Tag: Beavers

Beaver Foreclosure

heidi08 Beavers November 3, 2011

I guess the city of Vallejo is so used to abandoned housing that they decided to add a beaver lodge to the foreclosure list. Cheryl found the lodge a month ago, wrapped invitingly around both sides of a flooded eucalyptus tree and at the head of a stately pond defended by a low dam in a culvert. It was made entirely of reeds and impossible to photograph in the thicket of tulles. Now it looks like this.

Remember how our old lodge looked after Skip lowered the water level? You could see directly into the interior and I always worried what harm might come their way. Apparently mom worried too because she got to work building on the opposite shore. Here’s how ours used to look:

Dad watching from the old lodge – Cheryl Reynolds

So what was the big problem that made them take a back hoe to a better homes and gardens marsh? One of a pair of culverts was partially plugged and looked like this.

Now that they’ve had their foreclosure fun the Marsh is a trickle and the culvert has a pipe in it that looks like this.

I don’t really know how to classify this installation. It’s obviously a hand-rigged attempt at a Clemson design, but the area is so remote that I can’t see this as an ostentatiously ‘pretend’ effort which proceeds the excuse for trapping. Someone really wants to keep beavers out of the culvert without killing them, or spending any money whatsoever and I guess that’s a small comfort. Or at the very least thinks they can ‘drive’ the beavers away by making the area inhospitable. I wrote the mayor and the director of public works and gave them info and plans for a beaver deceiver, but obviously they decided to wing it or listen to their buddies in Cordelia.

Well good luck fellas, and here’s hoping that your beavers have lots of holes to hide in while waiting for the water levels to re-stabilize. Oh and if you haven’t had time yet go sign the Ottawa Petition below. They’re working hard and they deserve our support.

A New Breed of Stupid

Here at Worth A Dam we have seen more than our fair share of beaver stupid. We’ve seen folk insist they eat fish, harm salmon, breed like rabbits and tunnel under buildings. We’ve seen claims that they have poison tails, bite off their own testicles, and build with auto engines. I naively thought we had seen it all. Ahh no, this story from Texas takes the blue ribbon.

A beaver that city employees have dubbed “Rocky” built a dam in the middle of Edcouch’s northern drainage ditch that connects to an Hidalgo County drainage canal. The dam is preventing water from entering the larger drainage canal and if it rains, the ditch could overflow and flood a nearby school and neighborhood, Public Works Director David Alaniz said.

Alaniz does not want to kill Rocky, but he has not found a good way to relocate the rodent. Public Works employees broke up Rocky’s dam a few weeks ago, but the busy beaver built a new one within about a week, Alaniz said. Workers dismantled the dam again Thursday. They also have set a cage in the water to catch the beaver, but so far Rocky has not taken the bait.

“We put a can of beans in there, but I don’t think beans would attract him,” Alaniz said.

Beans? I’m sorry, beans? You know, the article doesn’t even say they opened the can. Stunning. I knew the story would be worth reading as soon as I saw the name of the town. Edcouch. Who names a town Edcouch? Couldn’t Mr. Alaniz ask around to his fellow public works directors in ‘Sam-chair’ and ‘Mark-table’ and figure out that beavers might not eat beans? I guess we should be grateful that it’s vegetarian.

Troy Allen, the general manager of the Delta Lake Irrigation District in Edcouch, said his crews have to clean out some areas of ditches and canals every three to five days to get rid of beaver dams. A few years ago, Delta workers used special traps and caught 10 to 15 beavers, Allen said. They killed some and relocated others.

“We don’t like killing them if we don’t have to,” Allen said, explaining that sometimes it is necessary because the beavers are difficult to trap. Delta employees also go out at night to shoot the nocturnal beavers, Allen said.

UPDATE: I thought I was being so snarky with my illustration. Turns out I was right on the money. Go watch the complete and surpassing footage by clicking on the picture:

I imagine it’s mighty hard to catch beavers if you are lacing the cage with beans. You are clearly working very hard to do absolutely nothing useful whatsoever so you can come out at night and shoot beavers. Could I possibly be forgiven for suggesting that this might be the morning staff meeting of Edcouch public works department?

I’ll track down the major players in the article, and introduce them to real solutions, but I have to admit I’m not hopeful.. In the meantime you might want to glimpse some real beavers working on the dam this morning, sin frijoles.

What’s in a name?

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Who's Killing Beavers Now? July 24, 2011

“People get upset about that, but that’s why we call them aquatic rodents,” he said. “We want to stress that they are rodents … not furry, cuddly teddy bears.”

Thank you Greg Hall, the street superintendent of Norman OK, for putting a long-suspected trade secret into language everyone understands. We should all respect your authority and pay attention. Officials call beavers “rodents’ when they want to discourage any opposition to killing them. Officials say beavers ‘breed like rodents” when they want to justify the need for killing them.

Officials are hoping that instead of seeing this:

: Beaver Kit 2008 – Cheryl Reynolds

You think about this:

: Big Black Rat – Anonymous

So they can do this:

: USDA Self-Adminstration

“People think beavers are cute and cuddly, from what they’ve seen on TV, but they can cause real problems in an urban area like Norman,” Hall said. Beavers, who build dams to store food and raise their families, are also destructive and can lay waste to a fully grown tree overnight.

“You can go to sleep one night and the tree’s fine and then wake up the next morning and it’s gone,” Hall said. “They work quick and they can do a lot of damage.”

What a relief to know that when we read the word rodent it doesn’t apply to the literal meaning – you know the fact that their teeth keep growing their entire lives (Latin Rōdentia- meaning “gnawer”). Wikipedia tells me that rodents in general make up 40% of all mammals and appeared shortly after the last winged dinosaur around 65 million years ago. It is true that MOST rodents breed quickly and are important to the ecosystem by being a good food source and spreading seeds around before they die. Beavers are unusual rodents in that it takes a long time for them to breed and, like porpcupines, (another atypical rodent) they are only in estrus for a few hours a year.

But as Greg helpfully illustrates, calling them rodents has nothing to do with anything except to explain the big red target on their backs. Of course we can’t expect Oklahoma to wrap trees or manage beavers in a more solution focused way through the use of flow devices, even through the Skunk Whisperer is nearby in Tulsa and can’t wait to install one. We certainly can’t expect Oklahoma to use fewer federal services from the USDA when statistics for 2009 show it is one of the highest users in the country (I guess the tea party might hate taxes but it loves them some uncle sam beaver-killin’). We obviously can’t expect Oklahoma to think of the droughts it faces each year or the trout or wood duck it wants to harvest down the road.

We can just be grateful for Greg telling it like it is.

“We want to stress that they are rodents … not furry, cuddly teddy bears.”

(Just a thought, but I’m pretty sure Greg would have something to say about bears too.)

Holes

heidi08 Beavers June 23, 2011

Looks like South Carolina pulled a ‘Martinez’ – with fairly predictable olefactory consequences. Seems something was wrong with the dam and they decided that beavers were digging holes in the 40 year old bank and endangering it. They must have used the same underwater psychic team as our city council did to know that those holes actually existed. Since they couldn’t afford a block of sheetpile, they just dropped the water level to repair them by hand.

How far down were these alleged holes? Well, when they dropped the water level all the fish in the lake died off and have been laying around in a smelly puddle for birds to poke out. Here’s Skip Lisle’s thoughts on beaver holes. Being as its summer that lake won’t be refilled any time soon, and folks are upset that their favorite fishing hole has been taken out of commission for a generation.

Of course the brilliant minds at work here used the ‘blame-the-beaver-defense’ to justify their decision. Never mind that even if the beavers WERE DIGGING BANK HOLES they wouldn’t have been more than a foot or two below the water level.

The commission warned residents in November the lake would slowly be drained in May, but Pate says it was like pulling a plug on a bath tub. Pate was told the lake would be drained just 9 feet so engineers could repair the holes. He said from Friday night to Saturday morning the lake went from almost full pond to nearly dry.

They were just aiming for nine feet but needed to go the whole thirty? Gosh, I hope those dangerous beaver holes were repaired! You know how destructive those deep underwater beaver caverns can be for a lake.

Surely the good minds of York couldn’t have killed off all those fish for some other reason! Like a need to do some structural repairs that had nothing whatsoever to do with beavers? Maybe some engineering error they were hoping could be fixed with just a nine foot water drop? Or maybe someone lost their wedding ring in the process and just had to get it back? Or found a map suggesting there were some of these at the bottom?

Oh and the best part?

The beavers that caused the trouble in the first place have been trapped and relocated. Repairs on the damn [sic that is really their error] are to begin this week.

Call me a cynic, but If those beavers have been ‘relocated’ anywhere other than the ‘AFTERLIFE”, I will eat a bug.

************************************************************

The plot thickens, I wrote the reporter and the coordinator of the Watershed responsible for this decision, and sent them both skip’s article.

Your remarkable story about the draining of the lake in York should be full of question marks. How did the commission know that beavers had made holes in the dam? How did they know that they were causing a structural problem? More importantly any reporter should investigate the claim enough to find the documented fact that when beavers dig holes they are rarely lower than a FOOT below the surface. The proposed ‘nine foot drop’ would have been more than sufficient for observing AND repairing any beaver damage. The fact that they drained the entire lake means that the damage had nothing whatsoever to do with beavers, and this deception should have been your real story.

Heidi Perryman, Ph.D.

President & Founder

Worth A Dam

www.martinezbeavers.org/wordpress

Barbara wrote back to set the record straight…

Heidi,

I don’t know who you are or why you are under the false impression that this lake was drained. It was only drained enough to expose the portion of the bank where the beaver dams are and provide enough dry land around the damage to get equipment to the site. I just returned from an inspection of the bush hogging that has just taken place there in preparation for a site showing for potential contractors who wish to bid on the work. There is plenty of water in the lake –(looks like it only was taken down 5-6 feet) and there are 19 beaver holes flagged. That much damage on the bank of the dam constitutes a threat to the integrity of the dam for flood control. Local and state officials inspect the dams regularly and have noted the beaver damage and prescribed the repairs necessary. There was no deception here – our Watershed Board has the responsibility of maintaining these flood control dams and are doing their job. The fact that some carp died (which the buzzards cleaned up in less than 48 hours) and one property owner’s grandson was upset because he spent money to stock the lake with fish (which no one even knew about) was blown out of proportion by the reporters. There is no story here – no beavers were harmed, the fish stock is renewable, and the 22 property owners around the lake will be glad that the dam will prevent future property damage from flooding.

Barbara O’Connell

District Coordinator

York Soil and Water Conservation District

1460 E. Alexander Love Highway

York, SC 29745

803-684-3137 x 101

barbara.oconnell@sc.nacdnet.net

Hmm. Thanks for your prompt response and since you were mighty hard to find I can’t image you’ve gotten many letters besides mine. That’s a pretty big discrepancy. Apparently either the lake was drained or it wasn’t and either a lot of fish or killed or they won’t. Since we’re in California and Barbara didn’t include a photo of either the lake, the holes or the beavers I can only wonder.

Coincidence

heidi08 Beavers, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Why We Care May 15, 2011

: Rainbow at secondary dam

I thought I’d risk being labeled as a crazy new-age twinkie and discuss an alarming and impossible by-product of beaver research. It seems to happen in inexplicable moments and without recognizable patterns but I’ve been noticing it more of late. It is the type of data that most scientists never report because it just makes them appear too bizarre and fanciful. But you, dear readers, already know the worst so we may as well have a candid discussion of the phenomenon.

Coincidence.

Now there are typical everyday coincidences that surprise your life such as running into your principal at the gym or finding out your old boyfriend exactly drives the same make and color of car as you do. And there are rarer personally meaningful coincidences that hum in your awareness like realizing that your locker combination is actually your mom’s date of birth or finding out that you got married in exactly the same town as your best friend from the army got divorced. These things happen. We never expect them, but we are prepared for them. They are like cosmic puns and they usually make an excellent story over a pitcher of margaritas.

But then there are beaver coincidences, random violent streaks of destiny that are so truly alarming that all the hairs on your arms keep standing up even after you’ve had to sit down. I wasn’t planning to mention this at all, bit it seems the time has come. Please be assured that my ridiculous claims are completely true, and that if I had given myself license to fabricate I would have come up with something a little more believable. Our story begins with Longfellow.

Remember a few weeks back when I was talking about how reading Enos Mills pointed me to a section in the poem Hiawatha that I hadn’t paid attention to before? It was the section on Puk-Puk-Keewis who asked to be turned into a beaver so he could hide from Hiawatha in the lodge. When I read it I planned to blog on it the following day, and was excitedly looking about for graphics. It turns out there are sadly no images of turning into a beaver on the internet(s) so I nearly despaired of having the right picture to put with the story.

Then I remembered that in my living room is a very old copy of Volume ! of the Collected Works of Longfellow. I bought it ages ago because it was such a lovely tome (and yes, tome is the right word – huge, heavy, illustrated, leather raised binding ) – that I couldn’t resist. So I thought, gosh maybe there’s a drawing of puk-puk-keewis in that copy and I can scan it and put it on the website. I used the internet to find exactly where the passage was and marched in to track it down. Mind you, the 500 page book is lying opened on a book stand I picked up at a thrift shop. We don’t really use it but every now and then we turn the pages to keep it from looking too dusty.

What exact page do you suppose that book happened to be open to?

I didn’t dare post about it at the time, as it was too much even for me to explain. We slunk around the house suspiciously for hours after that, trying to think what well-read visitor to my house might have done it on purpose and struggling not to feel like some tiny cog in massive beaver machinery. In the end I decided to take it as an affirmation that I was doing the right thing, and at the very least the universe didn’t object.

Yesterday I heard from our research buddy Rick Lanman, M.D. whose working on the historic prevalence paper. He had been buried in some dusty volumes researching the fur trade for slivers of information about the west coast when he came across this magazine article from 1840. Guess what he found? Nothing startling about beavers in the sierras but something much more unexpected.

That’s pretty small print. Let me see if I can make it bigger for you.

Look who wrote the article on the history of the fur trade 171 years ago.

What a shock to run across this article written by James H. Lanman in 1840 – wonder if he’s a direct ancestor? This is a real trip. It’s not like our surname is that common! Rick

Ah Rick, I know just how you feel. Every now and then I can almost hear this low groan as the gears shift into place and I realize we are in the grip of something important, something that seems to have a life of its own. Well, in for a penny in for a pound I say. It could be worse. At the moment we’re keen on the flat-tail of some beaver sightings in Port Costa, which could theoretically be our dispersers. I’ll keep you posted. The next coincidence we can only anticipate but certainly not imagine.