Tag: Skip Lisle

Speak of the devil!

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere October 29, 2009

Guess whose in the news this morning for ripping out a dam and wrapping trees with chicken wire? Good old North Carolina, the city of Greensboro to be precise. Seems those darn beavers keep taking city trees and building in an area where the banks are susceptible to erosion. (um are there banks that aren’t?) The city brought in their back hoe and are threatening to use their boy-toys again if the beavers dare rebuild.

Insert chalk outline here:

Beavers have chewed through several tree trunks by Latham Park and near the Elm Street bridge (H. Scott Hoffmann / News & Record)

Municipal workers spent part of Tuesday removing the beavers’ dam from North Buffalo Creek with the backhoe. And they wrapped the park’s most vulnerable trees nearby in protective wire mesh to discourage the workaholic critters from rebuilding in the same spot, just north of Moses Cone Hospital not far from an Audubon Society natural area.

Not far from the Audubon Society nature area? Oh dear! You better get rid of those beavers right away or they’ll start encouraging wood duck and night heron and you know how Audubon hates that. Next thing you know all that coppiced new growth from the trees they took will be producing nesting habitat for thrushes and finches, and nothing makes an Audubon member more irritated than having too many bird species to look up in their Sibleys.

The beavers will either take the hint and skedaddle or they will try to rebuild the dam just east of North Elm Street, a spot where their appetite for trees has been a problem. City administrators also fear the beaver dam’s potential for triggering erosion, which would further pollute a stream Greensboro officials are trying to revive.

Really, they’ve been trying so hard to restore that stream? Gosh, that’s awful. Watershed restoration is such a key civic responsibility. Too bad there wasn’t some team of ecological aquatic engineers that could take on that job, restore the banks, raise the watertable, improve water quality bring fish and wildlife while simultaneously trapping silt and buildup. It’s a big job, it would be great if they could live on site too, and do repairs constantly. Still, Greenboro’s not made of money. They obviously just spent their last dime on overtime for the men, gas for the backhoe and chicken wire to wrap those trees. Where would they ever find a team like that to work for free?

“If the beavers can’t find anything to eat, they will likely move on,” said biologist David Mizejewski, whose Animal Planet series included an episode on beavers.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

STOP THE PRESSES.

Animal Planet? As in Animals on this planet? Okay, you do know, Mr. Biologist from Animal Planet, the episode on beavers featured Skip Lisle installing a flow device in Canada, right? I don’t mean to startle you but these devices work in America too. You could chose the ideal height your eroding bank should be at, invest a day’s work for Skip to come down and train y’all how to do it, and then have the beavers keep restoring that creek for you? Just want to make sure you’re aware of your options, here.

Vermont, where Lisle lives, is 15 hours away. Mike Callahan of Beaver Solutions in Massachusetts, is 11 hours away. Both could solve this problem easily for you, and both are headed towards the frozen winter in their area and won’t have much to do for a while. Didn’t North Carolina get Stimulus money for beaver management? Why not take 5000 of those dollars and pay to have an expert solve your problem so that several better experts can restore your creeks?

Best part of the article:

If the beavers rebuild their dam near Latham Park, the city will remove it again, Phlegar said. He hopes for the best, but he’s also prepared for the possibility that the beavers will leave the park only to set up housekeeping in an equally inappropriate area somewhere else. What are the odds that might happen? “That’s the $6 million question,” he said.

Let’s see, what are the odds of beavers sticking around someplace they call home even though people do enormously annoying things that interfere with their food supply and dams, and the beavers just determinedly rebuilding? Martinez? Any Comments?

Meet Glynnis Hood

heidi08 Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental September 24, 2009

Another presenter at the beaver symposium, and a favorite of Alex and myself, Glynnis has done important research on the effects of beavers on drought conditions and the environment.

“Removal of beaver should be considered an environmental disturbance on par with in-filling, peat mining and industrial water extraction,” said researcher Glynnis Hood, lead author on the study and an assistant professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Alberta’s Augustana Campus in Camrose, Canada.

Ahhh Glynnis, we need to send YOU a t-shirt next! I guess those beavers in canada are doing something besides holding down the backs of nickles.

“In times of drought they may be one of the most effective ways to mitigate wetland loss,” said Hood. “Some people believe climate is driving everything, but the presence of beaver has a dramatic effect on the availability of open water in an area. Beaver are helping to keep water in areas that would otherwise be dry.” Even during drought, where beaver were present, there was 60 per cent more open water than those same areas during previous drought periods when beaver were absent.

Here are some other presenters at the conference, Dr. Peter Bush from Boston University, that Alex posted about yesterday.

Obviously Massachusetts is a hotbed of beaver thinking. Today our old friend Mike Callahan of Beaver Solutions is on his way to the state house to do some presentations on beavers for the MSPCA. Good luck Mike!

You’ll probably recognize this other presenter with no introduction…

Alex! We are so grateful to you for this sneak peak at the world’s best beaver minds! Stay tuned tomorrow for the first ever episode of “Castor CSI” where beaver DNA will provide starting insights into foul play…

Our Correspondent in the Field…

heidi08 New Species September 25, 2009

Skip Lisle & Alex Hiller at 2009 Beaver Conference in Lithuania

Hi Heidi,

you are receiving the summary of the first lecture day – September 21, 2009, – at the 5th international Beaver Symposium. I had to solve unexpected difficulties in getting Internet access. Proudly wearing your “Worth a dam” T-Shirts Skip Lisle immediately recognized his adventures in Martinez , CA, when getting sight of me just after breakfast. Another participant from Denmark pointed at my T-Shirt telling me that he knows about it via Internet

Skip is well known to the citizens of Martinez, CA, for the construction of a “castor master” beaver dam flow device in Alhambra Creek one and a half year ago. His talk at the end of the second lecture day was the most practical and instantly useful of the whole conference. If anybody wondered what could be done about flooding problems regarding co-existence with beavers, Skip would have the proper solution at hand.

From the presentation of Peter Busher: Darwin and the elephants

“Beavers, in a population sense, can be regarded as `mini elephants`, since they are also relatively large (for rodents), long lived and have few predators (other than humans) in most natural situations.”

Prof. Peter Busher from Boston University, Massachusetts, as chairman of the scientific committee referred to Charles Darwin who developed 250 years ago on the population dynamics of elephants his evolution theory. DarwinŽs famous book “The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life”was published in 1859. Moreover in 2009 it is the bicentennial of Darwin (1809 – 2009 ).

According to Busher Darwin had developed an exponential growth equation, that given one elephant cow starts calving at the age of 30 for the consecutive 60 years until death meanwhile giving birth to a calf every three years that reaches maturity itself following the same scheme we should expect 19 million elephants to live on earth within a surprisingly short period of time. In fact we know that such kind of equations cannot come true according to loss of habitat, hunting, disease, accident, wildfire, extended drought etc..

Busher insisted on long-term investigations “since any short-term study does not allow
a full understanding of the natural pattern of change in beaver populations: The general long-term pattern is one of slow initial growth, exponential growth (traditional “J” shaped curve ), decline and stabilization around a carrying capacity”.

For example the number of beaver sites in Voyagers National Park, Minnesota, increased from 50 to 360 between 1940 to 1985 whereas the number of beaver individuals throughout the entire state of Massachusetts increased from 22500 to 65000 within 8 years from 1994 to 2002 according to Busher. What was rich growth, what was poor
growth ?

Change in population size occurs regardless of the density, populations fluctuate over the time, finished Peter Busher his lecture that could be regarded as a proper measure for the numerous detailed presentations following on that topic.

Among the presentations were investigations on the reasons of population change, such as food competition among elk and beavers researched by Glynnis Hood, assistant professor at the University of Alberta, Canada:

Caused by overpopulation elk chewed down tree saplings knee high in Elk Island Park Alberta, Canada. On the contrary, according to Hood “beaver turn down a vertical forest into a horizontal” by felling trees in order to forage on leaves and twigs. It were the beavers smart enough to adapt their foraging behavior, given array of forage species, “which potentially buffers the effects of competition between elk, deer and beaver.”

Other topics of the first lecturer day were beaver biology and paleontology at the International Beaver Symposium being performed from Sept. 20 – 23, 2009, in the little eastern European country of Lithuania sited between Baltic Sea and Russian border. Mild temperatures and sunshine made it easy and comfortable to stayand socialize .

On the red pine shaded conference center at a marvelous lakeside in Dubingiai north of Lithuanian capital Vilnius 99 beaver enthusiasts of almost scientific background from all over Europe were joined by 6 leading North American beaver specialists, among them Peter Busher and Skip Lisle.

More to come!

Best
Alex Hiller

Lithuania Bound!

heidi08 Educational, Environmental September 20, 2009

Today is arrival day at the 5th annual beaver symposium held this year in Lithuania. The focus is on the European beaver (Castor Fiber) its biology and best management practices. Tomorrow the conference begins in earnest with scientific presentations, but today it’s arrival, hotel accomodations and maybe drinks in the lobby. We have two friends attending this years conference. Skip Lisle who will be presenting with the Scottish Beaver Trial group on tuesday, and Alex, our beaver fan in Frankfurt who will be attending as our “foreign correspondent”. Expect great reports on the days adventures, but maybe not until wednesday.

Wednesday, by the way, is fieldtrip day. Check out the description of the “Excursion”.

for Wednesday, September 23rd . This tour will occur in the vicinity of the conference center. Hilly moraine is the characteristic landscape in the area, and mean density of beavers reaches 4.5 colonies/1000 ha.

A ha, surprisingly enough, stands for hectare and is equal to about 2.5 acres. A Moraine is the scruffy debris covered plain that was once the carved path of a glacier. And that sentence right there is a keen reminder why scientific writing can be mind-numbingly boring.

Which, reminds me of a fun website I found recently, allowing researchers from all disciplines to submit their dissertation in the form of a Haiku. The simple theory is that dissertations are long and boring, you spend years of your life you will never get back, and mostly no one reads them or gets them. But of course everybody gets Haiku’s!

It takes a long time to get a Ph.D. Maybe five or six years, four if you’re fast. Seven if you’re me. At the end, you’ve written a big fat document which all of your committee members will read if you’re lucky. How can you gain a wider audience for the major product of ten-or-so percent of your time on Earth? Why, rewrite it as a haiku, that’s how. Everybody likes haiku!

In case you need a reminder, the Haiku is a short poem with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second line, and five in the third line. In case you forgot what a syllable is put your hand under your chin and say the word syllable to count how many times it moves. Unless your mouth is full of crackers you probably counted three.

I submitted my Haiku, but of course we need a few beaver ones too. Check out the titles of the presentations and let me know if you have any suggestions. Here’s Skips presentation and a helpful Heidi-Haiku.

Solutions to beaver-human conflicts that are long-lasting, reliable, and preserve precious wetlands: an update of successful flow device techniques in North America and Europe

Lisle S., Czech A.

Nice and scientific sounding, but you can’t dance to it. How about this instead?

Save Beaver Wetlands!

Solve the trials without traps.

Here’s how I do it:

Circumpolar

heidi08 Creative Solutions September 7, 2009

I always remember enjoying my astronomy class. I liked staring up at the constantly rotating planetarium ceiling, and I liked writing notes with a flashlight. I even enjoyed the weird math procedures necessary to add hours of ascension, which is almost unheard of in my “math is hard” brain. I remember one night the teacher telling us to look for the nebula near the spiral and me whispering to my classmate in a panic “What’s the spiral?” Was he referring to our galaxy? Some weird space shape newly documented? We generated anxious questions along the whole back row until a very calm person in front of us said that by “spiral” he was referring to the binding of the notebook.

Oh.

Anyway, notwithstanding that memorable bit of panicked stupidity (or perhaps because of it) I liked astronomy. I especially liked the idea that certain constellations, like the big dipper, were “circumpolar” meaning if your latitude was high enough they never set at all for you but simply rotated around the sky like the lable on a record. I mention this because one of our most important beaver friends, Mike Callahan of beaver Solutions, is this very day in Juneau Alaska under a circumpolar (but very rainy sky) and getting ready for some beaver management training next week.

You’ll remember that Bob Armstrong got together a group of volunteers to work on keeping the pathways and culverts clear when some Mendenhall Glacier beavers started to outwear their welcome. Like all problem solving involving beavers, the only solution offered was the final solution, and Bob wasn’t willing to let that happen. So he and a group of scrappy beaver-saving friends showed up on weekends to mitigate the damage. I read about this wildly familiar dedication and wrote Bob to start a dialogue. I learned that their primary concern was dealing with the beavers in a way that did not block salmon passage. I put him in touch with Skip Lisle and Mike Callahan, and talked about solutions.

Mike and Bob talked about beavers and big pictures and longer term solutions that helped, rather than hurt, salmon. They arranged for Mike to come to Juneau this week, and he’s even staying in Bob’s home and getting the inside view. Two weeks before he was leaving he got word that he had received the AWI grant, and agreed with my suggestion that Juneau training would be an ideal place to film, so his videographer friend is coming with him and will catch the training for posterity.

In the meantime beaver friend LB is happy to hear that Bob is a nice guy in person because she’s meeting him for a blitzkreig beaver tour of the Mendenhall Glacier when she visits Juneau next month.

Just in case you forgot the lovely view those beavers wake up to each evening, here’s a reminder. Imagine this with dripping rain and 50 degree weather and you’ll have some idea how it looks to Mike right now.