Tag: Sherri Tippie

THE BELOVED HEROINE OF ALL THINGS BEAVER

What are you doing tomorrow night? Maybe I will join you and we’ll make a mass migration to see this wonderful presentation from the fairy godmother of beavers everywhere. Tempted?

‘Leave it to the Beavers’ upcoming presentation from Sherri Tippie

The SteamPlant will host an event at 6:30 p.m., Wednesday, July 31 with a presentation from President of Wildlife 2000 Sherri Tippie to discuss beavers and their role in water resources.

Sherri Tippie (Photo courtesy of The Beaver Believers)

Colorado Headwaters is inviting the community “for an entertaining and informative evening to learn how beavers can protect vital water resources, increase ecological diversity and help counter the effects of climate change.”

“Who can turn a desert into an oasis? Who can save crops and cattle from drought? Beavers!”

The press release says: “Beavers build whole landscapes that support hundreds of other creatures. In fact, North America’s fertile landscapes are mainly the work of beavers.”

You bring the popcorn and I’ll bring the champagne. It would be so much fun to sit in the back row and bask in her spirited accessible beaver glow.

I only had the privilege of hearing her live at my very first conference. I wept tears of joy through the entire presentation. Nothing about my struggle to save our beavers seemed to matter anymore because I somehow knew Sherri would fix it. She is the hero of every beaver story and despite the fact that Ben didn’t make room for her in his book we ALL know it.

Sherri is to beavers what Henry Ford was to automobiles, Jackson Pollock is to modern art, or what Martin Luther King Jr is to race relations. Listening to her changes everything.

Sherri Tippie with kit and awesome t-shirt

Now, one might think, at this late stage of my beaver career, that I had seen every single cool beaver drawing this side of the Atlantic and beyond. But yesterday reminded me that there are still wonderful surprises to discover. This clever feat is from what artist Jordan Fretz called “Interactive Art“.

Isn’t it wonderful?

SHERRI AND TELL(I) ABOUT BEAVERS

heidi08 Beaver relocation March 20, 2019

How did this ever slip by me? I am sure I read the title about “70 years of trapping” and it went into the recycle folder. I’ve just about had it with the glorious recollections of an aging trapper, but I will NEVER NEVER get tired of articles like this.

LEAVE IT TO TIPPIE: Nationally-renowned beaver trapper recalls decades of tales

Sherri Tippie sits at a table in her home that is filled with stuffed beavers, which she collects.
Portrait by Philip B. Poston/Sentinel Colorado

Tippie — a Denver local who has been called North America’s best beaver trapper — is featured in “The Beaver Believers”, a documentary underscoring the role that beavers, and their dams, play in preserving scarce water as climate change and drought intensifies.

Early this month the film was screened at the Banff Mountain Film Festival in Denver, and it’s picked up awards on a cross-country tour.

Tippie features prominently in the full-length documentary alongside five scientists introducing beavers into habitats as a means of preserving increasingly scarce water. Although Tippie is not a scientist — in fact, she’s a hairdresser by trade — she’s become an authority on beavers and their ecosystems through more than 30 years of trapping the aquatic rodents in Colorado.

Ahhh Sherri! It is wonderful to read about you getting the press you deserve with Sarah’s documentary. I hope there was a long time of discussion about this movie and why beaver matter. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to see her still fighting the good fight and getting credit for it.

For decades, Tippie has fielded requests from local governments and landowners to safely remove beavers from metro-area streams and irrigation ditches where they do what they do best: Down trees, build dams and flood waterways.

Instead of killing the industrious but irksome creatures, Tippie live-traps entire families of beavers, holds them in her Denver backyard for several days and then deposits them safe and sound where landowners or governments want them, usually in Colorado’s high country.

For Tippie, beavers are more of an obsession than an occupation.

Denver home is chock-full of beaver-themed knick-knacks: Tiny clay beavers she’d made herself, piles of beaver stuffed animals and even bath towels threaded with little beavers. Her sweater had a picture of a beaver on it.

HA! Tell me about it! I’m sure beavers just arrive on your doorstep like ours. It’s not so much of a decorative flair as a constant stream of things coming your direction. Believe me, I’m learning all about it.

As a recognized authority on trapping, she’s been featured in many newspapers during her three decades of work including Sentinel Colorado, Time and her favorite — Costco’s magazine.

For Tippie, beavers are more than just a beautiful animal: They’re a keystone species that create entire ecosystems by damming streams, creating rich conditions for plant and animal life and keeping water in dry soil for longer.

She spoke frankly about local governments and politicians who she thinks are abandoning beavers and destroying the environment. She swears like a sailor and isn’t afraid to tell people how she feels, she said.

Ahh Sherri. Speaking truth to power in every room she visits. That’s the way to change the world. You have been an inspiration to me for more years than I can count.

Tippie was a natural subject to feature in “The Beaver Believers”, said Washington-based director Sarah Koenigsberg. She originally heard Tippie speak at a beaver education event in Utah, she said.

“This woman is a firecracker. I’ve got to track her down,” Koenigsberg recalled thinking. “Obviously, she captivated everyone.”

Koenigsberg met with and filmed scientists across the West; and in Colorado, her crew camped out in Tippie’s backyard for about 10 days. They forged a deep friendship.

Lucky Sarah. Lucky beavers. When I am at the edge of endurance and sick and tired of all the negative attention beavers receive in the world, Sherri always inspires me to try a little bit longer. She remains a national treasure and we should all be grateful for her many decades long hard work.

SHERRI AND SHERRY SAVING BEAVERS

heidi08 Beavers and climate change, Who's Killing Beavers Now?, Who's saving beavers now? November 14, 2018

Back in October I was contacted by Ron Chaney of Manitou Springs in Colorado who was worried about some dam building that was going on. Since he was about a half hour drive from Sherri Tippie I put them in touch and called Sherri to follow up.

This morning’s headline tells me that good steps were taken, but not unfortunately not enough to save those beavers.

Beavers drive a wedge between Manitou Springs environmentalists, business owners

As temperatures grew colder in Manitou Springs, the arrival of furry, buck-toothed neighbors drove a wedge between some business owners and residents.
An unusual influx of beaver activity in recent months cost the town some of its most prized trees. And as some wildlife lovers sought to find a solution that didn’t involve harming the hungry creek-dwellers, Evelyn Waggoner, the owner and operator of Green Willow Motel Cottages, took matters into her own hands.

Waggoner called Alpine Wildlife Control in early November to trap and euthanize three of the beavers.

City Councilor Becky Elder, an environmentalist who’s admired the species since childhood — when she says she earned the nickname “Becky Beaver” — was crushed.

“Some of us … get our hearts broken, because we care,” she says. “… It’s a lot bigger than just a beaver or three dead beavers.”

This should serve as a painful reminder to all of us. Even when there’s a will, a local advocate, a supportive city council member, and a nearby beaver expert, everything can so very quickly come to an end. The default position is always to kill beavers.

Sherri Tippie, president of Denver-based nonprofit WildLife2000, had a slightly different take when she came to the city pool and fitness center to share her expertise with a group of Manitou residents on Nov. 6.

“Beaver are coming back to the areas where they belong,” Tippie said.

She’s been working with beavers for decades, live-trapping and relocating them (she always advises keeping families together) and educating humans on how to live in harmony with them.

A handout she provided for information session attendees says beavers benefit ecosystems by creating wetlands, preventing erosion, promoting biodiversity and improving water quality and quantity. Notably, for Manitou: “A network of beaver dams can help reduce high flows and downstream flooding.”

I don’t know about you but I get a happy, happy feeling seeing Sherri on the front lines with her wonderful drawer displays which show a fantastic model of a castor master and beaver deceiver, as well as some truly adorable clay beavers she made herself. It’s too bad the lives of these beavers couldn’t be saved, but inroads were made. Baby steps.

Integral to that plan: Roy Chaney, the city pool’s director of aquatics and fitness, who’s been heading efforts to educate the public about beavers since the handiwork of “Manny the Beaver” appeared in the pond next to the pool about a month and a half ago. (Chaney’s invitation brought Tippie and Aaron Hall, a representative of Defenders of Wildlife, to talk about mitigation strategies.)

Chaney hopes that one day, with Council’s support, Schryver Park might host nature day camps where students can learn about beavers’ benefits to the environment.

Chaney was delighted to see that on the morning of Nov. 9, about half of the scraps of wood Tippie told him to leave by the pond had been added to Manny’s dam. He says Defenders of Wildlife is providing a camera to place by the dam and hopefully catch Manny in action.

Hey Ron, keep an eye out and maybe Manny will stick around. Saving beavers is hard, hard work and takes more time than many of us ever dreamed possible. I will write the good folks at Manitou springs and give them some ideas about how to coordinate a better outcome with all the players next time. They are very, very close.

Here’;s another hard worker we know very well, who stepped in to save some beavers that couldn’t be saved and found her life changed because of it.

Beavers: Humanity’s natural ally in combating climate change?

Sherry Guzzi wasn’t thinking about climate change eight years ago when she set out to save a family of beavers living near her Lake Tahoe, California, home.

A former architect and lifelong wildlife lover, Guzzi was mostly thinking it was just plain wrong to kill animals seeming not to be causing any real harm. She was also thinking about the preschool next door: children there were rallying around their unofficial mascots, hoping to spare the nettlesome beavers from “removal,” the benign term that for many California beavers means death.

Beavers, ‘a critical landscape-scale force of nature,’ and a resource in combating global warming?

But strong community support didn’t save that beaver family back in 2010. Guzzi says the highway department arranged to have the beavers’ lodge and dam destroyed, leaving the family of four with no protection. “The parents were trying to make a little mud dam so the babies would have a safe place, but then [the crew] came again and shot them in the night,” Guzzi recalled on a recent phone call. “It was very discouraging and just so unnecessarily sad.”

Sherry Guzzi! It’s wonderful to see this article starting with your stories. A rising tide raises all boats, but you’ve received too little afterglow from the publication of Ben’s wonderbook. I so remember the early days of grim beaver rescue when our own Lori traveled to Tahoe to talk to folks about how to live with beavers. Seems like a million years ago.

For her part, Guzzi says she was inspired by the ordeal to launch a nonprofit organization, the Sierra Wildlife Coalition, dedicated to helping people co-exist with beavers and other wildlife in the Tahoe basin. The organization now has a couple hundred members and a core team of dedicated volunteers. Guzzi has also become a self-avowed “beaver believer” – a growing community, she says.

Yes, crack open the lid on this story just a little, and you’ll find that a whole world of passionate beaver devotees indeed exists. And they are capturing more attention. Beavers and the humans who love them have claimed a starring role in Beaver Believers, a new documentary that’s turning heads on the film fest circuit, and also in a critically acclaimed new book, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, by Ben Goldfarb. Beavers are figuring into dozens of media hits, and also in a PBS series.

So what’s inspiring this fan base to grow, despite long-held beliefs that beavers are nothing more than a nuisance? In a word, hope. Because as it turns out, these natural engineers may well be humans’ natural allies in efforts to confront climate change.

Here begins yet ANOTHER wonderful review of Ben’s book and the good things beavers can do if we let them. I got all excited when I read that sentence about the “PBS Series” but the author was just referring to the Nature documentary from a few years ago.

Sigh. I wish there was a whole series just about beavers!

Until that lucky day you’ll have to make do with little old me. In the meantime, hurray for our beaver saving friends Ron and Sherry who stepped into the murky waters of beaver advocacy and didn’t get the outcome they wanted, but because of their brave actions made it easier for so many others to follow their lead and make a difference.

BEAVERS AND DIRT

heidi08 Beavers, Environmental October 9, 2018

Dirt Rich – Trailer from Passelande Pictures on Vimeo.

Back in the spring of 2015 I was contacted by filmmaker Marcelina Cravat who was working on a documentary about climate change and creative solutions. She was interested in talking about the wetland work that beavers do and wondered if Martinez would be a good place to film some sequences. She and her husband came over to survey the setting and meet the fam.

At the time we were excitedly expecting what turned out to be our last group of kits and had already arranged with Suzi Eszterhas to photograph them for Ranger Rick magazine. That had been set up at the last beaver festival so I thought I better ask her how she felt about another camera on site before I answered Marci. To my surprise Suzi said ‘no’. Because in her experience it was hard to work around two visions at once. So I introduced Marci to the good folks in’ Napa, and off she went in their direction.

Dirt Rich explores strategies that re-stabilize atmospheric carbon levels and revitalize the soil in an effort to reverse the effects of runaway global warming.

Fast forward three years later, and her film premiered this year at the SF Green Film Festival this summer, got awards at Sundance and is available to watch online for a short period. Robin Ellison of Napa has a lovely snippet of footage inside and let me know about the opportunity to watch our beaver buddies online. The 6 minute beaver segment starts around 24 minutes in and stars Brock Dolman, Kate Lundquist, Eli Asarian, Sherry Tippie and some even more beautiful furry faces. I can’t embed it, but here’s the link. Dirt Rich. Lucky for you, you have three more free days to watch the whole thing.

And here’s proof of many selfless hours spent at the beaver dam. Congratulations Robin!

FRIENDS IN HIGH (ALTITUDE) PLACES

heidi08 Beaver Chewing, Beaver ecological impact August 10, 2018

There’s good news and kinda less good news today. Where should we start? I’m excited about the good news so lets start there. It seems our old friend Sherri Tippie is back on the beaver circuit again. I hadn’t heard anything about or from her for a while so I wasn’t sure. But this was WONDERFUL news! The talk was last night.

Beaver expert visits Vail Valley

Betty Ford Alpine Gardens will be presenting Beaver Habits and Habitats, an intimate evening with Sherri Tippie on Thursday, Aug. 9, from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at the Education Center in Vail.

Tippie has dedicated more than 30 years of her life to beavers. She is a self-taught live-trapper, relocator and passionate educator who promotes coexistence and nonlethal management strategies for the keystone species.

In 1986, Tippie founded Wildlife 2000, an organization dedicated to fostering a healthy coexistence between humans and beavers. A Denver resident, she is nationally recognized as an expert on beaver ecology in general and beaver live-trapping in particular. She has trapped and relocated more than 1,000 beavers over the decades.

Hurray for Sherri! I wish we could have all gone to her lecture last night. We would have learned so much and laughed a lot, I’m sure. Ben Goldfarb was of two minds about featuring her in his book, because she was already such a ‘celebrity. I lobbied hard for her founding father status, but I guess his editor didn’t agree. Sherri deserves her own book anyway. You know it would be a best seller.

Speaking of Ben, yesterday was also the time his Patagonia papers were released. It’s actually not a terrible look at the issue, and easily the wisest thing I have read on the topic. But I’d still rather him be promoting American beavers than promoting the cull of some foreigners.

Why two countries want to kill 100,000 beavers

If you’re a boreal toad — or a wood duck, or a brook trout, or a moose — you might owe your life to a beaver. (Kudos, also, on learning to read.)

Castor canadensis, the North American beaver, is the ultimate keystone species, that rare creature that supports an entire ecosystem. By building dams and forming ponds, beavers serve as bucktoothed housing developers, creating watery habitat for a menagerie of tenants. Songbirds nest in pondside willows, frogs breed in shallow canals, and trout shelter in cold pools. There’s even a beaver beetle that eats the skin of you-know-what.

Modern beavers have been wandering North America for 7.5 million years, giving flora and fauna plenty of time to adapt. Willow, a favorite snack, resprouts multiple stems when it’s gnawed down, like a hydra regrowing heads. Cottonwoods produce distasteful tannins to deter chewing. America’s rarest butterfly, the St. Francis Satyr, eats little but sedges that grow in beaver wetlands. The evolutionary connection runs so deep it’s often boiled down to a pithy bumper-sticker: “Beavers taught salmon to jump.”

Until, that is, an ill-conceived scheme unleashed nature’s architects on a landscape that had never known their teeth — and forever rearranged ecosystems at the bottom of the world.

Okay, I get it. That’s a nice introduction. Where beavers BELONG they make a wonderful difference and save biodiversity. Where some nazis tossed them to get rich quick in in the 40’s they’re causing problems.

And as beavers spread, they did what beavers are wont to do: They transformed their surroundings.

Just as New Zealand’s flightless birds had no recourse against invasive rats, Tierra del Fuego’s trees were ill-equipped to withstand “los castores.” The region’s forests are dominated by beeches that never evolved beaver coexistence strategies: They don’t resprout after cutting, produce unsavory chemicals or tolerate flooded soils. As beavers chewed down beeches and expanded free-flowing streams into broad ponds, forests opened into stump-dotted meadows. In 2009, Chris Anderson, an ecologist at Chile’s Universidad de Magallanes, found that beavers had reshaped up to 15 percent of Tierra del Fuego’s total land area and half its streams — “the largest alteration to the forested portion of this landscape since the recession of the last ice age.”

Somehow you can just tell this isn’t going to end well already. I guess you shouldn’t throw a new species into an ecosystem but honestly, wouldn’t it be easier to plant some willow than to catch and kill 100,000 beavers?

Over the years, Chile and Argentina have made halfhearted attempts at curtailing the invasion. A bounty program failed to motivate trappers, while proposed markets for beaver meat never materialized. Recently, though, the two nations have gotten more serious: In 2016, they announced a plan to cull 100,000 — one of the largest invasive-species-control projects ever attempted.

Grr. This was better.

In some respects, the South American beaver narrative is a familiar one: Humans introduce nonnative species; nonnative species wreak havoc; humans futilely attempt to erase their error. Yet the beaver story is more interesting — for, befitting a keystone species, the rodent takeover has produced winners as well as losers. Research suggests that beavers have benefited native Magellanic woodpeckers, perhaps by making trees more susceptible to the wood-boring insects upon which the birds feast. The slackwaters behind dams also support native fish called puye, which are four times more abundant around beaver impoundments than elsewhere in southern Chile.

Now that’s something I never read before. That’s almost worth reading the entire article for.

The biggest beneficiaries, however, have been the beaver’s fellow North Americans: the muskrat and the mink, two other lusciously furred mammals the Chilean government naively plopped down in Tierra del Fuego in the 1940s. On their own, the imports might have perished; beavers, however, ensured their survival. When researchers scoured one invaded island, they found a whopping 97 percent of muskrat tracks, scats and burrows around beaver ponds and wetlands, suggesting that one rodent was supporting the other. Mink, a weasel-like carnivore, have in turn feasted on the muskrats — as well as native birds and mammals.

I never read that either. They brought in a whole menagerie for their fur benefits. Of course the beavers helped the mink and muskrat. It seemed like home to them.

The whole saga, ultimately, is a sort of Bizarro Beaver story: The very same tree-gnawing, dam-building, pond-creating talents that normally make them such miracle-workers have mostly produced disaster below the equator. South America’s beavers are both charismatic and catastrophic, life-sustaining and forest-leveling, an invasive scourge and a popular tourist attraction. As the compassionate conservation movement dawns, beavers pose, too, an ethical dilemma: How do we balance ecological health with animal welfare? Is the only solution really mass slaughter?

Of course it will be. My goodness we commit mass slaughter of beavers in America all the time and OUR trees coppice! No one needs an excuse to kill more beavers. This is a well-written article, and I learned a lot but, honestly, having Ben use his remarkable talents to write about South America is like having a master chef come for the night from France and prepare macaroni and cheese for a dinner party. He might just do it better than anyone else in the world, but for goodness sake, it’s macaroni and cheese! I’d rather see him use his skills making intricate, exotic, luscious flavors, (writing things no one has ever said in a way no one else can) instead of serving up this tired old chestnut again.

Sheesh.