Tag: Ben Goldfarb

FRIENDS IN HIGH (ALTITUDE) PLACES

heidi08 Beaver Chewing, Beaver ecological impact August 10, 2018

There’s good news and kinda less good news today. Where should we start? I’m excited about the good news so lets start there. It seems our old friend Sherri Tippie is back on the beaver circuit again. I hadn’t heard anything about or from her for a while so I wasn’t sure. But this was WONDERFUL news! The talk was last night.

Beaver expert visits Vail Valley

Betty Ford Alpine Gardens will be presenting Beaver Habits and Habitats, an intimate evening with Sherri Tippie on Thursday, Aug. 9, from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at the Education Center in Vail.

Tippie has dedicated more than 30 years of her life to beavers. She is a self-taught live-trapper, relocator and passionate educator who promotes coexistence and nonlethal management strategies for the keystone species.

In 1986, Tippie founded Wildlife 2000, an organization dedicated to fostering a healthy coexistence between humans and beavers. A Denver resident, she is nationally recognized as an expert on beaver ecology in general and beaver live-trapping in particular. She has trapped and relocated more than 1,000 beavers over the decades.

Hurray for Sherri! I wish we could have all gone to her lecture last night. We would have learned so much and laughed a lot, I’m sure. Ben Goldfarb was of two minds about featuring her in his book, because she was already such a ‘celebrity. I lobbied hard for her founding father status, but I guess his editor didn’t agree. Sherri deserves her own book anyway. You know it would be a best seller.

Speaking of Ben, yesterday was also the time his Patagonia papers were released. It’s actually not a terrible look at the issue, and easily the wisest thing I have read on the topic. But I’d still rather him be promoting American beavers than promoting the cull of some foreigners.

Why two countries want to kill 100,000 beavers

If you’re a boreal toad — or a wood duck, or a brook trout, or a moose — you might owe your life to a beaver. (Kudos, also, on learning to read.)

Castor canadensis, the North American beaver, is the ultimate keystone species, that rare creature that supports an entire ecosystem. By building dams and forming ponds, beavers serve as bucktoothed housing developers, creating watery habitat for a menagerie of tenants. Songbirds nest in pondside willows, frogs breed in shallow canals, and trout shelter in cold pools. There’s even a beaver beetle that eats the skin of you-know-what.

Modern beavers have been wandering North America for 7.5 million years, giving flora and fauna plenty of time to adapt. Willow, a favorite snack, resprouts multiple stems when it’s gnawed down, like a hydra regrowing heads. Cottonwoods produce distasteful tannins to deter chewing. America’s rarest butterfly, the St. Francis Satyr, eats little but sedges that grow in beaver wetlands. The evolutionary connection runs so deep it’s often boiled down to a pithy bumper-sticker: “Beavers taught salmon to jump.”

Until, that is, an ill-conceived scheme unleashed nature’s architects on a landscape that had never known their teeth — and forever rearranged ecosystems at the bottom of the world.

Okay, I get it. That’s a nice introduction. Where beavers BELONG they make a wonderful difference and save biodiversity. Where some nazis tossed them to get rich quick in in the 40’s they’re causing problems.

And as beavers spread, they did what beavers are wont to do: They transformed their surroundings.

Just as New Zealand’s flightless birds had no recourse against invasive rats, Tierra del Fuego’s trees were ill-equipped to withstand “los castores.” The region’s forests are dominated by beeches that never evolved beaver coexistence strategies: They don’t resprout after cutting, produce unsavory chemicals or tolerate flooded soils. As beavers chewed down beeches and expanded free-flowing streams into broad ponds, forests opened into stump-dotted meadows. In 2009, Chris Anderson, an ecologist at Chile’s Universidad de Magallanes, found that beavers had reshaped up to 15 percent of Tierra del Fuego’s total land area and half its streams — “the largest alteration to the forested portion of this landscape since the recession of the last ice age.”

Somehow you can just tell this isn’t going to end well already. I guess you shouldn’t throw a new species into an ecosystem but honestly, wouldn’t it be easier to plant some willow than to catch and kill 100,000 beavers?

Over the years, Chile and Argentina have made halfhearted attempts at curtailing the invasion. A bounty program failed to motivate trappers, while proposed markets for beaver meat never materialized. Recently, though, the two nations have gotten more serious: In 2016, they announced a plan to cull 100,000 — one of the largest invasive-species-control projects ever attempted.

Grr. This was better.

In some respects, the South American beaver narrative is a familiar one: Humans introduce nonnative species; nonnative species wreak havoc; humans futilely attempt to erase their error. Yet the beaver story is more interesting — for, befitting a keystone species, the rodent takeover has produced winners as well as losers. Research suggests that beavers have benefited native Magellanic woodpeckers, perhaps by making trees more susceptible to the wood-boring insects upon which the birds feast. The slackwaters behind dams also support native fish called puye, which are four times more abundant around beaver impoundments than elsewhere in southern Chile.

Now that’s something I never read before. That’s almost worth reading the entire article for.

The biggest beneficiaries, however, have been the beaver’s fellow North Americans: the muskrat and the mink, two other lusciously furred mammals the Chilean government naively plopped down in Tierra del Fuego in the 1940s. On their own, the imports might have perished; beavers, however, ensured their survival. When researchers scoured one invaded island, they found a whopping 97 percent of muskrat tracks, scats and burrows around beaver ponds and wetlands, suggesting that one rodent was supporting the other. Mink, a weasel-like carnivore, have in turn feasted on the muskrats — as well as native birds and mammals.

I never read that either. They brought in a whole menagerie for their fur benefits. Of course the beavers helped the mink and muskrat. It seemed like home to them.

The whole saga, ultimately, is a sort of Bizarro Beaver story: The very same tree-gnawing, dam-building, pond-creating talents that normally make them such miracle-workers have mostly produced disaster below the equator. South America’s beavers are both charismatic and catastrophic, life-sustaining and forest-leveling, an invasive scourge and a popular tourist attraction. As the compassionate conservation movement dawns, beavers pose, too, an ethical dilemma: How do we balance ecological health with animal welfare? Is the only solution really mass slaughter?

Of course it will be. My goodness we commit mass slaughter of beavers in America all the time and OUR trees coppice! No one needs an excuse to kill more beavers. This is a well-written article, and I learned a lot but, honestly, having Ben use his remarkable talents to write about South America is like having a master chef come for the night from France and prepare macaroni and cheese for a dinner party. He might just do it better than anyone else in the world, but for goodness sake, it’s macaroni and cheese! I’d rather see him use his skills making intricate, exotic, luscious flavors, (writing things no one has ever said in a way no one else can) instead of serving up this tired old chestnut again.

Sheesh.

BEAVERS POST HASTE

heidi08 Beaver Book July 27, 2018

You know I don’t bring out the big Star Wars award ceremony clip for just anyone, When beaver benefits earned an article in the New York times a few years back I thought it deserved some pomp and circumstance. But this in the Washington Post might get a double dose. It even mentions the Martinez Beaver Festival!

How beavers can save the world from environmental ruin

Beavers, those paddle-tailed, buck-toothed dam-builders we know from local ponds and streams, create chaos. They pull down trees, cause creeks to flood and generally confound the human need for order and control. But in his new book, “Eager,” environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb makes a convincing case that we should change our view of this tumultuous behavior and recognize it for exactly what it is: animal engineering capable of restoring our ailing environment.

Subtitled “The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter,” the book shows the many contributions of this oily-coated rodent. Beavers create wetlands and make conditions favorable for many animals to thrive. Beaver ponds and meadows store carbon, which keeps it out of the atmosphere and thus helps counteract the rising temperatures associated with global warming. We must, Goldfarb contends, overcome our penchant for seeing beavers as pests — and too often killing them as a result — and instead recognize them as “the ultimate keystone species,” indeed as “the animal that doubles as an ecosystem.”

Ahhh let that sink in. Is this what basking feels like? I’ve done it so rarely. Remember it’s in the Washington Post so it must be true! I hope every snorting city manager reads this, and every disbelieving trapper and everyone at Fish and Game. Shhh here we come:

To document these transformations, Goldfarb treks all over the United States, from Western wilderness areas to Walmart parking lots. In Washington state, under the direction of a biologist, he hikes up a creek to help release a pair called Sandy and Chomper to their new home. He attends the 10th Annual Martinez Beaver festival in California, where he interviews numerous “Beaver Believer” ecologists and activists, including inventors of flow-device tools that partially drain ponds or prevent beavers from damming up culverts and washing out roads, and thus save beavers’ lives. The result is a book that’s a most unexpected gift: a marvelously humor-laced page-turner about the science of semi-aquatic rodents.

We’re in the post! Our silly little beaver festival made the Washington Post!!! I need to sit down. Wait, I am sitting down. I might need to stand up! Ohhh the city is never ever going to live down the Martinez beavers. Not Ever! Isn’t that wonderful?

But here’s the take-home message: Goldfarb has built a masterpiece of a treatise on the natural world, how that world stands now and how it could be in the future if we protect beaver populations. He gives us abundant reasons to respect environment-restoring beavers and their behaviors, for their own good and for ours.

Ahh Ben, you have ringed the world with a glowing fire of beaver praise, I have dreamed of this day since forever it feels like. I can’t believe it’s happening. I don’t think I will ever stop thanking you. If you, gentle reader, have resisted this far, resist no longer Buy the book! It is good. It is well written. It is true, It is important. And it is FUNNY! If you don’t want to keep it forever and ever march down to the city hall or public library and donate your copy when its done.

Everyone should know these things.

YOU CAN’T ‘SKIP’ VERMONT

heidi08 Beaver Book July 26, 2018

If you had to pick a single paper in the nation that features the most accurate beaver stories, you would be hard pressed to find one more engaging and reliable than the Brattleboro Reformer in Vermont. They were the first ones to cover the lovely, intimate field notes of Patti Smith who went on to author the Beavers of Popples pond, and they are always quick on the draw to follow the important work of Skip Lisle.

Now they are fielding Ben Goldfarb’s book which talks about their 0wn homegrown hero.

Nature’s Carpenters

Resourceful rodents create entire ecosystems

Grafton resident Skip Lisle, a beaver expert, shows off a newer version of his beaver deceiver.

GRAFTON — In the 1960s, if you lived in Vermont, you had to go to a zoo to see a beaver.

Not any more.

Author Ben Goldfarb, whose book “Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter” was published last month by Chelsea Green Press of White River Junction, was in Grafton Friday afternoon to meet up with one of the subjects of his book: Skip Lisle of Grafton and Beaver Deceivers International.

“We want beavers to keep creating wetlands,” said Lisle, who Goldfarb describes in his book as “the world’s foremost castorid conflict mediator.”

Translation: Lisle knows a lot about helping beavers co-exist with humans and avoiding fatal wildlife conflicts.

Lisle earned his place in Goldfarb’s book by inventing the anti-trap: a wire and wood device that he calls the ‘beaver deceiver’ that keeps road culverts free and flowing.

Lisle said when he was a kid, his parents took him to a New Hampshire wildlife zoo to see a beaver.

That certainly isn’t the case in 2018, as Lisle’s corner of Grafton has a thriving beaver community, and according to Lisle, all forms of wildlife are thriving thanks to the beavers.

The wetland was full of vibrant wildflowers, birds flitted from touch-me-not to touch-me-not, the concentric circles from rising fish dotted the wetland, and countless songbirds flitted constantly. Wood ducks, Canada geese and hooded mergansers also made the large pond home. Before the beavers, Lisle said, it was a field.

“Now it’s just teeming with life,” he said, to the plunking of wood frogs and a chorus of birdsong.

It’s Martinez hero and our old friend Skip Lisle! Hi Skip! And hey look Ben Goldfarb is right beside him! Wasnt he just here at the beaver festival? It’s amazing when you think about it how many beaver paths go through Martinez.

Environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb visits Grafton resident Skip Lisle, a beaver expert, during a book tour for Goldfarb’s book “Eager” on Friday, July 20, 2018.

Lisle, a wildlife biologist by training, said he wishes flow devices would be accepted and put into use to save more beavers.

He said he built his first deceiver out of his father’s garden fencing.

He travels all over New England installing the ‘deceivers,” which are wire contraptions built around culverts or other drainage pipes and which prevent the beavers from damming the culverts. In essence, the ‘deceivers’ create permanent leaks in a beaver’s dam, allowing water to drain at a slow rate and thus avoid the ire of highway engineers and public works directors.

“He’s a pretty big figure in the beaver community,” Goldfarb said of Lisle.

Goldfarb, an environmental writer whose work has appeared in Mother Jones and Audubon Magazine, as well as High Country News, recently moved from Northhampton, Mass., to Spokane, Wash. He and Lisle acted like old friends. They share a devotion to the sleek, nocturnal mammal and its pivotal role in the environment. Goldfarb, like Lisle, is a ‘beaver believer.’

To Lisle and Goldfarb, it is nothing short of murder the practice in which some state highway departments and road foremen trap and kill beavers rather than find a way to co-exist and prevent damage to roads and other infrastructure.

Beavers have played an even more important role out West in creating wetlands and restoring some of the ecological balance, and co-existing with cattle grazing.

Goldfarb was on his way to Manchester for a book signing event at the Northshire Bookstore. He has traveled all over the United States and even to Scotland to research and write his book, which was commissioned by Chelsea Green.

Do you think a beaver book has ever made a bigger splash? Even though there was a flurry of press around Glynnis Hood’s book debut and Francis Backhouse still gets good coverage, I never saw anything like this sustained, cross country beaver benefits tour. I don’t even want to think about how depressed I’m going to be when this is over. Carpe Diem!

Beaver dams do pose flood risks, he said, but they are also “forces of flood mitigation.”

“I’ve been battling this for 25 years,” said Lisle, who said he has hopes that Goldfarb’s book will open people’s eyes to the importance of the beaver.

It’s wonderful to see Skip get ‘founding father’ status. He should. And it’s great to see yet another persuasive voice for Ben’s book. Aren’t you curious how it’s doing already in sales? Well, it’s off to a bang up start, that’s for sure. Ben’s book is headed to the Washington Post this weekend and booked locally for Terra Vera KPFA radio on friday. Where, as it turns out, I will also be serving in a minor role discussing the historical California conundrum. So far I don’t get the impression the host doesn’t seem to like me very much so I’m expecting to be mostly ignored, but who knows?

SCIENCE MAGAZINE IS EAGER FOR BEAVERS

heidi08 Beaver Book July 24, 2018

Acting as unofficial beaver secretary during this wild and glorious renaissance period is truly a full-time job. I can barely keep up with the latest news and my beaver ‘to-do’ list is getting longer and longer. Never mind, it’s a wonderful problem to have. Let’s turn our attention to the big guns where Sarah Boon yesterday reviewed Ben Goldfarb’s book for Science Magazine.

Recognizing their role in maintaining healthy watersheds, “beaver believers” work to rehab the rodent’s reputation

Why should we care about beavers? Consider all they do. Beavers convert vegetation to marsh to wetland and back again. They facilitate water storage in ponds and recharge groundwater. Ponds and meadows sculpted by beavers concentrate nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus. Not only does this create fertile ground, it helps filter agricultural runoff. Beaver-dammed landscapes create habitats for other species, and their complexes can serve as wildfire breaks.

Beavers still face obstacles when we attempt to reintroduce them into ecosystems in which they once flourished. Predators can eat a beaver for lunch, while cattle grazing removes vegetation and can alter a stream’s configuration in such a way that it can no longer support beaver populations.

Eager also highlights the problems of preconceived assumptions about beavers and beaver management. A common supposition among fish ecologists, for example, is that beavers are bad for salmon because their dams prevent the fish from swimming upstream. However, Goldfarb cites a comprehensive review of 108 papers that showed that beavers benefit fish populations more often than they cause negative consequences.

We’re coming to my FAVORITE part. Pay close attention.

A more egregious error occurred in California in 1937, when ecologist Joseph Grinnell declared that beavers had never inhabited large portions of the state. Although this was untrue, it went unchallenged and affected beaver recovery and ecosystem management across the state until it was disproven in 2012.

DISPROVEN! DISPROVEN! I can’t tell you how joyful it makes my heart to read those words in Science-frickin-magazine of all places! I love the idea that we changed the accepted lore about beavers forever and ever. So that our painstaking findings and hours pouring over microfilm archives just get casually tossed out in the middle of this article like saying ‘it turns out the earth isn’t flat’.

I have a second favorite part. I admit. It’s here.

Goldfarb speaks largely with “beaver believers”—individuals who try to help humans and beavers coexist by mitigating the impact of beavers on the built landscape and by reintroducing them into stream systems that they can potentially restore. He lets his interviewees tell the majority of the story, recalling, for example, Councilman Mark Ross’s interaction with a local businessman during a tense meeting of pro- and anti-beaver groups in Martinez, California (“‘This seventy-year-old guy is about to hit me! …Do I hit back against a senior citizen or not?’”)

hahahahahahahahahahaha Martinez infighting in science magazine! Is there anything more lovely to behold? I rushed straight to the mailbox to look for my thank you note from the mayor, but I’m sure it just got delayed. Because honestly, what city wouldn’t be proud to be included?

Goldfarb ends the book with a trip to the United Kingdom, where beavers haven’t been seen since the 17th (Scotland) and late 18th (England) centuries. Here, reintroduced beavers are a huge tourist draw, and beaver dams reduce the impacts of flooding—a big problem in the UK—although many farmers aren’t convinced. As Goldfarb writes, “Everyone shares a goal; no one agrees on strategy.”

One thing Eager was missing was a visit to Canada. The beaver is the country’s national animal and graces its nickel coin. Canada has acres of landscape shaped by beavers, and Goldfarb cites a number of Canadian studies, but a firsthand experience would surely have enriched his otherwise excellent story.

I’m highlighting the last paragraph in a horrible color because that’s just plain stupid. It’s that thing teachers do when they have nothing bad whatsoever to say about your work but they want to act like they’re doing their job so they give you stupid irrelevant advice along with your well-earned praise. Obviously there have been VOLUMES about beavers in Canada, most recently by Frances Backhouse and before that by Glynnis Hood. It is wonderful for Ben to cover the story from an un-canada-centric perspective for a change.

And this is a GREAT review, in a gut punch location. I heard from the publisher that he’s going to be reviewed in the Washington Post sunday, and I just found out he is going to be on local radio KPFA on Friday.

With me too! So buckle up!

BEAVERS AS WORKING CLASS HEROES!

heidi08 Beaver Book July 21, 2018

The National Resource Defense Council gets on the beaver bandwagon thanks to Ben’s book. I like that headline a lot. Squeeze in boys, it’s starting to look crowded back there.

Beavers Are the Working-Class Heroes of Their Ecosystems—America Should Appreciate Them More

As the climate warms, beaver dams could help the arid West store water and lock up carbon. Doesn’t sound like the work of a “pest” to me.

The tale of how the North American beaver was saved from the brink of extirpation is just one of the unexpectedly gripping stories found in a new book, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter. In it, author Ben Goldfarb chronicles humanity’s unusual relationship with these animals, which has had its share of ups and downs. For instance, no sooner had conservation efforts begun to bear fruit in the last century than beavers became rodenti non grata among farmers and ranchers who hated the creatures’ penchant for building their dams in irrigation ditches. People no longer killed the animals for their pelts; now they were perceived as pests, to be exterminated on sight. Even as wildlife managers and habitat experts tried to make the case for beavers as a keystone species, critical to the health of their ecosystems, their public reputation suffered and their ranks continued to dwindle.

That’s the truth – although I don’t know about the idea of any ‘specific time’ being responsible for their negative press. It seems to me that folks have always been fairly negative about the animals. Even when Morgan wrote his glowing beaver book for the railroads I’m sure the railroad trapped out plenty to make sure the tracks would stay put.

But according to Goldfarb, things are starting to look up for beavers here in the 21st century. (Full, semi-boastful disclosure: Goldfarb, who also writes about nature and wildlife for Mother Jones, Scientific American, Smithsonian, and Audubon, among many others, is a former onEarth intern.) The pro-beaver gospel that he and other “beaver believers”—his term—have been spreading seems to have finally broken through.

Oh I dearly hope so.

How so? “A farmer’s most important resource is water,” says Goldfarb, and “nothing stores water quite like a beaver.” That’s why, over the past decade or so, a small but growing group of ranchers has begun advocating for restoring beavers in the arid West. Goldfarb cites the case of Jon Griggs, a ranch manager in Elko County, Nevada, whose grazing lands were recolonized by beavers back in 2003. “They turned Griggs’s stream into a spectacular cattail marsh that sub-irrigated the surrounding meadows, improving grass production for his cattle,” Goldfarb says. When drought hit the region in 2012, the rancher was able to water his cows with the beaver ponds, “even as his neighbors had to pay through the nose to truck water to their livestock.” Since then, Griggs has become a vocal proponent of beavers’ agricultural value, and now, Goldfarb says, “there’s a little cluster of progressive, pro-rodent ranchers in one of the most conservative corners of the country.”

In some of the West’s driest precincts, wetlands cover just 2 percent of the land, yet they support 80 percent of its biodiversity. And beavers, Goldfarb says, are master wetlands architects. The ponds and pools formed by their dams support just about everything that flies, crawls, hops, and swims in this country. “Swans and ducks nest in and around beaver wetlands and ponds,” he says, launching into a litany of the beavers’ beneficiaries. “Moose cool off in them. Frogs spawn in them. Baby salmon and trout grow up in them. Mink and herons hunt in them. Woodpeckers and flying squirrels nest in the dead trees killed by rising water levels. Songbirds perch in the willows. Bats snatch insects out of the open airspace above the water’s surface.”

And the bad news?

In spite of all the data suggesting that beavers do more good than harm, Goldfarb admits that for every newly minted beaver believer such as Jon Griggs, “there are probably a dozen folks who still shoot beavers on sight.” Public ambivalence, alas, is reinforced by governmental ambivalence. He notes that Wildlife Services, the branch of the Agriculture Department that manages troublesome animals, still kills more than 20,000 beavers across the country each year, “even though there are plenty of nonlethal ways to handle beaver conflicts.” At the same time, he says, “the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is restoring beaver populations in the Pacific Northwest to create ponds and wetlands for juvenile salmon. Sometimes it doesn’t seem like the left hand knows what the right hand is doing.”

Before the colonization and industrialization of North America, beavers had millennia to shape our physical terrain into the Edenic landscape encountered by the pilgrims back in the early 17th century. We should treat them well. We may soon find ourselves in need of their services again.

Nice article, Jeff Turrentine. Just one correction. We ARE in need of their services. Right now. How ever many new beaver believers are shaped by this book, (and I do believe there will be plenty!) they are going to be just barely in time. We need the water they save, the species they nurture and the wetlands they create,

And hey, we’d like it very much if the Nature Conservancy stopped killing them to save trees, okay?