Sarah Koenigsberg and her beaver film are in Canada. Here film is screening at the Banff Mountain Festival. In the meantime she is busy stocking up supplies to calm her frazzled nerves. This photo smiled at me from FB. Look, she found our much admired wine “Frisy Beaver”. I still want them to donate to the festival.
I like “beaver riot” on her shirt too. That’s clever. There may be an homage in our future!
Meanwhile the film will go next to Calgary where it will debut the night before our election {GO VOTE} in the science building of the University of Calgary campus.
Monday, November 5, 2018 from 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM (MST)Calgary, Alberta
Join director Sarah Koenigsberg for a private screening of her new film “The Beaver Believers”, a film about “passion and perserverence in an era of climate change”. Filmed in 8 western US states, Mexico, and Canada, this film focuses on the restoration and management of the North American beaver in watersheds of the American West.
This event is being sponsored by The Miistakis Institute (www.rockies.ca) and the Alberta Riparian Habitat Management Society (Cows and Fish) (www.cowsandfish.org).
So many of our friends together in one place! Hurray! I knew C&F would want to be part of a screening. I’m so glad its coming together so nicely in this “year of the beaver”.
Speaking of which, I heard from Ben Goldfarb that he liked he film and Robin pointed out that he had uploaded one of his own about some beaver relocation he was part of in Washington. Enjoy.
Now I’m off to the sierras for little late autumn. We missed the best showing but wish us a little color anyway.
HOPE VALLEY CALIFORNIA
Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”
Yesterday Rob Rich brought this to my attention: the newly released results of the Miistakis surveyworking with Cows and Fish to learn about attitudes towards beavers in Alberta are available. It’s a fairly interesting read, even if you aren’t a psychologist.
With a large number of respondents (N=639) they were careful in how they included and presented questions. Nearly 70% were landowners or land managers and 40% had had beavers on their land in the past 5 years. A very small number (21%) reported having no interest in beavers on their land and more than half thought it was a good idea!
The survey also did a nice job of looking at the basic knowledge about beavers. (You’ll be pleased to know that 70% of respondents realized they did NOT eat fish.) Interestingly, what the majority didn’t know was that beaver dams don’t block fish passage and beavers don’t disperse at 6 months. I took the survey back in June of last summer and wrote on the website that I was proud to be one of their “outliers”. I also commented that there were educational aspects to the survey itself, with some questions being as close to a “Push Poll for beavers” as one could get.
I am so enormously impressed with the hard work these folks are doing, and am delighted to see the results of this survey available. I can’t wait until 100% of those surveyed want beavers on their property! Maybe they’ll be so popular that you’ll need a beaver lottery!
Still, I’m a little cautious about these result which give the appearance that we’re “nearly there” in terms of changing minds about beavers. Years of painful statistics classes forced me to look closely at the methodology section to see how these mostly cheerful respondents were obtained.
I hate to be the beaver party pooper but this isn’t exactly a random sample. Or even a partially randomized sample. If I used the data base of “my contacts” to ask whether beavers matter what kind of results do you suppose I would receive? This is as much a study of how successful their messaging has been as anything else.
And based on these results I’d say fairly successful. I don’t think we’d manage these kind of numbers in MARTINEZ! Or from the city council!
It’s interesting to me that a sixth of respondents didn’t answer this question. It’s not like it was a factual question they didn’t know the answer to. Maybe it was at the end of a page? Maybe it was confusing for some reason? Obviously the cruel stats teacher in my mind would insist the question be discarded or that incomplete surveys not be included in the results.
Which is not to say that these results aren’t very very interesting and worthy of consideration. I just want folks to know that the battle isn’t over. We aren’t even at the beginning of the end.
Two fine articles appeared yesterday in defense of our favorite hero. The first is from the World Wildlife Federation’s Blog post. It has one of my top favorite photos that isn’t ours. The second is from a group called EPIC in Arcata that I hadn’t heard of until last week when Eli Asarian of Riverbend Sciences sent them my way regarding depredation permits. They were considering the impact of beavers on salmon and wondering whether depredation permits took that into account. I don’t know if I was helpful, but I think you’ll agree that something about the article suggests I made a lasting impression of sorts.
Engineering for nature comes naturally to beavers. Though they can sometimes pose real challenges for the people who share their space, their dams and the resulting ponds can help restore vegetation, combat climate change, rebuild fish habitat, reduce pollution by capturing sediment, and build resilience against floods and droughts by storing water and slowing the pace of racing streams and rivers. Without beavers at work, most of the biodiversity we associate with wetland habitats – the fish, birds and bugs – would all disappear.
Heather Diamond
Throughout Alberta, there’s a growing demand to find solutions to human-wildlife conflict. And in the North Saskatchewan Watershed (Alberta), where the threats from habitat loss and fragmentation and pollution are ranked “high” to “very high,” beavers are damn important. With some help from WWF-Canada’s Loblaw Water Fund, the Alberta Riparian Habitat Management Society, also known as “Cows and Fish,” is working to repair the beaver’s reputation, and, by doing so, the freshwater ecosystems it calls home.
Cows and Fish is repairing this rodent’s rep, and reducing human-wildlife conflict, by raising awareness about the important role beavers play in riparian health in their “Living with Beavers” workshops, like this one on Dec. 7.
While the beleaguered beaver may never be welcomed as an ecosystem saver, Cows and Fish is offering communities practical solutions for coexistence so that beavers and their dams – along with the core role they play in wetland health – don’t have to be removed.
Hurray for Cows and Fish! For my money they are the most persuasive unsung beaver advocates on the planet. Not appearing in any PBS documentary or publishing a coffee table book but making a real difference by talking to one farmer at a time, over coffee, in meeting, and putting out excellent resources that make sense to the average viewer.
Beavers are a keystone species, playing a critical role in biodiversity and providing direct benefits to surrounding ecosystems as well as fish, wildlife and people. Dams created by beavers create wetlands that help decrease the effects of damaging floods, recharge drinking water aquifers, protect watersheds from droughts, decrease erosion, stabilize stream banks, remove toxic pollutants from surface and ground water and many threatened and endangered species rely on the wetland habitat c
reated by beavers. They also produce food for fish and other animals, increase
habitat and cold water pools that benefit salmon, repair damaged stream channels and watersheds, preserve open space, and maintain stable stream flows.
Consequently, incised stream channels, altered streamflow regimes, and degraded riparian vegetation limit the potential for beaver re-establishment. For these reasons, preventing further habitat degradation and restoring degraded habitats are key to protecting and restoring beaver populations.
It’s a great article, with excellent science to back it up. It even has links to the FOIA data from Wildlife Services obtained by Executive Director Tom Wheeler which is what I was asked about last week. It ends with a wonderful plea on behalf of beavers.
Beavers Need Help
While the North Coast Region has a beaver deficit, every year hundreds of beavers are killed in California’s Central Valley by Wildlife Services, a federal agency tasked with (lethal) “removal” of “problem” or “nuisance” animals because landowners view them as a pest. The Department of Fish and Wildlife also issues depredation permits for landowners to trap and kill nuisance beavers on their property.
Instead of trapping and killing beavers that are unwanted in other regions, it is imperative that a relocation program is created, so that beavers can be relocated to North Coast rivers and other places to help restore streams and wetlands. Beaver reintroduction is a sustainable cost-effective strategy, but we need to work with stakeholders to navigate the political, regulatory and biological frameworks to safely restore their populations.
Well, I don’t disagree with that sentiment. Our review of depredation permits has never seen one from Humbolt county in three years, which implies they mostly aren’t there. Eli did tell me about a few sites that have beavers along the Klamath, so fingers crossed they’ll flourish eventually. But you know me, I’m never as happy about moving beavers as I am about working to let them stay right where they are.
And about that headline, I’m not saying my brain is the only brain this has ever occurred. And I’m not saying folks don’t get subliminal influences that just stick in their heads but they don’t realize they saw it somewhere else first. I’m just saying the timing is eye-popping. Eli introduced us on 12-08, and I wrote Tom about our depredation permit review that same day and sent this summary graphic. He replied a couple days later, saying it was a great design and that he had been planning to do the same.
There is much to revisit on the flooding front. I’ve been checking out the recent paper on this front from Puttock et al from Exeter University. Here’s the money quote on flooding.
beavers were likely to have had a significant flow attenuation impact, as determined from peak discharges (mean 30 ± 19% reduction), total discharges (mean 34 ± 9% reduction) and peak rainfall to peak discharge lag times (mean 29 ± 21% increase) during storm events.
And those effects were only from the 13 dams of a single pair of beavers! Imagine the effect of a healthy stream full of beaver! Apparently I’m not the only one to be really excited by those numbers. I’ll post the article at the end.
Beavers have been acting as engineers of their own craft in wetland areas for over a hundred years with their dams. However, rural people have had their concerns of the future prospects of flooding in their areas and will have the opportunity to learn how beavers can make an impact on water storage during periods of flooding and drought at an upcoming symposium hosted by the Miisstakis Institute and the Alberta Riparian Habitat Management Society (Cows and Fish) on how humans and animals co-exist.
“Beaver can absorb quite a significant amount of medium-sized floods and at the same time they provide benefits for ranchers and the environment,” said Rob Gardner, a Medicine Hat- based conservationist and consultant.
Gardner had noticed on his hikes out in the prairies that there were streams with beavers in them that were looking healthy with lush growth along the banks, while others nearby did not have the same treatment.
“Occassionally they’ll put a dam where it starts to flood something that people have gotten attached to whether it’s a hay field or wintering areas that’s close to a creek. If a beaver dam is flooding your property, then chances are a flood will be flooding it pretty soon. Beavers are giving fair warning that you build your structures close to the creek.”
You have to love Cows and Fish and the Miisstakis Institute for spreading the word so well and bringing it so down to earth for the ranchers. Beavers are giving you a message about your land and what you can expect. Pay attention! You can tell what a difference beavers make by using your eyes by just looking, (like we did in Martinez), or you can science the shit outta this thing, as they are doing in Wales. Turns up you end up with pretty much the same result.
Yesterday was a strangely successful day that turned out well for beavers. After writing about the Mystic lake madness I wrote the acting director of the Custer Gallatan Forest Service and some city folks protesting the decision to sit on this problem for three months and then expose the beavers to slow death. I was written back fairly promptly by that acting director saying the army corps of engineers had told them there was a risk of a 500-year flood event for the town below if the dam washed out. He assured me they knew about flow devices and would talk about this for the future, but had to do this now. The beavers would be trapped, not left to starve, which was something.
I was grimly comforted by this news, and mollified that he wrote back at all which I did not expect. He also said that he was back at his regular job now in Vermont and another ranger was in charge – whom he cc’d on the message so we could be in touch. I still thought the beavers were done for, but I was glad that my letter had been responded to.
45 minutes later I received this:
Update on Mystic Lake project. Engineers are currently working on a mitigation device to keep water to tolerable level after lowering and keeping the beavers in the system. Long term solutions will be discussed at a later date. Thanks.
Chad Benson Deputy Forest Custer Gallatin National Forest
There must have been a lot of other public outcry besides mine. Maybe we’ll never know. I will say I am capable of writing a fairly decent letter, but am downright talented at finding the right email address to target even when folks work hard to hide it. Still, I can count on one hand the number of times something like this happens. Maybe it has something to do with Amy’s recent presentation on the topic and my reminding the ranger of her skills and the fact that she was trained by the man who solved our beaver problem a decade ago? Maybe someone chained themselves to a bulldozer or threatened to stop dating the mayor’s niece. Who knows how these things work?
I’m just happy it did!
Dispersal: Elizabeth Saunders
To celebrate I started thinking about a festival design that would promote our new location and vaguely remembered a charming illustration by Elizabeth Saunders the artist who works with Cows and Fish. It was about beaver dispersal, but I thought it could easily be re-purposed to inspire Amelia on our brochure this year. Even as a starting place, I’m liking this a lot.
Today is full of blessings in every way! Louise Ramsay posted this on FB a very nice beaver program from radio 4. There are some irritating parts but stay patient because it gets very good. I especially find it kind of wonderful to hear how happily the reporter describes their return. Enjoy!
It’s interesting to me that a sixth of respondents didn’t answer this question. It’s not like it was a factual question they didn’t know the answer to. Maybe it was at the end of a page? Maybe it was confusing for some reason? Obviously the cruel stats teacher in my mind would insist the question be discarded or that incomplete surveys not be included in the results.
Now onto the story from EPIC, which stands for Environmental Protection Information Center. See if you can spot possibly my subtle influence.
ssionally they’ll put a dam where it starts to flood something that people have gotten attached to whether it’s a hay field or wintering areas that’s close to a creek. If a beaver dam is flooding your property, then chances are a flood will be flooding it pretty soon. Beavers are giving fair warning that you build your structures close to the creek.”
