In Putney, the challenge of living with beavers

PUTNEY — The town is trying to strike an appropriate balance with the beavers that live up in the Wilson Wetlands. Cory Cheever, a biologist with the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, was in Putney Tuesday to help members of the Putney Conservation Commission control beaver activity in the wetlands.

I got so excited about this article. A Fish and Wildlife Biologist installing a flow device instead of killing beavers! And in Vermont no less! So obviously they could hop up the road 24 minutes to Grafton and make sure Skip Lisle approves of their work, right? Maybe even get some help from the master on this! But if I was expecting the transfer or sharing of any knowledge I was sorely mistaken.

Cheever installed a series of his own dams — which looked a little like wire fencing placed in the water — in the culverts under Sand Hill Road to keep the beavers out while allowing them to live in the wetlands.

“This is a dam, from the beaver’s point of view this is a dam, but it is faulty, from a beaver’s point of view,” Kerrey said Tuesday while standing over one of the culverts. “It’s faulty because it has five holes in it, also known as culverts, so they are busy plugging those holes up.”

The Department of Fish and Wildlife has installed similar baffles all over the state.

That’s right, because BAFFLES are sooo much better than those other things that Skip or Mike install. So we had to start from scratch and re-invent the wheel to make it roll. Last year when we read about Mr. Cheever I wrote Skip and Mike to see if they had ever met, connected or exchanged a single email. I’m so innocent I was surprised when the answer came back “No.”

Well, maybe Fish and Wildlife is trying to avoid paying royalties to Skip by calling their design a baffle? Or maybe they genuinely just don’t know any better and didn’t open my copious emails the last time. In the vast scheme of things it doesn’t matter if Mr. Cheever makes up a different design or calls it a “beaver faker” as long as it works, right? I can’t get too upset about this article because look at this.

Kerrey says that when the water level dropped the Conservation Commission saw the need to bring the beavers back to dam up the flow. As challenging as the beavers are to live with, Kerrey said, it was still easier than bringing in a human specialist.

The beavers were able to bring the water level back up, but now they are damming up the culverts with their sticks.

“We would have had to figure out how to do that ourselves. We would have had to hire some engineer to figure out how to reestablish a wetland,” Kerry said. “Beavers already know how to do that. So we just decided we would wait for them. And we waited a little over year and the habitat for them is good so they showed up and they fixed everything, but they’re going a little overboard now.”

Is Fish and Wildlife paying for this? Or is it strictly something Cory convinces property owners to pay for in their spare time? I will write him again and see if we can’t possibly bring Mohamed to the mountain.

And speaking of experts I heard from Mike Callahan yesterday that he is on his way to Washington to film the salmon passing easily through his new adapted flow devices there. It seems that his auto cameras don’t pick up the passage which mostly happens at night, but Mike’s been assured the design works like a charm so he is going to spend some nights on sight with a camera at the ready!

He needs the footage of course for March when he’s coming to the Salmonid Restoration Federation along with all the OTHER beaver people!

From the “dead spot” to grand central station, it feels like I can’t keep up with the beaver news these past few days.Let’s start with this fantastic headline I saw Sunday:

The nuisance conflict: Can animals and humans peacefully coexist?

No trapping was necessary for the beavers in Adamant, either, after Cory Cheever, the Fish and Wildlife technician, got to work on their dam. Cheever, the beaver specialist, is in his fourth year of an assignment that runs from April to November and takes him all over the state. He installs up to 35 treatments a year, of two kinds: for road culverts and for beaver dams. “They like culverts,” he said, “because the road is their dam.” All they have to do is plug up the aperture, and the pond that’s a key part of their habitat will start to grow. The culvert treatment, on the upstream side, is to install a fence that prevents the beavers from getting in to fill the hole. Simple enough.

How exciting to see this work done at the state level! Mind you this is in Vermont (the home of Skip Lisle who invented the beaver deceiver), so they have a better shot than most at knowing better. I wrote both Skip and Mike excitedly to see if they knew Corey, but neither of them did. That and the fact that they refer to the install as a ‘baffle’ makes me a little cautious. If Cheever wants to install flow devices that work he should talk to the experts and keep talking. But still, I’m just squinting and trying to imagine fish and game paying for flow devices! Nope, can’t do it.

“The reason we do this,” Cheever said of the treatments, “is we want to maintain these habitats where possible.” That’s partly because beaver ponds help sustain dozens of other species.

Very well said! Of course you realize that having a name like Cheever and installing pipes for beaver is just asking for a limerick to be written for you? I’ll try to resist just to praise the excellent decision by Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department to spend a little money solving beaver problems without trapping by protecting habitat for the other fish and wildlife who depend on their dams. Go read the entire article which is all about humane exclusion. Now all I have to do is introduce Corey to a few friends…

Vermont Fish and Wildlife’s, Cheever

Installs flow devices for beaver

Their ponds grant the wishes

Of game, fowl and fishes

And now Adamant’s a believer!

___________________________________________________________________

This was a fun article that rang a nice civic memory bell in my head

South Portal display features beaver

Vince Belleci has answered thousands of questions about beavers and other critters over his 60-plus years as a trapper and wildlife expert. But the question he was asked by a youngster on Wednesday left him temporarily flabbergasted.

“Can they swim without a life preserver?” asked one of the 30 children from the Klamath County’s YMCA preschool program during a presentation at the South Portal Building, where Belleci introduced a display on beavers.

“That was a good question,” he said afterward.

Information about beavers is featured in a display at the South Portal Building at 205 Riverside Drive. Along with rotating displays that the building houses of the Klamath Watershed Partnership, Discover Klamath and the Klamath County Chamber of Commerce.

If the name Belleci sounds familiar to Martinez residents, it should. The Belleci name is one of the old Italian families forever in Martinez. I was very surprised to meet Vince at the beaver conference in Oregon 2011. He introduced himself as a former local with family in town after I presented on the Martinez Beavers. He was there to learn about installing flow devices and live trapping to broaden his skill set. He had heard all about the famous beavers from his family in town and knew all about the story. He was excited by my presentation and to see them first hand. Small, small, small beaver world.

Ginny Monroe, the partnership’s outreach coordinator, said it is hoped school groups of all ages will visit the beaver display, which will remain at the building until November. She and Belleci are part of a Beaver Management Team that was formed three years ago to oversee a 10-year program to manage Klamath Basin beavers. Although Belleci has no firm numbers on the region’s beaver population, he estimates there are about 1,000. One of the team’s goals is to humanely trap and tag problem beavers — those damaging agricultural lands — and relocate them to areas where their dam-building doesn’t cause problems.

______________________________________________________________________

More local news:

Martinez beaver supporter, faithful reader of this website and for years a maintainer of his own, fierce libertarian and resident spelling-nit-picker who oddly once nominated me for Contra Costa woman of the year, has died. I first met George when I accidentally putting a link to ‘my videos’ wrongly on the website. The link was actually for ‘your own videos’ so when he clicked on it he found pictures of his granddaughter on a ‘beaver website’ and was incensed. We eventually solved the mystery and soothed all the feathers, and went on to greener pastures and civic adventures of sorts. It is very sad to report that I received this from his actual granddaughter this morning.

“George passed away on July 7 peacefully in his home in Martinez, CA. He was quite ill before he died but was not in pain. There was no memorial service, per his request.”

There will never be another George Thomas Kysor and memorial service or no – he will not be forgotten. Thanks for the everything.