The Bright Fortune of Beaver Friends

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and Insects, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Who's saving beavers now? August 31, 2017

Has there ever, in ALL of history, been a beaver day like August 31, 2017? There are literally 7 positive stories to cover about beavers today, each more wonderful than the last. You dream of a day like this, when you’re just starting out telling folks that beavers matter, but you never think it will happen to you! Obviously I can’t cover them all today, so I will focus on our friends, because if this website is nothing else, it’s an old ~~boys~~ beavers’ club. And beaver friends lives matter.

Let’s start with our good friends at the Blue Heron Nature Preserve in Atlanta Georgia. Founder Nancy Jones trekked to Martinez to visit our beavers and hear the story years ago, and even made it to the festival one year. New Executive Director Kevin Jones came out as well and brought us a beaver chew from Georgia! Nothing could make us happier than to start with this story from WABE in Atlanta. I’m told it was on the radio this morning, and a link the the audio is coming later.

Beavers In Buckhead? Yes, And They Help Restore Nature

When you think of the wildlife in a city, beavers may not be the first animal that comes to mind, but they’re all over the place in Atlanta. And while the big, goofy-toothed swimming rodents can be a nuisance, it appears beavers may also help our environment.

“What I see is just the potential for all kinds of biological processes to be happening,” says Sudduth. “Cleaning the water. The wetland hosts a huge diversity of bird life that you wouldn’t see otherwise.”

Amphibians and fish thrive in Emma Wetlands, too.

What Sudduth is especially interested in is water quality. She’s studying if this creek is cleaner because of the beavers. She’s not quite finished with that work yet, but it has been done in other places.

“There’s more and more research coming out about that,” says Greg Lewallen, a Ph.D. student at the University of Saskatchewan, who studies beavers. He co-wrote a handbook on using beavers in river restoration for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and recently wrote a new chapfocusing on urban beavers. [Eds. note: with a little help. Sheesh]

Lewallen says beaver dams trap pollutants, and wetland plants help clean the water. Out West, in states including Oregon, Idaho and Colorado, there have been some projects that actively try to attract beavers. That can save money on river restoration work that would otherwise require things like backhoes.

Beavers do it for free, with their teeth.

“They’re an incredible species,” says Lewallen. “We can relate to them in a lot of ways as humans in my opinion. They’re incredibly industrious and hard-working, and for a rodent species, they are extremely family-oriented.”

Lewallen says almost all major cities now have beaver populations. We don’t see them much because they’re nocturnal.

Hurray for Greg and BHNP. I am so happy to see urban beavers discussed on NPR, you can’t imagine. Kevin wrote me this morning and was really excited about the news. BHNP is a success story like no other, and I’m so proud of everything they achieved. I’m thrilled that this report included our chapter in the restoration handbook and talked to Greg too. If folks are going to see urban beavers differently success stories need to come from all around them. Congratulations Greg, Kevin and Nancy!

More great news about our beaver buddy in Napa, Rusty Cohn who’s fabulous photos appeared in an Essay on the beavers of Tulocay Creek. I’m not going to post every photo here, just a few favorites, but GO LOOK AT THE ARTICLE it’s well worth your time.

Photos: Life at Napa’s Beaver Lodge at Tulocay Creek

The Tulocay Creek beaver pond is located next to the Hawthorne Suites Hotel, 314 Soscol Ave., Napa. At the creek, you’ll find river otters, mink, muskrats and herons as well as beavers. Here are some photos of the critters taken by local photographer Rusty Cohn.

“Since Beavers are nocturnal, the heat doesn’t seem to bother them,” Cohn said. “They come out a little before sunset and are mainly in the water. During the day they are sleeping either in a bank den in the side of the creek bank under a fair amount of dirt, or inside a lodge which is made of mud and sticks mainly.”

Go look at the whole thing and I PROMISE you won’t regret it. Wonderful work Rusty, Napa beavers are so lucky to have you.

And wait, there’s more, this from the big glossy magazine of the center for biological diversity. Guess who finally got the memo that beaver help salmon?

To Restore Salmon, Think Like a Beaver

Manmade “dam analogues” could help beavers recolonize former habitats — and help fish in the process.

In one project landowners and public-land managers have started building structures called “beaver dam analogues,” which are essentially starter kits designed help beavers recolonize rivers.

The premise is simple: Drive a row of narrow logs into a streambed and then weave the pilings together with cuttings sourced from nearby trees. The structure slows the pace of the water and traps sedimentation, allowing a small pond to form and creating favorable conditions for nearby beavers (Castor canadenis) to move in. Then the beavers can build their own homes and continue to modify streams to meet their needs.

Their use has spread. In California Brock Dolman and Kate Lundquist, co-directors of the WATER Institute at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, facilitate the effort to introduce beavers to watersheds. Because the animals provide ecosystem services, Dolman and Lundquist see them as underutilized allies in watershed recovery efforts. Their handiwork transforms the landscape, creating a mosaic of habitats. First, beaver dams modify streamflow, creating slow and fast-moving bodies of water. This leads to an increase in the types of streamside habitats available to a variety of wildlife, boosting biodiversity in the process.

Lundquist says the North American beaver is the continent’s original water manager, renowned for storing and caching water for future use. Since beaver dams are temporary and permeable, she explains, the structures allow water to flow, thereby reconnecting mountain streams with the floodplains below.

As California looks for ways to become more resilient in the face of climate change and the prospect of prolonged droughts, the construction of these dams may prove to be advantageous. They could even buy more time for stressed aquatic species such as oceangoing salmon and steelhead trout, which have been left high and dry by California’s prolonged droughts, deforestation and water-diversion projects meant to help farmers.

What remains unchanged is the beaver itself. “They are highly adaptable animals and able to persist,” Lundquist says. “What limits beaver are water and wood — period.” And that combination may be a damned good way to restore streams and solve water woes in California and other parched states.

Hurray for Brock and Kate and writer Enrique Gili[s for the wonderful article. It is great to see the benefits of beavers get discussed specifically in California. We all need to start having more serious conversations about water storage and beavers in our state, so I’m grateful for this push. It is great to have this issue noticed at the upper levels.

One thing that’s not clear in the article is that actual beaver relocation in California is still illegal. Unlike many other states who understand that value of sending in beaver to work their magic, our state still thinks of them as a pest and you aren’t allowed to relocate pests. Unless you’re on tribal lands, and then you can do anything you want. I’m happy the center for biological diversity came to the party, but wish they had clarified that one nagging detail! It’s hard to organize a campaign to change the law if the folk think the law already allows it!

Looks like the kits outta the bag!

heidi08 Beavers July 16, 2017

The rule is only good news on Sunday, right? There’s a painstaking amount of beaver stupid going on right now but I’ll stifle my impulse to ridicule and focus on the positive. They are being treated to beautiful kit show in Napa since last weeks coming out party. Now the little peanuts are wandering far upstream on their own and coming back whenever they dam well feel like it. Rusty has his work cut out for him, jogging up and down the creek to follow them, but he’s holding up bravely under the joyful strain.

Tiny Tail: Rusty Cohn

Ohhh so precious. What adorableness! We think there are (at least) two because if you look closely one’s eye looks a little puffy and the other is bright and shiny. And just to prove they really are better than us, Rusty snapped this at the pond for good measure, sigh.

I see Rusty is now posting the photos on facebook so I guess that means the ~~cat’s~~ – er kit’s – officially outta the bag! Maybe you should take a field trip and see for yourself?

Onward to the generous donations from Suzi Eszterhas to the silent auction. She can’t be at the festival this summer because she’s leading a tour photographing humpback whales calving in the Tonga.(!) So she wanted to donate and show her support anyway. You can see how committed she is to wildlife and making sure we take care of it. She sent three lovely books and a archival quality stunning print. Take a look for yourself.

The books are delightful accounts of hand rearing rare species that will be sure to encourage the budding naturalist in your life. But it was the print that really blew me away. A little back-story: very often during her time photographing the beavers on our creek she would tell us that she wouldn’t be there the next few nights because she had to nip down to Monterey or Morro bay to photograph some baby otters. And I would (as I’m known to do) give her a hard time for filming precious sea otter eye candy when beavers were way cooler and needed her more.

But suddenly, I almost understand why. Shhh don’t tell the beavers.

Surviving the Storm

heidi08 Beavers January 9, 2017

When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.

William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

Yesterday it rained and rained, so much that we parked across the street on a higher curb to avoid the runoff. Folks armed their driveways with sandbags and there were no beavers in Martinez to blame for the flooding. Just the sky, which decided we needed a two-day dousing.

Rusty in Napa was undaunted and boldly went to see how their soggy beavers were holding up in all that rain. Of course the broken dam was topped, but the lodge too was underwater in the worst of it. Remember if there is water over the lodge, there is water IN the lodge, and the beavers were rudely awoken out of their days slumber and had to find another bed.

drybeaverflooded — *Beaver atop lodge in flood: Rusty Cohn*

Sometimes they crouch in a cluster of trees, or have a little bank hole they can reach. Sometimes they decide to use the lodge like snoopy uses his dog house. And that’s what Rusty was hoping to photograph.

The amazing part to me, is that not only does this beaver look wonderfully calm and composed –

Dry yearling in storm: Rusty Cohn

(Nothing like we would look if we were flooded out of our home in the middle of the night) but he is also completely DRY. Look at his fur and consider the wonders of beaver weatherproofing.
On days like these we remember the countless worried storms we trudged down to our own beaver dam to see how our beavers were faring.

together — *Beaver sleeps on bank while beaver swims below: Rusty Cohen*

I remember the only beaver ‘swear word‘ I ever heard, watching a kit come out of the old lodge during very high current and immediately getting washed downstream in the flow. He was so surprised and alarmed he tailslapped loudly before swimming back. Which I’m sure has got to be the forensic equivalent of honking very loudly at a snow storm.

I’ve seen our beavers swim effortlessly upstream in a torrent, and move aside as terrible debris washed thru their ruined pond. Rain doesn’t hurt beavers. Snow doesn’t hurt beavers. Drought doesn’t hurt beavers. Really. Only we do that. Rusty had to work hard to protect his camera in the storm. But he was able to capture this later in the day so you could see for yourself that they are coping.

Sleepy and soggy, this beaver handles things just fine. Cue the “I will survive” soundtrack will you?

Godot Beaver

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Environmental, New Species, Urban beavers, Who's saving beavers now? June 17, 2016

Day four of “Project Habituation” and as predicted it was the most successful yet. Two beavers and several visits by dad working on the lodge. Even mom was seen (larger) shaking her head and feeding. Nothing while it was bright enough to film so mostly we were eagerly watching a bunch of this:

But still. Much better than the start and I’m sure if the project had days 5,6, and 7 we’d be happier still. Dream on! I’m just lucky I got Jon to ever agree to this brief insanity and won’t push my luck.

(Yet.)

We were still thinking about our slow improvements and micro-curve of success when Rusty Cohn’s photos arrived from last night. Of course beavers, and of course beautiful. Talk about the grass being greener! Still scratching his mosquito bites and hunched from lack of sleep Jon cursed at the computer screen before grumbling back to bed.

“fuckingnapa fuckingtopia!“

In addition to the enviable beaver photos, I particularly like that capture of the green heron doing his odd neck stretch. The birds are so twisted and stump-necked I never would have thought it possible if I hadn’t seen this a few years ago. Apparently beaver ponds are the gift that keep on giving.

Truer words…

heidi08 Beavers and water, Who's saving beavers now? April 19, 2016

It was nice to see Cheryl’s great photo properly credited with this story yesterday. Apparently it ran on the radio several times thought I never heard it.

State Using Beavers To Help Restore California Wetlands

(KCBS) – While they are small and furry, beavers could be key to restoring some of California’s most at-risk watersheds. State officials are already experimenting with artificial beaver dams in an effort to wetlands and recharge aquifers after four years of drought.

Michael Pollock of the National Marine Fisheries Service Northwest Science Center, said beaver dams help ecosystems by increasing habitat areas for endangered fish, birds and other animals. Pollock told KCBS putting actual beavers where they’re placing these fake dams would be even better.

Michael Pollock is a friend of salmon, which makes him a friend of beavers and a friend of this website. Once, years ago, I picked him up at the Oakland airport and we drove to Yosemite for the state parks conference with Wikipedia Rick and our own Cheryl Reynolds. I fondly remember the moment when he launched into his slide show promptly revealing a nutria photo. Ahh memories. Regular readers of this website will recall that not too long ago, Pollock was quoted as saying that manmade beaver dams were so good for fish folks:

I thought this kind of shocking behavior had to be dealt with as soon as possible, so I released this educational video to help Dr. Pollock learn the error of his ways. He wrote back that night and observed that I was having way too much fun with my new toy, but never mind that. The KCBS story confirms that my unconventional methods appear successful.

Reading beaver books is so important. Like this book “My Beaver Colony,” by L. Wilsson. Published by Doubleday & Co. Garden City, NY. 1968. Lars is one of those researchers who thought, wow it’s really hard to watch beaver behaviors outside, so I’ll just kidnap some and make some notes on their behavior from home. If I hadn’t have read his seminal work, I would have never learned about his important discovery that “Beavers never stretch“.

And I would never have properly appreciated Rusty of Napa’s video from last night.