Category: Who’s Killing Beavers Now?

Just the pound of cure for Warren

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Environmental, kits, Massachusetts Trapping Law, Who's Killing Beavers Now? June 30, 2013

An aerial view of the problematic beaver pond. (Submitted Photo/MATTHEW DOMNARSKI)

Warren works to stay ahead of beavers

BREACHED DAM FLOODS HUMAN HABITATION

WARREN — When Sherry Rapisarda called 911 on May 25 to say water was rising around her family’s trailer home on Route 67, she was told to evacuate. “I looked out the door and I told (the dispatcher), ‘I can’t evacuate, I can’t even get to my car,’ ” she said, remembering how the Fire Department arrived with a boat and ferried her, her husband, their two grown children and two cats to dry land.

The two floods, which officials have said were caused by the breaching of a beaver dam on state property just west of Colonel’s Mountain, have left behind damage on Route 67 and around the Spring Street area, where cars were sitting in about 3 feet of water.

People whose homes and businesses are flooded should expect their town to protect them and do whatever is possible to prevent it from happening again. They certainly deserve to have the causes analyzed and carefully understood so that they don’t suffer the same fate 3 weeks later. Scapgoats, lazy finger pointing and pretend facts do them no favors.

Before the dam broke the first time, it was holding back a big pond. Mr. Boudreau estimated conservatively that about 3 million gallons of water came down the hill like a tsunami.

But with two floods in three weeks, people will likely remember this for a while, and they won’t let local officials forget, either. They’ve sent a letter to selectmen and want something done about the beavers.

Still, fixing the problem requires a process. First the Board of Health must issue an emergency trapping permit so the beavers can be removed. Health Board Chairman Kenneth Lacey said Mr. Boudreau is working on the permit now.

Since state trapping laws prohibit the relocation of beavers, they must be killed, officials said. So the town needs a licensed trapper to do the job and funding to pay that person. Trapping season, when the beaver pelts would have had some value, ended in April and won’t start again until November, so the trapper doesn’t benefit much unless he is paid.

The beavers have been at the site for at least 50 years. Officials know that because the dam and pond show up on topographical maps from 1956. Mr. Boudreau said there are four huts, which he guesses are home to about 20 beavers.

It’s good to know that the problem is in such capable, thoughtful hands. I’m sure the beaver dam didn’t fail because of some other man-made problem upsteam or some trapping you allowed earlier. I’m sure that the 2012 study you reported almost exactly a year ago, entitled “Warren County study finds roads could be endangered by beaver dam failures“ couldn’t possibly have provided any information at the time that could have prevented this. I’m sure you know it was entirely caused by those verified 20 beavers and if they just kill them it will never ever happen again. I’m sure the trapper hire will give them a money back guarantee that the area will never flood in the future.

I can’t help thinking of this.

Looks like our two kits have moved back to their summer home by the secondary dam. This morning we filmed both of them coming back and downstream into the bank hole to settle for the night. I suppose the entire beaver section of Alhambra creek is like a giant ranch home where they spread out according to their own tastes. Here’s one swimming down under the Marina Vista bridge before ducking home.

And here’s the second high tailing the same distance, filmed from the footbridge.

And if you want to make sure they’re getting all the beaver training they need, check out this perfectly mudded dam.

two sleeping secondary 020 — Freshly mudded secondary dam

Maddening

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Dispersal, Who's Killing Beavers Now? June 29, 2013

Naive child that I am, I once believed that the function of a Conservation Commissions, (charged with protecting wetlands and wildlife and developed as a function of the Wetlands Protection Act), was to actually, you know, CONSERVE things. Silly, silly, Heidi. What was I thinking?

Beavers damming in Hopkinton

In this beautiful weather, beaver damming can cause some not-so-beautiful problems if proper precautions are not taken. “Beavers are out there this year,” said Don McAdam, Conservation Administrator. The Conservation Commission’s job is to protect public and private ground water supply, fisheries, and wild life habitats – even from something as seemingly natural as local beaver populations.

That’s right Don, thank goodness the conservation commission was there to protect Hopkinton from all that NATURE. Anything could happen if you weren’t vigilantly at the ready, killing every water-saver that paddles onto your shores. I guess maybe you should be more specific about what you’re trying to conserve? I can just bet there are more like you at home.

Beavers dam culverts (pipes that go under roadways) and can cause flooding if the dam should break or block pipes, said Public Works Director John Westerling. The animals can pollute water, as well, he added.

Just so you know, Hopkinton is literally 70 miles away from Beaver Solutions. Mike could drive over and fix those culverts in an hour. I wrote of course but they haven’t responded. I shouldn’t be surprise. You have to work very hard to be this ignorant so close to MIT.

Beaver caught in Sherwood

Robin is no longer in the hood. After numerous sightings in the Birch Hill Drive area, the land-locked beaver that made the news last month has been caught today at the Mount Edward grocery.

This week store staff were surprised to find the beaver almost up the steps on the way into the store, said Chuck Gallison, wildlife biologist with the provincial government. He said that his department was giving the beaver the nickname Robin, as in Robin Hood of the Sherwood Forest.

I: Photo of a beaver trying to enter the Mount Edward grocery on Mount Edward Road in Sherwood. This photo was taken on Wed., June 26.

I don’t know if I can take many more of these terrifyingly lost dispersers looking for a place to call home. I am so grateful ours have an excellent waterway to travel. You may or may not remember that PEI has a stunningly bad record when it comes to beaver management – prompting one of my favorite graphics of all time. Their head of wildlife argued vociferously with Wikipedia Rick that the animals weren’t native until he produced an 1830’s document that showed they were. Well, I guess this story is slightly better than their usual but it still makes me very nervous.

With no place to go, the animal stayed put until other wildlife staff arrived with a net, then a cage. The beaver is at this moment on its way to a secret but secluded location on P.E.I., far from the network of culverts it had been using to elude capture for months now.

More beaver stupid from the Taos internet story which has apparently gone viral. My inbox was flooded with stories about the delicious crime from places as far away as Germany and Australia. I suppose I can look forward to days more of this at least. If my internet is spared the voracious beaver-appetite I will let you know.

It made me think about how ready the world is to report and repeat bad news about beavers, and what an uphill batter it is to get the real story out. Even Bay Nature has been reluctant to talk about the salmon issue yet, and got forbid the AP should pick up on a story of a flow device working! I am reminded of an old John Donne poem…

Now if you’re like me you need something nice after all those irritants. Beaver friend Glenn Hori was down the other night to photograph two kits and five adults. Enjoy!

glen adult and kit — Adult & Kit: Photo Glenn Hori

Slightly better at keeping secrets

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, Creative Solutions, Earth Day, Educational, Environmental, Festival, Who's Killing Beavers Now? June 27, 2013

Way back when Worth A Dam was just forming, (during the punic wars, as Edward Albee would say) I was looking for a licensed non-profit to be our receiving organization and was having conversations with an urban wildlife group based in LA. I was so excited they were interested in being involved I wrote it about it on the then nascent website and they were so annoyed I had blasted the secret liaison-in-process that they withdrew. Keeping secrets, I learned, is very important for beavers. Who knew? It was okay, very soon after their withdrawal I did a presentation for Pleasant Hill Creeks and met Bill Feil of Land for Urban Wildlife who became our official non-profit umbrella and that has worked very well for 5 years. I think it was all for the best, but I did learn something about keeping secrets.

What I learned is to not talk about the thing you’re not supposed to talk about, but to keep asking for permission over and over in alternately charming and irritating ways until your requests are so annoying you are given the all clear! So when Suzanne Fouty called to ask me if I’d talk to Sarah Koenigsberg of Whitman college in WA a few months ago, I said sure. Talk beavers to a complete stranger? Of course! Turns out Sarah is an instructor working on a film project about beavers and their advocates, focusing on climate change and water. She was going to interview Mary Obrien and Suzanne Fouty and Sherri Tippie for the film, but all three insisted they talk to me as well.

It was an incredibly exciting moment to think that the three believed I had something important to offer to the film, because I admire those three women slightly more than God. I could remember the amazing article that first introduced me to Mary way back when she was described in that excellent article from High Country News. It remains one of my favorite beaver reads, even though I now realize the photo at the beginning is a muskrat – not a beaver.

The Semester in the West – or here let them describe it

Whitman College Semester in the West is an interdisciplinary field program focusing on public lands conservation and rural life in the interior American West. Our objective is to know the West in its many dimensions, including its diverse ecosystems, its social and political communities, and the many ways these ecosystems and communities find expression in regional environmental writing and public policy.

We agreed that they would come help with Festival VI, get some film of it and we’d do an interview as well. Wow! Can I tell everyone right now? I was dimly able to ask. No, Sarah said, let me get it confirmed and formalized and then it can happen. I promised to hold my tongue. Which I did. Can I talk about it now? How ’bout now?

Cat out of the bag! All I can say is Sarah should be thankful there were distracting new kits to keep me occupied! Yesterday I finally got the ALL CLEAR so now it’s official and I can formally say that Sarah of Tensegrity productions will be coming to do an interview and film the festival.

The project at hand is a documentary film with the working title, The Beaver Believers. It tells the story of several strong women and their allies, and their common cause of seeking to restore Castor Canadensis, the North American beaver, to much of its former native habitat to provide more water and habitat in the ever-warming West. We propose to tell their stories of creativity, grit, and whimsy with the same spirited spontaneity and serendipity as their activism and ecological citizenship itself. The film will be 35- to 45-minutes in length, appropriate for the “documentary short” category in film festivals.

A collaborative effort between filmmaker Sarah Koenigsberg (director of photography) and Whitman College Professor of Politics Phil Brick (director), The Beaver Believers is already well on its way into pre-production, and we have a rigorous production schedule planned for the summer of 2013. Filming will take place from May to August with shoots scheduled in Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. {eds note: AND MARTINEZ!}

Now you must hear a taste of their reporting on the subject, listen to this podcasts started at the Utah festival last year. Click on the photo to listen and imagine how the first festival in Utah might compare to the 6th in Martinez. Don’t you live their voices? Mary’s metaphor of the wildlife riding on the beaver tail is an art project waiting to happen! And Sherry’s voice always makes me want to sit in the front for and listen! Suzanne is outstanding! Oh and while you’re listening remember that painting beaver tails and pinning the tail on the beaver are all things the learned about from us.

: Click to Play

They’re stuck with us now. We’re on the calendar and they are sending a team to help lift, carry and film. I’m sure they’ll want to do a beaver viewing too! I’ll do an official announcement this weekend and let Martinez know they’re going to be on camera for beavers. Again! I heard from Sarah that they just got back from Idaho yesterday, visiting some places with beautiful beaver dams and some places that should have them but don’t because they’re always trapped and killed.They also met with Carol Evans of the BLM in Nevada and checked out their amazing habitat in Elko.

I confess to you that I am deeply excited and appropriately terrified about their coming, but every contact I’ve had with Sarah has been reassuring. When I listen to the clip yesterday I realize that this is going to be a inescapably big deal and I can only comfort myself in the usual manner by thinking critically. The very young voice behind that podcast (one of the students) gets to describe Dr. Obrien’s face as being “lined with the desert”? (!) And Dr. Fouty wears “hippie clothes?” (!!) Goodness, what does Mr. ‘Sage’ look like? No comment? Why are the women itemized in narration and not the men? We would have words. That ought to keep me focused. I can do this. I’ve been interviewed in my living room before. Don Bernier filmed me and the first ever meeting of Worth A Dam and Richard Parks used an interview for his final project at UCB school of journalism. I’ll carry on as best I can. Think of the beavers.

And speaking of distracting new kits, our bravest 2013 model was out at 7:30 on Thursday night, allowing me to catch this glimpse as he made his way up from the secondary, through the primary and back home.

His uncle provided a more relaxed photo shoot.

Sacrebleu!

heidi08 Beaver Anatomy, Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Who's Killing Beavers Now? June 21, 2013

Beavers have a friend in retired SUNY ESF professor

Dietland Muller-Schwarze, of Manlius, holds a piece of artwork of beavers given to him by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as part of a "Lifetime Achievement Award" he received for his 25 years of research and other work involving the animal (David Figura | dfigura@syracuse.com)

Dietland Muller-Schwarze, 78, a retired SUNY ESF professor in wildlife biology, studied the animal in parts of the Adirondacks and in the Alleghany State Park for more than 25 years. He wrote two books on them — the most recent, “The Beaver: Its Life and Impact,” was published in 2011.

They do a lot of good. Their dams create wetlands, which cleanse the water. The water percolates slowly through the area and gets purified, everything from bacteria to toxins get taken out. In addition, these wetlands create habitat for other large animals, birds, insects and plants. In the Adirondacks, beaver-made wetlands are assisting the comeback of moose. Finally, beaver-made, wetland/meadows were attractive to the early settlers of this country, who drained them and easily turned them into farm land because of the fertile soil.

Nowadays, we know there are many ways to design and regulate things like stream flows by doing things like putting pipes in beaver dams so that beavers and humans can live peacefully together. There are such things as “beaver deceivers’ that can be set up in front of culverts so that beavers can’t block them up.

Oh Dietland! I don’t think I’m ready for you to retire unless you use your free time to start a Worth A Dam Manlius chapter? What will all those forestry students do without you? I remember how firmly I clutched your book and scoured through its pages when I was on the beaver subcommittee. I gave a copy to the city council who must have at least read the jacket. One year you donated a copy for our silent auction and I remember your email praising Worth A Dam as one of my most prized possessions. Well, enjoy your retirement. And let us know if you feel inclined for a little volunteer work?

Sigh. Why do the good ones always retire? Here’s someone who’s NOT retiring.

Central Frontenac considers new beaver dam bylaw

EMC News – Out of necessity, Central Frontenac Public Works Manager Mike Richardson has become something of an expert on beaver dams. As such, he was at Central Frontenac Council’s regular meeting last week in Sharbot Lake with a draft bylaw to help his department deal with this ongoing problem.

“Section 1.1. says ‘no person shall permit a beaver dam or other obstruction on property.

If he’s an expert on beaver dams I will eat my labrador. Our old city manager called himself an expert on beaver dams once. Permit me to doubt. Here’s another one who’s apparently not retired…or arrested.

Sterile as a beaver

There’s a stat that Denis Fournier repeats often, both when he writes and during the course of our phone interview. The average beaver, he says, cuts down 200 trees per year. “A beaver colony can have nine to 12 beavers in it. So that’s 2000 trees per year,” says Fournier, who works as a wildlife management technician for the City of Montreal. “After humans, they’re the animal the most able to change their environment. They can cause a tremendous amount of damage.”

For people like Fournier, responsible for maintaining the ecosystems at Montreal’s nature parks, that was a huge cause for worry. So the City conducts its own struggle against the beavers, and in the case of Parc-nature du Bois-de-l’Île-Bizard, located just off of Pierrefonds, that means capturing them, tagging them, and finally vasectomizing them.

The vasectomy program, in place since 1995, came about after beavers were seen as being an increasing threat to ecosystems around Montreal. Thus far only six beavers have been sterilized, all of them in Île-Bizard. Fournier used to go out into the wetlands himself and set the traps, which would then have to be checked every day so as not to traumatize or endanger the beavers. Nowadays he’s too busy with other responsibilities, so the city hires a professional trapper to do the work. If they find any younger, unsterilized beavers that move into the park, they’re taken to the Biodome, sedated, sterilized, implanted with a microchip and then released 24 hours later into the wild. They continue to set traps in the fall so that they can monitor the beavers.

I am speechless. What is wrong with people? Have they lost their minds and all sense of human decency? Are there some kind of toxic spores in beaver scat that make people insane? I found this article cheerfully posted on the Beavers:Wetlands and Wildlife facebook page, but I’m assuming they hadn’t read through the vasectomy details. (Nope: Owen says vasectomy is better than trapping. I’m not so sure.) There is even a photo of the operation in process. I don’t see the word VET anywhere in its glossy pages, so I’m going to assume that someone from city staff performs these delicacies themselves. Maybe Mr. Fournier and his son. Just to be clear, it is true that in general vasectomies are far far more simple than hysterectomies to perform. But remember that all beaver sex organs are internal, so we’re not talking about a simple snip here.

The article says that the project was started in 1995. And since then 6 beavers were successfully treated. That’s barely one successfully surgery every two years. I guess if a few beavers are killed in the process, it’s time well spent.

Montreal is an island where the water recently was declared unsafe to drink. It is home to about 4,000.000 people who mostly speak French. Its 141 square miles boast an apparently uncounted square miles of water, because even though its surrounded by water, I can’t find the statistics for that anywhere on the Google. This is the only part of the article that came even close to making me laugh

There could be anywhere up to 100 beavers around Montreal, though not of all them in city parks, which makes containing them an ongoing process.

11 colonies of beavers in a city half the size of New Orleans? Must go, I have letters to write.

Otterly Ruined

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Environmental, Video, Who's Killing Beavers Now? June 11, 2013

Worth A Dam was at the ready with lenses poised for Kitwatch 2013, but an unexpected visitor changed the entire night.

Otter Pipe-1 — Otter on flow device: Photo Ron Bruno

Last night the otter wasn’t ON the pipe, but IN the pipe using it as a tunnel to get over the dam and eat all the fish in the pond. Mom and Dad weren’t happy about this carnivore in their midst and there was a round of tail slapping and water charging. Now a lot of beaver advocates will defend staunchly that otters don’t eat beaver and that the literature on this is ‘controversial’. But the beavers don’t appear to think so. They react with what appears to be very stern alarm when the otters show up in June. The otters might be there for a fish run and have no interests in kits at all, but the beavers don’t care. They don’t ask questions. They just defend. The little otter suddenly remember something he had to do very far away and hightailed it away from the pond. But the beavers remained jumpy and no kits were allowed to emerge and even Jr tried his hand at a very novice tail slap.

_________________________________________________

Enough cheer and kitcentrism, we have important beaver jobs to do out here in Castorfornia. Take for example this depressing revisit. I say revisit because we talked about this story back in November, when I took six hours to find the addresses and personally write everyone involved and told tell them how to solve their problem.

Eagle Ranch on beaver watch

EAGLE – High water flows in Brush Creek from spring runoff might take care of the beaver problem that flared up in Eagle Ranch last fall. A rapidly expanding population of beavers was building dams in the residential area, killing trees and clogging storm ponds that are part of a pollution-control system. “With the high water, the beavers likely went up or downstream,” said Eagle Open Space Director John Staight.

Stacy Chase of Chase Wildlife LLC in Gypsum — the company Eagle hired to monitor and mitigate the beaver problem — said she is waiting to see how many beavers move back to the area after runoff. “There’s one dam we’re actively monitoring and at least one beaver that we know of in the area,” she said. “Otherwise it appears the population has scattered.” Chase said she broke up a large dam that was near the bike path.

“We’ll see how quickly the dam is rebuilt and that will give us an indication of how many beavers are working on it,” she said.

Interesting population estimation tool. I wonder if the WHO has tried it? Destroy their economy and see how long it takes to rebuild? Well if the population is our Dad beaver it would take a night, but if the population is some of our yearlings it could take a bit longer. Hmm I may have spied a flaw in your fool-proof plan. The beavers are scattered you say? You killed a few but the rest have escaped. You know, scattering, the way beavers always do. What an interesting expert they’ve chosen to solve this problem! Considering Sherri Tippie is 90 minutes away. Who is this expert ‘mitigator’. I must know more about her.

Oh.

Staight said the town has the option to trap and euthanize the beavers but that is the last thing anyone wants to do. Instead, trapped beavers will be relocated. The town started trapping and relocating the beavers last fall, but was told to wait until the summer to do any relocating.

“The Colorado Parks and Wildlife Department said relocating the beavers so late in the season before winter would likely cause the beavers to starve to death,” Staight said. “They told us if we were going to trap them in the fall we should euthanize them.”

Yes we wouldn’t want to kill the beavers. We just want to move them and scatter them and ruin their families and separate the children from their parents in the middle of winter.

Chase said if the dam problem persists, there are water-flow control devices that can be installed in the dams. “It tricks the beavers and they can keep building the dam without effects,” she said. “We’re always going to have issues because of the way the waterway is and we will need population-control measures,” she said.

Well look at that. After we wrap the trees with fairy dust and kill some family members and rip out some dams, we can try installing a flow device or two if we need to.

Oh goody.