GOOD GOLLY MISS MOLLY IS AT CDFW!

This is the article that got all my attention after the holidays. And its not because I love Modesto so much. See if you can guess what caught my eye.

Beavers in Modesto? Sightings aren’t unusual, but you have to know where, when to look

Residents may not be used to seeing beavers in Modesto, but it turns out there is a long history of them in and around the area’s rivers and creeks. Jim Inman, wildlife biologist for FishBio based in Oakdale, said he sees beavers in Modesto fairly regularly, even in Dry Creek. “I’ve seen them downstream in the Grayson and Shiloh area and as upstream as La Grange,” he said.

Molly Alves, Beaver Restoration Program supervisor for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife said this definitely is a part of the state where beavers are historically native.

Molly Allves is the Beaver Restoration Program supervisor for CDFW? She has been with the Tulalip tribes forever and just last month listed herself as employed there in her presentation at the Beaver Institute.

This is WONDERFUL news because she knows more about beaver relocation than anyone except maybe Gerhard Schwab. I was worried that CDFW was modelling itself after the Utah program for moving beavers, but this is MUCH MUCH better news.

Alves, the Beaver Restoration Program supervisor, said there have been problems with beavers felling fruit or ornamental trees, and they are attracted to human infrastructure, for example “culverts” or tunnels that allow water drainage under roads. “Culverts are the biggest thing. Basically, a beaver sees a culvert and it sees a dam with a tiny hole in it, and those are easy to plug, particularly when the culverts are undersized,” she said. Hart, the Fish and Wildlife volunteer, said beavers have been known to plug up canals and flood out farmers’ lands. “Beavers are controversial because to an environmentalist and nature person, they’re a keystone species that creates an ecosystem,” he said. “But where man land-manages the rivers and waterways and agriculture, they are a nuisance species.” Hart fished a large, dead beaver from under the footbridge at Kewin Park last year. “They do get poached,” he said. “So the one I picked out might very well have been shot.” For the first time in 75 years, beavers are being relocated to other areas of the state, but it’s in small numbers for restoration of historic beaver populations like at the Tule River Indian Reservation, and only as a last resort. There are several ways to reduce the negative impact of beavers in areas that are more populated. Lundquist said her team is creating a beaver help desk to inform and provide resources on how to coexist with beavers. Wraps have been placed around some cottonwood trees in Tuolumne River Regional Park’s Gateway parcel that prevents beavers from chewing on them as they grow.

Well well well. Is Valerie Cook still the program manager? And she hired Molly after she presented her relocation data to the staff? Either way this is VERY GOOD NEWS for the beavers, because being relocated is hard work.

And they have a much better chance under Molly’s watchful eye. This deserves celebration as other than making Chuck Bonham cry at the first relocation its the very most encouraging thing I’ve heard yet about the CDFW beaver restoration program.

Welcome aboard, Molly.

SHH, MOLLY ALVES IS TALKING

heidi08 Beavers and salmon September 23, 2022

Molly Alves is a Wildlife Biologist for the Tulalip Tribes of Washington, where she has worked for over eight years to protect and restore treaty-reserved subsistence resources. Unfortunately for her other job responsibilities, she dedicates most of her time and passion to salmon recovery via beaver relocation as manager of The Tulalip Beaver Project. Beginning this August, she will build on this work as a Masters student at Utah State University, where she will be studying the global policies and practices surrounding beaver relocation and management.

EVERY DAY IS LABOR DAY FOR BEAVERS

heidi08 Beavers September 5, 2022

Let’s celebrate labor day by praising the ever-working beaver shall we? Never a day off and no supervisor needed. Beavers do all the work of their own accord. Molly Alves is a name we should recognize allowing beavers to do their work. Let’s hear what she has to say today.

BEAVER BENEFITS IN THE SMITHSONIAN

heidi08 Beaver relocation, Beavers and salmon May 3, 2021

Well the beaver coho story is only 30 years old. Don’t you think its time for the Smithsonian to act like they discovered it? Me too.

Scientists Are Relocating Nuisance Beavers to Help Salmon

Alves helped launch the Tulalip Beaver Project in 2014 with the aim of using beavers to boost declining salmon numbers. Since the low-cost project began, scientists have relocated more than 200 “nuisance” beavers, as they are called, and created dozens of salmon-friendly beaver ponds. While scientists don’t have statistics on salmon population changes after beaver reintroductions, they say anecdotal evidence shows the rodents reshape the landscape in a way that’s fostering more fish. Now they’re set to expand their easily scalable work into new watersheds in western Washington, and other groups in the Pacific Northwest are picking up on their successful tactics too. “I’ve heard multiple people say that Washington is kind of a leader in beaver projects,” says Kodi Jo Jaspers, a Trout Unlimited employee and manager of the recently-launched Wenatchee Beaver Project on the other side of the Cascades.

Just so you know. There are no “Nuisance beavers”. Only property-owners that can solve problems. And property owners who can’t.

The reintroductions are important because the outlook for wild salmon is dire, especially in the Pacific Northwest. About a third Tof salmon and steelhead populations on the West Coast have already gone extinct according to a 2007 study in Conservation Biology. Today, 14 more populations out of 131 remaining are at risk of extinction in Washington alone, according to a 2020 report produced by the governor’s salmon recovery office. In the heavily populated Puget Sound area, only one of 22 different populations of chinook salmon—the largest species—has exceeded population goals set by NOAA in 2007.

These declines have led to a flurry of funding for salmon recovery projects. Many of those projects are costly and logistically complex; they include tearing down man-made dams that block fish passages, removing pollutants from contaminated waters and installing new salmon-friendly bridges over spawning grounds. The salmon recovery office estimates that only 22 percent of the funding needed for these projects has been met—after $1 billion has been pumped into salmon recovery efforts.

Moving beavers for fun and profit! That sounds like a book that needs to be written. Everyone loves a good ‘moving beavers’ story. Molly has been in the New York times. The Washington Post. And now the Smithsonian.

I wonder if any of these folks ever think about the problems that COULD be solved by installing a flow device and letting beavers stay put?

Salmon need icy cold, clear water year-round, and that’s exactly what beavers provide. A 2019 study by Benjamin Dittbrenner, the executive director of Beavers Northwest, showed that each beaver relocated by the Tulalip Beaver Project created a swimming-pool sized pond of water for every 328 feet of stream. The beavers also slowed the stream down, causing more water to soak into the ground. The dams cooled downstream water by more than two degrees Celsius because the deeper water was harder for the sun to heat. And the ponds increase the amount of water available throughout the dry summer months by 20 percent because of the small reservoirs created behind the beaver dams. All of these new conditions add up to ideal habitat for salmon fry, as the baby fish are called.

I’ve been dooint this so long I have the graphic all ready for every occasion. Fancy that. This is the paragraph I like the most.

“If you have beavers in conflict with people and they will be killed if they’re not moved, then yeah. We’re gonna move them,” says Alexa Whipple. “But we’re trying to create more programs for coexistence strategies.” Biologists use tools that homeowners might not be aware of to mitigate damage. For example, scientists install pond leveling devices that prevent flooding and wrap the base of trees in beaver-proof fencing.

Now that is worth the price of admission. Hey I wonder when the Smithsonian is going to write an article about the harm people do to salmon when they trap beavers. Any time soon?

Don’t hold your breath.

Despite the success of beaver relocation programs, quantifying the projects’ impacts on salmon is tricky. Limited funding means projects don’t have the resources to count salmon numbers in the streams. Instead, biologists measure easier-to-collect data like water temperature, the number of new ponds and the size of those ponds. “Our metric of success is just whether they have impacted their environment somehow, in some way, by some structure,” says Jaspers, with the assumption that building better habitat equals more salmon.

Even though the biologists don’t have the written numbers to show it, they have witnessed direct benefits to the fish. “We’ve seen sites just completely transform to these massive beaver complexes of like 12, 13 dams and ponds everywhere,” says Alves. “Now there’s hundreds of salmon fry swimming in these ponds.”

Or you know. You could leave the beavers where they are. Solve any issues they cause with about 2 hrs of work. And have salmon populations explode across the pacific coast.

Your call.