Because the beaver isn't just an animal; it's an ecosystem!

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Peter Fimrite’s alarming aricle about Tahoe Bears Gone Wild triggered my skepticism meter even before I heard from our friends in Kings Beach. There are several telltale  signs of hyperbole in the article, which I’ve come to recognize after years of reading countless “Beavers Blamed for Another Bank Failure” articles. Let’s look at them together, shall we?

Maybe we should start with the title. “Black Bears Wreaking Havoc on Tahoe Area.” Not exactly subtle. Clearly  the problem with Tahoe isn’t unfettered development encroaching on animal habitat and  hardscape causing acres of erosion down the mountain side. The problem is BEARS!!! Wreaking Havoc! Well, often the reporter doesn’t choose the headline, so we can’t blame Pete for that. Let’s keep reading.

Black bears, normally shy around humans, have been smashing windows, yanking doors off their hinges and entering homes and businesses in the Lake Tahoe area like never before, according to the California Department of Fish and Game.

Smashing windows! Yanking doors off their hinges! Is this bear gang violence? (Has there been tagging? Is that what that bear was doing hanging over the bridge?)  Of course bears have always yanked doors off their hinges and smashed windows to get things they really want. They’re BEARS after all. You know there used to be people in Tahoe that understood that. They were accustomed to dealing with bears. Now if you walked down the condo’d streets and canals you would see the very same neighbors you’d recognize from your home in the Bay Area. 62 depradation permits? Nice to know Fish & Game still has a purpose. It occurs to me that its possible the number of blood thirsty bears hasn’t gone up, Pete. But the number of bear-stupid humans who leave food and ice chests and candy wrappers out, has.

Hunter said the brute tore a window out of the restaurant on Nov. 11 and raided the kitchen, gobbled a 3-gallon tub of spumoni ice cream and sampled the salami, ravioli and tortellini before sacking out in a wine box in the kitchen. He found the snoring beast the next morning and, with help from his son and an expert from the Bear Education Aversion Response, or BEAR League, splashed ammonia on the hairy slob’s face and shooed him out.

Brute? Hairy Slob? Are we talking about an animal break-in or a frat party? Well I’m sure after the reporter exhausts his supply of perjorative labels he’ll get down to the real story.  Maybe he’ll talk about the increase in development in the Tahoe area, or how, when the economy tanked, newly developed units got abandoned and allowed more animal traffic. Maybe he’ll talk about since we humans know this, we’re responsible for keeping our supplies locked up and out of sight. We need to make our trash bear-proof. We need to keep from attracting these animals into our backyards and restaurants.

These skills take education and community response to develop, so enter the program described later in the article “BEAR” (Bear Education Aversion Response) Guess who’s on the BEAR team? The husband of our beaver-saving friends in Kings Beach. Guess who the reporter didn’t talk to? I’ll give you a hint, here’s his response to the article.

This account is completely wrong. I was the volunteer who originally showed up to chase the bear out of Bacchi’s restaurant. No ammonia was thrown on anyone’s face – I tossed about 1/4 cup of ammonia on the floor near where the bear was lying down. He exited, and I chased him down the hall and outside across the meadow and into the woods. I shot him with a paintball gun to even keep him moving. This was a very old, very sleepy and slow bear, well known by neighbors for years, and never aggressive.

As volunteers for the BEAR League, we advised the owners of several precautions to take, including securing their garbage (their dumpster bin was NOT locked) and securing old, loose windows. This was 10 days before the bear was shot, plenty of time to have done something.

Mr. Hunter’s account also clearly shows he was blocking the bear’s exit path – ‘the bear realized it was a dead end and turned back toward me’ – which is the only reason a bear would come toward someone, other than the short ‘bluff’ that Mr. Hunter also described. Nobody was attacked, but someone obviously likes the undeserved attention. Your reporter should have known better than to repeat such hyperbole without checking the facts.
Ted Guzzi

So let’s get this straight: you’ve written an article that blames the animals for exaggerated human fears, thus creating more human fears so that more animals can be blamed in the future. The article fails not only  to discuss the responsible options this man neglected to exercise, but it goes on to describe a rampant increase in the number of bears roaming about the state without mentioning the rampant increase of humans.

“He came around that table and just charged me,” Hunter said. “He covered about 30 feet in three bounds. I knew bears were fast, but this was the fastest thing I’d ever seen in my life. I had no time to get the shotgun around. It was the proverbial life flashes before your eyes kind of thing.” Miraculously, Hunter said, the bear turned away at the last second. “He was between these two tables 6 or 7 feet away when he realized he was trapped there and he reared up again and turned back toward me,” Hunter said. “I wasn’t going to let him get close to me. That’s when I shot him.”

What was the man’s name again?  The innocent victim who was forced to shoot the bear. I won’t say it. It’s just too easy. But tell me the truth, Pete, have you been watching a little too much Stephen Colbert lately?)

Mary also wrote the chronicle. Let’s see what she has to say,

I am a 39 year resident of Lake Tahoe. What happened at Bacchi’s is tragic. This man was advised over and over to secure his property and make his garbage inaccessible, but instead he ignored the experts advice and shot this old bear that was known and not feared by the neighborhood. Now his photo is on the front page of your paper as if he is some hero that narrowly escaped with his life. In addition, your story and the story in our local paper, the Sierra Sun, are only vaguely similar. Is the sensationalism for the sake of circulation or dinner counts? Shame on you.

Well, what Tahoe residents read the SF chronicle anyway? Oh, right. The flatlanders who come up for Christmas and the weekend ski and wish it was more like the Bay Area. They’ll get together with Fish & Game and make sure the hunting regulations are changed for bears in the state. I can see it coming. So can Mary. She’s organizing a candelight vigil at the restaurant and calling the media to invite them. I just had one piece of advice.

Invite children, and have everyone bring their Teddy Bear.



Beaver friend Brock Dolman wrote yesterday about the finishing touches to the schedule for the salmonid restoration conference 2011 in San Luis Obispo.

I just wanted to let you all know that our ‘Pro-Beaver is Pro-Salmon’ perspective will get a bunch of myth dispelling boosts at next spring’s Salmonid Restoration Federation Conference in San Luis Obispo 2011!  Dr. Michael Pollock will bestow his abundant research-based beaver basics as the keynote speaker for Conference!!!  Fellow Beaver-Booster Paul Jenkin of Surfrider Foundation will inspire us with the exciting vision for the removal of Matilija Dam and Ventura River Recovery!! Paul, like many of us, is clear that “not all dams are not created equally”!!

Afflicted with an unrelenting case of Beaver-Fever – I will be facilitating a day long ‘Sustainable Water Conservation’ workshop, with a roofwater hands-on project and for the morning have lined up for the speakers portion a few of our Castor-Compadres:  Rick Lanman – Beaver-Buddy extraordinaire with his very informative historical distribution information on the pre & post contact occurrence beaver in CA!  Mattolian Beaver-Booster Tasha McKee will be talking about her work with Beaver mimicry efforts in engineering beaver ponds until the real deal can be re-introduced into the Mattole Watershed!

So Cal Steelhead Super-Star – Matt Stoecker will inspire us with Dam removal efforts in the Santa Maria & Sisquoc Watershed and reinforce his observations that where he has observed beavers he has generally observed greater numbers & larger endangered Southern Steelhead!!

This is my favorite part….

Bit by Bit and Bite by Bite – Down come the Trees of Beaver Fallacies …Limb-by-Limb and Whim-by-Whim shall Castor and Coho be comrades again!!??

Thanks Brock (and Rogers & Hammerstein)  for inspiring this….

The salmon and the beaver should be friends
Oh, the beaver and the salmon should be friends
One thing likes to eat a tree, the other likes to swim to sea
But that’s no reason why they cain’t be friends.
Waterbody folks should stick together
Waterbody folks should all be pals
Beavers dance with the salmon’s daughter
Salmon dance with the beaver gals!

I’d like to say a word for the salmon
He swims from little creek out to the ocean
He bumps among the foam, then he jumps to get back home.
I can’t imagine where he gets the notion!
The salmon is essential to the water
He feeds at sea and brings back all its glory
Makes food for other things with the nutrients he brings
And all our fishermen can tell the story!

But the salmon and the beaver should be friends
Oh, the salmon and the beaver should be friends
One thing brings the sea to shore, the other makes the water store
But that’s no reason why they cain’t be friends.
Waterbody folks should stick together
Waterbody folks should all be pals
Salmon dance with the beavers daughters
Beavers dance with the salmon’s gals!

People always worry about beaver
Will dams they build cause flooding when its wetter?
Could all these dams prevent fish from getting where they went
But once we understand we all know better!
The beaver builds without a plan or rebar
His dam makes ponds that all the critters share
In summer and in snow, salmon have a place to go
And everybody hungry gathers there!

Waterbody folks should stick together
Waterbody folks should all be pals
Beavers dance with the salmon’s daughters
Salmon dance with the beaver’s gals!


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Is it me or does that beaver sound vaguely Scottish? On a related note Louise Ramsay of the Tay Beaver Bruhaha offers this excellent read…

Here is an article by Jim Crumley in the Dundee Courier today. It is very entertainly written and highly recommended if you have a moment.


Jim Crumley


I SUPPOSE I should really know better by now, but I have been trying to fathom the logic that underpins the thought processes of the denizens of that strange and faraway land known as Scottish Natural Heritage.

“Oh, what now?” I hear you ask, the answer to which is,“Beavers.”

It seems that SNH has commissioned the services of SASA, that’s the Scottish Agricultural Sciences Agency since you ask, and no, I’d never heard of it either, but I do lead a rather sheltered life, and have never had cause to prompt an investigation of potato blight, which I gather is the agency’s stock-in-trade. But SASA has another arrow in its quiver, which is to go Pied-Piper-like around the land ridding it of vertebrate pests – rabbits, mink, rats, that kind of thing – a skill that SNH has called on in an attempt to rid Tayside of its beavers.

“Hold on,” I hear you say, you being of a thoughtful turn of mind, “surely SNH wants to establish a beaver population in Scotland? Didn’t it fund a reintroduction scheme in Argyll?”

You see, I knew I could count on you to ask intelligent questions. Yes is the answer to both questions. You may be surprised to learn (I know I was pretty astounded), that putting a handful of beavers back in to Argyll has cost £2million, which seems to my o-level arithmetic to work out at rather more than £100,000 a beaver.

The figure is all the more astounding when you consider that the Tayside population has established itself free of charge and is apparently self-sustaining, a state of affairs which poses a number of problems for SNH.

Firstly, the Argyll project begins to look like not very good value for money.

Secondly, the Tayside population seems to suggest that allowing nature to manage nature is a better idea than allowing people to do it, which is embarrassing at the very least for SNH, the Scottish Government’s advisor on conservation. Reading between the lines, it is fairly safe to assume that SNH feels that its Argyll project is threatened by the Tayside beavers. As the government scours the public sector for every unnecessary scrap of spending it can strike from the record as if it has never been, there must already be mutterings in dark corners that if we can have beavers on Tayside for nothing, why don’t we do away with the £100,000-a-head beavers in Argyll?

Hence the involvement of SASA whose role in all this will be to trap the Tayside beavers and either send them off to sundry zoos or otherwise dispose of them, which means killing them. They are, after all…wait for it, wait for it…the wrong kind of beavers.

The £100,000-a-head beavers are from Norway, and are thought to be genetically more or less identical to the long-extinct Scottish population. The problem with them is that they come from a localised Norwegian population and they have brought with them some of the obvious defects of sustained in-breeding. Several have died as a result.

The free Tayside beavers are from Bavaria. Actually they’re from Perthshire, which is where the origins of the population are thought to have escaped from a wildlife park, and where they seem to have established a breeding population in 2001, and from that small beginning they have migrated up into Angus and other parts of east Perthshire No-one knows how many there are and estimates seem to vary between about 30 and about 100.

So they seem to be prospering, and the slightly hybridised nature of the Eurasian beavers of Bavaria has none of the defects of the genetically pure but inbred European beavers from Norway. In other words, those animals defined as the wrong kind of beavers seem to be the right kind if the object of the exercise is to establish a wild population of breeding beavers.

And here is where the logic starts to fall apart at the seams. Instead of studying the Tayside animals to learn more about them from nature, SNH’s response has been to take nature out of the equation so that the only beaver study in the land is the one it has spent £2million on. Of course, studying the Argyll beavers is made simple by the fact that every beaver is radio-collared and micro-chipped and generally equipped with enough technology to make it worthwhile establishing a new branch of PC World in Oban. The Tayside animals have none of these things, and the only way you can watch is to practise stealth and patience and get cold and sit still and just watch them when they turn up.

When you watch their behaviour patterns represented as meandering lines on a graph on a laptop screen, you have achieved little more than reducing a wild animal to a computer game, which is hardly an accomplishment to be proud of. When you sit still outside in their world and watch their behaviour patterns unfold before your very eyes, you pay them the compliment of allowing them their mystery. They may or may not reveal their mysteries to what they judge to be the right kind of watching eyes.

And what is more valuable in terms of our understanding of this animal we have invited back into the land that once extinguished it: to watch it hamstrung with technology and fankled by bureaucracy, or to watch it on its own terms, as nature intended?

And here is another question I feel certain you are about to ask as the SASA people confront their task of capturing and quite possibly killing wild beavers: is that legal?

We may not have got around to a specific beaver protection law in Scotland yet: the introduction project is still officially a trial, which may yet be abandoned. But the EU species and habitats directive of 1992 requires member governments to look at ways of re-introducing lost mammal species, and the beaver is one of these, and whether it is Norwegian or Bavarian should not affect its right to protection within the reintroduction process.

In the same way, a sea eagle that wandered across the North Sea from mainland Europe would be given the same level of protection here as a sea eagle raised from the egg at a Scottish nest.

So it seems to me that nature is trying to tell us something with its Tayside beaver colony. We spend so much of our time and energy and resources trying to persuade nature to do our bidding, to operate within conditions we impose on it. Here is an all too rare opportunity to bear witness as nature unfolds the direct opposite of that process, as nature imposes new conditions on us. We should watch and learn and delight in the possibilities that will flow whenever we are willing to give nature its head.”


Update:

How tired are we? Well that was an event! 60 very enthusiastic third graders got a personal tour of the beaver dams, the tale of their history in Martinez and an introduction to how beavers build “animal neighborhoods”.

The sidewalk art was amazing, the questions and comments were delightful, the beavers were a big hit and the help was SUPER! Highlight of the day? Jon spotted an otter in the morning and a green heron in the afternoon. An unexpected surprise was a beautiful field mouse on the grass very unafraid and visible for the children, first sighting ever!

Hopefully they’ll be a nice write up in the record, there was a friendly reporter who loved the beavers and a photographer. We should have some photos soon, but if I were you I’d go see those chalk beavers now before they get smudged.


From the “It serves you right you beer-swilling , beaver-killin’, troglodyte” files, here’s a nice tale of getting what you deserve.

Seems that Yvan Fournier of Iroquois Falls Ontario received a set of fairly hefty fines for illegal beaver trapping. I guess it wasn’t his first time. The article says his shotgun and a ‘tool’ he used to kill beavers was ‘forefeitted to the crown’. Its nice to know these things have consequences. I just wish the money was going straight to a ‘beaver education and humane management’ fund. Well, nothing is perfect.

I’m sure this had to sting a little.


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