Tag: Malcolm Kenton

BEAVERS IN MARYLAND: DAY ONE

heidi08 Beaver Conference, Beavers March 4, 2020

By all accounts yesterday was a splendid beaver day, with presenters from around the world really swinging the bat hard for beavers. To the right is Frances Backhouse posing with conference organizers Scott McGill and Mike Callahan (in disguise). Here are some highlights from yesterday Sharon and Owen Brown of Beavers: Wetlands and Wildlifeand were presented with the lifetime achievement award, Skip did a very well received presentation on the history of the beaver deceiver (summarized by Malcolm Kenton) and here’s a brief run through of what I’ll be presenting today.

The only mess-up of the day is that Emily Fairfax didn’t get time to present her awesome fire dissertation – It was a packed schedule and either things started late after lunch or James Wallace couldn’t squeeze her in – but she was hoping to be able to say something about it last night and in her connections with people She was a good sport of course and Lord knows we’ll be hearing from her again soon!

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Check out these great notes by Malcolm on Skip’s Presentation, Worth A Dam’s Emsissary Doug Noble said he stole the show.

Skip Lisle, inventor of the “Beaver Deceiver,” speaking at #BeaverCON2020:
– The Beaver Deceiver is a flow device, but not all flow devices are beaver deceivers!
– We’re like moose — we like wetlands and we know where to turn to make healthy, productive ecosystems. We need to develop a common language & history.
– We’re lucky to live at a time when there are tremendous opportunities to save society a great deal of money with creative long-term remedies and create tremendous habitats.
– There’s a lot of pushback out there because people are used to wetland areas being drained – the culture associates wetlands/swamps with stagnation, disease, “wasted land” and various unpleasantness. So many places inefficiently keep killing beavers in the same places over and over again.
– In my career at the Penobscot Nation, my friend and I kept trying and building junky flow devices until we came up with the successful trapezoidal concept. The trapezoid had to get larger because they’re attached to the dam. Dam-leak separation makes a flow device more robust. Though they’re smart, beavers don’t do much deductive reasoning and can’t grasp the hollowness of a pipe.
– There’s a lot of controversy about where flow devices can work, but I don’t have any problem with zero inches/feet of water. A dry flow device can do a great job protecting beaver habitat upstream. Getting people to stop killing beavers is another issue — there are wide-open trapping seasons in most of these places.
– Every site is different so I need to put in a lot of thought as to what device best suits the place. Some culvert protectors need floors and some don’t.
– We’ve done enormous damage to wetlands after draining them, but beavers can repair all that if we just stop killing them. One beaver in one month (before moving on) brought so many birds to a site I worked on that weren’t there before. It’s miraculous! Remarkable wildlife viewing spots can be created in very short order. Every town can do this.
– I build simple wood structures to guide beavers’ damming — I don’t use the term “beaver dam analog” because it doesn’t need to look like a beaver dam to get them started.
– You can have a long beaver dam parallel to a road and have the water level much higher than the road, with a few pipes through the dam and under the road, and the road stays dry.
– There’s also an aesthetic and spiritual value to keeping beavers on the land — they’re dynamic, fascinating and all different. They bring a lot of joy to our lives.

A packed house with Doug Noble sitting next to Sherry Guzzi of Tahoe!

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Blasts from the past…

heidi08 Beavers December 27, 2013

Wikipedia tells us that the Gray Fossil Site is a Late Miocene-epoch assemblage of fossils located near the unincorporated town of Gray in Washington County, Northeast Tennessee, and dates from 7 to 4.5 million years BCE). The Gray Fossil Site was discovered by geologists in May 2000. They were investigating unusual clay deposits turned up during the course of a Tennessee Department of Transportation highway project to widen State Route 75 south of its intersection with Interstate 26.

Apparently the freeway path was redesigned by governor’s order so the site could be protected. It contained such unexpected Tennessee inhabitants as tapir and red panda. And now two kinds of beaver.

Red panda, beaver, horse, camel specimens all part of Fossil Site dig season

“We have dug probably less than 2 percent of the entire site,” he said. “When you think of how big the site is, and how deep the site is, and all of these little pits that we’ve dug here and there … we’ve dug so little, yet we’ve found so many cool things.”

Wallace said a second type of beaver was also uncovered this year.

“We do have beavers at the site, and for a long time we only had one kind. It was about the size of a muskrat,” he said. “This last summer out on the spoil piles, which were from the original construction of the museum itself, one of our workers actually found a foot bone that’s basically a modern-sized beaver.

“It looks like we have two different species of beaver at this site. My guess is the one that’s the size of the modern beaver was probably living a lot like a modern beaver, but the smaller one probably was filling the modern role of a muskrat or something along those lines.”

Now there’s something you don’t see every day. Folks in Tennessee excited about beaver! That’s pretty cool. When I bought my castoroides skull copy at the Bone Room in Berkeley, the owner suggested I also look at the pricey fossilized beaver tooth. My pocket book was very happy he couldn’t find it amongst the million treasures he showed that day so I got to preserve some dollars in their natural habitat. Whew.

Let’s have some more recent history, shall we?

Lahontan, Louis Armand de Lom d’Arce, baron de. New voyages to North-America: containing an account of the several nations […]. Vol. 1. London: H. Bomwicke et al., 1703. FC71 L313 1703. P. 106.

The 1703 copper engraving of the beaver by Louis Armand Lohontan, (with it’s amputated ear and vampire teeth) was bad enough, but I was much more troubled by the action sketches beneath it, claiming to be of a “beeve” who was caught by his horns. First a unibeaver and now this? I was relieved to eventually find out that a “beeve” is an an old french canadian word for buffalo, which thankfully makes an ounce of sense.

Now some 300 years later…

The beavers are back in our north meadow. They made their first dam there some 30 years ago, but like prudent farmers, they leave at intervals to let the area regenerate. Their return improves the human neighborhood. In fact, having beavers next door is like visiting Switzerland; they’re so sensible and they have their affairs so well in hand that it can be embarrassing to those of us who are neither Swiss nor beavers.” — Nicholas Howe, “The Comfort of beavers”.

These were sent by beaver-friend Malcolm Kenton during his Christmas vacation to North Carolina. They are from the April 1996 issue of Yankee magazine in his old archive at his mother’s.

On our last days of 2013 remember to make some important beaver history of our own!

Martinez visits Huntley Meadows

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers November 18, 2013

In the whole of our nation, from bright sea to shining sea, there are two locations where you can reliably see beavers on public land. Martinez and Virginia. The beavers in these locations are surprisingly a ‘feature’ not a ‘bug’. In fact the ones at Huntley Meadows have built a lodge up and over this lovely bench. Our friend Ann Cameron Siegal photographs the beavers there, and Malcolm Kenton visits regularly from his digs in Washington D.C. He blogs for the Greater Greater Washington website, and has a host of rail connections. When he stopped by Martinez recently Cheryl gave him a tour and a shirt and I asked him to send us a photo. He promised to pose for us the next time he went to H.M.

As can see, Malcolm dresses way nicer than us for his day job, but he agreed to slub the shirt over his pinstripes for this photo. Thanks Malcolm! I love that Martinez was there in spirit! If you look closely you will see that Malcolm is also wearing his “Beavers: Wetlands & Wildlife” cap. Malcolm befriended Sharon and Owen Brown and maintains the Facebook page for BWW. I am very happy to be part of the yarn that knits this vast beaver community together. This photo firmly confirms Malcolm as a friend to the beavers of which there are more than there used to be, but not nearly as many as their ought.

Now, am I mature enough to keep the paraphrase of ‘The Monks’ to myself?

(As in “Nice Shirt, Shame about the Hat”….)

Apparently not.

D.C. comes to Martinez

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Friends of Martinez Beavers September 30, 2013

Malcolm Kenton lives in Washington D.C. and writes for the rail website “Greater Greater Washington.” He was raised in North Carolina and attended Guilford College. We met because of some beaver business out his way and connected through email and facebook. Knowing he wanted to follow local beaver news, I introduced him to the beavers at Huntley Meadows in VA and to photographer Ann Cameron Siegal who was keeping an eye on them. They have been watching those beavers together since. I also suggested he connect with Owen and Sharon Brown and they met up a few months ago, Now he is maintaining their facebook page for Beavers: Wetlands and Wildlife. Malcolm is an avid rail and beaver fan, so it’s no surprise that he jumped at the chance to fly out and ride the capital corridor to Martinez. Yesterday he and a friend got a beaver tour from Cheryl and a visit to the John Muir House.

Although the train schedule meant he couldn’t come for prime viewing time, he was able to catch site of a hungry youngster who just couldn’t sleep in until his parents and siblings awoke. He posted this yesterday from his iphone. How’s that for a tourist amenity welcome to Martinez!

Malcolm and his friend loved the beaver dams in the city, the working flow device and the best view of a kit that’s not from the BBC, and then Cheryl kindly drove them out to the Muir House for a bit of Martinez history where he especially enjoyed photos taken by Muir’s daughter of the railroad! Then it was a quick red-eye home and an exhausting day ahead. I’m so glad he got to visit Martinez and sorry I couldn’t be there. At least he got the full natural wonder tour. Cheryl snapped this that day on the secondary dam.

That’s a double-crested cormorant on a beaver dam and he’s not here for the view.

Double crested Cormorant on secondary beaver dam – Photo Cheryl Reynolds

Does this look like ‘Havoc’ to you?

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Environmental August 31, 2013

Beavers have built dams in the Roy Swamp Wildlife Management Area on West Cornwall Road in Sharon causing water to spill out onto the roadway during heavy storms. The selectmen plan to invoke the statute that allows the town to order landowners to keep their waterways free of debris. Ruth Epstein Republican-American

Me either, but Sharon, CT clearly has their own definition of ‘havoc’.

Sharon to tackle beaver damage

SHARON — Officials refuse to leave it to the beavers to wreak havoc, so they’re seeking ways to combat the effects of those industrious, highly energized creatures.

During the last meeting of the Board of Selectmen, First Selectman Robert Loucks said two large dams had broken, one on West Cornwall Road and the other on West Woods Road 2. The breakthroughs caused water to inundate the adjacent roadways, leading to severe damage.

You know what works real good at keeping the dam stable and preventing the pond from getting too high? A flow device! Lucky for you your in Connecticut the state with its own Beaver Expert (Skip Hiliker) or if you wanna shop around, Skip Lisle is 3 hours away in VT and Mike Callahan is 75 miles away in MA. You can think of better solutions than trapping, right?

Our beaver friend Malcolm Kenton sent this recording this am from his beaver watching adventure last night at Huntley Meadow. He writes

Here’s an audio recording I took of the 3-year-old beaver underneath the boardwalk by the bench lodge, uttering some whines as she nibbled on some of her food cache. The voices you hear are the four other people who were at that spot also watching and listening to wildlife.

To which I would say after listening several times, there are at least two beavers in that audio and you have kits!

And as sun sets on our beaver heroes on the West Coast, a third salmon friendly beaver-device is left in their path, this one a Flexible leveler with a special salmon swirl in the center. It’s been a job well done!

From Mike Callahan

Third WA Salmon-Beaver Site –

Here are pictures of the modified intake fence for Flexible Pond Levelers. We installed this fish-friendly flow device yesterday also. When the salmon exit the intake end of the pipe the chain-link fence cylinder guides them directly to a One-Way door on the side of the exclusion fence. See pics. We did not extend the pipe to the side wall of the intake fence because we need the water to enter the pipe near the center of the cylinder to prevent detection by beavers. The chain-link tube prevents the fish from needing to search for the exit and prevents them from bumping into or getting stuck in the fence. The surfaces are all smooth with no sharp edges. The One-Way door PVC pipes are weighted to keep them in a closed position but can be easily nudged open by fish when underwater. Again many thanks are due to the other team members Mike Rustay, Ben Dittbrenner, Dale, and Jake Jacobson. None of this would have been possible without them. If only we didn’t have to wait a couple of months for the salmon to return!