Category: City Reports

A Cautionary Tale…

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Who's Killing Beavers Now? March 28, 2012

Brace yourselves. This is a horrible story. I intensely dislike this story – no let’s be honest, I hate this story. Seems some private property along Orrington Rd. in Bangor Maine was owned by a man with a soft spot for beavers. So far so good. For all the reasons we talk about every day he let some beavers build a dam on his land and create some wetlands. When the city wanted him to get rid of them, he resisted. Of course he received the usual benefits of more birds, more fish and more wildlife. About 10 years ago there was a massive washout of the dam and the flooding caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to nearby roads. The property owner was stiffly reprimanded by the city and he- to his credit- nobly responded by installing a flow device.

The flooding Friday night was in the same area that washed out on May 23, 2001, when a beaver dam failure washed out a half-mile stretch of Swetts Pond Road and created a gully at least 10 feet deep at the entrance of Cemetery Road.

A device called a “beaver deceiver,” which resembles a culvert, was installed after the last major flooding a decade ago, but has since failed, White said.

“It’s a culvert that we placed in the dam to control the level of the dam,” the town manager said. The device now “is completely visible and it’s completely jammed full of sticks,” which caused it to stop regulating the water levels, Stewart said.

Ugh. The first thing attentive readers will notice is that this device was not in fact a beaver deceiver, since it was a pipe designed to lower dam height. Okay naming issues happen all the time. Let’s keep reading. The pipe was found stuffed full of mud and sticks. Hmm. If it was stuffed full that must mean it had no protection? No roundfence to keep the beavers from plugging up the pipe?

So I wrote the reporter about the issue. She wrote back and said that the pipe HAD a filter at both ends and that over the years it had decayed enough to give the beavers access and eventually failed – meaning they plugged up the pipe, and the water backed up higher than the dam could hold with the spring thaw and the washout did the rest.

“When the beavers built the dam they created an environment for other wildlife to use” that falls under state and federal protections, Fire Chief Stewart said

Did I mention how much I hate this story? This is one of those rare situations where so many people did the right thing and it still turned out horribly. Mind you it would have been nice if the landowner checked the filter once in a while or paid a 16 year old to do it. Flow devices don’t require MUCH maintenance, but they don’t last forever and you will need to do an ‘eyeball check’ at least every year! Especially when you know the area is vulnerable to flash storms that can wipe the heck out of beaver dams and roads because it’s already happened! Of course now the land owner has given up the beaver defense and is hiring a trapper to come remove the little culprits ASAP.

Larry Pelletier told town selectman Monday night he’ll hire a trapper to remove the colony of beavers on Swetts Pond Road. He says the town will do everything it can make sure this doesn’t happen, again.

Never happen again – as in no beavers will be allowed near a road ever again and we won’t put our faith in some crazy beaver deceiver ever again. I hate hate hate this story but I suppose the part of it we should learn from is that just because a flow device was installed a decade ago doesn’t mean the beaver challenge is solved forEVER, and we still need to pay attention to conditions and be proactive.

We need good cheer after that. Check out Gary Bogue’s be-nice-to-beavers blog this morning for comfort!

Nothing Could Be Finer…

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Festival, Who's Killing Beavers Now? March 27, 2012

The beavers are on the warpath in North Carolina, kicking ass and taking names building dams and taking trees along the 70 mile stretch from Cary to Greensboro. This picture was snapped by someone enjoying Bond Park and sent to a columnist who wrote that the beavers were ‘being relocated’, which I’m sure you understand as well as I do. (You know like when your parents told you that puppy went to ‘live on the farm’.)

I did a little searching for the Beaver Man and found the number is linked to the home of a 77 year old man in Stantonsburg NC. No business listing but his (?) son is listed as the rifle safety coordinator for the North Carolina Trappers Association, so that’s nice. Gosh, I can’t tell you how surprised I am that someone with the name ‘beaver man‘ on his truck turns out to be a trapper!

Well apparently they have lots of feelings about beavers in NC because look at this clip from Greensboro where they are worried that beavers will ruin their water quality.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but are you saying that this town rips out beaver dams over and over, tipping mud and silt and debris into the water again and again and then worries about water quality? Apparently the terms ’cause’ and ‘effect’ are not well understood in the area. Dear, challenged Greensboro. Don’t you know that beaver dams are sometimes called the ‘earth’s kidneys‘ because their filtering actually improves water quality?

Well, the benefits of beavers bandwagon may not have reached North Carolina yet, but it certainly has been making the rounds. Yesterday I received a call from Guelph, Ontario about printing my letter to the editor, a call from Maine from someone who wanted to save some beavers in the city park and start their own beaver festival there, and an email from Kentucky where a certain young stopmotion filmmaker we are fond of spent an hour with a reporter walking through bulldozed beaver habitat and talking about their benefits to the ecosystem.

To paraphrase for our friends in North Carolina: the arc of restoration may be long but it bends towards beavers!

Three more good things:

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions March 26, 2012

Beaver Town: Residents Coexist With Wildlife

Photo Credit: Steven David Johnson via Flickr

(ANIMAL NEWS) OREGON — The town of Corvallis, Oregon has decided to protect beavers residing in Dunawi Creek, right next to a local popular park. The park’s fields frequently flood from the beaver’s damming. However, an engineer team with support of the community is finding a way to coexist with the beaver’s natural behavior, instead of getting rid of them. Read on to learn how communities can live peacefully amongst animal neighbors. — Global Animal

Let’s start Monday off on a bright note! What an adorable picture! This feel-good beaver-tale comes from Corvalis Oregon, south of Portland where there are plenty of beaver fans among football goers. I’ve been reading something about this story for at least two weeks now as the city is making sure to get maximal promotional value for its kindness. Now it’s an AP story which is even better press than Martinez ever got. Good for them.And good for beavers!

Corvallis parks officials have decided that solving flooding caused by beavers at a local park will take a little engineering of their own. The Gazette-Times reports that for years beavers have caused flooding at the softball fields at Sunset Park from damming the Dunawi Creek. But now parks officials are planning to install pipes to keep the water in ponds at a manageable level.

Maintenance supervisor David Phillips says they considered removing the animals, but that moving the critters may not sit well with the community by Oregon State University, where the mascot is a beaver. Phillips says they “decided we should try and see if we can live with the beavers, this being a Beaver town.”

Mind you an earlier article reported that what they had put in was actually a 15 inch pipe with an elbow – so that the water drains into the elbow until the pond’s a certain height and then it stops until the water rises. No protection on the intake. Which is nice if the beavers don’t plug the pipe since the opening isn’t blocked in any way. The article describes the city as having a “team of engineers”. I’m sure they thought of this.

The beaver-gods must be smiling down on us this Monday because two other amazing things happened before I fell asleep last night. Worth A Dam received a last minute invite to the 100th anniversary celebration of Girl Scouts at the Alameda County Fairgrounds. (As in 20,000 girls and their families do some art and learn about beavers.) And I finally persuaded the iconic beaver author Hope Ryden (of the much beloved Lily Pond) to talk with me on Agents of Change. Since the subtitle of her book is “Four years living with a family of beavers” I’m thinking we’ll have LOTS to talk about! Stay tuned!

These Things I Know to be True…

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Educational, In the News, kits March 14, 2012

Baby animals are cute. Tiny kittens, fuzzy rats, baby wombats. Lets face it: baby everything’s are cuter than what they eventually grow up to be. We were cuter when we were babies. Baby animals are cute even if the adults versions are scary or scaly or carnivorous. It may be in the evolutionary best interest of baby animals to be cute so that their parents want to see them and take care of them – and that if their parents get lost or killed we agree to take over! I’m prepared for the ubiquitous “awwww” factor when viewing baby animals. This ain’t my first rodeo and I’ve been around the baby animal block a few times before.

But this is different.

No bunnies or puppies could prepare a person for this image. Take a moment to look at that startled face, curled tail, the webbed toes , and those little fingers clutching her hand. This is a baby beaver, called a kit and recently donated with her two sisters to the Chehaw Wildlife Center by the good folks at DNS (who probably killed her family). The article says they were found when the ‘dam’ they were living in was destroyed, so clearly we’re dealing sophisticated beaver minds.

I’m saying “her” because of their names, Molly, June and Penny, but there’s actually no telling if they knew enough to check the gender before they slapped the names on them. They clearly didn’t know anything about their development because this article says they’re “6-8 weeks old” – which unless they’ve been starved for 4 of those weeks, is absolutely impossible. I would be very surprised if they were more than 2 weeks old, and looking at how wet they are in the next two photos it is clear that they aren’t producing (or using) their own castoreum and no one at the ‘education center’ is waterproofing them or drying them off in the mean time.

Two of the kits will remain in their care to be used in educational programs – which, if the caretakers come to realize that these are babies and need to nurse for 6 more weeks and be treated with waterproofing or at least dried off with a cozy towel then they might live long enough to help. Certainly Georgia needs education about the role beavers play in the ecosystem and their importance for rivers and streams. Georgia is the state where the Clemson Pond Leveler was invented lo these many years ago, and certainly has a few folks who know a thing or two about beavers. But its also a state where they paid a bounty for tails and encouraged folks to keep them in their freezer until officials could get around to paying for the deaths. So it’s safe to say they need some education.

No word yet on the fate of third kit, and that’s a little creepy in itself. I will write them with some information and hope for the best.

UPDATE: Good News from the Responsible Folks at Chehaw….

Thank you for your resources! I know our Education Coordinator, Jackie, has been in contact with several zoos and rehabilitation centers (including your own) trying to make sure our beavers receive the best possible care! As an AZA accredited Zoo, they have received both expert veterinary and daily care. They will indeed play an important role in educating the public about ways to coexist with beavers and other native animals. I will make sure Jackie receives these links.

We received the beavers over four weeks ago and were told they were about 2-3 weeks old at that time. Before deciding to acquire the beavers, we carefully considered their husbandry needs as both kits and adults. While I cannot attest for their care before they arrived, I can assure you that all of their needs are now being met. They are being bottle fed around the clock with rehab-recommended formula (from the care sheet on your website). Their bottle feeding schedule and implementation of solid foods was researched through a number of different zoos and rehab facilities. They have even begun to eat solids including Mazuri Rodent Pellets, carrots, and apples. The current temperature here in southwest Georgia is about 80 degrees during the day, and after each swim, I can assure you they are thoroughly towel dried. They are regularly checked by our staff veterinarians and have been accurately sexed as female. As for the third kit, she will find a wonderful home at another zoo with a colony of beavers. Hopefully all three will help educate people about living with beavers.

Feel free to call us if you would like to further discuss the care of our beavers. I will leave you with the contact information of our Education Coordinator. Thanks for your care and concern!

Not to be accused of regional bias, LK offers this local example of beaver misinformation in yesterdays SF Gate photo identification contest, in which we are assured the photo is of a beaver “Swimming on its back”

To which I can only reply that this is a ‘beaver’ in much the same way as the Iraq war was an excellent use of American resources and after 5 years of publishing articles on the Martinez Beavers the SF Gate should know better!

And some really good news comes from Oregon where Jimmy Taylor (perhaps the one of two folks at the USDA with a favorable impression of beavers) will be presenting on thursday about beavers at the Alsea Watershed Alliance in his two hour talk titled “Understanding beavers here in the Beaver state.”

And this final note from Guelph where the mayor wrote me back and assured me she had lead volunteer groups to wrap trees in the past and would continue to do so in the future! Nice to be published in Canada!

Assorted Beaver Goodness

heidi08 Beaver Rehabilitation, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, Recent Sightings March 10, 2012

Today’s post has turned out to be a smorgasboard of beaver tales, so take a little bit of everything and when you find something you love go back for more! This morning I should start by saying I saw two beaver from the footbridge, and they swam around each other and even did a brief ‘push-match’ before ducking out of sight. Our two fancy hooded mergansers flew in and made a nice landing for a second act, and the mallards gave them wide berth. I saw new people photographing and we chatted. They had recently moved here from Spain and had read about our beavers on our website. How’s that for cosmopolitan beavers? That made it impossible to resist posting this again!

Green_Acre_Radio_Urban_Beavers.mp3 Here’s a lovely beaver radio program from Green Acres Radio in Washington. It talks about volunteers planting trees for beavers, which apparently is allowed in many cities that aren’t ours.

Every spring urban beavers come to a hidden park south of the Northgate Mall. They come to build dams. Most of the dams are appreciated by the humans they’re forced to co-exist with, but not all.

“As you see it’s right near the culvert here so Seattle Public Utilities has to take it out every time. But they’re moving around and I’m sure they’ll be moving into other natural areas as well.” Ruth Williams is a volunteer forest steward at the Beaver Pond Natural Area. Once called Park 6, the area has been transformed by beavers into a thriving wetland. The dams beavers build hold back water, making ponds that attract wildlife. The pond filters and cleans rainwater. Williams points to a large pile of branches in the middle of the pond. “That’s the lodge right out there. Yeah, the beaver lodge. And then the main dam, the first dam, is right over here.”

Fellow volunteer Frank Backus says, “They’re really doing what the watershed needs, a way of holding back the water so it doesn’t go rushing down and cause flooding down below.

Oh Washington! Such beaver wisdom in flagrant display! Even your volunteers are smarter than our scientists! Well I guess all of Washington isn’t that advanced because there was some tree vandalism. But listen to what the program suggests as a solution – EDUCATION!!!!!!!! Imagine that!

This next delightful read is about a Canadian ambassador’s introduction of beaver to China and will make you smile several times. I especially like the confusion about what a beaver IS.

Beaver Tales: Brian Evans, the Pursuit of China and the Perils of Beaver Diplomacy

Paula Simons

The University of Alberta Press has just published Evans’ new book, a surprisingly and delightfully funny autobiography called Pursuing China: Memoir of a Beaver Liaison Officer. My Saturday column profiles Evans, his remarkable life, and his life-long love affair with all things Chinese – here’s Evans’ account of how he became Canada’s official Beaver Liaison Officer, and saved Canada from the threat of national disgrace.

What could Canada offer? Well, it could keep to its tradition of following the American example and offer animals for the Beijing Zoo. But what kinds of animals?

What better than the beaver: Castor canadensis , dammer of rivers, felter of hats, prodigious breeder, and the symbol of Canada? Surely the Chinese, schooled in subtlety, would not fail to get the point. Cast your beaver upon Pacific waters, it was thought, and they will come back as pandas. Of course, we were offering one of nature’s most prolific creatures, known to China since the days of Beijing Man, in exchange for one of nature’s most reticent ones. But then, it was that sort of thinking that gave us the sixty-three-cent dollar.

Go read the whole thing, it’s wonderfully done and will teach you some excellent history! Not to mention that learning about Chinese attitudes towards beavers will get you ready for tomorrow’s treasure on the podcast interview with Michael Pollock, who in addition to studying beavers and coho and steelhead and streambeds ALSO went to study beavers in Mongolia!

Tired yet? Wait, there’s more. First an update on our new famous beaver friend in the NorthEast. We had a good chat about her beavers and her neighbors who aren’t loving them; she bought Mike Callahan’s DVD and I got the two of them talking about the one pond she’s worried about near her driveway. She posted about our exchange here. We talked lodges, wildlife and wetlands as well as when to keep an eye out for new kits! She says she already has seen a dramatic difference in birds and wildlife!

Just one more story to go and this is a heartwarming tale of beaver rescue from near Portland OR. Nice to see a family taking care of their furry neighbors and I’m thrilled that Audubon agreed to help out!