Free, furry nitrate-removal kits.

heidi08 Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental May 15, 2015

Wetlands continue to reduce nitrates

Wetlands created 20 years ago between tile-drained agricultural fields and the Embarras River were recently revisited for a new two-year University of Illinois research project. Results show an overall 62 percent nitrate removal rate and little emission of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas.

“Slowing down the rate of flow of the water by intercepting it in the wetland is what helps to remove the nitrate,” says Mark David, a University of Illinois biogeochemist in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences. “The vegetation that grows in the wetland doesn’t make much of a difference because the grasses don’t take up much nitrogen. It’s just about slowing the water down and allowing the microbes in the sediment to eliminate the nitrate. It goes back into the air as harmless nitrogen gas.”

I’m so glad Illinois is looking into this. We really need to understand the ways to fix our streams. The EPA says that nitrates are leftovers from all the fertilizers and rodenticides farmers use. And that if the get into wells or groundwater they can cause illness in children or cancer at higher levels.

Exposure to nitrates and nitrites at levels above health-based risk values has adverse health effects on infants and children. The health effect of most concern to the U.S. EPA for children is the “blue baby syndrome” (methemoglobinemia) seen most often in infants exposed to nitrate from drinking water used to make formula.

Exposure to higher levels of nitrates or nitrites has been associated with increased incidence of cancer in adults, and possible increased in cidence of brain tumors, leukemia, and nasopharyngeal (nose and throat)

As a rule Americans are against turning our babies blue or giving ourselves cancer. So we really, really want to get rid of nitrates when we can. And it turns out that just slowing down the water by making wetlands is a better way to do that than just about anything else. Even better than plants. Even better than building expensive bioreactors.

“Farmers generally prefer to install bioreactors because they don’t take up much space,” Gentry says. “A wetland requires about 3 to 4 percent of the drainage area. So, for a 100-acre field, you’d need about 4 acres in wetland. Although bioreactors don’t use much land, they also don’t slow the water enough during high flows. Research on their performance is still underway. Because water tends to be in the wetlands for a much longer time period, they are more effective.”

Wow, wetlands work harder for longer and they are supremely effective at getting rid of nitrates. We really need them! The article doesn’t mention it but they also have all these added benefits as a buffer zone for huge storms, and a stopping place for migratory birds, or habitat for wildlife. We should be working hard to protect them since they do this important work. Maybe giving a tax credit to farmers that allow them?

The article also doesn’t mention a certain rodent that actually makes and maintains these valuable wetlands for free. Its name escapes me now. What was it called again?

I think it started with a ‘B’?

Thanks to BK for sending this my way.

Swedish Beaver Ponds

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver-themed merchandise, Beavers elsewhere, Who's Killing Beavers Now? January 24, 2014

Constructed wetlands save frogs and birds threatened with extinction

Over the last few decades, several thousands of wetlands have been constructed in Sweden in agricultural landscapes. The primary reason is that the wetlands prevent a surfeit of nutrients from reaching our oceans and lakes.

An important objective in constructing wetlands is reducing eutrophication – over-fertilisation. It’s surprisingly positive that they’ve also had such a great direct effect on biological diversity,” says Stefan Weisner, Professor of Biology specialising in environmental science at Halmstad University.

A special thanks to BK from Georgia for sending this article my way. (I would never have found it because it stunningly doesn’t even MENTION beavers.) So the Swedes are paying their farmers to make wetlands and still paying their trappers to kill beavers? I’m scratching my head at that story, but happy to see they appreciate the value of wetlands. It’s a start anyway. If a country values wetlands enough to pay farmers to make them, we should have an easier time convincing them to leave the creature who does it for free.

Over the last 15 years, nearly 3,000 wetland areas have been constructed in agricultural landscapes around Sweden. Farmers have the possibility of receiving economic support for this from sources such as the Swedish Board of Agriculture. The primary reason is because wetlands catch the surfeit of nutrients from agriculture such as nitrogen and phosphorus–substances that would otherwise have leaked out into the seas and lakes and contributed to eutrophication.

The study shows that creation of wetlands is a cost-effective to catch the nutrients.

“It’s a very effective way of purifying the water. It’s less expensive than constructing treatment plants, and in addition it contributes to biological diversity,” Prof Weisner says.

The whole thing made me think of the WWII lyrics Jon used to sing as a boy on the playground. “The Yanks are flying fortresses at 40,000 feet…etc” set to the tune of the battle hymn of the republic….

The Swedes are building beaver ponds with farmers on the land

They do the labor all themselves, no beaver lends a hand

They say it helps the birds and frogs, and takes the toxins out

While trapping beavers off the land, of this I have no doubt.

Beaver, beaver, you could help the birds and fish

Beaver, beaver you could give them what they wish

You could do the farmer’s job much better by a score

And make the wetlands rich and pure just like you did before.

And speaking of Northern Europe, the silent auction received a donation from an artist who lives in Zurich Switzerland yesterday. (No, I’m not kidding.) Simona Cellar maintains the Etsy site Anomisbysimona and will be sending us her adorable eager beaver calendar to keep track of accomplishments. Thank you Simona!

Beavers on Aljazeera?

heidi08 Beaver News, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Earth Day, Educational October 15, 2013

You bet your sweet alif they are! Check out the episode four of Earthrise.

Earthrise: Beaver Farmer

An English farmer sets out to restore the country’s wetlands, with help from nature’s most experienced engineers.

Wetlands are one of the world’s most valuable ecosystems; as well as providing a rich habitat for plants and animals, they also store carbon and help reduce floods by soaking up excess rain. But around the world, vast swathes of them are being destroyed, and in England alone, 90 percent of wetlands have disappeared in the last 400 years.

Now English farmer Derek Gow has a novel plan to restore these precious habitats – bring back beavers, the massive semi-aquatic rodents that once played a crucial role in shaping the British countryside. Using their sharp teeth, beavers chop down small trees and branches to build dams across streams, creating a large network of pools and channels to live in, which form a brand new wetland.

Sylvia Rowley travels to Devon, UK, to see what nature’s construction workers can do, and to help release a pair of beavers into their new home on Derek’s farm.

I hope this particular episode is available on the web once it airs, because this is definately news we can use. I’ll be excited to see it in person. You will remember that Derek is the farmer in Devon (Southwest England) that has been pretty outspoken for beavers. I found out he and Duncan Ramsay (Free beavers on the Tay in Scotland) are old friends so we are working the country from both ends, (so to speak). I can’t wait to see this particular work from the beaver lobby and am excited to see this making the rounds.

And just to show you I’m a trustworthy source, here’s some feedback about yesterday’s Clemson Calamity:

Mike Callahan Heidi is right on about the historic importance of the Clemson Pond Leveler and that it rightfully has been relegated to the proverbial shelf as had her original personal computer or the Model T. Flexible Pond Levelers and Castor Masters work so much better, last longer, and are much cheaper and easier to install. Coincidentally today I am going back to the Norwottuck Rail Trail, the site of my first and only Clemson Pond Leveler installation in 1998 to adjust a Flexible Pond Leveler pipe that successfully replaced that CPL.

People Deceivers (Part II)

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Environmental October 14, 2013

The very first computer we ever owned was so expensive we had to take out a car loan. The year was somewhere around 1989 and because I was working on a dissertation we paid an enormous amount of money to add on 20 MB. (Yes, megabytes). It had a floppy disk drive and a CD-Rom drive. When you turned it on the screen greeted you with this welcome C:\>. We were so nervous setting it up that we didn’t use it at all for the first few weeks. Years of laptops and PC’s later, I have never spent so much for a computer since. Still, for a woman who was using whole bottles of white-out in an afternoon it was an amazing invention that allowed me to change what I was editing without type writer ribbon.

Just a year later we could have bought the whole thing with three times as much memory for a third as much money.

I mention this because the Clemson Pond leveler was state of the art once too. It was a monumental achievement that changed the way we thought forever, and we can’t possibly go backwards to a time when solving beaver problems wasn’t at least theoretically possible. It was invented by Dr. Greg Yarrow at Clemson University in South Carolina, around the same time as we purchased that computer. It remains the most widely recognized tool for beaver management, at least in name. It was as important to the later development of the beaver deceiver and the flexible leveler as my first computer was to the ones that followed it.

And, not surprisingly, it works about as well.

So you can imagine my mixed feelings when I saw this:

Busy as beavers

Members of the Student Conservation Association install a “Beaver Deceiver” at the Willie Wildlife Marsh in the town of Johnstown on Thursday. The construction aims to quiet the water flow, which reduces beaver activity. Beaver dams have caused flooding damage to the marsh. (Photo by Bill Trojan/The Leader-Herald)

The crew will clean out the clogged pipe and install a “beaver deceiver” – a device developed by Clemson University in the early 1990s that’s used to dissuade beavers from blocking currents. It makes the flow of water harder for the animals to detect, counteracting their instinct to dam up any moving water near their lodges.

Willie Marsh was set aside in the 60s to make a haven for wood ducks. It was built with a long ramp across the marsh and a duck blind for photographers.

Beaver may have raised the water level but I don’t think the fact that the park slid into disrepair had much to do with them.

(Everyone knows they mostly drink imported.)

Barbara Conner is the retired teacher who wrote about and shared photos from the group’s Willie Marsh visit in a Sept. 5 post on her blog. There is so much about this story that I want to admire. I love the idea of repairing damaged wetlands. I love getting kids involved. I love bloggers getting written about in the daily news.

But Willie Marsh is about 25 miles away from the sanctuary of Beavers:Wetlands and Wildlife. That’s like Mecca or MIT for beaver information. The idea that the DEC couldn’t think of any better solution than having children install a Clemson is baffling. Do they also beat their uniforms on rocks to wash them and ride mules to the office?

The Department of Environmental Conservation is a busy bureau and doesn’t have a lot of time for park or beaver management. Bill Ackerman is a reporter for the Leader-Herald who got interested in this story and must have scared the living daylights out of them when he printed Barbara’s photos. He did a great job in tracking down the story too. One of the driving forces behind the Marsh retired and moved away and surprsingly no one much has cared about the area until it found its way into the news.

Dick Spinks, who retired from DEC in 1992, said he and Jack and Jim Harnish of Gloversville did most of the work on the marsh site, with some help from other DEC employees based in Northville. Spinks said he personally built and installed the nesting boxes that have served so many birds over the years at Willie Marsh. Until he retired, he live-trapped beavers at the marsh and released them farther north, but that work hasn’t been done in years.

Never mind for the moment that live-trapping and relocating beavers is ILLEGAL in New York state. Let’s focus instead on the fact that someone who cared about this park retired, and some of the other folk who cared about this park died. Now the DEC has delegated it to the ‘circular file’. This is a place that no one in the current DEC cares about and no one wants to care about and (beavers or no beavers) no one would have cared about if the press hadn’t shamed them in the first place. So their solution is to have children install something they know full well won’t work and offer a gleaming promise that “Once it works we’ll fix the trails.”

Which of course will never happen so they can get back to the hard work of ignoring the park soon. The whole thing makes me mad enough to write a letter. To the reporter. To the DEC. To Beavers:Wetlands and Wildlife. To the retired teacher who took these photos. To the teacher of the students environmental alliance.