Category: City Reports

Dog owners beware

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, What's killing beavers now? December 4, 2015

Trail use concerns: Dog caught in beaver trap

Just once I would like to see an article with a headline, “Beaver caught in Beaver trap” – as if that were important enough to make the news. But this was scary for the dog and the owners.

They need to clearly mark when they do this, and beavers need to learn to read. Or better yet, just don’t do this.

Michael Pollock wrote that he was very excited to stumble across this article last night, from this June’s Southeast Naturalist. I was less surprised, and I’m sure you know why.

An Unusual Beaver (Castor canadensis) Lodge in a Louisiana Coastal Marsh

Ruth M. Elsey1,*, Steven G. Platt2 and Mark Shirley3

Abstract

In Louisiana, Castor canadensis (North American Beaver) rarely occur in coastal marshes and are far more common in forested wetlands. We recently observed a North American Beaver lodge in a coastal marsh that was constructed partly of commercial lumber, possibly made available by recent hurricanes. The animals may have used lumber for lodge construction due to the dearth of trees or other woody vegetation in coastal marshes. This observation points to the adaptability of North American Beaver when choosing materials for lodge construction

Remember that in Martinez California we’ve seen our tidal beavers build lodges and dams using golf clubs, lumber, trash, and prosthetic legs. More than once. And nobody published that in a paper.

Hrmph.

Multiple Elbows Sprained in Scramble for Credit in Sparks, NV

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, What's killing beavers now?, Who's blaming beavers now?, Who's saving beavers now? December 2, 2015

Beaver killing suspended after News 4 ask questions

SPARKS, Nev. (MyNews4.com & KRNV) — Just a few weeks ago, the City of Sparks was trapping and killing beavers along the North Truckee Drain that runs along Sparks Blvd. But the City suspended that plan after News 4’s Terri Hendry began asking questions. Now, the City is hoping a group or person comes forward to offer advice and expertise on managing beavers without having to kill them. CLICK HERE if you have expertise to send an email.

Yesterday I was sent news of this ‘change of heart’ by Brock Dolman of the OAEC, John Hadidian of the Humane Society, and Sherry Guzzi of the Sierra Wildlife Coalition. who had already been in contact with Ron Korman the public works manager of Sparks.

The sad part is of course they had ALREADY KILLED FIVE beavers, before deciding to appear like they actually would use alternatives if someone just gosh-darned just told them what to do. Now everyone is straining themselves to take credit for this finger crossed pledge to do it right if ONLY they knew how.

For the record, I wrote them with resources, suggestions, and my phone number minutes after this story broke a week ago. And you can count on no hands the number of times my phone has rung since then. One funny thing is that when I sent information to the mayor of Sparks he wrote back and said that the city attorney was handling the case now. Ahh memories of Martinez! City attorneys are notorious. I guess you send a rodent to catch a rodent?

Sherry and Ted Guzzi are less than an hour away and have already installed flow devices in the area. They’ve exchanged emails and phone calls, but the city is committed to pretending like they want to do this better but just don’t know how? Can someone please help? Preferably someone without any skills or knowledge?

This ain’t my first rodeo. I know politicians, city attorneys and public works lie lie lie. It makes me want to pull their receding hair out in chunks. But the truth is, it’s at least BETTER for us when they lie right – wanting to appear to do the right thing, than when they lie wrong not giving a damn about the truth.

Maybe I’ve become cynical in my very old age, but I really believe all we can truly expect of our leaders is that they understand what the public wants enough to tell the right kind of lies. They would never tell the truth, of course, assuming they even know it. But when they tell the right set of lies sometimes they accidentally behave correctly. Or slowly come to the unpleasant realization that it is in their own best interest to behave as if they were telling the truth. This is doubly true for beavers. Let them act like they’re open to installing flow devices or wrapping trees next time.

Because there will be a next time. And then we can use their own glorious self-interest, (our only truly renewable resource), to get what we want.

Martinez crime rate may sky-rocket

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, City Reports November 29, 2015

More good beaver news from our friends at Phys.org. This time especially referring especially to urban beavers.

Contact with nature may mean more social cohesion, less crime

Numerous studies have demonstrated the benefits of contact with nature for human well-being. However, despite strong trends toward greater urbanization and declining green space, little is known about the social consequences of such contact. In the December issue of BioScience, an international, interdisciplinary team reports on how they used nationally representative data from the United Kingdom and stringent model testing to examine the relationships between objective measures and self-reported assessments of contact with nature, community cohesion, and local crime incidence.

The results in the report, by Netta Weinstein of Cardiff University and others, were notable. After accounting for a range of possibly interfering factors, including socioeconomic deprivation, population density, unemployment rate, socioeconomic standing, and weekly wages, the authors determined that people’s experiences of local nature reported via a survey could explain 8% of a measure of the variation, called variance, in survey responses about perceptions of community cohesion. They describe this as “a striking finding given that individual predictors such as income, gender, age, and education together accounted for only 3%” of the variance.

The relationship with crime was similarly striking. According to the study results, objective measures of the amount of green space or farmland accessible in people’s neighborhoods accounted for 4% additional variance in crime rates. The authors argue that this predictive power compares favorably with known contributors to crime, such as socioeconomic deprivation, which accounts for 5% variance in crime rates. “The positive impact of local nature on neighbors’ mutual support may discourage crime, even in areas lower in socioeconomic factors,” they write. Further, given the political importance placed on past crime reductions as small as 2%-3%, the authors suggest that findings such as theirs could justify policies aimed at ameliorating crime by improving contact with nature.

You can read or download it here. Anyone who is surprised by this finding should have stood at the footbridge watching beavers while people of very, very different walks of life conversed about them. It was not at all uncommon to chat with toothless homeless, cycling yuppies, families pushing strollers, commuters getting off the train, and aging grandmothers together in that gathering. And I’m sure that amount of social cohesion affected crime rate.

I was working all day yesterday on the foundations of my section of the urban beaver paper, and kept asking our retired librarian friend BK from Georgia for help, which he nobly provided along with this article.Turns out there is a solid and growing body of evidence that having nature in your city is every bit as good for your physical and mental health as air quality, crosswalks and libraries.

To which we say, duh.

Plant it, and they will come?

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver Chewing, Beavers, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Who's saving beavers now? November 15, 2015

Once upon a time, lo these many months ago, the SF waterboard decided to help Martinez with some tree planting for beavers. It invited me out to present in December and got so inspired about beavers it decided to share its Watershed Stewards Program Interns from Americorp to help.

(Stop me if you’ve heard this story before.)

So Corie and Rebecca came out for a meeting with Worth A Dam and the city engineer, then obtained a permit to take willow cuttings from wildcat canyon, then came to Martinez for a day of planting. Cheryl, Lory and Jon showed up for a day of hard work at the end of March. Is this ringing any bells?

So they spent a day planting and Jon spent the evening wrapping trees and the beavers gazed wistfully at the forbidden fruit like children eyeing their presents under the tree, and life was good. The planting was even on channel 7 news.

Then guess what? Funny story. (Not really).

Public works got a divine inspiration (or a phone call from you-know-who) and ripped every planted stake out. They piled them to one side by the road. Jon just happened to notice as he drove by. I called the engineer in a panic to ask WTF and he called the foot soldiers who had done the dirty work and by evening these poor stakes were all back in the ground. No kidding. Shades of Alice in Wonderland painting the roses red. Some of the trees were upside down, some barely planted, all looking the worse for wear.

It suppose it goes without saying that they all died.

Well, the SF Waterboard was not very happy with that. And our good friend Ann Riley swore that we would REPEAT the planting next year, this time before thanksgiving, when they’d get more water, using the help of their next intern. And these trees had better not get pulled up.

But in the meantime our beavers died or scattered to the four winds and the city launched its grand bank destabilization project, which Riley was super not happy about either, so she negotiated with the engineer that our replanting should happen exactly there, where they had pulled out all the other living things.

The new intern’s name is Brenden Martin. And he and Riley are coming friday with some helpers to replant. This time they are going to use willow cuttings from here. Meanwhile, oddly enough the film crew from Middlechild productions will be out from the UK and filming it for the part of their documentary about how cities can live with beavers. Then heading to Napa to follow up with some beaver footage.

Rusty Cohn has boldly volunteered to come help Jon and Lory with the effort, and Ron will kindly take some photos for us. Oliver Smith, the assistant producer i’ve been chatting with, is probably interviewing Lara or Mark as well as interviewing me that day. The crew arrives SFO tueday night and supposedly the gang is staying at the John Muir Lodge.

Honestly, two months ago I was feeling like if we didn’t have beavers we should cancel the planting and let the city be responsible for their own damn trees. But Jon persuaded me to be patient and now I feel differently. Besides it’s working out well for Urban Beavers everywhere, and that makes me happy. I ask myself, if I were a beaver living in exile and saw a bunch of tasty morsels planted in my absence, wouldn’t I think about coming home?

I certainly would.

beaver kit eats breakfast: Cheryl Reynolds

More Beaver Gospel from HCN

heidi08 Beaver News, Beavers, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Who's saving beavers now? November 9, 2015

In the beginning there was the word.

And the word was beaver.

The first truly exciting article I read about beaver was from High Country News in 2009. It described the way we had forgotten what watersheds were supposed to look like and introduced me to the dynamic character of Mary Obrien, describing her ‘long think rope of a gray braid.’ I was so excited to see her on the schedule at the first beaver conference that I peeked around looking for long gray hair, and was dissappointed that there were too many possibilities to guess. It was okay, she had cut her hair by then, but we met anyway, went to lunch and next year she came to the beaver festival. Remember?

Well this morning High Country News has done it again: celebrated beaver contribution on a grand scale with an article about the much beloved Methow Project and its guiding light Kent Woodruff. I feel obliged to say that the great headline was hijacked from the Canadian version of Jari Osborne’s game-changing documentary. But the rest of the text is golden.

The beaver whisperer

The lovers are wards of the Methow Valley Beaver Project, a partnership between the U.S. Forest Service, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Methow Salmon Recovery Foundation that, since 2008, has moved more than 300 beavers around the eastern Cascades. These beavers have damaged trees and irrigation infrastructure, and landowners want them gone. Rather than calling lethal trappers, a growing contingent notifies the Methow crew, which captures and relocates the offenders to the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest and state land.

Why would Washington invite ditch-clogging nuisances — so loathed that federal Wildlife Services killed 22,000 nationwide in 2014 — into its wildlands? To hear Methow project coordinator Kent Woodruff tell it, beavers are landscape miracle drugs. Need to enhance salmon runs? There’s a beaver for that. Want to recharge groundwater? Add a beaver. Hoping to adapt to climate change? Take two beavers and check back in a year.

Decades of research support Woodruff’s enthusiasm. Beaver wetlands filter sediments and pollutants from streams. They spread rivers across floodplains, allowing water to percolate into aquifers. They provide rearing grounds for young fish, limit flooding and keep ephemeral creeks flowing year-round.

“We want these guys everywhere,” says Woodruff, a white-stubbled Forest Service biologist with an evangelical gleam in his blue eyes. On this sweltering July morning, he watches as wildlife scientists Catherine Means and Katie Weber hoist Chomper and Sandy, now caged, into the truck that will convey them to the Okanogan-Wenatchee. “We want beavers up every stream, in all the headwaters.”

Yes we do. And mouth too. (Ahem). I’m so happy this is getting the attention of the higher-ups. Kent is a mild-mannered but passionate man who makes easy alliances across party lines. I’ve always been a little jealous of him. Compared to our hard scrabble here in Martinez, the Methow project has always lived a fairly charmed life because it has SO much agency support. Here’s the list of partners in 2014:

So you can see he’s very gifted at playing well with others. One thing I love about the article is getting the back story about Kent himself;

That’s where Woodruff came in. Since arriving in the Okanagan in 1989, he’d focused on birds, installing nesting platforms for owls. But he yearned to leave an enduring legacy, and in 2008 his opportunity -arrived. John Rohrer, Woodruff’s supervisor, had been relocating beavers on a small scale since 2001 — even digging a holding pool in his own backyard. Meanwhile, the Washington Department of Ecology wanted to improve regional water quality. Woodruff thought beavers could help. He offered to expand Rohrer’s endeavor.

I never knew he was a bird man! Cheryl will be happy to read that. Now I’m a purist and want there to be a sentence in here crediting Sherri Tippie for the realization that beaver families do better when they’re relocated as a unit. But I guess saving beavers is a bit like the story of Stone Soup if you’re lucky. Everyone contributes what they can without realizing it matters and in the end helps create something nourishing.

Anyway, its a great article. Go read the whole thing, and if you feel inclined leave a comment about the valuable role beavers can play in urban landscapes.

Here’s was my contribution yesterday, which is an timely response to the articles implication that the answer to our beaver problems is to take them out of the city and move them up country. (As you know, I believe the answer is to let them move wherever they dam well please and make adjustments accordingly.) Credit where its due, the play on words comes from our friend Tom Rusert in Sonoma. But I’m fairly happy with its application here. See if you can tell what city this is: