Cinderella story: Otters & Beavers

heidi08 Beavers April 5, 2015

Bay Area river otters make a comeback

Our friends at the River Otter Ecology Project get a fitting tribute to their hard work and recent publication. Congratulations for making an important difference! They are proud to welcome otter presence back to eight of the nine bay area counties. Since otters are no doubt there because of the recovering fish population and cleaner water, it’s something we should ALL be happy about. We’ve watched ROEP grow from a hint of an idea, to a plan and into a massive success and I couldn’t be happier for them! They are this year’s winner for the John Muir non-profit of the year conservation award, and have always been grand beaver supporters of our efforts and happy to cross pollinate. Check out their new publication and enjoy the recovery for yourself.

I have to admit though, despite all good intentions, when I consider the charmed life otters lead, with their cheerful beloved antics and their lithe fish-eating ways, I can’t help getting jealous. No city ever makes a decision to kill otters and no one gets mad at them for flooding roads or blocking culverts. In California the otter’s biggest threat is accidental trapping if it wanders into a conibear set for a beaver on purpose. Otters rarely get mistakenly attributed in photographs, and people don’t call them pests. Their comeback inspires a ticker-tape parade, and beavers are greeted with pitchforks and torches. It can feel like beavers are the red-headed step child of the aquatic mammal world. And for that matter, why didn’t our three beaver prevalence papers make the news? The three were monumentally hard work overturning 70 years of thought!

And then I read this:

“…we strongly recommend attention to their potential role as a keystone species in the San Francisco Bay Area”

Could that be true? I knew of course that sea otters were a keystone species, because of their diet of sea urchins, which otherwise deplete kelp forests, where so much sea life lives. But river otters? Was nothing sacred? Would there be otter keystone charm bracelets next? I went searching around for clues and found this from our old friend Steve Boyle saying it has to do with the role of nutrient exchange:

The river otter has been termed a keystone species because of its role in nutrient transport between aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, and a sentinel species because of its sensitivity toenvironmental contaminants and other disturbances (Bowyer et al. 2003). As such, river otter presence

should be considered an important element in aquatic and riparian ecosystem health in Region 2 habitats potentially suitable for river otters. The existing and additional management efforts described below should help to make river otter populations across Region 2 more widespread and secure.

Oh alright then. Otter poop it is. (Snark Alert: Can’t really imagine what that bracelet would look like?) I hrmphed off to Rickipedia who reminded me not to worry because the thing that makes beavers wondrous is that in addition to being a keystone species they’re also ecosystem engineers. Which is much, much rarer.

So I think it’s time for new graphics, don’t you?

Ecosystem Engineer

Now here’s something entirely positive about beavers, Peter Smith’s discussion of their Economic Impact at the recent Scottish Beaver Conference.

And of course, this!

Visitors & Casualties

heidi08 City Reports, Educational, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Who's Killing Beavers Now?, Who's saving beavers now? November 8, 2014

Last night’s visitors from San Francisco were 30 high school students with backpacks and notebooks who came to see the beavers.They were accompanied by their energetic and fearless teacher/handler Catherine Salvin. I gave a little talk on the footbridge about beavers as ecosystem engineers and described their physical adaptions to life in the water. Then Jon took them on a tour of the dam and up to ward street to look for the kit. On the way she made sure they sketched the dam, the flow device, and the chewed trees.

There were some great questions, some appreciative listeners and a few who predictably couldn’t have been more bored. They had read the New York Times article beforehand, and were fairly schooled in the basic story. (Someone couldn’t exactly remember the word and said they were ecosystem technicians, which I loved.) I’m happy to say that not one student thought beavers eat fish or live in the dam. That’s Catherine right front below.

After their tour our smaller yearling made several appearances, swimming obligingly and foraging for them to watch. When it first emerged 30 noisy bodies trampled for a closer look and it dove immediately. I was surprised how quickly they learned to watch silently so they could see and sketch the beaver at leisure. A second beaver appeared later on and a great egret fished ostentatiously at the bridge during the quiet moments.

All in all it was a good night, for beavers, for ecological education and for Martinez. Thanks WALC!

This morning I heard from Robin that the second wave of depredation permits for beavers (the not-computerized ones that had to be scanned by hand) had arrived. She wrote,

“Yes, we have Region 4 well represented with counties Kern, Fresno, San Luis Obispo, Madera. Also Region 6 with Mono county. Nothing in the Southern coastal region- Los Angeles to San Diego.”

What does this mean? 4 – Central Region Serving Fresno, Kern, Kings, Madera, Mariposa, Merced, Monterey, San Benito, San Luis Obispo, Stanislaus, Tulare and Tuolumne counties. Region 6 Serving Imperial, Inyo, Mono, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. That means permission to kill the water-savers in the driest regions of the state. Robin will generously donate her weekend to get the stats together. But she can’t possibly go fast enough for me.

I recently was talking to a reporter from the guardian about depredation in California, and she wanted to know if the numbers were going up or down. I realized we couldn’t know for sure, but might glean something from earlier records. I don’t have access to earlier depredation permits, but I do have the stats from a FOIA request by reporter Thomas Knudson on beavers killed by the USDA in 2010. Comparing the two is kind of like apples and oranges, because one is ‘permission given’ and the other is actual beavers killed, and just because a permit is issued the beavers could be killed by someone else and never wind up in the USDA stats. Think of it like “All mothers are women” but “not all women are mothers” grouping problem. Remember the column on the left is the actual number of beavers killed by USDA. And the column on the right is the number of depredation permits issued (which might valid for an unlimited number of beavers).

However you slice it, we still have our grim winner:

So Placer county is still the leading beaver killer in the entire state. No surprise there. Even more interesting to me is second place. USDA killed 108 beavers in Colusa County in 2010. But in 2013 the entire county got only got 4 permits. What gives? Did they suddenly have a change of heart and think that killing beavers was wrong? No indeed. Those 4 permits were issued for the incredible number of 94 beavers PLUS one unlimited wildcard of dead beavers. And they were all awarded to USDA. Let’s assume that those US killers are good at their job and always get their beaver. 94 + X (make that at least least 10 probably a lot more) and that puts them right back in their number 2 spot.

Some things never change.

Beavers are SO cool

heidi08 Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, Video July 30, 2014

Last night was one of the best beaver nights I ever filmed. My fingers are literally aching to make a movie, but there is too much to finish before Saturday. Humor me and play the soundtrack while you watch the clips. Its practically required.

Last night we came to the secondary dam and saw a fairly large breech from the tide, the entire secondary pond was down by a few inches. The beavers were sleeping above the primary dam upstream 150 feet away from the break. I’ve seen their wake up routine a million times but I’ve never seen this.

As soon as they got up a yearling came straight down to see what the problem was, noticed a new snag exposed by water loss on the way, swam to the dam and started putting mud on the hole.

Don’t believe that beavers can remember what their pond looks like both on top of and under the water? Check out this double take.

Now Heidi, maybe you’re saying, don’t anthropomorphize this. Maybe he thought it was food. Maybe he was checking to see if was another beaver’s dam. Maybe it was a fluke.

Fluke? Here’s Dad with kit 5 minutes later.

And another double take.

(It’s funny because we have particular sticks we watch to see if the water is higher or lower, and now it really seemed like they did too! “Oh that’s exposed? We’ve really got a problem”Then Mom Dad and new kit came out of the lodge and made a bee line for the damage. Remember, in winter when all kinds of debris float downstream, we get to see beavers swim past new branches that were never there before. They are sometimes idly curious about them, or snuffle to see what’s good to eat. That’s not what was happening.They were seeing a log above water that used to be submerged.

It was never so clear to me that it’s not just running water that triggers beavers working, they obviously have some other cues, like maybe the opening to the lodge being uncovered, or the drop down from one pond to the next – they know how deep the pond should be and what and what snags belong where.

They must.

The extremely hard work paid off and the whole was quickly patched. Mom and Dad did several applications, a yearling pitched in and even our newest kits sat in the middle and pretended to help.

All of which reminded us, as if we needed to be reminded at all, that

BEAVERS ARE COOL.

Yesterday the Huffington Post, The Nation and Mother Jones decided to play our song.

The Original Geo-Engineers

During a long career with the Bureau of Land Management, Sage Sorenson saw firsthand how beavers created rich green habitat out of overgrazed and burned-over land. Now retired, he calls himself a “beaver believer” and devotes his days to monitoring and protecting scattered “remnant” beaver colonies in our region. Quietly but persistently, he advocates for their reintroduction onto stressed landscapes that need their services.

Beavers are the original geo-engineers. It’s no exaggeration to credit them for their major role in building the North American landscape. In pre-colonial times, there were as many as 400 million of them. They used their big buckteeth and tough paddle-tails to build dams across every stream imaginable, spreading water to a Noah’s Ark-worth of creatures that thrive in the wet habitats they create. Now, of course, they are mostly long gone from the land, and conservationists want them back.

Go read the entire article. It’s awesome, and share with everyone you can possibly think of. Then comment so that everyone knows beavers generate attention and let’s hope Chip Ward writes me back and supports the beaver festival.

Oh, and always remember whatever happens, we loved beavers LONG before they were ‘trendy’. (Sheesh.)

Will introducing beavers onto wounded watersheds save the world? The answer is: yes. That and all the other acts of restoration, protection, and restraint, small and large, individual and collective, taken together over time. Sure, it’s not the same as the US taxing carbon or China abandoning coal. Restoring a watershed doesn’t curb the corporations that reduce communities to commodities. But in addition to the global goals we support, our responses to ecological crisis must be grounded in the places where we live, especially in the watersheds that nourish our bodies.

Rewilding tattered land is holistic because it sees and honors connectivity. It trades hubris for humility by acknowledging complexity and limitations. Its ultimate goal is landscape health and resilience, not the well-being of a small handful of stakeholders.

If we want to construct a healthy and resilient world for ourselves and our fellow creatures, we could do worse than look to the lowly beavers for hints on how it can be done. They build a vibrant world for themselves and so many others by weaving one small limb into another, stick by stick by stick.