Category: City Reports

There but for the grace of God goes Martinez…

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Who's Killing Beavers Now? November 5, 2013

Did you ever have one of those friends that never listened? Whatever project he happened to be working at the time on he never wanted advice, or read instructions, or learned from your or your uncle’s experience. He wanted to figure it out himself, and was blessed perhaps with more testosterone than sense. He waived off your advice installing the sprinkler system, putting together the table saw, and laying the foundation. He was the original do-it-yourselfer and didn’t take kindly to guidance of any kind.

Even though he could have used it lots of times.

I think this must be what Bakersfield is like, as they enter their 7th year of beaver challenges, eschewing all the help that has been directed their way. They had their first big beaver drama around the same time as we were facing ours. Folks got pretty engaged and there was enough media attention that the Beavers sports team in Oregon actually gave support of some kind. I would love a FOIA to learn what happened to those original beavers, but of course they promised that they weren’t trapped just ‘discouraged’ and the media likes to pretend that its the same beaver, coming back, every couple years.

Chew on this: The bike path beaver is back

Nearly two years after we left him, having felled eight trees at Truxtun Lake, the fabled bike path beaver is back on the gnaw at the Park at Riverwalk, and making a winter home near the Bright House Networks Amphitheatre.

Recreation and Parks Director Dianne Hoover says the beaver, or beavers, have damaged three Oak trees during the past two weeks, and have felled 11 bay, crape myrtle and redbud trees, costing the city around $550.

Don’t worry. Dianne knows just what to do. She’ll solve it herself and not pay attention to any of that silly advice from those crazy beaver lovers in northern California with the swear word in their names.

In response, city crews have wrapped the bottom three feet of the trunks of more than 30 trees at Riverwalk in green nylon netting that resembles chicken wire, or a very small-gauge chain-link fence.

The device has a better than 90 percent success rate, a parks employee said, at convincing beavers to eschew trees.

90% protection! My goodness! I had to look up this fine product and see how it worked. There are several versions on the market, and sells at height of two and three feet as protection against rabbit, deer, hare and woodchuck. I haven’t seen any that claims to be proof against beaver. Because that would be a very stupid promise unless you lived in one particular city where ridiculous things are routinely believed about beavers.

“They go through and gnaw around and leave a spike, so we had to remove those for safety reasons. We think they’re coming from Kern River Canyon and migrating down. That’s what we think, but we don’t really know for sure,” said Hoover, who described the city’s efforts as “trying to live in harmony with all.”

Crews have dug out the tree stumps at Riverwalk because they’re a hazard.

Thank goodness they acted in time to prevent those trees from coppicing on their own. What with that explosion of nesting habitat who knows what could of birdlife could have cluttered up their precious bike path?

We may all need to move here

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions November 2, 2013

Nanaimo wants to ban ‘barbaric’ traps

The City of Nanaimo is counting on the provincial government to give teeth to its potential ban on “barbaric” animal traps.Nanaimo city council opted to create a municipal bylaw against the use of body-gripping traps, which politicians called a cruel practice. Councillors also agreed the municipality will no longer use traps to manage nuisance beavers.

Nanaimo is located on Vancouver island in British Columbia. It was once a mining town with mostly Seattle weather, light snows in the winter and regular Orca sightings. And it has an unbelievable city council.

Coun. Fred Pattje, who put forward the motion to ban traps, said there are other, non-lethal ways of dealing with beavers, including water flow management devices. The city can and should try to prohibit body-gripping traps, which are “too cruel a way” to deal with the animals.

The most famous mayor of Nanaimo was Frank Ney who in 1967 started the great Bathtub races to the main island for Canada’s centennial celebration. The colorful Ney participated avidly every year dressed as a pirate until his death. The bathtubs now can have motors up to 8.5 horse power but still need to weigh a minimum of 350 lbs. It’s a huge event that has encouraged other regions to try and copy it.

Surely the town isn’t all enlightened right? There must be some naysayers too?

Coun. George Anderson felt the bid to ban was a knee-jerk reaction to public concern and wanted to wait until the city collected more information on the environmental and financial implications of the more humane management methods. City staff members have promised a report in a year on the effect of internal changes for beaver management.

But the remaining eight councillors say it’s important to get started on a bylaw now.

Wow. Just wow.

Nanaimo is just a ferry’s ride away from our friends at fur-bearer defenders. Clearly they have benefited from smart neighbors. I’m thinking fieldtrip?

BMAP (Bureaucrats Make Assassination Possible)

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Who's Killing Beavers Now? October 26, 2013

Clint DeWitt, environmental projects manager with Kanuga Conferences Inc., talks about how the organization is dealing with a number of beaver dams on its property.
MIKE DIRKS/TIMES-NEWS

Landowners complain about too many beavers

“I’m tasked with catching every beaver, not just one or two beavers,” Williamson said. “I have to catch every beaver at the place and warranty it for three months. You’re looking at the difference between a $300 job, versus the same job outside a BMAP county might be $800 or $1,000.”

Just 300 miles away from the beaver-appreciation article I talked about yesterday and whose author was thrilled to learn about flow devices and wrote me back several times, at the other end of the Blue Ridge Mountains the Kanuga conference center in Hendersonville just can’t kill them quickly enough.

“They’re just terrible,” said Jerry Moore, who has maintained the WNC Air Museum Airport, also known as Johnson Field, for 25 years. “They back the water up to the runway. They’ll raise it up a couple of feet. Last week, I dug (a beaver dam) out of the field and it dropped the water down 18 inches. They’ll be back, but it helps for a while.”

Moore said beaver-related flooding and tree damage near the airport reached its zenith about “six or seven years ago,” when a state trapper removed 50 beavers from the area. “It was just infested with them,” he said.

Infested! Beaver lice! The article is basically constructed around convincing the cities that don’t participate in BMAP to cough up their contribution. BMAP stands for “Beaver Management Assistance Program” but since its run by Wildlife Services at APHIS the acronym should really be “Bureaucrats Make Assassination Possible”. Killing is all they mostly do, except sometimes when they install pretend flow devices that don’t work.

Mitigating beaver damage doesn’t always involve trapping them or breaking up their dams, Williamson said. When beavers at Kanuga Conferences started flooding a lake loop trail — as well as threatening the habitat of endangered species in a nearby bog — he worked with Kanuga staff to design and install two pond levelers to lower water levels in the 1-acre bog.

Kanuga was home to roughly 20 to 30 beavers in 2007, said Environmental Projects Manager Clint DeWitt. He said the Episcopal Church-affiliated retreat didn’t want to eliminate the web-footed animals, only the damage they were wreaking on the bog habitat and the Daisy Lake Trail.

Relocating beavers is not an option, Williamson said, since that would just shift the nuisance to other areas and perhaps spread disease. He added beavers are highly territorial and would, if transplanted into a new area, likely die from fights with resident beavers or trying to cross roads on their way back home.

Before resorting to trapping, Williamson said he tries to use pond levelers, exclusion devices such as hardwire cloth around the base of trees and other non-lethal techniques. But with a constant stream of beavers coming up from the French Broad River, trapping is often necessary to control populations.

So even though beavers are so dangerously territorial that they would kill a stranger for moving in, there is such a steady stream of beavers on the move that new ones will just come to fill the space the corpse left behind and trapping is necessary to control the problem. I’m reminded of a certain Hermann Moll “zombie beaver map” from the 1700’s.

Well obviously North Carolina has a ways to go before achieving any real beaver management. And maybe something to learn about sociopathy as well. Check out the trapper’s colorful analogy at the end of the article.

“If I were trying to trap you, I would put traps at your front door, at the foot of your bed, at the light switch and at the toilet,” he said.

Well, it worked on his wife, anyway.

Big Picture: Beaver appreciation in Virginia

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Environmental October 25, 2013

Wild Ideas: Beavers: nature’s engineer

Pam Owen, Rappahannock News

While humans may not be happy with the beaver’s engineering, the ponds and wetlands it creates serve as habitat for many other species. When beavers move on, many of these wetlands convert to meadows, providing habitat to other species before forest takes over again. With this cascading effect, populations of many species rebound along with the beavers.

Humans should also value some of the ecoservices beavers provide, including the buffering effect on adjacent lands. The ponds and wetlands beavers produce keep water in the landscape for drier times and, during precipitation events, slow runoff and reduce flooding, capturing silt and pollutants in the process.

This is a nice beaver-101 article that introduces the reader to plenty of beaver benefits and even talks about wrapping trees to prevent chewing. I wish it mentioned flow devices too but it’s Virginia and we’re grading on a curve. We know the state has heard about them before, because Stephanie Boyles paper originated from Christopher Newport University and the Virginia Department of Transportation was a key player in her research which concludes:

Given the demonstrated low costs to install and maintain flow devices compared to the high costs of preventative maintenance, road repairs and beaver population control activities, a compelling case can be made to install flow devices in freestanding dams near roads or to protect culverts that beavers could potentially plug. Nevertheless, a more prudent approach may be for transportation agencies to identify conflict sites and install flow devices at sites that have the largest impact on road maintenance and beaver management budgets.

Stephanie Boyle, Christopher Newport University, Virginia

Still, even without the mention of flow devices, this is a smart positive look at the animal. The author describes their advanced adaptions to aquatic life and is smart enough to put a photo of an actual beaver (not a nutria!) at the start. I especially liked this part:

Some targeted species, such as native willow, actually benefit from this trimming, which stimulates root growth and the spread of suckers.

Smart beaver writing from a region we often associate with beaver challenges, (and famously two cases of beaver rabies last year). I’m off to go thank her and make sure she has copies of Stephanie’s important research. Let’s get Virginia on up to the plateau, shall we?

Hyperbole 9News

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports October 20, 2013

Using beaver deceivers to lower dam water

The Beaver is nocturnal and the second largest rodent in the world. While their dams provide ponds to protect against predators – right now in Fraser those dams are flooding the town with drainage pipes underwater – potentially causing more damage downstream.

There’s water inlets and outlets all along here that are getting clogged up,” Durbin said.

So, the plan is to use a secret weapon to outsmart the beaver – taking PVC pipe and punching holes in beaver dams to let the water out. The devices they call beaver deceivers. “The beaver deceiver we had was working keeping the pond levels lower,” Durbin said.

The only problem is that the bold beavers are deceiving the beaver deceivers and plugging up the pipes.

When I was two I used to turn my red tricycle upside down and crank the peddle around to make it an “Ice cream truck”. I could ask people what flavor they wanted and magically make it appear from the spokes. I could even make the little tune of the truck on its rounds.

It resembled an ACTUAL ice cream truck in much the same as a pipe stuck through a dam resembles a true beaver deceiver.

Goodness people will work very hard to avoid doing the right thing, won’t they? We are so lucky that the city manager of Martinez at the time didn’t listen to all the folks at that November 7th meeting and instruct our public works crew to “stick a pipe through the dam” to make a deceiver. Because when our beavers plugged the pipe (as any beaver yet known to man will almost certainly do) the city would have gotten rid of them as quickly as Fraser.

Call this a “people deceiver”. Because it appears to solve the problem humanely and is in fact guaranteed to fail and justify a more lethal solution. As I once said of the bumbling Bakersfield“,

We tried saving the beavers humanely by wrapping the trees in cellophane and hello kitty dolls, but it just didn’t work!”

The town administrator already knows what to do because he’s gotten several letters from yours truly. I will write him again, because it is theoretically possible that there might be hope for this bewildered steward yet.

Unfortunately I can’t same the same for the news team. Sheesh.