THE END OF A BEAVER TALE

heidi08 Beavers May 5, 2018

For the Anniversary of My Death
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day

W. S. Merwin

One of the first beaver stories that caught my eye was written by then editor of the Martinez Gazette Richard Parks in 2007. He was reporting on the life cycle of beavers and what Martinez could expect after his consultation with “beaver expert” Mary Tappel who was the original consultant the city turned to. His article quoted her warning that beaver populations explode because beavers can “Breed for 50 years”.

Novice that I was at the time this statement nevertheless caught my eye. Because it sounded unlikely that beavers could reproduce longer than humans. So I called the editor and asked “Is that a typo?” He was an earnest fellow and remembered specifically writing that down so he called her back to verify. She was so affronted to have her “facts” questioned that she decided to never appear before the beaver subcommittee and just whisper her vile opinions directly to staff but that is all blood under the bridge.

Of course we now know that a beaver is very, very lucky if it gets to breed for 10 years, and live to 15. There are reports of beavers in captivity living until 19 or 20, but in the wild we would think 12 years makes a beaver a senior citizen of his particular curious nation. I always try to calculate how old our beavers were. Dad was definitely the oldest. We know from research that the majority of beavers cannot reproduce before age 3, recently I remembered that when we first learned about the beavers the woman who told us about them said there were actually three and one was smaller – like what we now understand is a yearling. I never saw three beavers – but I believe her. That implies that mom and Dad moved here with a yearling in tow who later dispersed shortly after the new kits were born that summer when I started paying close attention. 3+1+1 – that means dad was at least 5 in 2007, which means he lived in Martinez until he was at least 13.

Not a bad run for a beaver. Certainly better than either of these stories this morning.

First wild beaver killed by car in England ‘was forced out of river by flash flood’

The first wild beaver reported to be run over and killed by a car in England may have been forced on to the roads by flash flooding. Experts believe the four year-old female ventured out of its natural habitat when water levels rose on the River Otter in East Devon last week.

She was part of a community of wild beavers which was first spotted in 2013 – at a time when they were thought to have been extinct for 400 years. The mammals are touted as a secret weapon in the battle against climate change because their dams can act as a natural flood defence.

Being hit by a car is certainly a very common way for a beaver to end its life. There is almost nothing I feel more hopeless about than a beaver on the road trying to reach a body of water on the other side. They lack the eyesight, speed and logic they need to become ‘streetwise’. They always loose.

This story this morning was worse though. West Kelwona is in British Columbia about 200 miles east of Vancouver.

Conservation Officers still hoping to locate suffering beaver

Okanagan residents are still waiting for a conclusion behind a potential case of animal cruelty. A $2,500 reward has been offered for any information that leads to the conviction of the person(s) responsible for shooting a beaver with multiple arrows.

The animal was found suffering near the shore adjacent to the West Kelowna Yacht club last week. Local Conservation Officers say they have heard no reports as to whether the animal is dead or alive and are encouraging the public to keep an eye out.

Of course there are multiple photos of the unlucky beaver stuck with an arrow which I at least have the decency not to show you. A beaver with a 12 inch arrow sticking out of his side cannot even go back home to heal, since the passage hole into the lodge is much too small for that. I am writing the psychological profile in my head of the young sociopath who did this (white male under 25 using own bow and his father’s boat) .

Never ever leave me alone in a room with him.

Which just goes to say that when people feel sorry for our beavers dealing with all the trash or the homeless or such a small urban creek, they are ignoring the fact that a great many beavers have it much, much worse.

Martinez was the lap of luxury.

ATTENTION SHOPPERS

heidi08 Urban beavers May 4, 2018

If I didn’t know better I would be asking myself “Why Walmart?” Beavers in Utah have been found at walmart, in Michigan, in Maine, it’s almost as if they prefer the store which can’t possibly be true, because no one really does.

Cortland is in the lower third of New York and recently had it’s own walmart beaver encounter. Of course it’s just because – acre per acre – there are more walmarts across the country than any other chain so randomly these encounters happen there. Not that beavers were a fan of the Waltons.

Still. I have to say that’s one tiny beaver in the film below.. Not a disperser. A kit that got lost?

Sheriff’s deputy rescues beaver from Walmart parking lot in Cortland

CORTLAND, N.Y. – Law enforcement officers never know what they may encounter on their shift. That was true recently for Cortland County Sheriff’s Deputy Jason Kemp who responded to a report of a beaver in the Walmart parking lot near the store entrance.

Kemp’s rescue of the beaver was announced today on the office’s Facebook page. “…no matter what you face, you come up with a plan and solve the problem with whatever you can find,” the Facebook post stated.

Kemp used a shopping cart tipped on its side to scoop up the beaver and was able to turn the cart upright with beaver safely inside, according to the post.

The deputy transported the beaver and released it to a nearby pond.

Note that the brave New York policeman picked up the beaver with a metal cart. For comparison, here is how one unarmed woman from Colorado does it:

Sherri Tippie with kit: Wearing Worth A Dam shirt

MORE FRIENDS FOR BEAVERS

heidi08 Who's saving beavers now? May 3, 2018

I received another email yesterday concerning what I’m going to call the luckiest beavers in the entire state of North Carolina. This time it was from a professor who was making those lucky beavers a website to share photos and information about them.

The email was asking me about a document found in some dusty corner of the website describing the bogus reasons cities say they have to kill beavers. Honestly, if you held a gun to my head I wouldn’t recognize it or remember writing it, but it had my name boldly on the cover so at one pint I must have – I made sure he had some more relevant resources and offered our support.

I’m very impressed with the way the site uses the photographs of supporters to document how the beaver habitat creates a vital ecosystem. I’m also happy that it names the creek where they live instead of just referring to it as property of the Home Owners Association of Briar Chapel. This might be my favorite photo. It’s a cardinal sitting on the beaver dam, which I have never seen before.

The website has the latest news about the beavers and a call for volunteers and donations. It also has a relevant links page (on which we’re number one) and a collection of videos and information.

Now one of those videos I hadn’t seen before and was produced at Cornell University for their 4H naturalist program. It is engaging and well done with a glowing review of beavers. There were just a few minor problems.

Can you guess the first one?

Okay, woodchucks aside, the other giant problem around 5:45 where it describes the dams beavers build to manage water. They go on to say that this is packed with mud to make a wall – so far so good – which the beaver then tunnels into to make a home!!!

Et tu brute? Cornell University is advertising that beavers live INSIDE the dam? Complete with graphics? Cornell University got a grant from USDA to say that? You know the smartest person from my entire high school got a scholarship to Cornell and it has always been kind of a hallowed place in my eyes. I remember how admiringl I received his letters from Ithaca College. How could they be wrong? Heck, maybe there’s new research I don’t know about and I’m the one whose wrong. Maybe the fact that our beavers didn’t live in the dam was just a fluke. And all the others do.

Okay, well I wrote Linda last night with the polite question about where she got that interesting point. (She’s a professor of Ent0mology by the way.) And mentioned to the website creator that he might want to switch videos to one that was more accurate. He obviously decided not to because who are you going to listen to, some crazy woman who saves beavers or CORNELL university for gods sake.

Here’s the entire video if you want to investigate for yourself.

BEAVERS FEELING FESTIVE

heidi08 Festival May 2, 2018

Has there ever been better timing for a magazine article to come out in the history of the world? The Orinda Library just posted about our Ranger Rick article AND the Library invited us to come do a ‘beaver story’ reading at their lunchtime children’s hour before the festival. Sometimes things just fall into place and I’m left wondering how on earth we ever get this lucky.

Then I sent the article to all the fence-sitter exhibits who haven’t gotten back to us yet about the festival and received five new confirmations! One is Ranger Rick himself who will be tabling with Beth Pratt-Bergstrom as the California representative of the National wildlife federation, another is the forest service who will bring their mobile ranger station, and a third is a man who used to exhibit for ‘save the frogs’ but now has started his own nonprofit and wants to table for them. “Save the Snakes!” it’s called!

We’re getting such a nice crowd for the event and I’m starting to need help visualizing it all so I worked on this yesterday, Jon says I’m insane but I just wish I had little tin soldiers to go with it.

MAKE WAY FOR BEAVERS

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact May 1, 2018

So much has been happening that I was forgetting to think about the VERY biggest thing of all. The thing that will happen in the middle of June and run about 304 pages. I’m talking of course about the publication of Ben Goldfarb’s book. The author reviews are up on Amazon and I especially loved this one.

“This witty, engrossing book will be a classic from the day it is published. No one who loves the landscape of America will ever look at it quite the same way after understanding just how profoundly it has been shaped by the beaver. And even the most pessimistic among us will feel strong hope at the prospect that so much damage can be so easily repaired if we learn to live with this most remarkable of creatures.”―Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

You can obviously see why this is my favorite, but go read them all for a little thrill of anticipation. Then come back and feast your eyes on the latest example of why his smart writing will make a permanent difference.

Can Wildlife Services Learn to Believe in Beavers?

The U.S. Department of Agriculture killed more than 23,000 beavers last year. There’s a better way to manage our ecosystem engineers.

It’s no wonder Wildlife Services is particularly vexed by beavers, a species whose penchant for modifying its surroundings is surpassed only by our own. These relentless engineers gnaw down valuable timber, clog culverts, plug irrigation ditches, wash out roads, flood homes and even chew through fiberoptic cables. One 1983 study suggested that annual beaver damage approaches $100 million per year, a figure that has almost certainly continued to climb as Castor canadensis’s numbers have grown over the past several decades.

Whatever destruction beavers inflict, however, is far outweighed by their immense ecological value. In the course of reporting my book, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, I’ve witnessed these miraculous mammals helping people tackle just about every environmental problem under the sun. In droughty Nevada beaver ponds are raising water tables, sub-irrigating pastures and helping ranchers feed their cattle. In Washington they’re storing water to compensate for declining snowpack. In Rhode Island they’re filtering out agricultural pollution. According to one report, restoring beavers to a single river basin, Utah’s Escalante, would provide tens of millions of dollars in benefits each year.

And beavers don’t just furnish us with ecosystem services — they also sustain a vast menagerie. From wood frogs to warblers, mink to mergansers, sage grouse to salmon, there’s hardly a creature in North America that doesn’t seek sustenance in beaver-built ponds, marshes or meadows. In North Carolina biologists are even mimicking beavers to create habitat for the St. Francis satyr (Neonympha mitchellii francisci), an endangered butterfly whose preferred sedges flourish only in sunlit, beaver-sculpted wetlands.

Ahh you can tell you need that coffee cup filled again just so you can read every single word of this delicious article again and again. Click on the head line to go to the original. I’ve always said that there are two things folks need to learn about beavers: and they’re of equal importance. Why to live with them and HOW to live with them. This smart article offers a close up of both.

The conundrum, then, is this: What will it take to square beavers’ proclivity for nurturing life with their tendency to damage infrastructure? How do we reap their benefits without incurring their costs?

Last week I traveled to the town of Agawam, Mass., for some hands-on training in castorid coexistence. My companion for the day was Mike Callahan, founder of the nonprofit Beaver Institute. Since 1999 Callahan has installed more than 1,300 flow devices — pipe-and-fence contraptions that control beaver flooding without requiring trappers to kill the offending rodents. If you appreciate having beavers in your backyard but aren’t keen on snorkeling through your basement, a flow device might just be the solution you’re looking for.

Gosh, when Ben posted those pictures on facebook last week I thought he was just helping a buddy and having fun. I didn’t even realize he was researching an article! He marches through the installation and follows with the research showing why these devices save money. Then runs his finger along Jimmy Taylor’s review paper as if checking for dust.

Even Wildlife Services, beavers’ bete noire, shows fitful signs of coming around. In a 2013 review of various flow device models, Wildlife Services biologists acknowledged that “tools and techniques are currently available to integrate non-lethal beaver management into landscape-scale management plans.” Although the agency’s trappers have been notably slow to apply flow devices in the field, there’s reason to hope that future springs will bring lower kill counts.

“To keep every cog and wheel,” wrote Aldo Leopold, “is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.” Beavers, the animals who double as ecosystems, are among our most important cogs, fundamental to the conservation of North America’s water, wetlands and wildlife. Here’s hoping our tinkering gets more intelligent in the years to come.

Yep that’s how you do it. End with the quote of a well-worshiped naturalist and link it squarely to beavers. Ahh Ben I’m so impressed with what your writing can do and eager to see it change the lives of beavers. I literally can not wait for this book to be on every shelf. I’m suddenly remembering that passage on the bible about John the Baptist. He’s been doing his best with his meager tools but knows full well that even though his work matters it’s nothing compared to the voice of Him that’s coming soon.