Category: City Reports

Pipe Dreams

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, City Reports, Creative Solutions October 28, 2011

Eastford pipe system fools beaver, keeps street flood-free

What’s going on: Eastford Public Works installed a homemade “beaver deceiver” this summer at the pond at Westford and Church roads. The beaver dam causes Westford Road to flood. The system of pipes channels water from the pond through the dam and toward a culvert that runs under Westford Road. The beaver can’t block the pipe, Public Works supervisor Ben Schmidt said.

Ahhh there is NOTHING I love to read more than a story about public works solving beaver problems humanely! Yeahhh Eastford! Of course you will remember per our discussion last week that this is not technically a ‘beaver deceiver’ and calling it one would be classified as a TYPE I error, but still it looks good from the front. I’m hopeful that the other end of the pipe is still artfully protected and that since its back east it has already survived a few rains and the beavers truly aren’t going to simly plug it up when the water level rises.

In the meantime I would just remind everyone that Connecticut is a beaver-complex state with some folks dedicated to preserving their value and others ready to exterminate at a moments notice. It takes all kinds I guess. Hopefully the good works going on in Eastford will encourage a few others to try it on their own.

Additional measures: This week, Schmidt installed a grate at the entrance to the culvert that runs under Westford Road. “Beavers are smart,” Schmidt said. “They started damming up the backside of the culvert and blocked it.” It flooded Westford Road again.

What’s next: Public works will continue to monitor the situation. “This is the most success we’ve had at stopping it,” Schmidt said.

It’s Always Elk Grove…

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports October 27, 2011

My parents called me about this exciting report Monday night. Seems the a woman in Elk Grove saw a beaver in her neighbor’s backyard! Mind you, the kind of neighbor with a stepladder to look over her back fence saw the beaver in the house next door and is worried about her safety – (so worried apparently she called the news station instead of actually going next door). The ‘beaver’ sleeps in a pile of grass all day and nibbles on her trees. It leaves droppings on their patio and it’s the ‘biggest beaver she ever saw’.

Here’s what it sounds like in Heidi’s brain when we hear a story like that. Of course, there’s the usual WTF chorus, then a scouring of the video provided. (you see no beaver tail is visible). Then a reminder that beaver droppings are sawdust and underwater and nutria droppings look more like they’re from big hamsters. Then a quick google search to see if nutria are in the Sacramento Valley. (They are.) Then the time-honored question what are the odds that a beaver would be sleeping on a back porch in the open and allowing himself to b e filmed in the day time? And finally, “It’s the biggest beaver I’ve ever seen!” Really? I just have to ask, then. How many beavers have you actually seen, Nicole?

And since the camera can’t show us the tail, I just have to ask, did the droppings you saw look like this, or this?

Well, if for some bizarre reason this is a sick or insane juvenile beaver living in a backyard (and I’ll eat a bug if it is) then it nicely proves what we all warned them about back in 2007: The Elk Grove Beaver Massacre produced an unbelievable population rebound and will cost the city more money in the long run. It should never, ever, have happened.

Is Elk Grove in the news for anything else besides beavers? Anything?

Legal Beavers

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions October 24, 2011

The Supreme Court of Texas released a Per Curiam decision on friday regarding the 7 year long Barnes v Mathis case. (Per curiam means that the justices can enter the decision anonymously, as opposed to other decisions where they have to sign their names).

Dr. Lee Roy Mathis and H.E. “Buster” Barnes own adjoining property in Anderson County. Lake Creek runs through both tracts, and Mathis’s 1,254 acre property is located upstream from Barnes’s. Mathis maintained a wetlands complex on much of his land, which attracted beavers,waterfowl, and other wildlife. Barnes’s tract was used predominantly as a pasture. In September 2006, Barnes constructed an earthen road across the creek to more easily access his back pasture. To accommodate water flow in the creek, Barnes installed two twenty-eight-inch culverts, or drainage pipes, into the structure. In October 2006, Mathis noticed an elevated water level in the creek, which he suspected was caused by Barnes’s road. By November, Mathis noticed that creek water encroached onto his property, and he asked Barnes to modify the road. Barnes later installed an additional culvert into the structure. In December 2006, Mathis returned to his property after a twelve-day absence to discover that Barnes’s road was washed away. The flooding—and subsequent drainage—also affected over four hundred acres of Mathis’s property, damaging beaver dams, affecting the wildlife population, and draining the wetlands.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the first documented case EVER where damages were sought for destruction of beaver dams caused by flooding and not the other way round. I have asked our beaver-attorney friend for an opinion on this ruling but in the mean time here’s the PDF if you’d like to check it out for yourself. To my untrained eye it looks like the first time around the jury ruled “Mr Barnes may indeed have done something wrong but its not wrong enough that Dr. Mathis gets any money for it” and now it looks like the Texas Supreme Court ruled that it should go back and be retried at the appellate level, with some clarifications of terms.

But mind you, this is Texas. So anything could happen.

People Deceivers

heidi08 City Reports, Creative Solutions, Educational May 18, 2013

I thought I’d dedicate today to the spectacularly bad attempts made around the country to ‘deceive’ beavers without actually reading any instructions or talking to an expert. Let’s be charitable and assume that at least some of these attempts are truly efforts by well-meaning folks who just don’t know any better, but I am certain that others are purposeful fails: so that DOT or DPW can throw up their hands at those awful ‘compassionistas’ and say ‘see we tried your way, but it doesn’t work. Now we have no choice but to kill them.’

: Beaver deceiver helps reduce flooding but preserves habitat:Seattle Public Utilities and the Adopt-A-Stream Foundation are putting the finishing touches on a “beaver deceiver” on Thornton Creek near Northgate.

Any discussion of faulty flow devices must of necessity include two categories: the first is simply an error in nomenclature – meaning someone installs a flow device and calls it a ‘beaver deceiver’ when its really more of a flexible leveler or castor master – these labels refer to a protected pipe that controls dam height. This is the most benign of offenses and much slack must be cut to those who wield this effort or the media who simply mislabels it or misquotes. If the device works what do we care if it is named correctly? Maybe I’ve been grading on too much of a curve for too long, but I say if it appears that there’s a batsqueak’s chance in hell that it will solve the problem, they can call it anything they want and we should classify this as a Type I error and give the installers a cookie anyway.

It’s likely the DPW intends to inspect the integrity of the “beaver deceiver” system once the water recedes and make repairs if needed. Thus they’re clearing the nightly dam installed by the beavers around the pipe. (Photo 2)

Which is not to say that the naming issue isn’t important and any beaver management expert is likely to get fairly hot under the collar if you call the wrong thing by the wrong label. (Trust me, I know.) Even now Jimmy Taylor of USDA in Oregon is fiercly working to write a paper that clarifies the different labels and puts definitions in print so that there will be some consistency in the terms. Still, a rose by any other name….Beaver beggars can’t be choosers.

Of course not all cases of mistaken identity are so benign. More egregious cases of deceit occur with Type II Errors, where we can only drop our jaws in a WTF homage. These are almost certainly deliberate attempts to fool the public, or harm the beavers, or sometimes both. Here are a few breath-taking examples of Type II Errors.

I believe there actually is a kind of Type III Error which I’ve seen more often recently. I would define it as ‘trying a little bit’. In a Type III error there seems to be some recognition of the tools for beaver management and some acknowledgment that these sometimes work, but a failure of commitment to the concept so that the tools are haphazardly employed. A perforated pipe through a dam might be a Type III error, or a short pipe with a tiny fence around it. These attempts are difficult to catagorize because it isn’t immedilately clear whether they are attempts to fool the public or the beavers or just the actions of very lazy installers. But they do deserve their own label for now. An example of this is very near by in Cordelia with a beaver colony we’ve been watching out for. And if our city staff doesn’t get out and put the filter back on Skip’s flow device soon, Martinez will become another one!

: Almost Clemson Pond Leveler in Cordelia: Cheryl Reynolds

Still learning? Here’s some basics: Flow devices noclemature.

Best night ever to be a cop in Ohio

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Environmental October 20, 2011

We all remember the colorful Ohio story of the grandma who beat a fawn to death with a shovel, and the remarkable tale of animal husbandry from the Ohio trapper who told the paper he was only going to kill the ‘soldier beavers’. Maybe you even recall the nature center that brought in the trapper to tell stories of his hilarious animal killing adventures for children and families. Ohio, allow me to be frank, is insane. So it should come as no surprise to anyone that the head line today is of shooting escaped wild animals from a preserve in Zanesville.

As daylight came to this rural area 55 miles east of Columbus people were being told to stay inside. Officers with assault rifles patrolled the area looking for the wild animals ranging from tigers and bears to cheetahs and wolves.

“We’re telling people to look around, be cognizant of what’s around them,” Zanesville Mayor Howard Zwelling told CNN Wednesday morning. “We’re being cautious about it.”

Zwelling said he got a call from the city’s safety director around 9:30 p.m. Tuesday that Terry Thompson, the owner of the farm, had set the animals free and then shot himself.

So four schools are closed, people are staying in their cars and police have spent all night shooting lions, tigers and bears. Knowing what we do of the good sportsmanship in the state we have to assume that this is the very best night ever to be a member of the thin blue line in Ohio. Imagine the tales back at the station of the lucky officer who shot a wolf on the highway not to mention the water-cooler ribbing of the poor sod who only got a camel.

Let’s not think about the fleeing, frightened creatures who may be enjoying their first disorienting hour of freedom before being gunned down by Ohio’s finest. Don’t think about the Chimpanzees or Orangutans that lived in his house either. Lets just hope that when people in every state read this story

The U.S. Department of Agriculture had revoked his license to exhibit animals after animal-welfare activists campaigned for him to stop letting people wrestle with another one of his bears. USA Today

it makes them think about this:

Ohio has some of the nation’s weakest restrictions on exotic pets and among the highest number of injuries and deaths caused by them.

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Here’s some good news to wash that icky Ohio taste out of your mouth. Fur-bearer Defenders raised money last week to install a flow device on Bowen Island In British Columbia. This morning there’s a photo essay of their efforts on facebook and a nice story in The Province.

Bowen Island residents, animal protection advocates and municipal officials teamed up Tuesday in an effort to save the island’s “nuisance” beavers from their own damming ways.

A dam on the island’s Grafton Lake — which acts as a reservoir for the drinking water of nearly 4,000 residents — has been overwrought with beavers, who have been plugging a spillway daily with an assortment of mud, sticks and other dam-making debris.

“We have to dig it out every day. It’s costing us money,” said Bob Robinson, public works supervisor for the municipality.

Robinson said it’s his job to ensure that water is supplied downstream, but like other island residents he doesn’t want it to come at the expense of trapping or killing the furry animals.

So Robinson joined a handful of other island residents and members of the Association for the Protection of Fur-Bearing Animals at Grafton Lake Tuesday with a potential solution — constructing beaver-exclusion fencing, made from timber and wire, which prevents the beavers from building dams and blocking the waterway.

Oh, and more good news comes from our beaver friends in Scotland, where the
Scottish Wild Beavers group has just been granted charity status and launched a new website. Go check it out and think about giving them some beaver love from across the pond.

It’s interesting to think that when I started this beaver campaign there were exactly two active beaver websites on the entire internet. Three if you count the Department of Public Works in Washington. Now there are nine, and when Sherri Tippie launches hers there will be ten. That’s a pretty nice proliferation, considering that trickle down that follows.

Lets aim for 20 by next year? Maybe one in Ohio?