Tag: Frances Backhouse

Beaver Show and Tail

heidi08 Beaver Art, Beaver Behavior, Beaver Conference, Beavers, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and Ice, Beavers and Insects, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Who's saving beavers now? February 2, 2017

There is too much beaver news this morning. I feel like I’m struggling under a pile of important papers trying to get out. I will use the calendar as my only excavation tool, and start with what’s happening first. The other things can wait. Except for the serious cause for mocking, which obviously cannot be ignored.

Beaver Tales Art Exhibit: A Celebration of Beaver Art

2017 Beaver Tales Art Exhibit and Sale

The Wetlands Conservancy and partners invite you to see nearly 100 artists at six different venues throughout 2017. These shows will highlight the Beaver, our natural ally in conserving Oregon’s wetlands and restoring natural systems.

Beavers, though woefully misunderstood actually create and sustain wetlands that aid in resuscitating our riparian stream habitats. They play a central role in shaping our future as we prepare for the transformations that a warming and changing climate may bring. The Wetlands Conservancy is launching a statewide beaver conservation vision. Our goal is to learn more about how we can work with beaver to conserve and restore natural systems.

Join us on the dates and at the venues shown below to celebrate the beaver and understand the role and benefits wetlands play in Oregon and your community.

The show kicks off with a reading by Frances Backhouse of her great book, “Once they were hats” and then starts the exhibit with a month long display at Oregon State University before beginning a tour around the state. It is organized by the good folks who had me speak last year at their Wetlands event in Portland. I tried introducing the organizer (Sara Vickerman) to our beaver artist heroine with the Gallery in Concord (FRO Butler) but transportation was too difficult to figure out.

I do know there is one important kind of artwork that will be sorely absent in this show. Dam foolish oversight if you ask me.

From the sublime to the ridiculous. Here’s a grandpa in North Carolina who wonders if beavers are safe to be around children. No, seriously. Press the arrow at the bottom right to view larger.

Beaver invasion has Greensboro neighbors concerned

GREENSBORO, N.C. — When Steve Brown heard that beavers were living in a nearby creek, he couldn’t wait to show his grandkids.

“Beavers had come into the creek by the children’s playground and had built two dams. My first thought was that’s cool I’ll go and check it out and watch them,” Brown said. Then he had second thoughts.

“I got to thinking, it’s right next to the playground. Are beavers safe? Are they dangerous, especially around kids?”

An old snark like me would be tempted to say that his problem happened when he “started thinking“. Some people just shouldn’t be allowed to do that. But I will just post this instead so folks can see for themselves how dangerous beavers are around children.

North American Beaver Castor canadensis Children watching beaver in urban environment Martinez, CA *Model release available - #Martinezbeavers_1.2 — North American Beaver
Castor canadensis
Children watching beaver in urban environment
Martinez, CA
*Model release available – #Martinezbeavers_1.2

Beavers win all around!

heidi08 Beavers, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers August 25, 2016

A local paper wrote about my Placer presentation. Based on his questions, I was worried the article would be all about mosquitoes but it turned out okay

– Heidi Perryman, of non-profit, Martinez-based Worth A Dam, spoke in favor of beaver dams, saying that with techniques like beaver-proof culvert protectors, communities and the large, toothy rodent can live peacefully together. Jack Sanchez, founder of Save American River Salmon and Steelhead, went so far as to say in introducing Perryman that there would be no need for dams like Shasta if beaver dams were allowed to proliferate and store water. Martinez now has a Beaver Festival every August to celebrate how the community has learned to accept a beaver population. About seven beavers make Martinez their home, on average.

I’m certain I said nothing about culverts in my meager 15 minutes. He must have drawn on his own experience with beaver problems? But okay. The really exciting news is that someone from CDFG saw this post yesterday and wrote me about looking for folks interested in a beaver reintroduction program in the sierras and had some ideas about funding. I knew this was going to be a really popular idea with several major beaver players in the state so I sent out an email blast to make them aware. You won’t believe how quickly they responded. Fingers crossed the right folks will get together to get moving on this.

(Even though, based on the depredation permits we reviewed last year, they don’t need to relocate beavers so much as to just STOP TRAPPING the ones that are already there!)

Meanwhile TWO beaver books have been nominated for the “Lane Anderson award for Canadian science writing“. Both are good friends of this website and I could NOT be happier for them or for beavers.

Both are wonderfully rich and detailed works that taught even ME something new about beavers. Winners will be announced in late September. May the best beaver book win!

It’s obviously the year of the beaver for our northern cousins, and the mountie story is just icing on the cake. Here’s a nice interview with the pretty thoughtful man whose action inspired a nation!

I love the part about wanting to give back to nature.His impluse created such a stir it even made the weather channel. No really.

From hats to heroes

heidi08 Beaver-themed merchandise, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? November 28, 2015

Looks like Frances Backhouse book has hit the Canadian market in time for the holidays and is making quite an impression. I hope she sells many, many copies! I’m imagining Christmas morning all around the hemisphere is filled with happy fathers, grandmas, CEOS and science teachers reading about beavers over their morning coffee.

(Mind you, it would be great if she had a few extra copies lying around left over to donate to the silent auction at the beaver festival.)

Review: Frances Backhouse’s Once They Were Hats is fascinating and smartly written

Backhouse plots an absorbing itinerary that takes the reader on a tour of beaver habitats, as well as stops at a fast and furious Toronto fur auction and a visit to Smithbilt Hats, the legendary Calgary maker of western headwear. Among Smithbilt’s creations is the “Gus,” worn by Robert Duvall’s character in the series Lonesome Dove. Today, you can buy a wool version of the Gus from the company’s website for $110, but the highly prized, incomparably durable, full beaver model will run you $1,000. Sounds steep until you consider the guarantee that, “Once you get one, you’ll never need another.”

Most importantly, Backhouse identifies the beaver as a “keystone species.” By that definition, the beaver is “central to how a particular ecological community functions.” As such, its “effect on other animals and plants is disproportionately large.” Looking forward, the beaver’s positive impact on hydrology and water conservation could lessen the impact of drought caused by climate change. While not presented as a panacea, a strong case is made for how a “détente” between Homo sapiens and Castor canadensis can work to the benefit of both.

Hot dam! Beavers — extremely weird, and essential to who we are

Once They Were Hats is deeply, enthrallingly, page-turningly fascinating. Backhouse plays two roles in Once They Were Hats: narrator and historian; in one chapter she may be investigating the evolution of the beaver species — visiting the Canadian Museum of Nature’s warehouse to look at some whittled, wooden evidence of prehistoric beaver-like animals — and in another she is describing through dialogue her visit with a Native elder, whose Deisheetaan clan held the beaver as a crest animal. It’s in this way that Once They Were Hats is both a reliable source of scientific information and an interesting anthropological text, drawing two parallel lines through Canadian history: one human, one beaver.

Biologists began to redefine the beaver’s ecological significance — which is as or more interesting than its historical one. Beavers, like few other species, dictate their environments: their tendency toward deforestation has informed the evolution of many plant species, and the dams they build affect waterways and irrigation. They literally transform the landscape: One wetland scientist late in Once They Were Hats tells Backhouse that the near-extinction of beavers “fundamentally changed the way watersheds operate.”

How exciting for a beaver book to be heralded in this way! Congratulations Frances, and I hope it continues to generate adulations. I’m always especially thrilled to see folks talking about beaver benefits in the press. I would of course assume that this meant great things for beavers if I were not SO old that I remember the reviews of Glynnis Hood’s book that pronounced beaver as an “eco-saviour” and how dizzying that glorious inevitability seemed at the time. I was naive enough to write about it as “the New Gold Standard” in 2011, because I was sure the world’s attitude toward beavers was going to finally change at any moment.

Not so much. I guess Canadians are happy to celebrate beaver at regular intervals – just so long as they can keep killing them.

Kudos also to our good friend Robin Ellison from Napa whose lovely photos from the Tulocay beaver pond graced not one but two months of 2016 RCD calendar! A fine kit and a very regal pond turtle. You realize of course, that once adorable beaver kits adorn the watershed calendar the birds and otters are going to have to fight for space. Expect more grand beaver photos next year. The calendar isn’t for sale, but if you make a donation I’m sure they’ll let you pick one up at the RCD office (1303 Jefferson St, Suite 500B, Napa).

Bonus points for putting the beaver on my birthday month.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver Rehabilitation, Beavers and water, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Who's saving beavers now? September 24, 2015

Oh sure. No beaver news for 5 whole days and then an EXPLOSION of stories to share. Well, we have to start with this, because I told you it was coming 10 days ago.

Beaver: Back to the Future

Beaver, whose dams help slow the flow of water, play a key role in the health of our forests. They create wetlands, reduce the force of floods, and expand riparian habitat for wildlife. In our new 13-minute video “Beaver: Back to the Future,” four Forest Service employees and a retired Regional Forester eloquently and enthusiastically praise the power of beaver to beneficially restore and manage national forest water flows in the face of climate change.

Beaver: Back to the Future from Grand Canyon Trust on Vimeo.

Wasn’t that awesome? Everyone did such a fantastic and compelling job. And Trout Unlimited funded. How long must we wait for it to catch on. The smartest beaver folk in three states. Now only 47 more to go!

Maybe Coca cola can help. Beaver: the paws that refreshes!

Coca-Cola Leaves It to Beavers to Fight the Drought

What do Coca-Cola and beavers have in common? It sounds like the setup of a bad joke, but the fates of beavers and bottlers look increasingly intertwined. Coke is funding the deployment of beavers in the United States to build dams and create ponds that can replenish water supplies for local ecosystems and ultimately, people.

Coke’s deployment of engineering rodents has a similar goal: getting water into the ground. Before Europeans’ arrival on the continent, beavers lived in nearly every headwaters stream in North America, and they shaped the continent.

“They were everywhere and having a huge impact on the landscape and the hydrology,” said Frances Backhouse, a Victoria, British Columbia–based author whose book, Once They Were Hats, about the history and environmental role of beavers, will be published Oct. 1.

“Beavers mean higher water tables and water on the landscape throughout the dry seasons as well wet seasons,” she said. They are, according to Backhouse, “the only animal in the world that can rival us in terms of engineering the landscape.”

The funding repairs stream crossings and restores streams damaged by wildfires in California, New Mexico, Illinois, Michigan, and Colorado. It is helping to pay for the beaver project, which seeks to boost water retention in the Upper Methow River watershed in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest in Washington state.

Natural solutions like deploying the beavers are a good value, said Radtke. An earlier project in the Sierra Nevada Mountains used heavy equipment to install a series of plugs to contain water so it could seep into sediment. “It was fantastic,” he said. “It was working. But it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

The Upper Methow Beaver Project, a joint effort of five organizations, accomplishes the same thing for less. Coke’s investment in the project in 2014 was around $40,000. Total project cost for that year was $271,000.
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“It turns out that beavers work cheaper than big, heavy, yellow equipment,” said Radtke.

Ya think?

Alright, credit where credit’s due, relocating beavers to save water is MUCH better than killing them, and kudos to Coke for having the sense to fund a winner. But really the ideal place for beavers to be improving water is everywhere there is water and people to drink it, and I’ll be happiest when they are allowed to relocate themselves.

smile-again-1 — Smiling beaver kit by Cheryl Reynolds

Update on the little munchkin at Lindsay who survived the night and was looking healthier today. He’ll be ready to leave in a couple days, and if they can’t locate his family he’ll go to our friends at Sonoma Wildlife Rescue to mature and learn to be a beaver. This morning Cheryl and Kelly went out looking for his family and may have seen another kit and some chewed tulles. Fingers crossed he’ll be reunited with loved ones soon.

Do I look like a hat to you?

heidi08 Educational, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? August 26, 2015

Yesterday I received an excellent surprise. An early copy of Frances Backhouse newest book “Once they were hats”. If her name sounds vaguely familiar it’s because she was the journalist responsible for that excellent article in the Canadian Geographic a couple years ago, “Rethinking beaver“.

I wrote about that article in December of 2012 and said she did a stellar job of recounting the benefits but noted that since people were very lazy she needed to spend time focusing on how problems were solvable – because it didn’t matter how good they were if people thought their challenges couldn’t be fixed. She must have listened, because we crossed paths again at the Beaver Management Forum, and that’s how I received the early copy of this book.

Grey Owl would be happy to note that Canada’s beaver journey has taken a leap forward in the past 5 years, starting with Glynnis Hood’s Beaver Manifesto in 2011, then the Canadian Geographic article in 2012, Jari Osborne’s “Beaver Whisperer” on the CBC 2013, and its American version on PBS in 2014. This year saw Michael Runtz book and now Frances’ arrival. It’s all been pretty exciting for a beaver-phile like me.

Here’s how the publisher describes her book, I will tell you my thoughts just as soon as I turn every page.

Discover deeper truths and quirky facts that cast new light on this keystone species

Beavers, those icons of industriousness, have been gnawing down trees, building dams, shaping the land, and creating critical habitat in North America for at least a million years. Once one of the continent’s most ubiquitous mammals, they ranged from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Rio Grande to the edge of the northern tundra. Wherever there was wood and water, there were beavers — 60 million (or more) — and wherever there were beavers, there were intricate natural communities that depended on their activities. Then the European fur traders arrived.

In Once They Were Hats, Frances Backhouse examines humanity’s 15,000-year relationship with Castor canadensis, and the beaver’s even older relationship with North American landscapes and ecosystems. From the waterlogged environs of the Beaver Capital of Canada to the wilderness cabin that controversial conservationist Grey Owl shared with pet beavers; from a bustling workshop where craftsmen make beaver-felt cowboy hats using century-old tools to a tidal marsh where an almost-lost link between beavers and salmon was recently found, Backhouse goes on a journey of discovery to find out what happened after we nearly wiped this essential animal off the map, and how we can learn to live with beavers now that they’re returning.

If you have as little patience for all things beaver as I do, you can preorder your copy here or here. I found a nice interview with Frances concerning one of the heroines from her previous book “Women of the Klondike” I think you’ll enjoy.

Now, you’re on your own because I have some important reading to do.