Tag: Michael Runtz

The chair heard round the world…

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, What's killing beavers now?, Who's saving beavers now? October 26, 2016

Thankfully the Furbearer Defenders letter got the attention of the Canadian Press (like the AP) which allowed the story to be published several more times yesterday. Not as many as I might like but a good number including the respectable Globe and Mail. Let’s hope that several people are feeling very uncomfortable this morning. And that the three men who watched (‘chairleaders’) are starting to think about naming the fourth. The town is really small and just over the American border from North Dakota. Near as I can tell there is only one bar and one bakery so everyone knows who did this. I don’t think they should be able to use chairs at all in the meantime. Everyone should be forced to stand until someone comes forward.

In the time we need hopeful things. Yesterday I was invited to meet with the junior high principal to talk about the way teachers and students might be involved with their new flat-tailed neighbors. This was made possible by former Worth A Dam member Kathi McGlaughlin who’s on the school board and made the introductions.

It turns out it really is true after all. It’s not WHAT you know but WHO you know that matters.

kathy — Kathi teaches youngsters about beavers at the Flyway Fiesta.

In the mean time we purchased a very cheap efficient camcorder that we’re loaning to the kindly resident who’s deck overlooks our wayward beavers. She has seen something little hanging out with them in the shadows and we’re hopeful we can guess what that is. Fingers crossed we will see soon.

And something else to restore our faith in Canadian men in the vicinity of beavers. A lovely article from naturalist Michael Runtz (author of the beautiful “Dam Builders“) about beavers getting ready for winter.

Beavers are busy preparing for winter

If anyone has recently visited a beaver pond – the masterpiece creation of these remarkable rodents – two things would be apparent. One is that the beaver lodge has undergone a noticeable change in appearance. Plenty of fresh mud adorns its outer surface. Another is that a fallen forest had sprung up next to the lodge.

The mud is a sure sign that freezing temperatures are in the not-too-distant future. Starting in late September, beavers begin plastering mud over their lodges. This serves as insulation during winter. As the days get shorter and nights colder, beavers continue to add material during the day, especially on overcast days in November.

Mud is dug up from the pond’s bottom, likely not far from the two underwater entrances. Mud is carried with both front hands holding it against the chest, much in the way that we carry a load of firewood. But beavers seldom carry just a load of mud to the top of the lodge. They inevitably carry a stick or two as well, which are clenched between its teeth.

This double carry amazes me because it is done while a beaver waddles up its lodge with its head in the air, chin pressing down on the mud load it is carrying. It cannot see its feet, which are stepping across protruding sticks surrounded by slippery mud. Despite walking up a slope replete with trip hazards, I’ve never seen a beaver stumble.

The “fallen forest” is the beavers’ winter pantry. Beavers don’t hibernate and so eat every day. During the autumn they fell trees and cut off branches, which are dragged to the pond and piled up next to the lodge. The huge pile, which extends from the surface down to the bottom, contains branches that will be pulled into the lodge where their bark will be eaten. If you examine a food pile from its top to the bottom, you would see a change in the type of branches it contains.

Near the bottom you would likely find Trembling Aspen, Willow, and White Birch branches for these are beavers favourite foods. But on the top you would likely see alder, cedar, and fir branches, items usually deemed inedible. These are placed on top because the ice renders them inaccessible during winter. Their role is to hold down the best foods under the ice where they remain accessible all winter.

Ahh articles like this are good for the chair-battered spirit. Do you think the appearance of this the day after such horrors is just a coincidence or is their a National Beaver Board in Canada that ordered this just in time? Either way, I’m grateful When I read his paragraph about the ‘waddle’ I think always of this famous video. Another feel good moment between beavers and humans.

Beavers win all around!

heidi08 Beavers, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers August 25, 2016

A local paper wrote about my Placer presentation. Based on his questions, I was worried the article would be all about mosquitoes but it turned out okay

– Heidi Perryman, of non-profit, Martinez-based Worth A Dam, spoke in favor of beaver dams, saying that with techniques like beaver-proof culvert protectors, communities and the large, toothy rodent can live peacefully together. Jack Sanchez, founder of Save American River Salmon and Steelhead, went so far as to say in introducing Perryman that there would be no need for dams like Shasta if beaver dams were allowed to proliferate and store water. Martinez now has a Beaver Festival every August to celebrate how the community has learned to accept a beaver population. About seven beavers make Martinez their home, on average.

I’m certain I said nothing about culverts in my meager 15 minutes. He must have drawn on his own experience with beaver problems? But okay. The really exciting news is that someone from CDFG saw this post yesterday and wrote me about looking for folks interested in a beaver reintroduction program in the sierras and had some ideas about funding. I knew this was going to be a really popular idea with several major beaver players in the state so I sent out an email blast to make them aware. You won’t believe how quickly they responded. Fingers crossed the right folks will get together to get moving on this.

(Even though, based on the depredation permits we reviewed last year, they don’t need to relocate beavers so much as to just STOP TRAPPING the ones that are already there!)

Meanwhile TWO beaver books have been nominated for the “Lane Anderson award for Canadian science writing“. Both are good friends of this website and I could NOT be happier for them or for beavers.

Both are wonderfully rich and detailed works that taught even ME something new about beavers. Winners will be announced in late September. May the best beaver book win!

It’s obviously the year of the beaver for our northern cousins, and the mountie story is just icing on the cake. Here’s a nice interview with the pretty thoughtful man whose action inspired a nation!

I love the part about wanting to give back to nature.His impluse created such a stir it even made the weather channel. No really.

Dam Builders: A review

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver Chewing, Educational, featured, Tail slap, Who's saving beavers now? July 19, 2015

It took longer to arrive than I had hoped. The publication was delayed several times and is still expected to be another 6 weeks for American readers. But this weighty record showing 30 years of beaver watching is definitely worth the wait.

I received my courtesy copy from the publisher Fitzhenry & Whiteside Ltd. last week, and have been engrossed ever since. Everything about this book is impressive: its stunning photographs, gripping account of little known beaver details, and its truly classy lay out, right down to the beaver silhouetted page number in the corner. (I had a good friend who was a copy editor at Random House and I know how much work pulling these details together can be.) I had prepared myself to be impressed, and was not disappointed.

What I hadn’t prepared for was to be surprised.

After nearly 10 years in the beaver biz, reading and writing about them daily, and viewing them regularly at very close quarters, I pretty much thought I had heard and seen it all. Michael Runtz book was still filled with gloriously unexpected treasures. From the amazing photograph of a beaver floating on its back (yes you read that right, not a sea otter, I swear, he speculates he might be picking a splinter from its teeth with its rear toe) to the exciting collection of facts about their lives, (did you know that when beavers breathe they replaces a whopping 75% of the oxygen in their lungs? Compared to the paltry human rate of 15%!) or that beaver tails in colder climates actually look different in the fall than the spring, depending on how much fat content they’ve lost from it over the winter? Something we’ll never see here in Martinez.

If some of the photos seem vaguely familiar they should, Runtz supplied his stills to Jari Osborne’s Beaver Documentary (Beaver Whisperer in Canada, and Nature’s “Leave it to Beaver” in America). My favorite chapters were those documenting beaver effects. First a lovely one showing the biodiversity that blooms in beaver ponds, with beautiful macro photography of gnats, insects, dragonflies, to featherlight photos of birds and water fowl, to richly-textured images of otter and moose you can practically feel. Then a beautifully solemn one about what happens to the trees beavers kill by flooding. (Showing excellent homes for a variety of woodpeckers, wood duck and blue heron). And finally a chapter on the pond’s “afterlife”, what happens when the pond silts up and beavers move on, as the flora take over and the fauna shift accordingly with the flourishing nutrient exchange. Honestly, I was almost in tears through these sections, feeling that they showed better than I ever could hope to explain how powerfully beavers impact biodiversity.

(I wanted to sit every contractor, public works crew, and politician down at the table and force them to look at every page. But that’s just me.)

Unlike this website, Runtz doesn’t “preach” the beaver gospel. He simply shows it and waits for readers to get the message. There is a short section covering beaver baffles, which is the Canadian flow device that has had good success. He doesn’t talk about the beaver deceiver or its offspring, but I was happy to see him acknowledge problems and explain their solution. A memorable passage describes the anticipation of sitting at a beaver pond before dawn and listening as it comes to life, comparing it to hearing a truly impressive symphony warm up in the darkness before a performance.

With over 200 pages containing stunning photos from one end to the other, this is a book you will look at again and again. I anticipated and missed a forward from some smart researcher like Glynnis Hood or Dietland Muller-Swarze, talking about why his photos are invaluable, but maybe this book isn’t trying to prove that beavers have value. It just shows you that they’re ‘worth a dam’ without ever saying it.

I was especially struck by the final paragraph, when he comments on how children’s minds would be enlivened by a beaver pond, if they could just put down their electronics long enough to get there. It made me think of these 100+ year-old words from my hero Enos Mills in his last chapter of “In Beaver World” where he calls beaver “the original conservationist”.

The works of the beaver have ever interested, the human mind. Beaver work may do for children what schools, sermons, companions and even home sometimes fail to do, – develop the power to think. No boy or girl can become intimately acquainted with the ways and works of these primitive folk without having the eyes of observation opened, and acquiring a permanent interest in the wide world in which we live.

The American version of this unforgettable book won’t be available until (hopefully) mid-september. If you can’t wait, there will be two copies available in the silent auction at our beaver festival. As far as I know they will be the only two copies on American soil in the entire country. I’m guessing that they will be very popular items, so get ready for the bidding war.

In Defense of Beavers

heidi08 Beavers and Birds, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Who's saving beavers now? April 22, 2015

There is a great article from Ottawa on Michael Runtz, on whose new beaver book “Dam Builders” we are impatiently waiting.

The tale of the tail: Ottawa beaver expert defends maligned creatures

People say unkind things about beavers: Stupid, destructive, smelly, and destructive again. But Michael Runtz is coming out in defence of Canada’s iconic creature, and the great things it does.

“Beavers ponds dot the landscape everywhere and surely if there hadn’t been beavers . . . we’d be lacking a lot of our so-called small lakes and certainly ponds.

“And many larger animals would be less common, too. I dare say we’d have fewer moose in Ontario if we didn’t have beavers. (Moose love wetlands and eat water plants that are rich in sodium). And we would probably have fewer wolves.” Wolves often choose beaver meadows — abandoned ponds that drain and produce new meadows — as places to raise pups.

“If we didn’t have beaver meadows we would probably have fewer Algonquin Park wolf howls,” because that is where wolves gather.

“When beavers create a pond, trees drown, and dead tress are really important for the ecosystem. They themselves are individual habitats” — first for insects, then woodpeckers, then small animals (flying squirrels, saw-whet owls) that live in woodpecker holes, and finally for turtles and ducks that sit on fallen logs.

“Every aspect of the pond cycles supports a wealth of different organisms.”

“Honestly my favourite habitat is a beaver pond,” Runtz said. He suggests it is the best place to introduce young people to nature.

Runtz has been a great defender of beavers, and provided the still photos for Jari Osborne’s beaver documentary that aired on PBS last year. He is also a solid defender of wildlife in general and voluteers with the the Ottawa Carleton Wildlife centre to help raise awareness. His comments make me realize that it would be an awesome thing to have a active beaver pond within 10 miles of every school in North America! I especially loved this image:

“Go to a beaver pond at daybreak. Its like going to a play at the National Arts Centre. The lights are turned down and the curtain is down and you can’t see what’s there. That’s what a pond before daybreak is like.

“It’s dark and you hear some motion. You hear sounds. You sense these animals there but can’t see them.

“And the when dawn breaks, it’s just like the lights going up gradually on a stage or the curtains being slowly raised. It doesn’t come as bright sunlight all of a sudden. It’s a gradual lifting of the darkness. It’s just a compelling natural experience and I just wish we had all our kids exposed to that.”

Isn’t that beautiful?

Now on to Megan’s slightly less floral letter in beaver defense in Fargo, North Dakota.

Letter: Awful of humans to kill off beavers

There are few things that stun me in this world anymore, but I was completely disgusted with the Fargo Park Board’s decision to wipe out beaver populations along the Red River to “save trees.” This has to be one of the most egregious displays of nonsense veiled as a conservation act.

“We’ve planted new trees, and then they’re gone,” said Roger Gress, executive director of the parks district. Then stop planting trees, Roger. Last time I checked, the banks of the Red were all set in terms of tree fulfillment. So, you’re going to just murder colonies of beavers every time you feel like too many trees disappear? And you’re going to kill the beavers by either drowning them or trapping them, both gross and inhumane acts.

It seems like you’re treating the symptom and not the problem. What about beaver relocation? Or simply let the beavers have their trees because they’re an incredibly important part of a river ecosystem and that’s just how nature works. People love to see beavers down by the river. You are all awful human beings for doing this. Shame on you.

Wow. Don’t sugar coat things, Megan. Tell us how you really feel! I only wish she’d mentioned that Roger could EASILY protect the trees with wire instead of relying on murder. But that’s a pretty bold letter. You have to agree. I am very happy when other people defend beavers. It allows me to just sit on the sidelines and beam.

Speaking of beaming, I received word yesterday from the Contra Costa Fish and Wildlife commission that Worth A Dam received our grant for the KEYSTONE wildlife project at this year’s festival! We get the entire award, and I was especially happy to be able to use a little ‘psychology’ in my discussion. After (only?) 8 years the festival finally got support from both the county and the city. Bonus points: they also called my application “thoughtful” which is pretty much the nicest thing anyone could ever say to me. It was thoughtful too. I gave them an acronym. And even a logo!

It’s going to be an awesome festival this year.

Oh and if you haven’t already, celebrate Earth Day by taking the pledge!

Nativity Parade in UK?

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Who's blaming beavers now?, Who's Killing Beavers Now?, Who's saving beavers now? January 19, 2015

Beavers may get UK citizenship

BEAVERS could be declared a native British animal — for the first time in 400 years — after scientists found that at least three populations have become established in rivers from Scotland to Devon.

The biggest group of 150 animals live on the Tay, where, as in the River Otter in Devon, they have become a tourist attraction. Both are thought to have been illegal reintroductions. Another population is also growing at Knapdale in Scotland — the only one based on licensed releases.

The government had planned to classify beavers as non-natives under the Infrastructure Bill. This would have made future unlicensed releases illegal and prevented beavers from gaining protection in areas where they have become established.

Now Defra, the environment ministry, has said it will consider declaring them natives, subject to a study being carried out on the Knapdale population’s integration with other land uses.

What? DEFRA might call beavers native? After all of England spent centuries of extinction following centuries of economic harassment, it might at last recognize their rightful place? Be still my heart!

Oh right, it already is.

Wait, are beavers native to the United Kingdom. This is from the Aberdeen Bestiary, 12th century AD. The illuminated manuscript descended from the Royal Library of Henry the VIII to the university on the east highlands of Scotland.

De castore. Est animal quod dicitur castor mansuetum nimis, cuius testiculi medicine sunt aptissimi, de quo dicit Phisiologus, quia cum vena torem se insequentem cog novit, morsu testiculos sibi abscidit, et in faciem vena toris eos proicit et sic fugiens evadit.

Of the beaver There is an animal called the beaver, which is extremely gentle; its testicles are highly suitable for medicine. Physiologus says of it that, when it knows that a hunter is pursuing it, it bites off its testicles and throws them in the hunter’s face and, taking flight, escapes.

Laying aside the obvious impossibility of this fanciful account, (Given the fondness males of any species seem to feel for their testicles) we can at least establish that the United Kingdom once had access to beavers, because they were, in fact, native, and if something WAS native, that means it IS native, and you dam well know it, so stop trying to pretend like it’s a big decision or that you’re being generous by calling it native. It’s as native as humans are on British soil, or more so I’d wager if we were looking at the fossil record.

So there.

Fur- Bearer Defender’s Interview with Michael Runtz, author and photographer of Dam Builders.