Category: Who’s saving beavers now?

BEAVERS AND THEIR SOLUTIONS

heidi08 Who's saving beavers now? July 17, 2018

I was invited last night to be part of a radio discussion about beavers on KPFA’s Terra Verde this week, The producer had lined up Ben Goldfarb and Rick Lanman for the show as well. I’m heading to the Sierras today so it wasn’t possible, but it reminded of that foggy day of yore back in 2008 when they asked for a show on the beaver story in Martinez. In those days I was afraid to talk to reporters and had a full time job so I encoraged others to go to the studio (Linda Meza then of Worth A Dam, Mitch Avalon of CCC Flood Control and Lisa Owens Vianni of Estuaries magazine). They very pleasantly sat for an hour a did a nice job discussing the controversy and I was mortified that no one ever once mentioned the flow device or how we solved our problem. In my mind thus making sure that no one in the state would know that beaver problems could be solved by anything other than forbearance.

I swore it would never happen again, that I would get over myself and step up to the mike next time and was thrilled to be invited, but timing makes it impossible and in this new renaissance climant I know Ben will bring them up!

Meanwhile there’s a great letter (from Vermont of course) that’s worth taking time to appreciate.

Letter: Embrace coexistence over killing

Last year Protect Our Wildlife (POW) launched a statewide Living With Wildlife campaign to help towns pursue nonlethal methods to address human-wildlife conflicts. Good news is that POW recently partnered with the Town of Marlboro to help prevent beavers from being trapped in leghold and body-gripping traps, while also preventing beaver-related flooding and subsequent road damage. With grant funding, POW provided financial support to install three culvert protective water flow devices, called Beaver Deceivers, on Grant Road in Marlboro. This site is one of three that the town will have protected with such devices to save the wetlands and maintain these rich ecosystems for beavers and many other species of wildlife.

Water flow control devices are the most efficient and cost-effective tools to prevent beaver-related flooding and road damage and also to protect these keystone species. Traditional methods of removing beavers usually involve shooting or using leghold or body gripping traps, both of which are not only cruel, but offer only a temporary “solution”; good wetland habitat will host beavers – we can learn to live with them. Also, beavers have tightly knit family units with the kits living in the lodge with their mother, father, brothers and sisters until they are about two years old, at which point they are not yet mature enough to mate, but independent enough to leave the area and start building their own lodge, using the skills they learned from their family. Trapping and killing leaves kits orphaned and results in a futile loop of trapping and killing with no long-term benefits.

As our planet continues to face the real effects of climate change, including drought, we should learn to value these invaluable environmental allies and embrace coexistence over killing.

Brenna Galdenzi, president
Protect Our Wildlife POW

Nice letter! I thought Patti Smith’s remarkable sketches belonged with it. If Vermont doesn’t have a higher beaver IQ than the rest of the world I’d be very surprised, Thanks Brenna for making this happen. Do you think Skip installed the flow devices? I wonder.

In the meantime I’m stalling for the City Creatures Blog to go live with our story. Nothing yet. I’m pretty sure it’s going to happen because my name is listed in the author section. Maybe there are people in the world who don’t wake up as early as I do?

Is that even possible?

It’s up! Go hear to read what I write like when I’m not in my pajamas.

Is Your City Smarter than a Beaver?

Here;s the teaser paragraph to get you to read the whole thing, please post comments on the article so Gavin thinks beavers are worth writing about again!

In 2007, Martinez, California, had some unusual visitors. In those days you could drop by the local Starbucks, pick up your morning latte, and step right outside to watch some fluffy beaver kits munch down willow leaves, twigs, and scraps before they ducked off to sleep in the nearby lodge for the day. If you listened closely enough you could even hear them. Their vocalizations sounded eerily like the protesting complaint of a child who was told to stop playing and get to bed.

ONLY-THINGS-I-LIKE DAY

It’s Sunday,our beavers are safe for the moment, the silent auction items are all delivered and paid for, and Jon made corn ravioli’s last night. I think we should celebrate with an only good news sunday, don’t you? Let’s start with a lovely letter to the editor from Minnesota.

READER LETTER: Killing beavers is not the only answer

I was dismayed to read the article in the July 1 Leader regarding the beavers in a local pond.

A family of beavers built a dam that caused the water level of the pond to rise. The response of Hutchinson city employees was to set traps to kill the beavers.

I immediately called Wildwoods Wildlife Rehabilitation in Duluth to find out if there were other options for this situation. I was told that it is an established practice to live-trap beavers and re-home them, and there is a Minnesota organization that advocates for beavers and wetland restoration called The Beaver Project: Living in Harmony with Nature’s Eco-Engineers. It offers “innovative, cost-effective, and humane strategies and services to persons and communities to help protect and maintain property, roadways, and shorelines from beaver activities.”

I contacted the organization and they are seeking a beaver family for a particular lake right now. From them, I learned about a device called a beaver pond leveler developed at Clemson University in 1992. Instructions to construct the device are posted on the Minnesota DNR website or it can be purchased from the Minnesota non-profit, MINNCOR Industries. It took me 10 minutes on a Saturday to speak to these people and get this information.

I have spoken with the mayor of Hutchinson and he supports an investigation into an alternative solution and I left a message for John Paulson, the city’s environmentalist. I would be happy to coordinate a project to install a pond leveler or relocate these beavers. If these animals have already been needlessly killed, I hope I can educate the city of Hutchinson and others that killing beavers is not the only answer.

By Denise Luke Richfield

Ahh nicely said Dennis! I think things got a little muddled with the idea of the ‘pond leveler’ being invented by Clemson but never mind, you got the gist. There’s a way to solve this and good reasons to try. So it’s worth a shot, Minnesota would be a fine place to save beavers!

The second story comes from Wisconsin and isn’t really about beavers, but the headline made me smile very broadly.

Leftist Woodchucks #Resist Paul Ryan by Eating His Car

Activists have been making the private lives of Trump allies as difficult as possible lately, protesting at their houses, ruining their meals, and berating them in their hometowns. And it looks like the guerrilla faction of the #Resistance just welcomed some unlikely compatriots to their cause: woodchucks.

A family of the bushy-tailed, chisel-toothed mammals sabotaged Paul Ryan’s Chevy Suburban recently, chewing through the wiring and leaving his SUV totaled, NPR reports. During a Q&A Thursday at the Economic Club in Washington, DC, the House Speaker explained that his car had mysteriously died after he’d left it parked at his mom’s house in Wisconsin through the winter. When a mechanic put it up on a lift to see what was wrong, he said, “they realized that a family of woodchucks lived in the underbody of my Suburban.”

Sure, the woodchucks—also known as groundhogs, whistle-pigs, or land-beavers—might’ve just been looking for a dry, protective shelter where they could ride out the brutal Wisconsin cold. Or maybe, like the anti-Trump dogs who came before them, they were looking to stick it to the Republicans the best way their animal selves knew how.

Welcome to the Resistance.

HA! It was fun to stumble across this interview in my daily beaver search. It’s honestly amazing speaker Ryan can find time to comment on this tragedy, since he’s usually so busy taking away health care or eyeing granny’s social security! Well here’s wishing him lots of time to ponder whistle-pigs in the future.

Finally I think you deserve to see something of Rusty Cohn’s wonderful Saturday morning with the beavers. He was lucky enough to watch some animated hard work at the beaver dam near the fire-fighter’s museum. You’re going to like these. Click on the thumbnail to see it larger, and thanks Rusty!

JOHNNY BEAVERSEED

heidi08 Who's saving beavers now? July 12, 2018

It’s been so quiet on the beaver front. Days have passed since the last review of Ben Goldfarb’s book. I know he’s headed to Toronto for the NACCB conference next week, but I expected we’d hear something on the way.

Looks like the dry spell is over. Good. I like this part.

FERN Q&A:

Beaver-created wetlands could be a farmer’s best friend

Ben Goldfarb is one of the most eloquent and powerful storytellers writing today about environmental issues in America. His two stories for FERN, The Codfather, a rollicking tale of fraud and regulatory breakdown in the New England commercial fishery, and The Endling, about the final days of the vaquita, a shy porpoise that lives only in the Gulf of California, were among the best pieces we’ve published. In his new book, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, he makes the case that this widely vilified rodent, which was trapped nearly out of existence in the U.S., is not only making a comeback but could play a major role in mitigating the effects of climate change. Brent Cunningham, FERN’s executive editor, interviewed him about the book via email.

Given how thoroughly erased they’ve been from modern America, I would bet that most people’s idea of the beaver is connected to various cartoons. How big an obstacle is this disconnect to the larger effort of not only restoring the beaver but embracing its multifaceted environmental reclamation work?

We’re an increasingly urban nation, often disconnected from the rural areas where our food is produced and our wildlife, beavers included, dwells. To some extent, though, that’s changing. Just as the slow food movement has reconnected Americans with farmers’ markets and urban farms, beavers are gradually reentering our consciousness. They’re hardy critters, after all, capable of thriving in some pretty developed landscapes so long as we don’t actively kill them. Some of my favorite stories in the book are about urban beavers: the colony that moved into a wetland next to a Walmart in Logan, Utah, for instance, or the rodents’ return to the Bronx River — New York City’s first beavers in 200 years! We’re a country with a growing beaver population and, I think, a growing beaver awareness.

And with that awareness, I’d like to imagine, comes an appreciation for how important beavers are to our ecosystems. When beavers built dams and created ponds in a stream in downtown Martinez, California, wildlife from otters to herons quickly rode in on their coattails. Spend a few minutes at a beaver pond, and you can’t fail to appreciate how much life these creatures support.

I love reading what Ben has to say about beavers, but finding little mentions of Martinez is like discovering an unopened Christmas present with your name on it under the tree in January. A little something extra to you didn’t expect. Aww thanks Ben.

Related to both these previous questions, isn’t part of the implication of your book that we — humans — will need to reimagine certain ideas about the “outdoors” if the beaver is to return in a significant way? Like what a great trout stream looks like? Maybe even what a ranch or a farm looks like?

Incorporating beavers in agricultural landscapes is, to my mind, one of the most exciting frontiers in water management. Take James Rogers, the manager of the Winecup-Gamble Ranch in northeast Nevada. For decades, the ranch’s irrigation water was supplied from a reservoir behind a giant human-built dam — the kind of centralized water infrastructure solution that pervades the American West. Last winter, though, the dam washed out and the reservoir drained.

Most ranchers would have ordered it rebuilt, but James is a savvy, progressive guy, and he recognized that the ranch’s sizable beaver population could be part of the answer. Instead of rebuilding a single enormous (and risky) dam, he’s hiring a consulting firm to construct a number of smaller wetlands all over the property that will be populated and maintained by the resident beavers. Rather than putting all his eggs in a single basket, he’s diversifying his approach to water storage — with the help of a rodent. I so admire that humility and vision, that willingness to work with, rather than against, the natural world.

This is a good article that hits a lot of high points Click on the title to go read the whole thing for yourself. Ben sure knows what he’s doing.

If you were speaking to a room of ranchers and farmers, what would say to convince them the stop viewing the beaver as “irrigation-clogging, tree-felling, field-flooding menaces”?

Rather than doing the talking myself (after all, I’m just a lowly journalist), I’d introduce them to someone whose experience they’d respect: say, Jon Griggs, another brilliant Nevada rancher. Griggs is a former beaver skeptic. When the critters turned up in Susie Creek, the stream that runs through his grazing allotment, in 2003, his inclination was to kill them. But he let them live, and was soon happy he did. Beavers, and their dams, turned his stream into a sprawling cattail marsh, creating 20 additional acres of open water, raising water tables two feet, and increasing plant production by more than 30 percent. That wasn’t just good for the ecosystem, it was great for his bottom line. When drought hit in 2012, nearby ranchers had to pay a bunch of money to truck water to their thirsty livestock. But thanks largely to beavers, and the ponds and marshes they’d created, Griggs was able to water his livestock without expensive trucks. He’s become a great spokesman for the power of beavers, and he’s convinced neighboring ranchers to embrace these animals, too. If anyone’s going to change the fate of beavers in America, it’s guys like Jon Griggs — authentic agricultural community members with hard-won experience.

Ahh deft choice, although it literally makes me shudder to read Griggs name without at least a mention of the patient BLM fish biologist Carol Evans who painstakingly nurtured his curiosity before a single beaver even dreamed of moving in. Still, Jon is a convincing voice. Kudos for broadcasting him.

Nitrate runoff from ag operations is a huge problem, contaminating drinking water, killing aquatic life, and creating algal blooms and dead zones. You have a short passage about how wetlands, like those created by beavers, filter out nitrates and other runoff from agricultural operations. How realistic is it, given the current state of affairs in our country, that a beaver-based strategy for dealing with runoff can get a foothold and grow?

Well, I’m a congenital optimist, but I think it’s entirely realistic! We already know that wetlands capture runoff, and that beavers create wetlands; according to one study, beaver ponds are capable of filtering out as much as 45 percent of nitrates in southern New England watersheds. The limiting factor for wetlands restoration in this country is obvious: money. But beavers, of course, conduct wetlands restoration for free (and, even better, without requiring permits). Why not, then, learn to better coexist with a creature who will contribute unpaid labor to our greatest water quality crisis? Once more for the people in the back: Let the rodent do the work!

Ahh!

Do you know the story of Johnny Appleseed? He was a pioneer hero who famously walked all of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Ontario and Illinois bearing apple seeds and a shovel to spread the crisp good news. Never mind that he was more interested in boosting the alcohol production than feeding anyone, he was still regarded as a hero who cheerfully got the ecological message out.

Well I’m formally dubbing Ben “Johnny Beaver-seed” Because he’s traveling the countryside sewing appreciate for this curious flat-tailed crop, and I, for one, couldn’t be happier.

Oh the dam is good to me!
And so I thank the dam!
For giving me, the things I wish
The duck and the frog and the well and the fish
the dam is good to me!

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.

RED BUTTE CANYON WANTS BEAVERS

heidi08 Who's saving beavers now? June 7, 2018

Come and sit by my side if you love me
Do not hasten to bid me adieu
Just remember the Red River Valley
And the one that has loved you so true

Back in 1982 all the beavers in Red Butte Canyon were killed because officials said they caused ‘beaver fever’ in the drinking water. There were folks at the time who argued that this was a silly thing to do because any animal including the human ones can cause giardia, and beavers were actually maintaining the riparian and helping the wildlife they were studying in the ‘study area’, but nevertheless they persisted and got rid of all those dam beavers.

Now a smart woman wants to bring them back.

More than 30 years ago, all of Red Butte Canyon’s beavers were killed. Some Utah professors say now is the time to bring them back.

Now some U. biology faculty members led by Pat Shea, a Salt Lake City attorney, hope to re-establish beavers to restore natural processes and conduct research into how the environment would respond to new beaver dams that slow the passage of water and create wetlands.

A former head of the Bureau of Land Management in the Clinton administration, Shea holds an associate research professor appointment with the U. biology department and teaches a course about the canyon titled The Biography of an Urban Stream.

“Interestingly, here they have seen over 250 species of birds because subtropical migratory pathways go through the mountains,” Shea said. “If the little birds are out in the open in the valleys, the raptors come and get them, whereas here they can fly in and out, and there are water holes.”

Whatever risks arise from the beavers’ return would be outweighed by the restoration benefits and research opportunities, Shea contends.

“After the colonel killed all the beavers, the flora populations dropped from from 552 to 500 plant species because the riparian areas all but disappeared,” he said. “I am interested in seeing the progression of what native riparian plants do when [beavers] are reintroduced.

Something tells me Pat and I would be friends for life – a sensible woman who understands the good that beavers can do for urban streams. I can already predict we have some colleagues in common.

“Beavers do all this stuff for free. There are certain places where they can do good, but it’s complicated. It’s tricky to get them to stick,” said Wheaton, a beaver expert who has consulted on the Red Butte project.

Today, monitoring equipment, solar panels, bird nets and cameras occupy the canyon as part of long-term research into its hydrology and wildlife. Would the sudden reappearance of beaver dams disrupt this data gathering? The beaver proposal gives some researchers pause.

Hi Joe! We were just talking about you! (Hey I sure hope your sister and her children are planning to come to the next beaver festival!)

A lone beaver has been observed in Red Butte Reservoir, pictured here on April 26, a mile east of the University of Utah in the Red Butte Canyon Research Natural Area,

“Perhaps there is an appropriate place for beaver in upstream areas. We need to have a holistic conversation about it,” Bowen said. “If we are already seeing them in the canyon, is there a benefit of intervening at this level?”

Yes yes yes, you folks just talk amongst yourselves, don’t worry about me. I’m just going to move right in under your noses and get down to work.

Looking at the line of that beaver in the photo, whose bottom floats up nearly as high as his head, I would guess that’s a dispersing yearling, checking out new territory and thinking where to put the ottoman.

It is usually the height of folly to think that we can decide where beavers should return and where they shouldn’t. They have their own plans and will usually find a way to get there themselves, But it’s always to good to have people talking about their benefits and making a welcoming committee for when they show up.

I have every faith in the great beaver minds of Utah, one way or the other they’ll figure this out.