This week I was contacted by Andrea from Sacramento, an MD who spends her free time collecting used fishing tackle from the American River by where she lives.. Seems she had found a dead beaver that had been killed by swallowing a rusty hook. On the very same day another rehab reported the same thing with a different beaver.

She was looking for help getting the word out and general attention to the problem.

Waterbird Habitat Project

Sad to report I found one of the beavers dead in the pond this morning. There was necrosis of the cheek and tongue and a large hook in the water nearby. I last saw her Friday morning. Can’t know what caused the injury, but I will rake out the pond this week.

Another beaver died upstream today with fishhook in the tail tethered to a large weight near Sunrise access.

The most dangerous hooks are the ones in the water tethered to logs. Join in and help clean out the hooks and line in the American River.

In addition to cleaning the creek and bank regularly she has gotten permission from the parks department to hang this sign in several places.

She is doing the lord’s work and it’s a massive problem. Not just for beavers and birds but for otters and bobcats and every living thing that passes on the shore or dives in the water.

i commended her herculean efforts and suggest she think about doing some school children presentations and enlisting some childrens artwork on the problem. People don’t always see what makes the feel hopeless.

But they see things like this:

BEAVERS AND NIGHT HERONS

heidi08 Beavers September 25, 2024

I saw one night heron at our dam once, but I never saw him catch anything. This photo is from Rusty Cohn in Napa. In Martinez they all roost in one tree at the wharf and mostly hunt closer to the Marina. I know they must fish like other herons so the internet helped.

MOTHER MAY I? NO YOU MAY NOT. BECAUSE OF BEAVERS!

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver ecological impact September 24, 2024

I may be sentimental, but it always touches my heart to read about cities protecting wildlife corridors. Especially when the article has photos like this;

City staff recommend denial of Alpenrose land use permit

City of Portland staff recommended denial of the Land Use permit for the proposed 263-unit Raleigh Crest development on the Alpenrose site a week ago Friday, concluding that “all of the relevant standards and approval criteria have not been met.” Although the denial was based on several issues, the most complicated of them seemed to involve a wildlife corridor located on the southernmost edge of the property.

The pinch-point of the corridor is the area just north of the intersection of SW Shattuck Rd and Vermont St. Not only is this location tricky for wildlife, it’s also not a great place to be on a bicycle or walking—but wildlife has federal and state protection.

What’s this? Denying human use because wild critters need it more? Did I just read that aloud? Someone give me a glass of water. I can’t stop whooping.

Here’s an excerpt from the decision that talks about the wildlife issue:

… the site is a critical connection point for the movement of wildlife between the upstream habitat areas along Vermont Creek up to Gabriel Park and the extensive downstream habitat areas starting at Bauman Woods and the confluence with Fanno Creek and beyond into the Fanno Creek habitat corridor.

Thus, wildlife mobility is a key functional value of the site and the ability of wildlife to continue to move through this corridor should be preserved and carefully considered in any redesign of the SW Shattuck crossing. Any increased barriers to movement (e.g., proposed retaining wall, fall protection fencing, increased vehicular traffic, etc.) and reduction of wildlife mobility through this corridor must be mitigated, as they could have adverse long-term impacts on local wildlife species, particularly semi-aquatic mammals such as beaver, river otter, muskrat, and mink as well as the flightless ducklings of locally breeding waterfowl, such as mallard and wood duck.

Beaver are of particular concern because of their status as a keystone species in wetland ecosystems and the important role they play in creating and maintaining the habitat used by a wide variety of other species in this wetland complex.

BEAVER ARE OF PARTICULAR CONCERN? Am I dreaming? Did I just fall asleep without noticing because I must be dreaming. Either I’m hallucinating or they must hate the applicant a whole hell of a lot.

The applicant is Bike Portland which while I can imagine gets on folks nerves from time doesn’t have any dollar signs associated with. I’m sure if the request was to build a starbucks or a condo unit we’d be hearing less about wildlife.

But STILL.

EVEN IN WYOMING

heidi08 Beavers September 23, 2024

When I finally settled down to read this Cody Wyoming article I was glum at the recommendation for relocation, but after the usual discussion of musical beavers it gets even better:

G&F lectures about beaver management

Beavers are a unique species of animal known as keystone engineers, meaning they play a significant role in reshaping their environments, which provides benefits for a number of other species as well as themselves. However, beaver population numbers in the Big Horn Basin are at historically low levels.

By building dams, beavers increase the area of riparian ecosystems and restore the watershed in their respective regions. Over time, this leads to increased growth of cottonwoods and willows, as well as a rise in the water table and reduction of the impact of future wildfires.

However, property owners in the region experience difficulties when beavers dam irrigation ditches and culverts, which can lead to flooding of roads, driveways and pastures.

To assist landowners and beavers, Altermatt has relocated approximately 100 nuisance beavers. He has played a key role in moving beaver colonies from areas where they are unwanted and causing conflict to areas where they can flourish without causing unwanted changes to private land.

“When you’re able to trap and relocate entire colonies at once, there’s a better chance that the beavers establish themselves in their new location,” he said.

Yeah yeah yeah, we’ll take the beavers away and you can pat yourself on the back for not shooting them and maybe they’ll even live when we put the somewhere else! I mean sure, you’ll get new beavers after the old ones move out but this will fix the problem for now.

I liked this very much better:

Other nonlethal solutions for beaver management were presented by Elissa Chott, Beaver Conflict Resolution Fellow at the National Wildlife Federation.

Since 2019, Chott and her team have led a program in Montana to reduce beaver conflicts by installing tree wrap, pond levelers and exclusion fences on properties where nuisance beavers are present.

Chott was trained by Mike Callahan of the Beaver Institute, who has decades of experience on the East Coast in mitigating beaver conflicts by building these apparatuses.

In addition to installing these projects, Chott’s team assists in acquiring permitting and offsetting costs through a cost-share program. To date, they have completed 74 projects.

“We developed our cost-share program because we did not want financial causes to be the barrier to getting these projects completed,” she said. “We’re talking about hundreds of dollars to install these projects as opposed to thousands of dollars if somebody had to pay for everything themselves.”

The workshop concluded with a tour of the beaver holding facilities at the G&F office, as well as the building of an exclusion fence in a culvert on site.

GO ELISSA! You know what they say, “Teach a man how to move beavers and he’ll be free from beavers for a month. Teach a man how to SOLVE BEAVER ISSUES and he’ll be free forever”!

Just remember if you keep the beavers you have and figure out how to deal with them they can keep water on your landscape and make more wildlife for you to shoot later.. So there’s that.