Category: City Reports

Martinez SOS

heidi08 City Reports, New Species, pictures February 15, 2010

Let’s talk about Martinez. There has been a flurry of recent rule-breaking development in our downtown plan and design. The most recent is the proposal to put 42 units near shell avenue, even though the Mayor admits the road can’t take half that. Beaver friend Phil Ciaramitero is looking for support in helping impacted neighbors oppose this plan. He writes:

Dear Friends & Citizens of Martinez,

It is of grave & vital importance that we all attend next Wednesday’s (Feb. 17th at 5:30pm) joint session of the council & planning commission. Focus will be on the proposed Cascara Canyon project at the foot of Shell Avenue hill.

Do you remember what happened when the pro-beaver people came en masse? The beavers are still here. This Cascara Canyon project and the direction the council is taking needs to be curbed. Your attendance, if anything, will insure our faithful watchdogs that secure neighborhoods are important to us. We must have an impressive show of strength, if for anything – that we’re not going to go down without a fight. We live & work here and volunteer our time to make Martinez better. Their leadership has not really done a whole lot to enliven this city, nor taken any measures to step away from the polarization they’ve created and continue to perpetuate upon this community.

Please spread the word. We’re not keeping any secrets here. Tell everyone you know.

Phillip Ciaramitaro
925-917-0441

A detailed is response and press release is available here. Any city that changes it’s zoning to make room for favors needs to at least think about what it means to the neighborhoods it alters. This was voted down by the planning commission who knew it was a bad idea. The city council wanted it anyway. Shouldn’t you go to the meeting and inquire how exactly this will help your city?

“Go with the Flow Device!”

heidi08 City Reports, Creative Solutions February 9, 2010

This week our wikipedia friend launched the first ever entry on effective tools for beaver management. It talks about flow devices and culvert protection, and emphasizes that trapping is a short term solution. It still needs photos to give it that “stop killing beavers and read me” touch, but its well on its way to being a permanent resource.

Beaver Dam Pipes

Beavers diligently plug leaks in their dams, because their survival depends upon the cover provided by the water in their pond. If a beaver can detect the flow of pond water into a pipe, it will plug the pipe with mud and sticks.

To be successful, a beaver dam pipe must eliminate the sound and feel of water flowing into the pipe. Successful pipe designs (e.g. Flexible Pond Leveler™, Castor Master™, Clemson Pond Leveler) achieve this by protecting the intake end of the pipe with a cylindrical fence enclosure. A beaver swimming along the outside of the fence enclosure is unable to hear or feel the flow of water into the pipe and cannot reach it to block it.

Photo: Mike Callahan, Beaver Solutions Flow device filter ready to be lowered into water

The pond level is controlled by the height of the pipe in the dam. Since beavers depend on water for their survival, the more a beaver pond is lowered with a pipe, the more likely it is that the beavers will try to build a new dam to return the water to its previous high level. In addition, the more a beaver pond is lowered, the more valuable wetland acreage is lost. Therefore, it is important to lower a beaver pond only enough to resolve the threat to human health, safety or property.

I like being able to see the roundfence up close. Ours suffered a bit in the last rain, and Mike says its essential that whatever happens the shape of the fence isn’t changed. Once beavers are able to feel the suction to the pipe they will find a way to dam it. They are also smart enough to learn that round fencing means leaks, and will dam any round-fence in the future too! Yikes!

Culvert Protective Fences

The ‘’’Beaver Deceiver™’’’ (a trapezoidal shaped culvert fence) was invented by Skip Lisle in the 1990s while working for the Penobscot Nation in Maine. It is very effective at completely eliminating beaver damming of a culvert. It works in three ways. First, the perimeter of the trapezoidal fence is typically 40 – 50 feet long, making it difficult for a beaver to dam the entire fence. Second, as beavers try to dam the culvert, the fence forces them to dam in a direction away from the culvert, which is not their nature. Third, as they dam further out on the fence, the opening the stream is flowing into is getting wider. Therefore, the damming stimuli of the sound and feel of moving water decrease the further they dam on the fence. If the sides of the fence are at least 12 feet long the beavers will generally leave the fence alone.

To be effective however, a culvert fence must be surrounded by enough water that the beavers will need to dam the entire fence perimeter. In areas where the streambed is narrow rather than wide, the fence must be narrow so that it is surrounded by water. Being narrow loses one advantage of the trapezoidal shape, but it can still deter beavers from damming the culvert. Since beavers are excellent diggers, a fence floor is always generally needed to prevent beaver tunneling under the fence. The fence walls only need to be 24 inches above the water line, since beavers do not climb.

Photo: Mike Callahan, Beaver Solutions Trapezoidal Fence to prevent damming of culvert

When I think of how hard we all worked to find information about beaver management back before the fateful meeting in November, I am very very pleased with this development. At the time I had three important sources of information: An article on the Clemson pond leveler, an article from Canada about the use of “Limiters” to regulate water height in Gateau park, and an article from the HAW River Assembly in North Carolina. Think about how different the world will be for the next starry eyed woman who wants to save beavers!

Stimulus Money Killing Beavers: SC chapter

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Who's Killing Beavers Now? September 10, 2010

How reassuring to know that both Carolinas are using our taxpayer dollars to eliminate a keystone species. Remember the outrage feigned by officials when Senator McCain scoffed about money going to beaver management in North Carolina? Well now South Carolina is ready to undertake what they’re calling a “million dollar beaver project”. (Looks like Martinez isn’t the only one who knows how to waste tax-payer dollars and blame beavers!)

Apparently Columbia has some sewer pipe line problems. Like most cities who have been around for 200+ years, their old system can’t keep up with the demand. They cleverly asked for stimulus money to foot the bill. Then their (argentina-lovin’) governor, came rushing back from the ‘Appalachian Trail’ and insisted his state would have none of it. The issue went to the state supreme court where they ruled that it was the responsibility of the governor of a state in crisis to accept the life preserver and help its citizens. He actually bemoaned the finding saying “This decision is terrible news for every taxpayer in South Carolina”. Then he got distracted by other pressing concerns.

So it turns out one of the projects slated to get that money was the Crane Creek Outfall Project, which was a line that needed replacing to the tune of 400,000 dollars. After the ruling in June, the project was supposed to get underway. In January the city suffered a disruptive (?) 3.18 inches of rain over 31 days causing the sewer line problems to become more acute.I guess if your used to yearly droughts you can forget that water sometimes comes from the sky.

However workers explained that repair on crane creek was delayed because City officials have been trying to replace the section of pipe for some time, but crews have been unable to reach it because of flooding caused by beavers along the creek, said John Dooley, the city’s director of utilities and engineering.January 26, 2010

Ahh! At last a villian we can all relate too! Blame the Rodent! Never mind that the money for the project itself was strangled by a governor whom we now know told his wife he wouldn’t promise to be faithful in his marital vows, at least we have some beavers to shoulder the guilt. Apparently the city liked the excuse so much that 6 days later they announced they had upgraded to the full package.

An excessive population of beavers in Columbia has caused damage to the city’s sewer and septic systems. In June city officials signed a $1 million “Right of Way Beaver Clearing Contract,” to fix the problem.WACH news

The story goes on to say that the pesky rodents have made an alarming comeback since the happy days of the fur trade, and are now littering the waterways with their beaverish works. Biologist Jason Peebles is quoted as saying “When the population gets this large they cause problems.” (I can only assume he’s referring to the beavers and not the shovel-ready maintenance workers who are eyeing their shrinking paychecks). He goes on to add that with beavers in everyone’s backyard, their dams trap water and then break during storms, causing flooding that over taxes the drainage system. Repairing the sewer lines and drainage is estimated to cost a million dollars. Never fear! The money’s here! Your money. My money. Stimulus money.

“Harley said two-thirds of the $1 million contract goes directly to clearing the waterways the beavers have clogged and the rest goes to beaver removal.”

Our tax dollars at work. Because nothing gets the economy rolling like dead beavers.

Because decisions like this deserve public mockery.

Friends Helping Beavers

heidi08 Beaver News, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Friends of Martinez Beavers January 30, 2010

Fans of the Martinez Beavers will understand more intimately than most that the survival of our beavers ultimately depended on just one thing. Sure public outcry made a difference, and fear of political ruin quivered the hearts of at least two on the council, but if the dam had stayed at its original height and continued to pose a flooding threat, they would have been soundly dispatched. (Sent in a pickup truck to Plumas county if the god’s were kind or off to a glue factory somewhere if they were not.)

What fundamentally allowed the beavers to remain with us was the flow device, installed by Skip Lisle and often mistakenly called a “beaver deceiver”. (It’s actually a “Castor Master”.) This allowed for the water height to be lowered in such a way that the movement is disguised from the beavers. They don’t feel the suction and don’t associate the outflow with their dam, so they tolerate the water loss. Skip invented the beaver deceiver during his work with the Penobscot Nation. He went on to develop his ideas for the flow device and round fence over time. Skip is committed to showing the world that flow devices work. He traveled to Lithuania this summer to talk at the conference there, and he is headed for Oregon next week to give a four hour teaching at the State of the Beaver Conference.

Mike Callahan of Beaver Solutions trained with Skip and eventually developed his own full time business around beaver management. His vision of the best use of management skills included a teaching DVD that would allow property owners, cities and transit workers to cheaply implement tools that could manage problematic beaver behavior. He is well aware that allowing this keystone species to remain takes care of so many others, but Mike is a pragmatic beaver defender who helps businesses focus on the bottom line. Installing a successful flow device, he argues, can manage the problem now and in the future. Hiring a trapper is a temporary solution that will get more expensive over time.

Mike was awarded a grant from the AWI last year to make the DVD, and has been working towards its release. Expect it in the Spring of 2010. Recently he approached me asking to pay to include three minutes of my beaver footage in the production. Since Mike’s smart website was the first place I turned with beaver questions LO these many moons ago, and we became friends over the ensuing years, I can’t think of anything more “full circle” than using that footage to help him and help beavers around the country for years to come. Whatever financial agreement we figure out will go to Worth A Dam.

In the mean time, I am helping him spread the word about the upcoming project with an announcement postcard sent to beaver supporters and interested media. You might recognize my favorite photo from Bob Armstrong of the Mendenhall Glacier Beavers. (He gave his blessing on the prospect, and arranged for Mike to come do a beaver management plan in the state park there.) The idea is to follow up with a second announcement once the project is released. I’m hopeful that by helping more people learn that there are reasonable ways to manage beaver behavior, and inexpensive tools for learning about them, we can significantly impact the well-being of beavers all around the country.

In the mean time, our wikipedia friend is supposed to be honing a “flow device” entry this weekend. It’s hard to remember so long ago, but in 2007 I definitely had to hunt to find out about options. Remember how many people talked about the Clemson Pond Leveler at the meeting? Someone from Lafayette even donated the funds for one. That was one tool that had been published and talked about, but the technology had already come a long way since then. Mike was the one who explained that to me. Let’s hope “flow device” becomes a household name – at least as common as “snare”.

Here comes the sun…

heidi08 Beaver News, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports January 23, 2010

So yesterday staff was able to cut the cables, remove the snag and upright the filter. No jet ski’s or motorboats were employed, and we couldn’t be happier. The secondary dam clearly did much better than the news thought, because there’s a great bump in the water that just needs sticks woven into the top. I’m not at all surprised, since they spent the lions share of their effort working on it the last few times. As the sun is actually shining today, I think there should be some serious rejoicing.

Not enough good news? I heard from a friend of a friend that the trees have been wrapped in Lincoln Park in Illinois! Mind you with actual wire, (well chain-linked fencing). Let’s hope they had some laying around and wanted to use up their supply, not that they didn’t choose it without reading about what to use. And let’s hope they left some space between the wire and the tree. The friend wonders if 6 feet of wire is a little ambitious, but since the snow could give the beavers a four foot head start, it seems wise. Of course the good news is that any park that wraps trees is a park that expects to keep its beavers, so hooray! Nice work!

A final cheery rumor is that I was contacted yesterday by a certain former editor of a certain local paper who is now at the UCB graduate school of journalism and he wants to do a project on a subject that is very near and dear to my heart. Not the one that is still getting hours of media attention, but the other one that should have.

More on this, later. In the mean time enjoy the sun!