Category: Educational

Beaver Restoration means River Restoration

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Educational, Environmental October 17, 2014

West Coast Beaver evangelism coming to a state near you soon. Don’t miss the chance to hear about beaver restoration from the heavy weights whose research made this all sound possible. Hey, if you’re in California why not make a Beaver vacation out of it? Stop in Weed for their full blast of wisdom then toodle up the coast for the 4th annual State of the Beaver Conference the following week! There could be an entire fortnight of beavers!

Five interactive workshops focused on the use of beaver in aquatic restoration will be offered from January through April, 2015. Workshops are intended for land owners/managers, and restoration funders, reviewers, and practitioners who are actively involved in aquatic ecosystem restoration. There will be an opportunity to sign up as a peer reviewer of the draft Beaver Restoration Guidelines at each of the workshops, or request to be a reviewer by e-mailing Janine_M_Castro@fws.gov.

Locations and Dates:

• Everett, Washington, January 14th

• Portland, Oregon, January 21st and 22nd

• Weed, California, February 12th

• Juneau, Alaska, April 14th

Presenters:

Michael M. Pollock, Ph.D., Ecosystems Analyst, NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center

Chris Jordan, Ph.D., Mathematical Ecologist, NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center

Janine Castro, Ph.D., Geomorphologist, US Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA Fisheries

Gregory Lewallen, Research Assistant, Portland State University

Mary Ann Schmidt, Director, Environmental Professional Program, Portland State University

Go here to register or here to download the flier and share with your friends.

Beavers Far and Wee

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Who's saving beavers now? October 14, 2014

Beaver fence aims to stop pathway flooding in Fish Creek

A beaver appears to be missing a paw from a trapping mishap in Fish Creek Provincial Park. (Ingham Nature Photography )

Calgary officials are trying out a new way to manage beavers that are causing problems in Fish Creek Provincial Park.

The rodents keep packing mud and logs against a culvert in a city-owned storm pond. If left, the dam would cause the pond to overflow and flood a popular pathway.

In the spring, the city’s water services department is going to install something called an exclusion fence — a trapezoid shaped fence made of wire that prevents the beavers from plugging the culvert.

The city used to deal with situations like this by trapping and killing the beavers, but it reviewed that policy after an incident in July. A beaver got caught in a trap, but didn’t die and was spotted struggling to free itself.

Fish Creek Park Beavers

The area in Fish Creek Provincial Park where city officials tried to trap and kill the beaver over concerns it would flood a bike path. (Carla Beynon/CBC)

Upset animal lovers launched a petition to stop trapping in the city. That prompted the review, which revealed that debris got caught in the trap, causing it to malfunction. Since then, the city has been working with the Association for the Protection of Fur-Bearing Animals to come up with non-lethal alternatives.

“We want to go a different route so we don’t actually have to kill beavers,” said water services spokesman Randy Girling. “We don’t want to be known as killers or anything like that. We want to do the best we can for the wildlife in our parks.”

Hurray for Adrien and Fur-Bearer Defenders! They managed to convince the good folk of FCPP that it was better to try something new than claw their way out of any more bad press and public wrath. Adrien says it was hard, hard work. Like pushing a grand piano through a transom. But they persevered and were granted permission to install a beaver deceiver now. Gosh, I’m so old I can remember when Adrien installed his first leveler!

Sniff, they grow up so fast.

Speaking of the long arm of beaver defenders, I got an invitation this morning to present at the San Pedro Valley Park in Pacifica on beavers. A month after I’ll be talking in Auburn. That’s 133 miles apart for beaver defense. 1670 if you count Utah and Oregon. And Cheryl just visited Big Break in Brentwood where she snapped these videos of our work at the visitors venter!

Pretty cool to be long-range beaver preachers!

The Trail from Utah to Martinez

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and water, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Educational October 13, 2014

Hot of the presses I just got word from Mary Obrien that the BRAT (Beaver Restoration Assessment Tool) has just been completed for the entire state of Utah. The complete report and maps are here and I will put a permanent link on the margin alongside the last amazing thing Utah did for beavers, (and the one before that). Here’s a little excerpt from the executive summary.

This report presents the development and application of the Beaver Restoration Assessment Tool (BRAT), a decision support and planning tool for beaver management, to analyze all perennial rivers and streams in Utah. The backbone to BRAT is a capacity model developed to assess the upper limits of riverscapes to support beaver dam – building activities. Both existing and historic capacity were estimated with readily available spatial datasets to evaluate five key lines of evidence: 1) a perennial water source, 2) availability of dam building materials, 3) ability to build a dam at baseflow, 4) likelihood of dams to withstand a typical flood , and 5) likelihood that stream gradient would limit or completely eliminate dam building by beaver. Fuzzy inference systems were used to combine these lines of evidence while accounting for uncertainty.

With this announcement came a note from Mary that two stalwart Utah beaver champions are coming out to San Rafael for the annual Bioneers conference this month. They are going to a soils workshop and would like to meet Worth A Dam and the beavers if at all possible. For the past 5 years they’ve been hard at work letting beavers turn the tiny incised trickle on their land into this beauty. Their beavers have survived the last 5 years on mostly cattails because there are no trees to speak of!

Yet.

And speaking of beavers eating cattails, here’s a video Rusty sent this morning of a Napa beaver doing just that. The green water is pond weed/algae and don’t worry, I just read this morning that cattails are VERY nutritious.

Triumph at Taylor Creek

heidi08 Beavers and salmon, Educational, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? October 1, 2014

Great news from Taylor creek in Tahoe which has been the site of the most glacial-paced evolution in beaver management. I can’t tell you how many folks have been hard at work advocating the use of flow devices, but Sherry and Ted have been at the forefront every step of the way. They finally got the go-ahead to install a leveler in the side channel a while back, and since that was so successful they were recently given the go ahead on the main channel. I’ll let Sherry tell you about it herself.

The US Forest Service, pleased with the success of the Leveler installed by SWC as a “research project” on a small beaver dam on a man-made side channel at Taylor Creek, has asked SWC to also install Levelers on the main channel! The first Leveler kept water from saturating a meadow and running onto a trail that crossed the meadow. They requested that we install a Leveler on a beaver dam and pond some distance downstream from their Stream Profile Display, again in order to avoid any flooding on trails (and beaches where visitors watch the Kokanee Salmon spawning). Fish & Wildlife will be increasing flows in Taylor Creek this week, in order to let Kokanee salmon begin their fall spawning. The new Leveler on the main creek successfully kept the lower beaver dam at a level the Forest Service likes when flows were increased for one day last week. We look forward to installing another Leveler on the main creek channel at the beaver dam that is near the FS Display, to prevent any flooding of the trails and display, and, more importantly to prevent the Forest Service from tearing out this beaver dam, as they did last winter and years past. That was SWC’s major goal (and it only took 2+ years).

Also the FS is actually asking F&G to do as little ‘notching’ of beaver dams as possible, and to wait and see if fish can actually cross the beaver dams on their own – we’ll see if that really happens. (Plenty of fish managed to cross the beaver dams last fall during the government shutdown, when nobody could be taking out dams.)

Too much information, I’m sure, but thanks so much for all your posts. The last 2 photos were taken yesterday, 9-29 (Leveler installed Wed. the 24th) – the Leveler at noon, in the full sun you can see everything. (This is off the trails, where most people won’t see it at all.) And the main beaver dam upstream – you can see how low the water is now (and would be naturally – they’re raising it tomorrow for the fish).

And again, a huge thank you for your donation, all of which we’ll be using for this!!

Congratulations Sherry and Ted on a monumental job well done! As always, it turns out that fixing the problem is fairly straightforward, it’s changing those minds that’s hard, hard work! You did outstanding on both accounts, and the beavers thank you!

Taylor Creek for Beavers Hands (Medium) — Taylor Creek for Beavers Hands: Haerr

Wondrously familiar

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental, Festival, Who's saving beavers now? September 28, 2014

This is what two mostly damp beaver advocates look like at a Utah festival, On the left is Mary Obrien of the Grand Canyon trust, and on the right is me looking dazed to be sitting at the first booth at the Utah festival where a bright young college student tells you to take a treasure hunt and find the 5 ways that beavers help wildlife. Then come back wih your card filled out, paint a tail, and decorate a beaver-shaped gingerbread cookie!

It was raining the first time I gave my talk indoors at the nature center. So there were lots of folks who wanted to be dry and listen. Thank goodness it stopped soon and folks turned up anyway. At one point I sat by the pond and gave an interview to their tech crew about our experience, the student asking the questions was actually from Danville! Later we went down to the festival proper where we heard about one little boy who had had gotten the notice at school but his mom said “I’m sure it was probably cancelled with the storm”. He convinced her when he somberly said, “But we have to go check“.

Just in case you think I was exaggerating about the storm, the big empty stone-lined waterway around the nature center was RUSHING with muddy water that day. We were told that it probably rains 2 days a year in St. George and that summer temperatures commonly reach 115.

One great idea we want to try at home was a beaver lodge the children made – with the orignal frame of a dome tent covered with willow that kids added branches to to make a beaver house. They were running in and out hiding from ‘otters’ later in the day. Mary had also boldly invited the trappers association who displayed pelts for the children to feel. One surprising trapper commented, “People just don’t realize how good beavers are for streams and wildlife”. Which might have blown my mind if I was not already through the looking glass.

I gave the talk again in the afternoon and then came back to the hotel while they cleaned up. That night Mary picked us up and brought us to their camp sight in Sand Hallow where 15 tents circled their giant field station horse trailer-with-sattrlite dish. The cooking crew made us an awesome dinner of jumbalaya which we ate in a giant circle under the stars. The looming clouds were on the opposite bank and kindly stayed away from us.

After dinner there was a single darting bat, a crescent moon, and looming stars overhead. The great arc of 21 young students of semester in the west introduced where they were from and their majors, then said the favorite part of their day. It was amazing to hear their stories and did you even know there were political majors like environmental politics or environmental humanities? Then Mary asked me to say a little about the research we did on the historic prevalence papers. A huge gust of wind made my teeth chatter too much to talk anymore and fortunately caused the pages of ‘data’ to blow away so that everyone scrambled to retrieve it. Then we said our goodnights and thank you’s and dashed back to the car where Phil brought us back to the hotel.

This morning, Mary picks us up and brings us back to Cedar Springs, from where we will fly home tomorrow morning. The Whitman crew will head off for North for a 5 hour drive to their final camp, where they will end their journey and take finals before heading back to Walla Walla.

Dinner under the stars with tomorrows smart, talented environmental advocates was definitely the best part of the journey. But the woman who introduced herself at my talk as a docent from Yellowstone who does the beaver talks there was definitely a close second.

Then there was the child who explained he knew why beavers were important because (and I quote) “they make honey”