Tag: Fur-bearer defenders

Good things come in threes

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions August 15, 2013

Beavergate in Cornwall Ontario One Year Later – It was a Success! Clear Guindon Park Waters with no Flooding!

CFN – What a difference a year makes. When we started the Beavergate Protest we never expected that the devices placed in the Guindon Nature Park in Cornwall Ontario would have such dramatic results.

Funded fully by Lesley Fox and her Fur Bearer Defenders organization the road to clearer waters and healthier habitat were started by Wyatt Walsh pictured above.

Beavergate in Cornwall Ontario One Year Later – It was a Success! Clear Guindon Park Waters with no Flooding! Saved under Community, Cornwall, Cornwall Area Politics, GREEN News, Headlines, News, Ontario, Politics

Instead of signs that dogs and small children can’t read there is lush green. Mr. Walsh had one abortive attempt after contacting the Standard Freeholder go on deaf ears before CFN became active in trying to find a solution.

Our request for a 90 day moratorium on trapping to the City last year resulted in the traps being moved next to the lodge and wiping out the family of beavers lived.

That’s when local activist and musician Rebecca Sorrell entered and then with some media momentum and help from Lesley Fox and her organization oiula!

Congratulations Cornwall on moving your powers that be into a better beaver management strategy. It is hard, hard work changing hearts and minds, and we know that in Martinez. You might remember that Mike Callahan went and did an on site training with FBD Adrian Nelson to get the job done. If you listen to the video you can hear Donna Dubreuil in the background because she was there for the installation. This was a triumph for beaver friends in Canada, and it nice to remember their victory a year (and a month) later.

Mike Callahan & Adrian Nelson at the Guidon Nature Park Installation

Congratulations everyone!

On to this lovely beaver birth announcement from Devon, England where some fenced-in beavers are welcoming some new family members. Click here for an excellent BBC description & video of the event.

Devon wetland beavers have baby

Two beavers in a secure fenced-off area in west Devon have had a baby.

The animals are part of a three-year experiment by the Devon Wildlife Trust at a secret location to see if the animals can help restore wetland areas.

The baby beaver – or kit – is believed to be only a few weeks old, but it is not known if it is a male of female, project staff said.

Mark Elliot, from the trust, said staff were “thrilled”

Congratulations Devon! Mark is the coordinator for a group called “Working Wetlands” and I can see he’s headed for great beaver things.

Finally a nice reprisal in the Record yesterday of our beaver-extravaganza. Looks like mostly the same article with some tenses changed, but very nice to see again. Enjoy!

Kits show up for Beaver Festival VI in Martinez

New beaver kits appeared in Alhambra Creek recently, just in time for the Aug. 3 Martinez Beaver Festival. It was a time for family fun and an easy way to discover some secrets of urban wildlife.

The festival, in its sixth year, has grown appreciably. This year’s event, near the Amtrak station, featured wildlife experts, artists, entertainers, teachers and scientists, plus guided creek tours, games, hands-on projects, 41 display booths, music and information on the beavers, fish, otters, birds and vegetation surrounding beaver construction sites.

Which obviously begs the question: When will Cornwall & Devon be planning their first beaver festival? The world is waiting.

The Great Canadian EcoFest!

heidi08 Beaver Rehabilitation, Beavers elsewhere, Environmental, Festival, Friends of Martinez Beavers May 31, 2013

Congratulations to our hardworking friends in Kamoka where they are organizing their first-ever Great Canadian Eco-fest. Getting folks to pay attention, try something new, and put it in the paper is hard to do, so I couldn’t be happier for them.

“We wanted a large community event in Komoka, and tossed around a few ideas, but it was my wife who came up with the idea if an EcoFest,” said Steve Galinas. “She has been involved with animal rehabilitation groups and thought about organizing an event for those groups, but that is a very small niche so it evolved into eco-friendly”

The great Komoka eco-fest will be held at the community center (soccer fields) on sunday June 23 from 10-5. “We definitely hope this will be an annual event” Galinas said.

I tracked down Margaret last year when I first got wind of this. She told me that the inspiration came to her when she was listening to Adrian Nelson at Fur-Bearer Defenders talk about our Beaver Festival! We’ve been swapping ideas about whom to invite and how to make it kid friendly. Aspen Valley Wildlife Sanctuary will be there to educate folks about living with beavers and why they’re good for the ecosystem. (You may remember that sanctuary was started by Audrey Tournay who was the first woman who showed that rehabbed beavers could be released in the wild. This video just brought tears to my eyes so I’m guessing you’ll enjoy it)

Say it with me now: small, small beaver world! Good luck Steve and Margaret! I wish we could be there, but you can bet we will in spirit! Send us photos.

And because I never get tired of arguing about Jim Sterba’s ‘kill ’em all’ manifesto…

Earth Island gets a letter

Shortsighted Solutions

In his book Nature Wars (reviewed by Jason Mark in your Spring 2013 issue), Jim Sterba fails to recognize that, often, nonlethal solutions to wild animal encroachments are both less expensive and more permanent than trapping. He never acknowledges that beaver flooding can be effectively controlled with flow devices, allowing the beavers to remain. Or that new colonies can be naturally discouraged using the beavers’ own territorial behaviors. He never admits that beaver-created wetlands promote fish, birds, and wildlife while raising the water table. I am saddened to see Earth Island Journal promote his book.

Heidi Perryman, Martinez, CA

P.S. I sent this as a special gift to Margaret’s frazzled email earlier this week, hoping it would buoy her spirit as it always does mine.

The very good, the pretty good, the slightly good, and the ugly

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Environmental, Who's Killing Beavers Now? May 27, 2013

First we should give MORE kudos to our beaver friends at Fur-bearer Defenders who have strewn a path of beaver deception around the municipality of Mission in British Columbia just outside of Vancouver, installing 9 beaver deceivers to control flooding in culverts.

Beaver deceiver prevents dams from being built

A beaver deceiver being installed in Mission. Each unit saves the municipality thousands of dollars annually. Submitted phot

Gosh, I’m so old I can remember when Adrian Nelson had just gotten married and nervously installed his very first one after chatting a lot to Mike Callahan and scouring his DVD. And now these installs are practically a piece of cake! Delicious, effective cake that they actually talk an entire city into paying for!

The non-profit group approached the district with a simple, non-lethal alternative for managing flooding concerns associated with beaver activity: build a wire fence around the culvert intake, interrupting the beavers’ natural instinct to build where there’s current and the sound of flowing water. “They work awesome,” said Dale Vinnish, public works operations supervisor. “We don’t have to trap beavers. They moved elsewhere. They’re not causing a problem.”

The nine “beaver deceivers,” at $400-$600 apiece and built in one day, save the district thousands of dollars, because workers no longer have to pull apart dams. Previously, the municipality would break down two to three dams daily, several days a week, in addition to paying for the capturing and killing of about a dozen beavers annually.

“If we weren’t trapping, we were going in continuously to break apart the dams,” said Vinnish.

Great work Fur-bearer Defenders! We are entirely impressed that you are easily giving Washington State a run for it’s money as the beaver-management champion of the northern hemisphere. Go Mission!

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New footage from our famous San Jose beaver friends. Love the ‘urban safari’ feel of this video. Sadly if this is momma beaver, I’m not seeing any teats, and that means no silicon valley kits this year!

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Next, a nice column on ‘Extinction Events’ from Minnesota. His point is climate change, but my point (as always) is beavers!

For instance the pond created behind a beaver dam becomes the habitat for a wide variety of plant and animal species. Remove the beaver engineers and the entire ecosystem collapses.

It’s about time we start to realize the number of species that are displaced or wiped out when beavers are removed. Trickle-down economies work both ways. I wasn’t happy with this later sentence “Without the stream, there could be no beaver dam” because that’s not exactly true. I’ve heard of beaver creating ponds from tiny springs, so that the big beautiful pond becomes the only water in a desert. Certain ephemeral streams (like we have here in California that dry up in the summer) wouldn’t dry up if we had enough beavers. I kindly sent him this Chumash legend:

Author Jan Timbrook who is a curator for the Santa Barbara museum of natural history described this in her book ‘Chumash Ethnobotany” has some very interesting things to say about beavers:

“A willow stick that had been cut by a beaver was thought to have the power to bring water. The Chumash would treat the stick with ‘ayip ( a ritually powerful sbustance made from alum) and then plant it in the ground to create a permanent spring of water.”

Jan Timbrook, Chumash Ethobotany p. 180

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And on to the ugly. I’ve been sitting with this story a couple of days, but its fairly unavoidable and we better deal with it. This is the kind of negative advertising I hate, even more than I hate the Belarus story. Ultimately Americans value roads much more even than we value human life. Now every city will be more tempted to tell property owners they’re liable for beaver dams. Call me crazy, but it seems like if you’re worried about the stability of a dam, the smart thing to do is to reinforce it!

Flooding damages road in West Warren MA

Best night ever to be a cop in Ohio

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Environmental October 20, 2011

We all remember the colorful Ohio story of the grandma who beat a fawn to death with a shovel, and the remarkable tale of animal husbandry from the Ohio trapper who told the paper he was only going to kill the ‘soldier beavers’. Maybe you even recall the nature center that brought in the trapper to tell stories of his hilarious animal killing adventures for children and families. Ohio, allow me to be frank, is insane. So it should come as no surprise to anyone that the head line today is of shooting escaped wild animals from a preserve in Zanesville.

As daylight came to this rural area 55 miles east of Columbus people were being told to stay inside. Officers with assault rifles patrolled the area looking for the wild animals ranging from tigers and bears to cheetahs and wolves.

“We’re telling people to look around, be cognizant of what’s around them,” Zanesville Mayor Howard Zwelling told CNN Wednesday morning. “We’re being cautious about it.”

Zwelling said he got a call from the city’s safety director around 9:30 p.m. Tuesday that Terry Thompson, the owner of the farm, had set the animals free and then shot himself.

So four schools are closed, people are staying in their cars and police have spent all night shooting lions, tigers and bears. Knowing what we do of the good sportsmanship in the state we have to assume that this is the very best night ever to be a member of the thin blue line in Ohio. Imagine the tales back at the station of the lucky officer who shot a wolf on the highway not to mention the water-cooler ribbing of the poor sod who only got a camel.

Let’s not think about the fleeing, frightened creatures who may be enjoying their first disorienting hour of freedom before being gunned down by Ohio’s finest. Don’t think about the Chimpanzees or Orangutans that lived in his house either. Lets just hope that when people in every state read this story

The U.S. Department of Agriculture had revoked his license to exhibit animals after animal-welfare activists campaigned for him to stop letting people wrestle with another one of his bears. USA Today

it makes them think about this:

Ohio has some of the nation’s weakest restrictions on exotic pets and among the highest number of injuries and deaths caused by them.

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Here’s some good news to wash that icky Ohio taste out of your mouth. Fur-bearer Defenders raised money last week to install a flow device on Bowen Island In British Columbia. This morning there’s a photo essay of their efforts on facebook and a nice story in The Province.

Bowen Island residents, animal protection advocates and municipal officials teamed up Tuesday in an effort to save the island’s “nuisance” beavers from their own damming ways.

A dam on the island’s Grafton Lake — which acts as a reservoir for the drinking water of nearly 4,000 residents — has been overwrought with beavers, who have been plugging a spillway daily with an assortment of mud, sticks and other dam-making debris.

“We have to dig it out every day. It’s costing us money,” said Bob Robinson, public works supervisor for the municipality.

Robinson said it’s his job to ensure that water is supplied downstream, but like other island residents he doesn’t want it to come at the expense of trapping or killing the furry animals.

So Robinson joined a handful of other island residents and members of the Association for the Protection of Fur-Bearing Animals at Grafton Lake Tuesday with a potential solution — constructing beaver-exclusion fencing, made from timber and wire, which prevents the beavers from building dams and blocking the waterway.

Oh, and more good news comes from our beaver friends in Scotland, where the
Scottish Wild Beavers group has just been granted charity status and launched a new website. Go check it out and think about giving them some beaver love from across the pond.

It’s interesting to think that when I started this beaver campaign there were exactly two active beaver websites on the entire internet. Three if you count the Department of Public Works in Washington. Now there are nine, and when Sherri Tippie launches hers there will be ten. That’s a pretty nice proliferation, considering that trickle down that follows.

Lets aim for 20 by next year? Maybe one in Ohio?

Beaver-gate?

heidi08 Beaver-themed merchandise, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports September 23, 2011

Honestly, my phone rang off the hook yesterday, and every reporter who called me began the call by laughing hysterically. As civic marketing strategies go this ‘make-yourself-look-petty and incapable-of-learning-gracefully’ campaign is certainly paying off. I should really send the darlings at Mainstreet Martinez a thankyou note, because the beavers haven’t got a story in the SF Chronicle since 2009, and we didn’t even have to throw a festival or take anyone to court for this!

Let’s be reasonable. I wasn’t crazy about the beaver on the mural in the first place and I’ll tell you wby. It makes the city look to REASONABLE – as if they eventually saw the light and recognized the beaver as an asset to the community. It erases the gasping struggle that left claw marks down the length of Castro street where we had to drag them kicking and screaming every inch of the way to even approach doing the right thing. The mural inclusion of the beaver was a beautiful, responsive, act of ultimately false advertising right in the middle of town. It made our leaders look GOOD and even though we ultimately depend on them and want them to BE good, we don’t want them to get away with appearing to be good when they haven’t earned it.

So, in retrospect, this bit of participatory theater beaver cover-up is a more honest, community minded depiction of our history than anything the artist could have painted. And once again, Martinez shows to the world that its community heart is in the right place but its civic head is too busy (cutting off its nose to spite its face) to pay attention.

Which I’m never happy about, but as a piece of beaver attention-getting drama, works for me.

Meanwhile in the actual beaver world, Sherri Tippie and Mike Callahan are delivering their speeches today at the Living with Wildlife Agenda Conference. Their presentations are in the afternoon, and they met last night for dinner with the Canadian Documentary filmmakers who are interested in changing the story about beavers in the country. The entire venue got twice as big as it was planned and had to be move to a new setting. You can imagine how jealous I am that I can’t be there. I expect reports back from them and from Adrian Nelson who is kicking off the beaver discussion and I’ll let you know what I hear.

In the meantime guess what arrived at my house yesterday? I’ll give you a hint. The last word is Manifesto and the first word ain’t communist! I’ll be pouring through the pages post haste, and make sure I let you know when I get to the good parts.