As if the week could get any better for beavers! This morning a wonderful podcast appeared about beavers that brilliantly covered my two FAVORITE talking points about them. How and Why we should coexist!
It’s Saturday morning.What ever your plans MAKE TIME to listen to this.
Almost wiped out centuries ago by fur trappers, beavers have made a comeback in North America, including the Mid-Atlantic and the Chesapeake Region. While many see them as a nuisance — slayers of trees, builders of dams that flood roads and farm land — biologists and natural resource managers see good in the beaver comeback. Their dams create rich habitat for other mammals and fish while filtering sediment and damaging nutrients from waters that flow to the Chesapeake Bay.
We are in a golden bubble where so many good things are happening for beavers I’m not really sure where to start again. The wonderful teacher from yesterday friended me on facebook and has been saying that her children want to go on a fieldtrip to the threatened dam in Richmond. The story of Port Moody deciding to co-exist with beavers was everywhere yesterday including the CBC! And the cutest baby beaver in the entire world made the today show.
The City of Port Moody is creating a beaver management plan after a baby beaver died during a relocation operation in December, leaving residents “heartstricken.”
The kit and its family had been living in a storm drain pipe near Pigeon Creek since the fall. City officials said their dam was beginning to block the culvert, so the animals needed to be moved to avoid flooding.
Two adult beavers and one of their offspring were successfully taken out of the pipe in December, but the second kit drowned after workers set a trap.
Please note the photo. The CBC has considerable photo archives at its disposal and can pick any beaver photo it likes. When the story is a negative one saying beavers cause flooding or ruin crops you would NEVER see a photo like this. It would be chewed tree or an adult eating on the bank. Something that looks like a problem.
This photo looks like a parent.
After public outcry, Coun. Meghan Lahti asked city staff to create a plan that recognizes beavers as part of the community and recommends that beaver colonies should remain undisturbed whenever possible. City staff are now preparing an official plan to present for council’s approval.
Hurray for Port Moody and the beaver management plan! Hurray for any news stories that see a beaver family as parents instead of problems! What a wonderful note to end the week of wonderful news!
If there is one thing I regret about our beavers, it’s that we were never able to use all that public response to get a promise to secure their safety, or to coexist with future beavers. The council just NEVER was willing to say a decision had been reached to keep them safe. Ever. Ever. Ever.
But they were safe anyway, So I guess we didn’t do too bad.
JB, as he’s known, was orphaned last summer when he was about 8 weeks old. Now he lives with wildlife rehabilitator Brigette Brouillard, the 45-year-old founder and director of Second Chances Wildlife Center in Mt. Washington, Kentucky.
JB was orphaned so young that he doesn’t really know how to be a beaver. So he can’t be released into the wild.Instead, he’s licensed by the federal government as an “educational animal.” That means he’ll stay permanently with Brouillard, and go with her to places like schools and libraries to help teach people about wildlife..
Ahhh good ole’ Kentucky. They keep obligingly making SO MANY ORPHANS that there must be a heckuva lot of educational animals with flat tails. (And plenty of other kinds of tails too,) Well, these photos are really cute so we’re just going to agree that he’s the luckiest beaver in the ENTIRE state and leave it at that.
Nobody told me there would be days like this! With a fantastic news story from our friends in Port Moody AND a wonderful article about a Brooklyn teacher leading her class in beaver education from the National Wildlife Foundation. For the first time I can remember I’m spoiled for choice. I can’t decide which to share with you first. But I will go here because it’s just so DAM cute!
In December 2017, Diane Corrigan – a wildlife enthusiast and early childhood science teacher at PS 179 in Brooklyn – came upon an article about how a family of beavers were “wreaking havoc” in the Staten Island neighborhood of Richmond. Department of Environmental Protection officials came out during the day and cleared a two-foot hole in the dam. The beavers – known for being skilled engineers – repaired the hole overnight. At the time of this writing, the fate of the Staten Island beavers is unknown.
This human-wildlife conflict with New York State’s official animal piqued Corrigan’s interest. She decided to use it as a teachable moment with her first graders, not only to help students learn about beavers and the many wild animals we share our city with, but to explore an important question: Can wildlife and humans co-exist in densely populated urban areas like NYC?
Beaver pond levelers were successfully used in two beaver ponds in Utah to prevent flooding of a Walmart parking lot without disturbing the beavers – a win for wildlife and humans. Could this be tried in Staten Island?
In December 2017, Corrigan gave her students an assignment: If you were a beaver and had to build your home, what would your lodge and dam look like?
Although many people consider them a nuisance, they’re actually a keystone species that provides many ecological benefits. Beaver ponds, for example, improve water quality, create habitat for many other species, reduce erosion, and recharge groundwater reserves.
Aaaandddd scene! What a wonderful teaching moment, about beavers, empathy, problem-solving and ecology! The fate of those Richmond beavers just got instantly less gloomy. Come share your work at the beaver festival and you will meet SO many like minds. Diane Corrigan, there are precious few things I’m sure of in this crazy world, but this is definitely one:
And on to Port Moody where the valiant struggle and sadness has turned into a victory lap. The heroes Judy and Jim have already told me will be making the pilgrimage to our festival, and I can’t wait to meet them in person!
The city of Port Moody will develop a beaver management plan after the death last December of a beaver kit during efforts to relocate its family from a storm sewer pipe in Pigeon Creek.
Coun. Meghan Lahti said such a plan will help the city rebuild trust with residents, particularly in the Klahanie neighbourhood through which the creek runs and who had become fond of the creatures.
One of those residents, Judy Taylor-Atkinson, said a proper management plan “will open the channel to good science” and make it possible for the beavers to thrive.
She said the ponds of quiet water created when beavers build dams improve the survival rate of juvenile salmon, attract bugs and the birds and bats that feed on them, as well as salamanders.
“Beavers can’t make rain but they keep water on the land,” Taylor-Atkinson said.
“It is important to understand the nature of beavers in order to determine the best management of them,” Lahti said in a report presented to council Tuesday.She said the animals are a “keystone” species that play a crucial role in the local ecosystem.
She said implementing a beaver management plan should “use innovative techniques for dam management where applicable” while avoiding extermination or relocation whenever possible.
Music to our ears! Mark this day on your calendar because it isn’t ever morning that I get to write about two such pride-inducing stories. Judy and Jim who worked SO hard and ended their vacation leaving Arizona early to face a slew of bad faith just wrestled this heifer of a story until they got everything on it’s feet again. I am so impressed with your hard work and the help of your neighbors. I try not to say the obvious things, but sometimes it’s unavoidable.
A month ago I stumbled on this illustration while searching for possible donations to the silent auction at the beaver festival. It was offered by a very unfriendly sort of woman on Etsy who told me crisply to never contact her again. Bob Kobres of Georgia found other illustrations like it, but we still didn’t know their origin. Originally I assumed it was from Canada because of the wildlife, but no Canadian I asked recognized anything about it.
I checked with the library of congress and the national archives who decided they didn’t recognize it either. That made me think it wasn’t from this hemisphere after all, so I showed to our European beaver friends. Along the way I learned how to do a reverse image google search and I looked that way as well. The only place the images came up was the etsy site I originally saw them on and our website!
Except for the bat. The bat one was offered as a card also on this website.
I contacted the owner of the sight and asked her about the image. She said she had come across it in a secondhand shop the 70’s in Massachusetts, sold as a single 9×7 print with no other information but a line of text reading “At the low dark entrance to the cave she stopped”.
She loved immediately that the girl showed no sign of fear entering the cave, because she herself was interested in encouraging more young woman to go into natural sciences. She noted it was an old yellowed print already, and reproduced it as a card.
Polly Pearhouse of the Scottish beavers group didn’t recognize the artwork but thought the clothing looked Germanic (Bavarian) especially. That prompted me to ask my German beaver contacts. Our old friend Alex Hiller wrote that he didn’t recognize it, nor did Dietland Muller-Swarze when I asked. Gerhard Schroder didn’t know. Duncan Haley of Norway agreed that it could be German but suggested any Scandinavian country also.
This brave little girl who stumbled into the forest has been all around the world in such a short time now. Everywhere she has gone people fall in love with the illustration even thought they know nothing at all about its origin. I am reminded of William Golding’s book The princess bride which opens by saying “This is my favorite book in the world, though I have never read it.”
My fondness for this mystery maiden has grown over the search, and I remain committed to resurrecting her story!
In the meantime, our friends taking care of the beavers in Devon shared this on youtube after it aired recently on the BBC. I like everything about it but the part where they examine the yearling which made me squeamish. The rest is excellent. Enjoy!
The company constructing the southwest portion of the ring road has been ordered to protect Beaver Pond and put in extra time monitoring of the wetlands. KGL Constructors and Alberta Transportation will monitor the water quality and quantity in the pond.
The decision follows the Environmental Appeals Board reviewing the situation, after concerns were launched by residents in the area and the group YYC Cares. Jeff Brookman, with the group, is pleased with the province’s actions.
Be careful of the beaver pond! We talked about this group months ago when they protested work on the ring road threatening their beaver pond. Now they won the right to insist that those wetlands be protected. Good for them!
Wetlands are important. And good for business as this research shows.
High nitrate concentrations in waterways can be harmful to ecosystems and human health, contaminating drinking water and eventually flowing downstream far enough to increase the size of the Gulf of Mexico’s “dead zone.”
A study published today in the journal Nature Geoscience by National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded researchers offers new insights into this problem: Multiple wetlands, or “wetland complexes” in a watershed, are extremely effective at reducing nitrate levels in rivers and streams.
Wetland complexes can be five times better at reducing nitrate than the best land-based nitrogen mitigation strategies, the scientists say.
Honestly, I sometimes feel like all these researchers are beaver lobbyists without knowing it. Certainly they promote the very things beavers are blamed for doing every day. Recently I started to think about what it would be like if beavers had a ‘business card’ they could present to recommend their services. I came up with this which amused me very much.
And on the back:
Vistaprint is having a sale so I might just have to make some up. I just love the idea of handing these out to nonbelievers.
The kit and its family had been living in a storm drain pipe near Pigeon Creek since the fall. City officials said their dam was beginning to block the culvert, so the animals needed to be moved to avoid flooding.
In December 2017, Diane Corrigan – a wildlife enthusiast and early childhood science teacher at PS 179 in Brooklyn – came upon 
The city of Port Moody will develop a beaver management plan after the death last December of a beaver kit during efforts to relocate its family from a storm sewer pipe in Pigeon Creek.
One of those residents, Judy Taylor-Atkinson, said a proper management plan “will open the channel to good science” and make it possible for the beavers to thrive.
High 
Vistaprint is having a sale so I might just have to make some up. I just love the idea of handing these out to nonbelievers.
