Category: City Reports

Learning Curve

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Who's Killing Beavers Now? June 8, 2013

Remember the nature sanctuary in Grafton that misunderstood the meaning of the work “SANCTUARY” and trapped its beavers a while back? I wrote the chief administrator and the council and I bet a lot of other folk did too because I received several responses, including one from Mr. Karokti himself. Well it looks like the learning curve in Grafton has taken an upward slope, at least for now.

Grafton sanctuary struggles with beaver woes

A group of residents and members of the Nawautin Sanctuary Association in Grafton struggled with this issue this May when four beavers were trapped and killed by the Township. The sanctuary is a municipal property at the shores of Lake Ontario. Nawautin Sanctuary Association member Jean-Remy Emorine, who has lived near the sanctuary for the last six years, often walks his dogs at the sanctuary and watched the beavers.

“I was really upset when I heard those beavers were killed,” said Mr. Emorine, who is originally from France. “For me they are emblematic of Canada

I have taken the liberty of highlighting what I feel was the salient issue in this article. The town of Grafton did not, in fact “struggle” with this issue. Nor did the membership of the nature sanctuary debate or discuss because they were never informed. Approximately three folks had a discussion and a memo was written, a phone call was made and 4 beavers were killed. I would say the “struggle” for Grafton occurred instead at the emergency meeting where the remarkably tone-deaf decision blew up in their faces and splattered all over the media.

Never mind. They’re definitely struggling now.

“It’s unfortunate because I love animals,” he said, adding he knows there are other municipalities that struggle with similar beaver problems.

In his 25 years with the municipality, as far Mr. Korotki knows, no one has approached the Township with alternatives to trapping. Ms. Kilmer has been in contact with the Association for the Protection of Fur-Bearing Animals, which does offer other alternatives. Mr. Korotki said they will consider alternatives in the future and consult with members of the association.

Well I personally sent him info on Mike’s DVD and Sherri’s book as well as our website, so hopefully we won’t be reading that excuse ever, ever again. Now it’s Adrian’s job to provide workable consultation and nature’s job to move in some beavers to replace the ones that were assassinated.

I quite liked this little insert the paper did, although for some reason I can’t get my brain used to “Mr. Nelson”:

Now its THAT time again! Let’s hope we can get this on the local channel once more!

We wanted it natural…but not that much nature!

heidi08 Beaver Anatomy, Beaver Rehabilitation, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Dispersal May 29, 2013

West Linn police trap beaver that moved into a front-yard water feature

West Linn police thought they were going to deal with a sick animal Saturday at a home along River Street. But when they found a feisty beaver had taken up residence in a front-yard water feature, it was a whole different ballgame.

“The animal wasn’t sick at all,” said Officer Mike Francis, West Linn police spokesman. “He was just being territorial, staking his claim to the water feature.”

Thank goodness this happened in Oregon and nothing TOO bad happened to this beaver but after reading these grim details I want to cross examine these witnesses.

. “Mr. Harper,” I’d like to say in a Perry Mason voice, “Could you describe for the court your intention in putting in this water feature?”

“We wanted the yard to look natural” he’d say casually, and I’d lean closer, knowing I had the judge’s full attention.

“So natural that a beaver might move in?” I’d invite, enjoying the murmur of the jury.

“No” he’d stammer. “We didn’t want beavers. We just wanted birds, well not the kind that eat the koi. No raccoons, no beavers no turtles, we just wanted it to look natural, but not that much nature!”

And in my mind this home-owner courtroom would gasp and nod knowingly, and that’s when I’d show the video, to make sure the jury saw things my way. A scared little beaver stuffed in a hole. A crazy home-owner without an eye-dropper’s worth of compassion. And a snotty, squealing boy named ‘Maverick’ of all things.

They’d be shaking their heads by the end, and even the officer I called as witness would blush a little. Now I’d show a nice video of the little woman Sherri Tippie live trapping a beaver, soothing it and gently releasing it into a broad stream.

“You deliberately built a feature that looked natural because you wanted your yard to appear natural. Should we blame this young beaver for taking you at your word? In all likelihood the beaver would have moved on anyway, but if he didn’t you could clearly afford to hire Ms Tippie to relocate him appropriately. Instead you monopolized the afternoon of two peace officers and who might have otherwise been busy saving lives or property.’

“The beaver in question was an adolescent leaving home for the first time. Doesn’t he deserve a gentler response to his independence than this? What kind of response should the world take for Maverick when he leaves home for college and winds up staying overnight in the wrong place?”

‘Mr. Harper, would you please take a look at the back of the flag and tell me what you see.”

“A beaver” he’d whisper.

” I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you. Could you say that again for the jury.”

“A beaver” he’d snap.”But if I lived in California I wouldn’t let a grizzly bear live in my yard either!”

I’d smile with the jury to show how un-intimidated I was by his argument. “No doubt!” I’d agree. “You’ve made it clear that you don’t want nature of any kind in your natural looking yard. No birds. No beavers. No raccoons. In fact, the only kind of nature you can tolerate at all apparently is human nature. And the lowest kind of that. Fear, ignorance, curiosity, disgust. That seems to be the only nature you can bear.” I’d turn my head and leave the witness stand.

“Your honor, I rest my case”.

In my fantasy home-owner courtroom beaver justice would be served. Mr. Harper would have to pay salary for the time he monopolized the police as his personal animal control unit, and the water feature would be donated to the state, which better understands how to live with nature. 5 girl scouts would sew fabric into that snare so that it didn’t cause internal bleeding the next time the police used it and staff from PAWS would come check on that little beaver just to make sure he’s okay.

Thank goodness! I’ve been waiting to use this graphic forever!

The very good, the pretty good, the slightly good, and the ugly

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Environmental, Who's Killing Beavers Now? May 27, 2013

First we should give MORE kudos to our beaver friends at Fur-bearer Defenders who have strewn a path of beaver deception around the municipality of Mission in British Columbia just outside of Vancouver, installing 9 beaver deceivers to control flooding in culverts.

Beaver deceiver prevents dams from being built

A beaver deceiver being installed in Mission. Each unit saves the municipality thousands of dollars annually. Submitted phot

Gosh, I’m so old I can remember when Adrian Nelson had just gotten married and nervously installed his very first one after chatting a lot to Mike Callahan and scouring his DVD. And now these installs are practically a piece of cake! Delicious, effective cake that they actually talk an entire city into paying for!

The non-profit group approached the district with a simple, non-lethal alternative for managing flooding concerns associated with beaver activity: build a wire fence around the culvert intake, interrupting the beavers’ natural instinct to build where there’s current and the sound of flowing water. “They work awesome,” said Dale Vinnish, public works operations supervisor. “We don’t have to trap beavers. They moved elsewhere. They’re not causing a problem.”

The nine “beaver deceivers,” at $400-$600 apiece and built in one day, save the district thousands of dollars, because workers no longer have to pull apart dams. Previously, the municipality would break down two to three dams daily, several days a week, in addition to paying for the capturing and killing of about a dozen beavers annually.

“If we weren’t trapping, we were going in continuously to break apart the dams,” said Vinnish.

Great work Fur-bearer Defenders! We are entirely impressed that you are easily giving Washington State a run for it’s money as the beaver-management champion of the northern hemisphere. Go Mission!

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New footage from our famous San Jose beaver friends. Love the ‘urban safari’ feel of this video. Sadly if this is momma beaver, I’m not seeing any teats, and that means no silicon valley kits this year!

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Next, a nice column on ‘Extinction Events’ from Minnesota. His point is climate change, but my point (as always) is beavers!

For instance the pond created behind a beaver dam becomes the habitat for a wide variety of plant and animal species. Remove the beaver engineers and the entire ecosystem collapses.

It’s about time we start to realize the number of species that are displaced or wiped out when beavers are removed. Trickle-down economies work both ways. I wasn’t happy with this later sentence “Without the stream, there could be no beaver dam” because that’s not exactly true. I’ve heard of beaver creating ponds from tiny springs, so that the big beautiful pond becomes the only water in a desert. Certain ephemeral streams (like we have here in California that dry up in the summer) wouldn’t dry up if we had enough beavers. I kindly sent him this Chumash legend:

Author Jan Timbrook who is a curator for the Santa Barbara museum of natural history described this in her book ‘Chumash Ethnobotany” has some very interesting things to say about beavers:

“A willow stick that had been cut by a beaver was thought to have the power to bring water. The Chumash would treat the stick with ‘ayip ( a ritually powerful sbustance made from alum) and then plant it in the ground to create a permanent spring of water.”

Jan Timbrook, Chumash Ethobotany p. 180

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And on to the ugly. I’ve been sitting with this story a couple of days, but its fairly unavoidable and we better deal with it. This is the kind of negative advertising I hate, even more than I hate the Belarus story. Ultimately Americans value roads much more even than we value human life. Now every city will be more tempted to tell property owners they’re liable for beaver dams. Call me crazy, but it seems like if you’re worried about the stability of a dam, the smart thing to do is to reinforce it!

Flooding damages road in West Warren MA

Lip Service with a Smile

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Who's Killing Beavers Now? May 18, 2013

Once upon a time, in a little suburb of Ottawa, some beavers were discovered in a storm water pond near an apartment building. They weren’t very far from artist Anita Utas home, and she started to take an interest in them. When the city said the beavers would be killed she called some friends and plenty of people spoke out against it. Alarmed by the media coverage and the thousand emails, the mayor backed down, posed for this photo with the giant beaver, and Anita and her friends were heroes. Ottawa said it was going to work with wildlife interests to formulate a comprehensive wildlife plan. And there was much rejoicing!

Fast forward to 2012, when the wildlife groups had been so excited to be involved, became frustrated at their complete helplessness and marginalization on the committee and publicly resigned, saying “We aren’t giving up a seat at the table. There is no ‘table’.” A few months later, on Canada day when everyone was on vacation, the city goons ripped out the beaver lodge, swearing after objections that they had done no harm because the beavers had moved on.

Except the next day Anita filmed a mother beaver with two tiny kits, and since they had no lodge for protection they were spending the day breast feeding in a bush. And the father beaver was never ever seen again. After insisting that there were no beavers there, and then that if they were there they had never been harmed, they said the beavers must be relocated – because STORMWATER. Ever flexible and pragmatic, the white hats advocated a wildlife sanctuary that had agreed to take them. But the city insisted it would handle it themselves, and that no media or witness should be allowed to see it, but ‘just trust us – it will be fine’.

So Lily and her two kits were ‘disappeared’. And then miraculously, 90 days later video was sent to Anita of an adult beaver and a much older yearling! A note was attached explaining the other kit had lived fine, but had just dived and wasn’t visible at the moment, but see? They said. Everything turned out fine! You worried for nothing you silly goose-lover! The city waited for public attention to turn back to J-walking or childcare like it always did.

It was pointed out that unless the city had relocated those beavers by way of a time machine, there was no way in heaven or earth that those beavers were the same ones they moved. And the people who were mad before got mad again. And the people who had lied before lied again. I made a video of the event set to the soundtrack of just Paul Simon’s “Lie, Lie Lie” from the end of the Boxer, but Youtube, in its infinite copyright wisdom, took it away. If you know it, you might hum along as you watch.

Are you still with me? I know that’s a lot of back story to cover. One of the advantages of just putting down layers of evil and bullshit on top of each other over and over again, is that the story gets too long to even tell in the media. And because your story becomes too complicated to report on, the media talks about some one else’s simpler crime. Never mind, this is the Martinez Beavers website. We know all about complicated lies. I’ll get to the point.

This week, the never-awaited pretend Wildlife strategy Plan has finally been released!

Wildlife plan shows Ottawa a “dinosaur” in species protection, says group

Beavers, turkeys and coyotes will still be killed at the hands of the city despite 11 recommendations laid out in a draft wildlife management strategy early this week, charged a local conservation group, Wednesday.

“Here’s Ottawa continuing to kill the majority of beavers,” said Donna DuBreuil, president of the Ottawa-Carleton Wildlife Centre.

DuBreuil, who is also a spokesperson for the Ontario Wildlife Coalition, walked away from a working group on the document last September after more than a year passed without a stakeholder’s meeting.

“There was no support from the other agencies,” she said. “They have fought for years any progress.” The policy is now up on the city’s website for public consultation.

Here I did the heavy lifting for you. Maybe you have something to say about this excerpt?

With respect to beavers, opportunities appear to exist for the employment of “beaver deceivers” to protect some infrastructure (especially road and rail culverts), with associated ecosystem benefits and the potential for long-term maintenance cost savings. Seven beaver deceiver demonstrations sites have been established by the City. However, the City can find no precedent or support for the use of beaver deceivers in engineered stormwater management ponds, and the City’s stormwater engineers have concluded that they may interfere with the performance and maintenance of those facilities.

Because, you know, storm water is SO different from the other kind of water. And those 5 photos sent to us by that guy Mike Callahan of installations in storm water ponds could have been photo shopped. He’s not even Canadian. And what kind of name is ‘Beaver Solutions‘ anyway? There’s only one solution to beavers. And everyone knows it.

So help our Canadian friends and send your comments about how flow devices work and beavers create habitat HERE. As part of the plan they’re proposing hiring a 100,000 dollar a year wildlife biologist to handle these issues in the future. Smart thinking. Get an expert on staff to do it.

We wouldn’t want to put elected officials in voter jeopardy, right?

Bring in the Calgary?

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions May 13, 2013

Calgary’s Busy Beavers

Armed with incisors that don’t stop growing and a tail that everyone knows for a much different, definitely more delicious reason, the North American Beaver is quite the amazing critter. Using those incredible teeth, the beaver will chew down a tree in only a few hours that took years to grow. The beaver will then use that tree to build a dam, sometimes longer than a kilometer in length. As water pools behind the newly created dam, a pond is created. The water gets deeper and the pond grows larger, giving the beaver better access to the forest and trees beyond. A beaver is safest in the water, once on land it is incredibly vulnerable to predators like coyotes or wolves. So as the pond grows, so does the beaver’s safety net.

Isn’t it nice to read a story about beavers that isn’t about whether or not to kill beavers? And one published with actual photos of actual beavers and not otters or nutria or muskrat? Calgary is about 10 miles north east of Vancouver (everything in Canada is so far apart!) but they’ve clearly benefited from the fur-bearer defenders education. The article even mentions the park system wrapping trees!

With so much force, it’s no wonder that in our parks, such as Carburn, metal fencing has been placed around many of the trees to protect them from the ever-growing teeth of our must powerful rodent. As the family of beavers in Carburn Park eat their way through what trees haven’t been fenced off, it’s only a matter of time before the young kits found there, move on to start their own lives and their own ponds. It takes only the sound of trickling water to trigger the construction of a dam. With more dams, come more ponds and wetlands which benefits so many different animals. As they flock to the new, lush habitat, you have to wonder if they ever say thank you to the mighty beaver.

The article ends with this lovely photo by someone named Brendan Troy, who has clearly been keeping a close eye on these beavers. It makes me remember so fondly our 2008 kits and how much fun it was to watch them wrestle. I sure hope we have two this year, although the new little one hasn’t shown his face again all week! Which makes me realize that those 3 seconds of video were a very, very lucky fluke!

And speaking of our own beavers, they were a hot bed of activity last night. This time of year always makes it so easy to see so many family members! Even though we never saw the new kit, we saw plenty of action, including this. Since the new adult has appeared, we’ve been seeing more conflict moments between the beavers. last night I was finally able to catch one on film. You can see the argument is pretty half-hearted, ownership gets asserted and no one gets hurt.