Category: In the News

The opposite of ‘News’

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Environmental, History, In the News November 6, 2015

There has been such a horn-of-plenty full of great beaver news lately; beaver removing nitrogen and beavers saving LA. If you’re like me, you probably get this tingly, turning-a-corner feeling. Like the SEA CHANGE we need in beaver thinking is FINALLY here. That were steps away from changing beaver policy in California, the west, – even the world. At last, things are starting to take root and penetrate the richer soils where they can sustainably grow and reseed generations. We start to see headlines like this, and get really excited.

Bullish on Beavers

While some cattle ranchers scorn the giant rodents, others are putting beavers to work Mellen is one of about a dozen ranchers in a four-county area of south-central Idaho who are bullish on beavers. While some folks scorn the big rodents for their propensity to choke culverts and clog irrigation ditches, ranchers are discovering that beavers can be a valuable tool for restoring riparian areas, the green strips of vegetation that border waterways and provide most of the habitat for wildlife along Rocky Mountain streams and elsewhere in the West.

Mellen and his neighbors are not alone. Ranchers in Colorado, Oregon, Montana, Wyoming and Nevada are also working with federal officials to rejuvenate riparian areas with beavers. “Beavers are now looked upon as an integral part of stream recovery,” says Wayne Elmore, a national riparian restoration expert for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Prineville, Oregon.

Slowly, public-land officials, along with some ranchers, are working on ways to reverse a large part of the damage. In 1990, the BLM and Forest Service developed tougher regulations for riparian areas on public lands. And last year, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt announced a plan for range reform on most public lands that includes higher grazing fees and penalties for land abuse.

In practice, to restore riparian areas, federal range managers must gain the cooperation of ranchers who hold grazing permits-and that’s not always easy. Ranchers often harbor a distrust of the government; some consider public grazing allotments to be their own land. And ranchers often detest beavers. “I don’t know why some people have such contempt for beavers,” Pence laments. “It’s hard to get people to let loose of that. Heck, there’s even some people in my agency that think I’m crazy.”

Probably no one can convince a cowboy of anything as well as another cowboy. Retired Colorado rancher Bill Barnard has won numerous awards for turning the Cathedral Bluffs BLM grazing allotment near Meeker, Colorado, into a shining example of range stewardship. He gives beavers a heap of credit for his success. He says of fellow ranchers, “Maybe they don’t like beavers, maybe they don’t want beavers, but I tell them maybe they’d better try beavers or they’ll be out of business.”

Fantastic! Getting a cowboy to talk sense to other cowboys. BLM has the sense to use a trusted voice to promote a very suspicious product! It seems like there is a real recognition that human psychology is the biggest obstacle to our seeing beaver as a resource. How exciting to come across such an encouraging article. I guess we can expect many more to come!

There’s just one little problem.

Read the date again.

If you were reading this article in the delivery room after just having a beautiful baby girl she’d be sipping her first chardonnay by now. Bill Clinton was president. Friends had its first season. Whitney Houston was winning the grammy for singing the song you never need to hear again. And everyone who didn’t go to Two Weddings and a Funeral was watching Pulp Fiction.

In other words, this was a long fucking time ago.

Now I’m fairly used to finding brilliant remarks about beavers from 100 years ago, in the writings of Grey Owl or Enos Mills. I’m even used to reading them surprisingly from Fish and game in the 20’s and thirties. But reading something THAT smart from our recent past makes me realize that we’ve been ‘turning the corner’ on beavers for such a ridiculously long time. Frogs, salmon, water, carbon. We’ve turned ‘more corners’ than the media reporting on Iraq. We’ve turned ‘more corners’ than an octagon riding a tilt-a-wheel. We’ve turned all the corners. There are no corners left to turn.

Which doesn’t mean I’m giving up. Just taking a slightly longer-term view. It’s not about getting better science. It’s not about telling better stories. It’s not about proving that we can. The next time I’m inclined to hold my breath because ‘its finally happening!’ I’m going to make myself watch this.

Good things come to those who wait

heidi08 Environmental, History, In the News, What's killing beavers now? November 1, 2015

Fur market has ups, downs

Trapping season opens soon. By keeping an eye on the global fur markets, a trapper can still do well if they target certain fur bearers for this season.

Beavers will probably not even be worth trapping, except for conservation and damage control. There is little demand for beaver, and most of the beaver fur is going to the hat trade at greatly reduced prices. Expect most buyers to not make any offers on beaver fur.

And the winner is – UTAH!

heidi08 Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, featured, Friends of Martinez Beavers, In the News, Who's saving beavers now? October 13, 2015

The states of Washington and Utah have been running a neck-to-neck competition to be the beaver Mecca of America. They are both brilliant at beaver management in so many ways and light years ahead of their border cousins. For a while it looked like Washington, (with heavy weights like NOAA, Michael Pollock and the Methow project) was in the lead. But now Utah, (with beaver Shamans Mary Obrien of GLCT and Joe Wheaton at Utah State), has just made a giant leap forward.

Utah: Even their WALMARTs are smarter than yours.

Project helps protect Logan beavers, reduce threat of flooding

LOGAN — A project in Logan may be a lifesaver for beavers, and it may help Wal-Mart get along better with its furry neighbors. Workers have installed a system intended to reduce the threat of flooding caused by beaver dams.

“Killing beaver just didn’t seem like the right way to go,” said Dan Miller, chairman of the Bear River Watershed Council. “There was a better solution, and this is definitely it.”

The new system regulates the level of a beaver pond, functioning more or less like the overflow drain on a bathtub. It prevents the beaver pond from rising too high and overfilling.

Beaver dams store water in the springtime and allow it to trickle downstream in the late summer, a process that benefits downstream water users, he said.
“They help with the water quality,” Bouwes said, “by capturing a lot of sediment and other materials that we would have to clean up otherwise.”

Okay, Utah has some crazy ideas about women and minority rights and wants to sell back their national parks, but HEY they install flow devices at WALMART, so watch out America. This is what visionary looks like! Now Walmart needs to donate a field cam and install it on sight so they can see some photos of the wild creatures they just saved. (Better photos = more media = and more advertising of their good deed.)

I would send a thank you note to the good folk who approved this project, but I can’t find any details about management. Guess we better send our thanks to Nick Bouwes at Utah State and Dan Miller of the massive Bear River Watershed group. That should keep us busy.

And again

heidi08 In the News, kits September 25, 2015

O Gertrude, Gertrude,
When sorrows come, they come not single spies
But in battalions.

Hamlet Act IV: Scene 5

Sick baby beaver rescued in Martinez has died

WALNUT CREEK — A sick, malnourished young beaver found on Mt. View Sanitary District property in Martinez this week has died.

The kit appeared to be on the mend, but succumbed early Thursday evening. Experts still have no idea what caused the recent mysterious deaths of four other beavers living in nearby Alhambra Creek.

Two sanitary district employees found the three-month-old beaver kit on Tuesday. It appeared to belong to a family of beavers in Moorhen Marsh, a 21-acre wetland area where the sanitary district discharges treated wastewater that is home to beavers, river otters and western pond turtles. They brought it to Kelly Davidson Chou, district biologist. The tiny critter had a runny nose and appeared lethargic and unsteady on his feet, she said.

“I was expecting a much larger beaver because it’s not the time of year you see kits of this size,” said Chou, who took the ailing animal to the Lindsay Wildlife Rehabilitation Hospital in Walnut Creek for treatment.

The young beaver was two to three pounds underweight and most likely had an upper respiratory infection, according to Guthrum Purdin, director of veterinary services at the Lindsay. Purdin was treating the kit with antibiotics and hand feeding him rodent formula containing pureed grass, soybean hulls, wheat germ and other plants.

Four Alhambra Creek beavers, including three kits born this year, have died since July. The sudden deaths have perplexed veterinarians at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife who have ruled out rabies, pesticides, toxins, poisons and tularemia, an infectious disease commonly found in rodents.

“All we know is what it isn’t, we don’t know what it is,” said Heidi Perryman, executive director of Worth A Dam, a Martinez nonprofit dedicated to protecting and promoting the beavers.

Yesterday that kit from Mt. View Sanitation took a turn for the worse and died. They have no idea why. It’s not unreasonable to think it might be related to our kits’ cause of death. Lory is picking up the little body and taking it to UCD for necropsy this morning. Everyone is heartbroken about this little death, even the reporter I called with the bad news last night.

What is happening to beavers in Martinez?

At the edges of the heartbreak is something else: a stony relief. Maybe the fact that our kits died wasn’t our fault: I’ve been trapped under anvils feeling weighed down with the notion that I’m supposed to protect them and I didn’t. Maybe it wasn’t our dirty creek, our scary homeless, our public feeding. Moorhen Marsh is about 4 miles away and much less trafficked. Maybe it wasn’t anything I could have/should have controlled. Maybe death is gripping our beavers for reasons we can’t understand. Maybe this baby will give us answers.

But it still sucks.

While we’re discussing pointless tragedies, here’s one I encountered last night on the way home from work. NPR in its infinite wisdom was running a story about some entrepreneurs who are making some money off the feral hog problem in Texas by selling helicopter rides to shoot them from the air. No I’m serious.

Now I don’t want to be a save-everything, or start the first chapter of Worth A Hog, and I believe feral hogs can cause problems. But selling tickets to an all-you-can-shoot air ride is beyond horrific. And the fact that it was promoted on National Public Radio was outrageous. You can listen to the story here and share your outrage here. Or even better yet directly with the suits here :.

Giving up on love…

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and water, Environmental, In the News August 16, 2015

We’ve all been there. That moment when waiting for Mr. or Mrs. Right just makes no sense and we decide to forage on our own anyway. Why wait for love to start our lives when we have our own ability to start things? Unfortunately for Beatrix it took her captors 31 days to decide that it wasn’t worth her waiting anymore. During which she lived in concrete blocks covered with plywood, tormented by the sound of rushing water she could never reach. Remember?

Now she’s finally free.

Dam floods area; beaver moved

TULALIP — Beavers are natural engineers, but can be a nuisance if they’re residing in residential or city areas.

This was the case for “Beatrix” a name given to a female North American beaver by the students at Brookeside Elementary, who was flooding the school’s play field with her dams.

But Beatrix was in luck because the “Beaver Bill” and the agreement of the Tulalip Tribes meant that there are government regulations on who can handle and relocate beavers.

“We thought this was a perfect time to relocate this animal and get her to a better place,” Dittbrenner said.

She was finally captured in July until Aug. 6 she was released into the Skyhomish River.

I guess they thought a month in concrete was long enough. Or that they were nearing the deadline of when a beaver would have enough time to create a food cache before winter. Remember how the last article talked about how important it was to find her a mate she liked and introduce the pair to their new home together? Well, the party line has changed now. (Of course the media didn’t glance at the other article and ask why the line changed. Why would they?)

Before Beatrix was captured, it was revealed that she was a single beaver through wildlife surveillance. Cameras were set up around her beaver lodge to monitor before capture.

Though Beatrix is without a mate, she is a highly social animal and should be able to pair with a beaver at her new location.

“They’re just so happy to see another beaver, and take to each other really well,” assistant wildlife supervisor Molly Alves said.

Just to refresh our memories, here’s what the last article said:

Now the rodent, named “Beatrix” by neighbors, waits for the nonprofit Beavers Northwest that captured her to find her a mate. Pairing up beavers makes it more likely they’ll stay at that spot.

Lucky Beatrix.

Remind me never to be that lucky, okay?

In the interest of fairness I will say that it’s way better to move beavers than to kill them. And that I know these folks want beavers to be living free doing what they do best. But honestly. If you’re going to release her anyway, just do it without the concrete motel 6 stay. Okay? I’m still having nightmares from this footage.

Now that we have THAT out of the way, here’s a fun photo shoot from the Napa beaver pond yesterday. Quite the wildlife corridor wouldn’t you say?