First we should give MORE kudos to our beaver friends at Fur-bearer Defenders who have strewn a path of beaver deception around the municipality of Mission in British Columbia just outside of Vancouver, installing 9 beaver deceivers to control flooding in culverts.
Beaver deceiver prevents dams from being built
Gosh, I’m so old I can remember when Adrian Nelson had just gotten married and nervously installed his very first one after chatting a lot to Mike Callahan and scouring his DVD. And now these installs are practically a piece of cake! Delicious, effective cake that they actually talk an entire city into paying for!
The non-profit group approached the district with a simple, non-lethal alternative for managing flooding concerns associated with beaver activity: build a wire fence around the culvert intake, interrupting the beavers’ natural instinct to build where there’s current and the sound of flowing water. “They work awesome,” said Dale Vinnish, public works operations supervisor. “We don’t have to trap beavers. They moved elsewhere. They’re not causing a problem.”
The nine “beaver deceivers,” at $400-$600 apiece and built in one day, save the district thousands of dollars, because workers no longer have to pull apart dams. Previously, the municipality would break down two to three dams daily, several days a week, in addition to paying for the capturing and killing of about a dozen beavers annually.
“If we weren’t trapping, we were going in continuously to break apart the dams,” said Vinnish.
Great work Fur-bearer Defenders! We are entirely impressed that you are easily giving Washington State a run for it’s money as the beaver-management champion of the northern hemisphere. Go Mission!
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New footage from our famous San Jose beaver friends. Love the ‘urban safari’ feel of this video. Sadly if this is momma beaver, I’m not seeing any teats, and that means no silicon valley kits this year!
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Next, a nice column on ‘Extinction Events’ from Minnesota. His point is climate change, but my point (as always) is beavers!
For instance the pond created behind a beaver dam becomes the habitat for a wide variety of plant and animal species. Remove the beaver engineers and the entire ecosystem collapses.
It’s about time we start to realize the number of species that are displaced or wiped out when beavers are removed. Trickle-down economies work both ways. I wasn’t happy with this later sentence “Without the stream, there could be no beaver dam” because that’s not exactly true. I’ve heard of beaver creating ponds from tiny springs, so that the big beautiful pond becomes the only water in a desert. Certain ephemeral streams (like we have here in California that dry up in the summer) wouldn’t dry up if we had enough beavers. I kindly sent him this Chumash legend:
Author Jan Timbrook who is a curator for the Santa Barbara museum of natural history described this in her book ‘Chumash Ethnobotany” has some very interesting things to say about beavers:
“A willow stick that had been cut by a beaver was thought to have the power to bring water. The Chumash would treat the stick with ‘ayip ( a ritually powerful sbustance made from alum) and then plant it in the ground to create a permanent spring of water.”
Jan Timbrook, Chumash Ethobotany p. 180
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And on to the ugly. I’ve been sitting with this story a couple of days, but its fairly unavoidable and we better deal with it. This is the kind of negative advertising I hate, even more than I hate the Belarus story. Ultimately Americans value roads much more even than we value human life. Now every city will be more tempted to tell property owners they’re liable for beaver dams. Call me crazy, but it seems like if you’re worried about the stability of a dam, the smart thing to do is to reinforce it!
Flooding damages road in West Warren MA
