Baltic Beavers!

heidi08 Uncategorized November 12, 2009

Beavers have felled several trees in the heart of the capital of Latvia, by the Canal, Riga City Council’s Riga Gardens and Parks Director Agnis Kalnkazins (People’s Party) informed LETA.

Is this a “dog bites man story” or what? “Beavers fell trees! News at 11”. Soon to be followed by: “Enthusiastic Dog returns stick again and again!” “Rare pirate squirrel buries nut treasure in yard” and “Feline windpipe obstruction revealed to be hair cluster!”

LETA observed today that beavers have torn down one tree in front of the Latvian National Opera, by the Alfreds Kalnins Monument; another nearby tree has been seriously damaged.

A bystander tree was wounded in the crossfire, but escaped with minor injuries.

Kalnkazins points out that battling beavers is difficult due to the fact that hunting them is prohibited and there are no resources for wrapping wire gauze around the trees to protect them.

Did that just say there are no resources for wire? Just how poor is this country? We are talking about a memorial and an Opera House. How can there be a country in which people have enough money erect a memorial and see opera but not enough to buy wire? Maybe we should start a collection? Invite Bono? Live-Wire Aid?

At the moment, there are two beaver families living in Riga Canal: one in front of the Latvian National Opera House, and one by Riga Freeport’s administration building. Altogether over 120 beavers have been observed in several locations around Riga.

Ahhh, you can’t help but be touched by a city that knows where it’s beavers live. Seriously, write us if you want some tree help. We can connect you with some attendees from the recent conference in Lithuania and I’m sure get you some wire.

KV5 Beavers

heidi08 featured, Friends of Martinez Beavers April 16, 2011

The Valley of the Kings is a massive trove of hidden treasures that were riffled long before the 1900’s. As a woman who hiked through it in the largely unvisited period six weeks after 9/11, I can tell you It hums with the feeling of undiscovered things even though Howard Carter and his buddies before him pretty much took everything away but the pictures on the walls. There are 62 identified tombs, to date. To share the wear and tear of visitors, different tombs are open to the public each day. You buy a ticket that allows you to visit three, although often a kindly bribe will get you into more. KV5’s only claim to fame was the massive dumping of clutter from the excavation of the nearby tomb of KV3 (more famously known as the tomb of Tutankhamun).

In the 1980’s Kent Weeks left UC Berkeley to take a job as curator at the university of Cairo. He envisioned a massive photography and mapping project that would record the dimensions of every tomb. He even introduced hot air balloons to check the area from the sky. To get the specifics of unimportant KV5 he started to remove the clutter and check the tiny site thorougly. Sometimes little laborious actions have huge unintended consequences. He found a massive corridor lined with more than 70 tombs of the sons of Rameses II, and filled with some of the most important treasures ever discovered.

I tell you this story (and its a fantastic story if you’re interested) because every now and then in beaver-dom, a hundred separate unsuccessful excavations where we’ve forever been toiling without sunlight or water, suddenly touch upon treasures all at the same time. There is this massive and startling outpouring of good will, and we have to take a moment just to compose ourselves, make sure we’re in the right place, and appreciate our good fortunes.

This is a KV5 kinda week, with good luck, unlooked for friends, and wild coincidences. I will start from the top in no particular order. This weekend a sighting of five beavers was reliably reported. The voice of John Muir (Lee Stetson) called me up for a beaver tour late friday night. The editor of Bay Nature said at the awards ceremony that Worth A Dam had done amazing work and he was very excited about pursuing the overlap between beaver dams and salmon. Sunday we had a great conversation with JMA conservation award winner about a project he would like to take on that could benefit Worth A Dam. The physician from Los Altos who has expressed interest in our beavers has taken on the thankless job of editing and updating our Wikipedia entries. A new beaver friend has taken on the significant job of organizing a newsletter to distribute to our supporters twice a year. Our volunteer contractor doing the tile bridge project will be meeting with the director of public works this week.Thinking we needed a logo for the organization we placed another ad on craig’s list for an unpaid graphic designer and got a bevy of fantastically gifted artists who cared about these beavers and wanted to be included. I have a presentation for the Rotary Club of PH tomorrow and it looks like I’ll be in charge of the entertainment portion of JMA’s Earth Day event which will likely be a great way to connect with potential performers for the Beaver Festival.

As we flutter around in all this good fortune, I like to think of the excitement Weeks and his team felt when they stumbled into that first corridor. Can you imagine? Finding a place that no one knew existed with treasures that no one had dared imagine? And seeing the corridor stretch in front of you long beyond the shadowed lighting could possibly reach? Did he stop and check one room thouroughly? Or did he run along the corridor and see as much as he could?

Or did he just stand there in awe and thank the spirit of Amun-Ra?

Sarah Smiles…

heidi08 Uncategorized November 10, 2009

Beaver friend Sarah Summerville of the Unexpected Wildlife Refuge in NJ sent this today and I thought I’d share.

The Opposite of Camouflage

heidi08 Creative Solutions, Environmental, featured October 18, 2010

The word camouflage comes from the French camoufler which means to veil or disguise. Animals use camouflage to elude predators and hide from danger, or to deliver a sneak attack and creep up on a meal unannounced. Both the hunted and the hunter benefit from its obscuring defenses, and evolution has taken care of the animals that are best able to blend into their surroundings. Hiding means success.

Unless you’re a Martinez Beaver.

We were talking this weekend about how the work of Worth A Dam has been almost entirely about visibility: public events, conversations, photos, videos, letters, tours, activities, lectures, displays. We have done more outreach in the past year and a half than most organizations do in a decade. Our mission statement begins with “maintaining the Martinez Beavers” but mostly they maintain themselves just fine. The work we do is to try constantly to keep them from being meddled with so they can get on with their furry beaver lives.

Sometimes that takes the form of direct advocacy work, like when we took the city to court last year to challenge the sheetpile. Ultimately it was the spotlight of public opinion that got the city to hire a biologist to supervise the work, and protect our beavers during the action our lawyer could not stop. Talking to the Rotaries and Kiwanis clubs of the world help calm peoples enormous fears about this issue. Teaching children about wildlife and the watershed has been our secret weapon against beaver prejudice, and I cannot tell you how many police, council members, biologists, and country workers have ruefully offered their support because their children “love the beavers”. A cheerful community presence has made all the difference for our beavers lives, across the city, and across the nation.

It’s the opposite of Camouflage.

If our beavers had chosen a less visible home, outside the center of town, without access or easy observation they would have been long ago exterminated. Seeing their actions and efforts has made them part of the public conversation. Caring people instinctively worry about the accessibility of our colony. Will people harm them? Do they mind the interference? But honestly their public presence is the only thing that has kept them alive.

I hear whispers of lots of “secret” beaver dams that are allowed to exist only because the “authorities” have never seen them. This is a risky option, because all water flows into someone else’s property eventually. People tend to notice if you have an illicit beaver dam some how. Making sure no one knows about them is one way of assuring that beavers continue to survive. Worth A Dam has added another.

Making sure everyone knows about them.

Happy Anniversary!

heidi08 Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers November 8, 2009

Sorry I forgot to mention yesterday was the two year anniversary of the important council meeting at the High School. Doesn’t it seem like ages ago? We were all so young then…

Last night’s JMA awards was an amazing reminder that there are very good people doing astonishing grand things in the world. Lee Stetson as John Muir was a revelation and I was in tears by the end of it. We had been called the night before to take him out for a late night beaver viewing, and I told him I was sure when he was quoting Muir’s passion for the sentinel Sequoias he loved and worked so hard for, (“If just one of these colonels could go to Washington and argue on its own behalf, just one, we would never talk about cutting them down again”) he was really thinking about our beavers.

Well maybe that was just me.

Like that fateful day two years ago, it was a beauteous night and made me excited to be a part of something so rare and wonderous. I’m sure I’ll write more later, must dash to the Save Mt. Diablo event. Watch some of the video, skip through the 45 council minutes and just watch the people comments. They are stunning.

Happy Anniversary Martinez! It’s been a heck of a ride!