ANOTHER ONE NIGHT STAND [OF TREES]?

heidi08 beaver myths January 8, 2020

So no new nibbles seen yesterday and no sightings either. We have to seriously consider the possibility that this is a “one night stand” (of trees) and not an announcement of a new business address. Sigh. Fingers crossed.

In the mean time there’s a very special treat for the end of the world. It’s a beaver trivia game on the Mississppi based trapping magazine, Mossy Oak. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll want to buy a firearm. It will be fun.

Beaver Quick Facts and Trivia

Beavers can build a large dam from scratch in about a week.
One beaver dam can flood and destroy thousands of acres of timber.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that beaver’s cause $100 million in damage to public and private property in the Southeast.
A beaver has a flat scaly tail used for swimming, diving, signaling alarm and maintaining balance while cutting trees and eating.
Beavers incisors have to grow continuously to keep up with the wear and tear of tree cutting and eating habits.

Now wait you forgot to mention that beavers start fires, spread disease and ruin forests! Gosh I expected better fake facts from a trapping news paper!

At around 2 years of age, beavers are forced out of their colonies and will begin searching for a new home and mate.
Beavers will make multiple sent mounds in close proximity to each other to attract mates.
At 2-3 years of age, beavers will pick a mate and mate for life unless one of them is killed.
Breeding begins during the late winter months and will extend through the early spring months
Their offspring, or “kits” are born fully furred with eyes open and are able to swim almost immediately after birth.
A colony can contain up to 12 beavers and usually will consist of one adult breeding pair, newborn kits and yearlings from the previous year.

Up to 12 beavers? Never mind all that pesky research. Let’s just write what we guess! If in fact beavers mate for life unless you kill them, as you say, they wouldn’t need to ‘find a mate’ very often now would they? Way back when I went to beaver school they told me that scent mounds were mostly territorial. To keep strangers away. But I’m sure you know best.

Beaver Trivia

1. What is the average age an adult beaver will reach in the wild?
a. 1-5 years
b. 6-10 years
c. 11-14 years
d. None of the above

2. Scent found in beaver castor is a common ingredient in perfumes
(True or False)

3. Beavers have excellent eyesight and rely on it daily.
(True or False)

4. Beavers are able to swim within 24 hours of being born.
(True or False)

Now honestly these are hard. I don’t know whether to answer the actual truth or the pretend bullshit truth that you guys argue exists so you get to kill more beavers, Hmm. But of all the questions I have to say number three is my favorite.

Beavers have excellent eyesight and rely on it daily!

Nice test construction skills boys! Are you sure they don’t just rely on it every other day? Or once a week? And hey even if beavers had lousy eye sight, wouldn’t they use it every day anyway? I mean you’re commuter car might be a piece of trash but you have to drive it to get to work don’t you?

Quick Facts

Beavers incisors can grow more than 4 feet a year.
Prehistoric beavers were believed to reach 400lbs and 8 feet in length.
In the colonial ages, beaver trapping contributed to shifting economic and political alliances between Europeans and Native Americans.

Well, that first fact is doozy. I guess we’re supposed to be imagining beavers with four foot teeth? It’s hard to even how that fact would be observed. I guess you could count the amount a tooth grows in a day in the lab and multiply it by 364. But that really wouldn’t tell you if the process is constant or sporadic or if it occurs the same no matter how long the tooth is?

I can’t blame you specifically, Everyone gets beaver facts wrong. You aren’t special. Even the national geographic site says that their life span in the wild is 24 years.

It’s an ignorant beaver world out there boys and girls. We have a lot of work to do.

CHEW CHEW CHEW BABY

heidi08 Beaver Chewing January 7, 2020

If there is a soundtrack you should be hearing in your head all through this post, It’s the jaunty Andrew sisters number above. I could not get it out of my head all day yesterday. And here’s the reason why. At our beaver dinner Sunday, we had two guests who take the train from the east bay and walk up Castro to our house. When they got here they told us about some pretty interesting marks on the trees.

So of course I made Jon check first thing in the morning. And guess what he found? Chew Chew Chew Baby!

That beautiful gnawed arrow! Precious beautiful wood chips! Look at how lovely. If there’s a more heavenly sight for these sore eyes I can not imagine what it is. After we finished dancing a jig and calling everyone we know to share our cigars we did what we could to face any backlash that might arise. I connected with city leaders and Jon wrapped the trees to make sure the final product isn’t felled into the street or the restaurant.

Beavers in Martinez again. Just like it used to be.

There are a few fascinating things about this bit of manna from heaven. The first is timing. Every year the beavers were with us, like clockwork, around new years we would see a massive chewing night. Not -mind you- a massive felling night, just chewing. Several trees in a clump. Almost like marking territory. For no apparent reason,

It used to vaguely remind me of the half empty bottles you find in your kitchen the day after new years. Did we drink all that?

Was this a beaver party? A single beaver with a very sudden tooth growth spurt? Who can say, But this is not a new phenomenon, the January tree massacre. It’s something I’d worry about every year. I don’t know if it happens everywhere or if its something of a family tradition unique to our beavers, but I know it exists.

Another thing worth noting about this incident is that this is the EXACT SAME PLACE the beavers were living before. Right above where they lived. So whether that means this is some offspring visiting his old haunts or some disperser staying overnight at a ghost town because it was easier than making a new home from scratch we cannot say but it’s pretty awesome news anyway.

And the final bit of awesome sauce is that if you look closely you can see that these VERY trees have been chewed before, resprouted, and chewed again. If there is a better educational poster for coppicing I certainly don’t know what it is.

Of course there’s no guarantee that a beaver that visits is a beaver that stays. It might just be “one of those things”. A random stop on a journey somewhere else. Like all magical trysts we could get all excited but this could turn out to be a classic one night stand [of trees]. Just because you really really like when someone visits it doesn’t ever mean they’ll stay.

Cue the second soundtrack.

But we’ll always have Paris. A town that gets happy about beavers. A town that knows what a flow device is. A network of people to help. A village of people where 200 people react with joy when I post a picture of a tree chewed by beavers. Who else has that?

There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.

If it be now, ’tis not to come.

f it be not to come, it will be now.

If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all.

JUDGING BEAVERS HARSHLY IN KENTUCKY

It’s a funny thing. You make a fancy ravioli dinner for 12 of your closest beaver friends and you spend the evening chatting about the first East Coast beaver conference or repeated train rides to sacramento to get the governor to back the right legislation or countless meetings with the watershed association and fish and game to replant creek or remastering the renaissance style of painting directly with eggshell and you feel like the world is pretty close to getting it right. It’s all within reach, and you are sitting with the right group of people to reach it.

And then you get up in the morning and read an article like this, and realize how far we truly have left to travel.

Beavers create travel headache for southeast Muhlenberg residents

MUHLENBERG COUNTY, Ky. (1/3/20) — The beaver population in southeastern Muhlenberg County has created a dam issue along Mud River Union Road.

There are approximately 50 residents who live at the end of the county road, where a nearby creek flows into Mud River. It appears water is across a section of the road about a half-mile leading to the homes, which makes travel difficult.

Muhlenberg County Judge-Executive Curtis McGehee said this week that the issue was brought to his attention during his tenure as sheriff a few months ago. He is speaking to road department officials and magistrates about hiring a beaver trapping expert to help remedy the issue.

Until the beavers are under control in that area, there’s not a whole lot officials can do.

It takes a judge to kill a beaver in Kentucky?

Well, I guess a flow device is right out then, your honor? I mean if you’re going to falsely incarcerate thousands, bemoan the closing coal plants and shut down all the women’s clinics, then progressively managing beavers is impossible. Right?

Too bad for Muhlenberg. Because this whole flooding this is going to happen again. Soon.

BEAVER ADVICE FALLS ON THE OPPOSITE OF DEAF EARS

heidi08 Beaver Book, Flow Device Installed January 5, 2020

Good morning! I’m late today because we were kind of busy yesterday. Cookies made. House completely rearranged. Shouting occurred. Let’s just say the chocolate wasn’t the only thing that was “tempered”. ba-dum-dum. But now its beautiful and we have the whole morning together. Let’s share and tell our way to victory, shall we?

This one from Portland, Maine.

Letter to the editor: Trapping not the only way to manage beavers

I’m writing in response to the Dec. 27 letter about wildlife populations and self-regulation, specifically beavers. The letter caught my attention because I’ve been reading “Eager: The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter” by Ben Goldfarb.

Hey we know him! What did you learn when you read our friends manifesto?

The book also discusses the idea of cultural carrying capacity, which is the number of animals that humans can tolerate. The level of tolerance comes from how much conflict arises between people and the animal, in this case beavers.

No one wants their property flooded or water contaminated, but is trapping the only answer?

I’m sure hoping you say it isn’t.

According to Skip Lisle, the answer is no. Lisle has a master’s degree in Wildlife Management from the University of Maine, and he worked with the Penobscot Nation to find ways of peaceful co-existence with beavers.

Lisle discovered, as have many others, that killing beavers is not an effective long-term solution. It’s better to find non-lethal ways of ending conflicts with beavers, which led to his company Beaver Deceivers LLC (https://beaverdeceivers.com). He provides flow devices and has invented other tools to prevent beavers from damaging private and public property.

This is a helpful reminder that instead of trying to get rid of animals, we should be looking for ways to live peacefully with them.

Erica Bartlett

Wonderful Erica! Well said and well read, as the saying goes. Now we ourselves in Martinez hired Mr. Lisle to put in one of them there contraptions and it solved our issue for 10 years. That was ten years we didn’t have to pay trappers or think about flooding in our creek. Ten years of more wildlife and better fish in our creek. Ten years of no new beavers moving into our creek.

Hey, that sounds almost like a solution!

DEGREES OF BEAVER FREEDOM

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver Grooming, Beavers January 4, 2020

I think I mentioned before that I was horrific at math and oddly skilled at statistics. I’m sure there’s some kind of left brain/right brain distinction to explain some of it but for what ever reason one made sense and the other made me panic. No matter who taught it, No matter how much I tried.

One of my favorite concepts used in statistics was always “Degrees of Freedom“, Usually calculated as N=1, it basically it refers to how many chances you might have to achieve those same exact results given the number of times you tried or how many people you tried with. As the degrees of freedom go up the odds of it happening again also go up so the rarity of the results go down. As the degrees of freedom go down, the odds of it happening just like this ever again go down and it becomes very ulikely. Until there is zero chance.

I mention this because in the back of my mind I tend to think of the days before the annual Worth A Dam ravioli feed as Degrees of Freedom. As in “There are this many chances to get it wrong or forget a detail or have to take someone to the ER and still achieve the desired result.” The closer we get to day, the room for error gets lower and lower. As of this morning there is one day left before our 5 course dinner for 13 people. That means one day to get the house set up and make sauces ready and dip the cookies in chocolate. If we were visited by unexpected relatives today, or broke someones toe or had a power outage – tomorrow would become nearly impossible.

In other words, we are down to 1 Degree of Freedom.

Today is a day for Chinese takeout from the cartons in the living room so we don’t mess up the silverware or the table setting. And it’s a great day to read this cozy column by Patti Smith from Vermont which we always enjoy.

Remember when last we heard from Patti she was mourning the death of her beloved beaver Willow, who after a very long life had been unable to escape a bear.

The View from Heifer Hill: Finding an old friend on the river of life

During the last week of December, I skied down to look for the beaver that recently moved into the brook below my house. Beavers do not relocate in December unless calamity strikes. I suspected that a raging torrent from rain and snowmelt had destroyed this beaver’s dam and washed its food cache downstream. While this new location offers good foraging, the rocky stream bottom provides little mud for sealing a dam. Without a deep pond, ice can seal the entrance to a beaver’s lodge, trapping the beaver inside.

I had tried hollering on several occasions to entice this beaver to appear. Since that technique hadn’t worked, I decided that on this visit I would use the stealth approach — sitting quietly and waiting for the beaver to reveal itself. Once I settled myself by the brook, I noticed that the beaver had been building a lodge directly across from my seat. After a few minutes, I heard the gurgle that announced the emergence of the occupant. The beaver that surfaced paddled quickly over and swam back and forth a few times before lunging up the icy bank and onto the snow beside me. I was so pleased to see the notch in the tail that identified this beaver as Dew.

I first met Dew eight or nine years ago. The uncertainty stems from not knowing if she is Dewberry, born in 2010, or Sundew, born the following year. Either way, I met her shortly after she was born to that champion of beaver survivors, Willow. “Survivor” might seem a strange thing to call a beaver who was just eaten by a bear, but she lived to near the maximum lifespan for a beaver (about 20 years). I have not yet determined her exact age, but the teeth I recovered will allow me to.

Isn’t it wonderful that after losing her friends and matriarch of so many years she would run into one of her children who just moved in after losing her old house in storm? Mother nature can be pretty dam sweet sometimes. When she’s not busy doing the other thing.

Dew is the only one of her offspring known to survive, aside from the yearling Gentian. I concluded last month’s column with the hope that Gentian would inherit her mother’s penchant for longevity. Given that I could not find any of her siblings, I didn’t hold out a great deal of hope. Yet here was Dew — approaching her ninth or tenth year! Dew, who seems to have survived her first mate, Ilex, and is now wintering alone in this unlikely location. Given her heritage, I give her much higher odds of surviving this challenging winter than other beavers. I have seen her mother survive as bad.

Patti is such a delightful mix of science, heresy and affection. She pretty much breaks all the rules about not naming or feeding the animals you’re studying. But she also seems to learn more about their lives than anyone who follows the rules ever will. Ever time we get to visit Patti in Vermont my heart swells with the deepest fondness and I am reminded of my own days watching beavers.

Patti is a kindred spirit.

On New Year’s Eve, I took a few friends out to visit her. Along the way, a dark shape was spotted hustling away into the shadows. When I hailed the beast, it stopped, then turned and came toward us. There was Quirinus, one of the porcupines I have been studying. He paused on his travels to eat an apple with us.

The forest, glazed in a mix of ice and snow, shone bright in moonlight. Once we settled by the brook, Dew arrived and began opening up channels in the slushy ice. She took an apple and swam to her lodge to eat it before reappearing and clambering up on the opposite bank. There she spent 15 minutes in elaborate ablutions, scrubbing and combing every bit of her corpulent physique. One of my friends had a blazing headlamp that lit up the scene like stage lights. Dew seemed to be preening for her audience. Why not? Beavers are social animals, and she had been on her own for at least several weeks.

I am so glad that she gets to spend quality time with the beaver after losing his or her mother. I remain completely mystified about how she tells them apart. We only ever had a few beavers whose identities I could spot on sight. Mom with her chinked tail. Dad with his size. GQ with his good loos. Mom II with her red fur. That’s about it.

Maybe you do better? I have a touch of prosopagnosia. I can barely tell humans apart.

When Dew finally swam off, we headed upstream a bit and built a fire. There in the snowy forest, we enjoyed the rising sparks, and a very localized rain shower caused by the melting ice on branch overhead. I couldn’t imagine a more beautiful transition from one year to the next. I was warmed by the fire and by knowing that a new beaver ambassador would carry on the work of my old friend Willow. May the new year bring such joy to you.

And to you Patti!

And may the new year bring joy to any and all reading this site. Wish us luck dipping the tails today. I would invite you all for dinner but consider yourself lucky to escape it. We are not at all generous hosts who do this out of the goodness of our hearts and a love to entertain. We actually do this to compensate for demanding terribly exhausting days of service at the beaver festival and the willingness to resist saying “NO” when being asked for the millionth time. You know what they say, To those whom much has been given, much will be asked.

It’s one free dinner that actually costs the attendees a lot. It dam well better be delicious!

New Years Ravioli Feast-20