Several aspen trees were felled by beaver along the Blue River in Warriors Mark recently. Special to the Daily
Am I the only one that gets a kind of tingly feeling when a paper runs a photo like this?Colorado Summit Daily has a fairly nice glimpse this morning of beavers-getting-ready-for-winter.
Beavers are active this time of the year!
My friend Terese Keil, property manager for Trappers Villas, called me the other day to tell me a bunch of landscaping aspen had been chewed down literally overnight by beavers.
A call to Fish and Wildlife confirmed several reports of beaver activity in Summit County and loss of trees on properties. Apparently, they are busy building dams and lodges in preparation for winter. The advice was to protect the trees with wire mesh along the bottom of the trunks.
Beavers are prolific engineers and builders, and prefer to work mostly at night; their specially adapted incisor teeth and powerful lower jaw muscles allow them to chew down trees. Their teeth never stop growing, and their four front teeth are self-sharpening. They have been seen to work as a team to carry a large piece of timber.
The author Joanne Stolen is a retired microbiology professor from Rutgers – now turned artist and living in Breckenridge, CO. This is a mere 2.5 hour drive from Sherri Tippie so I’m going to imagine that if they aren’t friends already they soon will be. In the mean time I have been perusing the linocuts on her art websiteand noticing there wasn’t a beaver yet. I’m guessing she’ll be inspired to fix that oversight very soon!
There are typically two dens or rooms within a beaver lodge, one for drying off after exiting the water, and the second, a drier, inner chamber is where the beaver family actually lives. Special to the Daily
And remember this Wednesday I will be talking at the Rossmoor Nature Association about our beavers and their effect on our creek. You know you have friends there, so see if you can get an invitation. I’d love to see some familiar faces.
Oh and if you need provoking after a weekend that was just too relaxing go read this morning’s whimper from Mississippi where they are bemoaning the fact that the federal governement (which they mostly don’t believe in) is now only going to pay for half the cost of killing beavers with the USDA and isn’t that a shame? I mean its not like the state needs the water or the wooducks or the trout or the filtration. Obviously those beavers have to be killed because flow devices never work and Uncle Sam needs to do it!
There’s a lull in the beaver-trapping news, and I thought it was as good a time as any to show you the other side of what I do with beaver news. Usually I write the reporter, the paper, and any named officials I can find. (Finding officials whose email is unlisted has actually become a weird kind of challenge to me, and I am always thrilled when I crack the code.) Usually the paper will call you first to find out if you are a real human and they have permission to print. Sometimes it just gets printed. Even by recent standards, this was a particularly productive week.
Great article Thursday about driving in to see some beaver dams in the wilderness. Of course, beaver dams create wetlands and attract wildlife whether they’re in the backwoods or in the center of town! Five years ago, resident pressure forced my northern California city to install a flow device to allow some local beavers to stay and now, because of the dams, we regularly see heron, wood duck, steelhead, otter and even mink in our tiny urban stream! Beavers aren’t that hard to see if you know when to look.
Mr. Bandolin’s comments about beavers were interesting. Willow can usually keep up with beaver appetite since more wetlands create more willow. Beaver populations tend to stabilize since offspring leave to seek their own territories at two years. However one variable that really affects whether willow can replenish as fast as beavers chew is the issue of “browse pressure.”
I hope everyone reads your fantastic article and really spends time thinking about the relationship between beavers and wildlife. We are holding our fifth beaver festival to celebrate just that, and they are having their first this year in Utah. One chapter of Audubon in Idaho recently did a “beaver count” because the animals have such an impact on birdlife! Here on the Pacific coast we are realizing that they might be the only salvation to our dwindling salmon populations.
HEIDI PERRYMAN, PH.D. Martinez, Calif. (Editor’s note: Heidi Perryman is the president and founder of Worth A Dam; website, www.martinezbeavers.org/wordpress.) Colorado
Living with beavers Heidi Perryman, Ph.D., President & Founder Worth A Dam Martinez, Calif.
Re. “Beavers gnawing along Tenmile Creek,” SDN, May 26
Great article about the Tenmile Creek beavers. It is a good reminder that even though beavers can bring challenging behaviors, humans who are up for the challenge reap huge benefits for birds, fish, wildlife, water quality and storage. My own city decided to “live with” some local beavers by installing a flow device that has controlled the pond height for five years. (They aren’t that hard to see!) Now we regularly also see heron, wood duck, otter, steelhead and even mink in our tiny urban stream! We have a yearly beaver festival (http://bit.ly/K42Or4) and work hard to teach other cities that beavers are worth having around. Check out the new issue of the Atlantic Monthly for a reminder!
Remember that trees you want to protect can be wrapped with wire or painted with sand to discourage chewing. Since you’re in Colorado you also have renowned beaver expert Sherri Tippie in Aspen to help with any challenges that might arise.
www.martinezbeavers.org/wordpress
(I received a call last night from the Yellowknife paper in the Northwest territories asking to publish my recent letter. It hasn’t run yet, but here is the text in case you’re interested. Aside from Scotland, this is the most distant letter that has ever been published. I’m weirdly pleased.)
Aside from the mayor’s impossibly colorful description of beaver trampolines and residents using ‘rubber paint’ to bounce beavers away from their poplars, I hope Yellowknife has looked for real solutions? Obviously beavers are a keystone species that create essential wetlands for fish, birds, wildlife and important game species. Killing them to protect trees is a little like destroying automobiles to prevent speeding – it works but at what cost? A better solution than chicken wire (since beavers are way bigger than chickens) is to wrap the tree with galvanized steel wire, or less obtrusively to paint it with a latex paint that matches the color of the bark mixed with heavy mason sand. This has to be repeated every year for it to work. Remember that beaver ‘chewed’ trees will still coppice and create ideal bushy nesting habitat for migratory and songbirds. Why not have residents of the lake plant swift-growing willow along the shore to provide an easy food source and better riparian border? Our city made a commitment to tolerate our local beavers 5 years ago and implemented real solutions to the challenges they posed. Now we regularly see heron, steelhead, otter and even mink in our tiny urban stream.
Any city smarter than a beaver can keep a beaver, and those most interested in watershed protection and saving taxpayer dollars know why they should.
Heidi Perryman, Ph.D.President & FounderWorth A Dam
Letters to the Editor about beavers isn’t a spectator sport! Anyone can do it! Show us your published letter and Worth A Dam will send you a free beaver thank you!
We are heading for the launch date of Glynnis Hood’s remarkable book “The Beaver Manifesto” so I thought I’d whet your appetite a little. Remember Glynnis is the inspiring researcher who has turned down the allure of grizzlies and wolverines and devoted her research and teaching at the University of Alberta entirely to beavers and the good they do. She is so famous that I was afraid to speak to her at the beaver conference but as luck would have it I got stuck with her at the airport for an hour and a half waiting for a plane that declined to take me. Best 90 minutes I ever spent.
Beavers are the great comeback story—a keystone species that survived ice ages, major droughts, the fur trade, urbanization and near extinction. Their ability to create and maintain aquatic habitats has endeared them to conservationists, but puts the beavers at odds with urban and industrial expansion. These conflicts reflect a dichotomy within our national identity. We place environment and our concept of wilderness as a key touchstone for promotion and celebration, while devoting significant financial and personal resources to combating “the beaver problem.”
We need to rethink our approach to environmental conflict in general, and our approach to species-specific conflicts in particular. Our history often celebrates our integration of environment into our identity, but our actions often reveal an exploitation of environment and celebration of its subjugation. Why the conflict with the beaver? It is one of the few species that refuses to play by our rules and continues to modify environments to meet its own needs and the betterment of so many other species, while at the same time showing humans that complete dominion over nature is not necessarily achievable.
You can pre-orderyour copy now! I liked the intro very much but the video image is a little colorloess for my tastes. How’s this?
And on a local note, beavers get a good plug from Martinez in Idaho:
A flooded Highway 9 in Blue River during July’s high water hearkens back to a Western landscape governed by beavers.
It’s been said that the West we’re accustomed to — the “fast-flowing streams and invitingly open banks, celebrated in photographs and songs and pickup truck commercials,” Kevin Taylor wrote in the June 2009 issue of High Country News — is an illusion. It’s a message Grand Canyon Trust project manager Mary O’Brien preached in Taylor’s story.
Gosh it’s nice to see a reminder ofTaylor’s seminal article again after all this time. I love that it made enough of an impression to get a mention two years later. I remember being so excited to read it and learn about heroine Mary O’brien preaching beaver gospel with “her thick rope of a gray braid” that when I travelled to Oregon for the conference I scoured the 200+ attendees looking for that rope.
(I quickly realized there were far too many gray ropes to identify hers in particular, and had to wait until we were properly introduced. Now she’s coming to the beaver festival to see about starting her own in Utah, and you’ll have a chance to see for yourself!)
Looks like at least half the gospel was heard in Colorado, since everyone is willing to admit that beavers are a Keystone species but no one seems willing or able to install a flow device.
“There’s been some pesky ones up there by Highway 9,” he said of the beavers — and Blue River second-home owner Mark Ronchetti agrees. Speaking on a drive to his Albuquerque, N.M. broadcast meteorologist job, he said when he bought his 9-acre property the area was “so choked off by beavers building dams that it stopped up the water to make it like wetlands.”
He said he found 10 to 15 dams “clogging the flow” that he’s since broken up. He’s also relocated some of the architects because beavers are such hard workers, they’ll rebuild a dam within days, sometime hours.
“Without that, the house would’ve been flooded,” Ronchetti said. He’s noticed properties north of his lot that are vacant, and where beavers are happily abiding. “It’s been ignored,” he said. “I understand having beavers and habitat, but we can’t just let it go. Some wetlands is good, but there must be some control of what’s going on. The Blue River has got to be able to flow through there.”
Hmm. “We only need so much of this habitat business. A river has to get where its going, otherwise they’ll be anarchy! I can’t be held responsible for ripping families apart when there are young to take care of. I’m a meteorologist for gawdsake. Never mind that if I move THESE beavers I’ll just get new ones. You can’t expect me to think of past tomorrow’s forecast.”
Taylor called the rodent a time shifter, “having the power to extend the release of water late into summer, saturating the ground and healing watersheds. It has the power to re-create the primordial, wetter West that existed for millennia — a West we just missed seeing.”
Beaver activity can transform an ephemeral stream that traditionally runs for just a few days in spring into one that lasts for several months. The present disconnect with the beaver comes largely from the trapping era, when beavers were extensively eliminated. North America had an estimated 60 million beaver before European settlement, which eventually dropped in a century of trapping to roughly 100,000, common figures show. According to Taylor, the West held just a fraction of that. They’ve since made a comeback that beaver-restorers believe still has a long way to go.
They are a keystone species that restores riparian habitat and raises the water table. Their fur was used for felt in beaver hats, a fashion later replaced by silk hats — a shift that likely saved the beaver from extinction, according to the Colorado Division of Wildlife.
“No mammal other than humans has a great an influence on its surroundings. This is a ‘keystone species’ in riparian communities; without them the ecosystem would change dramatically,” states the Colorado Division of Wildlife. The ponds that well up behind their dams create navigable waters beneath the ice so they can be active year-round.
Ahh Kevin, we missed you. It’s great to read you again. Come to think of it your article never mentioned flow devices. That might have been a mistake. Not quite sure the state of Colorado is quite ready for your vision. They seem to be missing a lot of the point.
Further north, in Silverthorne, public works director Bill Linfield and his crew spend hours, days and sometimes up to a month in spring breaking dams at Straight Creek as it approaches the outlets and Willow Creek upstream from the Willowbrook neighborhood.
Wetlands in Willow Creek require Linfield’s crew to go in with wader and pull the dams apart “one stick at a time,” Linfield said. “By the next morning, the beaver has rebuilt the dam. It’s a constant battle.”
Which is why he’s relocated several of the beavers. This year, no trapping took place, but it’s been an almost annual occurrence since public works took on the task of protecting the outlet buildings and the Willowbrook houses.
“We don’t want to kill them. We just want them to go somewhere else,” Linfield said.
Once again for the folks at home,you want these beavers to stay just where they are. Honestly. If you move them out new beavers will move in and you’ll have to deal with this problem all over.Figure out what are the conditions you require to maintain safe roads, properties,ranches and find out what tools will allow you to have those conditions EVEN IF THE BEAVERS STAY. A flow device? A culvert fence? A dam reinforcement? Figure out the right tool(s) for the job and then build it. Then thank your lucky stars that those beavers will keep any others away.
Nice article, but missing key points of the sermon kinda reminded me of this,
Oh and if you need provoking after a weekend that was just too relaxing go read this morning’s whimper from Mississippi where they are bemoaning the fact that the federal governement (which they mostly don’t believe in) is now only going to pay for half the cost of killing beavers with the USDA and isn’t that a shame? I mean its not like the state needs the water or the wooducks or the trout or the filtration. Obviously those beavers have to be killed because flow devices never work and Uncle Sam needs to do it!
