Category: What’s killing beavers now?

You mean I have to actually read the information too?

A beaver headline appeared yesterday that was so ridiculous I couldn’t even bring myself to read the article until this morning. Now I see it is so thick with misinformation that I just wrote the author. Chalk this up to the “Beaver lies and the lying liars who tell them”, category.

Is the beaver truly nature’s architect or just a ‘dentally defective rat’? — Canadian Myths

The myth: The beaver etched on our five-cent coin can’t possibly compete with more majestic symbols, such as Britain’s lion or the U.S. bald eagle. But the rodent doesn’t just represent an idea of strength and fierceness — it played a role in the founding of Canada.

The beaver may be a buck-toothed rodent but it fuelled the fur trade, and therefore the economy here, for hundreds of years. Still, not everyone is happy with the beaver’s prominence as the only animal that is an official emblem for Canada.

In 2011, Conservative Nicole Eaton told fellow Senators the “dentally defective rat,” which wreaks havoc on her dock each summer, should be replaced with a “polar bear, with its strength, courage, resourcefulness and dignity.”

Beavers have made a comeback, and there are now anywhere from six to 12 million of them in Canada, more than the estimated six million at the start of the fur trade. Many of them are living close to humans, and their ability to build a dam in days, and flood a forest, corn field or cottage creates frustration. There are now so many that an industry has grown up around removing “nuisance beavers,” which account for a fifth of the beaver pelts auctioned off at NAFA.

The entire article has an annoying fur trade focus and is generally poorly written but THIS might be the worst sentence I’ve ever seen written about beavers. The author claims we have more beaver now than we did during the fur trade! Never mind that she’s off by at least one zero at least and possibly as many as six. Never mind that there were once enough beavers to cover every head in Europe. Obviously if it was once written that the continent was in possession of two species, man and beaver, there must have been a TON of them. Never mind that even your fur trapping history books should tell you how wrong that is.

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong.

Patty generously devotes a whole paragraph to letting a trapper discuss the more important things beavers do.

Others defend the animal as “nature’s architect,” a reference to its ability to manufacture an environment that is essential to its survival. They are “one of the fantastic species when you look at the way they modify the habitat,” says Pierre Canac-Marquis, a trapper and biologist, retired from Natural Resources Quebec. “It really takes some knowledge, some intelligence, because it’s a very complicated process,” he says of building a dam out of sticks and mud.

Yes let’s interview trappers and ask them about how fantastic beavers are, because really, consumers are the best judge of ecological value. Honestly, I can’t imagine being given such a big byline and doing SO LITTLE WORK.

But that’s just me.

On to better things, this was posted in one of the Scottish beaver forum’s yesterday. You will quickly see why this mom beaver wants plenty of food for her little ones.

Now I’m off to Auburn to try and promote beaver benefits in the scariest county for beaver in the state of California. Wish me luck!

The Madness of Manitoba

heidi08 Beaver Art, Beaver Behavior, stupid solutions, What's killing beavers now? June 23, 2017

Sometimes there is so much good news about beavers you almost forget what a horrible, stacked deck they face in egregious and uninformed parts of the world. It can feel like beavers have ‘turned a corner’ and no one can legitimately challenge their value again. And then you see articles like this. Manitoba is the Canadian Province right next to Sascatchewan and has obviously learned all their least impressive alarms and tricks over the years.

Dam those beavers

Infestation causes destruction in Interlake.

ASHERN — A certain buck-toothed, flat-tailed national symbol with a waddling gait is wreaking havoc in parts of Manitoba on a scale not seen in a lifetime. Armies of beaver are penetrating deeper and deeper inland in the Interlake and some other parts of Manitoba, flooding farm fields with their dams and destroying municipal infrastructure such as roads.

“It’s just beaver country like stupid,” said Dan Meisner, a councillor with the RM of Grahamdale who is in charge of beaver control. Meisner, who is also a trapper, took out 400 nuisance beavers in one recent spring-summer period alone.

Beaver country like stupid? I really, really believe that, Dan. Exactly like stupid. Because the entire province is surrounded by solutions and you can only see problems. It’s like you’ve been given a vast carpentry set with complex engineering tools thrown in and you’re stumbling around looking for the hammers.

People in the area say there haven’t been beaver in this part of the province since before their grandparents’ day. Meisner remembers finding a stick stripped bare by a beaver and taking it to show-and-tell at school because it was so rare.

The province said it has not received an increase in beaver complaints, but could provide no other data on the beaver population.The province started offering a $15 bounty per beaver three years ago, but RMs regard it as a drop in the bucket. The RM of Grahamdale has tacked on an additional $35 per beaver.

Manitoba also provides up to $750 for removal of a beaver dam, but recommends getting rid of the beaver first or the dam will just be rebuilt.

The problem in the Interlake has been brewing since at least 2003 and progressively getting out of control, landowners said. As the beaver move inland, it’s imperative they build more dams to survive because they need water — they are almost completely defenceless on land. So they block culverts, causing ditch water to backup and flood land.

“They’re like rats and they keep populating,” he said.

“Whenever you go to get a beaver, it never lives in a nice place. You’re either going through thick ice or in heavy bush with mosquitoes and bulldogs (horseflies),” Meisner said.

Because honestly, there is nothing in the world less pleasant than spending time at a beaver pond. They are wetland slumlords, you know. With all those fish and dragonflies getting in your way. It’s startling to me that not one person has noticed that the reason they haven’t seen an ‘infestation’ of beavers before in their grandfather’s lifetime is because the very clever fur trade had KILLED THEM ALL!

I’m sure they remember that as the good ol’ days.

Let’s have a nice palate cleanser after that bitter beaver pill. Deborah Hocking is the talented artist who did the illustrations for the successful book “Build Beaver Build“. She was one of the artists I implored to donate to our silent auction. As it happened she liked our story SO much she offered to design us a bookmark for the event, which we can give out at the festival. We figure kids can use them with their journals and they’ll be a perfect match.

I talked to her yesterday and sitting down at her desk busy designing right now. Wish her muses of castor, okay? I can’t wait to see the finished product. Here’s the lodge image she included in the book just to get you interested.

Beaver teeth carving: Shigir Idol

heidi08 Beaver Anatomy, Beaver Art, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, History, What's killing beavers now? June 17, 2017

Three times older than the pyramids and twice as old as Stonehenge, the statue was originally dug out of a peat bog by gold miners in the Ural Mountains in 1890. The remarkable seven-faced Idol was carved with a beaver jaw and is now on display in a glass sarcophagus in a museum in Yekaterinburg, Russia.

Beaver’s teeth ‘used to carve the oldest wooden statue in the world’

New scientific findings suggest that images and hieroglyphics on the wooden statue were carved with the jaw of a beaver, its teeth intact. Two years ago German scientists dated the Idolas being 11,000 years old.

At a conference involving international experts held in the city this week, Professor Mikhail Zhilin said the wooden statue, originally 5.3 metres tall, was made of larch, with the basement and head carved using silicon faceted tools. ‘The surface was polished with a fine-grained abrasive, after which the ornament was carved with a chisel,’ said the expert.

‘At least three [sets of teeth] were used, and they had different blade widths.

The faces were ‘the last to be carved because apart from chisels, some very interesting tools – made of halves of beaver lower jaws – were used’.

Zhilin, leading researcher of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Archeology, has spoken previously of his ‘feeling of awe’ when studying the Idol, more than twice as old as the Stonehenge monuments in England.

‘This is a masterpiece, carrying gigantic emotional value and force,’ he said. ‘It is a unique sculpture, there is nothing else in the world like this. It is very alive, and very complicated at the same time.

‘The ornament is covered with nothing but encrypted information. People were passing on knowledge with the help of the Idol.’ Only one of the seven faces is three dimensional.

While the messages remain ‘an utter mystery to modern man’, it was clear that its creators ‘lived in total harmony with the world, had advanced intellectual development, and a complicated spiritual world’, he said.

The professor has found such a ‘tool’ made from beaver jaw at another archeological site – Beregovaya 2, dating to the same period.

Studying the Idol, he believed the tool is consistent with its markings, ‘for example when making holes more circular’, said Svetlana Panina, head of the archaeology department at Sverdlovsk Regional Local History Museum.

The idol was put on a stone basement, not dug in the ground, said Zhilin. It stood lik

e this for around 50 years before falling into a pond, and was later covered in turf. The peat preserved it as if in a time capsule.

I know I have very specific tastes in news, but that is sooo cool. Of course if there were ready made carving tools all around you would use them, rather than make your own. I’m assuming the fact that there were three sizes of tools means that they were three ages of beaver harvested?

Regular readers of this blog will know right away why it was the bottom mandible and not the top used for carving. I used to think this tusk-beaver from a bavarian crest was so silly -but it actually makes more sense than our modern bucktoothed cartoon.

Despite what the funny-papers tell us, lower teeth are much larger (which is why it’s so rare to get photos of the upper ones). One fine exception to that rule of castor is this wonderful photo taken by my facebook beaver buddy Sylvie Biber. That may not be her real name, considering, but I believe she’s eastern European, living in Scotland, where she took this wonderful photo.

Top Teeth Sylvie — *Beaver teeth: Sylvie Biber*

You can bet I’d chose the bottom ones for my carving!
This also made me remember the research I did of the bay area tribes that lived near Brentwood and Antioch. In their burial grounds archeologists found beaver mandibles buried with the bodies and all their posessions. The paper I read said that no one knew why. Psychologist that I am, I always assumed it was because beaver teeth changed things and what do folks want to change more than death? But maybe they were precious tools, just being tucked away with the owner?

Starved for information

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Dispersal, Environmental, Mike Callahan, stupid solutions, What's killing beavers now?, Who's blaming beavers now? June 14, 2017

Why is it that folks in the county library complain about having nothing to read? I guess for the same reason your teenager opens the fridge and says there’s nothing to eat. Certainly the state of New York has blinders on when it comes to solving beaver problems, other wise they would have called on Beavers: Wetlands and Wildlife years ago. The answer to their question is a whopping 130 miles away.

Spencer Trying to Fix Nuisance Beaver Problem in Nichols Pond

As the Spencer Village Board of Trustees continues to ponder the beaver problem that has been plaguing Nichols Pond, they sought input from expert Scott MacDonald, who has had to deal with the industrious critters in his capacity as executive director of the Waterman Conservation Education Center in Appalachin.

For years MacDonald has been trying to figure out the best way to curb damage by the beaver population at Brick Pond in Owego. He found an effective method, though it involved installing two bulkheads that control the water level at a cost of $80,000 taxpayers’ dollars. The Spencer Village Board is seeking a more cost-effective way to prevent damage in and around the village-owned pond.

MacDonald agreed that it was also probably a beaver that chewed through the underwater electrical line that powers the fountain in the center of the pond. Goodrich said he’s not sure whether or not the fountain will be repaired in time to turn it on this summer.

I want to meet the man who sold them the 80,000 dollar solution, because he’s a genius and should work for the federal government. Clearly no kind of flow device or beaver deceiver was ever installed because they have a crew of volunteers pulling out debris on a daily basis.

The handful of volunteers who clean the debris out of the pond’s culverts are becoming fed up, according to Goodrich. “They want to move onto other stuff,” he said of the volunteers, “but they’re so busy with the beavers they can’t do anything else.”

“I don’t blame them,” he added,” because they’re out there every day.” He said that most if not all of the volunteers are older and that the physical labor of clearing out sticks and packed mud can be hard on them.

Therefore, Goodrich said, the board needs to come up with a solution sooner rather than later. The beavers cannot be trapped and relocated because they are considered a “nuisance” species in New York State, the logic being that it’s not fair for people to release beavers elsewhere and pass on the burden to other landowners.

Goodrich said that he is not opposed to having the beavers killed, a resolution that none of the other trustees were very enthusiastic about supporting.

Most of the trustees said they believe that if the beavers are killed another family of beavers will move in. Goodrich argued that trapping the beavers that live in the pond currently would at least give the village time to come up with an adequate solution before new ones decide to make the pond their home.

MacDonald said he considers having the family beavers killed the one “black mark” on his record as caretaker for the pond, even though it was necessary to secure the state funding necessary to save the pond after the flood.

“It was very bad,” he said. “The public got very upset about it.”

We learned so much from that incident. We still don’t have a clue how to solve beaver beaver problems.

Since that time, he has learned how to raise and lower water levels at certain parts of the pond. If he pays attention to what the beavers are up to, he can often dissuade them from building in problematic places because beavers won’t build dams where the water is not deep enough for them to float the big logs they need to start their shelter. Beavers, he told the board, do not like to drag heavy logs.

Even with the bulkheads, MacDonald said there is some manual labor involved. There’s one culvert he has to dig out himself every once in a while or it becomes a major project — over the last winter he let it go too long, he said, and a few weeks ago he had to go out in a wetsuit with a backhoe to clear the stopped-up water flow.

Some level of manual labor seems inevitable if the beavers are to stay, but Spencer Village Trustee Nicole O’Connell-Avery said that she disapproves of setting kill traps.

She said the traps would likely be set underwater and would catch the beavers by the leg, holding them until they drown. She said it sounds like an awful way to die, and questioned whether or not the traps could endanger swimmers, pets or boaters who fall overboard.

O’Connell-Avery was enthusiastic about the idea of installing heavy-duty fencing in strategic areas that would prevent the beavers from building at the pond’s intakes and outtakes. Mayor Christine Lester said she thought this was worth a try.

O’Connell-Avery also offered up the unique but untested idea of population control: catching, neutering and releasing the pond’s male beavers. O’Connell-Avery works at Cornell University, and she said she would ask around to see if her colleagues would be interested in using the pond as a case study.

Beavers live in families of eight to 10, and usually only one family will live in a body of water as small as Nichols Pond. When the family has about eight offspring, the parents kick out the two oldest, who then seek new habitats at neighboring ponds, according to MacDonald. O”Connell-Avery said that this structured family setup might make for an ideal situation in which researchers could trap the males and keep track of the results.

When the family has about EIGHT OFF SPRING THEY KICK OUT THE TWO OLDEST? Really? And you work at Cornell? Are you the frickin’ janitor?

Good lord this riles me. I’m too old for this sort of nonsense. Considering that Cornell already HIRED Mike Callahan to install a flow device, every one of these folks should know better. That was just over an entire year ago, I guess I can understand why you wouldn’t be up on such ancient history.

I guarantee you Mike didn’t charge the university 80,000 dollars for his installation, by the way. Heck even when we brought Skip Lisle 3000 miles out from VERMONT to solve our problem it didn’t cost us 80,000.

ACK! Someone get me a paper bag to breathe into. The Cornell website tells me that Nicole is a supervising vet Tech at the wildlife animal hospital at the university. She could really make this happen. We can only hope that before she picks up the scapel to neuter these beavers she cracks open a book and reads that beavers enter estrus once a year and young disperse at two years regardless of the family size. Surely she will listen to a reasonable argument?

Given Spencer’s track record so far, I’m not counting on it.

I need to calm myself by sharing the beautiful new sign that arrived yesterday for my beaver booth. Isn’t this lovely? It will hang out from my booth like one of those Ye Olde Shoppe signs!

Remember the good ol’ days and those cool hats?

heidi08 Beaver Anatomy, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental, What's killing beavers now? June 2, 2017

It’s time to honor the beaver trapper again, at least somebody thinks it is. This glitzy article out of Canada at least has the presence of mind to pose it as a question. And to interview Leslie Fox of Fur-bearer Defenders also. I guess that’s a little progress in 150 years? It also features some interactive graphics and a 360 video of trapping a beaver because there’s no end to the money HBC will spend glorifying the sport, apparently.

The title of this glitzy article is too clever by half. Not the trappers life of course…the trap line. Get it?

Life on the line

Are fur trappers stuck in the past or a vital piece of Canada’s living heritage?

“That’s good, that’s what we need,” Henschell answers, as Kotowich heaves up a water-logged beaver that’s been dead since the trap snapped shut. The pudgy creature thuds on the ice. Like generations of fur-bearing animals before it, this buck-toothed symbol of Canadian sovereignty met its end in a trap.

With 100 years of experience between them, Henschell and Kotowich say they trap because they love the wilderness and its solitude. They trap to connect with something powerful and elusive that they feel some smartphone-addicted young people are losing sight of in the internet age.

“It’s like going home,” says Henschell, who comes from a family of trappers and says he was conceived in a remote log cabin in the fall of 1938, not long after his parents married.

Canada marks 150 years of nationhood on July 1, 2017. Much of what led to the country’s birth revolved around the trapping and trading of furs, but while the commerce and conflicts of the trade are central to Canada’s history, there is pressure to envision a future without fur.

Some argue there’s no longer a need for the industry.

Lesley Fox, the B.C.-based executive director of the Association for the Protection of Fur-Bearing Animals, says Canada’s historic connection to the fur trade makes it difficult to challenge the industry.

“There is a lot of nostalgia, a lot of Canadiana, and the media hypes that up,” she says.”The modern-day fur trade is very, very different than the fur trade I think we know from our history books.”

The fur trade is inherently cruel and the range of affordable synthetic alternatives have rendered wild fur unnecessary, Fox says.

Sales by the global fur farm industry dwarf those of the wild fur trade year over year; Fox says that illustrates how trapping in 2017 is akin to a frivolous leisure activity like trophy hunting.

“There is a lot of talk about ‘living off the land,’ ‘stewards of the land,’ the word Indigenous gets thrown around a lot, ‘people’s livelihoods,’ and in my opinion that’s all rhetoric. It’s actually not true,” she says.

The province also helped pay for eight “beaver deceivers” — one of several non-lethal flow devices to prevent beaver damming — last year. Animal rights activist Fox says the non-lethal methods are more effective long-term solutions, and trappers should start using their skills to deploy beaver deceivers and other flow devices instead of killing the creatures.

Hooray for Leslie. And hooray for actually mentioning long-term solutions. But we need more talk about what all those beavers that were taken away once gave to Canada! Mind you, there is a lot of sanctimonious tripe about how important trapping is to indigenous people and how tragic it is that an entire way of life (not beaver life, mind you) is forgotten. I suppose with July 1st looming that’s unavoidable. What I object to is that there is ZERO mention that when a trapper turns an animal into fur it takes away the ecosystem services from ALL OF US.

Rather than complain anymore I will just post the lovely finished design that was painted for us by Coyote Brush Studios, and let you admire something truly beautiful. I’m pretty sure this makes the point better than I can hope too. Thank you Tina Curiel and Lindsey Moore for your stunning work!