Category: Why We Care

Valuable

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Educational, Environmental, Who's Killing Beavers Now?, Why We Care March 3, 2012

Let’s say (and why not) that you were a mild mannered beaver advocate associated with arguably the most famous beavers in the golden state and a fairly impressive website. What if some unnamed media outlet wanted your opinion on some internal memos obtained into the dealings between a certain beaver-stricken city and the federal agency that usually handles such things. And that after getting mad, nauseated and breathing into a paper bag every 5 minutes while you’re reading this delightful list of beaver-bashings you notice that a major contract for the city isn’t with the beaver-trappers, or with the tree planters, or even with hydrologists.

It’s with the beaver-re-education squad, who will provide brochures, website content, and even classroom visits designed to teach residents how destructive beavers can be and overcome any natural compassion or curiosity in the populace. Money to combat people like…oh..say…ME.

Let’s say that you were to find out that this beaver disinformation campaign is not unique to any particular city, but is part of most every beaver-management response once the public reacts negatively, or the media gets involved, or folks start spouting crazy-hugger humane ideas. Like Martinez for instance. Like the “expert” that suddenly showed up in our city and advised our city staff that flow devices always fail. Remember her? Let’s assume after seeing the amount of money that changes hands for a re-education campaign I have become more certain than ever that she didn’t come to Martinez for the view.

All of this is to say that information is power. And this website, with all its flaws and quirks – with all its solutions and stories and community, is powerful. The powers that be spend copious amounts of money to influence public opinion. And we have spent very little money and re shaped public opinion in a way that will affect thinking about beavers for decades to come. Every time we’re in the news-cycle, or talk to folks at Earth Day, or someone looks up the website because they want humane solutions, or children explain what a keystone species is at the beaver festival to get a charm bracelet, I’m reminded how much.

I guess after all the horrific displays of stupidly reflexive thinking, it was nice to realize that a city spends a vast portion of its time and resources thinking about the knotty problems caused by people like us.

Oh and check out Don’s lovely article about beavers in the Washoe newsletter. (Page 12) Hopefully we’ll make some new friends and I’ll find out some gossip about the beavers I’ve been watching for the past 7 years!

Beavers go Rogue…

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Environmental, Why We Care February 18, 2012

Draft plan to protect coho outlines multiple options

February 16, 2012 Mark Freeman Mail Tribune

Improving side-channel habitat, curbing the urban influences on water quality and getting more beaver dams are all identified as steps for helping wild coho salmon reverse their trend toward extinction in the upper Rogue River Basin.

Ahh now that’s music to my ears! Mind you this is from the state where beavers are still classified as a predator on private lands so they can be killed without a paperwork burden. Well, let’s just say the state’s attitude towards beavers represents some ambivalence and conflict – although not as much nefarious conflict as California.

The plan states that upper Rogue wild coho face a moderate risk of extinction, with rearing habitat for juvenile coho as the biggest single obstacle for recovery in the upper Rogue.

Coho need cool, clean water outside of streams’ main channels to survive and thrive during their 14 months rearing in fresh water before they migrate to the ocean, the draft states.

Improving rearing habitat can be as simple as increasing the numbers of beavers whose construction efforts have proven to create excellent rearing habitat, according to the plan. They can also be as expensive as the multi-million-dollar WISE project meant to make irrigation water delivery more efficient in the Bear Creek and Little Butte Creek basins while adding more water to coho streams suffering from a lack of water in the fall.

The best way this has been described to me was by Michael Pollock while we were driving to Occidental. He said aptly that Coho need time to grow up so that “They fit in fewer mouths and more things fit in THEIR mouths on the way out to sea.” Now that’s an explanation that makes sense and could be right out of harvard business school!

Champagne and cigars all around! Now that’s a beaver promotion to be proud of! Of course all the usual folk wrote letters to the paper saying ACK beavers are RODENTS and cause problems that can’t possibly be solved with our limited brain cells! But if you’d like to add your voice to the argument go here and explain what smart solutions look like.

Tomorrow’s podcast will feature Mary O’brien of the Grand Canyon Trust. Wait until you hear what she has to say about ‘beaver ghost towns’.

Watershed moment, indeed!

heidi08 Beaver Art, Beaver News, Beavers, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, Why We Care June 20, 2021

Wow. Yesterday was a dazzling blur, and I’m still trying to feel my way through it. We woke up early to pick Michael Pollock up at the train station, then drove to the meeting at Occidental where we found a room full of 20+ folks I had been emailing for the past year from various government and environmental agencies all ready to work hard, talk about beavers and change the way folks saw the role of beavers in watershed.

Some of them I knew, like Brock, Rick, Lisa and our Tahoe friends, but some were a delightful introduction to someone I had swapped email with but never met. It was a positive, knowledgeable, cheerful, pragmatic and very intriguing group. Michael found out at the last minute that he lost travel funding so Worth A Dam made the decision to pay for him to come down. I figured that having him there would really make a difference and was worth the train ticket. Brock and Rick are kicking in too.

The meeting was well facilitated by the OAEC’s director Dave Henson, and started with introductions and background. Then Rick and I reviewed the historical distribution paper and talked about where beaver belonged. Pollock made the excellent point that he couldn’t think of another instance where government agencies were relying so heavily on a 70 year old paper, and we all talked about how to change the mindset of today.

Then he presented his data from the current work which is looking particularly at beavers and steelhead, having pretty handily answered any Coho questions. After which we were treated to a delicious lunch, mostly grown on site, and a tour of the gardens. I chatted with our Tahoe friends about their upcoming grant project to get funding for school presentations and their 501.3(c) application.

After lunch we talked about obstacles and made schemes for the work that needs to be done to get a beaver management plan at CDFG that recognized beaver’s incredible assets, acknowledged the damage done to habitat and wetlands by their removal, and required that certain steps be taken to try and solve the problem humanely before trapping. Then we went around the room and discussed what we had taken from the day and what we were going to do next to advance our goals.

Somewhere in the day, Eli Asarian agreed to do the hydrology graph for our article, Lisa gave me a present of a lovely antique postcard from her grandmother, Rick gave me an adorable and entirely fitting ornament of a beaver curled up in a gift box, and Pollock gave me a series of frames containing the historic 1930 article from Popular Science about beavers on Mars – along with the most whimsically charming beaver card I believe I will ever see that he bought in Montana. Here’s the Monte Dolack painting that it’s from.

Afterwards there was dinner, conversation, and wine before a stroll under a brightly jeweled cold and clear starry sky that poured the Milky Way right onto our car.

Chuck James, the archeologist who found the remnant beaver dam all those years ago and kick started the historic paper with his efforts, followed us back to Vallejo before heading off to Redding), and we got home sleepy and dazzled from the day. After a chat by the fire and look at the giant beaver skull (which Pollock had always wanted to see) and the scrapbook of our first year’s beaver story, (which he was less eager to see but he just had to look at to ‘get’ Martinez story), we brought him back to the train station where he embarked on another 22 hour journey home.

(My lost weekend was unbelievable, but his has to be something out of Salvador Dali.)

Well 2012 might not be the “year of the beaver” but I am more hopeful than ever before that big things are moving and shifting on the beaver front. This is as good an opportunity as any to thank the literally thousand of helpers that have cared about our beavers, cared about beavers in general, or taught us valuable lessons along the way.

It is said that the journey of a 1000 miles begins with a single step but when I finally fell asleep last night it felt more like we had just taken a series of sprinting leaps.

California Working Beaver Group Meeting at OAEC

Don’t call her the “Beaver Whisperer”…

heidi08 City Reports, Creative Solutions, Environmental, featured, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Why We Care September 15, 2011

Over the past 25 years, Tippie has probably live-trapped, fed, cuddled, relocated, observed, defended, conversed with, serenaded and otherwise saved from annihilation more beaver than any person on earth. Her expertise has been achieved through long hours in muddy, trash-choked creeks and endless struggles with know-nothing bureaucrats, smug exterminators and homeowner associations that view beaver as an invasive species. In 1987, when Tippie first started Wildlife 2000, her grassroots organization dedicated to beaver rescue, she was ridiculed by wildlife officials as a rank amateur; now members of those same agencies seek her out for advice and beg her to conduct seminars on how to trap safely.

Ohhh add Alan Prendergast’s remarkable article to the growing list of the “best beaver articles ever written”. Sherri Tippie obviously makes an inspiring subject and you won’t want to miss any one of his fantastic eight pages talking about her life, her work and her attitudes. He finds time along the way to sing the praises of beaver and make sure the reader knows why she bothers.

: Sherri Tippie has found new homes for hundreds of beaver threatened by Front Range development, including this refugee from Aurora.

This is my favorite sentence:

Even some of her most loyal supporters wish Tippie was a little less outspoken in her views on exterminators, dunderhead wildlife officers and others. But that’s just not who she is. “She’s the most ethical person I’ve ever known,” Gasser says. “And one-minded — is that a good word? Just totally focused on the beaver. I wouldn’t say she’s high on the diplomatic approach, but I have seen her do that.”

One minded about beavers? Outspoken about dunderhead wildlife officers? Be still my beating heart! No wonder I cried throughout most of her presentation in Oregon. Her marathon advocacy is so robust it makes me feel wondefully safe, like a child sleeping in the back of the car on the way home from a long day at the beach. Don’t worry, Sherri’s got this. She knows exactly what she’s doing.

And as for the rest of us, we can only watch and admire a hairdresser who let beavers crawl around her kitchen and talks to them on an ATV. This article is the best thing you’ll read all year and just in time for my birthday. Enjoy.

Sherri Tippe gives a dam about Colorado’s beavers from Village Voice Media on Vimeo.

Wildlife Services Serve No One

heidi08 Beavers, Environmental, Who's Killing Beavers Now?, Why We Care August 20, 2011

Some people say I’m too negative about the USDA. I’m always berating them for their vicious beaver/woodpecker/goose-killing ways. Maybe I should be more balanced. Say something nice about them for a change.

Okay.

Once I was attending a lecture in graduate school and, bored beyond belief, I glanced down at my sweater sleeve. It happened to have tiny flecks of color in the wool and the random pattern was fun to look at – or more fun than the lecture anyway. This time, though, the tiny flecks were moving.

I left class in a panic, certain I had such a bad case of head lice that they were dropping off in droves. I drove straight to the daycare where I’d worked forever knowing they could help. They fearlessly sat me down and checked my head. Then said, nope not lice.

I bug bombed the house. Threw out the sweater and shivered my way onwards. I didn’t see any more crawlies. I thought I was safe. Chalk it up to experience.

Next week I went back to class. Same teacher, same room, (practically the same lecture). I glanced down to keep from falling asleep and saw MORE CRAWLING!!!!!!!

This time I caught a few of the escapees. Someone told me to bring them to USDA in Concord to figure out what they were. They soberly took my tiny bugs. Dropped them in a vial of fermaldehyde and shipped to Sacramento. It was surreal, but oddly comforting. 2 weeks later the report came back.

As it happened they were Acacia Psyllids, a problem for the trees but not harmful to us or sweaters, and I had to walk through Acacia trees to get to class. And that, ladies and gentleman, is a good use of the USDA.

Now lets talk about this next story.

Seems there was an apartment complex in South Carolina that sported some recovering geese, injured by fishing line and beloved by residents. (Well, SOME of the residents).

Taxpayers subsidizing wild life extermination program, probe shows

By MARY LOU SIMMS

The trucks pulled up at dawn. PollyAnna, a year-old disabled goose whose wing feathers were growing back, was asleep when the trappers approached. Not long after, Debbie Dangerfield, a real estate agent and 16-year resident of River’s Edge, a sprawling residential complex in Charleston, S.C., was leaving her condo to check on PollyAnna when she noticed she was missing. Also gone were a dozen or so geese parents and their young.

The crippled geese also seemed to have vanished: Nibbles, a young gander with a damaged wing; Limp, so-named because of an upper-leg injury, and VeeVee, the victim of fishing-line entrapment.

As Dangerfield approached the entrance to the complex, she noticed two USDA trucks pulling away from the guard house and broke into a dead run, reaching the vehicles as they slowed to accommodate speed bumps. She begged the drivers to pull over, peering inside one of the trucks as they did.

There she saw PollyAnna crammed into a crate with half a dozen other geese.

Ouch. That seems harsh. I know you have jobs to do and all, saving airways from disabled geese or whatever, but just FYI, you probably shouldn’t ever take wildlife with a name. Don’t worry. They weren’t completely heartless. They did give her the “Sophie’s Goose Choice”

Eventually the police came and the River’s Edge management agreed to let her keep one bird.

Mary Lou’s EXCELLENT article follows goose-killing in New Jersey, Alabama, Mississippi and Oregon. It’s a grim shocking look at a fairly invisible outrage. She describes a freedom of Information Act-forced disclosure documenting countless wildlife killed by the USDA. (Including beavers of course.) Since the article is paid for by a private DC grant, and she works for the McClatchy Tribune (Same as the reporter I spoke with before the festival) I have to imagine that this data is making the rounds and going to generate a few similar stories in the future.

Good. It’s about time everyone realized what Unfeeling Sadists Do to Animals.