Detroit Beavers – Worth A Dam

Nature in the City Everywhere.

heidi08 Beaver-themed merchandise, Beavers, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental, Urban beavers, Who's saving beavers now? February 4, 2016

The grand plan in Vancouver is sweeping the media at the moment and there are plenty of follow ups to the story if you want to see them. Try here and here.

Yesterday I was contacted by a member of the Grosse Ille Nature and Land Conservancy about the beavers in the Detroit River. She was very happy about what the return meant, and wanted to pull together some advocates to keep things headed in the right direction. The funny thing was, I remembered writing about this back in 2012 and saying: sure they’re happy now, but wait until those beavers start chewing trees of blocking culverts.

Beavers: marginally better than pollution!

Ahhh how Nice. Okay, mark your calendars and set your clocks, because as encouraging as this article is I predict it will be a matter of months before we start reading stories about neighborhoods with blocked culverts and chopped trees. Folks are excited when beavers come BACK to an area because they assume it means they did very good things to make it possible. Hughlet Hornbeck once explained to me that the beavers coming back to Alhambra Creek was proof that EBRP had been doing the right thing for 50 years, for example.

Then industrial pollution in the mid-20th Century made the Detroit River too toxic for beaver and many other species to return. The cleanup of the river in recent decades has seen many species making a comeback.

“This is one piece of evidence,” Hartig said of the latest beaver sighting. “But if you add in there the return of lake sturgeon, the return of lake whitefish, the return of walleye, the return of bald eagles, peregrine falcons, osprey, beaver, wild celery, it’s one of the most dramatic ecological recovery stories in North America.”

Beavers are still exciting enough along the Detroit River that the reporter does an excellent job researching their history and providing context.. Enjoy it while it lasts though, because in the blink of an eye they’ll be reporting that gangs of four foot tall beavers cut down all the trees and caused tularemia.

So it’s been three years and its time for folks to get worried about their challenging handiwork, I’m glad friends are starting to get ready for an argument. We of course will help any way we can.

Speaking of helping, I got these fun photos from the Mountain House beavers in CA, and will be working with a supporter to help her put together a beaver article for the local paper. How cool are these photos for thinking about urban beaver!

mountain house lodge — **Mountain House Beaver Lodge: Caitlin McCombs**

And this fine example of dam building with reeds. You see beavers use material on hand.

mountain house dam — **Mountain House Dam of mostly reeds: Caitlin McComb**

Yesterday I learned that the city’s primary concern is that they believe the beavers are digging tunnels under the road. The city has already filled some with concrete. For the life of me I can’t think of any reason a beaver would do THAT, so I’m guessing this story is about to get very interesting!

New donation yesterday for the silent auction from Mink Works, by animator and Illustrator Marielle Rousseau of New York. How adorable is this? I ask you honestly. Go check out all her stuff. It’s delightful and she’s a self-professed wildlife lover in addition to being a real talent,

Happy to see beavers…

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports June 3, 2012

Belle Isle park staffers say beavers have returned after 100 years

By Christine MacDonald The Detroit News

Beavers are back after an absence of about 100 years, and experts say they’re another sign the Detroit River is coming back.

Park officials discovered the animals’ dens and tell-tale tooth-marked tree stumps in February in the island’s forest-covered canals. But it wasn’t until last week, when a park visitor snapped a cell phone photo of a beaver swimming in the Blue Heron Lagoon, that staffers were convinced.

They believe three beavers are living on the island.

“It’s pretty awesome,” said Keith Flournoy, Belle Isle park manager, after pulling away brush last week to show off one of the dens under a fallen tree. “This is a boost. It’s great to see the animal come back.”

First General Motors and now beavers back in Detroit! This IS good news! Remember we read about beavers at Edison powerplant on the Detroit River in February of 2009. Looking back on the column I wrote when I was just learning about beaver misrepresentations I can see I wasn’t hopeful about their future at the time. I’m happy to see that they swam into good hands. The original report was from Connors Creek, 27 miles away, so about dispersal range. Belle Island is a big, tree covered, wildly perfect place for them to be. Bigger than central park and located between Michigan and Canada. Click on the photo for a great video from the Belle Island Conservancy.

Apparently people have been reporting beaver for years but no one on staff believed it until someone snapped a cell phone shot and they started looking for felled trees. I’m not sure why they’d assume they DON’T have beavers since they are basically across the stream from Toronto. Now they say they are finding ‘dens’ and think three beaver are on the island. I have to admit I am not so sure of their naturalist acumen after reading this…

Only beavers and porcupine cut down trees in the same style, said Richard Kik, a zoo keeper at the Belle Isle Nature Zoo.

Porcupines? The Zoo keeper at the Belle Island Nature Zoo thinks porcupines cut down trees? I can only hope that was a reporter miscommunication or a typo or something. Otherwise I’m very, very worried about the fate of the animals in your care. Do you also thinks beavers eat fish and penguins fly? To be clear, porcupines DO strip bark from trees and eat little branches near the tops. Is that what you mean? But they do not do this…

There is only one animal that does that. And it isn’t pointy.

Well, I’m choosing to be cautiously opptomistic that Belle Island is so enthusiastic at the moment, but I think I’ll just drop them a ‘beaver information care basket’ just in case. In the meantime we should all just enjoy what it’s like when folks enjoy beavers and take them as the watershed compliment that they truly are.

The Tripple Tell…

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere February 21, 2009

After reading over yesterday’s Detroit news a few times, I started to get a familiar and uneasy feeling. Sure Edison is happy about their “single” beaver now, but what happens next? I find it very unlikely that a lone beaver would even build a lodge. I also find it unlikely that a beaver, who can effortlessly travel for miles, would move because the few trees near the lodge are gone. And, most ominously, as the wife and daughter of river-based power plant operators, I find it a little unlikely that down the road Edison’s only reaction to this beaver will be filial.

It got me thinking about the different layers of civic manipulation “the powers that be” use to manage public opinion about beavers. I had thought they were unique to Martinez, but after reading two years worth of reporting on the issue, I can see there’s a handbook somewhere, (or at least a shared instinct pool). Castor Machiavelli? I assume you’re all familiar with what they call in Poker a “tell“. Well, this is a three-piece “Tell” and I would bet that whenever you see these three in action the colony is headed for trouble.

Part 1: Secrecy

In yesterday’s article the power plant made the decision not to disclose where the beaver was even though it is a secured location. The city manager in Robeson Pennsylvania didn’t want to “give away the beavers location” and cause a media circus. Same for the beavers in Devon apparently swimming the Tamar. This is no accident. Keeping the beavers out of the public eye is essential to their speedy dispatch. In the over 50 beaver cases I’ve been involved with since this started, public awareness was the number one way to keep them from being killed once their behavior becomes inconvenient.

Part 2: Failure to Acknowledge Family Structure

These articles often cite “one beaver” or a “bachelor beaver” or even a “rogue beaver”. There is rarely a discussion of parenting or kits, (unless its a discussion of imminent overpopulation). Remember the “bachelor beaver” trapped in Oregon that turned out to leave a family of five or six behind him? Denying the huge and charismatic social structure of beaver family life makes them easier to deal with. We all understand that “young men living on their own can run into trouble”, but no one wants a family with small children to suffer because “Daddy was killed”. Beaver problems are treated in singular terms in order to make it easier to manage public opinion when their behavior inevitably becomes inconvenient

Part 3: Impending Departure

Martinez should certainly recognize this one. The article quotes “reliable” sources saying that “the beavers have used up their food supply and will move any day now.” This is what expert Mary Tappel told our city council nearly a year ago (although the beavers apparently didn’t get the memo.) The message is that the community should expect the beavers to leave, so any action taken that subsequently encourages the beavers to leave (oh say scapping away their food or hammering sheetpile through their lodge) is not really significant because they were going to leave anyway. This sets up a conditions where problems can be quietly managed out of the public eye when their behavior becomes (you know) inconvenient.

******************************************************************************************************************

And there you have it! Hours of Exhaustive research on the “Trifecta Tell” for your disposal. I’m not going to include SSS here (Suspect Salmon Sympathies) because I think that falls into a different catagory. That is stage two of beaver public opinion management, when the cat’s definitely out of the bag and the reporter is asking you about your concern for wildlife while the cameras role. This is clearly the initial assault. To cross validate my findings, I suggest you all make little tic marks on your newspapers the next time you read an article about beavers.

If you get all the way to three strikes those beavers may soon be outtttttttttttttttttt.