Category: Massachusetts Trapping Law

‘Pond’ Beavers, ‘Carnivous Doves’ and other lies.

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Massachusetts Trapping Law, Who's Killing Beavers Now? November 6, 2013

About this time every year, (usually a little bit earlier) so many stories of beaver problems clutter the newswires that I begin to despair of ever catching up to report on them. I start to wonder if it all really matters, if there’s any hope of changing hearts and minds, if a wishful girl with a beaver mission can possibly make a whit of difference is this crazy beaver-killing world. Well, I’ll let you know the answer to that question when we get farther along in the story, but for now we’ve got lots to talk about.

Beavers causing problems at Turner pond

Seaman attributed the change in water level to changes in the dam and beavers. Selectman Kurt Youland, who also owns property on Pleasant Pond, said many of the historical beaches around the pond have disappeared. He said there are about six active beaver lodges on the pond, which equates to nearly 40 animals.

Seaman said she has done all she can legally do and has hired a state biologist to trap beavers, raccoons and seagulls. She said it cost $70 to $100 per animal.

You kill seagulls? This is Maine, mind you. And you think you have six active lodges with 40 beavers in a single lake? Well, it looks like the pond’s about a mile across so that seems pretty unlikely. You know what a great way is to tell how many beavers are in an area? To get up early or stay up late and actually watch them for a few days! See who’s living where and who has young. You might even hear them, talking to each other and asking for favors. It could happen. But if you did that you would realize these are very social families who work hard and really care about each other. And then you wouldn’t be so excited to trap them, would you?

You know, I met a very reasonable-looking man from Maine on the footbridge yesterday. He was not very enthused about our beavers and said cautiously, “I’ve seen beavers before back in my home state. But they were smaller. Those were POND BEAVERS not these huge RIVER BEAVERS.”

I tried explaining politely that what he saw in Maine were kits, and that full grown beavers are much larger. I even tried to allow that our beavers do not have to fast during the winter freeze so they might carry a few more pounds. But he would have none of it, what he saw in Maine were POND beavers, a completely different animal.

So I have been muttering this to myself for three days now and wondering that we let people who think these outrageous things drive and vote and own firearms. My mom had a neighbor the other day tell her that “Doves were the most vicious birds, they attack other birds for no reason. You have to get rid of them.”

I guess that’s why we release them at peace ceremonies? To scare are enemies into keeping the truce?

My point (and I do have one) is that half the time (or more than half) people who sound very sure of themselves don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. And they don’t WANT to know, because their mind is made up, and like a double bed in a sleeper car, they don’t want to have to make it again. Reporters do not appear to know this. And they constantly confuse “sounding certain” with “being right”.

Here’s another example.

Beavers a dam nuisance to Hopkinton homeowners

HOPKINTON – MA

A group of neighbors in the South and North Mill streets area have hired a professional beaver trapper to combat what they call out-of-control flooding on their land created by beaver dams.

Speicher has applied to the town for an emergency permit to trap beavers using a kind of “quick kill” trap only allowed with special permission. He met Tuesday with town officials.

Meanwhile, a bill is making its way through the Legislature to permit wider use of quick-kill traps and streamline permitting by putting the state in charge instead of municipalities.

Of course a bill is making it’s way through the legislature. It always is. The one thing that we can be sure of in this world, besides death and taxes, is that a bill is always winding it’s way through the state house to overturn the will of the voters and remove the beaver scourge. Of course, even if it passed handily, it will do no such thing. Because the beaver population is growing whether you use kill traps, suitcase traps, or electric chairs to control it. It’s growing because that’s what successful populations do. Do you think Connecticut or New Hampshire never complain about beavers because they weren’t “tricked” into outlawing crush traps?

Someday I’ll get tired of making fun of Massachusetts for its ridiculously constant whining about the voters in 1996. I’ve written about it maybe 100 times in 6 years, and I received a personal letter from the governor last year regarding it. Some day I’ll give up and realize the state is on a crash course to beaver-stupid and can’t wait until it gets there and can conibear to its hearts content.

But not yet.

Beaver dams popping up in Springfield

In the mean time there’s a nice beaver story from Springfield MA, which very kindly reminds the viewer that tampering with beaver dams is illegal!

“All this time I haven’t seen any, and these beavers are really something new because they were not here three months ago…I hope they don’t touch them just leave the beavers alone. they are a good thing I think,” said Luisa Powers from Springfield.

Urban legends of beavers

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Environmental, Massachusetts Trapping Law, Who's Killing Beavers Now? September 3, 2013

Do you remember that story, back in fourth of fifth grade, you heard at a sleepover with friends? Two of the friends you had known since 2nd grade but one girl was someone else’s friend, or neighbor, or cousin and she was rumored to have slightly more street cred on account of her parents were divorced, or her mother had died, or her brother was in jail. And when the last pizza had been eaten and all the lights were out and you were huddled in sleeping bags on the living room rug or the back yard, she started with that spooky story in that absolutely chilling and unforgettable voice:

“Who stole my golden arm?”

And of course, even at 10, you knew the story was impossible and that ghosts weren’t real and that even if they were people don’t ever make arms out of solid gold, and you might have mumbled so all the way through at intervals but once Elvira leaped from the grave and shouted “YOU GOT IT!” and that terrifying story was over you couldn’t wait to think about who you were going to tell it to next. All the other kids must have too because pretty soon the story was all over school and was starting to get little adjustments, like the woman had been murdered for her golden arm, or it was actually a golden leg. It was a self-reproducing meme that was perpetuating itself like a virus through the primary grades. And even today, just saying the words has a kind of ring to it, and you can remember something of that chill. And it doesn’t matter whether its true, because its not that kind of story.

Which brings us naturally to the topic of beaver dams, water temperature and fish.

Richard Hartley, left, and Mark Brideau, right, both state fisheries biologists, electro-shock and catch fish in Barbers Hollow Brook in Oxford. The state biologists worked with Glenn Krevosky, center, of EBT Environmental Consultants Inc. (T&G Staff/RICK CINCLAIR)

Mr. Krevosky said Barber’s Hollow Brook is but one of several small headwater brooks in town where the positive effect of 46-degree groundwater in a stream has been compromised by beaver dams that dramatically raise stream temperature.

Todd A. Richards, biologist for the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, agrees that beaver impoundments have an impact on cold-water fish resources, but adds it’s only one point that makes an already bad situation worse.

He said beaver may not have as much impact in hilly and mountainous terrain, but their impact on streams with minimal flow and minimal change in grade is considerable.

“Beavers have a place, and historically, beaver populations were kept in check by wolf, cougar and native Americans. Obviously that is no longer the case. We are losing trout fisheries in areas that previously were not impacted by beaver and that has to be taken into consideration in restoring cold-water fish resources,” he said.

I believe Eisenhower was president when Clyde the ranger stuck his thermometer in the top inch of pond water and observed beaver ponds are warmer than flowing streams. He published a paper on it and of course the paper said what everyone wanted to hear, (that beavers, not progress and concrete, were ruining our streams) and so it went into all those biology text books and field guides. Never mind that if you ask an experienced trout fisherman where he loves to frequent after lots of beer and persuasion he will eventually say the beaver dam. Folks are so used dull easy hatcheries with fish dumped out of the truck that they don’t remember their grandpa or believe their friend Billy anymore.

So the meme of beaver ponds raising temperatures and ruining things for fish perpetuates itself. Michael Pollock was very perplexed by this temperature canard because it ran against everything he saw and observed. He tracked down the origins of the temperature meme to the root of its roots and learned the truth about its single thermometer in the top inch of the pond- origins. He ran expensive experiments funded by the federal government with sensors all the way down the depths of the beaver pond and proved it was completely, entirely and in all other ways untrue.

Okay now, follow this closely. The right of the graph is the mouth of the stream, so the water comes out of the ground colder and gets steadily warmer as it passes to the sea. Except for that one patch on the middle where it says AREA OF PERSISTENT BEAVER DAM BUILDING. How can this be? The water you see in the stream is only part of the story. The majority of that water is underground, beneath the soil, where it never gets warmed by the sun. This colder water passes through the bank wall in a process called hyporheic exchange which cools the temperatures. The placement of a dam increases hyporheic flux by increasing the downward hydraulic gradient across the dam.

End result cooler temperatures in ponds and below beaver dams and happy fish.

This data has been published and discussed in scientific forums. It has been quoted and re-quoted in fish journals from Washington to Norway. It doesn’t matter. Biologists like Mr. Krevosky and Mr. Richards would rather stay up late telling each other scary tales of beavers ruining streams for fish like “Whoooo stole my golden arm???” Of course they invited the media who comes to the sleepover and very responsibly write down every bogus thing they say as if it were fact.

“Previously enterred woman seeks valuable false limb. News at 11:00“

I have zero patience with the fact that this story comes from the fisheries of Massachusetts of all places. It is obviously a brick in the consistent argument, ‘The stupid voters ruined our lives when they took away our traps and infested us with icky beavers! Better change the law right away”. This bad-penny persuasion shows up every few months, usually proceeding a new last-ditch effort to overturn the will of the voters some way or other. Mark your calendar because we’ll be talking about this again soon, I guarantee it.

Oh and if the name of Mr. Krevosky sounds familiar, it should. I wrote about him 4 years ago on this website for famously claiming that beaver dams were ruining Massachusetts by promoting Purple Loosestrife. Here’s a taste of that column, which was fun.

Enter Mr. Glenn E. Krevosky of EBT Environmental Consulting. He has a theory, and like all good theories, it blames the rodent. He says that beaver dams cause flooding, destroy native plants and then make space for Loosestrife to take over. If there were fewer dam beavers, (he has persuasively shouted to the media), we could rid ourselves of this purple menace once and for all. Of course I went immediately to research his copius studies proving this brilliant hypothesis, and saw that the sum total of all literature published in peer review journals on this theory is zero. No research whatsoever. Nada. Not that this has troubled the media, mind you. They are perfectly happy to write down what someone from a very environmental sounding company says. (Of course I couldn’t find EBT consulting either, so who knows what E.B.T. stands for? Everybody Blames Them?)

Some things never change. I still couldn’t find anything about EBT on the internet. Obviously the digital age, along with certain beaver-related scientific facts, continues to elude him.

The Crucible of Beavers

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Massachusetts Trapping Law, Who's Killing Beavers Now? August 10, 2013

In the days immediately following a successful beaver festival I am suffused in a warm glow of fuzzy good feeling. Things are changing little by little for beavers, and we are helping in our little way. Martinez got smarter and other cities can too. Gradually the nation’s beaver IQ will go up and then we’ll all benefit.

Even with this heady insulation, a few shockingly disturbing articles manage to float to my in box (like the woman who made baby beaver dolls out of ACTUAL baby beavers) and I think, NO. I won’t write about that. I won’t pollute this good feeling I worked so hard to have with that artless sadism. The arc of environmentalism is long, but it does bend towards beavers. We are moving in the right direction.

And then something like this happens.

Beavers, dams stir concern in Danvers neighborhood

Over the years, beavers have built dams on the stream that runs between that neighborhood and Endicott Park. The stream runs down under Maple Street and eventually to College Pond.

“The wetland is behind our property,” wrote David Saunders of 12 Brentwood Circle. Saunders was unable to attend the meeting, and neighbor Mary Jalbert read his letter to the selectmen. “We have never seen flooding as bad as it has been this year in June and July. In the past we have had many temporary flooding events in the springtime — but they receded very soon after the rain fall subsided. This year they did not recede.”

Jalbert explained to the selectmen that the health inspector had visited the area twice this summer and on the second visit ordered a licensed trapper to remove the main dam. While the water level dropped some after the dam was removed, the water has now become stagnant.

Did you get that? This is a classy neighborhood just 5 miles from Salem, and the home-owners complained the beaver dams were backing up too much water. So the city removed the dams (and the beavers) and now they’re complaining that the water is too stagnant.

“Unless something is done to get this water moving, we are going to have more water back up to property,” said Ryan. “That’s going to seep into property. Mold will develop. And we will have a health issue in that regard as well. Not to mention damage to personal property.”

He added that the stagnant water is also a prime breeding ground for mosquitoes.

“When the dam was there, water was actually flowing,” said Soles. “Since they have removed the dam, I can agree the water doesn’t move.”

Let me get this straight. When the beavers were alive there was too much water. And now that the beavers are dead there’s not enough flow? And you’re in Massachusettes? Where solutions from both Mike Callahan and Skip Lisle are about 2 hours away from you?

“The wetland is behind our property,” wrote David Saunders of 12 Brentwood Circle. Saunders was unable to attend the meeting, and neighbor Mary Jalbert read his letter to the selectmen. “We have never seen flooding as bad as it has been this year in June and July. In the past we have had many temporary flooding events in the springtime — but they receded very soon after the rain fall subsided. This year they did not recede.”

Gosh, worse flooding than ever before. Those dam beavers! Moving in and ruining everything with the furry ways. Oh wait,

Rainfall was the big story in June’s weather

Rainfall was the headliner this year. June gave us copious amounts. We had 17 days with rain, much of it from tropical downpours that flooded streets and homes locally. From the 6th to the 8th, we had over 3 inches of rain here in Salem. Thunderstorms were no strangers. We had six days that produced these storms, some with an abundance of thunder, lightning and damaging winds.

So you had more rain than usual and even though the beavers built up their dams to keep the water, some flowed over while the dams were there. But you didn’t like all that water and hired a trapper and lo and behold in August the water isn’t flowing anymore! And now you’re worried about mosquitoes and mold. Oh and something worse.

He said algae was covering the wetlands now, and worse yet, a dead beaver was causing an awful stink. He said the trapper had told him dead beavers are not allowed to be removed but they can be buried, which was done.

“They buried it and supposedly turtles brought it back up,” said Soles. “And it’s rotting and we can’t open up our windows.”

I think I am more fond of this graphic than any I ever made. I suppose a healthy turtle would eat carrion. But even with my vivid imagination it is hard for me that they would unbury a beaver corpse and chow down. It was even harder for me to imagine that dead beaver bodies couldn’t be removed in MA. The entire state would be drowning in them if that were so! I asked our resident MA expert who happens to be married to a trapper. “Not true and completely ridiculous” was his answer. Apparently the reporter of this story didn’t bother with the cumbersome burden of verification.

Grave-robbing turtles, mold and mosquitoes, you would think this story couldn’t get any better. But gentle reader, you’d be wrong.

Jalbert raised another concern. A “floating” sewer was installed in that neighborhood and she wondered if the rising water levels would affect its performance

Floating sewer? A sewer that floats? Now how could that possibly go wrong? This entire town seems woefully unready for the demands of civilization. Honestly this whole story is rumor after heresay after gossip after imagination. I seem to remember this area was famous once for believing impossibly crazy things that their neighbors uttered and taking it for fact. You would think that in 321 years the region would have learned at least to look for a smidgeon of evidence before taking irreversible action.

Just the pound of cure for Warren

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Environmental, kits, Massachusetts Trapping Law, Who's Killing Beavers Now? June 30, 2013

An aerial view of the problematic beaver pond. (Submitted Photo/MATTHEW DOMNARSKI)

Warren works to stay ahead of beavers

BREACHED DAM FLOODS HUMAN HABITATION

WARREN — When Sherry Rapisarda called 911 on May 25 to say water was rising around her family’s trailer home on Route 67, she was told to evacuate. “I looked out the door and I told (the dispatcher), ‘I can’t evacuate, I can’t even get to my car,’ ” she said, remembering how the Fire Department arrived with a boat and ferried her, her husband, their two grown children and two cats to dry land.

The two floods, which officials have said were caused by the breaching of a beaver dam on state property just west of Colonel’s Mountain, have left behind damage on Route 67 and around the Spring Street area, where cars were sitting in about 3 feet of water.

People whose homes and businesses are flooded should expect their town to protect them and do whatever is possible to prevent it from happening again. They certainly deserve to have the causes analyzed and carefully understood so that they don’t suffer the same fate 3 weeks later. Scapgoats, lazy finger pointing and pretend facts do them no favors.

Before the dam broke the first time, it was holding back a big pond. Mr. Boudreau estimated conservatively that about 3 million gallons of water came down the hill like a tsunami.

But with two floods in three weeks, people will likely remember this for a while, and they won’t let local officials forget, either. They’ve sent a letter to selectmen and want something done about the beavers.

Still, fixing the problem requires a process. First the Board of Health must issue an emergency trapping permit so the beavers can be removed. Health Board Chairman Kenneth Lacey said Mr. Boudreau is working on the permit now.

Since state trapping laws prohibit the relocation of beavers, they must be killed, officials said. So the town needs a licensed trapper to do the job and funding to pay that person. Trapping season, when the beaver pelts would have had some value, ended in April and won’t start again until November, so the trapper doesn’t benefit much unless he is paid.

The beavers have been at the site for at least 50 years. Officials know that because the dam and pond show up on topographical maps from 1956. Mr. Boudreau said there are four huts, which he guesses are home to about 20 beavers.

It’s good to know that the problem is in such capable, thoughtful hands. I’m sure the beaver dam didn’t fail because of some other man-made problem upsteam or some trapping you allowed earlier. I’m sure that the 2012 study you reported almost exactly a year ago, entitled “Warren County study finds roads could be endangered by beaver dam failures“ couldn’t possibly have provided any information at the time that could have prevented this. I’m sure you know it was entirely caused by those verified 20 beavers and if they just kill them it will never ever happen again. I’m sure the trapper hire will give them a money back guarantee that the area will never flood in the future.

I can’t help thinking of this.

Looks like our two kits have moved back to their summer home by the secondary dam. This morning we filmed both of them coming back and downstream into the bank hole to settle for the night. I suppose the entire beaver section of Alhambra creek is like a giant ranch home where they spread out according to their own tastes. Here’s one swimming down under the Marina Vista bridge before ducking home.

And here’s the second high tailing the same distance, filmed from the footbridge.

And if you want to make sure they’re getting all the beaver training they need, check out this perfectly mudded dam.

two sleeping secondary 020 — Freshly mudded secondary dam

Beaver Population Density? Or populace DENSE about beavers?

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Dispersal, kits, Massachusetts Trapping Law June 12, 2013

Toward an understanding of beaver management as human and beaver densities increase

Human–Wildlife Interactions 7(1):114–131, Spring 2013. Siemer, Jonker, Becker & Organ

Attitudes toward beavers were more likely to be negative among people who had experienced problems with beaver, and intensity of negative attitudes increased as the severity of problem experiences increased (Siemer et al. 2004a, Jonker et al. 2006). Norms about lethal management also were closely correlated with problem experience. Acceptance of lethal management tended to be higher among people who had personally experienced problems with beaver (Siemer et al. 2004a, Jonker et al. 2009). When presented with a range of interaction scenarios, people who had experienced beaver damage were more likely to accept lethal management actions in any scenario where beavers had a negative impact on people.

So people who are inconvenienced by beavers, (or worried they’ll be inconvenienced by beavers) are more comfortable with killing them than folks who’ve just seen them on the TV? And this gets published as research? I am reminded of Horatio saying sarcastically to Hamlet,

“There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave to tell us this!”

This study revisits the Massachusetts beaver issue and the least-liked voter decision apparently in the history of the world. A 1996 referendum that indicated folks wanted it to be harder to kill beavers cruelly. This is vociferously blamed for ruining every sense of balance the state had previously developed. Even beaver defenders thought the the referendum had ‘tricked’ the voters (although how straight forward are most ballot issues, I ask you?) Once it was passed, alarming reports filled the air like spring pollen. Authorities said the population subsequently exploded because even though you could still use lethal techniques and even though you could use the old methods as long as one of 9 tiny conditions were met, it still took five minutes more time to kill them than it used to and that created anarchy. (Folks in the bay state are very busy and obviously no one has 5 more minutes to spare killing beavers.)

Hence the article, which is based on public attitudes towards beavers and a questionnairre that got mailed to folks who complained about beavers (and for appearances sake, some folks who didn’t) in 2002. Surprisingly, the folks who DIDN”T COMPLAIN didn’t return the survey as much as the people who were mad. (Gosh!) And the two groups said admittedly different things in general, but the researchers knew just how to handle this conundrum to get the results they wanted.

We detected some differences in each state when nonrespondents were compared to respondents (for a detailed description of respondent-nonrespondent comparisons, see Jonker 2003 and Siemer et al. 2004a). Although we found differences between respondents and nonrespondents, we decided not to adjust the data to account for potential nonresponse bias.

Because really, who would you want to do that? It doesn’t matter and it further doesn’t matter that the data for this study is 11 years old. This study is very important. They obviously only questioned residents who were smarter than the average bear. They were PSYCHIC! How do I know they were psychic? Read for yourself.

Sixty-one percent of respondents in the High beaver density group perceived a statewide increase in beaver damage over the previous 5 years. Only 24% of respondents in the Low beaver density group perceived that beaver damage had increased.

Remember, this was 2002. A scant 6 years after the voters passed the referendum to outlaw trapping, which the politicians took another few months to craft into law. Which means it wouldn’t have affected the 96 season. The state only has 2754 square miles of water, so there were a limited number of beavers to start with. Even if there were 1000 yearlings poised to disperse that first year, research tells us they mostly couldn’t breed until their third year or 1999. Now we’ve seen first hand that the first time a beaver has kits the numbers are low. So 500 kits born that year and 1ooo born the following year. Meanwhile a steady stream of yearlings is marching on with similar successes. Lets assume, of course, that these kits weren’t killed some other way or exposed to round worm parasite and die like nearly half of ours did. Let’s assume that the conditions in Massachusetts are so pristine and predator-free that the population gets as big as it can possibly be in those 5 years and increases by 500%.

I suppose 5000 new kits could be impactful. but remember none of these off spring will be ready to disperse until the year 2002 when this study was done, so its hard to imagine folks were feeling the burden of the booming population when these questionnaires were being filled out. Just to be clear, that means folks who wrote that the population was EXPLODING were actually writing that they were IMAGINING it would explode in the future and blaming their beaver problems on the new laws without actually understanding what was happening.

Heidi, you’re so picky. What about the part of the survey where they talk about flow devices and how attitudes change with successful installation? Don’t be silly. They didn’t mention flow devices at all. That’s right, in this entire discussion about WAC (Wildlife Acceptance Capacity) they did not mention the one factor that might conceivably affect this attitude. Because the researchers obviously knew that beavers were ‘icky’, and grant money was freely awarded to folks who said so. The good news for the authors is that as the population climbs more and more folks will get annoyed and become more willing to kill them.

Well, that’s something to look forward to.