Tag: Beavers and water

About that beaver call…

There was a fair amount of interest in the ‘beaver call’ video I posted a few days ago. Drs Lixing-Sun and Bekoff had never heard it before and thought the beaver was an adult and sounded distressed. Neither of which I agreed with. The more pragmatic Skunk Whisperer from Oklahoma had the interesting observation that the beaver was actually IMITATING the human. Whoa. Then a favorite rehabber with massive ground experience with actual beavers sent me this story. She said I could share it but not her name because of the unusual (but totally understandable) care conditions.

That was very neat! The yearling sure seemed to be responding to the human’s call. Who knows what the human was saying? Whether he was mimicking the person or responding to him, it was a little yearling communicating with the person.

We once had a beaver who we hand raised. When he got critically ill (Tyzzers disease), he was sleeping with us.”Bruce” always slept right in my arms. Every morning the alarm would ring and I’d moan and reach over to hit the snooze button, One morning after about a week, the alarm rang and before I could groan Bruce began moaning. It was hysterical. Every morning after that he’d do it.

He would often mimic the tone of my voice of things I’d say frequently. One time he had an accident and when I walked in he said UH OH in the same tones my voice would say it. Of course he couldn’t enunciate it, but he got the sounds right with his whiny voice. So it would not surprise me if that beaver was imitating the person calling to him.

Hahaha! Now that I can believe. Experience trumps research! I can totally imagine that happening. And it is hysterical to think of these careful lurking trappers trying to master what they think will lure a beaver, and actually just giving the beaver something to learn to copy! Beaver mocking birds!

I discovered a new free tool on the internet playground yesterday. In case you want to play too it’s called FLAMING TEXT and here’s the link. You enter in the word you want and then ‘shop’ for all kinds of logos, backgrounds and fonts. Then tweak it to your satisfaction by adding or removing colors, glows, etc. I have only made it through ten pages of options and there are several. It would be a great pass-time if you were recovering from knee surgery or waiting for Godot.

Which means it is very, very dangerous.I made the above graphic yesterday to match our logo and make letterhead, because I spent the day imploring folks to give to the silent auction at the beaver festival. Zoos, museums, amusement parks, cruises, excursions, you name it, I asked for it. You’ve heard of “Dialing for dollars”? Well this was Begging for Beavers. We’ll see what it generates. At least it looked looked sharp.We even got our insurance yesterday for the festival, which meant we could turn in the application for the park permit. Now we need to coordinate the exhibits so that people show up for the grand event! Of course the really fun thing would be to combine the images with graphics to make something impressive. I decided I had to try and get this message out. If I can’t send it to the governor at least I can submit it with payment in every water bill.

Beavers with Benefits

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Who's saving beavers now? December 21, 2014

Someone has finally got the beavers and water story right. And it’s about time.

Leave it to beavers: California joins other states in embracing the rodent

AR-141229981.jpg&maxh=400&maxw=667 — A beaver dam spans the length of Los Gatos Creek. (Thomas Mendoza — Santa Cruz Sentinel)

LOS GATOS >> Californians are crossing their fingers for more rain after three punishing years of drought have left streams, rivers and wetland parched.

One animal has the potential to restore these dry landscapes.

Go ahead, guess which one. I’ll wait.

Isn’t this a fabulous start to an article? Before you do anything click on the link so they get to count hits for the report. It will convince them that this interests people. We met the reporter Samantha Clark before when she covered the beavers in San Jose for the campus paper. Now she has landed a gig with the Santa Crus Sentinel. Turns out she used to go to school with my neice so maybe osmosis has something to do with her remarkably being the first reporter in the state to get the water story right.

“This state has lost more of its wetlands than all other states, and beavers can rebuild those wetlands,” said Rick Lanman of the Institute for Historical Ecology in Los Altos. “Knowing that it is native should help guide restoration efforts.”

This article reads like a who’s who in beaver doxology honestly, just wait.

Beaver dams bestow benefits to the environment that we humans can’t easily copy. They turn land into a sponge for water. Their gnawing and nesting promotes richer soil and slows down water, improving imperiled fish habitat. Their dams raise water tables, nourishing shrubbery alongside streams that stabilize eroding banks and add habitat for birds and deer. They also help the endangered California Red-legged frog.

“There’s a growing interest in using beaver as a habitat restoration tool,” said Michael M. Pollock, an ecosystems analyst with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle. “They create good wetland habitat much more cheaply than other restoration methods.”

Samantha did her homework, tracking down Rick, and Michael. They are busy men but the generally make time to talk about beavers, I’ve been very impressed.

“It would be great if we could recognize the benefit of the beaver and to resolve conflict nonlethally and manage them to continue receiving those benefits,” said Kate Lundquist, director of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center’s Water Institute, a group that is drafting beaver policy recommendations for state Fish and Wildlife.

I am so happy to read an article that’s actually promoting beaver benefits in California! (And not complaining about methane emissions.) But there seems to be one voice missing. Rick, Michael, Kate, hmmm now who could it be?

Since beavers moved to the Alhambra Creek in downtown Martinez, the area has seen new species flourish. By moving mud, the beavers create a haven for bugs.

“Because we have an insect bloom, we have a bloom of all the different fish and animals up the food chain,” said Heidi Perryman, founder of the beaver advocacy group Worth a Dam and who led the effort to save a Martinez beaver family from extermination. “We’ve identified three new species of fish and seven species of bird. And we see more otter and mink than we ever saw before.”

Ohhh that’s who was missing! Someone whose learned how to live with beavers and seen it first hand! Not bad. Samantha doesn’t do enough to talk about HOW to live with beavers, but she nails WHY.

In San Jose, a beaver has taken refuge in the dry Guadalupe River. The critter’s dam outside a dripping storm drain created a tiny oasis.

“They can get by with very little,” Pollock said. “In a number of cases, they’ve built on streams that have run dry and because they have built the dams, water flows again.”

Because beavers are so good at recharging ground water, they can make streams flow when they would otherwise run dry such as during the summer months.

If I were a state facing drought for the past 3 three years, I’d be thinking about this article and these plucky rodents and re-examing my policies. Wouldn’t you?

Happy Solstice Everyone! Beavers get easier to see after today!

Love the Honey: Hate the bees.

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and water October 6, 2014

There is a smart and sassy column in yesterday’s Sacramento Bee. Bemoaning how wet it is in Oregon and how dry it is in California. Jack Ohman lived in Portland for 30 years and would like some of the water he endured up there to follow him to California. But he doesn’t want the beavers.

Jack Ohman: Portland, I’ll take your rain; keep the beavers

I have just returned from Portland, Ore. I lived there for almost 30 years. One of the things that drove me crazy about Portland was the rain.

My hair was always wet; I felt like I had a beaver sitting on my head at all times, just lying in wait to construct a quick dam. My shoulders constantly felt damp.

Water.

Even in non-drought times, I understand Sacramento is arid. Since I have been here, I get actively upset if it’s cloudy. My Sac buddies say that last Christmas, which featured temperatures hovering in the 70s, even in San Francisco, was truly surreal. I just assumed that this was typical Nor Cal weather. My kids loved it. Shirt-sleeves in San Francisco on Dec. 29 seemed normal to me, and, frankly, owed to me after 29 years of torrential, biblical rain.

Now, just run a nice tunnel down here from the Columbia River and no one gets hurt. But keep your beavers. Those things can really mess up your hair.

Mr. Ohman actually doesn’t specify whether means actual beavers or football beavers, but since I doubt he felt like he had a wet wide-receiver on his head, I’m assuming actual. Which is ironic. Since the one thing that would make California wetter is the thing he says he doesn’t want.

Of course I wrote and told him so. He’ll probably write back right away and thank me.

Beaver Resilience

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers and water, Creative Solutions, Who's saving beavers now? September 21, 2014

So this is what most of the Guadelupe River looks like this summer. Too bad for the remaining fish and definitely too bad for the thirsty wildlife. You’ll remember there were three beavers on the creek in 2013, and they made an historic splash. One was seen with a packing strip trapped around her waist and she was rescued so it could be removed and released to the exact same spot.

Not surprisingly, those beavers never showed their faces again. Although sometimes they still see sign of them.

10653742_667508093345785_4447968827182793828_n — Beaver chewed tree on the Guadelupe River: Steve Holmes

On Friday I got several very distressed emails from the friends of Los Gatos Creeks that they had discovered a beaver in great despair, living under a pipe in the dry river. They were ready to call in rescue to get him out. And what did I think? Later emails said he was ‘living in a pile of his own feces’ and was obviously sick. I was able to piece together that he was living under a culvert with a tiny leak and trying to use that water. And Greg Kerekes of urban wildlife took this photo.

Beavers using culvert in drought — Beaver in the Guadelupe: Greg Kerekes

This photo made me happier than any I’ve seen recently. Look at what that resilient beaver decided to do with the tiny drip! Waste not: want not. He has made a dam to keep the water inside the pipe since it won’t soak up the water, and if he needs water to drink or eliminate, there it is. In a few weeks it will be deep enough to hide him from unfriendly eyes. Remember that beavers are herbivores so even if he was in a puddle of his own ‘sawdust’ it wouldn’t be cause for alarm. But when I talked more to Roger Castillo about what he saw I realized the ‘filth’ he had seen the beaver sitting on was a scent mound that he was making to mark his ‘home sweet home’. Even though this looks alarming to us, he’s fiercely proud of his ingenuity and doesn’t want to share!

He’s sleeping to the right beside his accomplishment, in a little bed of reeds during the day. His hidden stash of water means coyotes or bobcats are unlikely to come and get a drink, and he seems ready for the long haul. Who knows? Maybe he’ll even get company? A beaver pioneer in the dry Guadelupe river. How different would California look during a drought if we had millions more like him?

You’ll remember that beavers were one of the first species back after Mt. St. Helen’s errupted. And were among the first to reclaim the land in Chernobyl after the nuclear reactor disaster. Here’s Leonard Houston’s opening remarks from the 2013 State of the beaver conference.

“Within this strangely pastoral setting the animals go about their business, sometimes finding uses for what we’ve left behind. The wolves rise up on their hind legs to peer through the windows of houses, looking for routes to the rooftops, which they use as observation posts for hunting. Eagles build nests in fire towers. Deer, elk, bison and wild horses flourish in abandoned farm fields.

As to the beavers, they have shown an amazing resiliency to some of the worlds most cataclysmic events, in large surpassing sciences understanding of what we call sustainable habitat. Beavers, forced out decades ago when the landscape was engineered for collective agriculture, have already undone much of man’s work converting polluted swamps to free flowing rivers and restoring one of central Europe’s great marshlands.”

So I wouldn’t worry about that little pioneer beaver. He’s doing just what he’s supposed to – what we all should, really. How careful would we all be of water if we didn’t think any more was coming? I mean out of the sky, out of the tap, out of the bottle – ever. Wouldn’t we all build little dams around every drop to eek it along?

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Last night we saw some very lucky beavers expanding their territory to Ward Street. I thought you’d like this footage of dad and the new kit.