This painting, by Dwayne James, is among my favorite. It is an obvious riff on the beaver tale paddle that used for canoes, but it is so much better. The rippling light on the water reminds me so much of our hours spent in the canoe that it has a special place in my heart already. but beavers are just made for canoes. Everybody knows that.
The whole news reel is wonderful but go to 5:32 to see what I mean.
Rumor has it that a beaver suspect was observed last night at 8;30 near Starbucks. Browsing on purloined substances. An actual beaver seen by someone who knows the difference between a beaver and a raccoon! I’m so excited. The only thing better than a beaver in Martinez is two beavers in Martinez!
Jon’s going to be busy tonight!
For those of you following along at home that would be the last one on the right.
The next bright spot on our good news for the day comes from the beaver working group in Montana, whose newsletter is put together by Sarah Bates of the National Wildlife Foundation. Guest what she included this month amidst a discussion of the BRAT tool and BeaverCon 2020?
The links really work too! I just wish she’d mentioned “WORTH A DAM” but I guess if someone follows the links they’ll get the idea. Right? Affirming to see the urban beavers print get noticed.
For those of us that can’t sneak down to the beaver pond to see what’s happening, I pass along this glorious webcam of the PGE peregrines in San Francisco. True story. I started watching George and Gracie way back in 2006 because my Dad used to work in that building lo these many years ago. I was stunned to watch a community grow around following a single family of wildlife online. We all felt so connected to them, to each other, and to their story.
There was the heartbreaking time the fledgling falcon fell off the ledge and onto the busy SF street: A brave Fed-ex worker stopped his delivery truck and brought him back up to the 39th floor in a box. Since he alone of all his siblings got to ride in the elevator everyone called him ‘Otis’. It informed all the later efforts watching beavers and helped me understand what they meant to people.
And now they’re back, and the camera is way way better. It follows them around the scrape and you can actually ZOOM! ENJOY!
Lots of beaver news today. Lets focus on or friends, first! Mike Settell in Pocatello Idaho is doing another beaver count! How can it be that his volunteers look frozen but he looks young and cheerful after all these years!
On Feb. 1 and Feb. 8 Watershed Guardians will hold its 9th annual BeaverCount, a free snowshoe event to raise awareness of the important role beaver play keeping the Portneuf River watershed healthy.
On Feb. 1, volunteers will meet at the Mink Creek Nordic Center at 10 a.m. where a training will be held for anyone interested in counting beaver activity. The training will include winter outdoor preparedness and censusing techniques for beaver. Participants will also learn about their watershed. This training is for newcomers and BeaverCount veterans, known as “Flattailers.” Flattailers are encouraged to attend the training to update their skills.
Man that’s smart! I wanna be a flat-tailer! Don’t you?
Snowshoes and food will be provided by Watershed Guardians for both weekends. Participants must pre-register, which they can do on the Watershed Guardians Facebook page or at the website, www.watershedguardians.org. Should conditions warrant on Feb. 7, the count will be rescheduled for Feb. 15. Please check Facebook and/or the website for updates on weather conditions during the week prior to Feb. 8.
Watershed Guardians is a 501c (3) non-profit whose mission is to, ” Protect, maintain and restore the Portneuf River Watershed, one beaver at a time.” Data collected from BeaverCount is used to influence management decisions with regard to trapping regulations.
Brave beaver-loving Mike has been at this work nearly as long as us. On a tougher landscape where fur-trapping abounds. Thank goodness he’s willing to snowshoe every year and share what he knows!
Let’s stop by our local Sonoma beavers next and see what they’re up to, shall we?
The Sonoma Index-Tribune recently published a couple of articles about beavers and otters in Sonoma Creek (“Otters Join Beavers in Sonoma Creek,” Dec. 27).
It’s a good sign, not just because it’s nice to know that Sonoma Valley’s main waterway is actually clean enough to support wildlife, but also because beavers can actually improve life for other critters, including my favorite, rainbow trout.
Our Sonoma Valley creeks used to be home to a healthy population of steelhead/rainbow trout and spawning areas for king and Coho salmon. In my boyhood here we could fish for trout in most of our streams through the spring and early summer.
Since those days, our creeks have lost more than half of their water and many completely dry up by June and stay that way until the fall rains return.
This kills any chance for salmon fry and steelhead trout fry to survive.
I don’t understand the headline. Shouldn’t it be “We should all give a dam?” But the column is excellent! That’s what we need. A few more beaver friends argue that saving salmon and trout depends on them. Thanks Bill! Have we met?
About a year and a half ago, I visited the Scott River valley were local residents formed the Scott River Watershed Council (SRWC) and are working with Dr. Michael Pollock, eco-system analyst for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In this little community people are doing something about bringing back their creeks.
The river, no bigger than our own Sonoma Creek, was once a prolific salmon and steelhead spawning resource, before it was ruined by past gold mining. Then climate change and other factors caused it and its tributaries to dry up during most summers.
But in 2014 SRWC began constructing “beaver dam analogues,” which are human made structures that mimic natural beaver dams, store water and create habitat for all kinds of local species, including steelhead trout and Coho salmon. Over time, these naturally appearing dams create pools where fish can survive.
Dottie and I met with Betsy Stapleton, chairman of the SRWC, who showed us some of the work her group has done on the creek. The results are impressive. They were able to preserve large areas of fresh, clean water in which Coho and trout fry are surviving. Every season, the fish count goes up.
Real beavers are helpful, but when there are not enough of them, small grassroots projects like those in the Scott River Valley can really help. Perhaps something like that would work here.
Oh yeah. Now that’s what I like to see. A beaver friend we don’t know yet talking about a beaver friend we already know! The stage is filling up. Soon you won’t be able to swing a dead salmon without hitting someone who knows why beavers matter!
Even in Silicon Valley there are friends looking out for beavers. Take this excellent photo taken by Erica Fleniken of the Southbay Creeks Coalition yesterday morning on the Guadelupe. She says she was watching two beavers swim and snapped this beautiful photo.
Two beavers in January mean kits in June. Big smile.
Can speed bumps actually slow traffic?
I mean will the busy flow of uncontrollable cars actually slow itself down based on a tiny obstruction in the roadway repeated over and over again>? Why does no one ever ask that question and why does the other one get poised repeatedly?
Beavers are to be reintroduced to Cumbria’s Eden Valley to see if they can thrive in upland environments.
The animals, which were hunted to extinction in the UK in the 16th Century, will be introduced to the Lake District for the first time in a trial. Efforts to return the species to other parts of the UK, including Yorkshire and Somerset, are also under way.
The government-approved trial will look at how beavers restore small farmland streams and can aid flood prevention.
Oooh ooh, call on me! I know this one!
It is hoped the beavers will deliver benefits such as carbon storage, flood mitigation and an increase in other wildlife.
Conservationists support the return of beavers to Britain’s rivers for the benefits they can provide in preventing flooding, by damming streams and slowing the flow of water, as well as boosting water quality.
I don’t know. Do you think the repeated observations of science and gravity will apply in another region? Do you think speed bumps will slow traffic? That’s a real head scratcher. I guess we’ll find out.
The funny thing is that just last night I was reading about the great flood of 1862, and thinking about the timing of this massive event. Obviously all those humans mining for all that gold had some effect. But given the fact that the entire beaver population was wiped out about 20 years earlier and their decaying dams would just about be completely gone – one has to wonder.
The Great Flood of 1862 was the largest ever recorded in Oregon, Nevada and California’s history. The flooding occurred from December of 1861 until January of 1862, drowning the state in water and leaving much of the Northern Valley unlivable until the summer months of 1862.
The flood created a lake down the center of the state that was 300 miles long and 20 miles wide. It’s estimated that thousands of people were killed in Northern California during the event.
Entire cities were under water and many people were killed.
The foothills of the Sierra Nevada were seeing tremendous flooding activity during this time. The American River near Auburn rose 35 feet and some of the small mining towns were completely submerged. On the Stanislaus River near Knight’s Ferry, two major bridges washed down the river and anything within 40 miles was completely destroyed.
The year before had extra heavy snow so the melt didn’t help matters. But don’t you think all those missing speed bumps might have had something to do with the calamity?
John Carr wrote about his riverboat trip up the river during the peak of the flood:
“I was a passenger on the old steamer Gem, from Sacramento to Red Bluff. The only way the pilot could tell where the channel of the river was, was by the cottonwood trees on each side of the river. The boat had to stop several times and take men out of the tops of trees and off the roofs of houses. In our trip up the river we met property of every description floating down—dead horses and cattle, sheep, hogs, houses, haystacks, household furniture, and everything imaginable was on its way for the ocean. Arriving at Red Bluff, there was water everywhere as far as the eye could reach, and what few bridges there had been in the country were all swept away.”
It’s a terrifying story of our history that I knew nothing about before. When Stanford was inaugurated governor of California he had to row his way to the capital.
I bet a lot of those beaver hats got floated away too, Ironic, huh?
I’m sure you played musical chairs as a child. It was as ubiquitous as dodgeball and no one escaped its wrath. You march around an increasingly shrinking circle of chairs while some horrifically cheerful music blares in the background and when the music STOPS you grab a seat, Except there’s always one less chair than there are children.
Who ever doesn’t get a seat is ‘out’. That unhappy child takes a chair and leaves the game and the torture continues with its hardened ring of increasingly wary children. Until there are two left. WIth one chair between them. And the ‘ring’ they march has two sides: one where victory is possible and one where it is not. If the controller of the music has any sense of fairness at all they close their eyes so that they don’t see who is where.
Well, Idaho apparently likes to play a similar game with beavers. Only the last ones that can’t find a pond are killed. And they play it over and over. Doesn’t that sound fun?
Beavers are generally hardworking, industrious and helpful critters when they’re in the right location. But when they set up shop in the wrong location — say in the city — it can be disastrous.
Take the Target department store parking lot in Idaho Falls for example.
The fury aquatic rodents have been known to saunter across the store parking lot and chew down ornamental trees in the parking lot medians. Oddly, beavers show up regularly at the nearby waterway next to the store attracted by plenty to eat, ready-made dens and water. Each year, beavers have to be escorted out of town.
So rather than help Target use the fencing sold by the garden department to wrap its special trees, they bring in a retired expert from Idaho fish and game to save the day.
In a million years you will never guess what his name is,.
Their point man is retired volunteer Roy Leavitt, 79. Leavitt, always on the go, enjoys keeping up with busy beavers. “Capturing the problem beavers has been my job for the last three years,” Leavitt said.
LEAVITT moves BEAVERS. The comedy rights itself,
James Brower, Fish and Game regional communications manager, said the – relocates 15 to 20 beavers each year. In 2019, 16 beavers were relocated. In 2018, 18 were evicted.
Leavitt said there are two beavers living in the waterway next to Target right now that “I’ll need to get to this spring.”
Fish and Game says there are two types of beavers that come to test out the city life. One type is looking to set up a permanent home and the other are referred to as “canal beavers.”
“The canal beavers are often transient,” Brower said. “They don’t set up shop. They come, chew up some people’s decorative trees along the ditch banks and people want us to come and get them out. But a lot of times it’s a munch-and-run situation. They usually don’t stick around too long, especially in those canal systems.”
Well, sure. Those canal beavers with their Venetian influence. What do you expect. Of course since the shopping mall is on the beaver highway as it were, getting rid of one will always always mean you make space for another. But I’m sure you knew that, right?
“Sometimes the county will call us or a cattle company or landowner that have a road or culvert that they use to irrigate or water cows and the beaver have come and stopped it up or they have flooded the road, causing damage of some sort,” Brower said. “We get a lot in the Ririe area, too. The beaver are coming up and gnawing on people’s decorative trees and shrubs.”
Rather than a death sentence, Fish and Game prefers to redirect the industrious critter’s energy elsewhere, inviting them to move into a fixer-upper. The Upper Snake Beaver Cooperative has identified several backcountry locations in eastern Idaho that historically had beaver but don’t any longer.
Okay. I guess its a millimeter better than killing them. Although depending on how the relocation goes it might be killing them slowly. I’ll give you credit for knowing beavers are valuable and more use alive than dead. And for setting up a beaver patrol at Fish and Game in the first place.
But honestly. Learn to wrap a tree and install a flow device will you?
“We would like to see them introduced because they’re habitat kings,” Brower said. “They just sit there and work and build dams and build ponds and improve streams, make straight channels flow year-round opposed to some that are perennial and stop certain times of the year. We do it in the name of habitat restoration.”
Now that’s worth boasting about.
