the name of what was described as a smart guy who had worked there before settling on another River Conservancy. I wrote him my concerns and asked if he might have any suggestions about who to contact or how to make approach.

He was very thoughtful and prompt. He answered that beavers were very very destructive and maybe I might want to take some some time to learn about the ecology of beavers at lower elevations first.

Deadly Depredation Digest

heidi08 Who's Killing Beavers Now? April 13, 2018

Looking at the depredation permits of 2016 it is clear we have a winner. (And lots and lots of losers.) For the first time in 5 years it’s NOT Placer. They were edged out by a nose to Sacramento. Although if you look at the number of beavers the permits were issued for, the contest is really not even close.

All told permits were issued for a total of 3,300 beavers in the state of California alone. (I doubt honestly that there are that many beaver anywhere in the state) obviously the actual totals wasn’t any where amount. I think USDA reported 696 beavers killed in 2016. Unlike everyone else they have to report actual beavers taken – not permission given. Wildlife services traps about two thirds of the beavers in the state, so I’m guessing actual take was less than half the allowable.

Still, Too Dam Many.

New this year is replacement of unlimited permits with permits for large sums, like 99 and 50. These are usually issued to utilities, large acre parcels or water reclamation districts. They are annual customers whose names we’ve seen before. If you took out all the big agencies the stats would look a great deal different. Still, it’s a third more than last year, which was twice as many as the year before that. Each permit is issued for more beavers in nearly every county. I’m guessing this doesn’t reflect a sudden boom in the population but a shift in management policy and a wish not to have to do more paperwork.

Bright spots in yesterday’s slaughter review? How about the property manager who listed prior efforts as having used “Friendship traps”. I’m not even sure I know what that is – maybe live traps? – I’m tempted to be totally cynically and ask ‘isn’t all friendship a trap, really?” The other bright spot you can see yourself on the graph if you look very very closely.

One permit issued for San Bernandino County!

Victorville, where the permit was issued, is about an hour west of Los Angeles. If you’re an old timer like me you will remember that there were no permits issued that far south for the past three years and it’s a big deal to have beavers recovering in that area.

(No that CDFG weighs that at all in their decision to grant a permit), but still, it’s pretty cool. There was a campaign to bring beavers back to LA a few years back.

Turns out all they had to do was wait.

DEPREDATION DUTY

heidi08 Who's Killing Beavers Now? April 12, 2018

In August of last year I sent a letter the California Department of Fish and Wildlife with a formal request for copies of all the permits issued for depredating beaver in the state in 2016. Under the Public Records Act they have 90 days to respond, and at about day 95 they wrote back saying they couldn’t find any relevant records to send.

I figured they didn’t understand or had misfiled my letter so wrote again saying I wanted copies of all the permits issued for beaver depredation in the state and surely some beavers were allowed to be trapped in 2016. They forwarded my letter to their attorney who called back and said. Oh, those records! We’ll get those out right away.

But they didn’t get them out right away or even after another 90 days, so I recently followed up with a third letter saying it had now been nearly 8 months since my original request and I still wanted copies of all the depredation permits issued for beavers in California.

And 8 hours later I received a massive set of emails from the attorney.

There are about 150 records, folks asking for permission to kill beavers all over our golden state. I am about half way through indexing them by location, complaint, and permitted take, and can see that one difference is that they are no longer issuing “unlimited” permits like they did years ago when Robin Ellison and I first did this in 2013. Although they’re still averaging about 150 permits a year they’re maxing the take at 99 beavers,which must be pretty near the same thing, (because I’m very sure no one counts or keeps a tally mark on the barn door every time there is a kill.)

So far according to my tallies there have been permits issued for the deaths of 1935 beavers. And,as I’ve said, I’m half way through. This is a significant (50%) leap from 2015 and prior years. I imagine because of slowly getting rid of unlimited beavers. As you can see below, as the number of unlimiteds drop the numbers of beavers permitted climbs, Which makes sense in a horrible sort of way.

Reading through them is as usual grim and tedious with few surprises. The part that catches my attention the most at the moment is the part where the permittee is supposed to list all the things they tried to solve the problem before asking to trap. You and I, and other reasonable humans would of course say things like “Tried wrapping trees, fencing the culvert or installing a flow device”,

But of course that is not what these landowners say.

It is beyond belief how often they say HAZING or CLEARED DAM or REMOVED DEBRIS. As if any one of those things would discourage a beaver from building a dam. There are some who feel they need to defend their behavior so little they say nothing at all or only that they got a prior permit. There seems to be no clear understanding that they should explain what they tried before hand to fix the problem be resorting to trapping. Many just list what the problem forced them to do to maintain conditions.

“I had to drain the runoff/remove debris every morning!” Which of course isn’t about stopping the beavers at all. I think of being in divorce court and the judge asking “What did you do to save your marriage” and the man answers “Her cooking was so lousy I had to eat at the bar every night!” After reading through some 75 of these things I keep expecting them to list irrelevant chores as well…like “I had to put gas in my car and buy milk from the grocery store!” Because it would make nearly as much sense.

Except for one permit that quite touched my heart. It was from a cattle rancher in Siskiyou county and it was one of the very few that were issued for a whopping 2 beavers. In the list of things he tried before resorting to getting a permit to trap he said he attempted:

“repeated removal of dams, mylar flagging as deterrent”

In five years of reviewing permits I have never seen any person mention they tried “mylar flagging” as a deterrent. I know of course people use mylar tape to discourage birds from smacking into windows or eating strawberries, but I’ve never heard of it being used to keep away beavers. Of course one of its repellent properties is the reflection it causes, which we would expect is highly unlikely to happen at night, when the dam-building beavers are actually there.

But still, going through these permits is so horrific one looks for cheer where one can find it. I think it’s kind of adorable. I’m imagining he just used an old balloon.

PRETENDING TO CARE

heidi08 Who's Killing Beavers Now? April 9, 2018

This is an odd news day. There are two new articles on beavers that appear to be nobly motivated and they are both woefully deficient. I’m thinking they are both intended to mollify the crazy beaver lovers so that the serious people can continue trapping.

The first is from Chilliwack British Columbia, which is North East of Seatte about an hour east if Port Moody. (We must all try very hard not to giggle at their name.) (There are more important things to ridicule).

Chilliwack formalizing its approach to beavers

When it comes to beaver management in Chilliwack, council is ready to formalize its practices. Beaver activity can cause flooding and drainage problems. Blocked culverts can damage roads. Dikes can be weakened by burrowing, leading to flooded public and private lands.

With hundreds of kilometres of open watercourses across Chilliwack, there can be “a resident beaver” every square kilometre. “Managing the activities of wildlife must reflect a balanced approach to protecting public infrastructure and private property, public safety and the environment,” stated the report.

Any trapping to remove nuisance beavers is used as an absolute last resort.

Hmm, that sounds reasonable. I’m not a greedy woman, Trapping as a last resort would totally mollify me. What kinds of things are you going to try before trapping?

Management follows a series of co-ordinated and progressive steps, starting with “monitoring” and then: tree wrapping; dam removal by hand; removal of debris/blockage; and finally, mechanical dam removal.

“When no other effective means of preventing or controlling the potential damage or risk to public safety due to the activities of beavers is available, they may be removed by trapping.”

A provincially licensed trapper must be employed.

So no flow devices or culvert fences. No actual solutions just taking away the dam which you KNOW is going to be rebuilt. And then you can do what you always planned to do but call it a solution of last resort.

That should keep those environmentalists happy.

The only truly helpful thing they are adding to their list is wrapping trees. But it doesn’t clarify how they plan to do this. So I’m guessing doily’s.

Honestly I just hate it when people say they’re going to try to help beavers and they obviously aren’t. It’s way worse than those grim cities that just issue a payment per tail. At least the people that will care about this stay watchful and keep paying attention.

The second story comes from Virginia bemoaning how beavers have come back in droves since the fur trade. Go ahead and guess what the photo is for their cover story. Guess.

“Physical damage caused by beavers in the Southeast is estimated in the millions of dollars annually,” reads the beaver link at humanwildlife.org.

Give them this — they do good work.“Beavers are important in that they create new habitats that benefit a variety of other animals,” says the game department.

“Their dams slow the flow of moving waters and allow other wildlife and plant species to colonize this modified ecosystem.”

It is an exceptionally happy — albeit waterlogged — community there described. “Ducks and other waterfowl, as well as many reptiles, amphibians, and aquatic insects, are attracted to beaver ponds.”

What, curious taxpayers ask, can be done?

Two broad categories of control are non-lethal and the opposite.

The odd thing is that this article cites Stephanie Boyles great paper even though it carefully skirts the point that installing flow devices saves communities thousands of dollars and works longer than trapping.

I guess we can’t expect them to get the facts right since they can’t even choose an accurate photo.

Can we have some real beaver articles please soon?