Good news for beavers in Wales! They’re getting closer to reintroduction. Count this as great news for dragonflies and salmon and otters and waterfowl too. Well here, I’ll let our good friend Peter Smith tell you. In addition to having the very best job on the planet, he’s an excellent spokesman!

Beavers’ return: Afon Rheidol river near Aberystwyth is preferred site

Plans to reintroduce beavers to the Welsh countryside after hundreds of years without them have moved a step closer.

The Afon Rheidol river in Ceredigion has been chosen as the location for their return next year. Should the move go ahead it could see beavers brought in from the UK and around Europe.

Of course there are the usual grumblings from farmers and fishermen but they seem to be facing a losing battle. The players have done everything right and the advocates have made the right friends.  Fingers crossed, but it looks like after being missing for 400 years,  beavers coming back to Wales! Can a Welsh beaver festival be far behind?

______________________________________________________________

Any news closer to home? I received this paper from Leonard Houston this morning. Its by Dr. Wayne Hoffman and the midcoast Watershed council. Hoffman is a name we’ve read over and over again this year, but we still haven’t connected. After I sip some coffee and read through this treasure I’m definitely introducing myself! In case you want to read  this yourself, I’ve put a permanent link on the right hand margin under solutions. UPDATE from the small world files. Just heard from his colleague and co-author Fran Recht that she attended my presentation at the beaver conference this year and was inspired by the Martinez Beaver story!

Those interested in salmon and habitat restoration are express ing renewed interest in reestablishing beaver populations as inexpensive “watershed engineers”. In many places the type of work that beavers do improves conditions favorable to cohosalmon, cutthroat troutand other animals. Their dams also store water that help increase nutrient levels for other organisms in the stream, build up eroded streambeds, release water during the dry seasons, and improve water quality by slowing waters to allow sediment to settle, among other things. However, in Oregon, beavers have been considered a pest as well as a game animal so their protections are limited and their numbers have fluctuated dramatically over time due to a variety of factors.In the central Coast major declines in beaver ponds and dams have been documented in the past 2 decades. This background aper provides a summary of the benefits of beavers, their conflicts with humans, and the policies and conditions that affect their survival. It also provides examples of ways to reduce conflict with humans, and suggests needed legislative actions

Once upon a time, in a little suburb of Ottawa, some beavers were discovered in a storm water pond near an apartment building. They weren’t very far from artist  Anita Utas home, and she started to take an interest in them. When the city said the beavers would be killed she called some friends and plenty of people spoke out against it. Alarmed by the media coverage and the thousand emails, the mayor backed down, posed for this photo with the giant beaver, and Anita and her friends were heroes. Ottawa said it was going to work with  wildlife interests to formulate a comprehensive wildlife plan. And there was much rejoicing!

Fast forward to 2012, when the wildlife groups had been so excited to be involved, became frustrated at their complete helplessness and marginalization on the committee and publicly resigned, saying “We aren’t giving up a seat at the table. There is no ‘table’.”  A few months later, on Canada day when everyone was on vacation, the city goons ripped out the beaver lodge, swearing after objections that they had done no harm because the beavers had moved on.

Except the next day Anita filmed a mother beaver with two tiny kits, and since they had no lodge for protection they were spending the day breast feeding in a bush. And the father beaver was never ever seen again. After insisting that there were no beavers there, and then that if they were there they had never been harmed, they said the beavers must be relocated – because STORMWATER. Ever flexible and pragmatic, the white hats advocated a wildlife sanctuary that had agreed to take them. But the city insisted it would handle it themselves, and that no media or witness should be allowed to see it, but ‘just trust us – it will be fine’.

So Lily and her two kits were ‘disappeared’. And then miraculously, 90 days later video was sent to Anita of an adult beaver and a much older yearling! A note was attached explaining the other kit had lived fine, but had just dived and wasn’t visible at the moment, but see? They said. Everything turned out fine! You worried for nothing you silly goose-lover! The city waited for public attention to turn back to J-walking or childcare like it always did.

It was pointed out that unless the city had relocated those beavers by way of a time machine, there was no way in heaven or earth that those beavers were the same ones they moved. And the people who were mad before got mad again. And the people who had lied before lied again. I made a video of the event  set to the soundtrack of just Paul Simon’s “Lie, Lie Lie” from the end of the Boxer, but Youtube, in its infinite copyright wisdom, took it away. If you know it, you might hum along as you watch.

Are you still with me? I know that’s a lot of back story to cover. One of the advantages of just putting down layers of evil and bullshit on top of each other over and over again, is that the story gets too long to even tell in the media. And because your story becomes too complicated to report on, the media talks about some one else’s simpler crime. Never mind, this is the Martinez Beavers website. We know all about complicated lies. I’ll get to the point.

This week, the never-awaited pretend Wildlife strategy Plan has finally been released!

Wildlife plan shows Ottawa a “dinosaur” in species protection, says group

Beavers, turkeys and coyotes will still be killed at the hands of the city despite 11 recommendations laid out in a draft wildlife management strategy early this week, charged a local conservation group, Wednesday.

“Here’s Ottawa continuing to kill the majority of beavers,” said Donna DuBreuil, president of the Ottawa-Carleton Wildlife Centre.

DuBreuil, who is also a spokesperson for the Ontario Wildlife Coalition, walked away from a working group on the document last September after more than a year passed without a stakeholder’s meeting.

“There was no support from the other agencies,” she said. “They have fought for years any progress.” The policy is now up on the city’s website for public consultation.

Here I did the heavy lifting for you. Maybe you  have something to say about this excerpt?

With respect to beavers, opportunities appear to exist for the employment of “beaver deceivers” to protect some infrastructure (especially road and rail culverts), with associated ecosystem benefits and the potential for long-term maintenance cost savings. Seven beaver deceiver demonstrations sites have been established by the City. However, the City can find no precedent or support for the use of beaver deceivers in engineered stormwater management ponds, and the City’s stormwater engineers have concluded that they may interfere with the performance and maintenance of those facilities.

Because, you know, storm water is SO different from the other kind of water.  And those 5 photos sent to us by that guy Mike Callahan of installations in storm water ponds could have been photo shopped. He’s not even Canadian.  And what kind of name is ‘Beaver Solutions‘ anyway? There’s only one solution to beavers.  And everyone knows it.

So help our Canadian friends and send your comments about how flow devices work and beavers create habitat HERE. As part of the plan they’re proposing hiring a 100,000 dollar a year wildlife biologist to handle these issues in the future. Smart thinking. Get an expert on staff to do it.

We wouldn’t want to put elected officials in voter jeopardy, right?

CBC News Posted: May 15, 2013 3:18 PM CT Last Updated: May 15, 2013 5:35 PM CT This premature beaver kit was brought into the Wildlife Haven Rehabilitation Centre on Tuesday after a trapper removed it from its mother's womb. Three other kits that were also found had died. This premature beaver kit was brought into the Wildlife Haven Rehabilitation Centre on Tuesday after a trapper removed it from its mother's womb. Three other kits that were also found had died. (Wildlife Haven Rehabilitation Centre)

The trapper discovered the four kits after killing the mother beaver, according to the Wildlife Haven Rehabilitation Centre which is caring for the young beaver.  “He had trapped a beaver and then he killed it and noticed that its stomach was moving, so he cut it open and took out four baby beavers,” Reesa Atnikov, the centre’s supervisor, told CBC News on Wednesday.

What a humanitarian! St. Francis of the fur trade! So after killing the mother and three of its siblings, the trapper had the kindness of heart to take the trouble to slit open her belly and bring one gasping survivor for rehab. No word yet on whether he donated the sum he received for offing the beaver for the babies care. Gosh, this is such touching story, they should show it every Christmas.

The surviving beaver kit, which is about the size of a large baked potato, is receiving around-the-clock care and its condition is improving, Atnikov said.

No mention of the literally thousands of unborn kits that are killed every year when trappers take care of a ‘nuisance’ mom. The internet is literally strewn with photos of unborn kits because the monsters think its kind of cool to see them all tucked away and fully formed like that. Don’t worry, I know my audience and won’t share any. But trust me they’re out there.

Meanwhile, lets hope the baby does okay, that he doesn’t remember any of this or the butcher that delivered him. Also that the Wildlife Haven Rehabilitation Center has enough funding to pay for his ongoing  care. You can help by donating here.

________________________________________________________________________

And speaking of kits, Cheryl was out for our own kit-watch yesterday. She made a discovery that the streetside lodge was being generously mudded. And she snapped this, which should leave very few questions about where mom (and at least 1 newbie) is living at the moment!

Mom beaver with teats: Cheryl Reynolds

It’s okay, the first time I looked I wasn’t sure I saw it either. Check between her head and foot on the right. That little brown thing hanging down means she’s got babies, (and not the unborn fileted kind either). that’s two years in a row mom has changed her mind about where to raise her baby. She seems very capricious! But there aren’t five beaver colonies in the world followed more closely than ours. For all we know it could be normal to have the baby one place, get it all messy, and move to a new abode?

At any rate, after two weeks of watching and waiting we can know for sure that it was dumb fool luck that got those first seconds of early footage. And that, for now at least,  we should be looking for Junior in the pond by the primary! You can bet we’ll keeping hoping for more foolish luck in the future.

Whew! The world is entirely devoid of beaver news today so we can talk. Thank goodness. Come on in and close the door. I wanted to share a theory about beaver behavior and the snippiness we’ve been seeing lately at the beaver ponds. We know a new adult has returned, and clearly that makes a difference to the colony. But this weekend I realized it wasn’t the new adult beaver that’s causing it.

Our beaver born last summer is almost a year old now, and we can still tell him apart by his size most of the time. Junior, we refer to him as for ease of reference. The altercation I got on film made me understand that he was involved. And as I was uploading I had a moment of audio and no video so I actually HEARD it -  the unmistakably kit whine. When I saw it again I noticed that Junior goes over to the big beaver to see what he’s eating, and the adult makes a charge for him, and at that moment the whine occurs.

Did you hear it? It’s such terrible audio its hard to discern. But right around 2 seconds a whining sound comes seems to pierce the train sound. We very very rarely hear whining from beavers when they get older. Is seems to be saying “don’t attack, I’m just a kid, remember?”. His whining is maybe intended to deescalate the adult, and it apparently works. I thought when I first saw this that we were viewing two beavers trying to decide hierarchy, but now I think that what’s happening is that Junior is still acting like a baby, asking for food -

but he’s NOT the baby anymore.

Having a younger sibling in the colony changes everyone’s role, but Junior’s most of all. And he might be the last to know. The day is gone when he can come to the table and steal the treat from indulgent parents with impunity. It’s a new world. He is partly ready for this new world, he does mudding every day and almost always carries a stick when he comes from the den, but he hasn’t forgotten his childish ways, always swims towards mom when he sees her, and expects everyone to share.

Alternating between  kit and yearling, Junior is in the beaver equivalent of middle school.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

Batesville Mississipi’s crack investigative police team had one onery mystery on its hands. Oh sure, they’d untangled their share of inexplicable crimes. But this was worse. Something  about the terrible finality of those missing trees made it worse.  Worse than that time that cookie was missing from Ma Topper’s jar. Worse than the time that kidnapper ran off with the baby Jesus from the manger display.

Who in the hell was chopping the trees on court street?

I won’t comment on the collective IQ of an entire police force that couldn’t hazard a guess what was removing trees a mile from the river. I won’t speculate that the entire state has such an abysmal record on beavers that they wouldn’t know how to wrap a tree if their lives depended on it. I won’t even say that wedged as they are between Alabama and Arkansas there must be a regional shortage of problem solving skills to go around. But thank goodness they had the presence of mind to bring in the trapper.

——————————————————————

Meanwhile in Massachusetts…

Mike Sullivan of Beaver Solutions holds a replica of a beaver skull from 10,000 years ago when the rodents were roughly 8 feet long and likely weighed 200 pounds. Today the average beaver weighs about 30-40 pounds.

Don’t leave it to the beavers

Mike Callahan of Beaver Solutions, a company based out of Southampton, Massachusetts, spoke to Boxford’s BTA/BOLT on May 1 to offer suggestions for outsmarting those pesky rodents who spend their days building dams and lodges throughout the woodlands of the North Shore.

The flooded or dried up areas that result can be managed by clever humans without trapping and killing the beavers, says Callahan who proposes such solutions as pond leveler pipes for dams and special keystone fences for culverts.

Nice! Educating the masses! Now just guess who gave Mike that skull lo these many years ago as a thank you for endless advice when a certain city was set on killing some beavers.

Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Calgary’s Busy Beavers

Armed with incisors that don’t stop growing and a tail that everyone knows for a much different, definitely more delicious reason, the North American Beaver is quite the amazing critter. Using those incredible teeth, the beaver will chew down a tree in only a few hours that took years to grow. The beaver will then use that tree to build a dam, sometimes longer than a kilometer in length. As water pools behind the newly created dam, a pond is created. The water gets deeper and the pond grows larger, giving the beaver better access to the forest and trees beyond. A beaver is safest in the water, once on land it is incredibly vulnerable to predators like coyotes or wolves. So as the pond grows, so does the beaver’s safety net.

Isn’t it nice to read a story about beavers that isn’t about whether or not to kill beavers? And one published with actual photos of actual beavers and not otters or nutria or muskrat? Calgary is about 10 miles north east of Vancouver (everything in Canada is so far apart!) but they’ve clearly benefited from the fur-bearer defenders education. The article even mentions the park system wrapping trees!

With so much force, it’s no wonder that in our parks, such as Carburn, metal fencing has been placed around many of the trees to protect them from the ever-growing teeth of our must powerful rodent. As the family of beavers in Carburn Park eat their way through what trees haven’t been fenced off, it’s only a matter of time before the young kits found there, move on to start their own lives and their own ponds. It takes only the sound of trickling water to trigger the construction of a dam. With more dams, come more ponds and wetlands which benefits so many different animals. As they flock to the new, lush habitat, you have to wonder if they ever say thank you to the mighty beaver.

The article ends with this lovely photo by someone named Brendan Troy, who has clearly been keeping a close eye on these beavers. It makes me remember so fondly our 2008 kits and how much fun it was to watch them wrestle. I sure hope we have two this year, although the new little one hasn’t shown his face again all week! Which makes me realize that those 3 seconds of video were a very, very lucky fluke!

And speaking of our own beavers, they were a hot bed of activity last night. This time of year always makes it so easy to see so many family members! Even though we never saw the new kit, we saw plenty of action, including this. Since the new adult has appeared, we’ve been seeing more conflict moments between the beavers. last night I was finally able to catch one on film. You can see the argument is pretty half-hearted, ownership gets asserted and no one gets hurt.

Gnawing at nature in beaver country

FAIRFAX COUNTY, Va. — Northern Virginia’s War of the Beavers pits human sprawl against Castor canadensis in a swampy morsel of fauna and flora surrounded by concrete, cars and money.

The setting is a miniature utopia called Huntley Meadows Park in privileged Fairfax County, half an hour south of the White House. This is a swampy second- and third-growth woodland choked with cattails. It is described, nevertheless, in a brochure available at the Visitor Center, as “a rich, natural island in the suburban sea.”

Meanwhile, those pesky beavers have run amuck — messing with the water levels, felling oaks and hickories, and generally doing what they have been doing since the Middle Pleistocene.  “For an adult beaver, the only predator is the car,” Huntley’s director says, addressing a gathering of pro- and anti-beaverites.

I guess the Canadian reporter is on vacation, and drove 1500 miles south east to Virginia to see relatives. He decided to stop off at Huntley meadows where our friends Ann and Malcolm have been keeping an eye on the local beavers. Of course he didn’t actually see any beavers, because he was there in the daytime. He had to rely on their stock photo images. Brace yourselves.

A beaver swims in a pool inside his enclosure at the “ZOOM” Zoo in Gelsenkirchen, western Germany on March 12, 2012. A Photograph by: PATRIK STOLLARZ, AFP/Getty Images

Shouldn’t he be ashamed of himself? He is a grown reporter submitting his travel expenses and writing off  lunch to post a stock photo of an OTTER on international news. Correction, I just read from his byline that he’s a Brooklyn-born Canadian reporter who lives in D.C. American as apple pie. Maybe he has no control over the photos they run with his article, but honestly call me next time! I can put you touch with amazing photos of the Huntley Meadows beavers. I’ve seen some egregious cases of mistaken identity in my life time, nutria  mislabled as beaver, muskrat, even groundhog. But this – this hands down takes the birthday cake and makes a wish blowing out all the candles.

The director is an amiable expert named Kevin Munroe who knows every rail and redbud in the park. It is his duty to explain to the people of Fairfax County why, after 21 years of bitter contention, a detailed Beaver Behaviour Study, and more than 60 public meetings, the park’s stewards finally have decided to spend $3 million to turn Huntley’s seasonal ponds into a gated community for North America’s largest rodents.

This will involve the installation of a “Clemson Water Leveler System” comprising vinyl sheet pilings sunk three metres into a cordillera of lakeside mounds, sliding doors to keep the swamp in a perpetual state of “hemi-marsh,” and underwater pipes with cages around them to keep the beavers from gnawing through the arteries of their own purported salvation.

I can only hope that when they say “Clemson” they don’t actually mean the archaic pipe and fencing system of the 90′s because there’s plenty of better choices to solve their water problems. But then, since the director is telling everyone that adult beavers have no predators, we can’t be too sure. (no coyotes? mt. lions? bobcats? released pet alligators?) I suppose it’s conceivable you killed them all already but I’m sure there are plenty of big dogs that would be happy to chase a little beaver bait. Those beavers that had rabies last year got it from somewhere, and its fatal right?

Twenty years ago, I would have said ‘Protect, but don’t manage,’ ” Munroe says. “I grew up reading The Lorax. I would have been the one standing across the gate to keep hunters from coming in to shoot the deer. That was a tough decision to make: You’re going into a wildlife sanctuary to blow away Bambi?

“But we’ve seen invasive plants take over the forest and deer herds decimate the woodlands. Before Europeans came here, deer were controlled by wolves, by mountain lions, by Native Americans. How many of those do we have in Fairfax County now?”  “Is this the human future?” I ask him. “Tiny fragments of the so-called ‘natural’ world heavily managed?”  “The short answer is yes,” he replies. Then he tells us that river otters have been spotted this spring in Huntley Meadows Park. “River otters!” the audience clamours, exultant at the news. “River otters eat baby beavers,” says the naturalist, damming our joy.  “It’s OK,” says Kevin Munroe. “Circle of life.”

There is something deeply irritating about this article, and its not just the otter or the furtive reference to Belarus. How many times have I personally written the park mangers at Huntley meadows? Thirty? They should be experts at beavers by now, even if the reporter can’t name three reasons why the keystone species shouldn’t be killed. Here’s a actual picture of the actual beavers at Huntley Meadows.

Beaver: Ann Cameron Siegal