Tag: Beaver

Beaver, Urban Settings & You (B.U.S.Y.)

heidi08 Beavers November 19, 2015

Yesterday was the first official conference call for the urban beaver chapter of Pollock’s next restoration guide. While I was eagerly waiting for the call I made this very fun graphic and fielded dates for the followup meeting of the art committee of the PRMCC. Then I met my coauthors, Greg Lewallen and Kaegan Scully Engelmeyer. Greg is a Master’s of Environmental Management student at Portland college one of the four authors of the initial guidebook. Kaegen is the Urban Land steward for The Wetlands Conservation, which is partially funding the paper.

I should have known the conversation was going to be weirdly ideal when it started out with an alarmed discussion of two beavers that were mysteriously killed on conservancy land, and how upsetting and confusing it was. It would be Kaegen’s job that day to go find out what he could, and we discussed bringing our kits for necropsy at UCDavis and whether there was an equivalent facility in Portland.

As the conversation proceeded, I found out what was expected of our 20 page segment and when the important deadlines were coming. We went over a rough timeline and I mentally marked those places where I would disagree or have something to add. I didn’t say them aloud of course because my coauthors were so new to me I wanted to get a read on them before I leaped into the fray. I always struggle with myself to sound science-y and not too beaver-huggy, even when I’m conferring with people I regard as friends. I needn’t have bothered. Every single contribution I offered was listened to and regarded as important.

I was regarded as important.

The work we had done in Martinez, all nine grueling years of it, was regarded as groundbreaking. All the ways we had focused public support and educated about beavers. I was an expert – THE expert – on urban beavers. If I had been anyone else I’m sure I would have been suffused with satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment.

Instead I felt like this:

Jon had zero idea how to reassure me afterwards, because he was enormously excited and thought I should be. I tried to explain that I had cultivated my beaver acumen entirely in opposition. Raiding information stores and firing blasts of information at slow-moving establishment tanks like a rebel on the run. It’s a vast, vast understatement to say I’m unused to being a welcomed voice among brilliant beaver colleagues.

By the end of the two hour conversation, I had signed up for the introduction and lit review, the segment on outreach and education, and the segment on beaver challenges, and obviously any beaver photos that might be needed. We are supposed to have a rough version by the first of the year. We set up another call and they wondered what financial arrangement I would need to be willing to come to Portland next year to present our work in person because there would be so much interest in the work we had done.

So I guess it was a good day for urban beavers.

The very good, the pretty good, the slightly good, and the ugly

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Environmental, Who's Killing Beavers Now? May 27, 2013

First we should give MORE kudos to our beaver friends at Fur-bearer Defenders who have strewn a path of beaver deception around the municipality of Mission in British Columbia just outside of Vancouver, installing 9 beaver deceivers to control flooding in culverts.

Beaver deceiver prevents dams from being built

A beaver deceiver being installed in Mission. Each unit saves the municipality thousands of dollars annually. Submitted phot

Gosh, I’m so old I can remember when Adrian Nelson had just gotten married and nervously installed his very first one after chatting a lot to Mike Callahan and scouring his DVD. And now these installs are practically a piece of cake! Delicious, effective cake that they actually talk an entire city into paying for!

The non-profit group approached the district with a simple, non-lethal alternative for managing flooding concerns associated with beaver activity: build a wire fence around the culvert intake, interrupting the beavers’ natural instinct to build where there’s current and the sound of flowing water. “They work awesome,” said Dale Vinnish, public works operations supervisor. “We don’t have to trap beavers. They moved elsewhere. They’re not causing a problem.”

The nine “beaver deceivers,” at $400-$600 apiece and built in one day, save the district thousands of dollars, because workers no longer have to pull apart dams. Previously, the municipality would break down two to three dams daily, several days a week, in addition to paying for the capturing and killing of about a dozen beavers annually.

“If we weren’t trapping, we were going in continuously to break apart the dams,” said Vinnish.

Great work Fur-bearer Defenders! We are entirely impressed that you are easily giving Washington State a run for it’s money as the beaver-management champion of the northern hemisphere. Go Mission!

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New footage from our famous San Jose beaver friends. Love the ‘urban safari’ feel of this video. Sadly if this is momma beaver, I’m not seeing any teats, and that means no silicon valley kits this year!

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Next, a nice column on ‘Extinction Events’ from Minnesota. His point is climate change, but my point (as always) is beavers!

For instance the pond created behind a beaver dam becomes the habitat for a wide variety of plant and animal species. Remove the beaver engineers and the entire ecosystem collapses.

It’s about time we start to realize the number of species that are displaced or wiped out when beavers are removed. Trickle-down economies work both ways. I wasn’t happy with this later sentence “Without the stream, there could be no beaver dam” because that’s not exactly true. I’ve heard of beaver creating ponds from tiny springs, so that the big beautiful pond becomes the only water in a desert. Certain ephemeral streams (like we have here in California that dry up in the summer) wouldn’t dry up if we had enough beavers. I kindly sent him this Chumash legend:

Author Jan Timbrook who is a curator for the Santa Barbara museum of natural history described this in her book ‘Chumash Ethnobotany” has some very interesting things to say about beavers:

“A willow stick that had been cut by a beaver was thought to have the power to bring water. The Chumash would treat the stick with ‘ayip ( a ritually powerful sbustance made from alum) and then plant it in the ground to create a permanent spring of water.”

Jan Timbrook, Chumash Ethobotany p. 180

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And on to the ugly. I’ve been sitting with this story a couple of days, but its fairly unavoidable and we better deal with it. This is the kind of negative advertising I hate, even more than I hate the Belarus story. Ultimately Americans value roads much more even than we value human life. Now every city will be more tempted to tell property owners they’re liable for beaver dams. Call me crazy, but it seems like if you’re worried about the stability of a dam, the smart thing to do is to reinforce it!

Flooding damages road in West Warren MA

All kinds of news…

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, Educational, Environmental, History January 31, 2012

It seems like its been ages since we talked about OUR VERY OWN beavers, but my oh my have they been busy! This weekend the tree above Reeds sleeping hole was artfully felled and polished off, then used to rebuild the now-curved secondary dam AND it turns out the long-lost third dam! Pictures will follow but you can rest assured that Martinez Beavers are no slackers!

This weekend I was able to complete a wonderful interview with Mary O’Brien of the Grand Canyon Trust, and our conversation took so many exciting directions that my head has been a little dazzled trying to follow them all. She told me about the beaver management paper they had just submitted to the forestry service, getting tuned into beavers by attending Suzanne Fouty’s dissertation defense, and Newspaper rock in Utah with hundreds of tribal images of humans and animals.

Of course this is my favorite part:→

Getting ready for the interview I went to re-visit the article that first introduced me to Mary lo these many years ago. “Voyage of the Dammed” in High Country News remains my favorite beaver article ever written. This time when I looked at the photo I saw it in a new light – an OMG-that’s-a-muskrat-light!

Of course I wrote everyone involved about the error: the author, the publisher and the hapless photographer, but they’ve made no response so far. It’s the only photo without a description, so maybe they know its not a beaver and just used it to ‘imply’ beaver? Still it’s a little like finding out Jesus on the Mount was reading from a teleprompter. Sigh.

Oh and this photo from Mike Callahan’s facebook page explains why we should be happy that our beavers are busily taking down trees and building third dams instead of occupying their time in a more insidious way:

plugged filter — Dammed up Intake Exclusion Fence on a Flexible Pond Leveler

If beavers were spiders…

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, New Species September 23, 2010

Last night we discovered this beauty in our garden. She is about the size of a quarter and her web takes up half the vertical plane of my dining patio. Gary Bogue tells me it is a marbled orbweaver, (Araneous Marmoreus) one of the beautiful harmless garden spiders who build spiral webs. I am used to discovering some kind of orb weaver in the garden in the fall, but have never seen anything like this.

When we found the web it was damaged and we wondered if she’d be back. Last night as we watched she crawled into the middle and carefully ate the silk from yesterdays spinning. After resting a little she started on her amazing new web. The Entomology page at Ohio State tells me that she rebuilds her web every night! She cleverly digests the protein rich silk of yesterdays weaving to fuel her next endeavor. Orb weavers have a single signal thread which runs through the middle of their work and tells them if prey has been caught. Unlike other unimaginative spiders who wait in the center, the marbled orbweaver waits in a silken hole at the edge of the signal thread in case something is taken. Adults are so big they use a leaf or two combined with silk to make their holes.

It got me thinking about the industry required to rebuild your entire home and your way to make a living every single night. Beavers and spiders have a lot in common it seems, they both construct their worlds themselves, they consume their building materials, and they do the bulk of their work while we humans are asleep. What if a beaver had to rebuild his dam and lodge night after night? What if, like the spider, the beaver had to work alone?

Often I encounter the argument about instinct versus learning when trying to understand what beavers do. When one looks at those careful weavings and flawless concentric pattern one can only credit remarkable instinct. It’s not like spiders stay with their parents for a year perfecting their techniques. Still, spiders must get better as they work. The web of a first ever orbweaver must not be as skilled or the location as perfectly chosen as an established weaver.

Beavers, on the other hand, get a year or two to learn from their parents, and we can see it happening right before our very eyes. Last night, I witnessed the first EVER placement of a stick on the dam by one of our three kits. Not exactly a stellar placement, and I have certainly seen Dad move things after earlier generations have placed them, but it was a brave debut. Beavers do have instinct, but they have to train it over years of practice to teach them about the terrain, the materials and little tricks of the trade.

All of which the Orbweaver must cope with on her own. Go outside and look in your garden tonight. You might be surprised at what you find.

Superciliary Tufts

heidi08 Beaver Anatomy, Beaver Behavior, Educational, Environmental August 29, 2010

Back when I was trying to prove the number 1 picture of a beaver on (the) google was actually a nutri a (I’ll wait while you go check). I started noticing that beavers have unique whisker-like hairs above the eyes. If the lighting is right and you look close you’ll see them. Artists almost never include them but I made sure Libby added them to the beaver festival flyer. Apparently these are called “superciliary tufts” or “superciliary vibrissae”

Your cat has them and they tell him to blink and react to changes in the air flow to catch things. Whiskers in general are incredibly important as guides to tell an animal how close things are and whether they can squeeze in between them. Our wikipedia friend researched the issue and found a 2009 article saying that the neural information communicated by the vibrasse in aquatic mammals was so significant it deserved its own sensory name.: “The Vibrassal Sense.”

Behaviour and ecology of Riparian mammals

By Nigel Dunstone, Martyn L. Gorman

While beavers don’t have to worry so much about trees getting away from them, they do need to detect small changes in flow and water motion to know when and how to make repairs to their dam. Skip Lisle writes this about superciliary tufts in beavers:

Beavers have a phenomenal ability to find their way around a pond underwater in the pitch dark—-in deep water, under ice, at night. They know every square inch of the underwater world, all learned by touch. Various hairs must play an incredibly important role.

This makes total sense. When our very first kit got sick years ago and was found out to be blind we realized that his ability to navigate in water was never notably affected. Yesterday I realized I had never seen these ‘tufts’ on our kits, and lord knows I had been looking at them long enough to notice. Did that mean they get them when they got older? Could they be a mark of maturity? In scouring through photos it seemed like dad had more than mom. Maybe they get more as they aged? Could they be used to tell the maturity of a beaver? Who knew more about this mystery and who could help? I wrote every beaver expert I know to ask their thoughts and I’ll let you know what I learn.

Then I got out our heavy duty binoculars and went down to the dam for some tuft-hunting. Guess what I found our kits have?

Click on the picture to enlarge it. They’re there. While I was down there solving my own mystery, I heard some activity behind me downstream and saw some big wave action. As I was trying to find out who was below the dam, I saw a hulking furry figure scurry over it, dunk immediately underwater and run a steady line of bubbles all the way up to the lodge.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!DAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It has been almost two months since we saw him, but I kept telling myself he was most likely still here. Where would he go? I was by myself at the dam last night for most of the evening and maybe that’s why I saw him. He’s a wary beaver who stays away from commotion. I was sooo happy to see him, and know that our three lovely kits have at least two defenders to look after them.