Category: City Reports

This is what the cavalry looks like in Massachusetts

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, Festival October 19, 2013

Pittsfield solves beaver problem at Wild Acres pond humanely

In conjunction with Beaver Solutions, highway… (Stephanie Zollshan / Berkshire Eagle Staff)

“Everybody in the pool,” Dan Osterander yelled out, as he and other city workers stepped into the pond and installed a fence to keep out the beavers Friday morning. The crew used an excavator to remove twigs and mud that formed the dam.

They were joined by Michael Callahan of Beaver Solutions, who was contracted by the city to find a humane solution to a flooding problem city officials blame on the critters.

On Friday, Callahan took 50 paces into five-feet deep pond waters to place a cage that will connect the pipes to where the city has its own dam to control the water.

Callahan has a thriving business thanks to a Massachusetts law which prevents the lethal trapping of beavers. Any disturbance of a beaver dam requires a special permit.

Looks like our good friend Mike is busily convincing another city that beavers are Worth A Dam. (Although the reporter continues to be under the impression that we would only install a flow device because of the evil 1996 law. Apparently he has failed to notice that beavers can STILL being trapped and killed and cities routinely get permission to do so – even with grip traps if one of nine exceptions are met. Nor has he thought about the fact that if you pay a trapper $500 to take out some beavers one year, and new beavers move in the next year, you’ll pay it again and again, adding up to way more than hiring Mike.)

Never mind. We’re always happy when public works crews have to jump in the water and help someone install a flow device.

The owner of the farm has complained about high water levels at the pond, said Jim McGrath, Pittsfield’s park and open space planner. The Bousquet Ski Area needs the water for snowmaking in the winter.

Van Derkar, a Pittsfield conservation agent and former wildlife biologist, said beavers shouldn’t be negatively impacted by the city’s work.

“It shouldn’t affect them. That’s the whole goal,” Van Derkar said. “We need to be able to work with them.

Here endeth the lesson.

When’s the last time you went wine tasting in the Autumn with about 1000 other wildlife lovers? Oh wait, never? Then you should come join us at Cornerstone in Sonoma for the 2nd annual Optics and Nature fair. Worth A Dam will be there with lots of folks you know and some you’ll be very excited to meet. You can learn about lions or owls or beavers, and if you decide to pick up an extra pair of binoculars for junior the optics folks will pay the sales tax. See you there?

Photos I love

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, pictures October 18, 2013

Beavers end government shutdown!

Well, almost. Check out this fun article from KZOK about Sarah’s beaver heading to D.C. to fix the dam congress. Besides knowing how to cooperate and finish what they start, beavers know something about working with obstructions!

Sarah’s Beaver Ends Government Shut-Storm!

Sarah’s Beaver, unlike some folks in our state, loves it some good government. All this grandstanding over “Obamacare” had got the United States Government shut down completely, which spelled danger for North America’s largest rodent.

“This is bulls***”, thought the Beaver, and it stowed away on a flight to our nation’s capitol to talk some sense into our state’s congressional delegation.

Sarah’s Beaver went and met with the Washington State Delegation of the only group in America less popular than Nickleback or dog poop. Congressman (and former King County Sheriff) Dave Reichert (R-Eastside) was the only one of them who would agree to a photograph, but guess what? No sooner did the Beaver get back to Seattle, than the squabbling grown-up toddlers managed to come to some kind of agreement, and the Government of the United States of America can get back to protecting Beavers!

Did I mention I love the state of Washington? I might put this photo on my fridge. Come to think of it, wouldn’t you LOVE a photo with every member of our city council holding a beaver? I can’t believe its never been done. Wow, maybe John Muir too?

Speaking of great photos Cheryl sent this that her boss snapped on the freeway yesterday. Mazel tov! What an excellent way to start out.

This photo I love has the very strange fortune of have been taken by me and not by Cheryl for a change. Talk about a face that could launch a thousand ships. I call it “Things are Looking UP!”

Finally there’s a nice report on the California Fur trade from Michael Ellis on PBS this morning. Years ago he brought a group to see our beavers and we have swapped emails. Still, he’s not exactly a believer. (Yet) In this report he refers to them as “rats”. Obviously there are about a million things he needs to mention about beavers other than the fur trade. Starting with the drought, erosion and wildlife damage we caused when we wiped them out. But its a nice report, and you should go listen.

Beavers

Michael Ellis looks at how the fabulous fur of the beaver shaped the history of California and the West.

People Deceivers (Part II)

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Environmental October 14, 2013

The very first computer we ever owned was so expensive we had to take out a car loan. The year was somewhere around 1989 and because I was working on a dissertation we paid an enormous amount of money to add on 20 MB. (Yes, megabytes). It had a floppy disk drive and a CD-Rom drive. When you turned it on the screen greeted you with this welcome C:\>. We were so nervous setting it up that we didn’t use it at all for the first few weeks. Years of laptops and PC’s later, I have never spent so much for a computer since. Still, for a woman who was using whole bottles of white-out in an afternoon it was an amazing invention that allowed me to change what I was editing without type writer ribbon.

Just a year later we could have bought the whole thing with three times as much memory for a third as much money.

I mention this because the Clemson Pond leveler was state of the art once too. It was a monumental achievement that changed the way we thought forever, and we can’t possibly go backwards to a time when solving beaver problems wasn’t at least theoretically possible. It was invented by Dr. Greg Yarrow at Clemson University in South Carolina, around the same time as we purchased that computer. It remains the most widely recognized tool for beaver management, at least in name. It was as important to the later development of the beaver deceiver and the flexible leveler as my first computer was to the ones that followed it.

And, not surprisingly, it works about as well.

So you can imagine my mixed feelings when I saw this:

Busy as beavers

Members of the Student Conservation Association install a “Beaver Deceiver” at the Willie Wildlife Marsh in the town of Johnstown on Thursday. The construction aims to quiet the water flow, which reduces beaver activity. Beaver dams have caused flooding damage to the marsh. (Photo by Bill Trojan/The Leader-Herald)

The crew will clean out the clogged pipe and install a “beaver deceiver” – a device developed by Clemson University in the early 1990s that’s used to dissuade beavers from blocking currents. It makes the flow of water harder for the animals to detect, counteracting their instinct to dam up any moving water near their lodges.

Willie Marsh was set aside in the 60s to make a haven for wood ducks. It was built with a long ramp across the marsh and a duck blind for photographers.

Beaver may have raised the water level but I don’t think the fact that the park slid into disrepair had much to do with them.

(Everyone knows they mostly drink imported.)

Barbara Conner is the retired teacher who wrote about and shared photos from the group’s Willie Marsh visit in a Sept. 5 post on her blog. There is so much about this story that I want to admire. I love the idea of repairing damaged wetlands. I love getting kids involved. I love bloggers getting written about in the daily news.

But Willie Marsh is about 25 miles away from the sanctuary of Beavers:Wetlands and Wildlife. That’s like Mecca or MIT for beaver information. The idea that the DEC couldn’t think of any better solution than having children install a Clemson is baffling. Do they also beat their uniforms on rocks to wash them and ride mules to the office?

The Department of Environmental Conservation is a busy bureau and doesn’t have a lot of time for park or beaver management. Bill Ackerman is a reporter for the Leader-Herald who got interested in this story and must have scared the living daylights out of them when he printed Barbara’s photos. He did a great job in tracking down the story too. One of the driving forces behind the Marsh retired and moved away and surprsingly no one much has cared about the area until it found its way into the news.

Dick Spinks, who retired from DEC in 1992, said he and Jack and Jim Harnish of Gloversville did most of the work on the marsh site, with some help from other DEC employees based in Northville. Spinks said he personally built and installed the nesting boxes that have served so many birds over the years at Willie Marsh. Until he retired, he live-trapped beavers at the marsh and released them farther north, but that work hasn’t been done in years.

Never mind for the moment that live-trapping and relocating beavers is ILLEGAL in New York state. Let’s focus instead on the fact that someone who cared about this park retired, and some of the other folk who cared about this park died. Now the DEC has delegated it to the ‘circular file’. This is a place that no one in the current DEC cares about and no one wants to care about and (beavers or no beavers) no one would have cared about if the press hadn’t shamed them in the first place. So their solution is to have children install something they know full well won’t work and offer a gleaming promise that “Once it works we’ll fix the trails.”

Which of course will never happen so they can get back to the hard work of ignoring the park soon. The whole thing makes me mad enough to write a letter. To the reporter. To the DEC. To Beavers:Wetlands and Wildlife. To the retired teacher who took these photos. To the teacher of the students environmental alliance.

That will do for starters. Did I leave any one out?

Get ready for a new holiday special!

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Creek Seekers Poetry Contest October 13, 2013

Town disturbs wetland

The Town of Perry in Wyoming County is facing a fine from the DEC and the cost of the lots of man hours to restore what it damaged. Several acres of protected wetland were drained dry off of Beardsley Road when highway crews opened up a beaver dam while working on a road project.

Why not show this every Christmas? Seems the town of Perry in Wyoming county New York had a road that needed some repairs in a protected wetland. They wanted to get into the culvert to fix it but some hard working beavers had raised the water level and they didn’t want to get wet or install a diversion dam so the highway superintendent just ripped out the dam, killing thousands of fish and destroying the wetland with out ever getting a permit because it would take too long. Trust me, the story gets better. Now Perry has negotiated to pay a smaller fine and if they REBUILD THE DAM and fix what they ruined.

I don’t know about you but when I think of Dave Scola and the Martinez public works crew repairing a beaver dam after it has been ripped out I can’t stop smiling for the rest of the hour. Let’s hope this cautionary tale makes folks afraid of ripping out beaver dams next time.

Need more good news? How about a golf course that appreciates its beavers? Mind you this is in the Yukon where they cheerfully go out of their way to kil them.

Beaver family calls Yukon golf course home

Golf course owner Jeff Luehmann has welcomed a beaver family. (CBC)

A golf course in Whitehorse has a new group of visitors, and they’re not the types to just putter around.

“Well there’s at least four that we know of. There’s two dominant ones, a male and female that have been here on and off on the property,” Meadow Lakes Golf Course owner Jeff Luehmann says. The guests? Beavers. A family has built a dam in one of his ponds and now calls the water hazard home. The beavers moved in several years ago, and now there’s an entire brood.

Normally, the practice is for them to destroy problem animals. But Luehmann says the critters are doing him a favour.

“What I do is put poplar,” he says. “They feed on that. I also put metal mesh on the trees I want to keep.” “We just took the initiative,” he says.

Quick, somebody get 100 scouts to send Jeff thank you cards right away. I’m sure there are people in the enormity of the Yukon who appreciate beavers, but on a GOLF COURSE??? Wow. Just. Wow.

Only good news today from the Northern Hemisphere, so far covering about 5000 miles from the Yukon to New York, and now to the Bay Area adding another 3000. This is from the Beaver Restoration Toolbox which is being perfected by Karl Malcolm of USFWS. Or would be if the federal government would let people go back to work so he could make final adjustments. I can’t share the whole thing until its official but we were asked for input and I gave him lots of info and the Martinez plug. Ask how happy was I to see this on page 8.

Whew! That’s a lot of good news for one day. I will just end by saying some of the greatest beaver friends are out of work at the moment and living on savings. Michael Pollock of NOAA fisheries, Suzanne Fouty USFS, Jimmy Taylor USDA, Carol Evans BLM. There are a about a million more that have gone 12 days now without a paycheck.

Bad news for beavers. And humans.

Get the popcorn

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions September 19, 2013

You’re going to love this story.

Beavers to blame for big dam boondoggle

If you ask the neighbors on Southwest Merestone Court in Tigard, there’s nothing more important than the large wetland and pond that stretches for acres behind their homes. For more than 20 years, it has been the ideal habitat for fish, turtles, foxes, deer, otters and osprey. Neighbors quickly point out a pair of nesting bald eagles in a nearby evergreen.

But the most famous residents of Merestone Pond are the family of beavers whose dams helped transform the section of Summer Creek years ago. The beavers have a longstanding feud with city workers, who say the places the beavers build their dams are threatening two culverts under Southwest 121st Avenue.

Crews have removed the dams twice in the past 15 years, and removed a portion of a third dam last Wednesday, re-sparking a contentious fight between neighbors and city officials. The neighbors are fiercely protective of the beavers. When work crews removed a dam from the pond in 2011 — which city workers said was clogging the culverts — neighbors called the police.

You know, a million years ago I wrote a certain famous beaver expert that works for the federal government about our upcoming beaver battle and he said, gosh, of course I’ll help. “I love a good beaver row!”

Years later we know exactly how he felt.

This story warms the very cockles of my heart. From the protective neighbors calling the police, to the valiant beavers rebuilding their pond anyway and the lurking city workers getting admonished by ODFW.

Beavers may be trouble

Crews installed two vertical logs upstream of the culvert in 2011 in the hopes of attracting the rodents to rebuild a safe distance away, but the beavers have shown little interest in building where the city would prefer.

“These beavers in particular are being really tricky,” Ruther said.

Urban beavers can be troublesome for cities, but they are also an important part of the ecosystem, Liz Ruther, ODFW said. “Those beavers are doing fabulous habitat work out there,” Ruther said. “The area looks beautiful. Hopefully, they will continue moving around. We really want them to use the attractants.”

Goodrich said that as long as the beavers don’t threaten the city’s infrastructure, the city has no plans on removing the dam any further. “We look at Tigard as a partner for urban beavers,” Ruther said. “They are a big deal for water quality and fish.”

Wait a minute. You’re just outside Portland, and you’ve paid for crews to come rip out the dam multiple times and never installed a flow device? Honestly? That’s like a novice at the Vatican not realizing there was wine in the sacristy. Surely you know there are better ways to protect the culvert, maintain the pond, and still keep the neighbors happy, right?

Plans are in the works to install a pipe under the dam, which would allow some water to continue to flow and not disrupt the beavers, Goodrich said.

I can only hope you mean OVER and not UNDER the dam. The Clemson design is 30+ years old now. A flexible lever will cost a fraction as much for parts and labor and work better. Tigard can do this. Well, I wrote John and Liz and offered what help I could.