Category: Who’s saving beavers now?

And they say one person can’t make a difference…

heidi08 Beaver Art, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Earth Day, Educational, Environmental, Tail slap, Who's saving beavers now? April 15, 2017

You know sometimes, your hard work gets ignored or something you wrote and really feel proud of gets tossed aside as “grey literature”, or a program you really hoped would say good things advises folks that flow devices never work and they should eat beavers, and you think, maybe this is just too hard. Maybe saving beavers is too much work. Maybe it can’t be done or if it can be, it needs some one better than me to do it. And you think about throwing in the beaver towel once and for all.

And then you see something like THIS and it changes your whole attitude.

Draper homeowners fight to preserve backyard wetlands despite flood risks

DRAPER — Dozens of students from Oakwood Elementary gathered in the backyard of a Draper residence Friday to see a beaver dam that may soon disappear.

Kris and Kelly McAdams are hoping their backyard wetlands ecosystem can stay, despite calls to remove the natural beaver dams behind their home. While the McAdams see the wetlands as a beautiful feature that adds value to their property, Salt Lake County Flood Control officials are concerned that a failed beaver dam could clog man-made drainage downstream.

The McAdamses received notice from flood control engineers on Christmas Eve, asking them to remove an “unauthorized deposit of materials,” the beaver dams that they say have been around for years.

“They say the beaver dams are unstable structures, although these have been here for at least 20 years and they have withstood hundreds of high-water events over that time,” Kelly McAdams said. “The dams are well-built here and rather than removing them, they could fortify them, and I suggested putting in a grate system downstream.”

Despite his assertions, county flood control officials worry that debris from the dams could flow down Willow Creek, clog a culvert and cause flooding to nearby homes.

Alyson Heyrend, communications director for Mayor Ben McAdams, said Salt Lake County’s Flood Control authorities have the responsibility of keeping streams and channels clear of any obstructions.

She said a compromise was offered to the property owners near the dams to support the wetland features while removing the dams, but Kris and Kelly McAdams have maintained their opposition to the removal.

They have appealed the notice to remove the dams and have rejected the compromise offer, taking their case before an administrative law judge, who will rule in early May on whether the beaver dams will be removed.

Rep. Carol Spackman-Moss, D-Holladay, also arrived to lend her support to the property owners.

“The county needs to look at the bigger picture, and see the effect that it would have on the wetlands,” Spackman-Moss said. “For these students to come out here and see what they have been studying and get a sense of the damage it would do and how this would all disappear, they would lose something so valuable.”Confe

Spackman-Moss said the county would need to address the issue, and said council members for Salt Lake County ought to come see the property for themselves as they address property and public issues.

Confession coming: either tears of joy are streaming down my face or I just climaxed twice. (Or possibly both). Oh my goodness! This is POWERFUL stuff. Spackman-Moss is a democrat from the 37th district, life long teacher and grandmother. And the class full of fourth graders are FOURTH graders who wrote save the beavers on their hats!

I need to sit down.

In my conversation with Kelly on Saturday I had lots of praise for what he was doing. And two learned-the-hard-way pieces of advice. Have his attorney talk to Mitch, and BRING CHILDREN. “We didn’t know it would be so powerful” I told him truthfully. But it always is. Kelly’s a father with grown sons. But I told him to find some youth. Boy scouts, kindergarten, daisy princesses, and have Allison work with them to draw pictures, make hats, what ever activity that looks cute enough for the media to take photos of.

And guess what?

Kelly you are doing an awesome, awesome job. I’m so impressed with your ability to pull this together, not get intimidated or overwhelmed and still seem so very reasonable. You are a credit to your state and a true kindred spirit of Martinez. I would only offer one criticism at all, and that is that last Earth day OUR hats were a little cuter. 🙂

Oh and for those who might be interested I sent these comments and corrections to the edible beaver program Outside/In yesterday. Felt good to get it off my chest and even if it changes no one’s mind, I dare say someone will definitely read it anyway.

proof

These are a few of my favorite beaver things!

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Dispersal, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? April 13, 2017

Homeowners, Salt Lake County battle over beaver dams

I heard from Kelly yesterday that they had received help from a local non-profit to access the media and knew this was coming. My my my this is a splendid report, that emphasizes the whole ‘home as castle’ argument that appeals to the manly provider heartstrings. Never mind the California saving habitat nancy-boy argument. If you haven’t watched it you should, and if you want to help their efforts you can donate and/or sign the petition here:

“We’re always watching ducks and geese come in for takeoffs and landings on the creek,” McAdams said. “It’s a beautiful thing to see and experience.”

“Striking the balance is the real challenge here,” Graham said. “We’ve had discussions. There are options. Beaver dams are not an option because they’re naturally made, they’re not secure, but there are options to create the same type of effects (behind McAdams and his neighbor’s houses).”

26172854 — Two homeowners are in a fight with Salt Lake County to keep the beaver dams behind their properties that have contributed to a rich wetland environment full of ducks, geese, birds, muskrats and other wildlife. (KSL TV)

McAdams said prior to the Dec. 24 notice, the county had made separate offers to deliver $500 and then $5,000 worth of rock to install around the creek, but he believes the delivery and installation would cause more harm to his property along with the wetland.

“To destroy nature like that with total disregard, it just frustrates me to no end,” McAdams said.

He said he could face fines amounting to roughly $750 per month if he does not agree to have the dams removed.

“(Salt Lake County) Flood Control intends to drain a jurisdictional wetland and displace all this wildlife when there are easy alternatives that can be performed on dams and downstream debris mitigation,” McAdams said.

“If I didn’t feel strongly, I would have given up a long time ago,” McAdams said. “I feel very strongly about this.”

Ahh Kelly, we know JUST how you feel. Way to go! You and Erin are fighting the good fight. The one that matters. And while you do it you are teaching your entire community why beaver dams matter. You have all our support, and anything else you need we’ll try and send your way!

Meanwhile I never tire of stories about brave dispersers or an opportunity to re-post THIS picture.

Ontario highway closed as wandering beaver refuses to leave

CAMBRIDGE, Ont. – A wandering beaver shut down part of a highway in southern Ontario on Wednesday as police worked to get the animal back to its natural habitat.

Ontario Provincial Police Sgt. Kerry Schmidt says the beaver was spotted sitting on a storm drain against a concrete dividing barrier on Highway 7/8 in Cambridge, Ont.

Schmidt says officers blocked part of the highway and tried to shoo the animal across the road to the ditch. But he says the beaver was having nothing of it and refused to move from the left side of the highway.

He says police had an officer stay with the beaver to ensure it was OK and called in wildlife control. Schmidt says wildlife control was able to capture the beaver and bring him back home.

“No one got hurt, and everybody’s happy,” Schmidt said.

And people wonder why everyone says Canadians are so nice. I’m not sure there’s anywhere else they’d close a highway for a beaver. (Although if I were emperor they ALL would). You know that beaver wasn’t impressed I’m sure. He didn’t want to go back on that side of the road. “That’s where I came from! If I go back home now they’ll all laugh at me!”

Urban beavers lead the way

heidi08 Educational, Environmental, Urban beavers, Who's saving beavers now? April 12, 2017

Yesterday was a hard day, but I’ve decided to spare you (and the many sponsors who helped achieve said hardness) by not discussing it. Let’s just say that by five pm there were not one but TWO musing articles titled whether ‘beavers are friend or foe?’ or ‘eco-heroes or eco-destroyers?’ from fairly key players. Which is exhausting in an of itself. Thank goodness this appeared later that night from Dan Protess, writer and producer of the series.

Getting over Purity

This is the WTTW nature series out of Chicago public radio that produced the program with Ann Riley I posted earlier. Over the episodes the producer has had a real education in what urban nature IS and why it matters. I appreciate his learning curve because it mirrors are own.

Somehow I never noticed that I work in a desert. Not an actual desert—those are filled with cacti, snakes, and other forms of life. My office is in a suburban-style neighborhood, surrounded by vast lawns, which, I recently discovered, are not good for much. Turf grass does not provide nectar to butterflies and bees, or perching spots for birds. In fact, just to be certain that our lawns are completely useless, we regularly burn fossil fuels to mow them.

All of this is painfully obvious to ecologists. But as a journalist who slept his way through high school biology class, the ecology of my suburban neighborhood did not come to my attention until a few months ago, when I started production on Urban Nature.

Urban Nature is a web video series, in which we look at coyotes, squirrels, migrating birds, monarch butterflies, and all of the charismatic creatures that we often like to celebrate. But in the series we also discover the unexpected ways in which unassuming species are eking out an existence at the fringes of cities.

On the side of the expressway are random patches of clover and dandelions, which are absorbing storm water and carbon dioxide. In vacant lots, there are non-native trees with dead branches, which are providing homes to squirrels and woodpeckers. And in the most polluted waterways, there are fish, water birds, and even the occasional beaver.

Got your attention yet? Definitely got mine, although for some reason the sight won’t let me post a comment and keeps erasing them when I try. But I have to believe he’s heard of our urban beavers and the lessons they taught.

I have come to understand that this ragtag bunch of urban wildlife and habitat is downright useful—way more useful than the lawns surrounding my office.

Although I have lived in Chicago my entire adult life, I have never appreciated the less-than-pristine forms of nature that you tend to encounter in cities. That is not to say that I did not appreciate nature. But my relationship with the natural world was fairly similar to my relationship with champagne: it was something I reserved for special occasions. I would fly to Arizona or Patagonia, hike and camp for a week, and then come back to Chicago and turn my attention back to my computer screen.

My love of nature did not extend to city parks, pigeons, or invasive plants. It was a love I reserved for the kind of “pure” nature that I saw on my trip to Alaska. Sure there were roads there, and sure the glaciers were melting because of the carbon dioxide I was emitting on my daily commute in Chicago, but I did my best to avert my eyes from the heavy hand of humankind. If I squinted hard enough, I could imagine the unspoiled wildernesses that the Native Americans must have seen; a people who, I imagined, walked so gently on the earth that they did not even leave footprints. The idea of pure nature was my fetish, and my vacation pictures from Alaska were my pornography.

Then I set out to produce the Urban Nature web series.

In a story about “daylighting” creeks in Berkeley, California, I learned about a centuries-old battle between humans and urban waterways. In the nineteenth century, we were so confident in our engineering might that we buried streams, which stood in the way of our development. For 100 years these waterways have flowed in culverts and sewers beneath our streets and homes, only to overflow occasionally during heavy storms. But now we are using bulldozers and modern science to bring these streams back aboveground, buoyed in part by a sense of nostalgia, and concerns for the increased flooding that has been brought on by climate change.

My previous vision of ecology included complex relationships between microbes, flora, herbivores and carnivores—pure systems into which Homo sapiens might occasionally intrude.

Now I find myself appreciating the equally intricate web of life that my neighbors and I have woven on our block.

Not only is the nature on your block equally complex (and why on earth would city nature be less complex when it has such a harder job?) but it is also the FIRST NATURE that babies and children will see and the one nearly all of us will see the most. Bear with the child psychologist in me for a moment, but we all start out life in a dark world where everything is part of us, so we are EVERYTHING and there is nothing that isn’t us. We spend the next year slowly learning that this isn’t true and our mother is OTHER and separate from ourselves. What a demotion! People don’t do or bring things just because we will it. No wonder babies cry a lot. We once were the entire universe and then we slowly begin to realize we aren’t even the center of it.

Awareness of the other is a huge job. (And some adults who happen to be president never master it.) Watching that crow fly over, collecting pine cones or poking a snails long eyes is part of the complex unfolding moment that awakes our awareness of yet another other.

And if we don’t care about that gritty, opportunistic, urban nature that’s right in front of us, if we don’t see the robin’s egg shell on the sidewalk or carpenter bee visit the dandylion, if we don’t hear the voices of excited raccoons chittering away to find new garbage, then we won’t be ready to embrace and defend the cheetahs, whales, and rhinos that will need us down the line.

Asphalt is the tundra most of us travel. And when we realize it, too, is where the Wild Things Are, we become part of everything and I would argue, more fully ourselves.

He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time.

Jack London
The Call of the Wild

“Beavers are the cure we don’t want to take.”

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and Ice, Beavers and Insects, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? April 8, 2017

You’ve heard of a red letter day? Well yesterday was a red-beaver day. Here at beaver central we are good at picking up trends and regional changes. We’re usually at the front of the line when it comes to hearing good news. But I’ll be honest, I never expected this.

Draper Fight Centers On Beaver Dams, Wetlands, Flood Control

Two, small beaver dams lie at the heart of a quarrel in Draper. County flood officials are ordering residents to take them down. But the homeowners say the dams protect the wildlife and value of their homes.

Kelly McAdams says the notice of violation letter came on Christmas Eve.

“Inspection by Salt Lake County Flood Control,” he says, reading from the letter, “has indicated that fallen tree limbs and debris have been deposited in the form of a beaver dam into Big Willow Creek, a county-wide drainage facility, without authorization.”

Next month, McAdams goes before an administrative law judge and expects to lose, considering beavers and wetlands have no standing in county law. But he and his wife are set on preserving this patch of habitat for the beavers and all the other creatures that rely on this wetland wonderland.

Make sure you listen to the story which made NPR this morning and sign the petition, then check out SLTribune.

Leave it to beaver? No way, says Salt Lake County

Draper • Big Willow Creek bends and meanders behind Kelly McAdams’ Draper home and her backyard steps down into an urban wildlife preserve.

Thanks to a string of beaver dams, the creek pools into wetlands teaming with life. Ducks and geese nest on the banks lined with cattails; herons and pelicans visit to dine on the 18-inch carp and catfish. Neighborhood kids also fish the ponds.

But where McAdams, his wife, Kris Burns, and neighbors on Dunning Court see an ecological sanctuary, Salt Lake County sees “unauthorized modifications to a countywide drainage facility.”

The county Division of Flood Control has ordered them to remove the dams or face a $25-a-day fine, even though federal wildlife officials say these dams enhance the water quality, hydraulics and riparian habitat

The waterways and channels need to be clear and run and serve their purposes. There is a balancing act,” Graham said. “The county has demonstrated many times it balances wildlife habitat on creeks and waterways as they run through the city.”

Graham has overruled McAdams’ appeal, which is slated to go before an administrative law judge on April 26.

Because my life is just like that I had already heard about this case from the real estate agent representing them who contacted me on April 1 looking for supportive letters to the court on the issue of beavers, water storage, and biodiversity. I put out the usual appeal for help to our beaver friends in Utah but with this new flurry of news I heard this morning from Mary Obrien who is on it. Joe Wheaton is in Europe but I’m hoping he can contribute or at least assign a student to do so. I also heard from our retired attorney friend who won the famous Lake Skinner Beaver case at the appellate level that he would be happy to talk to them and has some ideas to pursue.

“You have all these ecosystem services that keep the entire stream corridor functioning as it should,” said Jones, with the Wild Utah Project. “Many other municipalities across the county are starting to allow beavers back to perform this critical engineering service.”

Meanwhile I know Worth A Dam will write something and mention how a Contra Costa County Flood Control Specialist was on our beaver subcommittee and approved the flow device that controlled flooding and washouts for nearly a decade. I have personally contacted everyone I can think of that might help ‘circle the wagons’ in this case, but more is always needed. If you want to help, email me and I’ll give you contact info. The entire Tribune article is excellent and even talks about flow devices but y requires a little persistent to get past their subscriber wall.

Meanwhile, completely independently but not unrelated, I heard from Michael Pollock yesterday about this prayer-answering article from the unlookedfor source of BeefProducer newsletter. No seriously. It is beautifully written by Editor Alan Newport and he starts out with one of the VERY best lines I’ve ever read. Send this article to every old curmudgeon you know who won’t listen to reason.

In defense of beavers

To reverse streambed erosion the hated beaver is the most likely candidate.

Beavers are the cure we don’t want to take.

No matter how much we improve our grazing, no matter how many water-control structures we build, our streams and other watercourses will cut deeper and deeper into the landscape, robbing us of soil and drying out our pastures and fields.

It took me many years of study and observation to come to this point in my thinking, but today there is no longer any question in my mind. Read on and you’ll learn why I say so.

I’m almost 60 years old and throughout those years I’ve watched the streams cut deeper and deeper into the soil near my home. On my uncle and aunt’s farm, the little rocky crossing we walked across and drove tractors across and rode horses across without a thought disappeared years ago into a gulch. The entire creek today is much deeper than it was, and so is every other creek, stream and wash I know of.

So the question, I reasoned, was what process had previously stopped this from being a natural course of events that outpaced the normal upturn of new soil through movement of the earth’s crust?

In North America, the only answer I‘ve ever found was … beavers! They once lived by the millions in every state in the union, and new evidence says their homeland stretched across much of Mexico and into the arctic tundra of Canada. I have more recently learned beavers also were common across Europe and Asia.

With all this in our knowledge base now, it seems if beavers were the agent of change and good in streams for hundreds of thousands of years before we arrived, then they could be and should be again. They work day and night, like the cow, without us lifting a finger.

I understand that beavers are a pain in the neck, but so is erosion and droughty land.

I have no particular love for beavers, but I do love the land and God’s creation. It’s my understanding we are to be stewards in His image. So here I stand, saying kind things about one of the most hated creatures in the world of agriculture.

Go read the whole article. And then read it again. It’s really well written and contains an impressive amount of research. It’s even more impressive when you realize that Alan is the editor of BeefProducer and lives in Oklahoma. Meanwhile I’m going to be busy thinking up a graphic for that AWESOME first line and writing my amicus brief to the court in Utah.

Then I may just lie back and smoke a cigarette. This has been an incredible morning.

It seems to me, I heard that beaver song before.

heidi08 City Reports, Educational, Who's Killing Beavers Now?, Who's saving beavers now? April 3, 2017

Late last night, when we were all in bed
Mrs. O’Leary left the lantern on the shed
And when the cow kicked it over, she winked her eye and said
They’ll be a hot time, in the old town tonight!

Do you remember singing this in a round at camp? I do, and for obvious reasons it sprung to mind when I opened this story this morning.

City removes beaver traps from Warner Park

The Madison parks division has abruptly removed all beaver traps from Warner Park after outraged residents began yanking the traps without city authorization late last week.

“This type of action presents significant safety risks to the person removing the traps,” wrote parks superintendent Eric Knepp in an email to city officials. “As always, we consider the totality of the circumstances in our decision-making related to wildlife management in our parks, and in this case the potential safety risks outweigh the benefit.”

While she doesn’t condone residents “taking matters into their own hands,” retired Madison police detective Sara Petzold is relieved the beaver traps have been removed from Warner Park. Petzold lives near Warner and visits it frequently with her giant schnauzer, Milo. On a recent walk, she spotted a truck with the license plate “ITRAP.”

Ohhh my my my, a retired police officer worried about the trapping and a media story that didn’t go away with the setting sun. Time for me to get the popcorn and settle in for a front row seat. Is it just me or did someone else here Barbara Streisand start singing ‘memories’ in the background?

The retired detective then learned the truck belonged to a trapper contracted with the city to remove beavers. He told her that he was placing traps near the underwater entryways to the beavers’ lodge.

The animal rights group PETA has also contacted the city about its beaver trapping policy. Kent Stein, a member of the group’s “emergency response team,” sent an email to Madison Mayor Paul Soglin, Common Council members and Knepp urging them to forgo trapping in favor of other methods to mitigate potential damage caused by beavers.

“Please understand that death by drowning is a terrifying and exceptionally painful ordeal (beavers can take up to 15 minutes simply to lose consciousness),” Stein wrote to officials. “Successful long-term wildlife control requires targeting the environment (vs. the animal) by making it unappealing and/or inaccessible to unwanted species. Examples of this for beavers include curtailing access to food sources by spraying tree trunks with [repellents], coating trunks with latex paint, or ‘caging’ trunks with three foot high wire mesh/hardware cloth offset by at least 10 inches to prevent gnawing.”

So now you have PETA telling you to wrap trees and a whole lot more folks calling your office I bet. I know I spent my first hour of the day writing the editor, the parks and the mayor. Stories like this never fail to delight me. It’s like playing the same waltz grandma danced to when she was a girl.

I know this song.

Ann Shea, public information officer for the parks division, also declined on March 30 to answer questions. But in an emailed “response,” Shea explains that a resident recently alerted the city to beaver activity “in and around the Warner lagoon.” She says staff inspected the area and noticed that more than a dozen trees had “irreparable damage or had recently fallen due to damage.” She confirms a licensed trapper with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources was brought in “only to the extent necessary to mitigate the hazards of tree death, shoreline damage, and flooding.”

“In assessing the trees and shoreline, staff determined that the damage was recent and caused by beavers. Staff also determined that a number of trees that had not fallen would need to be removed as they were in a hazardous condition and location for dogs and people using the park,” Shea writes. “In addition to the tree damage, beavers often build dams near the outlet structure to Lake Mendota from the lagoon. This will create flooding across the park, especially during large rain events, and could alter the land use over the intermediate term by raising the water level of the lagoon.”

Shea says the raised water level may also contribute to the anoxic conditions of the lagoon by limiting the flow to the lake which increases the likelihood of a large scale fish die off. In response to inquiries about “drowning traps,” Shea responds: “The Wisconsin DNR does not recommend live trapping and relocating of beavers. If a live trap was used, the beaver would still likely be euthanized.”

However, Petzold says the parks division has yet to provide evidence to justify its “covert trapping policy.”

“I think we need to look at the benefits of having beavers at Warner Park, the negatives and, as a city, find the right balance,” says Petzold. “I have not seen any indication that parks has really undertaken any of those analyses. That’s what concerns me the most. This could have easily flown under the radar and we’d have no idea why the beavers were gone.”

What? You mean there might be BENEFITS to having beavers in the area? You don’t say! Tell me more! This retired officer knows her stuff. I just wish I were a young student in Madison that could be hopping aboard this particular train and bringing some friends. Don’t you?

But in his email to city officials, Knepp defends his division’s efforts to trap beavers at Warner Park.“Our wildlife management practices are rooted in years of knowledge and experience from professional staff of the specific locations and issues involved. Trapping is a very limited method that is only authorized in specific situations and within Wisconsin DNR guidelines and regulations,” says Knepp. “We do not pursue this as an option without consideration of alternatives. Parks is willing to have any or all of our wildlife management practices reviewed should that be the desire of our policymakers.”

Ahh isn’t it adorable when exectives puff up and defend their staff’s decision to trap beavers? They get so red in the face when they realize somethings being scrutinized that everyone took for granted before. I’m thinking fondly of our mayor recognizing the freight train headed his way. He was just clever enough able to pull his dignity almost completely off the tracks before the inevitable impact.

Well, good luck boys and girls in Madison. We definitely will help you any way we can. And let us know if you take any videos, because this stuff is great to watch on the TeeVee.