Category: Who’s blaming beavers now?

COMMUNITY SPECULATION 101

A million years ago when I was employed I had a very popular bird feeder on my deck. It was visited by chickadees, nuthatches, woodpeckers and all manner of finches. When I describe it as ‘popular’ I mean by the birds of course. Not the humans. Not the aged curmudgeon did taxes in the office directly below me. He complained about the bird noises and droppings and leftover seed shells.

I wanted to keep him happy, and keep him from complaining to the landlord so for a period of time I was able to get Jon to clean his porch every week. Swept the seed away and rubbed off any droppings. It was a horrible job. The curmudgeon would fold his arms and watch angrily while Jon worked growling if he missed a spot.

One time the grumpy Gus pointed to a pile of pollen on the side of his porch and said. “Get that! All that green stuff, It was never here before!” Which of course it had been. Every May for as long as he rented that office and even before. Because it was from the pine trees who coned off pollen in the windy spring days and made everyone sneeze. He had never seen it before because he never looked at his porch until he started looking for the problems the birds were causing.

It was then that I realized he was looking with different eyes. The exact same kind of eyes people glare thru when beavers are being watched suspiciously on their property. Which is what I thought of when I read this article.

Bay Lake and Beavers: Coming to Terms with Wildlife

Living in a rural location inevitably means having a relationship with Mother Nature. And sometimes that relationship gets complicated. Bay Lake residents have been immersed, literally, in just how complicated it can be to live side by side with beavers.

Beavers have lived in the area for many years. Bud Ulsh, who was born in 1933 and has lived nearby his whole life, remembers hiking around Bay Lake and seeing evidence of beavers at least 20 years ago. Bruce Wagner, a division manager with Pierce County Planning and Public Works Maintenance and Operations, said that beavers began to cause significant problems at Bay Lake in 2011. That year the county placed a device known as a beaver deceiver to prevent beavers from blocking the culvert under Delano Road that allows outflow to Mayo Cove to prevent the road from flooding.

Resident Teresa Ives, who has lived on the lake for 15 years, said the device just seemed to encourage the beavers to build dams around it. The north end of the lake was once a narrow 20 feet across and now is close to 200 feet.

Oooh this is starting to get good. Settling in for a game of “Beaver Telephone”

A number of residents reported that the lake level has risen at least two and a half feet in the last few years. Docks that were above water are now submerged. Ives estimated that she has lost about an acre of her 7-acre property to rising water levels, and access to her floating dock was under water in mid-May.

Richard Miller has lived on Bay Lake since 2007. When he planned his dock, he kayaked around the lake to see what others had done. He built a floating structure with a stationary dock for access that was higher than any others on the lake. That dock, already replaced once, was under water in May.

Miller said there used to be some variation in the water level from summer to winter, with about 10 feet of beach in the summer. “I built stairs to get to the beach,” he said, “but now the beach is gone and the water meets the stairs.” He calculated the size of the lake at about 128 acres. Every foot of additional depth adds 400,000 gallons of water to the volume of the lake. “That’s at least one and a half million gallons more water now than a few years ago.”

Three complaining old biddies that blame beavers for EVERYTHING!!! Is tha all? Can’t you find anymore out there?

Reactions to the effects of the beavers have varied. Lee, whose house was most at risk, said, “Beaver need to be classified as nuisance animals. If they can hire a helicopter to shoot a wolf for killing cattle, they should help us get rid of the beavers. I am on the verge of losing my home.”

Yeah that’s what I’m talking about. A really outrageous request to be able to shoot them like wolves from helicopter! Why just shoot them? Why not hang them?

Ahh ain’t humanity great.

Stay tuned for our next installment when the creek dries up and they complain about all that stinking mud in their front yards!

The good part is that this complaining lake is in Washington state so if anyplace on god’s green earth is equipped to deal with these castor complaints from the peanut gallery, they are.

LYME DISEASE HAS AN ALMA MATER?

Let’s start by hopping out to Connecticut where a familiar story awaits our attention. It’s full of conflict and interesting points to ponder. How would you like to live in a town they named a disease after?

As Beavers Flood Properties Old Lyme Debates Need for Action

OLD LYME — Dave Berggren can’t do laundry in his house any longer. He keeps his showers brief and he worries that having guests will overtax the septic system.

Berggren’s septic system drains so slowly that if he washes a load of laundry or uses the bathroom too often the water backs up into his pipes. His leach field – and his lawn – have been inundated with water due to beaver activity which has raised the level of Black Hall Pond.

“I don’t dare put a charge of water that large [like laundry] and I use the bathroom gingerly,” Berggren said. “It is a good thing I live alone and there are no females here. My leach field is backing it up.”

???

Truly it’s a burden to have a leach field backing up because of beaver damming. But you think its good there aren’t women on the property in particular? You may have threatened your sympathy card Dave. Because you know how women are. Always flushing the toilet with their selfish, flushy womanly ways.

You know I’m suddenly not actually surprised Dave lives alone.

Not only have the beavers flooded Berggren’s property, his neighbors have all seen the flooding of lawns, as well as trees and shrubs chewed and felled by the beavers. The Ames Open Space Property has also had over 17 acres of land flooded due to beaver activity on Bucky Brook and in a culvert near Whippoorwill Road.

“The beavers took half my ornamental evergreens,” said Rick Humpage, another resident of Boughton Road. “Traditionally I could see two boards of my retaining wall, now there is just one.”

On June 19, Mark Wayland, a building official for the Town of Old Lyme, surveyed Berggren’s property, also on Boughton Road. Wayland wrote a letter, now filed in the building department records, summarizing the problem: “At the time I observed obvious high water of Black Hall Pond encroaching on the property caused by active beavers and beaver dam at the south end of the pond. The water table has risen to the point where it has affected the existing structure’s foundation bearing soils to an extent of causing the structure to be “sinking.”

Wayland wrote that “[i]t is the purpose of this letter that the condition be made and documented to the destructive nature of the beaver dam at this location in question. It is also in my observation with the rising ground water at this location the existing septic system may also be in jeopardy and/or damaged.”

Oh those rotten beavers, sinking property! Dave needs to trap that varmint fast! Trouble is this beaver is sneaky and avoids the law.

Last year, Berggren did reach out to DEEP and was granted a trapping permit. The permit, however, was only good for 21 days.

“I had 21 days to get a trapper to trap the beaver. I sent the permit to the trapper and it took three days to arrive. It arrived the Friday of a holiday weekend,” Berggren said. “My 21 days were shrinking fast.”

The beaver was never caught, and Berggren has instead been forced to tear down the dam every other day in an effort to keep the water level from rising further.

Why do people always think it’s ONE single beaver culprit? A beaver that builds and maintains a successful dam is keeping the water level up to protect his family. I must say you picked QUITE the trapper. Who doesn’t work on weekends and couldn’t find the beaver in question’s resident calling card. And only 21 days? That makes me actually wistful. Our CDFW issues permits for the year and is usually happy to extend it.

Never mind. Something tells me the article is about to get a whole lot better.

Evan Griswold, a member of the Open Space Commission, expressed support for the beavers at a recent meeting. “I’m on the beaver’s side. They are part of the natural environment,” said Evan Griswold. “Yes, they are changing it from woods to grassland, but so what? Let the beavers do what the beavers do best.

Regardless of jurisdiction, the commission strongly opposes trapping and killing the beaver. Instead, the commission is recommending that if the town were to take action, that the town consider a beaver deceiver — a device that blocks beavers from dam-building in protected areas.

A beaver deceiver would cost the town about $3,000 and has a 90 percent success rate for the lifetime of the device. Trapping is typically only a short-term solution.

The culvert under Whippoorwill Road “is definitely a site where a beaver deceiver would be effective,” said Michael Callahan, the founder of Beaver Solutions LLC which has installed more than 1,500 beaver deceivers in the past 20 years. “Beavers are smart and probably look at that road bed as a dam with a hole in it. With a little bit of work the whole road bed becomes a dam. They get the biggest pond for the smallest amount of work.”

Dave, Dave. Dave. You’re in very good hands. Mike will fix this problem for you way better than that stupid trapper who couldn’t find the beaver in the first place. Let him do his job and your toilets will be flushing so well you might be able to have an actual WOMAN over to the place once in a while.

Sheesh.

NOW YOU MUST CLICK ON THIS TWEET.

Maybe you’re very busy this morning and you have to get Janie to day camp and the cat to the vet. Maybe you just had a fight with your best friend and found out your mother is coming for the weekend. You MUST click on it anyway. If you do nothing else I ever advise, for the rest of your entire life, you MUST do this. I’m not kidding. This is seriously, fatally, adorably, cute. Stupid baby pictures, cat videos or puppies don’t even comes close.

Our two American beaver parents, Alice and Patch, really have their paws full! Alice recently gave birth to 7 beaver kits. The little ones are spending most of their time inside their den with their family, but they grow quickly and they’ll soon be exploring outside! pic.twitter.com/ToZfH2kxfX

— Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium (@PghZoo) June 24, 2019

TIME FOR A ROAD TRIP!

heidi08 Beaver Art, Who's blaming beavers now? June 13, 2019

Well okay, I guess that’s a bit of a problem. You got me.

Beaver dam breach causes washout of Phillips road

PHILLIPS — A beaver dam that gave way during Tuesday’s rainstorm in Franklin County caused two roads to wash out and closed a portion of Route 4 for about five hours, a Fire Department official said.

Beaver activity in Adley Pond has caused the pond to swell in size, and during a period of heavy rain Tuesday the dam gave way, Deputy Chief Jeremy O’Neil said.

Now there are plenty of public work crews and power companies that when they can’t explain things say “Oh the beaver did it” and we thumb our noses at them. But I looked up the area on google earth and did see an huge swelling pond and what might have been a beaver dam So okay. It’s a fair cop. These things happen.

Luckily Mainers seem to be taking things in stride.

The road was closed for about five hours Tuesday afternoon. It reopened around 6:15 p.m. and is safe to use, although further repairs will be needed, O’Neil said.

“(The beavers) don’t adhere to modern building codes, so when we had a significant amount of water in that body of water, the dam breached,” he said.

The Fire Department helped reroute traffic while the DOT and the Highway Department repaired the road.

I’m sure the beavers would say “Building codes are for sissies! We don’t need no stinking codes“. Or something to that effect,

Amelia is hard at work on the brochure for the festival and I just had to share her stellar map of the park, Don’t you want to go right away? Isn’t this amazing? We are so luck she has been kind enough to help us for a million years,

HOW YOU KNOW YOU’VE ARRIVED

heidi08 Beavers, Who's blaming beavers now? February 26, 2019

So yesterday we received a donation from Mary O’brien, which happened when she asked about our Ecosystem poster and I said we’d send some right away. There are VERY few things more affirming than receiving a donation from the woman that pretty much single-handedly inspired me to do this work in the first place. It was 2009 that I read what I still consider the most important beaver article ever written in High Country News and it was SO long ago that it wasn’t even by Ben Goldfarb. (Sorry Ben.)

Voyage of the Dammed

Even with a tall wooden cross mounted on the wall behind her, Mary O’Brien doesn’t look like a typical preacher. In her blue cardigan and jeans, a single heavy braid falling like a gray rope down her back, she paces slowly from side to side, telling her listeners that we are worshipping a false landscape.

I was so star struck by the article that when I went to my first beaver conference I remember busily SCANNING the crowd for that thick grey braid to see which one was her. It turned out there were far too many grey braids to count – (some of them on the men). Plus it turned out she had cut hers off by then. But she was genuinely happy to strike up a conversation anyway, and that’s how we first met. Here she is at one of our early festivals photographing the children’s tiles on the bridge.

Mary’s an amazing and powerful woman, who is very patient with the many competing and stubborn voices in Utah. She’s also not afraid to tell people what to do or ask for help when its useful. I agree with her that this is a really cool poster. My favorite part is that it makes people smarter when all they do have to look at it. Coyote studios did a wonderful job with my idea and the quote from Alex Riley. It was a joint effort.

Well there many be more sources of beaver wisdom that there used to, but there’s still plenty of beaver stupid to go around. Here’s a little slice from North Carolina.

Mayor says beavers may be to blame for damage to Cary road

Cary, N.C. — Beavers may be behind a dip that has recently developed on Green Level Church Road in Cary, according to Mayor Harold Weinbrecht.

IWeinbrecht said it appears as though a group of beavers has built a dam inside two 72-inch storm pipes that run beneath the road, which likely led to issues with the pavement.

Beavers are SO useful to mayors! Think about it. Whether you’re blamed for a pothole or a power outage or a warehouse fire beavers offer the handy excuse and get-out-of-jail-free that card city officials need most. Surely it wasn’t due to Cary’s shoddy workmanship or anything like that.

Just like it wasn’t Martinez fault when the creek bank started eroding because all they did was put in topsoil near a flood plain.

Blaming the beavers is a civic treasure, Politicians should love beavers. There should probably be a national holiday.

NO EASY WALK TO BEAVER FREEDON

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, What's killing beavers now?, Who's blaming beavers now? December 23, 2018

Beavers have made it into the news lately in three countries but their public approval is mixed. Some folk have decided to work with them, some are ready to do away with them, and some are dragging their heels about legislation to protect them.

Meaning Christmas eve-eve is pretty much like any other Sunday as far as beavers are concerned.

A live-and-let-live compromise for land-flooding beavers

The Aamjiwnaang First Nation and neighbouring Suncor Energy think they’ve found an agreeable solution to one big dam problem.

Beavers moved into the area in 2011 and built dams on forested lands that caused flooding and even impacted operations at the refinery’s East Tank Farm.

“This was causing a lot of damage to trees in the area as well as safety issues for our community members” said Jessica Pickett, Aamjiwnaang’s lands manager.

“And the flooding caused infrastructure concerns.”

The Aamjiwnaang is the current name of the Objibwe located above Ohio between lakes Heron and Eerie. Who do you suppose they went to for help with their beaver problem?

“This was causing a lot of damage to trees in the area as well as safety issues for our community members” said Jessica Pickett, Aamjiwnaang’s lands manager. “And the flooding caused infrastructure concerns.”

A species-at-risk technician with the band suggested building dam bypasses, and corrugated pipe made of heavy plastic was installed beneath the dams, allowing some water to flow through the area without disturbing the beavers. So far so good, Pickett said.

“It was nice to see everyone sitting down, working together and listening to each other,” she said. “By drawing on the expertise of everyone and valuing each other’s contributions, we were able to address an issue of mutual concern.”

Whoever it was seems to have had the right idea. Good for them. Now the beavers can stick around and bring more birds fish and wildlife to that forest floor. Nicely done, team Aamjiwnaang .

Nothing like those flailing losers at the county airport a few states over in Wisconsin.

County Airport dealing with ongoing beaver problem

BURNETT COUNTY–– “It’s been frustrating, so we had to bring in a guy to come in and do some beaver trapping,” Airport Manager Chuck Shultz told the infrastructure committee last week. “It’s a private trapper that the DNR in Grantsburg suggested.”

Mike Rod, of Falun, is an independent trapper and has been helping trap the beavers in Siren since July. He is often the recommended trapper in the County.

“This is a pretty common thing for Burnett County,” Rod said. “It’s hard to tell how many are left out there.”

You know that old saying. “If at first you don’t succeed. trap, trap again.”

Rod explained that the beavers live in a 30-40 acre area surrounding the airport. In that area, they have built five different dams.

Shultz said the dams create giant pools of water at the airport and the nuisance beavers are the main concern.

“We’ve trapped four beavers so far,” Rod recalled. “And we’ll take down those dams in the spring.”

Shultz explained that the beavers have been creating dams in the area surrounding the airfield and not where the committee thought they were doing damage near Old 35.

“They were even going in and out of a culvert we got out there,” Shultz said. “We put up a crusher screen to block the entry off.”

You’re kidding! Beavers going into a culvert? That almost ~~never~~ always happens! I’m so sorry your thick airport heads had to deal with this trying furry problem.

Sheesh.

A final beaver outrage comes from our friends in Scotland, who are still waiting for protection for the free beavers of the Tayside.

Legislation to protect beavers delayed as Tay colonies face ‘persecution’

The Scottish Government has still not introduced legislation to protect beavers despite revealing it would do so more than two years ago. A Green MSP said the animals are being killed in a free-for-all while ministers stall on the issue.

The Tayside population of the Eurasian species emerged from private owners illegally releasing them into the wild – and have caused problems for farmers.

Environment Secretary Roseanna Cunningham announced in November 2016 that the semiaquatic rodents would get legal protection. A year ago she said legislation would be brought forward in the first half of 2018. The Scottish Government now says it will be done next year.

Mark Ruskell, the Scottish Green MSP, said: “It’s disappointing that a year on from the promise of legislation we’re still waiting.

It’s a long road to freedom that’s for sure. Not just for beavers, by the way.

“This vacuum has allowed persecution to continue, with animals still being shot.

“Bringing beavers back from extinction is making a huge contribution to restoring Scotland’s wetland habitats, boosting biodiversity while helping natural flood management.

“Giving this iconic species the proper protection it deserves would show that the Scottish Government aren’t just paying lip service to issues of animal welfare.”

Separate to the Tay colonies, beavers were released in Argyll in 2009 in an official trial.

The government announced in 2016 that both populations could remain.

Of course farmer’s are still complaining that they’re building dams that cost them thousand of dollars to remove. And you know how everyone is scared to upset the farmers. This could take a while to sort out.

No easy walk to freedom.