Tag: Ph.D.

A HEYDAY FOR BEAVERS

Heyday Publishing that is.

Looks like artist and water guru Obi Kaufann just signed a 6 volume contract with California’s favorite publisher. The latest book looks very nice. But it’s the one that comes after that which got my attention.

Artist, author of ‘The California Field Atlas’ talks about Sonoma County’s ecology

Bestselling author, artist and adventurer Obi Kaufmann answers to an unusual calling: over the past few decades he’s explored vast tracts of California’s wild backcountry on foot, from the Siskiyou Mountains near the Oregon border to the Salton Sea near Mexico.

In the process, he’s acquired a unique firsthand view of the state’s diverse natural world and the complex workings of its deepest systems.

This coming Tuesday, Feb. 11, Kaufmann will be in Santa Rosa to introduce a slice of what he’s discovered and his new hand- illustrated book, “The State of Water,” along with perspective on what he sees as California’s unfolding ecological story.

Okay now that looks like it definitely belongs at the beaver festival. And Californians thirst for knowledge about their own water. But guess what he’s working on now?

“I am working on a series of what will ultimately be six books,” he said. “And two of the main characters in the next book (on forests) are Sonoma County locals — the salmon and the beaver.”

“Can you imagine, just 200 years ago, nearly every watershed on nearly every water course in Sonoma County held these two species,” he said. “We’re looking at thousands of beavers, a beaver population density of two or three per kilometer.”

“Beaver created cold, clear, clean water habitat for salmon. And at the end of their life cycle, when the fish returned to the headwaters of their birth, they laid their bodies down, depositing hundreds of thousands of metric tons of calcium, phosphorus and nitrogen, which came back down the Russian River in big floods to feed the forests the fertilizer they need.”

Kaufmann believes the two native animals offer modern Californians an ecological architecture for restoration.

I’m guessing Brock Dolman promoting beavers and salmon will be heavily featured in that book. I just hope it comes out FAST. California needs to get the beaver salmon point soon, or it will be too late. For the salmon I mean, beavers of course will stick around no matter what stupid stuff we do.

Plenty of people get on the beaver bandwagon eventually. Check out this article.

Polluted, damaged streams in Chesapeake region at center of debate over cleanup

A billion-dollar industry has emerged as local governments work to stay below EPA limits for urban runoff that allow them to qualify for stormwater permits and that help determine federal funding to states in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

But environmental scientists say it is unclear whether the high-cost projects are worth the investment. The work typically uses heavy machinery to clear old trees and plant new ones around re-engineered streams that contain boulders, wood and vegetation meant to absorb harmful pollutants.

In some cases, such projects may be hurting surrounding wildlife unnecessarily, some experts say.

“You modify the system so much that you risk transforming a stream ecosystem into something else. And the question becomes: Is that good?” said Solange Filoso, an aquatic biologist at the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Science who advocates for smarter stream restoration designs and a greater focus on the sources of urban runoff.

Now we all know that. And we all know what would do it better. But I didn’t know Maryland knew that too.

Thomas Jordan, a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, said a fair amount of guesswork is involved in the effort. He cited a $1 million project on his center’s property in Anne Arundel County, Md., that initially caused the water to turn a rusty color — because of iron leaching out of rehydrated soil — and, later, appeared to be no more effective at removing pollutants than a beaver dam further downstream.

“And the beavers do that free,” he said.

Thomas Jordan at the Smithsonian Environental Research Center gets an email. Something tells me this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Are you now, or have you ever been, a beaver supporter?

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental December 4, 2011

When Brock was rooting for farming truffles, he unearthed this amazing report from ODFW (Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife). Allow me to preface by saying that the states display increasing amounts of beaver-stupid as you move farther down the pacific coast, so Oregon is smarter than California, but not as good as Washington. In what used to be called schizophrenogenic parenting, Oregon beaver are protected on public lands and listed as a predator so they can be killed without paperwork on private lands. There is clearly strife among the policy makers because that compromise is making no one happy. Oregon recently changed their policy to allow beaver relocation but they were frustrated that no one seemed to be doing it – (mind you it requires such things as getting permission from the neighboring property owners 6 miles up and down stream!) But still, they wanted to learn more about the attitudes towards beavers.

Many fish and wildlife biologists and land managers understand the critical role that beavers play in improving aquatic and floodplain functions, and have initiated reintroduction efforts to restore beavers to many areas in Oregon. Beavers are beneficial because their dams help to create wetlands and habitat for fisheries recovery, and some people enjoy the aesthetic value of seeing beavers. To realize these benefits of beavers, there is an urgent need to address current and potential future conflicts between landowners and this species. This is important if measures are sought to reintroduce beavers into unoccupied areas, especially on private lands.

Mark D. Needham, Ph.D. & Anita T. Morzillo, Ph.D.

Landowner Incentives and Tolerances for Managing Beaver Impacts in Oregon

So Oregon wanted to know how Oregon felt about beavers and they brought in Dr.’s Needham and Morzillo to do a massive survey and report on landowners. They sent 5200 questionnaires to all 4 regions of the state and received back 1512. (Which, if you were a grad student doing your dissertation, is a response rate you’d be pretty thankful about.) They asked questions about attitudes towards beaver, experience with beaver, problems with beaver, feelings about beaver and knowledge about beaver. Apparently people in Oregon on the whole feel better about beaver than people on our city council, because their general attitude seemed remarkably tolerant, even when it came to questions about what kind of problems justified lethal action.

attitudes — Landowner Incentives and Tolerances for Managing Beaver Impacts in Oregon

Pretty remarkable considering the news I cover about beavers every day. There were things in this paper I hadn’t ever considered, mainly that there’s a whole division of wildlife ecology that has to do with peoples attitudes towards wildlife. Whoa! Psychology and Ecology Combined! Maybe my life will make sense after all. Of course they also wanted to know who had seen one:I don’t know about you but I’ll eat a BUG if 43% of the 432 Eastern region folks saw beaver more than 10 times in their lives. That’s 185 people. For comparison, I’d bet there aren’t 185 people in all of Martinez that saw the beavers more than 10 times, and our beavers are the most visible creatures that ever ate willow. I have met a host of people that THOUGHT they saw a beaver when they actually saw a muskrat, or an otter or a turtle. I’m willing to believe 185 landowners in Eastern Oregon thought they saw a beaver more than 10 times. Does that count?

Interestingly the East had the most experience with beaver and historic damage from them. The glowing feel-good of Portland’s “hypothetical” beavers seems to give way when they were talking about “actual” beavers who gnaw trees and flood properties.

afraid — Landowner Incentives and Tolerances for Managing Beaver Impacts in Oregon

I’m just guessing but I believe these numbers would look very different in California. “Beaver damage is major” would probably top 70 percent in some areas, certainly 525 Henrietta St. It does seem like people are predisposed to ‘like’ beavers, from story books and cartoons and only find out they dislike them later when they cause problems. Hmm, that’s worth thinking about. Oh, and find me those three fellas that are afraid of beavers because we need to talk.

This is an interesting piece of the puzzle. I think the concerns to property are lower than they should be and the concerns for disease and pets are higher than they should be. People don’t really know what they’re dealing with do they? Beavers can cause serious problems. Look it up. People need to know what to worry about with beavers so they know what to do to prevent it. And they need to stop wasting time with stupid concerns.

An abysmal number of people have taken preventative action with beavers and an even fewer number have done so humanely. This was a stunning chart that must have made ODFW bristle. Note that they didn’t include “Shot the beavers” as an option I guess because that’s illegal and people might not want to get in trouble or feel spied on. But you know it happens.

Okay this is my favorite part of the whole survey.

Ahhh basic beaver 101. The authors called this “knowledgeable” about beavers. So 38% of these folks who have never wrapped a tree or seen a beaver, believe that beavers eat fish. Of course they do. Heck nearly HALF of the Portland population does!

Well, I guess it’s not so surprising. Shh, and brace yourselves, but I went to school for a long, long time and when the beavers first came to Martinez I can remember a conversation with Jon on the bridge where I speculated they must eat fish sometimes. I can barely remember thinking it, and I quickly learned otherwise, but it just seemed impossible they would spend all that time making “hatcheries” and never reap the rewards.

Well, beavers don’t eat fish. They don’t catch fish. They don’t have the stomachs to digest fish. I have sat on this video a long time because I don’t want to confuse anyone. But today you’re ready. You can remember that they are vegetarians BUT they aren’t stupid and some deals are too good to pass up.

Happy International Beaver Day!

heidi08 Educational, Environmental, Uncategorized, Why We Care April 7, 2011

Our friends at Beavers: Wetlands & Wildlife selected this day as International Beaver day, and the good news is it’s catching on. I’m told that today is a great day to give a beaver talk, write a letter to an editor about beavers or set up a display. Hmmm. I already do that on the other 364 days of the year, so I thought I’d do something truly special today. I’ll teach you a brand new thing. I learned about the concept from Michael Pollock on our Yosemite trip, and have been waiting for the right moment to share. Of course the unflattering story line is entirely my own responsibility. I figure a time when we’re waiting for beavers to build is a good time to learn.

‘Only it is so VERY lonely here!’ [without the beaver dams] Alice said in a melancholy voice; and at the thought of her loneliness two large tears came rolling down her cheeks.

‘Oh, don’t go on like that!’ cried the poor Queen, wringing her hands in despair. ‘Consider what a great girl you are. Consider what a long way you’ve come to-day. Consider what o’clock it is. Consider anything, only don’t cry!’

Alice could not help laughing at this, even in the midst of her tears. ‘Can YOU keep from crying by considering things?’ she asked. ‘That’s the way it’s done,’ the Queen said with great decision: ‘nobody can do two things at once, you know.

Consider this then:

A long time ago a tired researcher sat on his lawn chair and glared at the beaver dam in his stream and thought, I really need to blow that thing up, but first I’ll justify it. He took out the thermometer his wife had used to check his daughter’s temperature that morning and he measured the top two inches of water in the pond.

“Ah ha!” he said, comparing it to the top two inches of running water on the other side of the dam. “Beaver dams raise the water temperature and this hurts trout and salmon!” “Beavers destroy habitat for fish!” He trotted back into the house and wrote a paper which was published in the journal of wehatebeavers and soon the paper was quoted in ever other scientific paper on beaver dams known to man kind. (Then he blew up the dam which had been his goal all along, and alot of people were encouraged to blow up their dams too.) Soon every biology, hydrology and icthology student was taught that beaver dams raise the water temperature and regional agencies like Fish and Game or Department of Natural Resources wrote it into their policies and it became the great truth of the land. It was even quoted by the letter I responded to from LADWP yesterday. When a lone graduate student scratched his head and said, how do you know? He was nearly laughed off the campus and his thesis adviser had a tense conversation with his mother in the laundry room.

Hyporheic Exchange (Pronunciation: hi-poe-REE-ick)

So it turns out that when you look at a stream there’s the water you CAN see, the ground water you CAN’T see, and this layer of soggy silt & pebbles that acts as a sponge between the creek bed and the water table. This layer is constantly moving water into the ground, and pulling groundwater back into the stream. Water in the ground is naturally cooler because it gets no sunlight at all so every time it seeps into the creek bank it lowers the water temperature a bit, and when water is returned to the creek bed it is cooler.

Michael Pollock, of NOAA northwest fisheries was interested in this dynamic, and particularly what it meant to that old story about beaver dams choking out salmon and trout. He decided to set up some thermometers at different layers in the water, and also below the subsurface of the stream to find out the truth, then he repeated this at different points along a stream. Before I show you what he found, you need to know that the headwaters of any stream is cooler than the mouth. So we expect the temperature to gradually go up as the water moves down stream.

So reading the river from the headwaters on the right, the blue line is the subsurface temperatures and the lowest, which we would expect. The red line is the surface water of un-dammed areas, and the green line is the surface area in beaver pools. As you can see the red line is consistently higher than the green line, meaning that the surface area of beaver ponds is cooler than the surface area of free-flowing stream, the opposite of what our lawn chair researcher observed. Why is this?

I’m told the next graph has not yet been published so I shouldn’t post it on the web. Okay just imagine that the three measurements are combined we see this gradual sawtooth incline with a huge gap showing that the temperature suddenly falls. And guess where? There’s a huge temperature drop as tons of upwelling water seeps into the banks of the creek. It’s a beaver dam, whose deep pools increase the contact area of the water with the hyporheic zone, so there’s greater exchange and cooler temperatures. Say it with me now, “hyporheic exchange.” This is what the fish like. This is what enlivens the water and makes the creek more healthy. And this is why that researcher in his lawn chair all those years ago should be scornfully forgotten along with his entire findings.

Here’s the take home sentence for you to use in your next beaver argument, and you know you’ll have plenty. “Beaver dams cool streams by maximizing hyporheic exchange.”

Happy International Beaver Day! Celebrate by telling someone you know. Or everyone.

Advice for Advocates

heidi08 Educational, Environmental, Why We Care July 8, 2010

I’ve been fiddling for a while with a list of things the beavers have taught me and trying to turn it into something helpful to present at my talk at Close to Home in June. Mind you, this isn’t Letterman’s top ten list, but I’m pretty happy with it. Let me know if you think I missed anything.

1. Pick a subject that you love. Because you’re going to be stuck with it for a while.

2. Bring a camera. It helps if you can show people what you care about.

3. Offer solutions, approach the problems realistically. Find out whose famous for solving that problem and email them for help. It’s surprising how many well-known people return an email and how few will return phone calls.

4. Media. Don’t expect them to know about natural concepts like predators or tides or habitat or gravity. Provide photos, they like cute animals. Provide pithy quotes, they like easy copy. Provide video that is worth stealing and don’t expect credit.

5. When you say something don’t expect to be able to take it back. You have to get it right the first time. There is no time for context or mitigating circumstances. Short understandable sentences that are easy to relate to are best. Be prepared for the media to give the ’powers that be’ lots and lots more chances than they give you. Understand that they will probably never call them on obvious lies.

6. Identify your ultimate goal and be willing to make temporary alliances with anyone that moves you towards it. I mean anyone.

7. Remember that ultimate goal in your heart and be willing to sever or interrupt ties with anyone that threatens it. I mean anyone.

8. It’s not about you. Officials won’t do the right thing because they like you and for the most part they won’t do the wrong thing because they hate you. Mostly they have their own goals, alliances and Faustian contracts. You don’t matter at all. Keep that in mind.

9. Bring children. Children’s Art. Children’s Education. Images of children with the animal you are trying to save. Mothers with Children! Repeat as necessary.

10. Realize that the powers that be are counting on the fact that by the time you truly learn and understand steps 1-9, you’ll be so exhausted and demoralized that you won’t have the energy or inclination to do this again for some other species. Save something for the ride home and prove them wrong.

LA-17, a female Loggerhead, has just arrived at Audubon Aquatic Center, a facility of Audubon Nature Institute.Pictured from left to right Amanda Adkins, Jamie Mullins and Melissa Tomingas. photo credit Meghan Calhoun

Other Watersheds…

heidi08 Uncategorized May 6, 2010

‘There is another shore, you know

upon the other side’

Tonight Worth A Dam will present at the Friends of Marsh Creek Watershed meeting in Oakley. FOMCW is a well-respected environmental group that does remarkable things for the area. We crossed paths with them at the Flyway Fiesta and some other functions we’ve been at over the year. Turns out they are lead by a woman I went to high school with. So, go Alhambra with the conservationists! It is a great opportunity to spread the beaver gospel, because you know they will have beavers soon if they don’t already.

Along those lines, in January the local blogger “Mayor of Claycord” posted these photos of a beaver sighting in Marsh Creek. I of course sent them to Diane to inquire. She assures me that no one in their organization has seen beaver there. Was I certain it wasn’t an otter? Ohhh looking at that picture I’m ‘dam’ certain. Looks like its a great time to have an opportunity to talk about the good beavers can do in the watershed and remind them of the resources available for solving any difficulties they might cause.

Wish me luck with the epic highway 4 commute! I’ll let you now how it goes.