Never mind that old silly royal wedding, there’s fresh new beaver romances to pay attention to. Tell me that this story doesn’t have all the passion, intrigue and challenge of any new couple starting out! As a bonus we get to see Greg Lewallen on camera who was my editor on the restoration guidebook but I never beheld before. Be patient the video takes a while to load but it’s worth the wait.
There now. Don’t you feel better? I thought it was funny how they emphasize that the male would be finding them a burrow as soon as possible. Such interesting projection! Our stalwart female built all the lodges herself and never had a stitch of help! I’m quite sure they have zero data for their assertion that it’s the males job to find them a nice place to live. But I wish those kids all the luck in the world on their new life!
Yesterday the universe had so much fun with me! Comcast decided to migrate my email to a new platform so I had zero email all day and spent hours on the phone trying to get it repaired. As luck would have it it was the same day Steve Dunsky and Sarah Koenisberg were finishing up the details on whether there’s going to be a premier of her Beaver Believer film two days before the festival at the Empress Theater in Vallejo. So I actually don’t know. But I’m still hopeful. I will keep you posted.
My email is fixed now anyway, so yeah! This story made me smile despite my troubles. There but for the grace of god go I.
Holly Pepper was getting ready to take her dog for walk when she saw a conservation officer approaching her house.
Pepper immediately knew why the official from the Ministry of Natural Resources was paying a visit to her London home on May 10. Almost a month earlier, Pepper was walking her dog Cash, a seven-year-old labrador mix, through the
Holly Pepper holds her ticket for interference with lawful trapping after she had set off the beaver traps she found in Komoka Provincial Park west of London. Mike Hensen/The London Free Press
trails at Komoka Park when she saw a dead muskrat in a metal beaver trap in one of the park’s ponds.
Pepper started looking around the water and found four more of the deadly traps.
But it was the ministry that had hired a contractor to set a dozen of the traps around the ponds – the first time it has been done at sprawling park west of London – to kill beavers blamed for damming the area, causing high water levels that affected the installation of a municipal sewage and drainage system.
After confessing to the conservation officer about her role in trashing the traps, Pepper was issued a ticket for interfering with lawful trapping, an offence under the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act.
Seven beavers were killed during the trapping that ran from February until the end of April, a ministry spokesperson said.
No, silly, it wasn’t some free-lance sicko who set those traps Holly, it was a hired official sicko who was actually paid with your hard-earned tax dollars. There now, don’t you feel better?
Poor Holly, I just want you to know if you decide to fight this Worth A Dam has your back. If you need protestors at your trial we’ll put out some alerts. And if it turns out you go all the way to the big house don’t worry – we’ll send you a beaver cake with a file in it.
Has there ever, in ALL of history, been a beaver day like August 31, 2017? There are literally 7 positive stories to cover about beavers today, each more wonderful than the last. You dream of a day like this, when you’re just starting out telling folks that beavers matter, but you never think it will happen to you! Obviously I can’t cover them all today, so I will focus on our friends, because if this website is nothing else, it’s an old boys beavers’ club. And beaver friends lives matter.
Let’s start with our good friends at the Blue Heron Nature Preserve in Atlanta Georgia. Founder Nancy Jones trekked to Martinez to visit our beavers and hear the story years ago, and even made it to the festival one year. New Executive Director Kevin Jones came out as well and brought us a beaver chew from Georgia! Nothing could make us happier than to start with this story from WABE in Atlanta. I’m told it was on the radio this morning, and a link the the audio is coming later.
When you think of the wildlife in a city, beavers may not be the first animal that comes to mind, but they’re all over the place in Atlanta. And while the big, goofy-toothed swimming rodents can be a nuisance, it appears beavers may also help our environment.
“What I see is just the potential for all kinds of biological processes to be happening,” says Sudduth. “Cleaning the water. The wetland hosts a huge diversity of bird life that you wouldn’t see otherwise.”
Amphibians and fish thrive in Emma Wetlands, too.
What Sudduth is especially interested in is water quality. She’s studying if this creek is cleaner because of the beavers. She’s not quite finished with that work yet, but it has been done in other places.
“There’s more and more research coming out about that,” says Greg Lewallen, a Ph.D. student at the University of Saskatchewan, who studies beavers. He co-wrote a handbook on using beavers in river restoration for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and recently wrote a new chapfocusing on urban beavers. [Eds. note: with a little help. Sheesh]
Lewallen says beaver dams trap pollutants, and wetland plants help clean the water. Out West, in states including Oregon, Idaho and Colorado, there have been some projects that actively try to attract beavers. That can save money on river restoration work that would otherwise require things like backhoes.
Beavers do it for free, with their teeth.
“They’re an incredible species,” says Lewallen. “We can relate to them in a lot of ways as humans in my opinion. They’re incredibly industrious and hard-working, and for a rodent species, they are extremely family-oriented.”
Lewallen says almost all major cities now have beaver populations. We don’t see them much because they’re nocturnal.
Hurray for Greg and BHNP. I am so happy to see urban beavers discussed on NPR, you can’t imagine. Kevin wrote me this morning and was really excited about the news. BHNP is a success story like no other, and I’m so proud of everything they achieved. I’m thrilled that this report included our chapter in the restoration handbook and talked to Greg too. If folks are going to see urban beavers differently success stories need to come from all around them. Congratulations Greg, Kevin and Nancy!
More great news about our beaver buddy in Napa, Rusty Cohn who’s fabulous photos appeared in an Essay on the beavers of Tulocay Creek. I’m not going to post every photo here, just a few favorites, but GO LOOK AT THE ARTICLE it’s well worth your time.
The Tulocay Creek beaver pond is located next to the Hawthorne Suites Hotel, 314 Soscol Ave., Napa. At the creek, you’ll find river otters, mink, muskrats and herons as well as beavers. Here are some photos of the critters taken by local photographer Rusty Cohn.
“Since Beavers are nocturnal, the heat doesn’t seem to bother them,” Cohn said. “They come out a little before sunset and are mainly in the water. During the day they are sleeping either in a bank den in the side of the creek bank under a fair amount of dirt, or inside a lodge which is made of mud and sticks mainly.”
P
Go look at the whole thing and I PROMISE you won’t regret it. Wonderful work Rusty, Napa beavers are so lucky to have you.
And wait, there’s more, this from the big glossy magazine of the center for biological diversity. Guess who finally got the memo that beaver help salmon?
Manmade “dam analogues” could help beavers recolonize former habitats — and help fish in the process.
In one project landowners and public-land managers have started building structures called “beaver dam analogues,” which are essentially starter kits designed help beavers recolonize rivers.
The premise is simple: Drive a row of narrow logs into a streambed and then weave the pilings together with cuttings sourced from nearby trees. The structure slows the pace of the water and traps sedimentation, allowing a small pond to form and creating favorable conditions for nearby beavers (Castor canadenis) to move in. Then the beavers can build their own homes and continue to modify streams to meet their needs.
Their use has spread. In California Brock Dolman and Kate Lundquist, co-directors of the WATER Institute at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, facilitate the effort to introduce beavers to watersheds. Because the animals provide ecosystem services, Dolman and Lundquist see them as underutilized allies in watershed recovery efforts. Their handiwork transforms the landscape, creating a mosaic of habitats. First, beaver dams modify streamflow, creating slow and fast-moving bodies of water. This leads to an increase in the types of streamside habitats available to a variety of wildlife, boosting biodiversity in the process.
Lundquist says the North American beaver is the continent’s original water manager, renowned for storing and caching water for future use. Since beaver dams are temporary and permeable, she explains, the structures allow water to flow, thereby reconnecting mountain streams with the floodplains below.
As California looks for ways to become more resilient in the face of climate change and the prospect of prolonged droughts, the construction of these dams may prove to be advantageous. They could even buy more time for stressed aquatic species such as oceangoing salmon and steelhead trout, which have been left high and dry by California’s prolonged droughts, deforestation and water-diversion projects meant to help farmers.
What remains unchanged is the beaver itself. “They are highly adaptable animals and able to persist,” Lundquist says. “What limits beaver are water and wood — period.” And that combination may be a damned good way to restore streams and solve water woes in California and other parched states.
Hurray for Brock and Kate and writer Enrique Gili[s for the wonderful article. It is great to see the benefits of beavers get discussed specifically in California. We all need to start having more serious conversations about water storage and beavers in our state, so I’m grateful for this push. It is great to have this issue noticed at the upper levels.
One thing that’s not clear in the article is that actual beaver relocation in California is still illegal. Unlike many other states who understand that value of sending in beaver to work their magic, our state still thinks of them as a pest and you aren’t allowed to relocate pests. Unless you’re on tribal lands, and then you can do anything you want. I’m happy the center for biological diversity came to the party, but wish they had clarified that one nagging detail! It’s hard to organize a campaign to change the law if the folk think the law already allows it!
Here’s a nice article from last month’s Freshwater Magazine. It’s a sweet piece of writing with some delicious frosting added yesterday that I’ll tell you about later. Trust me, you won’t be disappointed.
When a group of five scientists in the Pacific Northwest began advertising for workshops on the science of beaver restoration, they didn’t anticipate a few things.
The workshops would be filled to capacity within a week. There was so much interest they needed to increase both the workshop size and the total number of workshops offered. There would be a waitlist, followed by phone calls and emails from people clamoring to get in.
“People are starting to see the value of beaver for more than just their pelts or more than just pests, but how we can work in concert with them to fix more rivers and streams.”
Regulatory agency staff, nonprofits, tribal representatives, private landowners, members of the general public and others paid the $50 fee for one-day intensives on the science behind how beaver restore streams.
But the sharing of knowledge and best practices would live beyond the day-long events. Workshop discussions were captured in an official guidebook on beaver restoration, published this past June.
“The publication is meant to be an accessible resource for anyone using beaver to restore waterways,” said Greg Lewallen, a master’s student at Portland State University and the research assistant for the project. “With enough educational outreach, the perception of these animals will start to change. That’s why it’s critical we continue to spread the word about the large role that these animals play in ecosystems.”
This article does a great job of emphasizing how thrilled they were by the response they got. Waiting lists are a reminder that the west was hungry for this information. You probably remember this publication from the delightful cover that featured Cheryl’s photo. People were really excited by this information. Now the crew was so estatic by the response they got that they want to work on volume II.
Only in this second version they want to include a chapter on the topic dearest to my heart. Are you sitting down? They want to include a chapter on this:
Did you know that 81% of all Americans live in urban settings? So if most of us are going to deal with beavers its going to be someplace next to sidewalks and parking meters. And if the fact that they were including a chapter on the topic was all the news for this morning, that would be enough. I’d be in heaven floating on a pink fluffy cloud.
But that is not all. No, that is not all.
Now if you want to study tortoises you go to the Galapagos, if you want to see the works of Michaelanglo you go to Rome, and apparently if you want to learn about Urban Beavers you contact Martinez. Greg wrote me this week and we arranged a fantastic phone call for yesterday, where I told him the long and winding story of our beavers and the tireless work the people of Martinez had done to save them.
I was so flattered to be asked, and thrilled to think that before our city the topic of Urban Beavers was never even discussed. (In fact the words were probably only paired as an obscure reference to leggy females that drank Manhattans and smoked black cigarettes.) But now the words actually existed. And Urban Beavers were a THING, like open space or two-way traffic. And they wanted to include them in the next edition!!!
My excitement could only be described with this video short.
So I was as excited as little Madeline here during our conversation, and kept missing words and skipping over myself. But, since this was a story I had told a thousand times before, I found my way well enough. And before the conversation was over, a little moth of a thought started fluttering wistfully in my mind. I shushed it away many times but it came only back stronger.
What if I could be a co-author on this chapter. Was it even possible?
All through the hour long conversation I waived the fluttering thought away and tried to imagine whether I was qualified for such an auspicious venture. It’s true I had already co-authored two papers on beavers that were published in scientific journals. And a few in my trained field of psychology, where I had even been sole author. So maybe it wasn’t a crazy idea. But was it impossible? This was NOAA, Fish and Wildlife and the USFS; did my scrabbling, back room beaver-tactics really belong there?
Well, some dreams never see the light of day, and some apples fall to the ground before they ripen.We can never know what would have happened if I had summoned the courage to ask Greg if I could be a co-author of the chapter.
Because HE ASKED ME FIRST.
Guess what I answered. Go ahead, guess, I can wait.
There are not one but TWO awesome pieces of beaver news this morning. I’ll start with the pièce de résistance, a phrase which literally means the thing with staying power. Because that’s what this is. Really.
Michael Pollock sent it to me yesterday on it’s glorious release. He said getting out 1.0 was grueling and he was still seeing typos, but he asked me to give him thoughts about 2.o down the line. Check out the title photograph for which it credits the Worth A Dam FOUNDATION. We would have liked Cheryl’s name too but I’m happy we got the website. And this is exactly the kind of place we want our photos to be. Just read for yourself.
More and more, restoration practitioners are using beaver to accomplish stream, wetland, and floodplain restoration. This is happening because, by constructing dams that impound water and retain sediment, beaver substantially alter the physical, chemical, and biological characteristics of the surrounding river ecosystem, providing benefits to plants, fish, and wildlife. The possible results are many, inclusive of : higher water tables; reconnected and expanded floodplains; more hyporheic exchange; higher summer base flows; expanded wetlands; improved water quality; greater habitat complexity; more diversity and richness in the populations of plants, birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals; and overall increased complexity of the river ecosystem.
It starts with a review of the hydromorphic and geological effects of beaver dams, then talks about filtration, groundwater and biodiversity. Honestly. for the beaver nay-eayers on your list, this is a big dose of science from the heavy weights FWS, NOAA, and USFS. Even if you can read nothing else, take a look at the first chapter because it says literally everything you know to win the next five arguments you have about beavers.
Chapter 1—Effects of Beaver Dams on Physical and Biological Processes
Beaver impoundments change the spatial distribution of water (groundwater, pond, or stream), as well as the timing of its release and residence time in the watershed. Beaver dams impound water in ponds and pools, and these impoundments slow the flow of the stream; this holds the water within the stream reach for longer periods and can increase base flows (reviewed in Pollock et al. 2003). Indeed, some perennial streams transform into intermittent and/or ephemeral streams following the removal of beaver dams (Finley 1937, Wilen et al. 1975).
Conversely, reintroduced beaver have transformed some intermittent streams back to perennial streams (Dalke 1947, Pollock et al. 2003), and recolonizing beaver have transformed slightly losing streams to gaining streams ((Majerova et al. 2015).
Honestly every ecologist and politician needs to read this from cover to cover. It ends with first hand case studies of watersheds where beaver were introduced. And describes the successes they observed. I already told Michael it needs a section on restoration in URBAN streams and he says he lobbied for its inclusion but was denied.Thus far. Another something for version 2.0.
At the end is a list of resources for answering any burning beaver question that might arise. And guess what’s first?
That’s right. Listed before the established forefathers of Beaver Solutions and BWW, the little upstart crows of beavers from martinez have first place in the queue. Along with the cover placement. We are the Alpha and the Omega of living with beavers. Could there be a better sign that we are doing the right thing? Not for me there couldn’t. (I mean another thousand readers couldn’t hurt, but I’d rather be the GO TO spot when folks have burning questions than anything else.)
Honestly the whole thing is such a useful, instructive, science-based labor of love that it will take me weeks to fully read. I did my best to splash its announcement around the four corners of the internet, but feel free to share with your unpersuaded friend(s) of choice. What a fine ending to June!
I think I’ll leave the DU article for tomorrow. But if you want a sneak peak here it is.
