You Can Help Keep Beaver Safe on Public Lands!

Bob Kobres Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver News, Beavers, Podcast, Who's defending beavers now?, Why We Care April 11, 2023

This is important! Listen to this podcast. It’s great!

Toward An Executive Order Protecting Beaver on Federally Managed Public Lands

By Jack Humphrey Rewilding Earth

An interview with Suzanne Fouty and Adam Bronstein

Suzanne Fouty has been exploring the issues of water and the return of wolves in the West for over 30 years, the contributions made by beaver to ecosystems for over 25 years, and the synergy between beavers and wolves in restoring stream systems for over 10 years.

Her work on wolves began in 1990 at Yosemite Institute where she gave weekly presentations to students on the pending return of wolves to the West and some of the social questions in play related to livestock grazing and ranching on public lands and wolves.

She worked for the Forest Service in eastern Oregon as a hydrologist and soils specialist for almost 16 years before retiring in 2018. Since retiring she has been deeply involved in five recent efforts to close federally-managed public lands in Oregon to beaver trapping and hunting as a proactive response to climate change and biodiversity loss.

Suzanne was included in the PBS Nature episode “Leave it to Beavers” and featured in the film “The Beaver Believers.” Her writing and presentations have been primarily for the general public to share how beavers and wolves contribute to preparing communities for climate change via stream and wetland restoration, and the social and political obstacles getting in the way of those contributions.

Adam Bronstein is the director for Oregon and Nevada with Western Watersheds Project, a non-profit conservation organization working to protect and restore public lands and wildlife throughout the West. He is the host of Wilderness Podcast and also serves as board president of the Gallatin Yellowstone Wilderness Alliance in Bozeman, Montana, working to protect the remaining wilderness-quality lands of the Custer-Gallatin National Forest.

Topics

History of Beaver trapping and hunting on public lands

The requested executive order to close federally managed lands to beaver hunting and trapping

Drought and flood management with Beavers on the landscape

Beavers and their role as a keystone species

Extra Credit

Read the letter here

SIGN THE PETITION!

Beaver Benefits and Closure FAQ (PDF)

The world’s biggest banks have pumped trillions into fossil fuel projects in the past 5 years – Bank article mentioned by Suzanne in this episode

Show transcript (PDF)

Below are some posters that you can post on your favorite social media sites to let more people know about the petition and why it’s important to treat us as a partner and not as a product or problem!

FYI: There’s a recent techy research article here: Beaver pond identification from multi-temporal and multi-sourced remote sensing data. Also, rumor has it that Heidi will be back posting soon. YAY!

Bob

Nice Beaver News

heidi08 Friends of Martinez Beavers, Podcast August 15, 2017

No discoveries today, but some nice beaver news anyway. First stop is the Alberta Institute for Wildlife Conservation where they have successfully introduced two beaver patients to each other and need funds to let the little one grow up for a while before release. There’s a lovely short clip on the news story that I can’t embed here, but here is the explanation from AIWC themselves. To help them help beavers donate by ‘adopting’ and adorable beaver toy! We are very happy they seem to be doing everything right in beaver introduction, care and release.

Now we’re off to the opposite side of the northern hemisphere where Rhode Island Public Radio has a nice story about the recovery of a landfill. My favorite part is when the USDA biologist describes his favorite place as a beaver pond and talks about beavers without wanting to kill them. (No really!) Of course they think the beaver returning is a sign of their success cleaning up the water, and don’t realize he’s the CAUSE of it. But it’s nice anyway.

Montana goes with the Flow Device!

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, featured, Podcast May 7, 2013

Dam pipes save beavers and ditches

Last Sunday, a handful of people started removing part of a beaver dam from a ditch near Four Corners. But they didn’t destroy the dam. Instead, they took a notch out of the middle and inserted a large plastic pipe, which has restored the water flow down the ditch to the Gallatin River but leaves enough water for beavers to swim in.

“The normal practice is to blow up dams, but even after you do, the beavers come back,” said landowner Bob Judd.

That’s a landowner from Montana, where beaver advocacy isn’t exactly a regular occurrence. In fact the first 5 comments I read on the article were excitedly saying how much beavers needed killing. Never mind. There are clearly some forward thinkers in the state.

Fortunately for the animals, the ditch passes through the property of Judd and his wife, Kathryn Kelly, who wanted to keep the beavers around. The beaver dam has created wetlands on their 500-acre property that animals and birds are flocking to, Kelly said. Plus the standing water helps maintain groundwater levels and provides safe habitat for young trout.

So this winter, Kelly proposed the plastic pipe solution to the ditch company board. She spoke from experience. Last summer, she and Judd spent time in Maine observing beaver guru Skip Lisle of Vermont install flow devices to counteract beaver dams. Such devices have been used on the East Coast for about 25 years.

Skip! Nice to see your excellent work literally stretches from coast to coast! Well, lots of folks saw his handiwork in Martinez too! I love when good news about beavers gets broadcast to a new audience. We just need some newbies in the installation biz. The next generation who will allow cities to live with beaver for the next 50 years. Any hope on that front?

Beavers naturally repair any holes in their dams or lodges, so if people tear them down, the animals will return to rebuild. Similarly if a simple pipe is stuck through the dam, beavers will find it and plug it, said Amy Chadwick, a pupil of Lisle who works at Great West Engineering and designed the flow device.

But if the pipe end extends 15 feet or farther upstream from the dam and is surrounded by a wire cage, the beavers don’t know to plug it and couldn’t if they tried. Sometimes, such pipe structures are called “beaver deceivers,” although Chadwick said that name technically applies only to pipes going through culverts or ditches, per inventor Skip Lisle’s definition.

On Sunday, Chadwick joined Jeff Burrell of the Wildlife Conservation Society to help Judd and Kelly install their pipe. Each device has to be tailored to the specific dam, so it’s best to get an expert opinion.

Amy! Not sure whether pupil just means ‘I read about what Skip does’ or actually worked with him….but yesterday when I excitedly wrote her congratulations she wrote back anxiously saying that Skip might get annoyed because she was misquoted calling the pipe a beaver deceiver. Hahaha! She MUST have worked with Skip directly, I decided, because much like Adam himself, he is very concerned these things get the right names.

Amy introduced herself at the beaver conference this year after I presented, so we’re going to need to remember this name. And in the meantime celebrate a new flow device in Montana. It’s success is sure to change hearts and minds, which will definitely change the lives of beavers and the many species who depend on them.

Speaking of which, I just got an email this morning from a research assistant of Glynnis Hood working with her to show the cost effectiveness of flow devices. She wanted names of everyone who does this work so (in addition to many others) of course I introduced them to Amy! ________________________________________________________

No kit sighting last night. Cheryl was in attendance and her patience was rewarded only with a tail slap. We’ll be back again tonight, because tiny beavers deserve a photo shoot!

Worth A Thousand Words

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, pictures, Podcast January 29, 2013

Too much talking and not enough beavers! This is how I was feeling around day three of the conference, so I thought it was a perfect time to share our friend Ann Cameron Siegal’s excellent photos of the beavers at Huntley meadows in VA. It’s a great spot for watching wildlife. I first met Ann when she wrote an article about beavers for the Washington Post. I thought it was a good idea to establish first contact and found out she has been watching and photographing beavers for years. Remember it can be freezing but it’s fairly balmy there at the moment, so these beavers decided to make a break through the ice for the ‘outside’ when the weather warmed up.

Click on any photo for a closer look.

Post Earth Day Collapse…

heidi08 Earth Day, Educational, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Podcast April 22, 2012

There will be no podcast today, just the remaining buzz of good feeling as we try to recover from our massively successful earth day event. We brought 200 tails and they were all gone by noon. We spent the day describing the Martinez Beaver story and the good that beavers do and the impact this little colony had had on the ecosystem (and really around the world). I think I described that “beavers build a neighborhood” 500 times – at least.

On reason our tails were so successful is that every single adult, teen or child who beheld them wanted one of these:

Which, who can blame them? Thank you SO MUCH to our donor! And I’m hoping we can manage them again for the festival. If you’re feeling altruistic you can write Woodluck and tell them they really should donate to the Beaver group that has shown off their product to 5000 people so far. I tried, but have not been successful YET.

The other remarkable thing about yesterday, besides all the old friends, new friends, beaver supporter Igor Skaredoff as a perfect John Muir, memories of beavers, grandson of Muir supporting a beaver tail, and the 86 year old woman who said she saw beavers with her father in Martinez when she was 7 (c 1933) there was this…..

Now if you’ve had quite enough Beaver-Rama and you want some serious ecological news, check out this lovely article from the Massachusetts Eagle Tribune!

A brighter view for herons

Birds thriving in North Andover due to protection of beavers

Beaver ponds cause trees to drown, but the dead trees attract the great blue heron, which often return year after year. Over time, a beaver pond can attract more than 50 nests in a colony, called a rookery.

Chris Leahy, an expert with the Massachusetts Audubon Society who wrote a major report last year on Bay State fowl called “State of the Birds,” said that the resurgence of the area’s beaver population has led to a subsequent revival and expansion of the great blue heron population.

Once they saw the plot of land, they saw a lot of ecological value in the beaver pond, which even then had dozens of active heron nests and a lot of activity.

“It’s a very large wetland, which supports a lot of wildlife, everything from terrestrial animals like beavers and muskrats to all kinds of amphibians and reptiles, turtles and frogs and those species,” Rimmer said. “At that time, there were old nests there we could see. That’s pretty impressive, and we were interested in protecting it.”

Go read the entire breath-of-fresh-air article. It’s the best beaver reporting I’ve seen out of Massachusetts since – well – let’s just say a long, long time!