Tag: Leonard Houston

Beaver Chorus

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Educational, Environmental April 3, 2012

Looks like the Pittsburg zoo is doing a spring wildlife month, where every day in April they are releasing an educational film about an animal. Guess what gets top billing?

Out of the Wild: The American beaver

Welcome to “Out of the Wild,” a daily series from The Tribune-Democrat, working with the Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium. Every day in April, we’ll introduce you to a different North American animal – with information about each species’ habitat, behavior, diet and unique or interesting features.

Not a bad choice for your first effort! I’m not sure you clarified the ‘debate’ about whether beavers harm or improve the environment. You made it sound exactly like the ‘debate’ on whether the glass is half empty or half full. Tell me a real reason people think beavers harm the environment and then we’ll have a ‘debate’, but let me warn you, beavers are excellent debaters!

There’s good news across the pacific coast, starting with the 30th Annual Salmon Restoration conference this week in Davis. Registration is closed but there will be a convergence of beaver friends making implicit and not so implicit arguments about the role of beaver dams. Oh and Chuck Bonham the new director of Fish & Game will be giving one of the opening addresses so you know this message is getting to the right ears.

Should Streams be Managed as Drainage Networks or Habitat Networks?

Michael M. Pollock, NOAA,

Northwest Fisheries Science Center

Ooh Ooh! I know! Call on me! The whole thing will start off with a bang when Brock gives a talk focused on salmon and beaver…I’m apparently not supposed to say anything but since no one really pays that much attention to what I say I will pass along his description…

Also – SRF is gonna be fun – we have my beaver focused talk on Wed., we have Michael Pollock talking, Eli, OAEC WATER and Sanctuary Forest/Mattole will all be tabling together at Friday night’s poster session – so beaver-palooza will be in full swing that night – and for your ears only there is rumor that on Sat., night of the banquet there will be a skit featuring a face off debate between a human large woody engineer and a beaver all sizes of wood engineer!

Back story: creek people used to ‘clean up’ woody debris by hauling it away, and then found out that it was VERY important to the food chain and fish. So now they are busy ‘installing woody debris’ themselves. Of course we all know who would happilydo that for free, but there is a running argument whether it’s better to install debris or let beavers do it (because you know beavers are so icky!). Here’s Pollock’s slide on the issue. LWD stands for large woody debris and ‘smolt’ are baby salmon. Oh and Eli’s poster presentation will include my slide on the different types of flow devices so we can promote effective beaver management!

Hope someone films the skit I’m not supposed to have written about! I’ll make sure to tell you all about it!

Brock also let me know that he will be Keynote Speaker for the Eel River Symposium later this month. The lineup looks amazing and since we know their are beaver on the Eel it would be good to teach people why they’re useful.

Not to be outdone, I just heard from Leonard Houston of the Beaver Advocacy Committee in Oregon that he has been asked to be on a beaver panel this month for the Oregon Desert Association coming up in September in Bend. Preach Beavers to the Desert, Leonard!

What else? Oh the charming city of Nashua of the infamous beaver incident printed my letter to the paper today. Non-suscribers can’t read it, but I’ll give you the text.

It’s stunning to me that in the entire community of Nashua there is apparently not anyone who recognizes that a young, dispersing beaver is trying to get to the water and will likely be hit by traffic if not assisted. Exposing school children to this heartless failure is unfortunate. This could have been a powerful opportunity to show children what communities can accomplish when they work together and how good it feels to help each other or another species. Instead it was a flurry of morning activity ending with a pointless death. Dispersal of young beavers seeking their own territory happens every march, and Nashua should learn from this event and have a plan to deal better with it next time.

Three Good Things!

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, featured, Friends of Martinez Beavers, History December 18, 2011

Sometimes it is slow news here at beaver central and sometimes it is fast, thick and icky, but this weekend has been a flurry of delightful stories I can hardly wait to share. First up is a grand new discovery about our friend Castoroides Ohioensis. Remember the very large beaver that was the size of a bear and went extinct at the last ice age? Seems they just ran one through a CTscan (don’t ask why no one thought of this before) and discovered a very long chamber behind his noise that they are speculating was used for resonance. Now every archeologist is busy trying to figure out the giant beaver call that echoed through the forests of paleo-history!

LAS VEGAS – Blessed with a hidden chamber in their over sized skulls, extinct giant beavers may have created a unique Ice Age call of the wild. Detailed CT scans reveal a dead-end passageway leading from the back of the animal’s skull toward its face. That chamber connects via a long, narrow slit to another passage going straight through the beaver’s skull from throat to nose, vertebrate paleontologist Caroline Rinaldi reported November 2 at a meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.

“I don’t know of any other animal that has this,” said Rinaldi, of the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine.

Our second grand story comes from the Oregon town of Five-Rivers (which is incidentally, very near where the State of the Beaver Conference was held this February). Seems they had a meet and greet with the locals, served hot cider and Christmas cookies, and asked landowners to open their heart to beavers. “Do it for the sake of the salmon” they encouraged!

FIVE RIVERS – The sparsely settled Coast Range valleys of Lincoln County’s Five Rivers country ought to be a highly productive breeding ground for coho salmon, but logging, road-building and other human activities have altered the landscape in far-reaching ways, leaving threatened fish runs in a precarious state.

Beaver populations also have declined throughout the basin, in part because of those same human impacts. Now the MidCoast Watersheds Council is working to enlist the aid of area residents in shoring up salmon numbers by reintroducing beaver colonies in some of the places where they’ve disappeared – even if that means some inconvenience for rural property owners.

Don’t even THINK that any of this would be happening without the day-in day-out hard work of Leonard and Lois Houston who have made beaver friends out of more folks than anyone can know. When I spoke to him recently about their good relationship with ODFW (Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife – note that they don’t call just care about GAME in Oregon!) he said that one thing he had learned is that it is easier to get enthusiastic support from the fisheries biologists than from the fur-bearer folks. Hmmm. Now that was a revelation!

“Beaver and coho salmon are just inextricably linked,” said Steve Trask, a fish biologist working with the council. “We’ve noticed over time that as beaver populations have declined, there’s been a real loss of production in coho salmon habitats.”Representatives of the Siuslaw National Forest, the Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife and the Alsea Watershed Council, all potential partners in the restoration effort, also were on hand.

Coho salmon fry emerge from the gravel of their spawning beds in the spring, then spend a year dodging predators and bulking up before venturing out to sea, where they spend another year or two before returning to their native streams to spawn as adults. Beaver ponds, Trask said, provide ideal rearing habitat for young coho and other salmonids, such as cutthroat and steelhead trout. The ponds capture nutrients from falling leaves and rotting wood, forming the base for a thriving food chain.

They also perform a number of other functions, from moderating flash floods to restoring old floodplain connections and re-establishing a more natural, complex channel structure that provides a variety of habitats for aquatic life. Bringing beavers back to Five Rivers, he said, could accomplish a lot of the watershed council’s restoration goals for the basin.

“We’re talking about somehow restoring beaver to the landscape so they can be a tool for salmonid restoration,” Trask said. “If we can get it going, it’s a pretty cheap way to do it.”

Wow. Just wow. Steve, do you happen to have any relatives that work for DFG in California? Just asking. And excellent job by the reporter, Bennett Hall, who clearly gets the whole relationship very well. My guess would be this isn’t his first time reporting on the beaver-salmon relationship. All we can do here in plod-along California is plod along. Sigh. Go read the whole thing.

Which brings us to our THIRD good story, and that’s the announcement that starting NEXT WEEK an interview with a beaver expert will air here every Sunday on a podcast series that I’m calling “Agents of Change”. For the past few months I’ve been trotting about wooing the beaver world and trying to get them to talk to me about why they do what they do and how beavers changed their lives. The first interview will be with Sherri Tippie and the second with Skip Lisle. You won’t want to miss these short, remarkable glimpses into the lives of people who make a difference on behalf of the animals who make a difference.!I think you’ll enjoy it, click for a sample.

*Much thanks to David Bowie and poet Mark Seth Lender for their valued contributions!

And because man does not live by beaver alone, I’m passing along this AMAZING look at the 4 night festival of lights popular winner from Lyon, France. Mind you this just has to be the very best blending of history, pop culture and modern technology that I have ever seen.

Can Urban Beavers be Worth A Dam?

heidi08 Creative Solutions, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers December 6, 2010

It’s official, the partial schedule for the 2011 State of the Beaver conference is out and I couldn’t be happier. I present just after Sherri Tippie and before Mike Callahan, which if you think about it, is a pretty nice beaver-loving sandwich. Yesterday I introduced Brock Dolman to Leonoard Houston who organizes the conference and now he’ll be presenting on watersheds as well. Brock was so enjoying my lyrics to the ‘beaver and the salmon should be friends’ that he wants to find some eco-singers to do it at the salmon conference cabaret, which made me very proud. I also introduced him to Tom Rusert of Sonoma Birding where I’ll be doing a beaver talk in February. Their recent Mt. Lion talk had 250 attendees! Tom was interested in maybe doing one on the beaver salmon relationship, so I suggested he talk to Brock and they’re getting together to chat next week. Small beaver world.

Of course I asked Brock if the beavers get a ‘finders fee’? And he assured me that he was “fee-ling” out multiple property owners in the region to find volunteers for a beaver re-introduction project, which is the best kind of fee!

Anyway, since I introduced myself to Susan, Susan to Tom, and Tom to Brock, I’m thinking of starting my own ecological escort service. I even made this comercial for GQ yesterday!

Behind the Scenes

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions May 20, 2010

I received this email last night from Leonard Houston of the South Umpqua Rural Community Partnership in Oregon. You might remember that these are the good people who sponsored the “State of the beaver conference” last February. He had some very interesting backstage insights into what happened in Newberg. I thought I’d pass them along to you.

Here is what is really happening, a fellow beaver advocate who is also a ODFW (Oregon Department Fish & Wildlife) biologist informs me that the Newberg beavers have moved upstream and on to property where they are welcome and are currently posing no threat to the culvert so they will be left alone, there will be no lethal management used as the State has adapted a policy allowing translocation of problematic beavers for restoration purposes and founding new colonies in historical habitat.

We are currently working with the ODFW Beaver Workgroup to enact a landowner incentive program to compensate damages or loss of crops to promote beavers being allowed to stay where they are, as we both know the benefits out weigh the liabilities.

The involvement of people such as yourself is the key to educating the public on the importance of the role beavers play in our aquatic ecosystems. Thank You for taking the time to help with beavers everywhere. We have offered our services to the City of Newberg and the local ODFW who was contacted to find a solution. They will be keeping us updated if things change for the worse.

Sincerely
Leonard and Lois

Now isn’t that interesting! Nothing to worry about and a friend at ODFW! A landowner incentive program! Beavers relocating when kits are born! I suggested to Len that I might connect him with the journalist who wrote the nice article in the Graphic, but he declined. He prefers to do his behind the scenes work and leave the visible drama up to crazy beaver defenders like us.

The whole thing reminded me a bit of Michael Frayn ‘s romping success “noises off“. Act one shows a very familiar, somewhat tedious farce being produced in the usual way with the usual vanities. Act 2 turned the whole set around and put the audience backstage and privy to the intrigues and foibles that drove and chased the actors. For Act 3 you were back facing the front, but still knowing all the drama of the back, understanding now how the play should go, and sensitive to all the reasons why it might not. Very smart comedy. I can’t find a clip of the cast I saw in London lo those many years and four presidents ago, but this is a nice production and gives you the general idea.

Will there be an Act 3 to the story of the Newberg Beavers? We’ll just have to wait and see.

Oil this morning in the Keys, because contrary to popular belief, the gulf of Mexico isn’t a bathtub and the contents actually go other places too. Now the oil is in the Loop Current and is getting pulled down the coast. Maybe people will take it seriously when it comes around the Atlantic.

State of the Beaver Conference: Update

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, Creative Solutions March 16, 2010

Beaver Friend Leonard Houston, the chair of SURCP who worked tirelessly for this years “State of the beaver” conference in February, was so inspired by Brock’s description of the salmonid restoration conference he had to write a summary of his own. Here’s a little taste of the wonders he and the others brought to the beaver table.

State of the Beaver 2010, After Shock

The February 3^rd, 4^th and 5^th, State of the Beaver Conference hosted by the Cow Creek Band of the Umpqua Indian Tribe , co-hosted by the South Umpqua Rural Community Partnership’s, Beaver Advocacy Committee and The Partnership for the Umpqua Rivers at the Seven Feathers Resort and Convention Center can be viewed as a tail splashing success.

From the Tribal welcome by Steven Rondeau of the Cow Creek Indians, to Leonard Houston of the Beaver Advocacy Committee’s opening speech, the conference took on a life of it’s own. Dr. John Hadidian, Director of the Urban Wildlife Program, of the Humane Society of the United States was first at the podium where he took us on a journey back in time, from early American beaver management to current human animal interactions. His presentation was not only inspiring but thought provoking as he challenges us to find non-lethal techniques to deal with beaver issues that we might enjoy beaver benefits.

Following Dr. Hadidian, from Norway, Dr. Duncan Halley of the Norwegian Institute of Nature Research took us to Europe where we learned of the beavers reconquest. Duncan taught us how conflicting human / human issues are more the forefront than human / animal issues.He also taught us how those issues have been resolved, allowing beaver reintroduction which has been successful throughout most of Europe. Dr. Halley spoke again as keynote presenter at the Beaver Banquet once again taking us world wide with human animal conflicts and the human resolutions in order to preserve wildlife and protect human interest.

Beavers and salmonid production was brought to life and light, by scientist Dr. Michael Pollock of NOAA. Michael is a well known research ecologist recognized as the foremost expert on west coast salmonid production and the relationship to beavers.Continuing the beaver, fisheries relationship, Jeff Rodgers accredited designer of the Oregon Coastal Coho Conservation Plan, appendix 3, and representing the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, beaver workgroup shared with us his research, and how beavers positively impact salmonid production.

Completing day one was Dr. DeWaine Jackson, of the ODFW presenting the Pilot Study of beaver translocation efforts here in the Umpqua Basin’s. DeWaine is the lead researcher for the entire project which encompasses both forks of the Umpqua.

Day two began with a new and exciting project utilizing a fish hatchery as a beaver nursery to hold captive beavers until family units are established before release. Kent Woodruff was kind enough to present this collaborative effort partnering agency and the Yakima Indian Tribe of the Okanagan Region of Washington.

Dr. Suzanne Fouty a fluvial geomorphologist showed us that beavers radically modify degraded stream systems, collecting sediment and recharging aquifers while elevating water tables. Her presentation was both scientific and passionate displaying a side of science seldom seen and richly rewarding.

Greg Jaclke an ODFW biologist then taught us of the past and present beaver management practices in the John Day River Basin in north central Oregon. Greg has an acute understanding of people and beavers with a promising future in beaver ecology.

Sherri Tippie of Wildlife 2000 then took us on a 24 year slide show of how she has moved over a thousand beavers. Sherri is a licensed beaver translocator by the state of Colorado and a true pioneer in beaver reintroduction.

Skip Lisle owner operator of Beaver Deceivers International then showed us how a wide array of his non-lethal management devices save beavers lives while allowing us to enjoy the many beaver benefits. Skip was another dual presenter hosting a four hour workshop on building and installing beaver deceivers and flow control devices. Skip was followed by Stephanie Boyles of the Humane Society of the United States on the cost and efficacy of Skips devices. Stephanie’s presentation showed how the state of Virginia hired Skip to install his devices in areas of beaver roadway conflict and how those installation and maintenance costs compared to prior costs associated with the same sites, it was nothing short of amazing.

Lewis Pence a retired Idaho Soil and Water Conservationist taught us how he used beavers to restore degraded streams in the high desert country of southern Idaho, his straight forward presentation was a visual confirmation of everything we had learned so far. Following the banquet to which we were welcomed by Sue Schafer of the Cow Creeks and featured Dr. Duncan Halley as keynote presenter, the conference quickly became a networking extravaganza.

Day three began with Mary O’Brien of the Grand Canyon Trust, outlining the new Utah statewide beaver management program. Mary is a former Oregon resident who is doing amazing things in the field of beaver ecology. Dr. Jimmy Taylor of the USDA, APHIS, Supervisory Research Biologist then presented on the current research programs and beaver management policies of APHIS and his own beaver management actions. Jimmy is a very forthright and honest scientist who is actively pursuing non-lethal management techniques to enable beavers and humans to exist harmoniously and beneficially.

Following Dr. Taylor, Leonard Houston of the Beaver Advocacy committee, then took us along with the BAC and ODFW releasing and following transmitterd beavers of the Tiller Beaver Research Project, it was a first time seen presentation showing us where beavers go and what beavers do after being relocated. Leonard’s presentation then focused on future beaver plans for the South Umpqua, Elk Creek, Salmon Recovery Restoration Project and how landowners are partnering with agencies to provide habitat and home for beavers.

Steven Rondeau , Natural Resource Director of the Cow Creeks then shared the spotlight with Lewis La Chance, Cultural Resource Director of the Cow Creeks. Lewis presented telling us of how the Cow Creeks held beavers in high esteem and of great cultural significance. Steven Rondeau then talked of perspective of life and beavers focusing on how his people had survived to regain their rights and how it was similar to the plight of the beaver. Steven teaches us that when faced with incredible challenges, we can prevail.

The State of the Beaver 2010 has not only served as a powerful educational tool it has brought about a unification of agency and activist, it has created a n opportunity to work together to create a new future, one in which man and beaver exist harmoniously.