CANADIAN RESEARCHERS ARE SHOCKED BY MARTINEZ OBSERVATIONS

heidi08 saltwater June 19, 2019

For more than a decade Martinez lived with beavers in its brackish Alhambra Creek and watched the tides ebb and flow past their habitat. For more than a decade Martinez watched its beavers from the footbridges and heard their chewing sounds and the little whine children exclaim to parents and each other. For more than a decade this was as regular to us as birds flying and fish swimming.

Apparently all of Canada is shocked by it.

Are saltwater beavers a thing? Scientists observe Canadian critters in potentially deadly habitat

At the end of long day studying saltwater marshes in northern Washington State, scientist Greg Hood had a surprising encounter.

“I was walking down the channel, and the water was about … thigh-deep — and a beaver was swimming towards me,” said Hood, a senior research scientist with the Skagit River System Co-operative in La Conner, Wash.

Wildlife biologist David Bailey has looked at how beavers living in saltwater have been adapting in Tulalip, Wash.

Their dams are built lower than a normal dam, and disappear under the water at high tide, he told The Current.

He explained that they’re built like that to stop the power of the tide from breaking them apart. The doors to their lodges are also at different heights to accommodate the rise and ebb of the water.

Shocked I tell you! All of Canada is SHOCKED to learn of these shocking behaviors in salty beavers! This report makes it seem like they’re adapting to the habitat is some new thing, but I cannot imagine that’s the case. Remember beaver used to fill every stream, estuary and pond so I’m sure evolution taught them to adapt to this long, long, long ago.

And really, biologists should not bounce on lodges. Just sayin’. Sheesh.

Just a thought but you might want to rethink your headline. Because if you are calling it ‘deadly saltwater’ and you see beavers who aren’t dead, your words are either wrong or don’t mean what you think they mean.

Even I can’t complain very much because yesterday was a BANNER DAY for beavers. As in the city hung up the banners in the park and it officially looks like we’re having a festival!!! This time they used a truck and not a ladder.

Vancouver’s Beaver I.Q.

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Dispersal April 16, 2013

A photo of the beaver sighted at the Olympic Village. Photograph by: Vince Kwok

Olympic Village gets furry new resident – beaver moves in

By JESSICA BARRETT, VANCOUVER SUN

A beaver had been spotted in the man-made water channel in Hinge Park on Friday and MacKinnon was curious to confirm the flat-tailed rodent had indeed moved in.

For 20 minutes, MacKinnon watched the beaver — he estimates it is about two years old — as it swam the length of the small wetland and sauntered up on the bank. The animal doesn’t seem to have built a lodge yet, and appeared fairly comfortable with its exposure to humans, said MacKinnon, author of the best-selling 100 Mile Diet and a self-described amateur naturalist.

Unusual as it may seem, the Olympic Village beaver is part of a trend, said Robyn Worcester, conservations program manager at the Stanley Park Ecology Society. “They’re turning up pretty regularly right now,” she said.

This lovely article has some of the very BEST descriptions of beaver dispersal that I’ve ever seen in the paper. In fact, I’m starting to think that Vancouver is giving Washington a run for its money as having the highest beaver-IQ in the Northern Hemisphere….if not the world. Just look at the description from Robyn Worcester of the Stanley Park Ecology Society:

This time of year many young beavers are settling in city parks along the waterfront after leaving the ponds they grew up in to find their own habitat. Eventually they find their way to the Fraser River, which spits them into English Bay or Burrard Inlet, Worcester said.

“They have to find their way to the nearest fresh water body. Generally they’ll hit Jericho and they’ll hit Stanley Park … and now they’ll go so far as the Olympic Village.”

Honestly, I can’t tell you how many articles I’ve read where folks were stunned that beavers were milling around in the spring, showing up uninvited, while reporters and ecologists seemed to scratch their heads and fail to understand why they were on the move. Infestation? Illegal Migration? Bachelors gone wild? The mystery of beaver dispersal apparently confounds most of the known world, even though it happens every year. It also happens to be the source of one of my very most beloved photos of all time.

But apparently the ‘mystery’ is no mystery to Vancouver. Not only do they understand beaver behavior and dispersal, they apparently know the routes they’re likely to use to get there! Hats off to Robyn and the great reporter on this article. Although I sent them emails to update their understanding of this:

beavers are often in a hurry to get out of salt water because it makes them ill.

Obviously the occasion called for a little Greg Hood and ‘salty seaside ponds‘.

even some beaver researchers, are unaware that beaver can be found in estuarine tidal marshes when the salinity is less than 10 parts per thousand (seawater is typically 30-35 ppt, while freshwater is less than 0.5 ppt).

As well a liberal showing of this video at their next staff meeting!

How do I know Vancouver is getting smarter than Washington about beavers? Remember my post about Adrian and the installation in Mission earlier? Adrian thanked me and sent this back:

When I drove back out to Mission to look at the property I started seeing culvert fences in all the ditches. Apparently the city now has 9 flow devices in that they’ve been building themselves.

Gale Beer for all!

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, Environmental May 28, 2010

I hope by now patient readers are getting a good sense of the connectedness of all things: how reintroducing wolves in yellowstone can improve forestation on the lower wetlands, or alligators nesting can make mud pools for ibis. Well here’s a great story from the Goat Blog of High Country News by Terray Sylvester of a particular researcher interested in the shrinking habitat of Sweetgale and its relationship to the decreasing salmon population.

Greg Hood is a researcher in western Washington who knows a few things about salmon habitat — a few surprising things. When Hood talks about preserving threatened populations, he doesn’t mention in-stream flows, fish ladders or water temperatures. Instead, he brings up a mostly-vanished ecosystem than once lined significant portions of the Puget Sound. It was composed of a shrub named sweetgale, tidal marshes and… beaver ponds near the seashore. That’s right, some beavers stake out seaside territory, and according to Hood, their ponds make excellent homes for juvenile salmon. Problem is, most of that tidal habitat has been destroyed over the last century or so. So little of it remains today that he thinks most people have forgotten — or have just never realized – how important the beaver ponds once were to the endangered Puget Sound Chinook.

Sweetgale (bayberry, dutch myrtle, chevalier) is a low growing, willow-resembling, and fragrant marsh cover that used to grow all over the salty creeks near the sea side. In older days they used the branches as a replacement for hops in Yorkshire, and Gale Beer is supposedly very thirst quenching. In addition to its intoxicating properties, it also attracts many insects which in turn attract greedy fish and its blue grey leaves give the fish more cover because they can hang around in deeper pools and not get snapped by equally avaricious heron. And who makes those deper pools? – wait for it – beavers who tolerate salty water.

Apparently as salty as 10 parts per thousand (salt water is 35 parts per thousand). How salty is Alhambra creek? (We just spent the last hour looking up the salinity of Carquinez Strait, which now is reported in Practical Salinity Units PSU and not PPT…an exciting “sea” change that happened in the 1978 and is based on the conductivity of the salt rather than the weight, which is interesting but hardly the point. The internet can be very distracting.) Back to our story. So the testing for our section of bay ranges between 0-2 PPU depending on the time of year and depth of the water test, which means that we are sayyy under 10 PPT.

Which is why our beavers can go all the way down to the train tracks and grangers wharf and out to the straight and be okay. Dispersers can go down stream to crocket or Richmond and set up shop without difficulty. And which is why, if you love salmon and you want our schools to improve so that we can have a salmon season again next year. you had better make friends with some beavers.

Now whose going to break the good news to Scotland?