Wanna Be-avers

heidi08 Beavers, Educational, Environmental, New Species April 6, 2014

This morning started with a power outage and the usual slow dawning of understanding what that means – Ohh no power in this room either, no heater, no computer, no router, no clock. In case you’re in the beavers neighborhood, reading this on your phone, this is what PGE says:

Outage Details START TIME:APR 6, 4:07 AM
ESTIMATED RESTORATION:APR 6, 8:30 AM
CUSTOMERS AFFECTED:1397
CAUSE:Unknown – PG&E is investigating the cause.
STATUS:PG&E is assessing the cause at the outage location.
LAST UPDATED: APR 6, 6:27 AM

Back on at 7:05. So lets talk about muskrats with this article from Jim Mcormac from the Dispatch in Ohio:

Muskrat deserves love as vital vole of wetlands

I just have to love any article that starts like this:

In the beginning, Kitchi-Manitou, creator of Earth, populated the lands with the Anishinabe. After these original peoples descended into conflict and war, Kitchi-Manitou flooded the lands in retribution. Nanaboozhoo was the sole survivor, along with a handful of animals. One of them was a muskrat. From their log ark, Nanaboozhoo sent the muskrat diving below the floodwaters. It returned with a pawful of earth, and from that the lands were re-created.

— Ojibway legend

I’ve written natural history columns for The Dispatch for a decade — more than 160 pieces on almost as many subjects — but never about the muskrat. Given its prominence in creation lore, an essay on the “earth diver” is overdue.

Although muskrats resemble beavers, they are only distant relatives of the much larger rodents. The muskrat is related to mice and voles, and is essentially a supersize aquatic vole. A hefty muskrat might weigh 4 pounds; a big beaver can be 70 pounds. Beavers also have a horizontally flattened tail, while the muskrat’s is laterally compressed, as if compacted in a vise.

Muskrats are an important cog in wetland ecology. They are prolific grazers of aquatic plants and help to keep marshes open and free of choking growth. Semiopen marshes usually support greater animal diversity, including waterfowl. The lodges literally support ducks and geese, which sometimes nest atop the domes.

To which I KNOW the wetland-giving beavers would reply, “You call that biodiversity?” Hrmph!

The Straight Poop

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental April 2, 2014

Paul Scott of the free Tay beaver group found this on the bank under a willow and happily brought it home to share. Because it was dry when he found it there has been a lot of discussion on its origins. He explained that the river in question has great fluctuations so it’s possible it was ‘exited’ under water and just dried out when the level dropped. Bruce Thompson (respected environmental consultant at ecoTRACS in Wyoming) had this to say about it:

“The usual diagnostics — shape, color, texture, size and location — appear correct for Castor, although I cannot discern what that larger light-colored content is — a leaf? The late and great Olaus Murie refused to claim 100% certainty with scat ID unless he personally saw it exit — I love that man! — but using the process of elimination (sorry) to remove other competing identities (at least in North America), and based on past collections of Castor canadensis specimens, I’m better than 90% confident that it’s beaver.”

Obviously we’re not talking North America here. And since this is Scotland its from Castor Fiber, not Castor Canadensis, but I don’t think they look all that different. Paul explained the ‘leaf’ saying

Was fairly confident of what it was when I first spotted it but it’s always nice to have it confirmed. The small leaf shaped object is fragment of wood which still shows the tooth groove down the middle. The 3ft mentioned in the original post is actually 3ft above the water as opposed to inland. The scat was found on the top of a horizontal Willow trunk, so could have been dropped there by a Fox or a Heron who picked it up thinking it was something tasty. The area is also prone to sever fluctuations in water level, so the original deposit could well have been made in water given that the high level would have submerged the spot. Two other samples were found a few feet away in a beaver dug canal but would have instantly disintegrated had they been handled. Sadly, I’ve been searching for a good example for a few years now. Happily, I can stop now.

And before you question what kind of man looks for beaver poo and happily saves it in tupperware, remember that it could easily be the first wild beaver poo collected from the county in 400 years, and maybe that will explain the fascination. Remember, that beavers were extinct for a long, long time in the United Kingdom.Would you take home dinosaur poo?

Like all beavers in Scotland, this one clearly has a very high castor-fiber diet!

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Oh and Owyhee in Nevada (not too far from the Elko River where Carol Evans of the BLM has documented compelling beaver magic) congratulates this years’ winners of the science fair, in which students Richard Pete and Indira Modesto took third place for “Beaver Pond Ecology.”

To which I can only reply: “Third?”

“Animal-watching meditation”

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Friends of Martinez Beavers March 31, 2014

There’s a new beaver watcher in the Scottish countryside, and since she’s a very nice writer I thought I would share what she wrote on her blog. This is Mandy Haggith of Cybercrofter.

We immediately saw willow trees at the lochside showing signs of beaver activity, some chewed right off, some partly gnawed. Across the loch was a huge lodge – a mound of sticks built out into the water.

We waited.

There is a special kind of animal-watching meditation. It took me years to learn it. As a child I was incapable of sitting still. My dad used to take me badger-watching, which involved sitting quietly by a sett at dusk until the badgers emerged. I would rustle and fidget, and the badgers would no doubt hear and use a different exit. The more frustrated I became by the wait, the noisier my scuffling and the less chance of seeing a badger, until eventually we would give up.

Somehow as an adult I have learned to wait quietly for animals. Attention is everything. Standing by that loch, I revelled in the cool breeze across the water, blowing gently in my face, perfect for not being smelled by the beavers. There was little sound except for the rippling water and the hush of breeze through twigs. It was good to know I was there, in the beaver’s habitat, experiencing their loch.

Don’t you love those passages? I am so jealous about going badger-watching! How true about the inner stillness you must cultivate to wait for wildlife to show itself to you. Except not in Martinez – where the train whistles, garbage trucks and swearing drunks all combine to create a hum that apparently relaxes our beavers. They seem to show themselves when they’re ready regardless of what you do. She had to work harder on the Tay.

As the light dimmed, details of the lodge became harder and harder to make out across the loch, and it became easier and easier to hallucinate brown furry bodies! I think I saw, faintly, movement at the fringe of the loch. I can’t be certain.

But what I can be certain of was the splash. And then the ‘pfffff’, closeby, a sound similar to that made by a seal surfacing. Only this was freshwater, so it couldn’t be a seal – it must have been a beaver!

Ahhh the inspiring detective work of a beaver spotter! Thanks Maggie for a lovely read. Our own Lory and Cheryl went on their own beaver trek last evening. They saw one of our kits! ( Now almost a yearling) working hard at the third dam. (You should trek down and see for yourself that it’s coming along nicely.) Cheryl writes:

Lory and I went down to beavers. Moses was there and had seen 3 beavers. We followed a kit (yearling now!) down to the third dam where he wrestled with another kit and then brought mud and sticks to the dam. They have a big hole upstream of that dam they brought a big branch into. I have a few pics I’ll get up tomorrow but they probably arent the best as it was getting dark.

And from Lory:

When Cheryl and I got to the secondary Moses was there and he said he saw three beavers. As Cheryl walked further down Moses and I spotted one beaver coming down the bank near the bank hole. One swam down and across the secondary. Cheryl and I followed him down to the third dam. It looks great. Lots of wood on it. Before we left we had two kits down there working. A man came by and wondered what we were looking at. He was from town but didn’t know there were beavers around. He watched with us. Let’s see what happens after these next few days of rain.

How wonderful that our youngsters are growing up together! Wrestling and carrying on in typical yearling fashion! I’m sorry we all weren’t there to see it, but I’m sure we remember what it looks like!

Sniff, they grow up so fast! Since this footage of the tiny fellow was taken on the evening of May 5 last year and then we didn’t see him again until June, I can’t imagine he was more than a month old. So almost Happy birthday to him or her and the siblings!

Take a walk on the Wild Side of Vancouver…

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental March 5, 2014

Eco Engineers

Maybe the most talked-about stat from the show: microloft apartments in Vancouver average 250 sq. ft. size, while a large beaver lodge can measure 300 sq. ft. Vancouver was once a beaver’s paradise of wetlands and forests. Some trees cut here were larger than any still standing in Canada. Today, the Vancouver region is the province’s largest clear-cut.

Making Vancouver a Wilder Place

J.B. MacKinnon’s RBC Taylor Prize Shortlisted non-fiction book, The Once and Future World, is now the inspiration for a new exhibition at the Museum of Vancouver, curated by the author. This is an exclusive look for Huffington Post readers into the new exhibition — Rewilding Vancouver. The author / curator worked with photographer Flora Gordon to visually explain how the exhibition and the book co-exist. His exhibition opened February 27, 2014 at Museum of Vancouver.

Remember when I came back from vacation full of ideas about Mr. MacKinnon’s book? Well, this morning the Huffington Post finally caught up and let the author do a nice story about his exhibit in Vancouver of what wildlife there used to look like. You should definitely check it out and while your there, comment and help me remind them that they need a full-page article on beaver benefits soon!

Rewilding Vancouver is an exhibition of remembering. It allows the public to reconnect with a forgotten history in order to look at the present and the possible future with new eyes.

Biggest beaver ever?

heidi08 Beaver-themed merchandise, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental March 4, 2014

Sadly this is not the work of a beaver chew, but a redwood poacher at Redwood National State Park. Folks have apparently been sneaking into the park at night and cutting out burls to sell or carve. The problem has gotten so common that they are closing the state and National park at night.

I hate the idea of these big trees being hunted like rhinos for their horn. I hope closing the park does the trick, but it may come down to some hidden security cameras on trees to find the bastards. My favorite trees in all the world are the Giant Sequoias they have at Calaveras, where I visited every summer as a kid. They are shorter and more massive than coastal redwoods, gnarled old giants that look like something from animation. Just standing under them makes you feel older and wiser. I think of Legolas visiting the ent forests in Tolkein:

“It [the forest] is old, very old,” said the Elf. “So old that almost I feel young again, as I have not felt since I journeyed with you children. It is old and full of memory. I could have been happy here, if I had come in days of peace.”

― The Two Towers, “The White Rider”

DSCF0067 — “The Bachelor” @ Calaveras Big Trees North Grove – Heidi

This is as good a time as any to tell you beaver-trackers that Bruce Thompson of Wyoming is printing us a set of track and scat scarves that will look like this. They should be ready for you to snap up in 6 color choices by Earth Day. Bring your checkbook! Looks like we will be working together to design just a wetlands track scarf soon.