Beavers and floods – Worth A Dam

Beavers in News

heidi08 Beaver Chewing, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Who's Killing Beavers Now?, Who's saving beavers now? September 26, 2017

One of my favorite segments of Sesame Street when I was a child wasn’t cookie monster or oscar the grouch. It was the silly attention Bert paid to pigeons, treating them as if they mattered and were worth attending to. He collected jokes and stories about them and even watched a favorite media segment called in an echoing broadcaster voice saying “Pigeons In The News!“.

I can’t imagine why that pops into my head now.

There’s local beaver business to report first. Our two little dams near Susanna Street were ripped out last week by Wednesday morning. I’m not sure by whom, but Moses left a note on my door when we got home from vacation, and when we went to look it was sure enough torn out, although not by heavy equipment. No word on what happened to our beavers but I have contacted folks to find out.

Stay Tuned!

Also I got an email from our old friend Glenn Hori who used to photograph the Martinez Beavers and spied a beaver dam in Concord near 680 and Willow Pass Rd. He couldn’t get a glimpse of actual beavers last night but that lovely dam isn’t maintaining itself.

FullSizeRender — Concord Beaver Dam: Photo By Glenn Hori

This is right near the Willows so one images the name might have attracted them?

Meanwhile newslines are abuzz this morning with the story of valiant beavers being brought in to save English cities from flooding. I always get nervous when beaver promises are made, but we better just enjoy this while it lasts.

English town enlists beavers to prevent floods

In 2012, the center of Lydbrook, a village skirting the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, England, was deluged with several feet of water. The flash flooding, unleashed by torrential rainfall across the region, sparked a mandatory evacuation and left badly damaged homes and businesses in its wake.

This wasn’t the first time this bucolic burg has been devastated by rapidly rising waters. Nestled between the River Wye and one of its tributaries, the flood-prone Greathough Brook, Lydbrook and surrounding parishes in the Wye Valley have long been vulnerable to inundation. In 2015, villagers collectively breathed a sigh of relief when it was announced that a section of an aging culvert meant to tame the flow of water through the village would be replaced as part of a flood defense overhaul costing 290,000 pounds (nearly $400,000).

Now, two years later, the Forestry Commission has decided to bring in the big guns to further prevent flooding: beavers.

As the Guardian reports, a scheme to release a family of Eurasian beavers within an enclosed area at Greathough Brook has been embraced enthusiastically by villagers and, most importantly, received a governmental go-ahead despite one report that it was blocked by a minister at the Department of Environmental, Food and Rural Affairs.

The idea is that once released, the clan of industrious semiaquatic rodents will get to work doing what they do best: constructing an intricate network of dams, ponds and canals that, in this instance, will slow the flow of Greathough Brook and prevent upwards of 6,000 cubic meters (1.6 million gallons) of water from rushing into the valley-bound village below.

While a qualified team of engineers that don’t have webbed hind feet could be brought in to dam the stream, the beaver is, well, cheaper and can get the job done in a swifter and less intrusive manner.

What’s more, there’s the chance that the beavers’ presence could be a boon for eco-tourism in the region as the animals, hunted into extinction across Britain and now being strategically released back into the wild, are still a relatively rare sight. A village that’s reintroduced beavers and put them to work to help prevent catastrophic flooding certainly could draw wildlife lovers to this sleepy northwestern section of the Forest of Dean.

Here’s a nice look at the Devon beavers from back in 2012. I shared this 5 years ago but it’s worth watching again.

Water Managers

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental January 20, 2014

6 Scary Facts About California’s Drought

6 Scary Facts About California’s Drought. Last year was California’s driest on record for much of the state, and this year, conditions are only worsening. Sixty-three percent of the state is in extreme drought, and Sierra Nevada snow pack is now running at just 10 to 30 percent of normal. “We’re heading into what is near the lowest three year period in the instrumental record” for snow pack, says hydrologist Roger Bales of the University of California-Merced.

California’s governor has declared an official state of drought, and there is an alarming discussion about the event becoming the new normal in our state. Will this be the factor that reintroduces beavers to our conversation? I wrote the State secretary of Natural Resources this weekend. As he grew up in Vallejo, I feel there’s a thin chance he might know the something about the story of the Martinez Beavers and someone on his staff will respond. I also commented about the idea on this article at Mother Jones and someone wrote back directing me to read Eric Collier’s “Three against the wilderness” which is about the best I can hope for.

Meanwhile I woke up to discover this from our very good friend Louise Ramsay in Scotland.

Time to bring back Nature’s flood management engineer – the beaver

By Louise Ramsay

As climate change brings more rain, Britain is suffering from the extinction here of our native flood engineer – the beaver. Louise Ramsay says it’s high time to re-introduce these charismatic rodents all over Britain.

There used to be a creature in Britain which helped significantly with this effort. It was made extinct here around four centuries ago, but recent reintroductions of this rodent have shown the vital role they once had in reducing flooding – and how they could take up that mantle once more.

In spite of their reputation for causing floods, beavers also have the capacity for mitigating the impact of flooding, but on a rather bigger scale. In times of heavy rain or sudden snow melt, the water rushing down from the highlands would be slowed up and absorbed more effectively by the large ponds, wetlands and streams with flights of beaver dams, than by deep cut ditches designed to channel water as fast as possible on to the next place.

Louise Ramsay remains one of the most inspirational women on the planet. Her keynote address at the last beaver conference was one of my favorite things EVER. And I am enormously pleased that she’s hard at work on the beaver front in Scotland. In case you need a reminder about her and Paul’s amazing story, here’s my interview with Paul on the subject of the free beavers of the River Tay. It contains an interview with her from the BBC.

Paul Ramsay (Save the Free Beavers of the River Tay)

Louise ended her wonderful presentation at the conference with a passage from the 19th century poet Gerald Manly Hopkins from his work ‘Inversnaid‘. I remarked at the time it could not have been better chosen or better delivered.

What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Doubtful deliberate decisions

heidi08 Beavers June 26, 2013

Busy beavers called a threat to Yukon salmon

A first nation in Yukon is looking to help one species by undoing the work of another. The Ta’an Kwach’an Council hopes it can help boost numbers of Chinook salmon.

The Whitehorse area First Nation has received environmental approval for a month-long project to remove abandoned beaver dams on Fox Creek.

Thank goodness, because everyone knows those salmon need wide open expanses of un-dammed creek to grow up where they are exposed to exciting challenges of predation and drought. Keeps them agile! Certainly there are mountains of hard scientific studies proving that beaver dams help salmonids, but none of them look specifically at ABANDONED beaver dams. They’re obviously special.

Gosh, I wonder why those dams were abandoned? Did something maybe happen to those beavers?

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that somewhere a low-level city biologist is feeding this tribe misinformation to trick them into thinking that if they just kill enough beavers their salmon population will recover. (Never mind the pollution and the concrete channels.) They are using the tribe as the ‘cow pusher’ on the front of the train to get the protesters off the tracks, because no one will express outrage by what a native tribe does! And after they talk the tribe into doing it first, and the policy gets noticed, the city can do it, and say “What? We learned this from the Whitehorse!”

This article has been up for a couple days now. The CBC article on the same topic had a dozen comments that were pro-beaver (including mine) which are all gone now. Hmm.

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Flooding has devastated much of southern Alberta, killing three people and prompting authorities to evacuate the western Canadian city of Calgary’s entire downtown — an estimated 75,000 people. But at least one resident of Calgary has stayed behind. Cameras caught a beaver swimming through strong flood waters up the Bow River.

Sorry for Alberta and the flooding but it’s nice to remember what strong swimmers beavers are. I know it has reassured me on more than one occasion!

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Great photos from Cheryl last night, you won’t want to miss. Great kingfisher too, who has been clatteringly noisily around the dams and making herself known!

long mud — Mudding the dam Cheryl Reynolds

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Yesterday I sent Ian’s raptor blues film to Tom Knudson of the Sacramento Bee and today he has tweeted it. I let Ian know and he sent me this amazing article. If you’ve been at all following this incredible young man you really should go read it for yourself.

ACHIEVER | St. X grad wins awards in animation competition

Since he was 11, Ian Timothy has enjoyed making stop-motion animation films. Now 18 and a recent St. Xavier High School graduate, he’s won two major awards for his approximately two-minute film “Day Shift.”

“Day Shift” won a Gold Medal in the student film category of the New York Festivals International TV and Film Awards Competition, one of only two student films to win the Gold Medal, the highest award.

For that film he also received a Silver Telly Award in Animation, the highest award given in that professional — not student — competition.

Ian will attend CalArts — the California Institute of The Arts in Valencia, Calif. — in the Experimental Animation program. The competitive program accepts 15 students per year and has trained “greats” such as Tim Burton and John Lasseter, Ian said.

Ian believes he was accepted because, “They want to see somebody has a voice as an artist. Not only that they are good, technically, but they know where they want to be and what they want to be.”

Okay THIS article is definitely going in the copy of the DVD he will be donating for the festival. You better save it because it will be a collector’s item one day. We disagree about one thing. Ian says his newest film is about the liberating effect of creativity. I say its about the creative influence of nature.

Maybe for Ian they are actually the same thing.

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Oh and as you can definitely discern: I have a new keyboard and a functioning “d”! Delicious Delight and Darwinism! All I can say is thank goodness it wasn’t the “B”.