Tag: Flow Device

Live Free or Kill a Beaver!

State removing ‘nuisance’ beavers near Exeter dam

(Translation: ‘Nuisance beaver’ = Beaver).

EXETER — The state has hired a wildlife control operator who began trapping a group of beavers that built a dam off Brentwood Road and caused water from Little River to spill onto nearby properties, according to town and state officials.

Town officials asked for the state’s help in dealing with the beavers as Brentwood Road/Route 111A is a state road. If the town had to pay to have the beavers trapped, it could have cost as much as $3,000, Town Manager Russ Dean said.

Neighbors have complained about the flooding since they noticed the waters of Little River rising. In a letter sent to town officials in November when the problem first began, Dr. Thomas Oxnard, a Greenleaf Drive resident, said the water level “has been approaching the road for the last few years.”

The dam is in the woods across from Greenleaf Drive.

“In the past, heavy rain storms have flooded over the road and at times closed the road to traffic,” Oxnard wrote. “I fear this will happen again.”

He also noted the beaver dam has caused large areas of “standing water on both sides of the road and the woods.”

I know it is uncharitable of me to refer to concerned citizens of the Granite State as “Whining” but I can’t help it. This postage stamp of a state is surrounded on all sides by beaver experts who could fix that flooding with a flow device in less time than it takes to wash the license plates where their snappy motto appears. (Did you know, in 1971 the legislature mandated that ‘Live Free or Die’ would replace the boring old motto SCENIC – which explains a lot.) If you lived in New Hampshire you could barely walk out your door or swing a dead cat without hitting someone who knows how to handle this problem much smarter. Vermont fits together snugly with the state like horses stand nose to tail, or some other well-known numerical positions. Skip Lisle, the inventor of the beaver deceiver, with more than 30 years of expertise in this area is 122 miles a way and could fix this problem in his sleep.

(For problem-solving comparisons: Martinez brought Skip 3000 miles to handle our flooding concerns. New Hampshire can’t stroll across the dam state line to find answers?)

More than 90 percent of the time, trappers set up the traps to kill the beavers, Tate said. “In my experience there’s no sense relocating them because they just cause problems somewhere else,” he said.

Exeter Highway Superintendent Jay Perkins said it’s far from unusual for beavers to cause problems by damming up a stream or a river. “It’s New England,” he said.

Tate said despite efforts to address the Exeter situation, the problem statewide is not going to go away. “Beaver nuisance situations have been occurring since the presence of beavers,” Tate said. “They’ve always been present in New Hampshire and they’ve always caused problems.”

Yes beavers have always caused problems. Except for the during friggin’ fur trade when they made the greedy bastards come here in the first place. Honestly, this story just steams my cup. The reporter’s name for this story happens to be Jeff McMenemy. Which I can really, really believe.

He’s certainly no McFriend of beavers.

acorn — Photo: Skip Lisle installs “Castor Master” in Martinez CA 2008
Graphic: Schematic Drawing from Mike Callahan’s Flexible Leveler.

Montana goes with the Flow Device!

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, featured, Podcast May 7, 2013

Dam pipes save beavers and ditches

Last Sunday, a handful of people started removing part of a beaver dam from a ditch near Four Corners. But they didn’t destroy the dam. Instead, they took a notch out of the middle and inserted a large plastic pipe, which has restored the water flow down the ditch to the Gallatin River but leaves enough water for beavers to swim in.

“The normal practice is to blow up dams, but even after you do, the beavers come back,” said landowner Bob Judd.

That’s a landowner from Montana, where beaver advocacy isn’t exactly a regular occurrence. In fact the first 5 comments I read on the article were excitedly saying how much beavers needed killing. Never mind. There are clearly some forward thinkers in the state.

Fortunately for the animals, the ditch passes through the property of Judd and his wife, Kathryn Kelly, who wanted to keep the beavers around. The beaver dam has created wetlands on their 500-acre property that animals and birds are flocking to, Kelly said. Plus the standing water helps maintain groundwater levels and provides safe habitat for young trout.

So this winter, Kelly proposed the plastic pipe solution to the ditch company board. She spoke from experience. Last summer, she and Judd spent time in Maine observing beaver guru Skip Lisle of Vermont install flow devices to counteract beaver dams. Such devices have been used on the East Coast for about 25 years.

Skip! Nice to see your excellent work literally stretches from coast to coast! Well, lots of folks saw his handiwork in Martinez too! I love when good news about beavers gets broadcast to a new audience. We just need some newbies in the installation biz. The next generation who will allow cities to live with beaver for the next 50 years. Any hope on that front?

Beavers naturally repair any holes in their dams or lodges, so if people tear them down, the animals will return to rebuild. Similarly if a simple pipe is stuck through the dam, beavers will find it and plug it, said Amy Chadwick, a pupil of Lisle who works at Great West Engineering and designed the flow device.

But if the pipe end extends 15 feet or farther upstream from the dam and is surrounded by a wire cage, the beavers don’t know to plug it and couldn’t if they tried. Sometimes, such pipe structures are called “beaver deceivers,” although Chadwick said that name technically applies only to pipes going through culverts or ditches, per inventor Skip Lisle’s definition.

On Sunday, Chadwick joined Jeff Burrell of the Wildlife Conservation Society to help Judd and Kelly install their pipe. Each device has to be tailored to the specific dam, so it’s best to get an expert opinion.

Amy! Not sure whether pupil just means ‘I read about what Skip does’ or actually worked with him….but yesterday when I excitedly wrote her congratulations she wrote back anxiously saying that Skip might get annoyed because she was misquoted calling the pipe a beaver deceiver. Hahaha! She MUST have worked with Skip directly, I decided, because much like Adam himself, he is very concerned these things get the right names.

Amy introduced herself at the beaver conference this year after I presented, so we’re going to need to remember this name. And in the meantime celebrate a new flow device in Montana. It’s success is sure to change hearts and minds, which will definitely change the lives of beavers and the many species who depend on them.

Speaking of which, I just got an email this morning from a research assistant of Glynnis Hood working with her to show the cost effectiveness of flow devices. She wanted names of everyone who does this work so (in addition to many others) of course I introduced them to Amy! ________________________________________________________

No kit sighting last night. Cheryl was in attendance and her patience was rewarded only with a tail slap. We’ll be back again tonight, because tiny beavers deserve a photo shoot!

Saving Descendents?

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions February 1, 2013

Looks like two neighboring beaver colonies will have flow devices installed to mitigate their ponding behavior. One on city land and one on private land. Since they are fairly close (as the beaver swims) I’d like to imagine they’re some of the seven yearlings we sent safely off into the world in the last 5 years, spreading beaver goodness along the Carquinez strait from Martinez. Only DNA testing would tell us for sure, but even if they’re not related, we know that their safety is directly related to the highly visible success of the home town of John Muir.

Back when our beavers were in danger, there were two pages about flow devices on the entire internet. One yellow information sheet from Beavers Wetlands and Wildlife, and one fact sheet on limitors from the Haw River Assembly in North Carolina. Now if you google flow devices, the entry on Wikipedia is the first thing to come up. It was written by our friend Rick and featuring photos from Mike Callahan of Beaver Solutions.

Good fortune means that Michael Callahan will be in the area to arrange at least one sight inspection, maybe two, on his way to meet the good folks of Worth A Dam and tour our beaver ponds. Hopefully we’ll even see one of our elusive beavers, though in winter nothing is predictable.

Flow device for castoroides?

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental September 27, 2012

Sometimes, as the only beaver-reviewer in the nation, hemisphere, or possibly world, I am confused by stories about cities managing beaver problems in one way or another. Sometimes it is clear that they are doing a willfully misinformed job and blaming nature for man’s mistakes. Sometimes their stories stir the heartstrings and inspire you with their pragmatic compassion.

But sometimes, I’m torn, frozen mid-sentence between ‘hurray’ and ‘WTF’ with jaw dropping confusion about whether to describe the event as a gallant but woefully misinformed try, or a deliberate effort to fail on a visibly massive scale on purpose so that folks stop talking about flow devices once and for all.

Once, a million years ago, when I worked at daycare we needed new sand for the play structure in the backyard. Since we were poor as church mice we had the delivery truck drop the sand in the parking lot and employed the 45 children with buckets and shovels to haul it in the back. The cheerful work scene that followed could have had a ‘snow white and the seven dwarfs’ sound track – that is until we noticed young Dylan.

He wasn’t carrying a bucket or a pot like the other children, (marching like mickey with two pails in the sorcerer’s apprentice,) but rather an alarmingly small plastic teacup barely full of sand.

“Dylan! Have you been carrying sand in that cup the whole time?” (We exclaimed and he soberly nodded) “How many trips have you made with that?”

“Seventeen.”

Which is exactly how I felt when I saw this picture of them re-installing the flow device in Grand Tetons National Park in Wyoming.

Mind you it wasn’t that Doran (Wyoming) wasn’t trying. Dylan made seventeen trips to the parking lot with the other children. And Wyoming tried to use a flow device instead of killing beavers. So hurray for effort. But I know that in addition to my email (which contained a link to Sherri Tippie’s book and Mike Callahan’s DVD), Sharon Brown of Beavers: Wetlands & Wildlife personally contacted them as did Mike Callahan of beaver solutions. Maybe folks in Wyoming don’t much cotton to advice from city dwellers in blue states such as California, New York or Massachusetts. As you can see from this photo the re-installation of this flow device required at least six men, a double tube of thirty foot piping and a crane.

They did install a fence around the pipe this time, which is good. But check out how small that mesh is on the wire and tell me again why the beavers won’t use it as a basis for ‘mud lathe and plaster’ treatment?

Oh and the article also says “beavers have been known to raise pipes to render flow devices ineffective”, to which even I, (who irrationally believe beavers are brilliant and wonderful in every possible way), would have to say ‘WTF’ and question the notion that beaver physical knowledge extends to the principal of osmosis inside of a curving opaque PVC pipe. Is it possible that high flow moved the pipes in those instances where it actually happened? Pipes do float and that’s why Mike and Skip tie concrete blocks and drill holes along the bottom. If you listened to experts you’d know that.

She says signs will be put up at the beaver pond to explain how this system works. “We’re trying to find that nice balance to protect the park road but also protect the beavers, our number one priority.

Have I become too cynical for this work? Do I suffer from credulity fatigue? If beavers are really your number one priority and you really, really want this installation to work, why aren’t you using proven tools that have worked for 20 years? Why would you install at 2 inch mesh filter? It can’t be that you were trying to save money by using what you had on hand because obviously the six men and the crane cost a pretty penny. How on earth do you get such massive media attention for what is basically a many-thousand dollar example of a man refusing to pull the car over and ask for directions?

Hrmph.

Now here is something AMAZING from our friend in New Hampshire to rinse with.

Guess who came to dinner last night?

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, kits, New Species September 3, 2010

Don’t worry. Baby beavers weren’t on the menu. But carp, minnows, perch and crayfish beware! There’s an otter in town. Two at least, because Moses filmed a huge one just a few days ago and now look!

This was a little fella, long and sleek and fast. Cheryl and Jon dashed about looking for the right place to photograph as he selected the choices spots to fish. He didn’t use the gap to cross the dam (otters hate to be predictable). He crossed on the bank farthest from the street.

Our beaver pond is a haven for fish eaters. The irresistible temptation to fish that captures the fancys of teens who should know better, is even more powerful for Otters. They have nothing but success in those crowded waters, making it worth risking some human contact. He even followed a few fast fish into the round-fence filter for the flow device! I sent this picture to Skip who was very excited about the prospect of being able to demonstrate that 6×6 wire allows wildlife access to the area! He thought the filter needed a loving touch up though, and asked if he should come out before the next storm?

After the otter cleared away, the main feature came out to play. GQ came upstream with three kits in tow looking lovely. All in all it was a pretty exciting evening. What are you doing this weekend?