This morning, Texas has some more staggeringly bad news for you. Houston again. Bad even by their standards. Brace yourselves. But don’t worry. After we’re done talking about how enormously stupid this was, I promise I’ll give you some good beaver cheer.
For three years, a roadside drainage pond at Interstate 10 and Barker Cypress Road has been a surprising home to West Houston wildlife, supporting countless fish, birds and turtles — not to mention an alligator or two.
But thanks to a TxDOT maintenance crew, the unlikely sanctuary met its end Wednesday morning when a bulldozer leveled a dam made by a family of beavers. Water quickly drained from the pond, leaving the unsuspecting creatures to fend for themselves.
On a Thursday visit to the site, Drew Karedes from KHOU Channel 11 discovered thousands of fish rotting in the sun, labeling the now muddy patch a “graveyard for animals.” leaving the unsuspecting creatures to fend forthemselves.
“The beavers would walk right up to you,” Joe French, Ron Hoover general manager, explains. “You could pat them and everything. They didn’t have a care in the world. There are a lot of families that would come out here to spend family time.”
So the department of transportation didn’t like all that nature in their drainage channel and decided to kill everything in sight and rip out the dam. Remember this on CYPRESS RD and used to be connected to one of the last bayous in the state. But not any more. Now it is a rotting pile of dying fish. Which TxDOT has promised to come back and clean up.
(It took me nearly three hours to find the email of the man who was responsible for this decision yesterday. Apparently if you’re a state employee making 82,000 a year in taxpayer money and some monsterously bad decisions, you make sure people can’t send you email. He’s second from the right end in this picture.)
TxDOT breaks ground on Grand Parkway expansion Among the elected officials and members of the Texas Department of Transportation conducting a ceremonial groundbreaking Tuesday morning on the Segment E expansion of State Highway 99/Grand Parkway are, from the left, Lance LaCour, Joan Huffman, Ned Holmes, Bill Callegori, John Barton, Michael Alford and Mary Evans. The highway will connect Interstate 10 to U.S. Highway 290.
The comments by the motor home and marine business next door are fairly heartening. They obviously appreciated their natural neighbors. Even their beavers. I assume the footage of the original habitat was theirs? Another mysterious place where alligators and beavers lived side by side. Maybe the news channel had visited before? Either way, now its a mud puddle.
(Just remember that way back when the city of Martinez wanted our beavers dead they paid Dave Scola to go on National Television and call the creek that John Muir’s wife named Alhambra a “Drainage channel”. That very creek that Italian families had earned their living on for a hundred years was part of their flood culverts. I have since learned that the rule book for wantonly destroying wildlife in creeks says that first you should just try and get away with it, and if you unfortunately get stopped, defend your action by saying it was just a “drainage channel.” The media usually doesn’t question that.)
Okay Heidi, where’s that good news you promised?
Last night 20 cub scouts and parents from troop 254 in Fairfield came to Martinez for a beaver viewing. Their scout leader works at Shell and had met Jon at the beaver dam before. Then got my info from Cathy Ivers and arranged a beaver tour. We passed out tattoos and information, talked about the ‘beavers building a neighborhood’ and then saw two kits, a yearling and mom. They even got a chance to hear some whining. Several other people just joined in to see what we were looking at. What a nice group of kids!
Worth A Dam: saving beavers one boyscout at a time.
There are liesthere are dam liesAnd there are statistics.
With one correction in spelling to Mr. Twain’s quotation, this is a fitting introduction to today’s column. Yesterday I received the results of the survey conducted at the four seasons in El Dorado. You’ll remember they were having troubles with beavers a while back and folks contacted us about wanting to keep them. A couple of them even came to Martinez to look around and see our flow device, then visit the beaver festival. They lost the battle with the HOA to save those beavers, but have formed a wildlife group to hopefully change the situation the next time. The HOA kindly responded with the usual survey of attitudes which 104 residents returned.
Ugh. I shudder to think what would have happened if Martinez got their hands on something like this. The questions aren’t exactly UNBIASED although the HOA deserves grim kudos for actually saying eradicate and not “remove” or “euthanize”. (Which Martinez used to cloak its ugly truth.) Okay 64 against keeping beavers and 36 for is significant at the p.005 level but the obstacle’s not insurmountable. They only need to change 19 minds. That’s like 10 couples. I’m thinking BBQ and martini’s, maybe in Martinez beaver glasses?
I especially love the part where the HOA asks residents if they will pay to thin the willow after they pay to kill the animal that would trim the willow naurally. Nice! I would start by saying, “Does the fact that you used our HOA dollars to complete this survey mean that if 51 had voted against eradication you would not have killed them next time?” If it does – we have our work cut out for us but it’s work we can do. Can you give me a map of the residences who responded to the survey? How many of them were on the creek?
If the answer is a mealy-mouthed “We have to protect the property regardless of what public opinion says” or something like that, demand they give a refund to residents for the expense of the survey itself (including the time it took them to add these things up), since its clearly a waste of time and of no value to the residents. Offer to do the survey for them next time so it won’t cost residents anything. It’s not as hard as it sounds. I know a beaver-friendly psychologist who would be happy to volunteer some time to put together new questions.
Is it better to solve a problem for the short term, or adopt a long-term solution”
Would you appreciate more variety of birds and fish in the area?
Do you know what a “keystone species is?”
Do you think the HOA at Four Seasons is as smart as other communities that have successfully employed humane solutions? Or would it be too hard for them?
Give me a call. I’m sure we can whip something together in no time.
And some more dam lies this morning from the Boston Globe, talking about how rebounding forests on the East Coast have made a wildlife boom.
Beaver: Wiped out entirely in southern New England by 1900 with only small remnant populations in northern Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Now hundreds of thousands live throughout New England, including an estimated 70,000 in Massachusetts.
Mind you, nobody has actually COUNTED the number of beavers on the East Coast or West Coast or Barbary Coast since they noticed there were hardly any left! The 70.000 figure comes from the panicked inflated statistics offered when MA Fisheries and Wildlife responded to the voters decision to eliminate crush and leghold traps. As in “OMG we’ll be overrun with beavers. There will be 70,000 in 10 years!”
Nice of the Globe to write that down for them like its a fact. But I’ve noticed before the Globe is very compliant when it comes to beaver dogma.
For the record, MA has 10,555 miles of land of which 25.7 is water. That works out to about 2712 miles of water total, which would mean that there would be about 2 beavers for every mile of water in the state. Which I suppose is theoretically possible, except for the fact that MA is notorious for not allowing beavers in reservoirs or near drinking water, so that’s got to subtract a lot of real estate. Plus some of that water has got to be under towns and concrete, and beavers can’t live there. Not to mention that plenty of beavers in cities and on private land are getting killed every day. So I’m going to hazard the guess that that statistic is inflated. In 2009 the NYT reported the population estimated at 30,000 beavers in the state. Which means that these remarkable animals that take three years to reach sexual maturity and breed once a year have more than doubled their population in four years.
Today, Ms. Hajduk said, there are at least 30,000 beavers, all over the state.
Wow, that’s a lot. Maybe this whole environmental movement has gone too far. We obviously brought them back too much. How many did their used to be? 29,000? Oh wait, remember those historical trapping records that showed 60 to 80 beaver per mile of stream? I wonder how many miles of stream Massachusetts has. (Gosh the internet is useful. 4320 miles of stream in the commonwealth of Massachusetts.) Lets just multiply that by the low number of 60…how many beavers would we expect if we were back to that baseline? I mean if we had done an even adequate job of “bringing them back” 259,200. Let’s be generous and just round down to 200,000.
Uh oh. By the most conservative possible calculations, Massachusetts is short 170,000 beavers!
Say it with me now:
There are liesthere are dam liesAnd there are statistics.
This morning I have too much news to tell you about. Some days I am scraping the barrel of beaver stories and some days I don’t know where on earth to start. Lets start with this update from Mike Callahan working on his ‘salmon adapted flow devices’ with our friends in Sonomish County Washington. Here’s what he sent last night.
So far so good here in Snohomish County, WA on our Salmonid-Beaver Dam passage project. Today Mike Rustay and I installed the first of three fish-friendly flow devices.
See attached picture.
Today’s site was a large culvert that already had baffles in it to help adult coho salmon migrate upstream to spawn. However, beavers decided the baffles inside the culvert would make great places to dam. they dammed it this spring and it was very difficult for the Snohomish crew to clean it out. Also during the fall and winter high stream flows a lot of woody debris floats into the culvert and gets caught which also creates barriers to fish movement.
So we needed to keep the culvert unobstructed by beavers, floated debris, and protect the culvert fence to keep from collapsing in the heavy flows. This is a very confined area for a culvert protective fence. So we decided to try to encourage the beavers to dam immediately upstream so they would not dam on the small culvert fence and block fish movement.
Mike Rustay and I installed a reinforced culvert fence with a salmonid passage. At the same site we also created two diversion dam sites on the two streams that flow into the 8 foot wide culvert. There is minimal water flow this time of year, but with the rains in late fall there are heavy stream flows and a lot of adult coho come up this culvert.
The reinforced culvert protective fence will keep any debris and all beaver damming outside of the culvert allowing unobstructed adult salmonid movement. We also installed two “diversion dam fences” 10 feet upstream of the culvert fence. These are 6 ft high fence posts with 12″ high fences. They are designed to provide easier, more attractive sites for the beavers to dam than the fence. They will also serve as log and other floating debris debris catchers during high water flows to keep the fence and salmonid passage open. Upstream of these two narrow stream channels are large impoundments which are very productive spawning and rearing areas for coho.
The culvert fence was outfitted with a One-Way door to allow adult salmon easy passage through the fence on their upstream migration. The One-Way door is made from white PVC pipes. See picture.
Late this fall when the adult coho come swimming out of the baffled culvert they will be “corralled” by a short fence (not shown in the pic). This corralling fence will funnel them directly towards the fish/wildlife one-way door in the culvert fence. This corralling fence prevents the fish from needing to search for the one-way door. They will swim upstream directly to it and get out into the open water with minimal work. There are also several debris catching fence posts outside the one-way door to help prevent woody or other floated debris from blocking it.
it was extremely exciting today to see dozens of juvenile coho swimming around the culvert fence! They were 2″-3″ long, eagerly feeding on anything in the water. Hopefully someday these same fish and many others will pass through the one-way door on the culvert protective fence on their way to spawn! Until then, keep feeding and growing! Fingers crossed.
One down, two more install sites to go over the next two days. Each site will be a different issue with a different device. I’ll keep you posted
Good work Mike and team! I love how thoughtfully these challenges are getting tackled. Personally I want a study saying flow devices actually interfere with salmon passage (instead of just reinforcing the people who assume that they do) before we get to excited about a cure – but I’m happy you are working on this. On a personal note, it is weirdly satisfying to think about Mike and Jake collaborating, since they were the two voices I relied on most heavily for our beaver battle in Martinez.
Now that we’re thinking about full circles, lets enjoy this
Other than humans, no animal has the ability to control or alter their environment like beavers do. Except when they are living in large natural bodies of water like ponds or lakes, beaver will dam streams to create a pond, or series of ponds. They use this large area of deeper water for protection from predators such as bears or coyotes. It is also used for easy access to their food supply and to transport food and building materials.
Beaver create a dam by inserting large sticks or limbs vertically in the stream bed then putting smaller ones crosswise. They fill in the gaps with mud, vines and other small sticks or plant material. As water levels rise or the water flows elsewhere, they will raise the level of their main dam or build coffer dams.
They often dig a network of canals to reach food or to easily transport it back to the main pond. Often a series of dams will create several ponds to give the colony access to more food supply. When the available preferred foods are exhausted, the beaver will abandon their lodge and move on in search of new homes and food.
Some trout fishermen are fond of beavers because the ponds they create provide the cover and food supply for trout to multiply and grow larger. Usually when hunters, trappers or hikers find a new beaver dam or colony they will make a note to return next spring with their fishing rods in hand. The ponds also create good habitat for ducks, especially wood ducks, and other birds and mammals.
This is a good start from a state that can be fairly schizophrenic in its beaver policies. The piece doesn’t mention flow devices and goes on to say that beavers damage valuable timber, but its a fairly decent beaver 101. You can read the whole thing here.
If New York is schizophrenic in its beaver management, this state is usually SOCIOPATHIC. But whatever else they may do, times do change. Even in Alabama. Yes you read that right.
While the rest of the world is preparing for evening repose, the inhabitants of the pond and preparing to take advantage of the cover of darkness.
The article makes the point that beaver ponds are good places to look for wildlife like alligators and turtles and egrets. Of course it doesn’t actually go so far as to say that they are VALUABLE but its Alabama and we have learned to take what we can get. Great job!
And just in case you think the entire world has transformed into a hazy fog of beaver adoration, lets round out the fair with a little dose of beaver stupid. Sarah Koenisberg of the documentary is in Medford Oregon and sent me an article from the local paper bemoaning some “beaver vandals” that ate up the trees that were carefully planted along the creek bank there. She asked me to find out who to talk to, which I did. Then this larger article emerged and I can see the target list of minds that need changing is longer than I thought.
MEDFORD, Oregon — A downtown Medford vandal is systematically taking down a riparian project along Bear Creek that high school kids spent four years turning from a mass of blackberries into perhaps the stream’s healthiest stretch.
Project leader Jim Hutchins says the vandal and perhaps a partner are sneaking into the 200-yard project area at Hawthorne Park and making off with a tree or bush almost nightly, much to Hutchins’ chagrin.
“This is what I woke to this morning,” Hutchins says, pointing to a sawed-off stem of an unidentifiable tree. “First they went after the cottonwood, then the alder and now the dogwood. Now I guess anything goes. It’s crazy.”
“Beaver vandalism,” he sighs.
Wow. How can folks live in Oregon, so near the beaver conference and Leonard and Lois Houston, in the beaver state and still be so misinformed? I of course wrote Jim right away about wrapping the trees and painting with sand. The article expresses dismay that wrapping trees with chicken wire didn’t work. Beavers are bigger than chickens? Who knew?
Now he wants them relocated.
“It’s not a straight forward thing, but we do have beaver handling procedures,” says Mark Vargas, the ODFW’s Rogue District wildlife biologist.
“Beavers are a nuisance problem and they cause grief with people wherever they go,” Vargas says.
Ow. It hurts when I slap my forehead that hard. Maybe I should be slapping someone else’s. Well Jim wrote me back yesterday that he might try my crazy ideas, and I introduced him to Leonard and Lois Houston. Hopefully Medford will get a little smarter, but I’m not holding my breath.
We need some good news after that much fuss. Last night we went beaver watching and were rewarded with out first on-camera look of the three kits foraging together. Usually they are too far apart for catching in the same frame. It was very high tide, so the dam was a soup, but they took advantage of the disarray to do a bit of a deep clean for lost treasures. It is like playing three games of Where’s Waldo at once, trying to keep your eye on all of them, but you should be able to do it.
Lots of whining, and a bit of sibling rivalry! Here’s last years kit (now a yearling) telling this year’s kit he isn’t going to share. I guess being an only child does make you a little selfish!
Was the kit traumatized by this harrowing scrape with his own mortality? Well about 3 minutes later the kit found something good and charged JR when he tried to investigate! I wasn’t lucky enough to get that on film, but I guess Not!
Sterling Massachusetts has a problem. Well a few of them apparently, but one problem in particular is worrying them at the moment. It starts with a B and ends with an EAVERS.
Sterling Conservation Agent Matthew Marro has begun a process to determine who owns the land where drainages have been backed up by beaver dams and causing severe flooding at Kyle Equipment Company at 14 Legate Hill Road.
Marro noted there have been welldocumented situations involving beavers and dams in the area and that he and other conservation commissioners have personally observed the creatures throughout the season.
Kyle said investigations they personally conducted in the area revealed that the drain basin serviced by a 24-inch diameter pipe located near the far corner of his property is “totally clogged by beavers.” He also noted that the wetland areas near the back of his property also contain two beaver dams which have resulted in a clogged culvert under Route 12.
Apparently Sterling is so certain of its facts that they have declared the phrase welldocumented to be a single word. Not only is that certain. That’s damcertain. All that flooding is obviously the fault of the beavers. Of course they need killing. We just need to find out who pays for it. This isn’t a complex moral dilemma that upsets us. We’re not worried about who gets killed, but the thorny problem of who gets billed.
The Kyles insist, however, that the DPW has done all it can to increase the drainage to alleviate the situation. However, something further must be done with the beavers, they said. “It is only going to take anotherth raini stormt bbeforef I hhave watert coming through my shop,” said Sean Kyle. He also pointed out that the paved area behind their shop has been destroyed and floats when the area gets flooded.flooded
The Kyles are apparently SO UPSET that they’re stuttering. I have not changed this copy a fingertip. The paper is accurately quoted in being inaccurate. (I heard a This American Life program report about local newspapers outsourcing their writing to the Philippines. Very very chilling and you should listen someday. As it is, we should probably not be critical of the writing in this article because its clearly not their native language.)
I’d rather be critical of the Selectmen and Public works director who have lived in this town and should know better. They are located 70 miles from Beaver Solutions and Mike Callahan. In less time that it would take him to listen to that TAL episode on his truck radio describing foreign fingers writing our local papers because we’re too cheap to bother with it ourselves, he could come to Sterling with his truck ready to build a culvert fence on those drains and the Kyles need never, ever flood again.
And no beavers would need to be killed. (Although several infinitives will likely continue to be split.)
Excellent photos this morning from Cheryl’s visit last night. Here are two happily munching willow near the secondary dam.
Satisfied Siblings: by Cheryl Reynolds
And this photo of a kit ponderously chewing. I love the water colors in this. Cheryl says it was a super high tide so mom must have been busy again this morning. There aren’t beavers in the Bahamas I guess, but this sure looks tropical.
Voices of what appears to be reason other than mine are always a delight on this website. Enjoy this excellent piece from Dick Sherman writing on the Danvers situation. Remember this is an area in Massachusetts very near Salem which had some beavers in its pond that were flooding their backyards, so they hired a trapper. And he killed several and then they complained the water was too stagnant. Oh and the trapper said he was prohibited from removing a dead beaver by regulations so they buried it but the turtles dug it up. Sound familiar? Maybe this will ring a bell.
Well,apparently if you have a lot of sense in Danvers, you move to New Hampshire.
My name is Dick Sherman, I grew up in Danvers as did my wife, (now in our 70s and live in N.H.). For 15 years, we lived directly on College Pond in the St. John’s Prep area on Spring Street. I can tell you about the beavers, Beaver Brook and College Pond.
In my opinion, the town is making a mistake by killing beavers and trying to control that watershed area as suggested by the residents. The area in question by Glendale Road and behind Glen Magna is a natural (God put it there a long time ago) watershed area. It feeds to Beaver Brook, which on the surface goes under Maple Street and then into College Pond.
The water table (aquifer) itself is under Maple Street. College Pond was and is a magnificent treasure, which as you know, is recognized now by the town as a conservation overlook area.
I sense from your article that the nearby residents, which once again pollute the Beaver Brook and College Pond as opposed to letting nature help out. Now you have now beavers, algae, and high water in the area. Did you not know that when you purchased, that you were in a “flood zone” and watershed area? Certainly, you did not know how beneficial it is to the ecology and to Danvers residents now and then.
Ahh thanks for writing this, Dick, but let me be honest. You must have driven your neighbors insane back on Maple Street. These people want lawns and potted plants, not actual nature. Come to think of it, you might still be driving them insane now. Maybe that’s why they ran your response in its entirety. It’s too long for a letter to the editor and too short for an op-ed. But they put in every gloriously impractical word. Maybe they wanted to watch the “fireworks”.
I especially liked this part of your letter.
This area incidentally (Spring and Summer streets) was the same and exact area that the “witches” were found as the result of eating bad rye and perhaps drinking from College Pond.
Could it be genetic?
Anyway, the residents of Danvers, in my opinion, do not “value” and protect their resources. I am not just talking about the beavers here. You should be fishing in College Pond now, or enjoying it’s former beauty, but it has been hidden away for many hundreds of years. So you develop the lands and give away this asset as opposed to protecting it for subsequent generations.
Well now isn’t that refreshing! Thanks for an excellent letter Mr. Sherman and I hope it makes a few people think differently about their watershed. And thanks for the excuse to rerun my graphic. Which has made me very happy.
Some additional news this morning. I’m late in sharing this with you which is definitely worth the listen. It’s a lovely interview with Jenny Papka of Native Bird Connections about avian vocalizations. You will remember that Native Birds joined us for the last 6 beaver festivals even our very first when we barely had 5 exhibits to rub together. It is no secret to say we are very, very fond of them. Here’s just one reason why:
Click to Listen
6 amazing minutes of radio. Great job Jenny. We are so proud of you. And why isn’t Big Picture Science looking into beaver vocalizations? That would be REALLY interesting!
Final grim read from our friend Beth of the National Wildlife Federation. She lives very near the Yosemite Fire and has some amazing observations about the massive blaze engulfing it. Read this and you might want to share.
Known as the Rim Fire, to date it has burned almost 160,000 acres (roughly the size of Chicago) with about 22,000 of those acres in Yosemite. Not surprisingly, given its immense size and threats to a cherished national park, the fire has prompted a media blitz, headlining everywhere from CNN to the BBC to Al Jazeera.
Yet almost universally missing from the media coverage, as usual? That climate change is making wildfires more frequent and more intense. As they have in past years, reporters won’t connect the dots in their main stories, treating the science that’s staring us in the face as a side story.
NPS fire crew enters the Tuolumne Grove of Giant Sequoias to establish defensible space protecting the big trees if the Rim fire advances. (Photo USFS)
Apparently Sterling is so certain of its facts that they have declared the phrase welldocumented to be a single word. Not only is that certain. That’s damcertain. All that flooding is obviously the fault of the beavers. Of course they need killing. We just need to find out who pays for it. This isn’t a complex moral dilemma that upsets us. We’re not worried about who gets killed, but the thorny problem of who gets billed.
