Click on photo to visit nest site and stay tuned for some great avian parenting.
Month: April 2009
Yesterday’s deluge brought alot of water in a very short time. Jon went down twice to check on our three strong dams and how they were holding up. Water was flowing freely over the top but things damaged looked minor. I’m sure by this morning the cumulative wear has been substantial. Yesterday the primary dam was newly mudded and looking pristine. What I call the “annex” (to the rear of the Escobar bridge) was holding water deep enough to cover some tulles. I watched not one but two green herons hunting in the creek, this one along the shore were a foolishly leaping frog met his doom.
I was at work during yesterdays downpour. I heard approaching thunder and saw a horizontal streak of lighting errupt very near my office. My friend from Florida wouldn’t have allowed me to stay in the building, but I thought it was thrilling. I’m less thrilled about another round of paintstaking repairs for our beavers. But they apparently don’t mind.
Does a cheerful Robin sleep outside your bedroom? Odds are there’s one not too far from where you live. One year we had the dubious fortune of having one sleep every night right by the bedroom window. The sleeping wasn’t a problem. The waking, was another thing entirely.
Robins have some of the most accomplished song around, and they can project mightily. They manage this because of their highly complex syrinx muscles. A syrinx is the vocal organ of the bird, just like the larynx is for the human. Instead of being located in the throat it is shaped like an upside down hollow Y just at the entrance to the lungs. As macabre as it sounds, this was part of our daily knowledge, when we were harvesting our own chickens, because the body would still make noise after the head was removed. Now the concept is almost completely foreign.
The complexity of the pairs of muscles entering the syrinx determine how intricate the song of the bird is going to be. The simple ‘coo coo’ of a dove, for example, means he was blessed with very few muscles, while the momentous joy of a robin shows one of the most advanced. And he knows it, and thinks you should know it too.A syrinx is a much more advanced organ that the one we have. With separate lungs controlling each half, it can produce sound continuously and some of the most advanced species can create double sounds at the same time.
Before spring the Robins begin the morning assault. Believe me I know. When it was still daylight savings you might hear them starting from 4 in the morning. The poet in me would say they were “greeting the dawn” but there wasn’t much dawn to speak of at that hour. I think they were greeting the end of my sleep.
One dark morning I had a plane to catch and had to wake up at 3 in the morning. After making sure I had everything packed and ready to go, I crept out to the tree where the robin slept for some petty revenge. Hadn’t he woken me every morning for the last four weeks? Fair’s fair. It was his turn. Everything was silent. I tightened my feeble larynx the best I could and began my assault. CHIRP CHIRP SING CHRIP WARBLE!!! How did he like it?
The robin fluttered awake with no alarm whatsoever, and immediately began his morning chorus an hour early. Apparently morning starts for Robins whenever they’re awake. They don’t have a snooze button and they’re always happy to start the day.
Defending our beavers has been a constant struggle against threat of one kind or another. We were warned that lives could be lost, that buildings would collapse, that supporters would be sued, and that the website would be come a target for hate-mail the world wide. With each subsequent challenge the threats would increase. Of course when you feel most threatened, you instinctively feel most vulnerable and unable to achieve your goals. However I have learned through painstaking observation that the reverse is usually true.
The closer you get to power the more ominous the response, and the surer your success. Threat comes when you are strong, not weak.
I mention this because this weekend one of our beaver loyals ran into a certain councilman who kindly wondered whether the “beaver people” were planning some kind of anti-Redevelopment campaign. He expressed concern that this could harm the beavers and bring “Stigma”, and he hoped that wasn’t true.
Are we both hearing the same theme song in the background here? “Nice Colony, shame if something were to happen to them”. (I mean other than lowering their dam by three feet, removing all their food and installing sheetpile through their lodge.) It would be a shame for the beavers to be tainted by a controversial issue that has been dramatically argued in this city since 1950. We wouldn’t want to bring controversy to these peaceful uncontroversial and uncritically accepted rodents, right?
For the record, Worth A Dam doesn’t have an “official” position on the Redevelopment issue. We’re beaver people, and we are committed to beavers. We are a heterogeneous group, and voted for Kennedy, Alford, McCain, Obama and Ron Paul. This is the way its supposed to be, where people set aside their differences to work on common goals, support each other’s shared interests and make space for things that they can’t agree on. I don’t expect readers of this website to agree with my opinion on everything, including RDA. You know how to contact me and express your thoughts as well. To be honest, if the city had ever sat me down and said, ‘if you will make sure beaver people don’t have any opposition for our RDA we’ll keep them safe and build the most beautiful habitat for them you’ve ever seen’, I’d have seriously thought twice. But of course the city didn’t do that. They didn’t ever view us as important enough to promise anything, or even vote on the issue. They just want to threaten that if we offer any opposition to an RDA they’ll support the beavers even less than they do already. (Get your nano-tools so we can measure the incremental shift.)
Honestly, their sheetpile-palooza was for me the single best indicator about whose interests they are likely to protect in this city, with or without an RDA. Warning a beaver loyalist that talking about RDA could harm the beavers is italian old school. Here’s the kindest version of what I think about that particular councilman’s concern for the possible stigma my having an opinion will bring the beavers…
[youtube:http://youtube.com/watch?v=0LnJskwydvM&feature]
BEAVER FESTIVAL XVI
DONATE
Beaver Alphabet Book
TREE PROTECTION
BAY AREA PODCAST
Beaver Interactive: Click to view
LASSIE INVENTS BDA
URBAN BEAVERS
LASSIE AND BEAVERS
Ten Years
The Beaver Cheat Sheet
Restoration
RANGER RICK
Educate & Engage
