Because the beaver isn't just an animal; it's an ecosystem!

Tag: Ben Dittbrenner


Is a month enough notice for beaver viewing night in Seattle? I hope so,  lucky dam city. They get Ben and Samantha in person!

Meet Seattle’s Urban Beavers

Monday, April 2, 2018, 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM
Since their near eradication in the early 20th century, beavers have made a surprising comeback. Today, beavers have returned to many streams and waterways of Seattle, including Yesler Swamp in the Center for Urban Horticulture’s backyard. Come join us as we discuss beavers, tour their work, and potentially view some busy beavers in action. , Ben Dittbrenner (UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences), will provide a presentation on beaver life history and ecology. Samantha Everett, local beaver expert, will lead a tour through Yesler Swamp, stopping at active beaver areas with some potential beaver viewing. Since beavers are nocturnal, we’ll be starting our tour after dark, so we have the best chance to view them.

If you are interested in the tour portion, please bring a flashlight!

How fun! I wish I could be there and heard from Judy and Jim of Port Moody that they’re coming.


Children watching beaver in urban environment
Martinez, CA

Apparently Cincinatti Ohio never got our memo about beavers dispersing in February because this was on the news.

Floods bring jaywalking beaver to streets

Beavers in the Ohio River are quite common, but rarely are they spotted in the city.

The beaver was caught on video emerging from the water at Smale Riverfront Park near the Roebling Suspension Bridge. The video was shot by viewer Jess Summers.

The little beaver briefly walked around on the flooded park’s walkway, then disappeared back into the Ohio River.

 


Hurray for Ben Dittbrenner and Samantha Everett who will be presenting on our favorite topic on Monday Night.

Meet Seattle’s Urban Beavers

October 2nd, 6:30-7:30pm

Since their near eradication in the early 20th century, beavers have made a surprising comeback. Today, beavers have returned to many streams and waterways of Seattle, including Yesler Swamp in the Center for Urban Horticulture’s backyard. Come join us as we discuss beavers, tour their work, and potentially view some busy beavers in action. , Ben Dittbrenner (UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences), will provide a presentation on beaver life history and ecology. Samantha Everett, local beaver expert, will lead a tour through Yesler Swamp, stopping at active beaver areas with some potential beaver viewing at dusk.

If you are interested in the tour portion, please bring a flashlight!

Doesn’t that sound enormously fun? I first met Ben when he joined me and Mike Callahan  for a quick lunch at the state of the beaver conference before we presented that afternoon in 2011. At that time he was working as a watershed Steward in Sonomish County in Jake Jacobsen’s old job in Sonomish. Beavers were definitely on his mind and he knew they were the direction he was headed.

Now he is Executive Director of a beaver nonprofit called “Beavers Northwest” and operates a website and relocation project in Washington. Jake who was one of our very first beaver friends back in the drama, is on the board as Treasurer.

CaptureMeanwhile I received an alarm call from Cheryl yesterday who stopped by the Concord Dam on her way home from work. A not very appreciative homeless woman was ripping out the dam with her crutch. Seems too many people were stopping to look at the dam and giving them less privacy for their encampment. So she got rid of the attraction.

Of course the beavers will rebuild and it will all happen again, but it’s frustrating. It was such a beautiful dam.

DSC_7743

 


Capture

Beavers Star in Tribes’ Fish, Water Conservation Project

SEATTLE – Sometimes moving to a new neighborhood is the best choice for everyone. That’s the theory behind a research project by the Tulalip Tribes of Washington to relocate beaver families. The critters have become a nuisance in the lowlands but in higher elevations, their hard work can benefit the entire Snohomish watershed.

 Ben Dittbrenner is a graduate student of University of Washington Environmental and Forestry Sciences and he’s working with the Tribes to trap and move beavers and study the effects of their dam-building. When less snow is predicted with a changing climate, he says a beaver dam is just the right type of eco-friendly barrier to moderate spring runoff.

 “It will just flow right down to Puget Sound and it won’t stay in the system for more than a couple days,” says Dittbrenner. “But if we can trap it high up in the watershed, we can keep it there for months and hopefully continue to keep those systems healthier for a longer period of time.”

Great work Washington! (Well moving beavers is better than killing them, but not as good as learning how to coexist. Let’s be clear.) But Ben is working hard on what I think is his dissertation so we’re happy he’s adding to the data pool. I first met Ben at the State of the beaver conference 2013. I was dashing to lunch with Mike Callahan in between our presentations, and a young man we didn’t know asked if he could tag along. Ben was working at that time for the Snohomish  public works, and was one of two folk assigned to fill Jake Jacobsen’s shoes when he retired. Ben and Mike got talking about fish passage in flow devices and eventually he became the site where the new adaptions were tried.  Now he’s hard at work at the School of Environmental Forestry at the University of Washington. The last I heard his dissertation was about using beavers to mitigate climate change, which is a very valuable topic. Great work Ben!

Onto Washington, where one syndicated columnist finds humor in the cherry blossom drama. Tom Purcell is actually writing about beavers in 1999, which. considering they returned in 2007 is a good lesson about  the futility of either trapping or relocation. The story is a bit of a bus-man’s holiday for us here in Martinez – but it’s a fun article anyway. Enjoy!

Purcell: Springtime in Washington, D.C.

The National Cherry Blossom Festival is beginning. The cherry trees, 3,700 of them given to America by the Japanese in 1912, will soon be in full bloom.  It reminds me why Americans are so wary of Washington.

 In the spring of 1999, you see, some culprits had been chopping down cherry trees.  The National Park Service, in a state of high alert for days, finally identified the tree fellers: three beavers, who decided to construct a dam in the Tidal Basin.

 In a normal city, this situation would have been dealt with swiftly. The beavers would have been trapped, transported to another location and released.  In fact, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), not known for common sense solutions, suggested exactly that.

 But Washington is no normal city.

 No sooner was PETA’s idea floated than experts began crawling out of the woodwork. One said it would be tragic to separate the three beavers, since they’re likely from the same family.

 Another said you can’t move beavers to a new colony because the new colony — beavers are Republicans? — would reject the freeloaders. Besides, what’s the point of being a beaver if you don’t have any buddies to plug up storm sewers with?

 A third expert said that, all things considered, the most humane solution would be to euthanize the beavers.  Boy, did the public react negatively to that suggestion.

 This is because beavers are cute. Their cuddly television presence clouded the public’s ability to address the problem rationally.

 The fact is that if beavers looked more like their pointy-nosed cousins, rats, even PETA would have lined the banks of the Tidal Basin with rifles and shotguns to take out the varmints before they felled more beloved trees.

Ha!  Write this down: when people see beavers they are harder to kill. We know it’s true. Certainly true here in Martinez. I hope it’s true everywhere. Of course he points fingers at PETA but there’s no need to single anyone out. Everyone can care about beavers if given the chance. I guess NPS learned part of their lesson from the public response and used their visibility to make a tree mascot for the blessed blossoms. Lemons and lemonade. Hmm, someone is smart.

Now for the completion of long term goals here at beaver central. I always loved the idea of using this in some kind of printing, but it was too weird for a shirt and too detailed for a poster. I loved how the bandana came out on my recent button order from zazzle, so I’m adding historical touch. Doesn’t this make you want to be a beaver researcher in a dusty stone library somewhere?


News and Weather For The Quad Cities –

Neighbors Want Solution For Beaver Dam Flooding

Just up the creek from where the water is backing up is a beaver dam, possibly more than one. It’s just north of Interstate 80 near the Davenport Municipal Airport. A resident who lives nearby and is dealing with water on her family’s land took some pictures. The problem is that the dams aren’t on her property and it’s been a struggle to get something done.

 “It’s been going on since April. We’ve had water up to our knees almost,” said Lindsay Andrews. She says last year there was barely any water in the creek at all. Now there seems to be a bit of a beaver problem.

 “We’ve seen a couple of beavers. My mother in law seen one. We watched one swim upstream not too long ago,” said Andrews.

 Their dams are leaving stagnant water and a muddy mess in area her family mostly uses for recreation but on a regular basis.

 “We used to do cookouts, can’t do that. Kids used to ride the trails, can’t do that,” she said, “the bugs are a big concern… Safety is a big concern with the kids.”

My god the horror. Our kids haven’t been outside in 5 months because we’re terrified of the westnile-virus mosquitoes or some such nonsense those rotten beavers have brought into our bright green fertilizer-ruined stream. I have only written about beavers in Iowa once before in 8 years of coverage so that means they aren’t even enough of an issue to hit the news cycle.  I’m honestly not hopeful for these beavers, but I dutifully posted my comment just in case some landowner wants to be in touch about options.

The only other comment is about how dynamite will fix things, so I ain’t hopeful.

_____________________________________________

A better use of our time is the youtube account of Ben Dittbrenner, who’s dissertation on beavers and climate change was mentioned a couple days ago in the news. He wrote back after my comment and said that he is thoroughly enjoying this part of his work, and his close contact with the beavers. He’s particularly struck by what a mollifying effect their adorable presence has on even the most hardened maintenance crew.

Of course Worth A Dam knows all about that. Remember the crane company that put in the sheetpile?

cooper craneYou should subscribe to Ben’s youtube account right away so you see the cool stuff he encounters during his project. I just wish data collection on MY dissertation looked like this!

Published on Sep 2, 2014

 This video is from our animal husbandry facility. Beavers are temporarily housed as part of the Skykomish Beaver Project. The goal of this research is to relocate nuisance beavers, which would otherwise be killed, into headwaters of the Skykomish River Basin to stimulate habitat improvement and climate change


Hydrologist Andy Bryden (left) and wildlife biologists Molly Alves and Jason Schilling release two captive beavers into a lodge they built earlier on Forest Service land near Skykomish on Wednesday. A team with the Tulalip Tribes worked with state Fish and Wildlife and the U.S. Forest Service to relocate six beavers found near Duvall.

Beavers brought here as part of an effort to improve ecosystems

SKYKOMISH — On a rainy Wednesday, a small team hiked into the woods near Skykomish hauling three heavy cages.Their destination: a creekside pile of cut branches and sticks. Their cargo: a family of six beavers.

The first cage was lined up with an opening in the pile of wood, which is actually a lodge built by the team the previous Friday. The cage was opened and the matriarch of the family, weighing 50 pounds, was gently encouraged into the lodge.

Once she waddled in, one of the team called out, “Mama went in,” and a small cheer went up.Mama beaver was followed by one of her young, then the cage was removed and the lodge entrance blocked to prevent the beavers from leaving while the next cage was lined up.Within 10 minutes, the entire family — mother, father, three subadults about one year old and one kit — was in the lodge, the entrance blocked with a log.

Beavers play an important role in maintaining stream health. Their dams help maintain a consistent base flow of water in streams so that it doesn’t all flow downhill in one springtime deluge, an important consideration in eastern Washington where many streams run dry in the summer.Beaver dams also retain sediment and help to reduce water temperatures in streams, making them healthier for salmon and other fish

Another beaver triumph for Washington state which is the beaver Mecca from which all wisdom flows. I am really happy to see our friend Ben Dittbrenner right at the center of it. He’s one of two folk who replaced Jake Jacobsen as watershed steward in Snohomish county. Jake was my very first beaver advisor, and Ben had lots of chances to learn from the master. He and Jake are both working with Mike Callahan on the adapted flow devices for fish passage. We first met Ben at the 2013 State of the Beaver conference when he joined us for a quick lunch before our talks.

Ben Dittbrenner is a Ph.D. candidate in forest ecology at the University of Washington working with the Tulalips on this project. Dittbrenner said this work will also help prove a theory in his dissertation.

“What we’re hoping to show is that the beavers can be used to reduce the effects of climate change,” Dittbrenner said.One of the major impacts expected from climate change in the Pacific Northwest is warmer water at higher elevations. That will lead to less snowpack, and therefore less water from snowmelt in streams in the summer, presenting risks to salmon and fish habitat.

Beaver activity resaturates the land, however. Stored water migrates downstream more slowly, and often through the water table, which keeps the temperature down.Beaver activity has also been shown to correlate with more stream meanders, more shady spots, and overall more diverse ecosystems, Dittbrenner said. In other studies, juvenile coho salmon were seen in higher numbers in streams with beavers.

“Beavers and coho go hand in hand, or foot and tail,” he said.

 Great work Ben and colleagues, and I can’t wait for the day when the work beavers do in smart cities that learn to live with them gets such a glowing article! And that, ladies and gentlemen is why Washington is the beaver beacon for the world.

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California, on the other hand, has a LONG way to go. I got back some preliminary data from our statistical analysis of the spread sheets we did on the 254 depredation permits issued in the past 20 months. Apparently we have an “OUTLIER”.

Ya think?

Outlier1

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