Category: stupid solutions

BEAVER STUPID NEVER GOES OUTTA STYLE

heidi08 stupid solutions December 18, 2018

What’s the news?
None but that the world’s grown honest.
Then is doomsday near. But your news is not true.

Hamlet 2:2

Here I am back from the great distance of the hospital, and what awaits me? The same foul degrees of stupid that were present when I went in. Well, I guess it’s nice to know that some things never change. Let’s start with this fine letter from a trapper in Missoula who didn’t take too kindly to all those nice things Greg was saying about beavers. Here’s Mike Dey’s take on things.

Trapper questions beaver expertise

Really, the hundreds of beavers I have trapped, I am sure I warmed the climate a lot. Unlike other species, beavers do not control other species. Beavers are controlled by their food.

Beavers must be trapped to keep them from destroying their food. The truth is, Greg Munther, you don’t know very much about beavers.

Some years back when prices were about the same as now, I took 96 beavers off the Clark Fork and Bitterroot rivers. I have trapped beavers from Libby to Bozeman.

Do you know why beavers will not cut large trees on the south or east of a body of water, and how far from the water beavers will go for food?

Why is it, that we as a society allow trappers to pontificate in public forums. I mean you never see opinion pieces from garbage collectors or Maytag repair men. For some reason we insist on behaving as if trappers knew things about the animals they were killing. I mean besides “Where to best kill them.”

Didn’t you know beavers never eat trees to the South?

One last question: Why did the Ice Age end? That was only 12,000 years to 20,000 years ago. I have been trapping beaver since 1963. There are a lot more beavers now than in 1963.

Climate change deniers who trap beavers on the side. I’m liking this fellow less and less. Beavers do not “control other species.

The thing is you know Mike has been outside. He has actually SEEN a beaver pond. He knows full well that there are fish and ducks and frogs in a beaver pond. So he knows that his argument is ridiculous.

He just doesn’t care.

Which brings me to the nice letter I received today from an inventor with a ‘humane’ way to stop otters. Stop them from doing what? I asked. confused. Being too cute and playful? , Jon offered.

No, it’s to stop otters from eating all your fish and ruining that pond! The owner wrote to suggest that it would probably – no certainly help with beavers too. So I might want to pass it on, since it would be so helpful.

“I believe this to be the single most overlooked & devastating problem a pond owner may ever face. A marine biologist study has stated 6 otters can go through a well stocked 10 acre pond in only 7-8 nights. This is because otters generally travel in groups of 3-6. Otters are excellent at what they do, catching fish. Mostly nocturnal, they feed at night. By the time you realize you have an issue, they have moved to another pond 2-3 miles away. Otters are not confined to the country either, as they have been found in storm water drainage systems in larger cities. I believe this to be the single most overlooked & devastating problem a pond owner may ever face. A marine biologist study has stated 6 otters can go through a well stocked 10 acre pond in only 7-8 nights. This is because otters generally travel in groups of 3-6. Otters are excellent at what they do, catching fish. Mostly nocturnal, they feed at night. By the time you realize you have an issue, they have moved to another pond 2-3 miles away. Otters are not confined to the country either, as they have been found in storm water drainage systems in larger cities. “

All units come pretested and programmed for the optimal volume and cycling to mimic predator sounds in its natural habitat. It features a waterproof speaker to deliver the patent pending sound through water for otter control

After thousands of hours of trial and error to fix my own otter problem, I realized that this product had the potential to vastly improve one of our nation’s favorite recreational activities, fishing, by ridding ponds/lakes of these terrors.

Now now now, can we just sit down and enjoy this for a moment. It’s just so damn refreshing to read a paragraph where otters are described as “TERRORS”.

Okay, let’s read a little more, shall we?

The solution I have found relies on the otter’s family tree. See, our pond and river otters are cousins to the marine variety. I discovered they share a built in fear of the same predator sounds. Harnessing this dormant fear with our technology, you can rid your pond of these pesky nighttime poachers.

So all we have to do is blast some Orca noises at these rascals and they’ll leave your precious fish alone! Orcas scare otters and beavers both, so no problem. For a mere 800 dollars you can get one of these devices shipped right to your door.

Scared yet?

A GIANT BEAVER TALE TO TELL

heidi08 beaver myths, castoroides, History December 7, 2018

I know you read this website every day, but you’re probably thinking, wait, there aren’t enough folktales or origin myths about beavers being the beginning of everything. Heidi should write about the big stories once in a while. And I agree! So we’re grateful Frances Backhouse shared this.

The Hero of the Dene

Long ago, giant beasts roamed the Earth and people were lawless, and the Dene of the Northwest Territories tell of two brothers who set the world straight. “Many old medicine stories talk about giant animals—bats, dinosaurs, beavers, monkeys—which once roamed the earth,” wrote the late Dene elder George Blondin in his book Yamoria: The Lawmaker. “Storytellers say we came from animals and long ago there were many half-animal/half-human life forms. It seems during this period that genetic forces as we know them today were out of control.” People were starving and ate each other, he writes of this “terrible period.” But Yamoria and Yamozha came from the west to be humankind’s salvation.

People were lawless? Well, that I believe. How do beavers come into the story?

“My grandfather says, as the story goes, that people were really, really scared when they paddled, because at any time they could encounter a beaver,” says Sangris. “And beavers, they don’t have any natural enemies. They’d come to anything that’s moving on water and if they feel threatened and if they don’t feel comfortable, they’ll capsize the canoes and break the canoes. So the Dene here, the Yellowknives Dene were afraid of them. They were afraid of the beavers so they’d paddle right on the shoreline as quietly as they could go. And they would tell the children not to make any noise.”

Shhhh watch out for beavers!

Sangris says no one knows what happened to them after the fight, but perhaps where they ended up is not as important as the legacy they left behind. “It’s always said that Atachuukaii corrected things. He made things better,” Elle says. For ridding the world of giant animals, Sangris says the two brothers are heroes to the Dene. “The Dene were free after that. There were no giant beavers swimming around anymore and no big birds flew in the sky and no big animals walked on the earth that could harm them anymore.”

Well, I might be scared of a 300 lb beaver too.

Giant beavers (Castoroides ohioensis), the key antagonists in many Yamoria legends, actually existed in the swamps and lakes of the North around the time humans first arrived, between 40,000 and 16,000 years ago. And like the legends say, they may not have been all that easy to deal with.

The North of that time was host to a wide diversity of large mammals, including horses, camels and woolly mammoths. But around the end of the last glacial period, about 12,000 years ago, the giant species began disappearing.

But were the giant beavers hunted? Were they around the same time as the humans?

Theories of over-hunting by humans would back up stories of Yamoria shrinking or killing off many of the giant mammals that threatened humans at the time, but Grant Zazula, a paleontologist with the Yukon government, has his doubts, saying there’s little evidence of over hunting and no evidence that humans preyed on giant beavers at all.

“A beaver the size of a bear with eight-inch teeth. I don’t know. If I was a hunter back then I would probably go with the horse or a bison.”

So how did giant beavers make their way into Dene stories? Zazula’s theory came to him the first time he did field work in Old Crow, in Northern Yukon.“If you go along the Old Crow River in the summer, and you float down in a canoe, there’s piles of bones of ice age animals on the riverbanks. They’re just all over the place.”

So the beavers themselves might not have been around, but their bones were. Native saw those bones and came up with some pretty exciting stories to keep their grandchildren warm at night.

I remember the first time I saw a castorides skull my eyes grew bright, I immediately conjured a fantasy of sitting at a city council meeting with that giant head in my lap.

Wouldn’t that be awesome?

THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE ADORABLE

heidi08 stupid solutions May 11, 2018

Here are three things you don’t usually find together. A scientific report about beavers in the news, a Dutch account of adorable orphaned beavers, and a city in Rhode Island that has decided to use huge metal cages to discourage beavers. One of the three stories is incomprehensible gibberish – and believe you me it ain’t the Dutch.

Town bringing heavy cages into fight against beavers

CUMBERLAND – From the Monastery to Diamond Hill Park, and numerous other waterways across town, local beavers appear undeterred in their path of destruction, causing downed trees and flooding as they move from place to place.

Now town workers, upping their game after a failed experiment with smaller “beaver deceivers,” or wire devices meant to allow water through and prevent beavers from building dams, are installing larger metal cages at strategic locations.

Highway Supt. Frank Stowik said a friend gave him the cages, and they’ve been reinforced with screens that he said are impossible to break through by jumping on them. Three are being installed at the Monastery, he said, and workers are planning to install more.

Um, did the ‘friend’ who gave you the cages borrow them from the BDSM club he visits on tuesdays when the wife’s playing bridge? I thought so. How exactly are they supposed to work. I realize you and the boys had fun jumping on them but what are they supposed to do exactly?

A smaller contraption was vandalized at the Monastery last year, he said, but these larger devices will hopefully prove more effective.

There are now discussions between some Land Trust members and town officials about potential solutions through trapping, said Murray. Past efforts at taking stronger measures were met with strong resistance, he said, so they’ll exercise caution moving forward.

Say no more. I understand what this is completely. We’ve seen it a million times before. Some compassionistas Save-the-beaver types stopped you from trapping and made you try a ‘beaver deceiver’. So you put a piece of dental floss in chicken wire and called it one because who can stop you? And then it didn’t work (surprise!) and you are bring in those huge cages leftover from the set of ‘shark week’ so when they fail you can say with a straight face,

“We tried using humane methods and they just didn’t work. Now we have to kill them”.

You’re working very hard to not succeed. I understand how this works. This ain’t my first rodeo.

New coverage of the Stirling study now in Science News

Study: Beavers Could Help Curb Soil Erosion, Clean Up Polluted Rivers

Led by University of Exeter’s Professor Richard Brazier, the study surveyed sediment depth, extent and carbon/nitrogen content in a sequence of beaver pond and dam structures in South West England, where a pair of Eurasian beavers were introduced to a controlled 1.8 ha site in 2011.

“The animals built 13 dams, slowing the flow of water and creating a series of deep ponds along the course of what was once a small stream,” the scientists explained.

“We measured the amount of sediment suspended, phosphorus and nitrogen in water running into the site and then compared this to water as it ran out of the site having passed through the beavers’ ponds and dams.. We also measured the amount of sediment, phosphorus and nitrogen trapped by the dams in each of the ponds.”

The results showed the 13 beaver dams had trapped 101.53 tons of sediment, 70% of which was soil, which had eroded from ‘intensively managed grassland’ fields upstream. Further investigation revealed that this sediment contained 15.9 tons of nitrogen and 0.91 tons of phosphorus, which are nutrients known to create problems for the wildlife in rivers and streams and which also need to be removed from human water supplies to meet drinking-quality standards.

Oh yes they did. Thank you for paying attention. Now if you could just send the results to the idiots in Cumberland and get them to stop “playing cages” long enough to realize that a LAND TRUST should value you its beavers we’d be in business.

The final act of this three-part drama comes from our friends in Belgium.Jorn Van Den Bogaert posted in the beaver management forum that his team had come across a nursing female beaver who had been hit by a car, They opened the lodge and rescued the kits and were asking how to care for them. All the right people helped and those kits are getting a good second chance as we speak. This was on Dutch TV last night, and even though you probably won’t understand it, you have to watch it because it is the best thing you will ever see.
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HOW ABOUT CHANNELING ACTUAL BEAVERS?

heidi08 Beavers and turtles, stupid solutions May 6, 2018

I know it’s only-good-news Sunday, but the world is mostly devoid of unreservedly positive beaver news at the moment so we get two stories that come very close to being good news. Let’s call them good-beaver-news-adjacent. The first is from Alberta Canada and does a pretty awesome job of talking about how beaver impoundments save water – it’s just missing the actual – you know – beavers.

Producer channels inner beaver to keep water on his farm

As a keystone species in North America, the beaver is so much more than just a hat with legs.

It is indisputably one of the most important and influential species, responsible not only for biodiverse ecosystems, but also for drought prevention. Takota Coen, a fourth-generation farmer, educator, and carpenter, has been channelling his inner beaver since he was a child.

“Every spring, all I did was throw sticks in creeks and try to build dams with weeds and mud,” the 25-year-old says. “Children have an innate sense of trying to slow water down.”

And all that play has made him a pro.

Now if I were in charge this realization that beavers save water and it makes a huge difference to available groundwater on a farm would lead Takota to tolerate the actual beavers on his farm and work with them to allow them to help his work. But sadly, I’m not in charge. So he doesn’t have any.

In the spring of 2014, Coen harvested enough water to meet their farm’s water needs for 40 years — 10 million gallons — in just 10 days.

A couple years earlier, when Coen decided to move to his parent’s farm, Grass Roots Family Farm near Ferintosh, Alta., the farm had a water problem: they’d already had two wells dry up on the property, a third that was dry right from the beginning, and a fourth that only pumped two gallons per minute.

“We had no choice but to look for water elsewhere,” he says.

Using LIDAR (light detection and ranging) maps of the property, Coen found the longest and highest valley on the farm, rented a Caterpillar D3 for a day and dug a 1.5 kilometre long, 1.2 metre wide, 0.3 metre swale — which he calls a “wetland on contour.”

That swale enabled Coen to catch all that runoff, and eventually, more.

Ahh so you made yourself a beaver pond and the rain filled it up! Great idea. I wonder how much that LIDAR and caterpillar rental coast you? Gosh, I know something that would have done that for free! Suddenly this graph springs to mind.

Onto Maine where we’re very happy they’ve decided to live trap a beaver rather than kill it. But honestly.

Catch & Release: Stalking the Wild Beaver

As state-certified Maine Animal Damage Control Cooperators, Maynard Stanley Jr. (pictured) and his wife Norma catch and release wild animals and help solve problems and conflicts between people and animals. This beaver (pictured) was building a dam in a culvert with sticks and mud, which, if left unattended, can cause a road to wash out, sometimes just overnight. So, Rockland Public Works Department called “Critter Catcher” Maynard Stanley Jr. on Tuesday to trap the beaver. The beaver is about four years old, Stanley said, and, after trapping it, he relocated it to a Maine Wildlife Management Area far away from people.

Oh okay.

You sent Mr. Critter catcher out to get ‘a beaver’ because obviously there was only ONE right? And he determined this bachelor is 4 years old by reading his kinder page? Something tells me this story is going to get more provoking. Just wait.

Before releasing the beaver, he and his wife stopped by Owls Head Central School for a quick Show and Tell. “The kids had lots of great questions,” Stanley said. “They love to see wild critters up close, smell the different trapping lures, and I enjoy sharing my experience and helping others understand wildlife and how to coexist. I give wildlife talks and have shown critters at other schools and never pass up a chance to talk with kids.”

Never mind that the poor beaver is confused frightened and isolated from his family. This morning we’re going to a brightly lit schoolroom full of noisy children who will poke at you and ask questions. Do you think that beaver was still in the clamshell trap? I’m going to guess he was because I doubt critter control moved him to something more comfortable. So five hours in that trap and then another five to drive him to his destination and then released without family or safety into some strange stream somewhere.

Poor little beaver.

The good news is that at least that culvert will NEVER get blocked again, right? I mean no other beaver is going to plug it tonight, or next month, because this story has a happy ending rof course?

A MISS IS AS GOOD AS A MILE

heidi08 stupid solutions March 26, 2018

I’m off to Auburn to talk about beavers this morning, but I thought I would leave you with some slightly silly news from Washington State, where a beaver was relocated from the water source – not because he was causing beaver fever mind you – but because officials said the dam made the water too turbid.

They only saw one beaver on camera so they’re SURE there’s only one. And the water operator became a ‘licensed beaver trapper’ and did this all himself.

Because honestly, how hard can it be?

Beaver transplanted from its home in Bremerton’s watershed

BREMERTON — A beaver was causing a stir to Bremerton’s primary source of drinking water. Earlier this month, public works officials began seeing a spike in turbidity, or decreased water clarity, in the middle of the night near the Casad Dam.

The dam, at the headwaters of the Union River west of Gorst, supplies about 60 percent of the water to Bremerton ratepayers. Just below it, before the water is treated in multiple facilities, a beaver was creating a new dam of its own.

There was no immediate panic for one animal, according to Kathleen Cahall, the city’s water resources manager. The engineer-like beaver can be a positive force on the nature around it, but in this case, the city had to remove it. Cahall noted that Bremerton must keep strict control of those waters — a pristine source of rainfall that collects behind the dam.

“Source control is paramount,” Cahall said. And that meant the beaver would have to go.

Well, at least you think beavers can be good news, but something tells me you’re still a little beaver-challenged.

It’s likely the critter’s in adolescence and was recently abandoned by his parents to fend for himself, according to Chad Huntelman, lead operator for the city’s water department. It fell to him to trap the animal.

He had no previous experience, but the city sought bids from 12 trappers. The cost to retain one for a year was $60,000. So Huntelman became a licensed beaver trapper.

He began to put out traps filled with cedar and a scent, and eventually, the beaver climbed right in. The state’s Department of Fish & Wildlife was called.

“They had a spot for it,” Huntelman said.

A state wildlife biologist took it to a creek in Mason County that was missing its beaver. The critter had been hit by a car and the owner of the property was glad to take a new one.

Ohhh little washington. You are so very close to smart about beavers, it is almost sadder to read stupid things from you. Why do you think this beaver was on his own anyway? Because you only saw one beaver on the night cam? And of course if you had two images of one beaver you could tell for sure that they were the same beaver right?

Pu-leeze. Why would a single beaver need to build a dam anyway? I mean without a family to protect why bother?

So you didn’t want to hire anyone qualified to do this, because how hard could it be to trap a dumb animal anyway? There are plenty of qualified folk like Ben Dittbrenner’s team that could have helped, but hey, you got this! The beaver was cooperative (probably a male checking out the scene for his family to make sure its safe) and boom! you caught a beaver! Since it’s Washington state you could borrow the hancock from someone, and lucky you there’s a home just waiting for that little transplanted beaver.

I suppose you took the cameras down now? Because you’re going to be shocked when see that beavers family working on your little dam. I just hope you didn’t create orphans along the way.