UNEXPECTED TREASURES

heidi08 Beaver Art January 20, 2018

It’s that time of year when I am madly begging for donations to the silent auction. Sometimes people respond in heart-warmingly generous ways that affirm the essential goodness of mankind, and sometimes they do the other thing, which is never fun. But not un-useful, as the woman who was offering this print wouldn’t donate OR tell me where it was from, but WOW I love this image, and now I have my own mystery!

She said did say it was from the 40’s, but it doesn’t look American to me. Since the English haven’t had beavers for 500 years I’m thinking maybe its from a Canadian children’s book? I know what you’re thinking, those beavers are kind of zombie like, but still its SO cute with the little girl helping them mud, don’t you think?

Anyway I tried to hunt around for it and the only other image I came across of children with beavers was this one, which made me smile and think of Skip Lisle. The mystery continues. Ask your moms and grandmas if they ever saw the image before, will you?

I’m happy to say I received a wonderful note from author Judith K. Berg (and her husband) after I wrote her thanking her for that fantastic letter to the editor. They were both pleased and impressed with our story and the website and had so many good things to say about beavers, I was very chuffed. I think she is going to donate signed copies of her books to the auction so you will get to read all about it!

Yesterday this article caught my eye, and I heard from a group that is talking to the lawyers involved to do the same thing in California. I’m wondering how all this is going to play out. Although if the government shut down continues it won’t make much of a difference!

How to Successfully Threaten Legal Action Against the Government

In a move that has left beaver, salmon, and wildlife advocates pleased, the federal government and state have agreed to stop killing beavers in the state of Oregon in response to a threat of litigation by wildlife groups.

If you’re wondering how wildlife groups can get what they want by simply threatening litigation, then you should probably take a look at their Notice of Intent to Sue. The notice letter goes to painstaking detail to explain exactly why beavers need to stop being killed, and how animals like beavers serve important roles in helping the threatened salmon population. Given that the letter worked, it seems worthwhile to examine a few of the things it did right.

Deterrence in the Details

In the letter, there is no shortage of details about how beavers modify the habitat of salmon, and other animals, to all the species’ benefits. By helping the salmon thrive, the wildlife groups claim that the beavers should be protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Basically, by creating dams, beavers help salmon by creating bigger pools for them to rest and feed, as they make their way up or down stream. Also, proposed alternatives to killing the beavers are included, since beavers do cause quite a bit of trouble for landowners, public utilities, and sometimes, even roadways (that are near rivers or streams, or connect to bridges).

In addition to all that, the very important detail about there being no environmental impact analysis seems to have played a big part in prompting the government to take action. In addition to the immediate cessation of the killing of Oregon’s beavers, an environmental impact analysis will be completed.

Make Compliance Easy

In addition to listing out all the reasons why the government should agree to their demand, it made compliance rather simple. All the government needed to do was simply stop killing beavers until after it conducted an assessment on the effects of doing so. There was no astronomical damages demand, and attorney fees were not even sought for putting together the required demand. When you want a demand (or any request for that matter) to be accepted, making sure it’s a simple ask can go a long long way.

I love how this article lays out what they did RIGHT. It’s practically a recipe for doing this again in other states.I can’t imagine Washington and California will be far behind, I showed it to our retired attorney friend who argued the land-breaking case in Riverside on the grounds that removing beaver required a CEQA analysis, and he was very pleased as well.

There’s more to this than meets the eye, and maybe it will make more of an impact that I guessed. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a mystery to solve.

BEAVER SCHOOL BEGINS PROMPTLY IN JANUARY

heidi08 Beavers and climate change January 19, 2018

You could go to college, sit thru boring classes, study for exams, earn a degree and owe millions of dollars afterwards OR you could just read this website for free every day and be a genius! Since I already did the first one, I’m committed now to the second. This arrived yesterday from USFS hydrologist Dr. Suzanne Fouty who let me know she will actually be retiring in March. (The forest service will be lost without her, but I’m selfishly hoping that all that free time means she will come to the beaver festival!)

Anyway, she sent a presentation that was given at a conference last year in Washington that I know will interest you folks. The author is Konrad Halen of Utah State. Click here for full text of the paper or here for a link to his slides.

“To What Extent Might Beaver Dam Building Buffer Water Storage Losses Associated with a Declining Snowpack?”

Konrad worked with Joe Wheaton to study this issue. .The question addressed was whether an increase in beaver dams could make up for the effects of climate change on the receeding snow pack. The author looked at the number of dams and calculated the volume of water behind each. Then he did the same with the volume of the snow pack in a prior year.

The results are kind of depressing in that they indicate that climate change is going to kick the snot out of our water supply and beavers can only help a little bit.

What he found is that beaver dam amount for a small fraction of overall snowpack water, but that they do indeed contribute. I guess the moral of the story is “Don’t screw up your climate!” And if it so happens that you are so stupid you do mess up your climate, then the moral is “You better have a LOT of beavers around to do what they can.”

Beavers can’t hit the undo button for us, but they CAN HELP if we let them. That should be foremost on our minds when we think about what to do when they block a culvert or flood a basement.

The next educational moment of the day is from Eli Asarian of River Bend Sciences who let me know about an upcoming discussion of the surprise beavers in the artic that we might be able to attend for free.

It’s an upcoming Webinar entitled

Tundra Be Dammed! The Beaver Colonization of the Artic

The next Northern Region, Alaska Section, AWRA Monthly Brown Bag Presentation will be given by Dr. Ken Tape, University of Alaska Fairbanks – Water and Environmental Research Center, on “Tundra Be Dammed: Beaver Colonization of the Arctic”. We will also have this presentation available for Free over the web (using Webex). Please see the following URL for more information. The role of beavers on the hydrologic landscape has always been significant in North America. Ken’s presentation on changes in the Arctic has relevence to potential changes across North America. Please join us next week and enjoy an informative presentation on Alaska.

The American Water Resource Association does monthly brown bags in Fairbanks and allows for remote participation through its webinars. To participate contract them here. I’m pretty curious about what gets said about these permafrost-ruining beavers in the Tundra, so maybe I’ll see you there!

BEAVER ON THE RED CARPET

heidi08 beavers and otters January 18, 2018

My goodness! Yesterday was a whirl of activity with exciting development for the festival pouring in and making me feel like uh-oh it’s really happening! Today the joyful strain continues with two excellent beaver appreciation articles. It’s almost like someone’s been reading my mind. (Or my website)

Ecosystem Engineers in Rivers: How and Where Organisms Create Positive Biogeomorphic Feedbacks

Ecosystem engineering is by definition an interdisciplinary concept, tying together geomorphology (the study of physical processes and forms in rivers) and ecology. Two researchers at Umeå University in Sweden that bridge these disciplines, a fluvial geomorphologist, Dr. Lina Polvi, and a landscape ecologist, Dr. Judith Sarneel, examined the available literature and summarized the range of ecosystem engineers that are found in river environments in their review recently published in WIREs Water.

An important aspect of this work was to determine where various ecosystem engineers have the most impact, in terms of three geomorphic factors—channel width, sediment size and the relative stability of the channel. For example, rivers affected by beaver dams can become more complex and change from being single-thread meandering channels to more complex multi-thread systems. However, although the beaver can be found throughout a river system from very narrow to very wide channels, they will only engineer by building dams and truly alter the river’s form in narrow- to intermediate-sized channels.

This sounds basically like beavers always make a difference but in the right shape streams they make a bigger difference. Fair enough. The article goes on to talk about other kinds of ecosystem engineers and how one should be careful to only put in native ones. Really? Somebody is STILL researching this? They talk about macrophytes as engineers of streams to which I say HRMMPH! When has anyone ever had a macrophyte festival?

Beavers are sooo much better,

I like this letter to the editor in the Register-Guard much better for obvious reasons,

Beavers important to ecosystems

I appreciated the Jan. 11 article bringing attention to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services’ illicit killing of Oregon’s beavers. During the 1990s, I conducted a research project on the then-state-endangered river otter population in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Because beavers occupied many of the same sites as otters in my 40-mile stretch of watershed, I documented their behaviors as well.

Through my research — and that of many others throughout the country — good river otter habitat is often equated to be a consequence of beaver activity. In fact, through complex science, these ecosystem engineers provide habitat for many other species as well: plants, invertebrates, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, and fish — including Oregon’s beloved salmon. Results from research conducted in Oregon, Alaska and British Columbia show that juvenile salmon have higher survival rates in streams with beaver ponds.

Beavers should be revered for their contribution to sustainable ecosystems, not killed to justify an agency’s existence. Two long-time beaver researchers, Bruce Schulte and Dietland Müller-Schwarze, expressed it well: “Given the flexibility of beaver behavior, perhaps we would be better to manage human activity, to use preventive measures to avoid problems with beavers, and to reap the benefits of living with beavers.”

Judith K. Berg. EUGENE OR

HOW much do we LOVE Judith? What a wonderful letter! Of course ideal otter habitat is the result of beaver work. And ideal salmon habitat and blue heron habitat too. Judith is the author of the very successful book “The Otter Spirit” which has won several awards, I’m thinking she deserves an award for her letters to the editor too, because “Beavers should be revered, not killed” is a mighty fine sentence.

She is definitely a member of Worth A Dam in spirit! Thanks, Judith.

DYKE DIGGERS? SERIOUSLY?

heidi08 Beavers January 17, 2018

Maybe it’s just me. But if I lived in a very low-lying area that required extensive levees to even make living there even possible, and I had to make the levees out of soil because it was what I had the most of, I sure would cover that earth wall with fencing or rip-rap or something that burrowing animals couldn’t dig through. At least below the water line where I couldn’t see it. An ounce of prevention, you know, is worth a pound of cure. Or any amount of GPS.

Doesn’t that seem relatively straight forward?

Study of behaviour muskrats, coypus and beavers kicks off

In a new study just launched by a number of Dutch district water boards and knowledge institutions, a team of scientists including statistical ecologist Emiel van Loon of the UvA Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics will be researching the behaviour of muskrats, coypus and beavers. The two-year project is titled ‘Dyke Diggers in Focus’.

standing of beavers’ behavioural patterns and territorial use, meanwhile, would make it easier to detect beaver damage and perhaps even ‘steer’ them away from burrowing in dykes.

To gain a clearer picture of these ‘dyke diggers’, the research will use transmitters equipped with GPS location and activity sensors. The project’s strength lies in pairing of science with practical techniques, with a hands-

Digging in banksides and dykes by muskrats, coypus and increasingly also beavers is causing significant safety risks, economic damage and structural maintenance expenditures in the Netherlands, where flood control is a constant concern. While capturing muskrats and coypus remains as important as ever, better insight into these rodents’ habits may enable faster and more targeted detection and ultimately allow a reduction in not only the number traps that are deployed, but also unintended by-catch and the needless killing of animals. Improved underon component for students, too. Use of this new technology will enable district water boards to answer the pressing question of how to prevent waterside damage through practical insight into the behaviours and territorial use of muskrats, coypus and beavers in the Netherlands. In future, the new technology will also be available to track and study other animals.

Emiel van Loon has been engaged to advise on the design of the experimental transmission component and will focus on questions such as how many animals should be tagged with trackers and where they should be captured. Additionally, Van Loon will be responsible for interpreting the tracking data and creating and validating the movement models to for example predict the use of space for the whole animal populations.

Nothing gives the whiff of modern science that air of prestige like saying it has GPS tracking. Science nerds just go crazy for that, (it’s like labeling anything retail with the words “bluetooth enabled”). People will be more likely to buy it whether it’s useful or not. Far be it from me to make fun of the vividly named Dr. Van Loon or question usefulness of putting a chip inside beaver heads to “STEER THEM AWAY” from burrowing into a wall, but tell me this. If they don’t burrow into your dykes, where are these creatures going to sleep instead?

Maybe creating a floating safe zones that would appeal to these animals would be more useful than this GPS thing? You know, some where to hole up and escape too or for a family to raise its young. Oh and use a couple of those graduate students to find out why no one can tell these species apart will you? Just sayin’.

**Left:** (Nutria) *Castor Impostor* ——- **Right:** Beaver (*Castor Canadensis*!)

I just got word from Carol Evans of a wonderful presentation she will be doing with rancher Jon Greggs to talk about their awesome work with restoring sage lands with beaver January 30th, 2018. The conference is mostly about ranching, but their part will be in the morning starting at nine. I have such respect for this work. Carol goes right into the lion’s den to deliver her message. You can sign up here.

This is an FYI as some of you have expressed an interest in hearing about the material Jon Griggs and I will be sharing at the National Society for Range Management meeting in Sparks, NV. I’ll be talking a lot about the effects of managed grazing and beaver colonization on valley re-hydration in the Susie and Maggie Basins. Jon will also be sharing his perspectives on all of this.

Restoring and Managing the “Emerald Islands” of the Sagebrush Sea: New Science, Sticks and Stones, and the Eager Beaver

SRM+2018+emerald+island+symposium_Final_1-12-18

WHERE BEAVERS ARE, WATER & WILDLIFE WILL BE

heidi08 Beavers January 16, 2018

Well, even though Wisconsin eliminated ALL air quality regulations Friday, there are things to enjoy about the return of beaver in the state. Starting with this article.

Something to chew on: Beavers regain toehold as popularity of the Milwaukee River grows

The American beaver is discovering that the lower Milwaukee River is once again becoming desirable real estate.

There are increasing signs of the beaver’s presence: Gnawed trees for miles up and down the shoreline; a ramshackle dam that sticks out of the ice in Lincoln Park; and the most tale-tell sign of all — a beaver lodge near W. Hampton Ave.

The inroads by the largest rodent in North America have been unmistakable, says Cheryl Nenn of Milwaukee Riverkeeper, who has worked for the advocacy organization for 15 years.

“They’re definitely becoming more prevalent,” Nenn said.

Beavers were a fixture in the lower Milwaukee in presettlement times. They are still common in the far upper reaches. But they are making a return to the river on the city’s east side.

“The corridor has become a better place,” Nenn said. “There is improving tree diversity — that’s important — and the water is improving. It’s all of those factors.”

Isn’t that a wonderful temporary house they built Chip? So smart. I’m glad Milwaukee is being visited by more beavers. and that there are new cleaner rivers for them to inhabit. They can help maintain those streams, you know. If folks stop being so trap-happy and let them do their job.

A nice look at the job they can do comes from this month’s permaculture magazine, which is available online now. You will recognize some of the names in it and I dare say ALL of the photos. (Because apparently everyone wants to borrow from us). The article starts with a short piece I wrote with Mike Callahan years ago, and then goes into a nicely detailed description of flow devices, beaver management, and why beavers matter. When author Timothy Sexauer contacted us in the summer, Cheryl agreed that this was exactly the kind of article where her photos belonged.

Go read the whole thing, it’s worth your time.

Beavers: The Ecological Restoration Agents

For many millions of years, in what we now call the Applegate watershed of southern Oregon, beaver have been the senior landscape engineers. At least 12,000 years ago, humans arrived and established permanent culture alongside the beaver. In the language of the Takelma, the Applegate is called “sbink,” meaning Beaver Place.

By the time the Takelma were violently displaced by the gold rush settlers, fur trappers had already nearly exterminated the beaver. As a result, rivers and creeks flowed faster and wetlands had become meadows, drastically changing the landscape and ecosystems.

That’s a pretty nice way to start an article. It goes on to talk about how when the beaver population recovered they found that the land had been settled, culverted and laid with concrete. Conflict often arise. But there are MANY ways to solve them. The author talks about working with Jakob Shockley to keep a basement from flooding. And the story ends by thanking Mike Callahan for his work and celebrating the launch of the Beaver Institute.

Jakob Shockey says the key is mitigating human-beaver conflicts so we can retain beaver where they choose to reside. When they are secure in their chosen spot they will naturally disperse their children further up tributaries where we most need to restore water retention. It is up to us to educate ourselves and others about the many benefits of beaver to the land and, importantly, the ways that we can non-lethally deal with these conflicts.

It is an honor to announce that Mike Callahan recently launched The Beaver InstituteTM as a means to catalyze public awareness at a continent-wide scale. The Institute’s mission is “to be a catalyst for advancing beaver management by providing technical and financial assistance to public and private landowners experiencing beaver conflicts, supporting scientific research, training mitigation professionals, and increasing public appreciation of the beaver’s critical role in creating wetland ecosystems.” The vision is to have “all beaver-human conflicts resolved in a science-based manner to maximize the many benefits that beavers contribute to the environment.”