I’m sure you all played the game of “Telephone” as a child, where one kid whispers a secret into the ear of a classmate seated in a ring and they pass it to the next one and it eventually makes its way all around the circle to the very last person who tells outloud what garbled message they heard.
Usually its transformed by them from something benign like “Emily is very smart” to something incomprehensible and outrageous like “He has manly farts” or something similarly hilarious. And everyone collapses in a heap of giggling.
Well, I think that might be how this article got written.
There are beaver myths that hardly raise an eyebrow, like saying they eat fish for instance or that they aren’t native to California. And then there are beaver myths that really get your attention – that stop the train in mid tracks and just make you scratch your head and go “huh?”.
This nice article from sonoma had one of those.
Threatened beavers return to Sonoma
When a Sonoma Valley woman saw a tree in her yard felled and chiseled by V-shaped gnaw marks, she was surprised and not quite sure what had caused the damage. Soon she learned it was the work of something she never expected to find near her home: a beaver.
“I really now understand the phrases ‘busy beaver’ and ‘eager beaver.’ We wake up in the morning and look out and think ‘wow’ look how much they did overnight,” she said. Every day that passed more of the tree disappeared developing into an hourglass shape where the beaver noshed, and late last week the tree was down.
The woman asked not to be identified by the Index-Tribune in order to protect the beaver and their habitat from the beaver-curious.
What a nice beginning to the article about our neighbors getting the very best kind of neighbors. I’m surprised she didn’t know what was eating her tree but I’m happy she is glad to have beavers back in Sonoma. So far so good. This is where it starts to get dicey.
Beaver are prey animals and easily spooked, said Richard Dale, executive director of the Sonoma Ecology Center. He said he’s seen beaver in the daytime, but as soon as they detect his presence they slap their tails and disappear.
Well I guess is some areas. They can also become habituated to human presence as we well know. I guess Richard will find that out soon enough.
Indication of their activities are usually more evident, such as the gnaw marks the local woman found. Dale said they make diagnostic V-shaped marks on trees, which they eat and use to build lodges where they hide for safety. They’ll use pretty much anything to build the lodge but typically they are made of sticks, rock and mud.
V shapes on trees? I mean I know they nibble trees before feasting and they sometimes make prominent V shapes in the water when they swim, but V shapes on trees? I guess if they try tilting their heads this way and then that way that would make a V?
It gets better. Brace yourselves.
They eat bugs, deciduous tree bark and cambium – the soft tissue under the bark – and are partial to willow, cottonwood, maple and a couple other tree species.
They eat BUGS?
Bugs and Cottonwood trees? What kind of Bugs exactly? Lady Bugs? Worms? Mosquito larvae?
I read that and thought maybe it’s a typo, maybe they meant to say “Buds” like new juicy flowers shooting up from the ground. I’m pretty sure there aren’t any animals that eat both bugs and the cambium layer of trees. Maybe honey badgers?
Sonoma clearly needs to come to the beaver festival and learn from the smart people who have been living with them for a decade. Oh and bring Mr. Dale along too. I can give some clues about talking to the media.
“They’ve been part of the ecosystems for thousands of years. Many systems are dependent on them,” said Dale, who has been studying them for about 25 years. Dale said beaver sightings in town are rare, but he recalls hearing of occasional sightings north of the city since the early 1990s.
“I was blown away when I saw them,” he said of the recent sightings.
While some people consider them a nuisance, beaver are called “keystone species” or “grassroots conservationists” and are considered vital to riparian habitats. They will build lodges in three different ways – open-water lodge, bank lodge or bank den, or burrow – and one colony may have several lodges scattered around their home range.
The lodges extend wetlands, elevate water tables and allow for recharging of aquifers and wells, and provide “habitat for other critters,” Dale said. In areas where there are beaver lodges vegetation and watersheds stabilize, and downstream flooding and silt runoff is reduced.
Well sure beavers are valuable to the landscape. They clean up all those BUGS no one else wants around. And their lodges extend wetlands. Because you know how beavers always build those LODGES to block the water.
Geez Perryman, cut them some slack. It’s not like there have been beavers on the landscape for the last 150 or there are any expertly maintained websites where they could learn better. Right?
For those times when a beaver is destroying valuable plants – such as vineyards – there is “beaver deceiver” technology out there, Lundquist and Dale said. Wrapping trees with wire will protect the bark, and if the lodge is in a place where too much water is backing up, there are simple cost-effective ways to release some of the water from the pond beavers have created.
You all know how a beaver deceiver protects trees and vineyard right?
Oy.
