Category: City Reports

Johnston Iowa…changing the rules one beaver at a time!

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Who's Killing Beavers Now? January 21, 2012

You’ll be relieved to know that the city council of Johnston, IA has voted to change the rules that prohibit trapping and relocation of beaver and have ‘voted to trap’ one nuisance beaver.

One pesky beaver won’t be a problem for the city of Johnston much longer.

On Tuesday the Johnston City Council approved a revision to the city ordinance for

Recently, a beaver has been wreaking havoc along the aptly named Beaver Creek.

City Administrator Jim Sanders said the current city ordinance did not allow for the city to trap the beaver and release it elsewhere.

I just have to ask. What on earth makes you think there’s only ONE beaver? Beavers aren’t known for living the single life in hermitage. And why does this article talk about permission to relocate with no indication of anything but trapping? I guess death is a kind of relocation….”the undiscovered country from who’s born no traveler returns” sort of thing

The revised ordinance, which was based on a similar ordinance in Urbandale, allows for trapping by a governmental unit to capture animals which are creating a public nuisance as a means of protecting public and private property. “I do believe a trap is a great way to relocate,” Matt Brown said of the ordinance. The council agreed to waive the second and third reading of the ordinance and approved publishing the ordinance.

Oh well. if Urbandale is doing it it MUST be okay. I mean, it’s not like its winter or anything. Or 6 degrees today in Johnston. I guess these beavers have been painstakingly making a food cache to withstand the freeze and when you ‘relocate them’ they’ll starve and die. You’re not doing something cruel and inhumane or anything.

And since its a new ordinance, there are no standards or requirements or laws about how to do this. No pesky rules about what kind of traps to use. No hancock’s for you. I’m sure you’ll get a snaggletoothed trapper to take out ‘the’ beaver with a snare or something. If he doesn’t die outright, he probably will starve in his new home before he dies of internal bleeding. Not to mention all the kits you’ll orphan by taking out their Dad or Mom. Hey maybe mom’s pregnant too already, so you might get an effective beaver abortion?

Well, I’m sure Iowa knows what its doing. We let them vote first, so they must be wise. They wouldn’t just change the ordinance for nothing would they?

Lands Council at the Capitol

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Environmental January 19, 2012

Check out Amanda Parrish giving testimony at the state house about HB2349. Here’s a little taste

BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF WASHINGTON:

5 NEW SECTION. Sec. 1. The legislature finds that beavers have

6 historically played a significant role in maintaining the health of

7 watersheds in the Pacific Northwest and act as key agents in riparian

8 ecology. The live trapping and relocating of beavers has long been

9 recognized as a beneficial wildlife management practice, and has been

10 successfully utilized to restore and maintain stream ecosystems for

11 over fifty years. The benefits of active beaver populations include

12 reduced stream sedimentation, stream temperature moderation, higher

13 dissolved oxygen levels, overall improved water quality, increased

14 natural water storage capabilities within watersheds, and reduced

15 stream velocities. These benefits improve and create habitat for many

16 other species, including endangered salmon, river otters, sandhill

17 cranes, trumpeter swans, and other riparian and aquatic species.

18 Relocating beavers into their historic habitat provides a natural

1 mechanism for improving the environmental conditions in Washington’s

2 riparian ecosystems without having to resort to governmental regulation

3 or expensive publically funded engineering projects.

In case you ever wondered, this is why Washington makes California look like beaver-barbarians. Amanda does an excellent job and even fields a very annoying question about fecal colliform from a senator that says he used to swim where beavers ‘did their business’ and knows its an issue. Here’s a picture of the ‘issue’.

Oh, and Jon ran into a channel 2 van filming the primary dam at 5:30 this am who apparently wanted to know if “We were worried about the lack of water in the creek”.

Now news cameras are coming to film the lack of water behind the dams?

Beavers: High-tech Version

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions January 17, 2012

So it turns out that I was ‘delightfully wrong’ again, with my thought that lowering the intake would lower the pond level. (In my defense I would say that Jon convinced me that the height of the ‘suction’ determines how much water is drained), but Mike Callahan gave this explanation, echoing Dave Scola’s summary of what Skip Lisle told him.

When a beaver dam pipe is installed through a beaver dam to control the pond level the primary factor that determines the pond level is the highest part of the pipe. With most beaver dam pipes the highest part of the pipe is where the pipe goes through the dam (e.g Flexible Pond Leveler™ or Castor Mastor™ with a Round Filter). See diagram below. The Clemson Pond Leveler has a standpipe positioned behind the beaver dam. The height of the stand pipe determines the pond level with that flow device.

In all these examples, gravity drives water through the pipe. Since water seeks it’s own level, the water level inside the pipe is always equal to the pond height. When the pond level rises above the high point in the pipe, water will flow through the pipe. If the pond level drops below the high point of the pipe during a dry period, then the pipe will stop flowing until the pond level rises enough for it to flow again. There should be no siphoning. The pond level determines if water flows through the pipe.

The diameter of the beaver dam pipe(s) need to be large enough to carry the flow of the entire stream most of the time. Beavers only raise the height of their dams in response to water flowing over the top of the dam. When the pipes are properly sized the beavers are unable to raise the height of their dam because the pipe(s) have created a permanent leak, keeping the water level down at a safe level. Very large storm events will flow over the top of the dam and the pond will only temporarily rise a little bit before the pipe(s) return the pond to the goal level. The pipe(s) should be set at a height in the dam to account for these minor pond level fluctuations of 6 – 12 inches.

So there you have it, the highest point of the pipe (and not the lowest) determines pond height. Which wasn’t changed during this recent re-filtering episode. As long as they rebuild the secondary dam everything should be fine and we shouldn’t worry. And since we’re on the topic I thought I’d post the graphic about flow devices I made for Sunday’s meeting.

Watershed moment, indeed!

heidi08 Beaver Art, Beaver News, Beavers, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, Why We Care June 20, 2021

Wow. Yesterday was a dazzling blur, and I’m still trying to feel my way through it. We woke up early to pick Michael Pollock up at the train station, then drove to the meeting at Occidental where we found a room full of 20+ folks I had been emailing for the past year from various government and environmental agencies all ready to work hard, talk about beavers and change the way folks saw the role of beavers in watershed.

Some of them I knew, like Brock, Rick, Lisa and our Tahoe friends, but some were a delightful introduction to someone I had swapped email with but never met. It was a positive, knowledgeable, cheerful, pragmatic and very intriguing group. Michael found out at the last minute that he lost travel funding so Worth A Dam made the decision to pay for him to come down. I figured that having him there would really make a difference and was worth the train ticket. Brock and Rick are kicking in too.

The meeting was well facilitated by the OAEC’s director Dave Henson, and started with introductions and background. Then Rick and I reviewed the historical distribution paper and talked about where beaver belonged. Pollock made the excellent point that he couldn’t think of another instance where government agencies were relying so heavily on a 70 year old paper, and we all talked about how to change the mindset of today.

Then he presented his data from the current work which is looking particularly at beavers and steelhead, having pretty handily answered any Coho questions. After which we were treated to a delicious lunch, mostly grown on site, and a tour of the gardens. I chatted with our Tahoe friends about their upcoming grant project to get funding for school presentations and their 501.3(c) application.

After lunch we talked about obstacles and made schemes for the work that needs to be done to get a beaver management plan at CDFG that recognized beaver’s incredible assets, acknowledged the damage done to habitat and wetlands by their removal, and required that certain steps be taken to try and solve the problem humanely before trapping. Then we went around the room and discussed what we had taken from the day and what we were going to do next to advance our goals.

Somewhere in the day, Eli Asarian agreed to do the hydrology graph for our article, Lisa gave me a present of a lovely antique postcard from her grandmother, Rick gave me an adorable and entirely fitting ornament of a beaver curled up in a gift box, and Pollock gave me a series of frames containing the historic 1930 article from Popular Science about beavers on Mars – along with the most whimsically charming beaver card I believe I will ever see that he bought in Montana. Here’s the Monte Dolack painting that it’s from.

Afterwards there was dinner, conversation, and wine before a stroll under a brightly jeweled cold and clear starry sky that poured the Milky Way right onto our car.

Chuck James, the archeologist who found the remnant beaver dam all those years ago and kick started the historic paper with his efforts, followed us back to Vallejo before heading off to Redding), and we got home sleepy and dazzled from the day. After a chat by the fire and look at the giant beaver skull (which Pollock had always wanted to see) and the scrapbook of our first year’s beaver story, (which he was less eager to see but he just had to look at to ‘get’ Martinez story), we brought him back to the train station where he embarked on another 22 hour journey home.

(My lost weekend was unbelievable, but his has to be something out of Salvador Dali.)

Well 2012 might not be the “year of the beaver” but I am more hopeful than ever before that big things are moving and shifting on the beaver front. This is as good an opportunity as any to thank the literally thousand of helpers that have cared about our beavers, cared about beavers in general, or taught us valuable lessons along the way.

It is said that the journey of a 1000 miles begins with a single step but when I finally fell asleep last night it felt more like we had just taken a series of sprinting leaps.

California Working Beaver Group Meeting at OAEC

Flavors of Stupid

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Who's Killing Beavers Now? January 14, 2012

So the director of public works assures me that they didn’t lower the pipe and that the pond will be the same height. Seeing that the filter is underwater I would be entirely uncomforted by this reassurance EXCEPT for that I had a profound realization at 3 am that changed my outlook entirely.

Bear with me here, but before they reinstalled the filter the pipe had been laying directly on the pond floor since the big washout in March. So all of spring and all of summer the pond was ‘controlled’ by a pipe placed at ground level. Although we saw Reed try and plug the pipe on the anniversary of mom’s death, it wasn’t until Dad came back in August that it stopped flowing.

Which means that even if they DID lower the pipe the pond won’t be any lower than last summer. Which is reassuring.

I went down this morning to check on the recovery expecting fierce rebuiding and maybe a red cross unit. I saw two beavers munching, a sleepy night heron, and no work done whatsoever. The tide was high so the secondary was mostly covered but you could still see the gash and nothing had been done to restore it. They clearly have their own pace at these things, even when we humans panic. Alright. We’ll sit tight.

Martinez has no monopoly here. Lots of stupid beaver news around the country and beyond this morning. Remember Upton, MA the city with the rare dragonfly that wanted to kill its beavers without ruining it’s special bugbog? Well they paid Mike Callahan to install a pipe to lower the pond, paid for the conservation commission former trapper to renew his license and kill two beavers and now are reporting that the pipe will keep the other beavers away. (Like Garlic?) Given the fact that I wrote the conservancy and the paper many many times that this was untrue, and the fact that they wrote me back so you know they read it, we will have to attribute this pretend conviction to willful ignorance and let Upton go with love.

Michael Callahan, of Beaver Solutions in Southampton, installed a pond-leveler which pumps water out of the bog while keeping beavers away.

A second bit of stupid comes from Scotland where there’s been rumors that they might just let the free beavers on the Tay stick around and do their thing. Paul Ramsay and friends did such a good job slowing down the massive beaver trapping that they might have escaped with only the zoo-death of Erica to show for it. Apparently the Scottish Game Keepers association is very alarmed at that idea and is ‘gamely’ offering to help do away with them.

One farmer in Angus is having to fell beaver lodges weekly on an adjacent burn to prevent large-scale flooding, with the animals regularly raising the water level by over a foot. “If I wasn’t having flood problems, I would be happy for the beavers to stay, but I don’t honestly see how we can carry on with it,” he said. “They have caused significant damage.”

Finally, a BEAVER-TRAPPING LOTTERY IN OHIO. (No I’m not kidding) Apparently they have so many compassionate humans that offer to protect their streams from beavers that they have to hold a lottery to decide who should be lucky enough to get to do it. Unbelievable. I have never felt closer to the Buckeye state than I do at this moment.

The city of Mansfield will hold a lottery card drawing for controlled beaver trapping at Clear Fork Reservoir. Two units will be available, a north unit and a south unit. Each successful trapper may have one assistant. Interested trappers may apply by mailing a 4 x 6 inch post card to Gary Foster, at 2678 Gass Road in Mansfield, 44904.

On a final note the website has been acting up lately and you probably encountered trouble loading pages. I’m told that it’s likely a ‘cache’ problem and have temporarily shuffled the home page down to holding only the last three posts to adjust for it. I spoke to our good old friend Scott Artis yesterday who is off bravely embarking on a new career in Bakersfield and he kindly said he’d look at it this weekend. Thanks Scott and let’s all keep our fingers crossed.