Tag: Ben Goldfarb

BEAVERS LOSE OUT TO ROAD KILL

heidi08 Beaver Book November 27, 2019

Did you enjoy that nearly two years in the sun? It seemed to go by so fast, Like the last days of summer vacation. Wasn’t it beautiful to watch the wave of beaver support cascading across the US like a standing ovation at some giant national stadium? It was good. Better than good. But it’s over.

We’ve officially lost to roadkill.

Don’t believe me? Guess who’s writing in this month’s Atlantic. And not about beavers.

How Roadkill Became an Environmental Disaster

Story by Ben Goldfarb

“Among Salvador Dalí’s many obsessions—sex, time, death, himself—one of the longest-lasting was giant anteaters. The Spanish painter began sketching the creatures around 1930, and decades later strolled the streets of Paris with a leashed live specimen. A surrealist couldn’t have chosen a more appropriate pet. Massive front claws force anteaters to walk on their knuckles, giving them the shuffling gait of a gorilla holding a fistful of steak knives. Entirely toothless, Myrmecophaga tridactyla possesses a two-foot-long tongue, an organ so prodigious that it’s anchored to the sternum and furls, Fruit Roll-Ups–style, into its owner’s tubular mouth. Anteaters use their tongue to probe anthills and termite mounds like moths at an orchid, lapping up prey with a sticky lacquer of saliva. These sieges are brief, ending when the insects flee or sting. Giant anteaters are thus rotational grazers, endlessly circuiting their bug-filled pastures. A few termites here, a few there, and by day’s end they’ve slurped down 30,000 bugs.

To wander in the 21st century, unfortunately, is to court death. The giant anteater’s range, which runs from Honduras to Argentina, is bisected by BR-262, the highway that cuts across the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul as it winds from the Bolivian border to the Atlantic Ocean. Along the way, the road knifes through two ecosystems: the Pantanal, Earth’s largest tropical wetland, and the Cerrado, the savanna that covers more than 20 percent of Brazil. Eucalyptus, iron, cattle, and cocaine pulse through this infrastructural aorta, transported in trucks against which soft-bodied, naive animals stand no chance. Researchers who have tallied BR-262’s roadkill consider the highway Brazil’s deadliest, and one of the worst in the world.”

Sniff.

These remarkable two paragraphs begin a champion 5000+ word article in this month’s Atlantic, It’s a beautiful and terrifying read and you should spend part of your holiday weekend appreciating the entire thing. But just like that the pale young man who jaunted at our festival two years ago becomes a star. The Atlantic is the Big-Leagues baby. I used to have a subscription at the office. The bright lighthouse beam that guided the way for beavers through the foggy night has suddenly turned its sweeping eye. Its now lighting the way for the next story. And the next.

We’ll always have Paris?

“giving them the shuffling gait of a gorilla holding a fistful of steak knives.”

You see it don’t you? That same heady prose turning its powerful thunderbolt Like Zeus on the cloud from one subject to the next. I’m suffused with that vague feeling of delight and resentment you have when you’re sitting up late at night smoking and watching that comic you dated in college debut on the Tonight Show. That guy once met your parents! He’s gonna be famous. Like Jerry Seinfeld and Norman Mailer famous. And you used to know him.

But he traded in beavers for Road Kill.

This is obviously a splendid section from Ben’s new book. As with Eager he is able to sell segments to magazines to help keep the bread buttered. July of 2018 was the time Eager came out. How long away is this next tome? We don’t know. The first copies of Eager were delivered to our home for the festival and his west Coast debut. The big box sat sealed in our living room until his arrival. We were there when he and his excited wife cut open the box and got to see his hard work in book form for the first time.

It surely won’t be the last.

Congratulations Ben! Beavers are proud and not at all surprised by your success. We are grateful you told our story, and will always read your name with fondness and remember our time together. But we’ll miss you and all the dignity and attention you threw in our direction.

The Atlantic! What a Thanksgiving present for you and your parents! You deserve it, It couldn’t happen to a nicer former beaver writer.

BEAVERS GET ANOTHER FINE BEN-TERVIEW

heidi08 Beaver Book September 2, 2019

Happy Labor Day. Happy September by the way. It has always been by far my favorite month. It used to be back-to-school, new notebooks, when leaves would change, acorns would drop, everyone would try and wear new sweaters before they need them in California, and my birthday looms on the horizon. I love the entire feel of September.

Perfect timing then for another big Ben-terview and event.

Author Ben Goldfarb brings his message of beaver admiration to Northwest Passages stage

Ben Goldfarb is many things. Award-winning author. Environmentalist. Journalist. Devoted fly fisherman. What he definitely isn’t? A beaver. No matter – he’s the next best thing. A beaver’s best friend. A “Beaver Believer,” in the Cult of Beaver.

“Like most people who grew up hiking and camping and fishing and canoeing, I’ve certainly been around beavers,” Goldfarb said Tuesday. “I had a baseline appreciation for how cool they are, and how they modify the environment. But I didn’t become a true Beaver Believer, as the people in the beaver cult call ourselves, until five years ago.”

Ahh yes. He means people like US. Like anyone fool enough to read this website. Ben came to our last beaver festival at the old park in 2016, and our first festival at the new park the following year. He published his book sometime in between, famously calling me “candid” and Jon a “genial fellow” – which, to this day, when he gets crabby or tired I still remind him of, Saying helpfully, “Wow, that sure wasn’t very genial.”

(It’s those kind of delicately candid observations that keep me so very popular around here, I can tell you.)

“Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter,” was released by Chelsea Green Publishing in June last year, about the same time Goldfarb and his wife Elise moved to Spokane from Connecticut.

Among its accolades, including being named one of the Washington Post 50 Notable Works of Nonfiction and Best Outdoor Book of 2018 by Outside Magazine, earlier this year it won one of the nation’s top literary prizes: The E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing from PEN America.

It truly couldn’t happen to a better subject or a nicer guy. The beavers chose their champion, and Ben’s doing a great job.

I especially liked this exchange.

Who first realized the beavers were so important?

It goes back a long way. There were people, there’s a great book called the “The American Beaver and His Works,” written in the 1800s. There was another great book called “In Beaver World,” in 1913. It seems like every couple of generations society rediscovers just how important this creature is. I think that the thing that has catalyzed this latest round of interest in beavers is climate change. We know that the West is getting hotter and drier. As it does, our water resources are increasingly under stress. A lot of our precipitation is falling as rain rather than snow. And we’ve begun to recognize that this animal that builds thousands of little reservoirs essentially up in the high country, up in the headwaters, has a really important role to play in helping us keep our streams hydrated, even through the summer and fall. It’s really climate change that has caused beavers to reenter the zeitgeist.

And the flurry of isolated beaver success all across the planet. Like Scotland. Vancouver. And Martinez. Don’t forget that. Ahem.

In your book you propose using beavers like medics, dropping them onto the front lines of climate change. Does Eastern Washington need this type of treatment?

One of the reasons that I was actually excited to move to Spokane when the opportunity arose, this is a city with a great beaver consciousness and culture already. There’s the Lands Council, which has had a very active beaver program for at least a decade, and has done lots of beaver relocation across Eastern Washington. There’s the fact that when you walk along the Spokane River, along the riverfront, you see half the trees down there have been wrapped with wire to prevent beavers from chewing them down. In a lot of cities those tree-chewing beavers would be killed. But in Spokane, there’s a great commitment to managing those impacts nonlethally. I think there’s already a lot of good beaver work happening in this area.

But certainly there’s the need for more. Hiking and camping around Eastern Washington, all the time I see streams that would have historically had a very abundant beaver population, where they just don’t seem to occur. One great example is Hangman Creek. Here’s this watershed that’s fantastic beaver habitat, and I think they are in there, but in very low abundance. Every spring it’s just dumping huge amounts of agricultural runoff into the Spokane River. Beavers would be one potential solution to that problem, by building dams, slowing water down, causing all of that sediment to settle out of the water column. They really have an important role to play in mitigating some of that agricultural pollution.

WE KNEW IT WOULD HAPPEN SOONER [STATE] OR LATER

Give it up for Oklahoma, where a nature writer David John enjoyed the beavers on his property for a record thirty days notes. Noting, without any touch of shame, ”

“I tried doing the right thing, But it was hard. So I stopped”

Move over Thomas Aquinas!

Nature Note: Bye, bye beavers

In early June, a dam was built at the outlet to the pond, next to a little bridge, probably with the help of an older female that appeared on the pond. Flowing water is a magnet for beavers to build a dam, to keep the water as deep as possible. The dam raised the water level nearly 2 feet, a good thing, but it also flooded trails around the north end of the pond.

In July I decided I needed to relocate the beavers, so I live-trapped both and released them on Bird Creek, the stream from which they came. My hope was to be able to live with them, but they caused too much damage; chewed down trees and produced flooding. Not their fault, that’s what beavers do. They need a large area in which to work. We just didn’t have enough room for them.

Although beaver dams can cause flooding, they are amazing engineers at flood control. No high tech stuff for them, just sticks and mud.

A whole month? You tried to do the right thing for an entire month? My god. By sooner state standards you’re practically a saint. Nice of you to let the kits be born before you stuffed them in a cage, or more likely, made them orphans.

That’s the classic pro-life position isn’t it? Make the kids be born and then forget about them.

Pardon me if I’m feeling a song coming on.

Oklahoma where a beaver cannot be sustained
And the drought deserved must be preserved
so the dustbowl state’s again regained!

Oklahoma, where the birds and fish will never rest
In ponds deep and cool, they’re no one’s fool
So the frogs and turtles travel west.

We know climate change is a scheme
And fondly of dry creeks we dream

So when we say…YA!
I’ll try my best todayyyy….HA!
I’m only saying I’ll live with beavers a whole month
For a whole month, O-k-l-a-h-o-m-a
Oklahoma!

Gosh that was fun. I feel better now.

Time for the second fun start to your day, Ben Golfarb was on Montana public radio yesterday with a great interview and a very nice interview-er. They both do a great job. Enjoy!

‘The Surprising, Secret Lives Of Beavers’ With Ben GoldFarb

By Sarah Aronson • Aug 22, 2019

GOOD BEAVER NEWS COMES IN THREES

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver Book, Beavers and salmon August 17, 2019

Yesterday I was proud to ‘grandfather’ another beaver celebration into the world. So I made a little housewarming gift for our friends at the Methow project. I like the way it came out.

Now there’s a great NCPR interview I’ve been just dying to share.

Chewing over three books about beavers

Aug 14, 2019 — Traveling around the North Country it is easy to see the work of beavers – dams and ponds and sometimes flooded roads. Are these clever rodents a nuisance or a benefit to our landscape? Todd Moe talked with Betsy Kepes after she read three books about Castor Canadenis, the North American beaver.

It’s a fun interview, and its wonderful to read that someone else cried when the matriarch died in Lily Pond. We were driving home from the mountains 6 months after mom beaver died and I wept so much we had to pull over. Hope really touched a lot of people, didn’t she?

Now lets go back to Washington state and K5 news where some beavers are being reintroduced after showing up in the wrong culvert. I admit, it isn’t often I like everything I see about a beaver relocation undertaking, but this seems pretty smooth.

Beavers in King County trapped, relocated to help salmon habitat

BEAVER BENEFITS IN NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

heidi08 Beavers and salmon, saltwater August 14, 2019

Just when you were feeling like summer had gotten to that sleepy, not-much-happening stage, we find a glut of beaver news. Yesterday four prime articles dropped and they all deserve our attention but I’ll start at the top and let the others trickle out later. There are beavers again in National Geographic. Sadly not written by Ben Goldfarb, but quoting him. Does that count?

Beavers on the coast are helping salmon bounce back. Here’s how.

This tidally salty wetland might seem a strange place to search for beaver, which are known to settle in freshwater ponds, lakes, rivers, and wetlands throughout North America, but that’s what I had come for. The beavers’ presence is remarkable not just because they’re only typically found inland, but also because their ecosystem engineering is the suspected key to the remarkable Chinook salmon recovery that’s going on here.

These dam-created pools are one of numerous, well-documented ways beavers create advantages for fish. They provide havens during times of drought. They also create slower-water habitats that host many more insect larvae—which feed fish—than fast-moving channels. Beaver lodges offer physical refuge for young fish navigating the predator-rich waters.

Oh this is fun. Having the full force of NGO and its team of graphics specialists turned for the moment like a bright spotlight on the subject of beavers. Promise me you’ll go read the whole thing later, okay?

Got that? Before beaver very few salmon. After beaver very many more salmon. Are you even listening wildlife services?

In near-shore areas, where tides impact the lives of all animals daily or seasonally, low-tide pool habitats created by beaver dams allow juvenile fish to seek refuge from predation, says Greg Hood, a senior research scientist at Washington’s Skagit River System Cooperative, who has researched beavers there. “The pools beavers make are too shallow for diving predators like mergansers and kingfishers and bigger fish. But the pools are too deep for waders like great blue herons, and there’s too much shrub around the margins, so birds with big wings can’t get in there.”

In his research, Hood found that pools created by beaver dams in the tidal marshland channels tripled juvenile Chinook salmon habitat compared to similar marshlands without beavers.

I have a question. How do fish know to avoid predation from birds? What is their thought process? “A big beak comes when the waters deep sometimes and eats my friends so lets go somewhere shallow?” Do fish even know whether water is shallow or deep?

Despite this evidence, there has been resistance to beaver dams in salmon streams, the concern being that they might impede the salmon’s ability to swim upriver—after all, the reason human-made dams have been removed is to help salmon. “Beaver dams are nothing like human-built dams though—they are lower, semi-permeable, and due to their porous construction, fish can go over or around them,” says Ben Goldfarb, author of Eager: The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, who points out that beavers and salmon co-evolved in the same ecosystems.

HOORAY! A fine Ben-sert! Nicely done sir. And people who think beavers block salmon don’t do their homework. Everyone knows that.

Beavers have probably continuously lived in environments that are difficult for people to access, says Hood. Beavers in out-of-the-way places were protected from humans and other predators, so they were likely unknown—or forgotten. Hood blames “ecological amnesia” for some of our assumptions about where beavers are “supposed” to live. He found just as many beavers living in the tidal shrub marshlands at the mouth the Skagit River than in other non-tidal rivers.

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Back at the mouth of the Elwha, Shaffer shows me how the beavers here are trying different channel locations and building techniques for their dams, looking for just the right placement in this particular ecosystem. It’s this kind of adaptive flexibility to local environments that led to beaver’s widespread success in North America in the past—and is key to its survival in the future. Because beavers’ building naturally expands entire ecosystems, their triumphs are a boon for other animals too, including those in need of all the help they can get—like Chinook salmon.

Ooh lala. Beavers are adaptive ecological swiss army knives that get the job done. I love this article! And that video. Isn’t it amazing? NG doesn’t allow it to be embedded so I tried a workaround with a new tool. If a team of attorneys come lock me up and throw away the key just remember I tried to spread the beaver gospel.

Now go read the whole thing, and make sure it’s open in all the waiting room coffee tables later this month.