Category: Who’s blaming beavers now?

THE TWELVE DAYS OF BEAVER CHRISTMAS

So the exciting disarray on the web edit page was due to the momentous change to WORDPRESS 5 wheeeee which happened to chose this particular moment of my recovery to assault its newness. Everything has changed, and I’m sure some day it will be better, but in the meantime I was able to add a plugin to resist change. So we’ll just be stick-in-the-muds for now.

The good news is Ben Goldfarb has given us a beautiful interview on morning edition. I can’t imagine what life will be like when all this dies down. I truly think his interviews are improving, because nothing was missing from this one either.

Wasn’t that excellent? The smarter the interviewer the more the man shines. Never dull moment in beaver-land, yesterday Port Moody salmon and beavers made the news as well.

Can beavers and salmon coexist in Port Moody?

It’s a rigorous and time-consuming task, but each year volunteers with the Burrard Inlet Marine Enhancement Society (BIMES) collect salmon, fertilize, count and raise thousands of chum, coho and pink salmon.

They baby them, check them for disease, release them into local creeks and Burrard Inlet and educate students and the public about the importance of B.C. salmon.
Why?

“Ultimately it’s about education and ensuring the next generation knows the importance of salmon to the eco system,” says co-founder Ruth Foster.

You knew it was coming. A paper would never talk about advocates for two threatened species unless they could make them fight, like bees in jar, right?

But today, as the carcasses of the last spawned coho and chum salmon rot into the soil or feed eagles, the group faces a new challenge, one that will take some deft diplomacy to deal with.

For BIMES volunteers, a beaver family that has moved into Suter Brook Creek behind Port Moody city hall has generated wide-spread community support.

The idea of a beaver family living so close to human activity is pretty novel, and the family, a bonded pair and one kit, is a testament to nature and beaver determination.

People have an emotional attachment to these creatures, says BIMES president Kevin Ryan, but he hopes the work of a city beaver management plan will also consider the importance of the creek for salmon. “We are looking to find a balance for fish,” Ryan said.

The group points to changes in the creek wrought by beavers, especially a large dam that they believe is too high for fish to jump to get into the spawning grounds between Murray Street and the SkyTrain line. BIMES worries about the effect of tree removal on the salmon-bearing stream because trees are important for shade.

As a keystone species, they say, salmon are integral to the local ecosystem. If they are pushed out, other species could be endangered.

So it’s down to this, is it? The battle of the keystone species! It’s amazing how natural science works differently in British Columbia than it does in any other region. I mean here are all these crazy people at NOAA trying to talk beavers into streams to help salmon and here you are trying to chase them away!

Beaver activity is apparent along the creek. Water has pooled behind a dam, blocking access to a trail, and there are now three dams in the creek and evidence of beavers taking out trees, including one that has been chewed but hasn’t yet fallen over.

But beaver activity in creeks is nothing new, and beavers have always co-existed with salmon, says Judy Taylor-Atkinson, who has spent a lot of time monitoring the beavers and is advocating for them.

“The beavers are part of the landscape. They were trapped out, but now they are returning,” said Taylor-Atkinson, who is a stakeholder in the beaver management plan.

She credits the work of groups such as BIMES for their hard work and dedication for reviving local streams, restoration work for salmon that is now also bringing back other species to the city, such as herons, muskrat, owls and other animals.

It’s a very good think that Judy is so delicate and politic. Because I’ve gotten crabby in my old age and I would probably just yell at them.

“It’s not one species against the other,” she said, suggesting the city’s effort to create a management plan will ensure this over the long term.

She’s so good. Isn’t she good? Not that it matters all that much when you have scared salmon worshipers at the helm,

“It’s been four decades since we started this work,” noted Rod MacVicar, co-founder of the Mossom Creek Hatchery along with Foster. “What we want to know is if they (beaver advocates) are in this for a long time.”

He has been doing some of his own research and believes the city needs to bring in experts to recommend the best way to deal with both the beavers and the fish.

While relocating the beaver family may upset some, MacVicar said it may be the best way to save the beavers while also protecting salmon in the creek. He’s worried what will happen when the beavers run out of food or, for example, if more trees are knocked down, shade reduced for salmon, or if the family increases in size. Because of a lack of predators, beavers are expanding their territory and the ponds they create can be good for fish but there may be detrimental impacts as well, if salmon can’t get past the dams to spawn.

“We don’t want it to look like it’s us versus the beavers,” Ryan further added. ”We are just looking for some balance.”

You know about balance, right? That’s where I get what I want, and you stop wanting that other thing! I’m just trying to create some harmony here. You know by over-riding science to compromise one species and cherish another. You understand that don’t you?

There may be opportunities for improving the creek and ensuring it can sustain both beavers and salmon. Finding ways to ensure that fish can get through beaver dams to be able to spawn will be the job of the city as it works to establish a beaver management plan that protects and ensures the future viability of salmon.

Good lord. It’s bad enough trying to educate people about how to solve real beaver problems. Now we have to spend time solving imaginary ones too?

BRACED FOR BEAVERS

heidi08 Who's blaming beavers now? July 20, 2018

I received an email from the engineer last night, asking about the beavers in their new location. It seems he was approached by someone about them recently. Hmm. Moses mentioned that the last time he visited the dam there were two thin slash marks in it, like someone wanted to let out the water. All of this gives me a braced, approaching-the-trenches feeling again, It was just barely a year ago that I learned the beavers were living next door. Things were going so well I had almost forgot to be worried about their fate.

It’s funny how quickly it all comes back to you.

I was comforted this morning by this, printed in the Rants and Raves section of the Seattle Times yesterday, and shared by Samantha Everette (who works with Ben Dittbrenner at (Beavers Northwest), What a fantastic letter!

Out of the mouths of babes, eh?

Yeah, why didn’t the owners just wrap the trees with wire instead of killing the beavers? Beats the hell out of me, I’m really not at all surprised by this. Even the children are smarter about beavers in Seattle than the adults in Martinez. I might have known.

SPEECISM

heidi08 Who's blaming beavers now? July 13, 2018

If there’s one thing that really annoys me, (and lord knows there are several) it’s a conservation commission that doesn’t like beavers. You know the drill: too much nature or the WRONG KIND of nature in our natural area. Apparently certain people like the otters and the baby ducks, but dammit a beaver just doesn’t belong!

Amy the artist at the festival commented how the intolerance for beavers is almost like a kind of racism.And I had to agree. It’s speecism – pure and simple. Apparently Rhode Island suffers badly from it.

Losing battle at Cedar Swamp

NORTH SMITHFIELD – Paul Soares is on a mission. He has a bone to pick with local wildlife, but it’s not squirrels eating from the birdfeeder or mice in the attic he’s worried about. Instead, the resident and chairman of the North Smithfield Conservation Commission is determined to do something about the beavers that moved into a section of public land near Rte. 146 a few years ago and quietly staked their claim, keeping it all but inaccessible to the humans who live nearby.

Once each week, Soares climbs into his red Toyota 4Runner and heads to Cedar Swamp, a 69.5-acre town property donated from the estate of Philip Silva in 2010. The property includes about 30 acres of swampland and another 40 acres of forested highlands and stretches from Rte. 146 to the power substation, ending just shy of Greenville Road at its eastern edge.

Once used as a hunting preserve, the property is home to dragonflies, deer and wood ducks and offers an oasis of wildlife just beyond the border with Woonsocket. It’s an area Soares and other members of the Conservation Commission hope to make accessible to members of the public for hiking and other activities, but a number of challenges stand in their way.

Guess what’s in their way! Just what is that is ruining their plans for a nature preserve? Go ahead guess!

“We’re trying to get this to the point where the public can have some decent access. It’s been a long struggle, and so far the beavers are winning,” said Soares.

Those dam rodents! I knew it!

“When the flooding is at its worst, this is all underwater,” Soares explained. “People can’t walk through here, and there’s 40-some acres of beautiful highlands you can’t get to.”

When The Valley Breeze first checked in on the property in 2016, Soares was supervising the installation of one of two “beaver deceivers,” water diversion systems costing about $1,200 apiece. Since then, the beavers have built another dam downstream, raising water levels beyond the systems’ ability to lower them. Conservation Commission members have tried other methods to control the flooding over the years, breaking up dams and building a bridge of logs that was washed away in the rising waters, but the beavers continue to rebuild.

Ooh how you’ve suffered! Can I just pause here to say that I think a beaver lodge among cypress trees is just about the most beautiful thing I know?

Beavers are very invested little rodents and they just continue to cut things down and build dams and there’s really nothing you can do to stop them,” he said.

There is one solution the Conservation Commission hasn’t tried yet. State law allows the trapping of nuisance beavers with a permit, provided they are not moved to another location where they could cause problems for someone else. Instead, the beavers must be killed, a measure Soares said the Conservation Commission is trying to avoid.

Mighty white of you.

For now, he and other members access the back section of the property by unlocking a gated area normally closed to vehicles and driving straight through the half-foot puddle to where an old logging road climbs out of the swamp on the other side. After passing a marker where Soares buried his Jack Russell terrier, Lucy, when she died in 2016, the road winds off into the woods, looping through 40 acres of heavy forest. It’s land that’s rarely seen except by members of the Conservation Commission who maintain the road and the occasional ATV rider trespassing on town property.

“They just keep expanding their range and causing problems,” he said.

I would say it’s a good thing you’re not killing the beavers, because four of the five comments on this article are defending them, and assuming you really want this land for hunting I would think you’d like to have more (not less) game species? Ever wonder what happens to your swamp and precious cypress when beavers leave the area?

Trust me, it isn’t pretty.

SOBERING FOOD FOR THOUGHT

heidi08 Who's blaming beavers now?, Who's saving beavers now? July 9, 2018

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.

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.