Category: Who’s saving beavers now?

Make way for Beavers!

heidi08 Beaver Chewing, Beavers and water, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Who's saving beavers now? March 19, 2017

It’s Sunday. All the cut-outs are done for the “Martinez-Loves-Beavers” art project at Earth Day. And we may well have beavers in Martinez. That all sounds like good news to me. But maybe you need some more, just to make sure. How about the appearance of our good friend Ann Riley on Chicago Public Television talking about why WILLOW is especially important to creeks. Ahem.

The Streams Below Our Streets | San Francisco

Cities once converted streams into sewers to make room for development. But now there’s a growing movement to unearth these buried waterways.

They flow beneath city streets, sidewalks, and even homes: creeks and streams across the United States were once forced underground into sewers, drainpipes, and culverts to make way for urban development.

For more than 30 years, efforts have been made in and around the Berkeley, California area to uncover—or “daylight”—the area’s buried waterways. The term daylighting was coined here in the 1980s, to describe efforts to bring Strawberry Creek back aboveground.

In 1903, a four-acre section of Strawberry Creek had been led into a culvert to allow construction of a Santa Fe Railway right-of-way. When Santa Fe abandoned the property in the early 1980s, the land was acquired by the city, and a park was proposed for the site.

As part of the park’s development, the Berkeley Parks and Recreation Commission planned to remove the 300-foot concrete pipe and expose the enclosed section of water. Although the idea was initially rejected by the city as too expensive and dangerous, the commission eventually implemented the plan. Activists argued that the transformation of the site from a derelict railroad right-of-way to a natural waterway would provide stormwater relief, and create heightened awareness about the ecology of streams.

The groundbreaking project represented the first time a culvert had been dug up and re-created in a channel, and helped pave the way for the formation of the Berkeley-based Urban Creeks Council in 1982. Co-founded by Dr. Ann L. Riley, the Urban Creeks Council was established to foster the preservation, protection, restoration, and management of natural waterways in urban environments. In addition, the non-profit organization works to educate the public on the ecological, aesthetic, and recreational values of restored urban streams.

Riley was introduced to urban stream restoration while she was training in the academic field of fluvial geomorphology with scientist Luna Leopold—who Riley called “the father of modern-day river restoration.” Fluvial geomorphology is the study of how water forms the earth.

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Just in case you don’t remember Riley, she’s the awesome beaver supporter and author who helped Worth A Dam plant willow for the last three years which our very schizophrenic city helped her do and then promptly pulled up. Ahh, memories. Sometimes she obviously has much better luck. If you didn’t watch the video, go watch now. It’s really well done and we are SO lucky she’s on our side.

Our donation this week for the silent auction is an watercolor painting that comes from artist Patricia Manning in Tonawanda New York. When she’s not busy crafting, sewing dollhouse clothing or raising her two girls, she likes to paint the natural world she sees. So obviously she chose our favorite subject. What got my attention first about this painting was the striking rings of water, which is something I’ve come to associate so intimately with watching beaver activity. They write everything they do on the water surface, which is lovely to see. Thanks Pamela for your generous donation! We’ll make sure to find it a good home!

Cree “Beaver Bird”

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers and Birds, Beavers elsewhere, Who's saving beavers now? March 18, 2017

Gentlemen may prefer blonds, but we prefer beaver ponds…

Beaver Bird: The Adaptable Hooded Merganser

Mergansers are expert divers. Swimming serenely, they suddenly disappear, leaving barely a ripple, and can remain submerged for up to two minutes. All birds have a nictitating membrane, a transparent extra eyelid; for mergansers, this serves as a diving mask that allows them to keep their eyes open underwater where they swim gracefully with webbed feet. Using wings to steer, they appear to fly through a liquid sky.

“They’re a cool bird to watch,” said Dr. Kevin McGowan at Cornell University’s Lab of Ornithology, “popping up in little ponds—very similar to wood duck nesting habitat. In fact, they often share the same pond, but hooded mergansers dive underwater to find their food, while wood ducks feed on the surface.”

“Between the 1980 and 2000 Breeding Bird Atlas surveys in New York,” said McGowan, “the occurrence of hooded mergansers more than doubled. They like beaver ponds, and there are more beavers now than there have been for a long time. Their breeding range has also moved south, probably due to reforestation over the past 100 years, which has improved their habitat.” The occurrence of breeding hooded mergansers nearly tripled in Vermont between 1981-2007, according to findings of the first and second Vermont Breeding Bird Atlas, edited by the Vermont Center for Ecostudies.

National Audubon predicts that, as the climate warms, hooded mergansers will significantly expand their winter ranges northward and live year-round where they are currently found just during the breeding season. Researchers in Manitoba discovered that, in 2001 hooded mergansers were returning to their breeding grounds 32 days earlier than they had been returning in 1939.

Despite its ever-changing environment, the endearing, diminutive waterfowl that is known to the Cree as the “beaver duck” is doing just swimmingly.

The beaver duck! Isn’t that wonderful? All these years I’ve been talking how hooded mergansers showed up in our beaver pond and Napa’s beaver pond, and I thought I was on to something but I wasn’t sure. Now I’m sure. This makes me happy. The Cree are one of the largest tribes of first nations in North America and extended across the middle band of Canada. The definitely knew their beaver because the Cree was one of the most important nations for the Fur Trade in the Hudson Bay Company of early Canada. When I gave a talk to the waterboard one fish scientist asked whether our mergansers eat themselves out of house and home, because they were such voracious fish eaters.

I’m just glad that these birds and beavers get along.

Maybe ‘Ephemeral’ means ‘without beavers’?

heidi08 Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? March 7, 2017

“An ephemeral stream is a stream or part of a stream that flows as a result of precipitation and is above the ground water reservoir. Ephemeral streams are found at southwestern perennial stream headwaters.”

The term ‘ephemeral’ is based on the Greek word εφήμερα meaning lasting for only a day. It applied to plants or insects that lived only a single day and later to ideas that quickly became useless or irrelevant. In California the naturalists talk a lot about ‘ephemeral’ streams, because they come and go with the rain and you can’t rely on them. Folks like to observe that these are the kinds of streams one gets ‘in the west’ and it’s always been that way.

Except it hasn’t.

Once upon a time California looked really different. There were no freeways or cell towers, no huge concrete dams, and the streams were unpolluted. There were different people living here. Peaceful tribes scattered all over the state. And guess what? Our GROUND WATER looked different too. Because there were these furry little engineers storing water everywhere like oompa loompas and making sure it didn’t get to the ocean until it had done its work on land. You can’t believe how moist and green everything looked.

Then the Russians, Canadians, French and Europeans hunted down the furry engineers and sold their protective outer coating for top dollar in what is sometimes called the fur trade, but what was actually the GROUND WATER TRADE.

California traded it’s precious groundwater for a few coins that were spent in other states.

Penny Chisholm is an MIT professor and award winning scientist who wanted to teach children about the origins of groundwater and worked with artist Molly Bang to explain it. The entire series looks fascinating but I’m especially drawn to this latest volume for obvious reasons. (Thank you to Robin Ellison of Napa for sending this my way.)

How the smallest, most abundant bacteria inspired a children’s book series

The pair has since created the “Sunlight Series,” a collection of children’s books written about different environmental topics from the point of view of the sun. The latest in the series, “Rivers of Sunlight: How the Sun Moves Water around the Earth,” explains the global water cycle.

The series is meant to stand the test of time by explaining fundamental processes, but that doesn’t stop Chisholm and Bang from briefly acknowledging humans’ uncertain impact on the environment by touching on topics such as climate change and fossil fuels. Chisholm asks, “If you don’t understand that the mass of plants come from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and that there’s a massive exchange of CO₂, from photosynthesis and respiration, how can you understand the role of fossil fuels and climate change?”

In 2013, Chisholm was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Barack Obama for her research. To balance teaching, conducting research, and writing books, Chisholm typically works a lot on the Sunlight Series over the summer, the time of year when Bang also resides in Massachusetts. “Everything I do is a lot of work, but it goes in spurts,” Chisholm said. She and Bang had been brainstorming a book topic for about a decade before publishing “Living Sunlight” in 2009.

Hurry for Penny! Making sense of water for everyone! There is a greater chance we will protect what we understand. The water cycle is pretty complicated and there were many parts to explain. But Penny made sure to include the real heroes in this tale. Check this out, because it makes her our new best friend and an ideal candidate to be on Mike’s Beaver Institute Advisory Board, don’t you agree?

Something tells me Dr. Chisholm is a true beaver believer and wears her own brass rat with pride!

Baker City Goodies

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver Chewing, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Dispersal, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Who's saving beavers now? March 6, 2017

Baker City Oregon is in the upper right hand corner of the state on the Powder river, which flows into the Snake river. Like Martinez it was settled early when the Short line railroad made it a stop, and is the county seat. By 1900 it was THE stop between Salt Lake City and Portland. It’s Main street looks eerily similar to ours. It even had a large Catholic population and has Cathedral because of it. Let’s think of them as a ‘sister city’.

Baker has a smaller population now than Martinez, and hasn’t sprawled like we did. Probably because it’s bordered by the Wallowa mountains that don’t take kindly to freeways. As luck would have it, that means it isn’t too far from famed USFS District Hydrologist Dr. Suzanne Fouty. Who happened to get very interested because there were some urban beaver sightings reported in this historic town.

Suzanne contacted me this weekend because she wants to use my talk to help teachers get on board with a student project that would let the children “adopt” the beavers, learn about them and sand paint trees etc. We had a nice conversation about her wish to get folks as interested and excited about the beavers as they were in Martinez. I can’t think of a more magical combination for success than an interested hydrologist, some enthusiastic teachers and an army of child guardians. Can you? Then I found this article and realized the whole thing was already a done deal – with a sympathetic press to boot.

By JAYSON JACOBY

Beavers in Baker City

Homeowners along Powder River are learning to protect their trees from the nocturnal animals. Larry Pearson sacrificed a healthy quaking aspen last summer to their insatiable incisors, but he bears no real grudge against beavers.

“Personally I like seeing them around,” said Pearson, who has livedfor 33 years in a home beside the Powder River in north Baker City. Well, not exactly “seeing.” Pearson has seen several beavers outside the city limits, but he’s not yet spotted one of the rotund rodents near his home on Grandview Drive.

That’s to be expected, given that beavers are largely nocturnal. “I can tell when they’ve been in my yard, though,” Pearson said. Even when the animals don’t leave blatant evidence – it’s pretty hard not to notice when a 14-inch-diameter aspen in your backyard has been gnawed down – Pearson said he can usually find the muddy patch in his grass where the beavers climbed from the river’s bank.

Fortunately, protecting trees from beavers is no great ordeal, Pearson said.

“You have to put wire fencing around virtually everything,” he said.

A homeowner whose tree was chopped down by an unexpected beaver and his first comment to the press is “wire wrap it!” Have I fallen asleep? Am I dreaming? IMAGINE if the Contra Costa Times or the Gazette had a section about how to protect trees from beavers. Whoa, I’m getting dizzy, I need to sit down.

That’s what the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) recommends as well, in its “Living With Wildlife” pamphlet, which is available online at www.dfw.state.or.us/wildlife/living_with/beaver.asp

Actually, landowners have a few options with beaver-proofing, said Brian Ratliff, a wildlife biologist at the ODFW office in Baker City. Wrapping tree trunks with metal flashing is effective, he said.You can also use welded wire fencing, hardware cloth, or multiple layers of chicken wire.

Regardless of the material, you should wrap the tree to a height of at least 4 feet, Ratliff said.

“When beavers stand on their tails they can reach pretty high,” he said. If you choose chicken wire or fencing, you should leave a 6- to 12-inch space between the cage and the tree trunk, because beavers might try to wedge their teeth through gaps in the wire to get at the tree (this isn’t a problem, obviously, with metal flashing).

You should also reinforce the cage with rebar stakes or other supports, as beavers, which average 40 pounds at adulthood, are capable of collapsing flimsy wire barriers. To protect a large area rather than individual trees, ODFW recommends building a fence, at least 4-feet high, made of welded wire fence or other sturdy material (chicken wire is too flimsy).

I like to think of myself as a generous woman who only wants the best for others. But sometimes, when I read an article like THIS published a full 10 months before Suzanne even got interested and involved, before the school children even circled the wagons, or the town pushed back, I get crazy JEALOUS.

Some people have all the luck!

Baker city, you have started the footrace with a 10-mile lead. Already your papers are sympathetic and your affected citizens are cool-headed. You have interested scientists inches away that will help you move forward. And you of course, have us in your corner. With all the help you could possibly ask for.

I believe, Baker City, if you can’t save these beavers, no one can.

Pearson said he didn’t notice any signs of beaver activity on his property until a few years ago.That coincides with ODFW’s experience, Ratliff said. “In the past two years or so we’ve started to get more reports about beavers, and to see more signs of their presence here in town,” he said.That’s not especially surprising, Ratliff said.

Beavers live along the Powder River both upstream and downstream from Baker City.

“Beavers are very good at migrating both overland and along waterways,” he said. “And the Powder River in Baker City is pretty good habitat for them, minus the fact that it’s through town.”The river’s relatively flat gradient and low velocity are ideal for beavers, Ratliff said. (One reason the animals build the dams for which they are renowned is to slow fast-moving streams; deep ponds protect beavers from predators, and give the animals underwater entrances to their dens in the stream bank.)

Ratliff said it’s not clear why beavers have only recently colonized the river through town in significant numbers. His theory is that the beaver population in the river outside the city limits has grown enough that young beavers are dispersing to less-crowded habitat.

In any case, Ratliff believes beavers can co-exist, in relative harmony, with people.

For one thing, beavers don’t as a rule stray far from the river; they’re not going to start gnawing at your home’s siding, for instance.When, as in Pearson’s case, beavers do munch on trees on private property, the solution – wrapping or fencing trees – is neither complicated nor especially costly.

“It’s really a neat opportunity to have urban wildlife,” Ratliff said.

Pearson agrees. He would, though, prefer that private property owners have more flexibility in dealing with beavers that cause damage. City ordinances prohibit residents from trapping or shooting beavers. State law prohibits residents from live-trapping beavers and moving them elsewhere.

Okay, now things are going to get REALLY unbelievable. Are you sitting down? I just want you to be ready for the shock, because it could trigger a heart attack or something. Take a deep breath, and think of it as a Disney movie. Sweet and a little too idyllic to believe. Ready?

Tom Fisk, the city’s street supervisor, said workers have had to move several beaver-chewed trees that fell across the Adler Parkway over the past few years.Crews used to haul the trees away, but recently they’ve just sawed the tree into chunks and spread the pieces along the river’s bank.

“We figured if we took away the tree the beavers would just take down another one,” Fisk said.

“It hasn’t been such a big problem that we’re looking at other options,” he said.Protecting trees with fencing, for instance, would hardly be practical, considering the river runs for more than two miles through town.

“There’s a lot of trees,” Fisk said.

What kind of groovy, laid back, reasonable town administrator says ‘well, there’s a lot of trees?’ Here in Martinez we held their feet to the fire for 10 years, were on fricking national news and on TV in the UK and our city manager is STILL ripping out the willow stakes we plant because he doesn’t want to encourage them.

Dear Suzanne, something tells me you’re going to do just FINE on this project. Baker’s going to celebrate beavers, children are going to learn and classrooms are going to thrive. Your creek will be filled with otters, frogs and heron. And heyy, maybe a Baker Beaver Festival is in your future soon?

Beavers to the Rescue?

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? February 27, 2017

Right before the glorious beaver conference, this article appeared discussing the benefits that beavers provide to manage flooding. It stars Derek Gow who was one of the headliners in Oregon’s first days. It’s pretty hard to argue with solutions that promise to save you laying sandbags. Even the fisherman hate to clean up after flooding, I bet.

Wild beavers could be brought in to stop flooding in the Forest of Dean

Beavers could make a return to the wilds of Gloucestershire for the first time in hund of years to help environmentalists stop a village flooding. The Forestry Commission are considering releasing the large toothed animals into a brook above Lydbrook in the Forest of Dean as part of efforts to protect the village which was badly flooded in 2012.

Trials have shown that beavers can create dams capable of retaining about 1,000 tonnes of water which would otherwise cascade down to villages like Lydbrook which runs along a natural valley leading down from the Forest of Dean to the River Wye.

As well as holding back water, the beavers are also said to increase biodiversity in woodland areas with some claiming their activities can help many rare species thrive.

Forestry Commission chiefs have invited expert Derek Gow to tell residents in Upper Lydbrook and Lydbrook how experts believe putting beavers into Greathough Brook in the Forest could help halt water gushing down the hillsides.

Mr Gow told the Financial Times: “For years, the whole idea of reintroducing beavers has been bogged down by myth and nonsense. It’s not as though we are looking at reintroducing a Tyrannosaurus rex that eats children. “People have the idea that because beavers have huge teeth they chop their way through forests like furry chainsaws, but they’re a creative, not a destructive, force.

“They open up the river banks to many other species: plants, butterflies, beetles, amphibians and fish. These are the building blocks of life, the species that support others.”

“Beavers have been managing water for millions of years; they’re adapted to do a far better job than us,” he said. “We can no longer pay to maintain flood walls and flood defences so beavers are a rational option when it comes to water management and flood control.”

There has been a proliferation of plants, butterflies, dragonflies, frogs birds and Devon Wildlife Trust say the only wild colony allowed in England has encouraged tourists to flock to the area to see them.

Newly elected Lydbrook councillor Sid Phelps supports the idea of putting beavers in the brook which runs down to Lydbrook and said: “They have not been wild in the UK for hundreds of years but I understand that they can support the ecology and wildlife of an area and are very effective at alleviating the fast flow of water which can lead to flash flooding.

“I’m not an expert on hydrology but I’m very interested to hear what the Forestry Commission have to say about what it would mean for Lydbrook.”

Residents have been invited to a meeting at Lydbrook Memorial Hall on March 9 2017 at 6.30pm. Officials at Forestry Commission declined to comment or give details of the scheme saying they wanted to talk to local residents and parish councillors first.

The paper is already in your favor, Mr. Gow. I suspect the townspeople to be at least open-minded to your suggestions. I, of course, get nervous about promising beavers can slow down floods because, despite what the engineering report told Martinez a decade ago, dams aren’t concrete and they function best when helped by many many other dams dotted along the stream. Which reintroduced beavers won’t have after 500 years. They still washout and need to be rebuilt after the water settles. Which could all take enough time to inconvenience a homeowner.

(In fact one of the talks I eavesdropped on at the conference was by Vanessa Petro from Oregon State University talking about their research on beaver relocations. She observed that “beaver dams were ephemeral” and in dynamic areas like Oregon were shown only to last around 2 years.)

Hmmm 2 years? Alhambra Creek is a pretty flashy stream, and our own primary dam washed out frequently but was rebuilt religiously for 6 years. The secondary dam (which became the primary) was rebuilt for 8 years. I wouldn’t classify either of them as ephemeral. I asked Vanessa whether her study addressed the washout and rebuild of dams, or just classified all washed dams as ‘ephemeral’. She said that their data did not cover the history of the dam or its destruction and rebuild, which is what I suspected.

Beaver dams are ‘ephemeral’ in the same way that mowing lawns is ephemeral. The work done has to be repeated over and over for long term effect.

Which still is no guarantee that rebuilt dams will necessarily prevent flooding. But, (to quote the famous-chicken-soup offering-Jewish-mother) “It can’t hurt“. I wish Derek every luck at his upcoming talk, and am so sorry I had to miss him this year. In the end, it’s kind of like cleaning your room because you are looking for a misplaced 20. There’s no guarantee you’ll find the missing cash, but I really don’t think there’s a bad reason to clean your room or re-introduce beavers.