Category: What’s killing beavers now?

Why-not Wyoming

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, What's killing beavers now?, Who's blaming beavers now?, Who's saving beavers now? October 26, 2017

Looks like those pesky beavers have been up to no good again. This time in Sheridan Wyoming which is almost far north enough to be in Montana. Apparently they took care of the problem JUST in time.

Beavers Cause Problem on County Road

Beaver dams, apparently built this past summer, caused some flooding over Slack Road, a county road in the northwest part of Sheridan County. County Engineer Ken Muller said three beavers have been removed, although a fourth may still be in the area, and county crews plan to take action this week to deal with the dams.

Muller said a state trapper was called and trapped three of the beavers. He said they’ve been relocated. The dams were built in nearby West Pass Creek, and Muller said the road is currently in pretty good condition. However, he said, the water is right up to the edge of the road on both sides, and crews need to deal with the situation before winter sets in.

Muller said this kind of situation doesn’t happen too often, but about four years ago, the county had an issue with a beaver dam flooding South Creek Road. In that situation, he said, the water actually crossed the road. Fortunately, he said, the road wasn’t damaged.

Relocated? Really? Do think Wyoming is ecologically sophisticated in ways for which we don’t give them credit? Or do you possibly think that trapper is just spinning a tale and blowing some smoke up our skirts by alleging that they were like that puppy our parents said went to ‘live on the farm”? I’m guessing that those beavers were relocated to Hamlet’s “Undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns“. But either way it’s a death sentence because it’s 34 degrees there this morning, with poor conditions to build a lodge or establish a food cache.

Still the lying irks me. So brazen. This song popped in my head as I read it, although different Sheridan, I imagine.

Ohh you cannot get to Sheridan, says the false knight on the road

Speaking of my husband’s homeland, God bless BBC programs like Autumnwatch which is broadcasting an admirable program filmed on the Devon beavers with a rare local farmer who isn’t a beaverphobe. I love seeing the wonder with which they watch as Autumnthe beaver does the most mundane beaver things. It is how i felt the very first year watching our beavers alone every morning. Turn your sound UP for this just to hear it in their voices.

Accidental Orphan

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, stupid solutions, What's killing beavers now? October 24, 2017

Sometimes, for their own nefarious reasons, the powers that be decide to do a heinous, horrible thing just because it’s in their interest – even after they fucking promised not to. And because it’s horrible and they are breaking their worthless promise, they send their most ghoulish henchmen out to perform the treachery on the sly. Now because the only goons they could possibly get to help them in this dastardly act are the knuckle-dragging imbecile types, the whole thing goes TERRIBLY wrong and winds up causing more attention in the end than if they had just did it on stage in a frickin’ tutu in the first place.

Which is where we are in Beauly.

Trapping of ‘illegal’ beavers halted after two deaths

Two beavers have died after being captured by trappers working for the government wildlife agency Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) because they were living outside permitted areas.

The social animals, believed to be a male and female, are thought to have been living as a family on a river in the Beauly area of Inverness-shire. A baby beaver, known as a kit, was captured but survived.

The orphaned kit is now being cared for by animal welfare staff at the Scottish SPCA, and a campaign to trap more Beauly beavers, which SNH says were introduced to the area illegally, has been immediately suspended.

In a statement, SNH said the deaths occurred after screening by vets. The agency said: “Vets have established that the first animal was suffering from an eye deformity and a suspected infection. Work is under way to establish the cause of death of both animals.”

The young beaver will be re-released later at the site of Scotland’s official reintroduction project in the Knapdale Forest, Argyll.

Well yeah, we killed two beavers but one of them had a mangled eye already so it’s to be expected right? The other one probably had something wrong too, and that orphan kit is probably better off without his deformed parents. Amirite? We actually helped him!

Last night SNH said that the trapping and screening techniques it employed had “been used safely in many previous cases, and were undertaken by highly qualified professionals”.

Once upon a time they decided to trap all the free beavers on the river Tay and put them in zoos. They brought in these fancy box traps from Europe and they caught one beaver with their efforts. Poor little Eric, was sent to the Edinburgh zoo and renamed Erica when it was determined that he was a “she”. Is this ringing a bell for anyone? Guess what happened to poor Erica? She died. And the idiots who had ordered the policy started to realize it wasn’t going to work because there were 150 free beavers and not 150 zoos.

You would think that people would learn from their mistakes, or at least learn to dread the shame of more mistakes. Do you think they ever read the novel Oliver Twist? Making NEW ORPHANS is generally bad policy. The story is in the Sunday Times and the BBC and it’s only tuesday so everyone will know soon.

The Scottish government ordered the trapping and removal of the beavers from the river near Beauly because they had been released illegally.

Cabinet Secretary Roseanna Cunningham was clear in July that “swift action” was required in Beauly but little explanation has been given on why attempts by SNH to capture and relocate these beavers have now been curtailed

I know why. Because they got caught. That’s why. In a horrible nasty parent-killing way. If they were using those big cumbersome box traps the only possible way those beavers died was because no one could be bothered to check the traps and they starved or suffocated in there. I guess that orphaned kit was probably in the box beside their dead parent for hours. which is a horrible thought. But they’re just animals right? It’s not like that will be upsetting.

I HATE THESE PEOPLE. And their weaselly lying murderous efforts to keep the farmers and anglers happy. I hope those dead beavers become the albatross around the neck of every slimy politician who wanted them gone in the first place.

Apparently, Superman uses a Cross-bow

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, In the News, stupid solutions, What's killing beavers now?, Who's blaming beavers now? October 19, 2017

I’ve been covering beaver stories a long time, haven’t I? And you would think, that in a decade of reporting beaver news I had read every outrageous thing that could possibly be done to these unappreciated animals. I would have thought so any way.

Until this morning.

Beaver trap methods cause resident concerns

The Town of High River will create formal procedures involving the removal of problem beavers, those that affect town infrastructure, after a report on social media led to outcry and questions to officials.

A posting on High River Respectful Rant and Rave in late September outlined an incident in which a resident saw a person shooting a beaver with a bow, or crossbow, along Lineham Acres canal.

“Come on Town of High River,” Sheryl Gorzitza Skory wrote. “Isn’t there a better way of dealing with these ‘destructive beasts’ who are only doing as nature intended for them to do?”

High River is just outside Calgary in Alberta Canada. Innocent child that I am I thought that shooting a beaver with a crossbow had to be a mistake, a benign action misunderstood or something done by some crazy bored teenager. All silly, silly me.

Kevin Tetzlaff, town communications advisor, said the beaver control program has been ongoing for a number of years. Calls from residents meant not all people knew of the program, he said.

“Yes, they are (killed),” Tetzlaff said. “There’s a variety of different methods the trappers use… Generally you can use traps that humanely kill the beavers.”

The bow and arrow or crossbow is another form when traps are not advisable, Tetzlaff said. The release read that if a firearm or weapon is used for hunting, police are notified and precautions are taken.

“We understand there’s going to be a range of views from residents, and that’s why, we really are limiting it to beavers in areas that have to be removed due to causing a risk to infrastructure,” he said.

If you’re trying to imagine what kind of town uses a cross-bow to shoot beavers, High River is a town of 13,000 and the set where they filmed Smallville and Superman III. Which means it looks just like you would expect have expected it to look 50 years ago. I’m guessing since the canal in question is lined with homes they didn’t want to fire a gunshot and terrify the neighborhood. Let’s theoretically imagine the sides of the canal were too steep to set traps.

But a cross-bow? Honestly?

The trapper has been instructed to stop using the crossbow in residential neighbourhoods, Tetzlaff said. In addition, the town will look at current policies and form official procedures, he added.

“Part of our process is we’re going to look at what other municipalities are doing to manage this kind of situation” Tetzlaff said, noting the town will develop a standard protocol moving forward.

Here’s an idea. STOP KILLING BEAVERS! Wikipedia tells me that the town of High River was subject to severe flooding in 1894, 1899, 1902, 1908, 1912, 1923, 1929, 1932, 1942, 1995, 2005 and 2013. They have continued to add canals and kill beavers all during that time and must be puzzled why this isn’t solving their problem.

Here’s a thought.

The case of the missing beaver dams!

heidi08 Beaver Art, What's killing beavers now?, Who's blaming beavers now?, Who's saving beavers now? September 8, 2017

I saw this yesterday and right away wanted to author a film noir children’s book beaver dam detective series. Can’t you see it now?

Investigation continues into loss of Mill Creek beaver dams

If you ask Sara Melnicoff of Moab Solutions, part of the Mill Creek Partnership, Mill Creek had 11 or more beaver dams this spring. Then in July every dam was gone.

Melnicoff first noticed the damage mid-July, before the heavy rains of July 24 and 25 caused flooding in the creek. She contacted Mary O’Brien of the Grand Canyon Trust, who had previously participated in writing Utah’s beaver management plan. O’Brien took photographs of the dams, some of which had been notched or had sticks pulled out of them.

“The dams had been compromised a few days before the flooding,” O’Brien said. “I have a whole series of photos that I documented for BLM of all 11 dams and each one has a notch cut out of the center. That’s all that it takes [to compromise the dam].”

11 dams suddenly gone! This sounds like a job for inspector beaver! (sorry, couldn’t resist.) Are there any suspects?

Eyewitness accounts support the claim that vandalism was involved. Maria Roberts, a Forest Service employee, was hiking with friends in mid-July when she saw a man pulling sticks out of the dams.

“I saw a guy, looked like he was pulling branches apart from the beaver dam. I figured he was supposed to be there, like he was working,” Roberts said. Another witness took photos of the man.

The day before the dams were compromised, Melnicoff said, she received an email from an unknown address concerned that the beavers were causing E. coli bacteria in town. O’Brien said that in her experience, beavers are not known to cause E. coli but do benefit the ecosystems they inhabit.

Oh ho! So we have a suspect AND a motive! Call in the expert witness…

“When they come up streams and have to build dams to get two and a half feet [of water to build their lodges], there is then a whole cascade of effects that happen,” O’Brien said. “Streams are often incised from grazing, from long-ago blow-outs of cattle ponds, from floods and so on and really the only thing that can restore that stream is basically woody debris … beaver are the chief engineers that do that.”

O’Brien said that beaver dams create habitat for other animals as well.

“When a beaver comes in and starts making a pond, that opens that up and now ducks come and shorebirds come and they drown the trees, which makes them perfect for cavity nesting birds, which makes it perfect for secondary cavity nesters who use the holes of cavity nesters,” O’Brien said. “[The] water behind the pond is a great nursery for fish. And then of course otter can come into the system because there’s fish. And muskrats are there. And water voles are there, so one thing that the beavers do is make the system far more complex. Without beaver, in a lot of, say, your mountains here, it’s a just strip of water coming through and there’s trees on either side.”

Thank you, Dr. Obrien. Excellent and relevant testimony. Call the next witness!

Arne Hultquist, director of the Moab Area Watershed Partnership, agreed that beavers are not the cause of E. coli in Mill Creek. “If I was having problems with beavers and E. coli, I would be seeing it at that site [above the Power Dam] and I don’t see it at that site. I see it down in town,” said Hulquist, who conducts water quality tests at various points around Moab.

Ah HA! So the beavers were blamed for something they didn’t even do! Their dams were destroyed and then all the wildlife they supported suffered the results. Thank goodness our crack team is on the case!

The DWR is still actively investigating the incident, according to Wolford. The DWR is looking into the incident based on the legal definition of wildlife crime, Wolford told The Times-Independent.

“We are still investigating [and] we have one final loose end to tie up, but it does not look as if charges will be filed,” Wolford said.

“There’s not really a crime for breaching a dam,” Wolford said. “The crime comes after, if it’s either displaced beaver or killed beaver. If there’s an actual beaver that’s dead in the area, that’s where the actual crime starts to come into play.”

Wolford added that the dams might have already been abandoned. “It’s possible that they were [abandoned to start with] because if the beaver were there, those dams would be built back up really fast,” Wolford said. “[It] usually only takes them a night to do it, especially the ones that tend to look like they were more man-made breached. They were small enough breaches that the beaver would have been back in immediately. The ones that are bigger breaches, those ones definitely look like flooding issues. As wildlife, we like beaver. They do a lot of good to the ecosystem and help out things quite a bit.”

The jewels might have stolen themselves, officer. It happens all the time in the real world. No fingers to point, nobody to blame, nothing to see here. Besides they’re just BEAVERS for god sake. How much should we really care?

I don’t know about you but that does not sound like they’re actively looking into it to me.

It’s nice to see beaver dramas happen in other towns. This so reminds me of the early days in Martinez. There was one day when someone left oleander branches on the dam and people were worried it was a plot to poison the beavers and the whole town was in an uproar. It turned out it was a well meaning ET who loved them and just thought she was doing something nice.

Ahh memories.

The clincher on this case is that the actual date on this story from Moab is 2013. I don’t know why it’s running again, but I guess they aren’t still ‘working on it’? Maybe they’re doing this instead.

Fail faster! Fail harder!

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, stupid solutions, What's killing beavers now?, Who's blaming beavers now? September 3, 2017

This is a great photo from Kentucky. You know why it’s great? Not because of that cool dam or the fact that you can see it’s leaky because water flows through it. No. Because that culvert is SO damaged anyway, with road collapse and erosion. Look at those dents! It looks about ready to flatten, but the county isn’t worried about that. They are worried about ONE thing. And we all know what that is.

Beavers costing county, landowners Animals threaten roads, crops, timber

They’ve cost the county nearly $100,000 since 2015. They damage cropland and timber. They cause flooding and threaten roads. They are beavers, and they are a growing problem in Hopkins County. Now, a working group under the commissioner of the Kentucky Department of Fish & Wildlife Resources that includes state and federal agencies as well as state and local elected officials is studying the problem.

“They stop culverts up. They stop drainage areas up with sticks and mud,” said Jeff Browning, Hopkins County public works director. “The water backs up and causes damage to roads, crops and woods.” “We start trapping every day, for eight hours a day, in December,” he said. This season, which ended in early spring, county trappers caught 168 beavers, significantly more than the 125-130 they usually get.

“We’re not gaining on it,” Browning said. “And I think it’s getting worse.”

He said his staff is researching multiple approaches, including looking at what other counties and states do, the possibility of setting up conservation-type districts to fund beaver eradication and working with the Corps of Engineers and Division of Water on the legalities involved.

“What I pledged to the group is that I can facilitate finding a solution and working with the counties and Legislature,” Johnson said, adding he expects to have initial information in about 60 days.

Prunty, R-Belton, said she reached out to Johnson after getting multiple letters from constituents in her home county of Muhlenberg. Damage to roads and cropland are not the biggest issue there. Instead, she said, it’s more of a case where former landowners liked the beavers because they created wetlands that attracted waterfowl, which was good for hunters. Now, some landowners want to harvest timber, but can’t because of the flooded land.

“It’s an economic issue for my constituents,” she said. It used to be profitable to trap beavers for their pelts.”There’s no end to it,” Wedding said.”We’ll never eradicate them,” said Browning, the public work director. “I just want some funding help.”

That’s not likely, said Prunty and Embry, R-Morgantown, given the state of the commonwealth’s budget.”I personally don’t see us allocating funds for that,” Prunty said.Embry agreed. Getting new funding “is always difficult,” he said.

Fish & Wildlife Commissioner Johnson said finding funding help is part of his group’s mandate.”We’ll look for other sources of funding that may or may not exist,” he said, indicating some federal help may be available through the USDA. But money won’t solve the problem, which is “how do you keep them under control for the long-term,” Johnson said. “It’s hard to fight those little suckers.“

And as we all know, if something isn’t working or showing signs of success, what you need to do is do it more frequently and faster. Hire more people to kill more beavers because eventually you know it will work right? I mean it’s not like there are these PROVEN tools that will let them protect the roads and culverts and allow the beavers to remain so that they can keep away other beavers right? It’s certainly not like we did it our selves in Martinez for a decade. Better to keep setting the mousetraps over and over and bill the citizens for it. Forget all those disappointed duck hunters.

More complaints from the city of Bristol in Wisconsin where those crazy beavers are just tiring them out.

Beavers causing DAMage in Bristol

Dam(n) it: The phrase describes the beavers’ instincts to build, and with the added ‘n,’ area residents’ reaction to the problems that the large rodents’ work causes in the Dutch Gap Canal.

The dams, removed for decades by residents, were identified at the Bristol Village Board meeting this week as a factor contributing to flooding in the Lake George area.

“We’ve got to get someone out here to trap them,” resident Scott Shannon, said. “It’s a friggin’ nightmare. I’ve taken probably 100 dams out with my (backhoe).”

“Tenfold,” Shannon said. “This is just wearing me out.”

Gosh darn those wicked beavers and their sneaky ways. Why doesn’t killing them work anymore? Don’t tell me there’s another way to solve this problem, because my back hoe is so much fun!

Marty Johnson, wildlife biologist with the State Department of Natural Resources, confirmed that the beaver population is increasing.

“There are more beavers out there,” Johnson said. “The trapping presence over time has lessened, so the population is on the uptick. We have been getting more complaints.”

Johnson said the DNR recently hired the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to blow up dams in the public hunting grounds in Wheatland. He said beaver activity at Richard Bong State Recreation Area has increased as well.

Paddock Lake administrator Tim Popanda said beaver were causing problems in the canal that leads to the lake a couple of years ago. There, the village obtained permission from the DNR to trap beaver on DNR property out of season.

The DNR website also offers suggestions, such as putting culvert pipes through the dams, to help mitigate the problems. One such system, called the Clemson Beaver Pond Leveler, was developed at Clemson University in South Carolina. Made mostly from PVC pipe, it allows water to flow through a beaver dam or plugged culvert.

“We are trying to figure out if there is something we can do to minimize it,” Kerkman said.

To that end, the Village Board approved spending $17,600 for an engineering study by Strand Associates to determine how water flows in the neighborhood and identify possible solutions. The study will assume beavers will continue to occupy the Dutch Gap Canal.

I have an idea. Give ME the 17,000 dollars and I’ll tell you how to solve this problem. And it isn’t with a 30 year old invention that will get clogged in a minute. Hire Mike Callahan or Skip Lisle or Amy Chadwick to install a flow device and have them teach you how to do it so you can handle the next 30 yourself. Them sit back and watch your water levels safely maintained and your roads clear and your fish and wildlife population thrive as your beaver population stabilizes.

I’m glad we’ve had this little chat.