Category: City Reports

Good Beaver News Trifecta

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Dispersal May 13, 2014

Leave It To Beavers

May 10, 2014

They are the master builders of the animal kingdom and their handy work has great importance to life on earth for many other species, including humans. A new PBS documentary examines the remarkable lives of beavers and their surprising contributions to our geology and ecology. We asked the film’s award winning director, Jari Osborne to give us a preview.

The miraculous work of beavers isn’t just a North American phenomenon: In the 16th century, the animals were remaking the English countryside. But then they gradually disappeared, hunted into extinction. Now, 500 years later, the beaver has suddenly and mysteriously returned to the United Kingdom. Reporter Christopher Worth from PRI’s The World tells us more.

Do yourself a favor and listen to this interview. Very smart presentation. And if you need some good cheer stay and listen to the artless transition where the announcer mysteriously wonders why beaver disappeared in the 16th century. I guess it wasn’t corrected after all. Three emails arrived this morning excitedly alerting me to this upcoming documentary. I’m sure more will follow. More importantly, have you planned your superbowl party?

napa beavers — Beaver lodge in Napa: Photo Rusty Cohn

Awesome news this weekend from a resident in Napa who discovered a beaver dam and lodge near his house in a creek off the Napa river. Check out that lovely lodge on the right hand side of the photo. He wanted to make sure the beavers were safe and wrote me for advice. I did a lot of sniffing Sunday and talked monday to the awesome director of the Napa RCD, who spoke with Napa Flood Control and told me that they have been following these beavers for 2 years! And have a “Living River” policy where they don’t interfere with wildlife unless there’s imminent risk. They were very interested in my thoughts about solutions if there ever was an issue, and we will keep in touch. She also told me that there is a vineyard on their land where some beavers showed up last year. They share the border with fish and game. Neither side was worried about harm being caused and Fish and Game actually set up night cameras so both sides could see the nocturnal residents! In the mean time, the man who contacted me has received calls from the Napa Registrar and the Press Democrat. And Wikipedia Rick is updating the Napa River entry with some very special photos.

Pinch me, because I think I’m dreaming. The very best part is that these same beavers could be Martinez’ progeny! How awesome is that?

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Good news out of London Ontario today which has been pushing for a policy where flow devices are tried first and killing can only come after specific permission is given. While nothing has been made official just yet, they have gotten a unanimous committment from the council to pursue it. Which is a dam big deal considering. Congratulations London!

Coun. Matt Brown, chair of the committee, agreed with the notion of coming up with a plan. “We hear the urgency,” he said. “We sense your frustration.” The committee voted 4-0 to push staff for a plan that would see killing beavers left as something to consider once all other options have been exhausted.

London challenged to ditch lethal beaver traps
London animal advocates want humane ‘beaver deceivers’
City Hall To Develop More Humane Beaver Policy

Let’s not do it the easy way!

heidi08 City Reports, Creative Solutions, Earth Day, Environmental March 27, 2014

Sacramento County approves plan to restore channel to natural creek state

A graffiti-ridden drainage channel running through the American River Parkway in Rancho Cordova is poised for a major makeover that will transform it into a cleaner and greener creek where recreational and educational activities abound.

The Sacramento County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved a contract assessing the environmental impact of the Cordova Creek Naturalization Project – a rehabilitation effort that has been in the works for nearly a decade. The approval is a major milestone in a plan that involves breaking up and burying the channel’s concrete walls and rerouting its water through a new creek, which will be surrounded by native vegetation and walking trails.

The new creek will allow the soil around it to absorb the water, which comes from a runoff watershed in Rancho Cordova, ultimately creating a 15-acre riparian area where trees and wildflowers can flourish.

“It looks like a fallow field with a concrete ditch running through it,” said Gohring. “When we’re done, it will be a meandering stream which will provide an amazing amount of habitat diversity. … For those of us who do ecological restoration work, it’s like the holy grail.”

Honestly, at this point, do I even need to say it anymore? I’ve seen your Holy Grail Rancho Cordova and it looks like this.

Wanted to share Amelia Hunter’s fantastic new design for the seventh beaver festival. Don’t you love seeing the duality of a beaver’s life? Thank you Amelia for your lovely artwork, and I hope when our ad runs in Bay Nature paying customers with great big grants flock to you in droves.

Another beaver friend is working to organize a guided Amtrak journey from Oakland hosted by the Oakland Museum Docent Chris Richards. That would be a fun way to add watershed context to the festival. Fingers crossed it will really happen. I pulled together this graphic to celebrate!

Just six pages?

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Who's Killing Beavers Now? March 26, 2014

Emily the Trapper is 26, smart, loves animals, and thinks your ideas about fur trapping are all wrong

As a 26-year-old female, Lamb is a rarity among fur trappers, but her work ethic and foul mouth quickly endeared her to colleagues. While some of the fur she harvests is sold for use in the fashion industry, she also works closely with government officials, wildlife researchers and the oil industry to help study and sustain animal populations in the wild

Lamb has always found animals beautiful. She used to spend entire afternoons sitting in the hay feeder on her family’s Sundre-area farm when she was a girl just so she could see the cows up close when they came to eat. After graduating from high school, Lamb decided she wanted to be a veterinarian or a Fish and Wildlife officer. She eventually earned a diploma in Wildlife and Forestry Conservation online, then began an internship with the Cochrane Ecological Institute.

Joining the business as an outsider was a challenge for Lamb. So was being the first and only woman in the company. “You don’t expect a girl is going to be OK with going out and killing stuff,” she told me. Lamb found the physical demands gruelling. “It’s pretty intense work,” she said. “Tearing around with 70- or 80-pound beavers in your backpack for undeterminable distances. And setting traps with poundage enough to break your arms.” There is also, of course, the locker-room talk that comes with being the sole woman in a crew of men. “Trust me, I hear about a million beaver jokes a day,” she said with a laugh. She considers the ribbing good-natured. “Obviously, I am an easy-going gal.”

This is any trapping company’s wet dream. A cute, young, sympathetic girl they can push to the front of the line to put a humane face on their ghoulish activities. No wonder the paper dedicated 6 entire pages to her story. (No word yet on when it will run a 6 page story on beaver benefits, or the rodent rebound from trapping coyotes, or why wolves help rivers.) There’s no time for fluff pieces like that when we have a cute 26 year old voyageur to write about.

Trappers are rarely paid for these contributions. They do it because they share a common commitment to wildlife understanding and sustainability. This is something Lamb wants the public to understand. “All of us–hunters, trappers, environmentalists, tree-huggers, hippies–every one of us, in the end, wants there to be as big and as healthy a population of wildlife as possible. Period.”

The style of beaver trap Abercrombie and Lamb use is a “body-grip killing trap”–often called a Conibear trap after inventor Frank Conibear–which a beaver springs by swimming into it. The trap is powerful enough to break a person’s arm. “That’ll wreck you pretty good,” Lamb said. The Conibear’s loaded jaws will catch a beaver around the neck and fracture its spine while compressing the carotid artery in its neck. Death comes painlessly and instantaneously.2 “The animal is living his life the way he lives his life, doing what he does every day,” Lamb said. “Then he’s not.”

Why is it that if you say that beavers are good for fish or wildlife reporters have to talk to someone who thinks differently to present a balance – but if you say conibears never make wildlife suffer they just obediently write it down with a flourish? Is there nobody in Alberta who disagrees with Emily? I’m assuming from the 60+ comments that there are. Maybe you could have contacted Dr. Hood for a quote about the impact of trapping beaver on surrounding wildlife?

Furthermore, the selective trapping of overpopulated animals like beavers and coyotes sustains their numbers. Abercrombie “traps out” about half of the beaver lodges on Chip Lake. In this way, he doubles the resources available for the remaining colonies and reduces their competitive stress. “I am keeping the population at a consistent high level on the lake by employing trapping as a management tool.” Abercrombie told me that 10 years ago, without enough trapping on the lake, the beavers clear cut the trees off every island. “They literally ate themselves out of house and home.” Those that didn’t starve contracted parasitic infections due to overcrowding. Eventually, every one of Chip Lake’s 200 beavers died. Now, thanks to Abercrombie’s trapping, about 60 individuals reside on the lake, a little more than half of what he figures the area can support.

You do realize animals move locations right? I mean if they chop the trees in one lake they move to another lake while those trees are coppicing and coming back to life? If you drink all the beer in your refrigerator what do you do? I assume there are more trees at the lake than there are in Alhambra Creek. Its been 7 years and our beavers haven’t eaten themselves out of house and home or died of tularemia. I’m surprised the Alberta beaver species must be way more greedy.

“As a trapper, this is my responsibility,” Abercrombie said. “I do it as a steward on behalf of the citizens of Alberta. I manage the fur-bearer resource in this area. That’s what trappers do. The government doesn’t do it. The animal-rights people don’t do it. We do it.”

Oh pul-eeze. I can’t stand this much selfless patriotism without a martini. I’m reminded of a certain self-justifying poem by Oscar Wilde.

And all men kill the thing they love,

By all let this be heard,

Some do it with a bitter look,

Some with a flattering word,

The coward does it with a kiss,

The brave man with a sword!

Oscar Wilde

Another Blessed Event in Bakersfield

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, City Reports, Dispersal March 7, 2014

Beavers spotted in Bakersfield, no new tree damage

The beavers were spotted Wednesday morning in a parking lot near Mohawk Street and California Avenue. One Eyewitness News viewer captured a photo of the furry visitors. In November, beavers were spotted in the northwest near the Riverwalk. The beavers then had done damage to area trees.

Bakersfield parks director Dianne Hoover said Wednesday’s beaver sighting was the first since November. “All told in the last three to four years, they’ve damaged about 40 trees,” said Hoover. She said each tree costs between $100 and $500 to replace.

No beaver story from Bakersfield will every be cheerful, but you should watch the news report just for the anchor. He’s adorable! Oh and seeing Diane Hoover in person helps me understand why she hasn’t been able to learn anything from my emails over the years – her heart is two sizes too small.

No word yet on whether any city official or media representative will ever learn a single thing about beaver DISPERSAL. Or when they’ll stop being confused by the same exact thing occurring at the same exact time over and over again all along the west coast. It’s kinda sweet that these two yearlings start out their journey in tandem. Do you think they’ll split up eventually? Like when a friend comes with you in hide and seek and you shoo them away to find their own spot? Check out their advanced nylon netting system to protect those 500 dollar trees. Bakersfield trees must be made of gold – or possibly crack?

Lynx ride beaver coattails in Scotland?

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports February 26, 2014

Is it time to allow Scotland to go wild?

HERE’S a question for you. Do you wish to see lynx and beavers living freely in Scotland again within our lifetimes? Let’s throw in another question. If these animals never returned to the wilds of Scotland, would that really bother you?

There are simple answers to these questions. The problem is that my answer could be the total opposite of yours. However, these are questions that we must reach consensus on if we are to agree an intelligent way forward for the conservation of Scotland’s wildlife and our landscapes.

Make no mistake about it, both beavers and lynx will trigger changes in our natural environment that will force us out of our current comfort zones and take us down the road to “re-wilding” some of our favourite places.

Are we ready to allow nature more say on how our landscape may look and function in places? There will certainly be physical changes that some of us will like and others will not, whilst others might not even notice. There will also be knock-on changes for the rest of our wildlife which could prove initially dramatic as our natural environment re-boots itself to the return of such key species. The life of a roe or red deer will become very much different in an area where a top predator is present whilst those species that benefit from wetlands will undoubtedly gain from the activities of beavers.

If there’s one thing I admire about Lynx its those dams they build that impact the entire forest. Oh wait – they don’t. I mean I have nothing against Lynx but I don’t understand why they’re lumping these two animals together. I’m sure there are useful trophic things lynx do for the habitat. Reduce rodents, add a predator, etc. Still beavers are wayyyyyyyy better.

Many of us believe that every species has a right to live where it belongs and the environment of Scotland is the poorer without it. We intrinsically know this, and the fact that we obsess in our media about trying to save the last members of a rare species (usually furry, feathered or bright-eyed) shows how the value we attach to it increases with its increasing rarity.

But how should we value species that were formerly native in Scotland but that we have now eradicated?

Conversely, while we can quantify the costs of livestock lost to re-introduced species, how do we assign a value to the fear, however irrational, that we might have walking through a dark wood inhabited by lynx?

We will continue to debate the pros and cons of whether beavers and lynx should return to live freely in Scotland and arguments on both sides of the debate are equally worthy.

However, the final question is possibly the most important. Does it bother you whether beavers and lynx live in Scotland or not?

The answer lies deep within us all and should be the one that determines this debate.

Honestly, I don’t think that IS the final question. Scotland can’t decide whether it needs beavers or not based on how much they are missed. How much would folks miss politicians if Scotland took them all away? Just because something isn’t missed doesn’t mean its not necessary. And beavers are NECESSARY.

Today’s donation comes from the Oakland Zoo who kindly offered a Family Pass for the silent auction. When is the last time you went to the zoo? I had so much fun on my recent trip with beaver friend and guide Cindy Margulis. I also heard rumors about the vast new land the zoo has purchased and will turn into California terrain before it was settled, with all the wildlife that USED to be here, including you-know-what! Thanks Oakland Zoo for supporting the Martinez Beavers!