Tag: Elissa Chott

A STITCH IN TIME SAVES BEAVERS

I just found out that our yearly trip to the ocean is cancelled this year thanks to Covid. That is pretty rotten and you may have to deal with a little more snark than usual for a long while. In the mean time I will comfort myself with the fine internship program offered in Montana.

Interning in Conflict Resolution: How do we co-exist with our wildlife neighbors

Beavers were once widespread in North America, with it estimated that 6 million thrived in our waterways before being trapped to near extinction in the 1800s. Unfortunately, removing beavers also removed their beneficial ecological impact, which includes cooler streams, greater habitat complexity, and increased biodiversity.

The same behaviors, such as felling trees and flooding sections of streams, that have huge ecological benefits can also conflict with the goals of landowners by threatening public safety and livelihoods. Without effective means of addressing these conflicts, landowners may perceive beaver presence as a threat and choose to lethally trap beavers to prevent future damage, even in cases where no current damage is occurring.

I like how the good things beavers do is so closely knitted to a description of the problems they cause. One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor, so to speak.

To gain the benefits of beaver activities throughout our watersheds, the National Wildlife Federation and the Clark Fork Coalition have partnered to support a pilot project focused on resolving these conflicts. As a Conflict Resolution Intern with the National Wildlife Federation, I was able to support the newly hired Conflict Resolution Beaver Tech, Elissa Chott, in a pilot project to build more acceptance for these crucial ecosystem engineers by effectively resolving the conflicts between their activities and the values of landowners.

Our main activities involved contacting landowners who have current conflicts, learning about their challenges, and installing a variety of technical solutions to address the threats posed by beaver activity. These solutions included tree fencing, pond levelers, beaver deceivers, and a variety of beaver fencing to prevent the damming of culverts or other pinch points along waterways. These technical solutions generally fall into two categories; preventing the felling of trees or preventing flooding.

Oh I wish there were beaver interns all across the land. This is the kind of pilot project that should be picked up by every governor and fire department across the nation.

These simple tools use our knowledge of beaver behavior to deter their activities in specific places where those activities are undesirable. Beaver deceivers, for example, enclose a drainage source for flooded ponds such that beavers cannot feel nor hear the running water. Without this sensory stimulus of a leak, the pond can be drained to a tolerable height without the beavers responding with additional damming activity.

Techniques to prevent tree felling and flooding were implemented at a variety of highly visible public and private locations and coupled with informational materials to build understanding in our communities around the ways we can co-exist with beaver. Through this pilot project, it has been a privilege to not only put these techniques into action, but to demonstrate the potential benefits of this program as it continues to refine and expand this approach to human-wildlife conflict.

Great work Elissa! And all her helpers! Take of the beavers and the beavers will take care of you. Just in case that isn’t motivation enough, here is some footage from our new friend at Suisun Wildlife.

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BEAVER HEROES AND BEAVER DETECTIVES

heidi08 Beavers June 27, 2020

Saturday morning, up at dawn. This should be beaver festival day. I should be hardly able to sleep. Not having coffee because there isn’t time. Getting the parking signs into the car to drop off. Instead I am listening to the crazy robin in my backyard who has routinely wakened me since April.

There will be no beaver festival this yearf Vide

Needing distraction I tried out a new toy, the free trial of VideoScribe, a whiteboard animation program from the UK. I think it will not be my new best friend, but it was fun to play with for a day. See for yourself.

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Meanwhile there was excellent news from the National Wildlife Federation Blog. And one of my favorite finds, a beaver imposter in the video. See if you can spot him!

Make Way for Beavers

Project lead Elissa Chott (Clark Fork Coalition) discusses installation with Park Manager Mike Kustudia. Photo by Sarah Bates

Enthusiasm for beavers and their role as ecopartners is growing! Why? They are nature’s original engineers, deftly creating new riparian habitat and healthy streams. But sometimes beavers need a little redirection, especially when their dams create flooding where we don’t want water, such as low-lying roadways or bridges.

To capitalize on beavers’ intuitive talents and to guide their good work in Council Grove State Park near Missoula, Montana, we recently collaborated with state wildlife managers and conservation partners to install a customized wire-frame structure to prevent beavers from damming a culvert under an access road. This allowed park managers and neighboring landowners to continue to reap the benefits of beavers who are busy in the area, and at the same time prevent beavers from flooding the park’s main access road.

Watch how we did it:

Excellent work, team beaver! I am SO happy when NWF invests time and energy and column space in beavers. But I’m not above giving them a hard time. Okay beaver detectives! Find that imposter!

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Got it? The first tiny nosed animal swimming back with some hard earned grasses in tow is a muskrat. Those would have to be grass blades from the pleisticine era. And that body is just wayyyyyyyyyyyyy to wiggly, even underwater, for a beaver.

Still credit where credit is due. We are always happy when people go out of their way to save beaver habitat. And lord knows the muskrats and the frogs and the herons are happy too. Great work team Clark Fork!

Park managers pound the corner posts to secure the culvert fence. Photo by Sarah Bates

Thanks to a collaborative partnership between the Clark Fork Coalition, National Wildlife Federation, and Defenders of Wildlife, expert assistance is now available to public and private landowners seeking non-lethal approaches to manage beaver activity.

Together we can build greater tolerance for beavers on our landscape by reducing beaver conflicts and increasing awareness of the many benefits of beaver activity.

Thanks to Britt Faulkner (Defenders of Wildlife) for creating this video for our project team!

Yes thanks Britt for giving us a pleasant diversion on a wistful morning. Let’s try this whole thing again next year. And see if beavers are not pushed off the stage by viruses yet again.

Fingers crossed.

12th Martinez Beaver Festival 2019. Photo by Cheryl Reynolds 6/29/19.

“LEAVING HEALTHIER, MORE RESILIENT HABITATS IN THEIR WAKE”

heidi08 Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Fire Prevention May 28, 2020

Feeling nostalgic? Time again for that age-old question, this time delivered by the big guns at the National Resources Defense Council. Same tune but different baritone. We’re ready for this. The planet is ready for this.

The Humble Beaver: Troublemaker or Climate Superhero?

Beavers create rich habitats and act as buffers against the effects of drought and wildfire—spurring efforts to pinpoint new ways to help us coexist with North America’s largest rodent.

At one point along the road that runs parallel to Lost Creek is a culvert that drains runoff from the mountainous terrain. There, beavers felled nearby aspen and other trees and set about constructing a dam in front of the culvert. With the pipe blocked, the water level behind the dam rose. “They have made these really beautiful ponds on one side of the road,” says beaver expert Elissa Chott. The deep water ensures the entrance tunnels leading to the beaver lodge—built of sticks, mud, and rocks—remain beneath the surface, providing protection from predators. And the large expanse of water offers easy access to the fresh leaves, stems, and bark that the vegetarians consume.

But what the beavers considered as the perfect place to build a home, the land managers at Lost Creek considered a nuisance. The rodents so effectively blocked the culvert that their ponds flooded the road. So the officials called Chott, who heads up the Beaver Conflict Resolution pilot project. A joint partnership formed last year between the Montana-based Clark Fork Coalition, National Wildlife Federation, and Defenders of Wildlife, the project aims to help public and private landowners find nonlethal solutions for dealing with problematic beaver.

There are ample reasons for people and North America’s largest rodent to learn to better coexist as these mammals rebound across the West. Beavers manipulate the landscape for their own purposes, but mounting evidence shows that the marshy expanses they create may act as a buffer against drought and wildfire, both of which climate change is exacerbating. Myriad other species benefit from the efforts of the industrious rodents too. Algae and aquatic plants thrive in their ponds and provide nourishment for fish, birds, and mammals. One study found 50 percent more species in beaver-built ponds than in other wetlands in the same area. When the beavers eventually exhaust their woody food supply, they move to a new location—but even then, the ecosystems they’ve engineered continue to give back. Their abandoned dams and ponds leak and drain, in turn giving rise to lush, grassy meadows that draw nesting songbirds and other animals.

Got that? AMPLE REASONS. Hurray for the beaver conflict resolution project. I wish ever state had a beaver task force! And here comes Emily.

Some of those benefits are still being revealed. Emily Fairfax, an ecohydrologist at California State University Channel Islands, has found that the clever creatures are creating wetlands uniquely resistant to drought and wildland fire. She has mapped an estimated 5,000 dams in California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming using satellite imagery. Using remote sensing, she compared how a drought or a fire affects the quality of the vegetation in areas with dams versus similar stretches without them. “It’s very clear that beavers keep things green,” she said. In contrast, in the undammed riparian zones she studied, the drought-ravaged landscapes had far less vegetation.

Fairfax is working to find ways to get higher-resolution imagery so she can tease apart what may make beaver-shaped landscapes better able to withstand the effects of climate change. Ultimately, she’d like to devise a tool for land managers to use when considering their resident rodents—an empirical model, perhaps, that would allow them to determine the number of beavers or dams needed to see an appreciable fire- or drought-buffering effect. After all, she notes, many land managers who encounter beavers are already searching for ways to help recharge groundwater and nurture native vegetation. But “because beavers were absent for so long, they don’t understand how the beavers fit into that [work].” As a result, they continue to resort to trapping or removing beavers, she says.

But “what if we could provide a number?” Fairfax asks. “If you could say that having X number of beavers is going to preserve 900 acres of wetlands during fire, and that should hold true for 70 percent of likely fires,” would that change attitudes toward beavers?

Oooh I know how many! As many as they dam well want! Beavers have a knack for this sort of thing. They know how many will fit in an area. Trust them.

Today, thankfully, conservationists no longer need to resort to such extreme measures as dropping beavers from the sky to help their populations recover. Instead, they’re watching the paddle-tailed architects slowly move back into the streams where their ancestors lived, carrying on the compulsion to stop the drip drip drip of gentle water flows, and leaving healthier, more resilient habitats in their wake.

Oooh that may be my favorite line in this whole article. Emily’s research is making peoples heads hurt. They want a buffer for fires so badly, but god dam does it HAVE to be beavers? Honestly? Anything but beavers. They haaaaaaaaaaaaaate beavers. I’ve always said it was like telling men you could cure impotence with feminism. Does ut gave to be beavers?

Yes. Yes it does.

OH SHEET, IT’S BACK AGAIN!

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver ecological impact, Flow Device Installed September 10, 2019

My goodness. They say when it rains it pour and boy-oh-boy they ain’t kidding, Yesterday a new Ben-terview dropped and the National Wildlife Federation posted another story about the Clark-fork coalition. I’m spoiled for choice, so I choose this. Almost entirely good news except for that one stupid part. See if you can spot it. Grr.

Good PR for Beavers

A pilot project in western Montana shows how people and beavers can coexist

Beaver dams hold water and recharge aquifers. They slow down water in small streams, which in turn reduces erosion, improves water quality, and helps expand riparian areas. Their ponds create diverse habitat to support fish, birds, amphibians, and mammals. As Montana and the West face a hotter and drier future, more beavers on our landscapes may be just what we need.

But beavers have a bad reputation for creating some problems for humans. Beavers mean trouble if they damage or cut down valuable landscape trees. If they dam culverts the resulting impounded waters can wash out a road, and if they block irrigation ditches the water can flood a farmer’s fields. What happens next is usually not good for the beavers, but trapping and killing nuisance beavers seldom provides permanent nor useful solutions. That’s why we believe there’s a better way.

The National Wildlife Federation and its partners, the Clark Fork Coalition and Defenders of Wildlife, recently launched a 6-month pilot project to test and demonstrate techniques that allow beavers to stay on the landscape while simultaneously solving the problems they can cause.

Oh this sounds good. Letting beaver stay on the landscape using actual techniques that solve the problem! I’m all ears!

The pilot project is run by Elissa Chott. As the new Beaver Technician at the Clark Fork Coalition, she brings years of experience addressing conflicts between bears and people. Elissa’s job is to find places where beavers are causing problems within the Clark Fork River Basin in western Montana. She works with landowners, county road crews, state parks and wildlife managers, and conservation partners to show how beaver damage can be minimized by installing a few simple devices.

Starting with one of the most basic nuisances that beavers are known for, the project aims to address the problem of beavers chewing through trees that provide a host of benefits to the land and communities. One solution is to wrap the trees with cylinders of heavy wire that beavers can’t chew through. This protects the trees and beavers turn to other vegetation for their food and building supplies.

Example of tree wrapping. Photo by Jay Sturger

Another common problem occurs when beavers dam a culvert, and the rising water floods or washes out a road. A solution to this is constructing a fence that prevents beavers from accessing the culvert; one version of this approach bears the trademarked name “Beaver Deceiver.” Beavers try to build dams wherever they sense running water, but if they can be kept far away from that stimulus, they don’t bother. A 40-50 foot-long fence constructed in front of a culvert’s upstream opening does the trick. The fence is shaped like a trapezoid, so even if beavers try to dam the fence near the culvert, the shape of the fence forces them further and further away from the sound of the water, until eventually they give up.

Elissa! Excellent to meet you! I can’t think of a more valuable resource than a beaver technician that teaches folks to solve problems! Except this makes me really queasy.

Beyond in-stream structures, researchers from Utah have been experimenting with simple white sheets or flags erected at a culvert to deter beavers. One enterprising Gallatin Valley farm family has even used an inflatable “scary clown” at a bridge where their otherwise-welcome beavers were blocking water and flooding their road. (“When the Beavers Met Bozo” is an amusing photo story, if not a definitive guide to controlling beaver activity.)

In addition to trying proven techniques that work, we thought we’d try made up ridiculous efforts that just look like we’re trying! I mean that 25,000 from USDA doesn’t last forever.

Seriously? Seriously? Just. Stop. It.

In addition to causing problems at manmade “pinch points” such as culverts and bridges, beaver ponds can overflow into farm fields or flood roads and other developed areas. In these cases, a device called a pond leveler can help. Pond levelers act like the overflow drain in a sink. A flexible pipe, submerged in the beaver pond drains the backed-up water to a desired height. The water is released on the downstream side of the beaver dam. The pipe’s intake is surrounded by a cylinder of wire fencing that keeps the beavers too far away to hear the water flowing into it, so they don’t try to fix the “leak.”

Here in Montana, Elissa Chott finds that, “Most landowners I’ve talked to are willing to live with beavers as long as they don’t cause a lot of damage or flooding.” Perhaps the chances are good that beavers will also become more accepted as ways to coexist are better understood.

Well that’s better. NO SHEETS, Why on earth do people think that something that frightens beavers for part of a single night is going to STOP them from doing work on their most important work every other night that follows?

If I live to be a thousand years old I will always, always HATE THE SHEET.

Now you’re all invited to a lovely audio Ben-terview which actually had some different kinds of questions. The audio’s not the best, but we learn the exciting tidbit that Ben recently got a dog, aptly named “Kit”. Awwww.