Category: Who’s Killing Beavers Now?

Class reunion: Stand-outs and Drop-outs

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental, Who's Killing Beavers Now? November 4, 2013

Mary Willson: Curiosity-driven life

Mary Willson sets up a mist net during her work involving American Dippers. They banded caught birds and, over the course of their study, found that contrary to the results of a study conducted outside Alaska, male American Dippers in this environment play a role in nest sanitation.

Though it’s hard to pinpoint when she first became interested in ecology, she was always curious about the world. It was when she was in graduate school that she discovered instead of going to the library to look something up, she could go outside and find out for herself.

“The answer was not in the literature. It was essentially an unknown, and you could go and find it out. That’s very cool,” she said. After her first grad school course, “there was really no turning back.

If the name sounds familiar, it should. She is the friend of Bob Armstrong in Juneau that worked on the Mendenhall glacier treasure, which I still love leafing through. The pair also invited Mike Callahan come out, survey the area and to do a beaver management plan for the site in 2009 and lead a volunteer group in the meantime to keep removing dams so that no one needed to trap them. Looks like she’s still a believer.

Willson goes for regular walks with friends including Armstrong and Hocker, on which they usually find at least three or four really interesting things to explore, she said. She volunteers as a member of the informally-dubbed “beaver patrol,” which helps monitor beaver habitat and ensure dams don’t negatively affect trails or other wildlife around the Mendenhall Lake and Dredge Lake.

“The idea is that you don’t have to kill the beavers. They’re actually useful. We like them, but they make ponds that are very good for juvenile coho,” Willson said. The ponds also create habitat for ducks, sandpipers, warblers, and other birds.

Yes they do, Mary. Nicely put. You are the voice of nature in Juneau, was just met some folks who lived in Alaska and sang your praises. Keep preaching the beaver gospel and let us know if you ever need help.

And because this is OLD HOME week at beaver central, we might as well visit an old classmate that didn’t do as well.

Beavers return to Park at Riverwalk

In 2007, a beaver which destroyed several trees along the bike path received an outpouring of support from the community after California Department of Fish & Game officials issued a kill order. The issue received national attention and the kill order was later rescinded.

According to Bakersfield City Clerk Roberta Gafford, beavers have been spotted recently at The Park at River Walk .In a release, Gafford said that “staff is in the process of wrapping trees with green nylon fencing, and will continue to monitor tree damage.”

That’s right, the city that famously learned the hard way that orange netting to protect trees doesn’t work and looks silly has turned over a new leaf. After years of letters of phone calls from me personally, as well as countless others, they finally understand that killing beavers brings national controversy their way and they have learned the error of their ways. They fully understand why that netting failed last time.

It was the wrong color.

Don’t hand in your passport yet…

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Who's Killing Beavers Now? November 3, 2013

Yesterday we talked about the ecological wisdom of Nanaimo, but not all B.C. can boast such foresight. Just three hours away on the other side of Vancouver, the town of Pitt Meadows has a lot to learn about beaver management.

Beavers busy in Katzie Slough

The City of Pitt Meadows has moved to remove several beavers who dammed a section of the Katzie Slough before they cause a flood.

City staff usually discourage the beavers from building by tearing down their dams but this particular colony has been persistent and refuses to move on. “They build their dams, we tear it down. They build their dams, we tear it down,” says Evans.

Thoughtful Pitt meadow has apparently been using the very advanced beaver management technique referred to as “T.O.&O.”. (Trying over and over.) I believe it was developed in the 30’s by Dr. Was ‘Ted’ Effort. Too bad the city has that rare breed of “REBUILDING BEAVERS”. That almost ~~never~~ always happens.

Being so close to FBD they must have heard of flow devices and know something about their use. Hmm, they probably have a completely resonable sounding explanation about why that wouldn’t work in Pitt Meadow, You know, something that makes it clear they did their homework but the lesson just didn’t apply to them.

“They are bad for us in Pitt Meadow because of our shallow drainage system, because everything is so flat. Every time they build a dam, it has huge impacts on our drainage system because it just backs everything up.”

Ahhh, nicely done sir. I fondly remember the sage advice two city managers ago explaining to the public that he knew all about flow devices but that they wouldn’t work in our special Martinez conditions. Still information has a way of getting out because look at the last paragraph of the article.

Animal Welfare Institute says a preferred option and a better long-term solution for dealing with beaver and human conflicts is to work with existing beaver in the habitat.

Beaver pipes can be installed in dams to control flooding, while road flooding can be controlled with Beaver Bafflers. There are several humane alternatives to protecting trees from beavers, including surrounding trees with cylindrical cages, coating them with a sand/paint mixture, spraying them with repellents and/or placing low fences around them.

You don’t say.

Now let’s head east where the Scottish Beaver Trial earned high acclaim in the Nature of Scotland Awards this week.

Scottish Beaver Trial: The Scottish Beaver Trial sees the first ever formal reintroduction of a mammal species anywhere in the UK. In itself, this is a major innovation and a remarkable step forward for conservation, driven by a committed and expert partnership. The project has been meticulously planned, carefully developed and comprehensively monitored and has rigorously followed IUCN principles. It is clearly a leading example of the way such programmes should be designed and delivered.

However, it is not just the environmental aspects that make this project so special and remarkable, but it is the whole integrated approach to the reintroduction, including education, tourism and the wider social and economic benefits as well. The partnership brings together multiple disciplines and multiple perspectives in an original and highly successful way. The project has been taken forward in the open, with a focus on inclusive engagement with local communities, experts, supporters, doubters, and the media.

The beaver is what is known as a “keystone” species, and has been recognised as a major ecosystem or environmental engineer – one that by its very presence and behaviour can transform riverine habitats into much more diverse and natural ecosystems. This has consequent benefits to a wide range of other species, and also the potential to impact on the delivery of other ecosystem services, such as natural flood management, water quality improvement, recreation, education and tourism. Taken together, this is about a sea change in the way we approach conservation at a natural ecosystem scale, and the way we involve people and communities in enjoying nature and the services it delivers. Bringing the beaver back home to Scotland has been an outstanding achievement.

Very well put indeed, I could hardly have said it better myself.

Never accept a popsicle in Mississippi.

heidi08 Who's Killing Beavers Now? November 1, 2013

New requirements for controlling beaver population

Under the new guidelines, landowners are asked to wrap each beaver’s tail and right front foot in a clear plastic wrap or freezer bag and freeze until collection day. Also different this year is the amount paid for each beaver.

“In order to increase the landowner’s allotment, the bounty price was cut from $12.50 to $10 per tail and foot,” Sandy Mitchell with the Natural Resources Conservation Service told the Daily Corinthian.

This is the new USDA beaver management plan from Mississippi. It is part of the lovingly titled “Natural Resources Conservation Service.” Residents of Alcorn county have to sign up by November 27th to be eligible. Last year the death squad paid for 382 beaver tails. This in the smallest county in Mississippi with only 1.46 square miles of water. Which probably means some of those getting paid had harvested beavers from other areas, or passed off cow tongues as beaver tails with freezer burn.

I’m curious how many times has Alcorn been a recipient of FEMA money because of drought? It was one of 27 counties that got drought relief last year.

USDA Designates 27 Counties in Mississippi as Primary Natural Disaster Areas With Assistance to Producers in Surrounding States

Which is kind of perfect if you think about it. The government pays residents to kill the water-savers and then the government pays those same residents for suffering a drought. Federal employees always have a job.

Do not, for a moment, forget that we’re at war.

I pledge allegiance to the streams,

and the beaver ponds of America.

And to the renewal for which they stand

One river, underground, irreplaceable,

With habitat and wetlands for all.

BMAP (Bureaucrats Make Assassination Possible)

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Who's Killing Beavers Now? October 26, 2013

Clint DeWitt, environmental projects manager with Kanuga Conferences Inc., talks about how the organization is dealing with a number of beaver dams on its property.
MIKE DIRKS/TIMES-NEWS

Landowners complain about too many beavers

“I’m tasked with catching every beaver, not just one or two beavers,” Williamson said. “I have to catch every beaver at the place and warranty it for three months. You’re looking at the difference between a $300 job, versus the same job outside a BMAP county might be $800 or $1,000.”

Just 300 miles away from the beaver-appreciation article I talked about yesterday and whose author was thrilled to learn about flow devices and wrote me back several times, at the other end of the Blue Ridge Mountains the Kanuga conference center in Hendersonville just can’t kill them quickly enough.

“They’re just terrible,” said Jerry Moore, who has maintained the WNC Air Museum Airport, also known as Johnson Field, for 25 years. “They back the water up to the runway. They’ll raise it up a couple of feet. Last week, I dug (a beaver dam) out of the field and it dropped the water down 18 inches. They’ll be back, but it helps for a while.”

Moore said beaver-related flooding and tree damage near the airport reached its zenith about “six or seven years ago,” when a state trapper removed 50 beavers from the area. “It was just infested with them,” he said.

Infested! Beaver lice! The article is basically constructed around convincing the cities that don’t participate in BMAP to cough up their contribution. BMAP stands for “Beaver Management Assistance Program” but since its run by Wildlife Services at APHIS the acronym should really be “Bureaucrats Make Assassination Possible”. Killing is all they mostly do, except sometimes when they install pretend flow devices that don’t work.

Mitigating beaver damage doesn’t always involve trapping them or breaking up their dams, Williamson said. When beavers at Kanuga Conferences started flooding a lake loop trail — as well as threatening the habitat of endangered species in a nearby bog — he worked with Kanuga staff to design and install two pond levelers to lower water levels in the 1-acre bog.

Kanuga was home to roughly 20 to 30 beavers in 2007, said Environmental Projects Manager Clint DeWitt. He said the Episcopal Church-affiliated retreat didn’t want to eliminate the web-footed animals, only the damage they were wreaking on the bog habitat and the Daisy Lake Trail.

Relocating beavers is not an option, Williamson said, since that would just shift the nuisance to other areas and perhaps spread disease. He added beavers are highly territorial and would, if transplanted into a new area, likely die from fights with resident beavers or trying to cross roads on their way back home.

Before resorting to trapping, Williamson said he tries to use pond levelers, exclusion devices such as hardwire cloth around the base of trees and other non-lethal techniques. But with a constant stream of beavers coming up from the French Broad River, trapping is often necessary to control populations.

So even though beavers are so dangerously territorial that they would kill a stranger for moving in, there is such a steady stream of beavers on the move that new ones will just come to fill the space the corpse left behind and trapping is necessary to control the problem. I’m reminded of a certain Hermann Moll “zombie beaver map” from the 1700’s.

Well obviously North Carolina has a ways to go before achieving any real beaver management. And maybe something to learn about sociopathy as well. Check out the trapper’s colorful analogy at the end of the article.

“If I were trying to trap you, I would put traps at your front door, at the foot of your bed, at the light switch and at the toilet,” he said.

Well, it worked on his wife, anyway.

It was the best of times and – well you know the rest.

heidi08 Beaver Anatomy, Beaver Behavior, Beaver Rehabilitation, Beavers elsewhere, Who's Killing Beavers Now? October 11, 2013

Sometimes I go for days with no beaver news, but we’ve entered the dragnet of beaver stories, where I received round the clock reports of beaver killing in Arkansas, or Arcadia, or Price Edward Island. I guess everyone wants to get their dead beavers in a row before winter, but it’s a little depressing. Here are the highlights of misunderstanding.

Grand Falls-Windsor Newfoundland About 30 beavers are clogging up Corduroy Brook Trail in Grand Falls-Windsor, and several of their dams and lodges have caused flooding.”We want the beavers, beavers are a good attraction, and we want them to stay around. But if we didn’t control the populations, they’d eat themselves out of house and home,” he said.

Naimo British Columbia York said it is unlawful to interfere with traps, but if people do find them they should be reported immediately to conservation officers. York said there are live beaver traps available, but they are “remarkably ineffective” and when they do work it only means a beaver will end up being relocated into what is likely another beaver’s territory. Beavers are territorial. They are also a hazard to drainage and are not a conservation concern on Vancouver Island. “It’s just far more humane to use killing traps than it is to try and live-trap them,” York said.

WINFIELD, Indiana | Beavers continue to create problems in town by felling trees and building extensive dam structures in retention pondsAt the Sept. 24 Storm Water Board meeting, Clayton said licensed beaver trapper Tom Larson could remove the animals at a cost of $200 per beaver.

Jonesboro Arkansas: Rogers says animal control is not equipped to handle the beavers. The rodents can use their powerful jaws and teeth to chew through the toughest of steel traps.

Is it spring yet? There are more where that came from but that’s all I can stand at the moment. Here’s some lovely “glass half-full” moments to improve your mood.

sonoma kit — Sonoma Wildlife Kit – Photo Cheryl Reynolds

Our own Cheryl Reynolds got to visit the little rescued kit at Sonoma Wildlife yesterday. She held him and fed him strawberries and filmed while he took down the “ramp” in his tank and tried to use it as a floaty device. We Worth A Dam folks are understandably a bit jealous, as you might imagine. I wrote her yesterday and helpfully quoted Luke 12:48.

For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.

Just sayin’. Go donate to buy this little fellow more strawberries, medicine, cottonwood branches and whatever else he needs. We can give this little fellow a new start and we should. And thanks Cheryl, for giving us a ringside seat to his big adventure.