Category: Urban beavers

REMEMBERING A BEAVER IN THE BRONX

heidi08 Beaver Art, Beavers, Urban beavers August 13, 2020

So the birthday bash was fun yesterday, and this is what I couldn’t show. A few months ago I was alerted to the art of Joan White in Wisconsin by a reader from Pennsylvania who had commissioned a piece. I talked with Joan and sent her some of Cheryl’s awesome photos. And this is what she produced. It is painted on a slab of cedar that was taken down by a beaver near her home. The photo does not do it justice. In person it;s so luminous that it looks like the beaver is going to come right out of the water into our living room. Up in the corner on the left are two tiny and beautifully detailed frogs and a snail, with some lovely sparrows and fish at the bottom. At the bottom it is signed with the title we chose, “Amik”.

In addition to being an amazing artist, she is also a visionary. She looks at the wood and literally sees the animal images that are reaching to climb out of it. There’s a graphic on her webpage that previews the wood and then the amazing paintings she creates from each individual peice, You have to go look. Honestly, when I was a teen I saw a display of unfinished marbled carvings of DaVinci and it was very similar, beautiful images stuggling to come to life and leap from their humble beginnings.

Of course I had in the back of my mind that I might one day ask ev entually for a donation to the silent auction if everything worked out. But in explaining the beaver I told her about our work and she offered before we could ask. She is very fond of beavers and thrilled to meet someone who protects them. So she has that going for her too.

We think all the walls in the house are jealous now because they didn’t get one too. We might need to see what we can do about that.

Meanwhile, here’s a fun reminder from the New York Times that of the famous bronx beaver and the the nature that we displaced all around us that is ready to come back.

When the Bronx Was a Forest: Stroll Through the Centuries

With more residents than Dallas, more than Atlanta and San Francisco combined, the Bronx is a vast, vibrant megalopolis, which also happens to be New York City’s greenest borough. It’s home to the largest urban zoological garden in America, a park system nearly 10 times the size of Manhattan’s Central Park — and the city’s last remaining patch of old growth forest.

Colleagues of mine have found American Eels also returning to the river. The Bronx River is proof that given half a chance, nature finds a way back. You know the story of José.

No. Who is José?

Oh, well.

Back in 2007 I was in my office at the zoo one afternoon when some colleagues came by and said that on their lunch break, walking along the Bronx River, they saw a beaver. I said, “No, guys, you didn’t see a beaver, you saw a muskrat. There haven’t been beavers on the Bronx River for 200 years.”

They were, like, “We know what a beaver is, Eric.”

So the next day, I go with them to look, and sure enough, there were markings on a tree that were not made by a muskrat. They resembled the carvings of beaver teeth. A few days later a photographer got pictures of the beaver. Nobody knew what sex it was — probably a male because males disperse a lot farther. It was named after José E. Serrano, the United States Congressman from the Bronx who directed federal money to help clean up the river.

Everybody had thought the closest beaver population was up in northern Westchester or Putnam County, which meant that José must have traveled all the way downriver, through Scarsdale, through Bronxville, through these really lovely, ritzy neighborhoods in Westchester — and decided to live in the Bronx!

In the Bronx Zoo!

The beaver built a couple of lodges and knocked down a couple of big trees.

José knocked trees down?

Well, the wind did, with an assist from the beaver. At the zoo everybody was like, OK, all right, that’s what beavers do.

But the Botanical Garden was less happy about the whole situation. They put some metal guards around some of the trees. Then a few years ago another beaver showed up. So, now there were two of them. The Bronx River Alliance had the idea to ask schoolchildren in the neighborhood what they should call the new beaver. And the kids decided on Justin. Justin Beaver.

So now José and Justin live in the Bronx? I haven’t seen either one of them in a while.

Hmm. Eric, do you think maybe they’ve moved back to the suburbs? Yes. Maybe.

If you were reading this website back in 2008 (And why wouldn’t you be) you’d know all about Jose, and the Manhatta project, and the grounds keeper at the park that was keeping an eye on him. And you’d be able to explain to the fricken New York Times that beavers don’t KNOCK down trees for god’s sake.

They chop them.

NORWAY DISCOVERS BEAVERS LIVE IN CITIES

heidi08 Urban beavers July 20, 2020

Well, well, well, Norway is SHOCKED I tell you. Just shocked! That beavers have moved into the city park. Apparently that’s never happened before. Boy are they in for a learning curve.

Beavers move from the forest into town

After nearly becoming extinct in the late 1800s, Norway’s beaver population is now estimated to number more than 70,000. After making their mark in local forests around Oslo, some have even started moving into town, startling visitors to the Frogner Park and even residents of the city’s trendy Grünerløkka neighbourhood.

“Few animals, with the exception of us humans, can reform a landscape to the degree the beaver can,” notes Bjørn Vassnes, who writes an ecology column for newspaper Klassekampen. “They not only can cut down trees over a wide area, they also can change the hydrologic balance of an ecosystem.”

Vassnes wrote last week that such activity can do nature a favour, by limiting how water runs “from clouds to the sea,” thus dispersing water and restricting flood damage while also adding to biological diversity. That’s made them popular with ecologists and environmentalists even though the visual results of beaver activity isn’t very pretty.

Heh heh heh. I think your little nordic lives are about to get very very interesting.

City officials in Oslo are both surprised and a bit anxious after beavers have been sighted this spring from the Frogner Park in the west to the banks of the Aker River that runs from Nordmarka right through the heart of town. Newspaper Aftenposten reported how tourists in the Frogner Park were startled to see a normally nocturnal beaver swimming around in the park’s creek that’s fed by underground tunnels at both ends.

Then came beaver sightings along the Aker River (Akerselva) right near the former Ringnes Brewery that’s now a housing and commercial complex complete with one of Oslo’s largest cinemas.

Gosh beavers in the middle of town! That’s soooo surprising! It almost ~~never~~ always happens! Let me see, do your towns have low gradient streams? Check√. And do your streams run through neglected wildlife corridors? Check √ And do you plant trees along them? Check√.

Hmm.

“This is rather fun and gives us an opportunity to see wildlife close at hand, in the middle of the city,” Terje Laskemoen of the city parks, recreation and environmental division (Bymiljøetaten) told Aftenposten.

“Seeing a beaver so far down the Aker River is suprising,” he added. “That another beaver made it all the way (from the forest bording the city) to the Frogner Park is very surprising.” Laskemoen stressed that it’s important for people to stay at a distance and show respect for Oslo’s latest arrivals.

Beavers are known to exist in populated areas, but problems can arise if trees start falling or if the beavers’ dams end up causing flooding instead of redirecting it. Laskemoen and his colleagues will be following beaver developments, and they may need to be captured and moved if they gnaw on too many trees in the park or along the river where people stroll as well. He said it “would be unfortunate” if the beavers start toppling trees.

“Beavers are usually afraid of people, though,” Laskemoen told Aftenposten. “I think they’ll end up leaving the park area pretty soon.”

Um, yeah. I’m sure that will happen of its own accord.

Children watching beaver in urban environment
Martinez, CAet us know how that works out for you okay?

Hey guess who gets new beaver patients in nearby Sonoma? These little siblings where transferred from Gold County Wildlife Rescue in Red Bluff to Sonoma Wildlife Rescue in near by Sonoma. If there is one thing in all the world Red Bluff is good at. it’s making orphans. I’m thinking Cheryl is paying them a visit very soon. And gosh, someone donated Worth A Dam a beaver coat a while back, maybe they want to cuddle with it?

Your donations to care for these ADORABEAVERS goes here.

URBAN BEAVERS GO TO PRESS

heidi08 Urban beavers December 13, 2019

My grandfather, who was no stranger to schemes and antiquated technology, had a massive printing press in Ross where he printed several local papers back in the day. My then unemployed father helped him buy it used for a song, move it across the bay and reassemble it in one piece. My father sometimes helped by laying the type for a while until he got a ‘real’ job. Think of it, trays and trays full of tiny letters that you had to place just right on the tray and cinch into place so it could make copies. Once my Dad famously dropped the arranged page so that my grandpa heatedly said he “pied the tray!” so it had to be redone.

Think about linguistically what’s involved in that phrasing. “Pied the tray”. We’ve never heard it before or sense.

A pied page was a true catastrophe in almost any newspaper printing shop, because of the work needed to put it all together again. Most of the time, everything had to be set over again

Printer’s Jargon

Well, printing has come a long way since those early days. The urban booklet is finally done and off to the printers who have explained it will only cost the equivalent of a small grandchild to be made into flesh. You can’t believe how lovely they’re going to look in book form. And you really shouldn’t believe it because they cost so much I can never give them away. Well, except for at the east coast beaver conference. That’s where they belong.

Until then we can savor it virtually. Thank you to everyone that contributed!

NITROGEN REMOVAL IN URBAN SETTINGS

heidi08 Beavers and Nitrogen removal, Urban beavers October 19, 2019

I guess if you live to be old enough everything seems new eventually. Yesterday I was hunting around for a pithy urban beaver quote and stumbled onto this article. I can’t even tell if I wrote about it before because neither the author or the headline comes up on a search. Lets pretend we know I didn’t and be shocked that a jewel like this ever slipped by.

OHH I found it. 3 days before my last day of work closing down 25 years of office record so no wonder I forgot!

Leaving it to beavers: Communities make room for natural engineers

Once valued as little more than pelts, beavers are back in vogue and rebuilding their reputation as habitat engineers.

It helps their cause that the dams they build as homes also create water quality-boosting wetlands and habitat for other species. In the process, the structures slow the flow of water and filter out sediment that would otherwise be on its way to the Chesapeake Bay.

And a new study out of the Northeast suggests the dams, which can alter the course of entire river systems, can also substantially reduce the amount of nitrogen in them.

Arthur Gold, chair of the natural resources science department at the University of Rhode Island, along with graduate student Julia Lazar, was interested in the role of certain landscapes in cleaning up waters before they reach key estuaries. With a focus on natural resources, the team looked for important landscape features that have “pollution-cleansing capacity.”

Beaver dams “had all the ingredients,” Gold said.

The researchers knew beaver dams deployed wet, organic soils to trap nitrates, but could they also transform it into a gas that would float away from the water altogether?

The answer, it turns out, is yes.

Now I know we have talked a lot about Gold’s research on nitrogen removal. But I just don’t remember an article specifically saying this was especially good news for urban beavers. Do you?

The larger beaver ponds they studied removed up to 45 percent of the nitrogen from the water that moved through them, while smaller ponds removed closer to 5 percent. Gold said some of the lower removal rates were in ponds that had little nitrogen work to do in the first place because they filtered forested landscapes.

They’ve come back to a landscape with much more nitrogen in it,” he said, “So, because of the conditions that beaver ponds create, we now have a new removal ecosystem that we didn’t have.”

Where have you been all my life, you precious perfect article!

Residents can use tree guards to protect their expensive ornamentals from beavers’ teeth. Rather than destroying dams or trapping beavers, they can mitigate the impact of rising water tables with devices like the “beaver deceiver,” which uses pipes to channel water through the dam while giving the beaver the feeling of damming the stream.

Beavers and their dams also bring new habitats to urban and suburban environments, creating the wetlands known to be key to several species’ survival. Griffin said more people are warming to the idea that a beaver can bring benefits to the neighborhood.

“On a larger scale, there is the realization that we have shrinking wetlands. Harnessing these creatures to [create wetlands] in places where it’s possible is a great way to control runoff and create new systems,” he said.

In more rural environments, beavers not only have room to roam but their dams can help remove excess nitrogen associated with septic systems and animal farms. That impact can be even more powerful if we make room for dams — or simply conserve patchworks of the landscape — between urban and rural areas throughout the watershed.

“By conserving the area and creating places for the beaver, you may not have to go in later on and install stormwater management,” Kaushal said. “You could have a [nitrogen-absorbing] sink that’s there by just conserving some of the land.”

Newly flooded forest ponds attract herons to form new rookeries and eagles to find new feeding grounds. Amphibians flourish in the shallow ponds and juvenile fish find room to grow.

In the West, natural resource departments have deployed beavers to help restore watersheds, where the ponds they create become rich with invertebrate life.

But beaver dams are also the foundation for “a riot of plant life,” Gold said. The plants contribute to the ponds’ ability to remove nitrogen from the water.

Honestly. I still can’t get over the fact that I’m not sure if I ever saw this before. The Bay Journal is based in Pennsylvania. How does such wisdom slip right past Washington and California and end up there?

When that plant material dies in the fall, Gold explained, the microbial community has a feast similar to what takes place in a compost pile. They need oxygen to fuel this decomposition, but there’s only so much to be had in a beaver pond.

The researchers found that those microbes are then able to use an alternate source of oxygen by stripping one of the oxygen molecules from the nitrate molecule, made up of one nitrogen atom and three oxygen atoms. Subsequent steps carried out by anaerobic bacteria in the wet soil strip the remaining oxygen atoms and may ultimately free the nitrogen atoms, a gas, and allow it to leave the watershed.

The chemical process is the same as what happens in a streamside wetland as it filters runoff from adjacent land. But, unlike a riparian filter, beaver ponds might be filtering — and removing nitrogen from — water that’s flowed off an entire watershed, perhaps 2,000 acres.

Gold thinks this research makes the case for beaver dams interspersed throughout a stream system and, as often as possible, downstream from major sources of nitrogen pollution.

Urban parks can be a great place for beavers to redefine the landscape, as they have at Bladensburg Waterfront Park along the District of Columbia’s stretch of the Anacostia River. Jorge Bogantes Montero, stewardship program specialist in natural resources for the Anacostia Watershed Society, said three beaver dams constructed in one stretch of the park demonstrate their ability to attract wildlife and clean the water even in the middle of the city.

There, he said, you can see firsthand “how beaver engineering inspired these new systems that bioengineers use for stream stabilization.”

Kaushal agrees that there’s room for them in these urban landscapes, especially as we learn more about their pollution-removal capacity.

“We need to, I don’t want to say embrace the beaver, but it’s a bigger symbol of some bigger things,” h

Oh man I need a cigarette after that article. This predates Ben’s book AND my retirement. And it deserves entry into the beaver hall of fame. Great work Whitney Pipkin pulling together some very complicated threads and tying it with a bow. You are my new hero from 4 years ago.

BEAVER COEXISTENCE STRATEGIES

heidi08 Friends of Martinez Beavers, Urban beavers October 12, 2019

What do you know. Here I was proudly posting a single page of my urban beaver booklet yesterday when a friend let me know that The Fur-Bearers just released the finished product! This was undertaken with a grant from A seed of Change for the the British Columbia Union of Urban Municipalities Conference a couple weeks ago. Perfect timing to motivate our work don’t you think?

You can see they delve into all the nitty gritty details of keeping beaver on an urban landscape, dealing with all the problems they might cause and how to fix them. There are some excellent references at the conclusion for folks to go read more and a nice case study about our friends in Belleville Ontario,

To tell the truth, I’m a little dissatisfied by some of the effort. The discussion about beaver effects on the ecosystem is lackluster, it says their natural history is mysterious and there’s no real analysis of the cost-saving that comes with fixing the problem once. Only a single photo is sourced. But, as first strikes go, it hits a lot of the target. I especially like the last page which raises several issues I wish were discussed in more detail.

COEXISTENCE SUPPORTS YOUR COMMUNITY

Beavers are a natural part of our communities. Whether we’re in a big city, a mid-sized town, or a gathering of properties in a district, entire ecosystems are kept alive and healthy by the activities of our national animal.

The general public’s interest in environmental policy is growing alongside what will inevitably be conflict with nature as our communities continue to expand; even when one area isn’t growing, another is, causing changes that ripple out over property lines and boundaries. New solutions – ones that consider long-term consequence to ecosystems and the ethical quandaries of the past – must be found.

Municipalities and individual landowners are also facing increasing pressure from provincial (or state) and federal governments who download responsibility for managing issues related to the environment, wildlife and social programs. While this difficult change is a challenge, it is also an opportunity: necessity is the mother of invention.

Not every community will welcome change to traditional practices of wildlife and infrastructure management; not every community will accept staying with the status quo. Ultimately, this booklet was created to illustrate that innovation of non-lethal solutions is not only possible, but ecologically and economically responsible.

Basic fencing can protect individual trees, bushes, or crops from beaver activity; exclusion fences can prevent damming from starting on sensitive culverts or properties; and, with a little education and beaver-like hard work, entire ecosystems can be rebalanced to protect wildlife and infrastructure.

The Fur-Bearers are proud of the goals accomplished by working with municipalities and landowners in the past, and look forward to supporting your community through coexistence strategies.

If you’re like me, you read all the way to the very very end, checking every reference in the bibliography put together by Janice Wong. Is kind of a free for all with Ben’s new urban paper , Hood’s flow device study as well as Longcore’s “Management by Assertion”, but there is also a USDA article about keeping beavers out of culverts (?) and sadly zero mention of Pollock’s restoration Guidebook, which as we know has a very helpful section on urban beavers and their benefits.

It has the look of a reference section where you want your thesis advisor to sign off and are trying to make her think you read a great deal of material but aren’t exactly familiar with the quality of all of it. At the very end there’s some fancy lawyer speak says “Do not try this at home” or something to that effect.

This PDF/booklet and the material covered is for informational purposes only. We take no responsibility for what you do with this knowledge. We cannot be held responsible for any property or medical damages caused by activities listed here. We would advise you to check your local laws, and work with local, provincial/state, and federal governments to ensure you are adhering to all relevant legislation.By taking any information or educational material from The Fur-Bearers and/or this document, you assume all risks. You agree to indemnify, hold harmless, and defend The Association for the Protection of Fur-Bearing Animals (The Fur-Bearers) from any and all claims and damages as a result of any and all the information covered. By taking and/or using any informational resources from The Fur-Bearers, you agree that you will use this information in a safe and legal manner, consistent with all applicable laws, safety rules, and good common sense.

It was just a suggestion. Don’t blame us if it doesn’t work and beavers kill your grandmother. If you agreed to read it it means you agreed to indemnify us from any responsibility if something goes wrong. My mouth would gape more at that statement but what I was mostly startled about was this one.

We strongly recommend working with a professional such as Beaver Deceivers LLC (www.beaverdeceivers.com) or The Beaver Institute (www.beaverinstitute.org.

Okay, now we like Mike and Skip too and trust them a great deal to get things right, but anyone with a ounce of history will be scratching their heads at this. You see up until very recently TFB has employed Adrien Nelson [a Canadian] to do all their beaver installations. He was trained by Mike Callahan after they met at the second State of the Beaver Conference. In 2017 Adrien did a webinar for them about installing flow devices and the area around Vancouver is filled with articles like this:

Volunteer help saves beavers and highway

Beaver dams threatened to flood a section of Highway 101 in Egmont, but thanks to two days of volunteer efforts, the road is now safe – and the beavers are, too.

Members of the Furbearer Defenders group Lesley Fox, Jim Atkinson and Adrian Nelson and Friends of Animals member Dave Shishkoff travelled to Egmont on July 31 and Aug. 7 to install two pond levellers and some exclusion fencing to appease the beavers and protect the roadway.

Adrian was the face of beaver management but no longer is. Go ahead, if you don’t believe me and do a search at the top of this page for his name which will come up 25 times doing installations for furbearer defenders all across the region. Not any more. Which is too bad because he is a friend of this website and a friend of our friends and skilled at what he does. I also liked the fact that he was a young man and could keep doing this work long after Mike and Skip had retired.

All good things come to an end. I’ve heard through the grapevine that the separation wasn’t amicable and since the parting advice of this booklet is to hire an American if you want this done right I’m going to guess that things haven’t softened.

It makes the launch of the book a little bitter sweet. Saving wildlife would of course be so much easier if people and their personalities, egos and feelings weren’t involved. I know beavers themselves are very happy it’s published, They don’t much care who works with whom as long as they’re not killed outright, and we should strive to remember their happy pragmatism.

Congratulations TFB on the excellent new resource you have made available to muncipalities and beaver supporters everywhere. I’ve made a link at the sidebar for people to go explore.