Introducing The Beaver Coalition

Back when “novel coronavirus” was a phrase most of us had yet to hear, Rob Walton and I ate lunch in a dingy bar in Portland, Oregon. Earlier that day we’d spent hours in a windowless conference room deep in a grey cinderblock building, talking beaver policy. Rob had recently retired as a senior policy advisor with NOAA Fisheries, where he was the primary author of the Oregon Coast Coho Salmon Recovery Plan. After 5 years of installing nonlethal beaver coexistence devices with my business Beaver State Wildlife Solutions, I was suddenly mired in new permitting challenges. We were tired, we were frustrated, we were driven, and we needed lunch. The beer was thin, the fries were clammy, but we were hooked by the thin tendrils of an idea that would become The Beaver Coalition.

The valley I grew up in, where I now raise my children, was called “Sbink,” or “place of the Beaver” by the Takelma People. And it was a place of beaver, until Peter Skene Ogden led his Hudson’s Bay Company trappers through on his quest to create a fur desert. Even when the fur was gone, the valleys of the Siskiyous still bore treasure. Waves of men would straighten the braided streams into single channels, moving them back and forth across the narrow valleys as they sluiced out the gold that had settled over thousands of years, captured in the complexity of a “beavered” landscape. While the gold is gone a few beaver remain, but their families now occupy the banks of incised riverbanks, the remnants of their past kingdom. As our late season snowpack slips into memory, each summer my children play with dry, powdery stones where I used swim in deep pools. Healing the land, paying back and paying forward, this is why I am focused on partnering with beaver.

While each of us on The Beaver Coalition team came to our work from different backgrounds, we are united by a drive to empower humans in partnering with beaver for abundant water and resilient, functioning streams. Rob brings an expertise in salmon recovery, an understanding of policy and a mastery of bureaucracy. Sarah Koenigsberg, producer/director of the award winning film The Beaver Believers, brought an awareness of these humble ecosystem engineers to tens of thousands of people as her film screened in film festivals worldwide. She brings the ability to unite people of different walks of life with a compelling story and a knack for helping scientists remember to talk like normal people.

Andrew Schwarz brings his skills and passion as a restoration practitioner. Jason Strauss brings a lifelong commitment to wildlife and a background in business. Mike Rockett brings a deep dedication to the environment, a skillset in the law and a history setting up nonprofits. Chris Jordan brings the tools of scientific inquiry, including his work in the team that developed the Beaver Dam Analog and the Beaver Restoration Guidebook to this effort as the chair of our Science and Technical Information Committee. We live throughout the dark shadow of the Hudson’s Bay Company “fur desert” and have formed this partnership to leverage each other’s skills and passion.

Why The Beaver Coalition? Simply put, this is our effort to carry forward the legacies of those we have learned from in a strategic bid to help beaver change the world. Our mission is to empower humans to partner with beaver through education, science, advocacy, and process-based restoration. To borrow a term from biology geek-speak, we will address the “limiting factors” that prevent beaver from doing what they do within our landscape. Through a strategic focus on building an effective coalition, clarifying and advancing policies, promoting the best available science, developing education and outreach, and implementing beaver-based restoration, we will help beaver repair our planet. As with so many in this community of “beaver believers,” we are simultaneously pragmatic and dreamers, facilitating a paradigm shift in society’s relationship with beaver. We hope that by building The Beaver Coalition as a resilient nonprofit organization that works with and supports others, our community will have another useful tool in advancing this vision.

Please visit our newly launched website at www.beavercoalition.org to read more about our approach and sign up for our mailing list to stay abreast of what we’re up to. We’re excited about our upcoming projects and will be announcing them soon through that list. Perhaps most importantly, we want engage in conversations about how we can best be of service in this effort. Please let us know what opportunities The Beaver Coalition should consider to empower humans in partnering with beaver. What important lessons have you learned that you think we might benefit from? Please reach out to us or leave us a comment on our blog or social media platforms.

We take inspiration and have sought advice from the scientists and biologists working in federal, state and local agencies, tribes, and the people behind organizations including: Beaver Solutions LLC, Worth a Dam, Beavers: Wetlands and Wildlife, The Beaver Institute, Methow Beaver Project, The Beaver Ecology and Relocation Center, Anabranch Solutions, The Beaver Advocacy Committee of the South Umpqua Rural Community Partnership, Beaver Deceivers LLC, Cows and Fish, the Miistakis Institute, Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, Beavers Northwest, National Wildlife Federation’s Montana Beaver Working Group, Beaver Works Oregon, Muse Ecology Podcast, Sierra Wildlife Coalition, Defenders of Wildlife and Ecotone Inc. as well as so many key individuals including Glynnis Hood, Michael Runtz, Sherri Tippie, Suzanne Fouty, Mary O’Brien, Ben Goldfarb, Derek Gow, Gerhard Schwab, Duncan Haley and Valer Austin. This effort is only possible because of the foundational and continued work of these people and organizations. As 4H youth across rural America have pledged for generations, we’re eager to continuing to work together and be of service, with our heads, hearts and hands for a better community, country, and world.

Conservation or Kidnapping?

Last week, a couple of officials from the Dallas World Aquarium (DWA), a married couple from Virginia (who write children's books), and a Panamanian boat captain (a rumored former bodyguard of Panama’s last dictator), attempted to bring eight pygmy sloths into captivity. The truth really is stranger than fiction.

The sloths were crated and brought to the tourist town of Bocas—about 50 miles away by water and outside the indigenous region that encompasses Escudo de Veraguas. Six of the captured sloths were destined for Texas. The other two were to be housed at the Sloth Sanctuary in Costa Rica, which receives major funding from the DWA. As the sloths were being held in a hotel in Bocas, word spread, there was a protest, and the police responded. The pygmy sloths were returned to their island the following day.

Captured pygmy sloth. Photo from The Bocas Breeze

The Dallas World Aquarium maintains it’s capture was a legitimate effort to establish a separate pygmy sloth population as conservation strategy—but this expedition is hard to look full in the face—for it was also a lucrative move on their part. Three–toed sloths have risen in social media currency. The Internet is laden with sloth memes, remix Youtube videos and celebrities gushing over captive sloths. While the DWA has been the only zoo in North American to keep three–toed sloths alive, they also capitalize on their captive sloths.

The DWA had the correct Panamanian export permits, and the USA did not require any special import permits—as it does not recognize the pygmy sloth as an endangered species. However, the DWA consulted with none of the researchers and organizations that have been working on this species, and it’s still unclear if they had permission from the Ngobe people. Their actions have triggered shock, confusion and indignation from many who have studied the pygmy sloth. We still don’t even know what they eat...

Photos taken at the Dallas World Aquarium

What the DWA tried is not really that surprising, it simply brings to focus one of the dirty secrets of international conservation efforts. Saving charismatic mammals is the best way to secure conservation money. These conservation icons must be in peril, and there must not be a simple local solution (for this cuts out the need for international organizations).

Mother Teresa, when speaking of people in need, said “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will”. This is true too for wildlife, and even science designates “indicator” and “surrogate species” to more clearly communicate landscape-wide conservation goals. As people who work in conservation, we must be honest with ourselves about what a species really needs. Sometimes this may not line up with the most flashy or catalyzing opportunity. It is our responsibility to draw the line.

Crated pygmy sloths wait on a dock in Bocas, Panama

Dark History

This passage came from a local “history book” published in 1884:

Within the bounds of Southern Oregon is found a population of about thirty thousand souls, pioneers and their descendants, who redeemed this beautiful region from the domination of the savage tribes and brought it within the domination of civilization. In the forty years of its history much has been accomplished. The primeval forests have been leveled. The fire of many a domestic hearth burns brightly in a land which not many years ago was wilderness. The old story of pioneer life is repeated here on this western shore by those to whom hardship and adventure were as second nature. Over this region, now fruitful in grain, the wild and debased Indian once roamed, an object of dread and danger. Bloody and fierce were the conflicts he waged against the superior race, fast despoiling him of his heritage, and the crimson history of war attests his valor and stubbornness. The Indian has melted away before the approach of the Caucasian, like snow beneath a noonday sun. Rude domestic utensils, and the arrow-heads fallen on many a bloody battle-field remain as sole mementos of a departed race.

It is easy to ignore history sometimes. In the day-to-day bustle of living and getting paid, we step through the present from task to task like upon rocks in a stream. We hop along, not looking at the history that swirls around us, until we accidentally slip and are plunged into its cold and lingering wetness. Once we’ve been immersed in the stories, it is hard to shake them off.

The history of this place in Southern Oregon is a heavy thing. Greed, of beaver pelts first and later gold, drove white men into this valley with self-important purpose. Peter Ogden’s journals, written less than 200 years ago, tell of arriving into the Rogue Valley near present day Ashland–how sunny and beautiful the weather in February was and how the native people assured him this good weather was normal for the time of year. I know this too, for 200 years later our Februaries are still sunny and bright. People always think about gardening for the first time in February. This concrete detail kicks me in the gut... because this is the same place.

Ogden’s journals also tell of how his expedition, camped at present-day Applegate, sent two scouts up the Thompson Creek valley. They rode until they were turned around by the snows on Grayback Mountain. It was April 10th. He also notes a visit of local Takelma and how a pack of wolves chased 50 horses out of camp.

I am struck by the proximity in both time and space of these men. Those two fur trappers–the first white men to head up Thompson Creek–would have ridden across the land where I grew up. Past the White Oak (between 300-500 years old) where we hung our swings as kids.

This is my valley, less than a tree’s lifetime ago. The Takelma are now gone. So are the wolves. The beaver have gone underground, for their nation’s survivors no-longer build dams, but hide in dens dug into the mud of the riverbanks. In the years following those two men and their company, hundreds, thousands more would come. My other library books tell of gold mines and murders, “Indian wars” and sawmills along the same creeks I know; Humbug, Williams, Sterling, and the Little Applegate. People fought and killed on the same land I walk. A race of people exterminated.

A memo from the Outside

A few years ago, I was talking with a sculptor well known for his portrayal of the natural world in metal. He had invited me over for dinner to discuss some fieldwork I had recently completed and after we ate, he showed me his studio in the backyard. It was a living and dusty place–where the cast-off projects and references crowded newly cast work. Antlers, assorted bird wings and the tarnished back half of a river otter scattered around eighteen bronze pygmy owls, lined up and shining. It could have easily been the workshop of a field biologist.

I remember him pointing out that both field scientists and artists “are in the same business.” We both go into outside looking for patterns, often with an hypothesis of what we’ll find there. When we do see a pattern, or something worth sharing, we record it and come back to file a report on what we found. Whether we create this report through art or a written paper, we both want to communicate our observations to people in a meaningful way.

...and sometimes, you find something worth sharing by accident.

Last month, as the storms finally swelled the streams and ponds around our valley, I spent an afternoon playing in the rain with my camera. I recently bought a waterproof housing for it and like any kid with a new plastic toy, I wandered about dropping it into any puddle I found. Just downstream from my family’s land on Thompson Creek, there is a pool that has always held lots of juvenile Coho salmon, steelhead, and anything else looking to avoid herons and raccoons. So I set the camera on record and auto-focus, tied it to a rock so the buoyant plastic would sink, and lowered it onto the stream bed.

Like a monkey blindly fishing for hidden ants with a piece of grass, I perched on the exposed roots of a Bigleaf Maple, dropping in the camera, waiting, pulling it up to inspect my footage, changing position slightly, then dropping it back in. Within a half-dozen tries I had a good shot and moved on to film the chorusing tree frogs nearby. Back inside, I uploaded the juvenile Coho footage collected that afternoon to Youtube, and sent it around to the people I work with on riparian restoration projects around the watershed. The email responses were swift and enthusiastic, the video was forwarded on, “liked” and had been viewed over 200 times within the first few days—not to shabby for a fish video.

The comments were heart-felt and sincere. People, with whom I usually correspond only to discuss permits, grant deadlines or regional priorities chimed in to laud the footage and I found myself checking Youtube to watch the video’s “views” rise. What in real life had been 3 minutes squatting in the rain became three days of electronic entertainment. Three days, while the fish went about their own business, as did the rest of the real breathing world.

As I continue to look for patterns in the Outside, struggling to share what I see with others, I will return to my glowing screen at night to load many more such videos–for they are captured glimpses into other worlds... memos from the Outside. But the whole story can only be found for one’s self, playing in the world of mud and living things.

Rock Chucks

This March, I took a position with the Bureau of Land Management in Southern Idaho. An important aspect of my move to Twin Falls has been, well, Craigslist. A faux antique dining room table (for a desk), a aged vinyl chair (1960’s diner style), and free pallets to support my thrift store mattress (always one of the more risky purchases). As a seasonal worker, I’m looking for inexpensive functionality and craigslist delivers. Recently I came across this ad offering “free rockchuck removal”.

free rockchuck removal (hagerman & surrounding)

Im looking for a good place to go rockchuck hunting close by if you have a lot and want them gone please let me know i will be respectful of property

Skeletal remains of a rock chuck, caught-up on a bush half-way up the cliff above Vineyard Lake.

There aren’t rockchucks (also called the Yellow-bellied marmot) in the Siskiyou Mountains where I grew up and my first encounter with Marmota flaviventris had been the previous day at the BLM office. A lone male has taken up residence under the building’s back porch, and he comes out regularly to nibble on the lawn and or lay in the shade of the picnic table. His appearance is what you’d expect of a burrowing, high elevation rodent. Flecked gray coat with deep orange belly. Small ears, tight to a squirrel-like head. He is about the size of a chubby house cat. Under more natural circumstances, he would have probably had a small harem of females and a series of burrows amid a rock outcrop or cliff. But he seems happy and who am I to judge. He’s definitely safer.

Skeletal remains of a rock chuck, caught-up on a bush half-way up the cliff above Vineyard Lake.

It is apparently a great entertainment to shoot these chubby rodents in mass, from the organized “chuck derby” to the leisurely afternoon of “yard-work” with your favorite high powered rifle. The internet is filled with photos of these marksmen shooting and posing with their vanquished and often disemboweled quarry. As Mrchuckhunter eloquently puts it in a youtube comments below his Chuck Hunt video “Passing a 27 caliber bullet through a chuck, is a little hard on the skin holding the whole package together. Where did he go? ‘Chunks and vapor.’” And according to the same man, Southern Idaho is the hotbed of rock chuck killing potential. I saw this first-hand just last weekend.

Picture posted by "Ironmaker" on www.ar15.com

A fish biologist friend had recommended that I explore Vineyard Lake, which lays in a small box-canyon just North off the Snake River Canyon. I started out in the early morning. Parking my car at a dead-end, I crossed an irrigated pasture and followed the rim overlooking the Snake River. It was cold and the wind blew through my clothes while I trudged East. As I descended into the box canyon, a Red-tailed hawk seemed to hover in the headwind just before me (redtails cannot hover in place like the Northern Harrier) and a rock chuck gave a severe alarm whistle from somewhere within the rock scree.

Down next to the lake the wind was almost imperceptible. There was a small creek that fed into the lake and I followed it to a spring that seeped from the canyon’s walls on three sides. I ate breakfast here and read a book for several hours. Later, when came out into the open back at the lake, something moved on the rim across the water to my right. It was one of three men, silhouetted dark against the sky some 350 yards away. I didn’t need my binoculars to see his scoped high-powered rifle, but as I brought them to my eyes I saw him croutch and fire down into the canyon. The other men were looking down at where he’d shot, and I scrambled back into the cover of a protruding canyon wall. My heartbeat churned in a panicked rhythm. I listened and waited, unwilling to venture back into the open to alert the gunmen of me presence. Eventually they left and I climbed out of the now silenced canyon.

Whale Thoughts

While working on a project with Sperm whales this past spring, I found an early edition of Farley Mowat's "A Whale for the Killing" at a used bookstore in Olympia. On the first page there appears this quote from Henry Beston:

"Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."

Off Washington's coast tribal fisherman had been reporting sperm whales near their longline boats. These vessels fish well off the continental shelf, by lowering a long loop of heavy baited hooks in the deep Pacific and drawing up Black Cod, Flounder, and other deep sea fish. These Black Cod can be over ninety years old. In Alaska, Sperm whales have begun stealing these fish off the lines as they are pulled to the surface. Tipped off, perhaps, by the distinct bubbling pattern of a boat's motor when operating its wench, Sperm whales will come from miles away. Sometimes as many as six whales to a boat. The largest predators on earth.

They also have the largest brains on earth. Researchers in the Gulf of Alaska captured this video of a sperm whale delicately plucking the fishing line with its thin lower jaw, as if it were a guitar string. The resulting vibrations flicked the catch from its hook. Presumably, to be easily eaten by the whale without hindrance of hook and line. From the frequency of their feeding clicks while depredating these longline boats, it seems they increase their normal feeding rate by three times. What we choose to call this behavior really doesn't matter, to the whales. We are fishing in their world, and they have learned to take advantage of those efforts; the meme may be spreading.

Does the appearance of Sperm whales near boats in Washington suggest other whales have learned this trait independently, or have they been taught? So far, every trick the fishermen have tried, from dummy longlines to bubbling buoys that obscure the engine's underwater noise pattern, have confused the whales for only a short time. We cannot know the thoughts of whales, but not because they do not think.