IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T WANT BEAVERS, FRY FRY FRY AGAIN

What will it take to change minds about beavers? I mean the saving water and fire prevention don’t see to be doing it. The biodiversity and red-legged frogs aren’t getting the message out. The trumpeter swans and trout unlimited studies aren’t turning the tide, The nitrogen removal isn’t winning votes. So what’s gonna be THE thing?

I’m still thinking maybe this.

Salmon lose diversity in managed rivers, reducing resilience to environmental change

The manipulation of rivers in California is jeopardizing the resilience of native Chinook salmon. It compresses their migration timing to the point that they crowd their habitats. They may miss the best window for entering the ocean and growing into adults, new research shows.

Fish that begin their migration in mid-spring are the ones that survive best and dominate adult salmon returns to rivers such as the Stanislaus. These results were cited in a study published this week in Global Change Biology. Flow alteration and habitat loss have in effect homogenized the survival opportunities of salmon in this highly managed river system, researchers wrote.

The good news is that even small steps to improve their access to habitat and restore natural flows could boost their survival.

Gosh I wonder what those small changes could entail. I mean if it was something easy to implement and cheap maybe those poor salmon would stand a fighting chance. But surely its a complex problem and there’s not some simple solution. That would be too good to be true. Right?

The trouble is, less than 3 percent of wetland habitat remains in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. This leaves the small, early migrating fry without the much needed feeding and rearing refuge they need to grow and thrive on their seaward journey.

The authors say that even minor steps to restore some of the natural fluctuations in river flow could benefit salmon by helping maintain some of their valuable diversity. Fry migrate early in such great numbers that even small improvements in their survival rates through the Delta could yield many more fish to help boost adult returns.

Gosh. Small safe ponds, Where fry can feed and get fat before they make the dangerous journey. Someplace where deep water is a sure thing. Where wetland habitat is expected and maintained. Plenty of little fish mean plenty of big fish. Who knew? Not a silver bullet, but a beaver bullet!

FIGHTING FIRE WITH EMILY AND BEAVERS

heidi08 Beavers and Fire Prevention, Beavers and Forests December 14, 2019

When you finish your dissertation and present the results at a conference of your peers it can be thrilling, affirming, daunting, terrifying. It can make all those late nights worth it, all the statistics and the slogging. You might get praised by someone you really respect, or get to shake the hand of a hero you referenced a million times in your lit review. You might get some crabby question from the competition who doesn’t agree with your findings. You might spill cheap coffee on your new suit and have to change in the car. You might get a million different outcomes.

You almost never get this.

Are Beavers Nature’s “Little Firefighters”?

It’s about dam time: Beavers are acknowledged for their firefighting skills in five recent blazes.

When a wildfire tears through a landscape, there can be little left behind.

A new study, though, suggests that beavers may be protecting life around streams, thanks to their signature dams. Satellite images from five major wildfires in the United States revealed that corridors around beaver habitat stayed green even after a wildfire.

Millions of beavers live in forests across North America, and they make their homes in a particular way: By stacking piles of branches and rocks in a river’s path, they slow its flow and create a pool of calm water to call home. They even dig little channels radiating out from their pools to create “little water highways,” said Emily Fairfax, an assistant professor at California State University Channel Islands who led the study.

Emily presented her research THREE DAYS AGO at the conference in San Francisco. Three DAYS!!! That’s how long it takes for star research to find its way into a front page article. Please tell me that someone is putting this on the governors desk with his coffee and making sure he pays attention.

Fairfax wondered whether beaver dams would insulate riparian vegetation, as well as the fish and amphibians that live there, from wildfire damage. Wildfires course through landscapes naturally, but blazes will become more frequent as climate change dries out forests.

Fairfax sifted through records of past fires in the U.S. Geological Survey’s database and chose five recent fires that occurred in beaver habitat. She then analyzed the “greenness” of vegetation before, during, and after the fires. She used measurements from NASA’s Landsat satellites, which use red and near-infrared light to detect the lushness of vegetation.

Fairfax found that vegetation along sections of a river without dams burned straight to the river’s edge. But for sections with a resident beaver, “essentially, the plants don’t know a fire is happening.” The channels dug by beavers acted like irrigation channels, said Fairfax, keeping vegetation too wet to burn, even during drought. In all, stretches of river without beavers lost 51% of their vegetation greenness, compared with a 19% reduction for sections with beavers.

EMILY you rising star of beavers! We knew you’d be making a difference. With your embrace of technology and your love of nature it was destiny. We never even doubted it for a moment.

But we never even hoped how quickly it would all happen.

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!

CUTE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN ENGINEERING?

heidi08 beavers and otters, Beavers and trout December 12, 2019

Sometimes you sing happy birthday to the wrong classmate. Sometimes the academy award goes to the lesser talent. Sometimes you thank the lady of the house for cooking the roast and the husband really did it all. It happens. We all make the occasional ‘acclaim’ error. Take this article for instance.

At park beaver pond, otters gorge on brook trout

Irene Greenberg had been roving around looking for something to photograph the Sunday before last when she came upon a brook trout bloodbath that’s the subject of Jackson Hole wildlife-watching legend.

It was a romp of otters that were responsible for the killing, which netted the mustelid family full guts of spawning fish. Greenberg, a semiprofessional wildlife photographer who’s got a soft spot for otters, was entranced and, for a while, watched on her own at a location she prefers not to reveal.

Hear that? A bunch of otters catch dinner at a BEAVER POND. And it’s ooh lets take photos of the atrocities! And be sure to canonize with our Cannon the 5 hungry culprits. Because they’re otters. And everything they do is adorable.

Even their murderous “gang” is called a “romp”.

Never mind that they owe their entire successful meal to the beavers who created that pond, and repaired the dams, Who wants to photograph those old things?

The brook trout are clearly spawning, with their ruddy undersides and yellow and red spotting easily visible in the shallow beaver-engineered ponds where they’re congregated.

The otters are “damn smart,” Mayo said. They faithfully show up to take advantage of the usually wary fish, which become easy pickings come the spawn.

“More or less every time they go under, they come up with a fish,” Greenberg said. “Sometimes they’ll come up and just eat them in the water, and sometimes they’ll come up on land and eat.”

“They are voracious,” she said. “And they eat a lot.”

Yes they do. Hey did you happen to notice in your frame-snapping frenzy, WHERE they’re eating a lot? My goodness it appears to be a beaver pond where all those brook trout are gathered. Gosh I wonder WHY they meet up there? I mean is it some kind of salmonid singles club?

Or could it be that beaver-engineered ponds make ideal habitat for babies to grow up? What with all those tastey invertebrates. And nice deep pools that don’t freeze solid in the winter where trout can thrive? Hey maybe you should be writing an article about THAT or photographing that doncha think?

But otters are cute. And you know how they sled in snow. It’s adorable! And so slinky. Lets write about them. Again and again instead of the brawny backed-engineers these ponds are made by. Because cute is more important than engineering.

Didn’t you know?

THE NATURE OF STEWARDSHIP

heidi08 Beaver Art, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, Creative Solutions, Who's stealing photos now? December 11, 2019

The creator of the wonderful image is Catrin Welz-Stein of Germany who is an alarmingly talented graphic artist that creates digital collages. Doesn’t it make you want to look at things more closely? Good. I added Amelia’s awesome hobo-beaver and the headline because I wanted to use the image in our activity for the festival. It seemed like destiny that the beavers kit-sack matches she-sherlocks cl0ak. Isn’t that just a marriage made in heaven?

Destiny also released this study in time for my grant writing. How unbelievably lucky am I that this meta-analysis came out with exactly the right results?

Nature May Boost Learning Via Direct Effects on Learners

Kuo M, Barnes M and Jordan C (2019) Do Experiences With Nature Promote Learning? Converging Evidence of a Cause-and-Effect Relationship. Front. Psychol. 10:305. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00305

What emerged from this critical review was a coherent narrative: experiences with nature do promote children’s academic learning and seem to promote children’s development as persons and as environmental stewards – and at least eight distinct pathways plausibly contribute to these outcomes. Below, we discuss the evidence for each of the eight pathways and then the evidence tying nature to learning, personal development, and the development of stewardship.

This entire study was so wonderful you should really go read the whole thing. Very well laid out and a summary of the 8 learning paths that change in contact with nature. A paragraph on cause and effect towards the end had me in tears. I swear.

And second, spending time in nature appears to grow environmental stewards. Adults who care strongly for nature commonly attribute their caring to time, and particularly play, in nature as children – and a diverse body of studies backs them up (for review, see Chawla and Derr, 2012). Interestingly, the key ingredient in childhood nature experiences that leads to adult stewardship behavior does not seem to be conservation knowledge (knowledge of how and why to conserve). Although knowledge of how and why to conserve, which could presumably be taught in a classroom setting, has typically been assumed to drive stewardship behavior, it is relatively unimportant in predicting conservation behavior (Otto and Pensini, 2017). By contrast, an emotional connection to nature, which may be more difficult to acquire in a classroom, is a powerful predictor of children’s conservation behavior, explaining 69% of the variance (Otto and Pensini, 2017). Indeed, environmental attitudes may foster the acquisition of environmental knowledge (Fremery and Bogner, 2014) rather than vice versa. As spending time in nature fosters an emotional connection to nature and, in turn, conservation attitudes and behavior, direct contact with nature may be the most effective way to grow environmental stewards (Lekies et al., 2015).

Read that again, will you? Contact with nature drives learning about nature which in turn fosters stewardship. It isn’t lectures about biology, but outdoor positive experiences – like beaver festivals and watching beavers themselves, for example – that drive children to later care for the environment.

We care about what we know. Not ‘know’ like books. But ‘know’ as in play in, discover in, spend joyful time in – breathe in.