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 CallahanHeidi 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.
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:
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.
That will do for starters. Did I leave any one out?
Beaver awareness comes from all kinds of regions. It can come from very unlikely places. Just take Martinez, for example, which installed a flow device even after establishing such a time-honored tradition of bad decisions that we built a refinery and a jail in the middle of town. Sometimes beaver wisdom even comes out of Georgia.
For centuries, hunting was an effective way to limit game populations. But popular opinion shifted as Americans moved to metropolitan areas where animals were seen as noble companions instead of food and pests.
Wildlife biologists and animal-control experts have had to find alternatives to lethal control methods. Options include fences and other physical boundaries, trapping, chemicals used as repellents and poisons and habitat changes, such as eliminating food sources like trash and pet foods and closing off nesting sites. Some neighborhoods are allowing sharpshooters to remove deer to reduce population problems and damage.
Wildlife-damage management, regardless of the problem species, has four basic components, according to Greg Yarrow, a Clemson wildlife professor attending the conference. The problem-solving process includes: problem definition through identification and assessment of damage, an understanding of the behavior and ecology of the problem wildlife species, selection and application of control techniques and evaluation of control efforts.
In case that name sounds familiar, Dr. Yarrow is the inventor of the Clemson pond leveler. The most publicized and promoted flow device out there. There is so much information available on the Clemson that 5 years ago when Martinez gathered to discuss ways to prevent flooding, a family from Lafayette offered to donate one to the city. It has been copied a million times and was basically ripped off by this design, which was recently recommended by fish and game to install for our friends in American Canyon.
Beaver advocates everywhere should be very, very grateful for Dr. Yarrow. We should know that his design taught what was possible and helped folks think about a new way to deal with beaver problems. But they should also remember that when this design was invented ‘Baby got Back’ was the hit of the year, Euro Disney just opened in France and Ross Perot ran for president. Digging out a dam to install a pipe through it is a lot of work and the perforated pipe isn’t nearly as successful as the flexible devices used today in designs like the Castor Master (what Skip installed in Martinez) or the Flexible Leveler (what Mike’s DVD teaches.)
Still, outdated learning is still learning. We should be happy this conference is taking place. Little by little folks are beginning to get the idea that beaver problems can be solved in other ways. Slowly we’re getting more wildlife conferences like this in Georgia, and more comments like these from New Hampshire:
“The youth services director, myself, and the parks and rec superintendent at the time, rather than trap the beavers or having them killed by professional hunters, (we) wrapped the trees with chicken wire to prevent them from chewing the trees; that way it saves the trees, ends the hazards, and the beavers simply move on.”
Just so you know, beavers are way bigger than chickens. But it’s a start!
Photo by Nathan Gray A sign with information about beavers is placed outside a stream off Martin Luther King Boulevard where beavers have built a dam.
Beavers have built a dam in a stream across the street from the Civic Center of Anderson (South Carolina). The dam is near a wooden overlook beside an informational display on beavers that is part of the county’s Recycling and Education Center. Although the nocturnal beavers tend to be reclusive, visitors can enjoy listening to the soothing sound of water trickling through their dam, which is only a stone’s throw from Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.The beavers’ new home will be left undisturbed, said Greg Smith, the county’s environmental services director.“It hasn’t become a nuisance,” Smith said. The beavers received a less hospitable reception in the past when they built a dam near the civic center.
Did you ever argue when you were kids who the family dog liked better? And to prove it you and your sisters all called it at exactly the same time and that poor dog just stood in the middle of the living room not sure what to do? That’s kind of how I feel about this article. It has true bright spots of beaver hope and still the sharp edges of fear and ignorance, all in the same place. When I read it I honestly can’t tell if its a victory, a delayed defeat or a dark omen of things to come.
First things first, congratulations Anderson! Leaving a beaver dam in the center of town could become a focal point, an educational opportunity or a demonstration of your civic pride and compassion. It could be a reminder of the benefits of ‘hard work’ and inspire your public works crews or waitresses or teachers to keep trying when odds seem insurmountable. It can remind everyone what can be accomplished when we work together as a team. The dam will trap sediment and organic material, microbugs will move in to break it down, bigger bugs will come to eat them and fish will come eat the bugs….soon new populations of bigger fish, birds and wildlife will be eating at the food-chain you’ve encouraged. That’s pretty good news for a recycling and education center.
Okay, now the rest. Just so you know, beavers don’t live IN the dam. They live in a lodge. Think of the dam as where they ‘work’. Imagine what a difficulty it would be to build a ‘hollow’ dam that a family of five or seven could live in. Of course it would be much, much more vulnerable to washouts. The dams solid base of mud and sticks gives it strength. Your beavers probably live in a bank lodge a little bit up from the dam, so the raised water levels protect their entrances and keep predators out.
“The main problem is the flooding that they cause,” said Greg Yarrow, a Clemson University wildlife ecology professor. A one-foot-high beaver dam can flood as much as 100 acres, which can create problems in timber stands and on farms, as well as threatening low-lying roads and railroad tracks.
Clemson. Clemson. That names sounds familiar. Hmmm. Oh, it must because that was the place they invented the Clemson Pond Leveler in the early nineties. You know, the perforated pipe that goes through the dam and lowers the water level to control flooding? Come to think of it, that guys name seems kinda familiar too. Maybe its because of this at the bottom of the paper.
For further information on the Clemson Beaver Pond Leveler contact Dr. Gene W. Wood, Mr. Larry A. Woodward, or Dr. Greg Yarrow • Department of Aquaculture, Fisheries and Wildlife • G08 Lehotsky Hall, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina 29634, (803) 656-3117.
Goodness! Talk about hiding one’s light under a bushel! A reporter asks you about a beaver dam causing flooding and you didn’t think to mention that you invented a proven tool for managing flooding? I know Clemson’s have fallen out of favor because they’re stiff and hard to implement and tend to get plugged up, but you laid the ground work for the Castor Master and Flexible Leveler that followed! Your work pioneered humane beaver management. Call me crazy but I think that’s worth talking about.
(Aside to reporter: it’s possible that since you have an expert on the phone you should ask a question at this point. Something like, “are there any ways to control flooding?” Just a suggestion.)
In Dorchester County, which is northwest of Charleston, public works crews broke up about 200 beaver dams after residents complained about flooding last year. The flat-tailed rodents, which are Canada’s national animal, also have been blamed for causing millions of dollars of damage throughout North Carolina. “They certainly can be very challenging to deal with,” Yarrow said.
Sigh. You see the cause for my hesitation about this ‘good news’. This reporter is very excited about the likely damage these wicked creatures will cause Anderson down the road. He doesn’t spare a paragraph, a phrase or even an adjective for the good work that beavers do for urban streams. I have to wonder if public works really broke up 200 dams in Dorchester County (which Wikipedia tells me is only 577 square miles total, 2 of those being water). 200 beaver dams in 2 square miles? Maybe they broke a 100 dams twice? Or 50 dams four times? I don’t know, what’s the learning curve on useless effort that squanders taxpayer money and has to be repeated again and again in Dorchester?
Well, the good news is that Anderson is keeping its beaver dam FOR NOW. I wrote the paper and the environmental services director just letting them know what options exist.
Photo by Nathan Gray Beavers have built this dam in a stream off of Martin Luther King Blvd.
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.
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.
