Category: City Reports

A Mixed Bag

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions January 9, 2011

Beavers near Anderson Civic Center allowed to stay

By Kirk Brown

Photo by Nathan Gray A sign with information about beavers is placed outside a stream off Martin Luther King Boulevard where beavers have built a dam.

Beavers have built a dam in a stream across the street from the Civic Center of Anderson (South Carolina). The dam is near a wooden overlook beside an informational display on beavers that is part of the county’s Recycling and Education Center. Although the nocturnal beavers tend to be reclusive, visitors can enjoy listening to the soothing sound of water trickling through their dam, which is only a stone’s throw from Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.The beavers’ new home will be left undisturbed, said Greg Smith, the county’s environmental services director. “It hasn’t become a nuisance,” Smith said. The beavers received a less hospitable reception in the past when they built a dam near the civic center.

Did you ever argue when you were kids who the family dog liked better? And to prove it you and your sisters all called it at exactly the same time and that poor dog just stood in the middle of the living room not sure what to do? That’s kind of how I feel about this article. It has true bright spots of beaver hope and still the sharp edges of fear and ignorance, all in the same place. When I read it I honestly can’t tell if its a victory, a delayed defeat or a dark omen of things to come.

First things first, congratulations Anderson! Leaving a beaver dam in the center of town could become a focal point, an educational opportunity or a demonstration of your civic pride and compassion. It could be a reminder of the benefits of ‘hard work’ and inspire your public works crews or waitresses or teachers to keep trying when odds seem insurmountable. It can remind everyone what can be accomplished when we work together as a team. The dam will trap sediment and organic material, microbugs will move in to break it down, bigger bugs will come to eat them and fish will come eat the bugs….soon new populations of bigger fish, birds and wildlife will be eating at the food-chain you’ve encouraged. That’s pretty good news for a recycling and education center.

Okay, now the rest. Just so you know, beavers don’t live IN the dam. They live in a lodge. Think of the dam as where they ‘work’. Imagine what a difficulty it would be to build a ‘hollow’ dam that a family of five or seven could live in. Of course it would be much, much more vulnerable to washouts. The dams solid base of mud and sticks gives it strength. Your beavers probably live in a bank lodge a little bit up from the dam, so the raised water levels protect their entrances and keep predators out.

“The main problem is the flooding that they cause,” said Greg Yarrow, a Clemson University wildlife ecology professor. A one-foot-high beaver dam can flood as much as 100 acres, which can create problems in timber stands and on farms, as well as threatening low-lying roads and railroad tracks.

Clemson. Clemson. That names sounds familiar. Hmmm. Oh, it must because that was the place they invented the Clemson Pond Leveler in the early nineties. You know, the perforated pipe that goes through the dam and lowers the water level to control flooding? Come to think of it, that guys name seems kinda familiar too. Maybe its because of this at the bottom of the paper.

For further information on the Clemson Beaver Pond Leveler contact Dr. Gene W. Wood, Mr. Larry A. Woodward, or Dr. Greg Yarrow • Department of Aquaculture, Fisheries and Wildlife • G08 Lehotsky Hall, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina 29634, (803) 656-3117.

Goodness! Talk about hiding one’s light under a bushel! A reporter asks you about a beaver dam causing flooding and you didn’t think to mention that you invented a proven tool for managing flooding? I know Clemson’s have fallen out of favor because they’re stiff and hard to implement and tend to get plugged up, but you laid the ground work for the Castor Master and Flexible Leveler that followed! Your work pioneered humane beaver management. Call me crazy but I think that’s worth talking about.

(Aside to reporter: it’s possible that since you have an expert on the phone you should ask a question at this point. Something like, “are there any ways to control flooding?” Just a suggestion.)

In Dorchester County, which is northwest of Charleston, public works crews broke up about 200 beaver dams after residents complained about flooding last year. The flat-tailed rodents, which are Canada’s national animal, also have been blamed for causing millions of dollars of damage throughout North Carolina. “They certainly can be very challenging to deal with,” Yarrow said.

Sigh. You see the cause for my hesitation about this ‘good news’. This reporter is very excited about the likely damage these wicked creatures will cause Anderson down the road. He doesn’t spare a paragraph, a phrase or even an adjective for the good work that beavers do for urban streams. I have to wonder if public works really broke up 200 dams in Dorchester County (which Wikipedia tells me is only 577 square miles total, 2 of those being water). 200 beaver dams in 2 square miles? Maybe they broke a 100 dams twice? Or 50 dams four times? I don’t know, what’s the learning curve on useless effort that squanders taxpayer money and has to be repeated again and again in Dorchester?

Well, the good news is that Anderson is keeping its beaver dam FOR NOW. I wrote the paper and the environmental services director just letting them know what options exist.

Photo by Nathan Gray Beavers have built this dam in a stream off of Martin Luther King Blvd.

Not a Concerto

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Who's Killing Beavers Now? January 7, 2011

Monday beaver friends Sharon Brown of Beavers: Wetlands & Wildlife and Mike Callahan of Beaver Solutions will be trotting down to their local public television stations to record an interview for Canadian Broadcasting about the beaver situation in Brandenburg Germany. Click the video for a nice summary of the situation. Officials are concerned that (wait for it) burrowing into banks could cause a collapse of the levee that protects the town. (Gosh sounds familiar…) Apparently there are still a few level heads in the country who have suggested that digging produces irrational fears in humans and people are panicking unnecessarily. I made sure they had Skip’s digging report and wished them well.

UPDATE: Beaver friend and WORTH A DAM foreign correspondent Alex Hiller sends these remarks:

What is being reported in the article is a long lasting problem depending on poor dam protection at the Polish side of river Oder. The border between Poland and Gerrnany goes along the middle of the river. On German side all dams were improved after the so called century flooding of 2001.

On the Polish side of river Oder nothing was done – except for repeated complaints. I learned about that situation from local German beaver defenders of that region when I was exploring beaver sites over there in autumn of 2005. It was supposed the complaints were meant to receive money from European Union funds, getting flood protection sponsored.

The big dams along the riverside are set back into the flat land at least fifty yards or more. I haven`t seen a beaver lodge being build on dry land with a tunnel of fifty yards to get access to the water.

What was in discussion and is still highly recommended are emergency hills to be built artificially between the riverbank and the flood protection dams that would offer refuge to all kind of wildlife. I learned about people that had stepped onto dams in the century flooding of 2001 after their villages had been flooded due to broken stretches of the same dams and started clubbing beaver families that climbed up onto the same dams because the people were afraid the beavers might dig into those dams and destroy them.

Beavers are being strongly protected by nature protection law in western European Countries ending at the eastern boarder of Germany, exactly in the middle of river Oder. In all eastern European countries, starting with Poland just across river Oder beaver affairs are being covered by hunting law. Complaining about the beaver means increasing the numbers of beavers for shooting ( they do not set traps in eastern European countries but shoot ). The Riga beaver conflict of Latvia was about hunting by shooting in town which is prohibited,

In Germany we have two cities named Frankfurt: Frankfurt at (river) Oder, a big town at the German-Polish boarder about an hours drive east of German capital Berlin vs. Frankfurt at (river) Main where I live just in the middle of Germany and about five hours drive southeast of Berlin.

Alex

Thanks SO much Alex! Of course remember all too well our own sheet-pile-palooza.

(A little aside. For some reason the German video was only possible to embed in – uh – German so I downloaded it in English, converted it and put it back up since I discovered that my personal Youtube account has been ‘upgraded’ to hold longer files. Hmmm. Who knew? Documentary?)

Defying History

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, History, Who's Killing Beavers Now? December 28, 2010

This Christmas Eve the Daily Iberian in Louisiana published another head-scratching WTF article. In it we learn that in addition to being considered a ‘nuisance animal’ by the State Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, beavers are ‘not native‘ to the region and have ‘no natural predators’!

Big, bad beavers are wreaking havoc on drainage channels in Iberia Parish, said Public Works Director Kevin Hagerich. Not indigenous to the area, beavers have started appearing here in the past several years, Hagerich said. “It seems to be getting worse every spring,” said Public Works Supervisor Herman Broussard. “They don’t have too many natural predators down here.”

Lets take those points one at a time, shall we? Beavers aren’t native in Louisiana? Umm…what do you think all those French people were doing there in the 1700’s? and 1800’s? They came down from Quebec looking for something. I wonder what it might have been?

The French in Canada, relying less and less on Indians to serve as middlemen, spread rapidly into the interior of the country, where fur-bearing animals were plentiful. Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet, a fur trader, reached the Mississippi River in 1673. The Sieur de La Salle followed them a few years later, in 1682 reaching the mouth of the river and claiming the entire Mississippi Valley for France. La Salle planned to found a colony in Louisiana, as he had named the region, to control river traffic and keep a monopoly for France on the fur trade there. His plans were carried out after his death, and New Orleans was founded in 1718, cutting off the British from use of the Lower Mississippi. Fur Trade

So the French came down the middle and the English came down the coast across and the Dutch came across the Hudson and Louisiana itself wouldn’t have been worth fighting over if it wasn’t for beavers. It was a big greedy free-for-all where destruction of several native peoples was just an incidental bonus in the pursuit of wealth. I’m going to go out on a limb here, boys and say if the entire economy of New Orleans was based on the beaver fur-felt hat industry circa 1750 then we can assume that beavers were native to the area.

Let’s move on to the pesky predator issue. Last time I checked the state still had a whole mess of these:

smile! — Alligator Everglades: Photo Heidi Perryman

Turns out they live the same place beavers do! They have a pair of the most powerful jaws on the continent! And they eat meat! They can even hold their breath a whole lot longer than a beaver, which has zero defenses against them! Whew, that must be a relief.

Now as for beavers being a ‘nuisance species’, I really can’t argue with that. They can create a ‘nuisance’. Small, narrow minds focused on short term solutions can find them an awful nuisance. They build dams and chew trees and generally change things. I bet a smart parish like Iberia, however, could be smarter than an actual beaver. You could install flow devices, protect culverts and wrap trees. Then your ‘nuisance species’ could improve your water quality, increase your fish populations, raise bird count and provide essential wetlands for wildlife and a much needed buffer for your coastline. It would be like an investment. Sometimes a ‘nuisance’ pays off.

Just one more thing. Since you seem kinda confused about history, you do know what your state was named after right?

Beavers Prevent Oil Spill

heidi08 City Reports, Creative Solutions, Environmental December 23, 2010

No, I’m not kidding. Maybe you aren’t convinced by this whole ‘beavers make habitat for birds/salmon/wildlife’ argument. Maybe you don’t care about raising the water table or combating the drought effects of climate change. Maybe you need more proof that beavers are worth all the trouble they cause to keep around. Have I got the Christmas Eve-Eve story for you!

Beaver dam helps contain oil spill into Greer creek

GREER — A heating oil leak from the basement of the former Allen Bennett Memorial Hospital is expected to have cleanup crews working today to remove the oil from a creek where one resident said a remarkably well-constructed beaver dam stopped much of the spill.

So the leak happened on Friday but no one noticed it until monday of course and the mysteriously named ‘number 2 fuel oil’ was mostly stopped at the beaver dam and didn’t pour into county water sources.

How much oil leaked into a tributary of Frohawk Creek, which feeds the South Tyger River,won’t be known until the contractor tasked with the clean-up finishes and a report is completed,said Thom Berry, spokesman for the state Department of Health and Environmental Control.The city engineer and a coordinator for the Environmental Protection Agency estimated between1,000 to 1,500 gallons had leaked.

The article praises the watertight engineering of the beaver dam and says it saved the town lots of money. I’m always happy when beaver dams get good press but of course I’m concerned about the beavers. There is no indication that the environmental firm hired to take care of the spill has any intention of dealing with them. Obviously the beavers needed to pass through the oil to breath, so theres no way they’re not coated too. I can imagine, with grooming habits, that they have rubbed that toxic sludge all over every part of every family member by now. Temperatures in Greer are dropping below freezing at night and these beavers need their fur in good working order to survive.

I wrote the cast of characters and spoke with Cheryl at IBRRC about it. She said the most knowledgeable voice in oil clean-up out that way is Tri State Bird Rescue. These beavers need to be live trapped, cleaned and re-released. Their dam probably needs to be cleaned too because they’re going to keep touching and working on it. Maybe they need to be relocated because the inside of their lodge is likely covered in oil too. My guess is that the environmental crew will remove the dam and the lodge because its ‘toxic’ and give no thought whatsoever to the first responders who depend on both.

Here’s my letter and where to write your own:

Reporter; City Engineer: City Administrator: Department of Health & Environmental Control

I wanted to write and ask how you plan to care for and monitor the beavers whose dam saved your city a great deal of money and inconvenience. A fuel oil slick on the water surface will obviously affect any animal who lives in it. Aside from its obvious toxicity when it sat on the water they swam in for three days before anyone noticed, the oil could reduce the temperature regulation of their fur and interfere with grooming and care for young. I am cc’ing this email to the International Bird Rescue and Research group so they can advise you how to safely treat coated beavers. You will need to live trap them using baily or hancock traps and I would be happy to advise you who to connect with for that to happen.

The beavers did you a huge favor with their dam. It is only fitting you pay them back.

Heidi Perryman, Ph.D.

President & Founder

Worth A Dam

www.martinezbeavers.org/wordpress

Reunion?

heidi08 City Reports, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental December 7, 2010

Have you ever seen one of those movies where someone embarks on a grand quest and has little mishaps and adventures with countless people along the way who point them towards their destination? There’s danger and upset and for a while things look bleak, but all the help the hero has gathered by then pulls them through? And at the end of the movie, once the quest is accomplished, there’s some big gathering or celebration and all those people are there? Together? Maybe they say ‘we knew you could do it’ or maybe they have no idea what all was involved but they’re just happy to see the hero and everyone have a good time?

I think that’s what this beaver conference is going to be like.

Let’s just review. Back in November 2007 when I was, (lets be honest), FREAKING OUT that the city was going to kill our beavers I made a series of desperate pleas for help. The first was to Mike Callahan who seemed to have a pretty straight forward website that actually suggested beavers flooding could be prevented without trapping. When he seemed willing to help I bombarded him with pictures and the engineering report, (poor man). He wrote back, hmm, “that’s actually more of a problem than I thought, you’re in for a real fight”, and I despaired.

Undaunted, he wrote back, don’t panic “Strange things have I in head that will to hand“, which is a quote from Macbeth and I knew we would become excellent friends. He’s presenting after me.

That same day Sharon of Beavers: Wetlands & Wildlife gave me Sherri Tippie’s phone number and I called her about the steps for successful beaver relocation. We talked about her work and what the risks were of housing and caring for the animals during the process. She’s presenting before me. She suggested I contact the attorney she worked with on a Southern California case, whose letter to our mayor she had already sent me.

I wrote Mitch Wagner right away and learned that he had tried the Friends of Lake Skinner case, which had been won at the appellate level against Fish & Game, Riverside Conservation Agency and the Metropolitan Water District. Seems they removed some beavers from the area with a bunch of bogus fears and Mitch successfully argued that because the decision was ‘discretionary’ rather than ‘ministerial’ it required an Environmental Impact Report according to the standards of the California Environmental Qualities Act. Mitch has been a solid beaver supporter for us and he and his wife generously donated the funds for the children’s mural last year. Remember because they won, damages and attorneys fees were paid for. There were a couple star witnesses in that case, one was Sherri Tippie and the other was the Keynote speaker for the conference.

Donald Hey!

Donald Hey is the co-founder of The Wetlands Institute, with a doctorate in environmental engineering. He’s a big advocate for beaver wetlands and soil hydrology. At the advice of everyone I wrote him for help when our beavers were allegedly tunneling under Bertola’s but I never heard back. Now I can listen to what he has to say and ask him in person.

Joe Cannon from the Lands Council introduced himself on Mike’s Facebook page, and Amanda was going to come for the beaver festival last year. I first connected with the lands council when I discovered there were several of our photos on their web page! I wrote them with possessive interest and they apologized profusely. It seems they thought they had asked us, but mixed us up with someone else at the last conference. Now the photos all link to our website and give us credit, and Joe’s a good beaver friend who I look forward to meeting.

Then of course there’s Len and Lois Houston, who wrote me a year into the beaver battle to offer support. He admired our website and thought we should be beaver friends. Is that everyone I know? Brock who I met through Wikipedia Rick who contacted us because he liked the website and wanted to learn about beaver in his area.

UPDATED ATTENDEES: just mailed by Len include Bruce Baker (who wrote the seminal beaver chapter, chatted with me and sent me a copy when I was on the subcommittee so I could use excerpts for the ecology section AND Michael Pollock whose salmon-beaver research is going to change everything.

I think that rounds out the attendees list that I know so far…I’m sure I’ll have plenty more stories to tell on February 6th. After our particular quest, the interviews, the subcommittee, the sheetpile, losing mom and three beaver festivals, it should be a pretty remarkable celebration.