Today’s beaver business takes us from the latte strewn streets of Seattle to the briney lobster traps of Maine. We are coast to coast here at all-beavers-all-the-time. Check out this delightful up “aren’t we noble” update from Seattle’s publicly owned power company. Apparently in addition to providing electricity City Light also purchases and preserves wetlands to protect salmon AND BEAVER!
With this acquisition, the Endangered Species Act Early Action Land Program is now responsible for over 2,712 acres to date, protecting fish habitats (mostly for Chinook salmon, but also protecting beavers, bull trout, steelhead and other species) and from pollution and destruction.
As we pass over the united states at a great speed I will just stop briefly over Minnesota to say that the reporter of the Humongous beaver article wrote me a kindly letter yesterday, ( which was surprising since I am fairly sure I was not trying to be kind). I thanked him and wrote back that there are precious few beaver advocates out his way and if he ever wanted to join the club we’d save him a seat.
Okay now onto Maine, where they celebrated the end of leftover turkey with the charming old trapper who never did it for the money and just wanted to be out in nature. Remember him?
It is unfortunate that Maine doesn’t know any other way to teach its children about nature; how to make them responsible and manage wildlife, other than by trapping. Since beavers create wetlands, augment fish and bird populations and increase wildlife, allowing these animals to maintain their habitat would improve the region’s game count rather than deplete it.
For the record, there are plenty of old-time trappers who have learned new tricks about humane wildlife management, and who make a better living solving problems than killing them.
Heidi Perryman, Ph.D., president and founder, Worth A Dam, Martinez, Calif.
Or maybe how many fingers it has…or whether there actually IS a right hand at all. Remember the beaver-dragonfly dilemma of Upton Massachusetts? They wanted the dams gone and the beavers dead but the ponds maintained to preserve the rare dragonfly. I heard from Mike Callahan that he had been out to present to the commission and they were half in favor of hiring him and half against. I guess they both got their way because this mornings article makes as much sense as any series of opposite contradictions I’ve ever not-read.
Conservation Commission members said last night they will give a beaver control specialist the go-ahead to lower the water level on the 30-acre bog by a foot over the next two weeks, 6 inches per week.
Michael Callahan of Beaver Solutions in Southampton will install a $1,280 pond leveler, a pipe system that pumps water out while keeping beavers away, over the next two weeks, but that is only a short-term solution, Conservation Commissioner Marcella Stasa said.
“Once the level is down, we have to trap all the beavers, because their inclination is to bring the level up to where it was,” she said.
Where to begin?I was excited at the beginning of this article but my hopes were well and truly dashed by the end. Seems one of the commissioners is a former trapper, which, well why shouldn’t he be on the conservation commission? Things that are dead are conserved, right? – well, preserved? After they finish paying Mike for getting in the near-freezing water and installing the pipe the former trapper has volunteered to pick them off one by one.
Commissioner Tom Jango has volunteered to trap the beavers free of charge, commission Chairwoman Christine Scott said.
Mind you, that quote is from the chair herself, which means the deep confusion in this committee runs from top to bottom. Are they keeping the beavers? Killing the beavers? Draining the pond? Not draining the pond? No one knows, certainly not the reporter who is not nearly as curious about this whole zen cohen as you might expect. Don’t you love how the flow device installation is a short-term solution but trapping is the real answer? I guess Upton thinks these are the LAST BEAVERS and once they kill off these castor-dinosaurs there will never be any others. Who has the heart to tell them?
The gnarled old trapper. The bright young scientist. The peacemaker who won’t take sides. I can’t help thinking that the commission meeting must look something like this.
Rice Creek Watershed District staffers recently received a big surprise when they learned a trapper had taken an unusually large beaver from a Blaine ditch.
An adult beaver in the wild can reach 60 pounds. This 75-pound version of Minnesota’s largest rodent was recently pulled from a section of Anoka-Ramsey Judicial Ditch 1, near a stormwater pond not far from the end of Dunkirk Court N.E. and a residential area in Blaine.
You know how sometimes you find something rare and special that no one has seen for 50 years and maybe no one will see again? Something that should be on the cover of National Geographic and explored by a team of scientists so we could understand how its rare specialness came to be? And its so gosh darn rare and special that you KILL it?
Yeah, me neither. Well, Blaine Minnesota sure does, because they’re celebrating that the trapper they hired to keep their ditches clear caught a big one. Actually, even though 75 lbs is big for an adult beaver, it’s probably not that rare. Plus its the beginning of winter and he hasn’t lived off his food cache for three months. We’ve always said that in Dad’s biggest strongest days he was 70 lbs. And when mom’s emaciated body was weighed at her death she still weighted 39 lbs. So on a good day she must have been 60, which means Dad (who was always gasp-inducingly bigger) must have been 70.
Well, this fine strong patron is gone now.
This is my favorite line from the story, demonstrating the super inteligence of the ditch supervisor who championed the assault.
People think beavers are rare because they don’t see them, Schmidt said. “They are nocturnal,” he said. “Most of their activity is dawn to dusk. They need open water to enter their lodge. Without the open water, they will die. Right now, it’s kind of panic time for them, because beavers are getting ready for winter.”
Further proof that reporters dutifully write down whatever they’re told without any applying any thinking whatsoever. “Most of their activity is DAWN to DUSK?” Is that really what nocturnal means? Isn’t most of OUR activity from dawn to dusk? Does that mean we’re nocturnal?
Or does that just mean that Ditch captain Schmidt is an idiot?
Here’s some good beaver news from a nearby M state to cleanse the palate.
There were a host of beaver articles in the past few days that deserved mention. I would call these The Good, The Bad and The Ugly but they are more like the Excellent, the Inspiring and the Whiney, which is not as catchy a title. For an excellent read I would check out Mary F. Wilson’s “Beavers in Winter” article, where she describes how our favorite species gets by in Juneau, Alaska. If her name sounds familiar, it should because she’s the co-author of the Beavers of Mendenhall Glaciar Book with our good friend Bob Armstrong.
Beavers seldom venture into the open air outside the lodge in winter, when ice covers their ponds, so for months a family of beavers breathes “indoor” air, using oxygen and generating carbon dioxide. Beaver lodges have underwater entrances, and mud seals the walls, so air exchange is effected through a ventilation hole in the roof. Apparently this roof vent is sufficient to keep carbon dioxide from building up and allow an influx of oxygen, because when researchers measured the levels of those gases inside an occupied lodge, they stayed nearly constant.
Temperatures inside a well-built lodge also do not vary much. For example, when outside temperatures drop to minus 20 degrees Celsius (about minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit), inside temperatures remain just above freezing. Thick walls obviously conserve more body heat than thin walls, so inside temperature varies more if the walls are thin.
Go read the whole thingand think about the adaptive skills of an animal that can survive at those temperatures and equally well in a bank hole on Alhambra Creek or New Mexico. Apparently Canada isn’t quite finished defending the beaver’s honor because this column from Conrad Black appeared on the weekend. (Yea, I mean THAT Conrad Black, who founded the National Post 15 years ago and is the former chairman of Brittain’s Telegraph Group of Newspapers.) Guess what he thinks about beavers?
If the beaver were a contemptible animal, it would never have been adopted and would certainly be disposable now. But it is a remarkably commendable animal, possessed of a formidable work ethic. (I can’t abide rhetorical questions but am sufficiently overcome by inter-species moral outrage to ask if anyone has ever been described as “working like an eagle” or “busy as a lion,” unless they were preying on the defenseless, or, respectively, overcome by lust or narcolepsy?)
More impressive, the beaver is a natural engineer, who not only grasps but by his own adaptive ingenuity, implements the basic principles of irrigation, flood and drought control, and in most of its elements, power generated from water courses. Apart from the honey bee, which was part of the national symbolism of France under the Bonapartes, in deference to the 500,000 Frenchmen who dutifully gave their lives in the great campaigns of Napoleon, the only other national animal that has made a direct constructive contribution to a country apart from the beaver is the elephant of India, often useful in construction and both civilian and military transport.
Hopefully all that good beaver reading will build up your immune system for the beaver-phobia displayed here by Denise Crosby, a self-professed tree lover in Illinois.
Recently a beaver destroyed a beautiful white birch growing ever so peacefully just a few feet from the back door of my family room. We’ve done stories over the years on the proliferation of deer, coyotes, bats, raccoons and the latest, skunks. But none of these fine-feathered or furry critters have the capacity to fell every darn tree in your yard. And beavers will keep chewing away as long as there is wood available, said Bob Bluett, a biologist with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.
According to Bluett, scientific data seem to indicate the beaver population has grown more quickly in Illinois than in any other state, thanks to their migration from the north, where dry summers have forced them to seek new waterways.
And they are “well adapted to all kinds of urban and suburban habitats,” he tells me. In other words, they don’t really care how much backyard lighting you have. Once the TV is off and you’ve retired for the night, they’ll feel perfectly at home chewing down the tree right outside your bedroom window.
Surprisingly Denise hasn’t responded to my helpful email telling her how to sand-paint trees. I gave her two whole days to learn in private before I committed her for mocking-fodder here. Let’s hope she and Bob are so busy looking up the resources I sent to see if they’re accurate that they haven’t had time to thank me in person yet.In the meantime lets think about that highlighted sentence shall we? “Scientific data indicates that beaver population has grown more quickly in IL than any other state.” Just fascinating! What kind of scientific data, I wonder? I mean to know one state has more beavers than another it would have to be collected on a national level, right? And since the Forestry Service isn’t counting beavers and they weren’t part of the recent CENSUS I can only think it must be numbers from USDA. Of course we know USDA isn’t counting LIVE beavers so they must be counting the other kind. Lets look at the stats for IL USDA beaver killing and see how it compares. In 2009 USDA was brought into kill 19 beavers, two with firearms and the rest with traps, which, since we’re grading on a curve, isn’t very many. I’m guessing that in 2010 might have been somewhat higher? Of course that doesn’t mean there were more beavers in IL but only means that there was greater reliance on USDA to kill them – which varies from state to state and year to year.Correlation doesn’t equal causation, as I learned in my research design class. An example? Ice cream consumption in positively correlated to deaths by drowning. So does ice cream cause drowning? (Think about it.)
So in addition to the faulty science and not giving her real solutions, the Department of Natural Resources advises her that trapping is hard work and costs a bit of money. Her thrifty son suggests shooting the beaver on the cheap. Charming lad.
Trapping can be tricky. You can apply for a license (with a couple of fees attached, of course) or turn the work over to a pro, which could run hundreds of dollars. My son said something about a .22 and a beaver hat. But Bluett points out shooting the critters is not allowed unless the animal is proving an immediate threat to you or your property.
So I tell him about the 50-pound beaver that almost killed a bulldog in the neighborhood a couple years ago. He assures me these creatures are not aggressive unless provoked; and more than likely, the pooch was the one trying to pick a fight. “Thanks for all the info,” I tell the very nice biologist. “Know thine enemy, I guess.”
Mr. Beaver, indeed, has become my foe. Not yet sure what the war strategy will be. But this is one battle I’m really sinking my teeth into.
My goodness, the entire Crosby family is thoughtful and ecologically minded!Since you love trees so much it may interest you to know that when beavers build dams they raise the water table and increase the riparian border. They also produce a natural coppice cutting when they chew trees, making the stumps grow back denser and more bushy and producing ideal nesting habitat for migratory and songbirds. I can’t think of a nicer gift to your beloved trees than a creek full of beavers.
You’ll be happy to know the website and domain names are repurchased for another year. Thanks Bruce who got us started way back in the early days! As proof of the good it does to have a grand spider’s web of a site that catches whatever beaver goodness flows downstream, I wanted to suggest you check out this from the State Parks of Arkansas blog. Seems some rangers had a kit adventure a few years back with pretty stunning results.
State Parks of Arkansas
Things started to get interesting when the lost little kit accepted an invitation to climb up on their paddle, and started using it as a diving board, no I’m not kidding, there’s a photo.
He’s so tiny! I assure you that no Worth A Dam member or beaver supporter would have let him wander off gently into that good night, but the report goes into great detail about not wanting to interfere with a sleeping fawn because its mother is going to come back for it soon. Which is true for deer – not true for beaver. Here in Martinez we have learned that Mom never lets a kit that size outside the lodge where harm could come to them without a chaperone. For one thing, with no ability to dive underwater and get into the lodge they could never get back! We never even saw kits until they were twice that size!
These were the smallest I ever saw and I only saw them on an adult they were probably about 6 weeks old. babies get a ride
The rangers brought him home and let him stay in an open carrier near the water until he decided to paddled off. Given that this is Arkansas I am heartened by how compassionate this was, and how touched these folks obviously were by the experience, but, honestly, I’m grading on a curve. The article was sent to me by an unknown retired librarian from the University of Georgia who thanked us for our advocacy! Georgia! (You know that state that suggests you keep all the beaver tails you harvest in the freezer until the government comes to give your bounty!) Okay, so there are much kinder people in the world than you might expect and you can’t judge a state by its beaver policies. (But, still, note to self, you better hope the parks department of Arkansas isn’t the one to rescue your missing toddler: because even though they might pick him up and take him home, the first time he crawls towards traffic they’re going to let him go with love!)
