August 7, 2010

heidi08 Beaver News, City Reports, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers March 25, 2010

It’s official! Yesterday I turned in the application for this year’s Beaver Festival which will be August 7th from 11-4. We are hoping for an “estuary awareness” car to bring passengers on Amtrak from the Jack London Square with the watershed appreciation of Lisa Owens-Viani. We are hoping for five hours of remarkable music, face painting, beaver tours and naturalist walks with Doc Hale. We are hoping for the children’s cloth drawings to be converted to a flag that we unveil at the festival. We are hoping for an excellent silent auction with donations from Safari West, Wild Birds, Six Flags, the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the Marine Mammal Center! We are hoping for the best attendance ever and the entire event to be sponsored by Castoro Cellars.

We dream big.

We are also hoping for YOU! So if you plan to be in town that day, would like to help out in anyway including transport, setup, take down, organization, musical delights, children’s activities, manning the book table, helping with sales, recruiting attendance, hanging up signs, taking down signs, having your daughter’s swim team sell water bottles, or offering a service so valueable I haven’t yet thought of it, drop me a note! It takes a VILLAGE to make a beaver festival.

Yesterday I had a very exciting chat with Julia Reischel of the Watershed Post. I had contacted her after reading her review of Mike Callahan’s presentation at the state house. Apparently I came close to giving her a “Road to Damascus moment” and she is now very interested in the role beavers might play in watershed restoration. She was delightful on the phone, and wanted to know who the “big names were” in beaver research so she could follow up. Why hadn’t she heard about the effect beavers have on birds? the effect beavers have on salmon? the use of beavers to combat climate change?

Sigh.

I honestly have no idea. Talk about hiding beavers’ light under a bushel. With the exception of Michael Pollock there really are no “big names” associated with this important research, and his name isn’t NEARLY big enough to make a dent in all the ridiculous lies that are being told about beavers by the salmon industry in Scotland. Research gets done, but its done by doctoral candidates because no one else wants to step into that mire.I sent her in the direction of Dietland Muller-Swarze who teaches right down the street.

Still, start with the dissertations. Its a great beginning. The rest will follow.

Borrowed Time…

heidi08 Beavers, Friends of Martinez Beavers March 24, 2010

The mistress of this website had a computer hazard this week which meant there could be no grand discussions of beavers or the fur trade, only panicked snatches from the laptop. A very nice man, recommended by beaver friend LB, came to perform herculean repairs and shook his finger gravely at the piles and piles of dusty beaver information in the hard drive. It’s time for a new system he said.

Preaching to the choir, I said! Bring on the new wide open spaces to fill with beavers! So our first computer, in 1987, had a whopping 20 MB hard drive and cost us equivalent of half a new car. This new machine will be equipped with a Terabyte, which is equal to 1,048,576 (1,024²) megabytes and cost us less than a new set of tires. That must be progress! I guess that should be enough room for all kinds of beaver footage!

And speaking of extra bytes, we were noticing this week that mom beaver always goes home in the morning with a little something to nibble on. She carries a branch for mid-day snacking, and brings it usually from great distances. It’s a unique behavior, nobody else does it with such regularity. We aren’t sure if she just gets hungry in the interim, or maybe is conditioned from a lifetime of kit rearing to bring something for a snack, but it helps identify her. If you stop by the dam one morning and see a beaver coming back with something in its mouth, check its tail for a notch, because its probably mom!

A fond farewell to winter….

heidi08 Friends of Martinez Beavers, Video March 23, 2010

My very first beaver friend, Bob Arnebeck, posted video this winter of he and his wife helping a deer stuck on the ice. It’s lovely to watch, enjoy!

Show me the man, woman or child who can watch this without thinking of this magical scene….

That’s Spring For You!

heidi08 New Species March 22, 2010

PGE may have falcons, but Mirant has hummingbirds! These two babies are being raised in a nest on a bearing cooling water return line for 6 unit condensate booster pump. The water line is warmer (but not too warm) so it’s an ideal nesting location. Mirant employes have marked off the area and are keeping an eye on their young visitors which are approximately ten days old. These photos were taken March 21st by Jon Ridler, 24-year employee at the plant and member of Worth A Dam.

Myth-understandings

heidi08 Educational, History March 21, 2010

Okay, I woke up this morning ready to write a somber introduction to the fur trade in California with all the exciting new beaver murder mysteries I’ve been reading, but instead I got immersed in this paper sent to me this morning by our wikipedia friend. It is Grinnell’s chapter on the Beaver in the 1937 UCB zoology departement’s “Fur Bearing Mammals of California“. Grinnell is a very important author, recognized for his conservation, and an early advocate for beaver. I especially liked his illustration of the interior of a bank lodge.

The lovely conclusion of his paper says,

The beaver is one of our most popularly appealing native mammals and should be conserved and encouraged for this reason alone, when other considerations permit. It might be advisable, even, in certain districts where they are somewhat detrimental to the works of man, to condone their shortcomings on the score of their esthetic and educational value-to maintain them so·that they will be accessible for observation by the public at large, both adultsartd children. The latter, especially, find in beavers and their works a keen stimulus to wholesome enquiry.

Ahhh that pretty accurately describes our experience here in Martinez. I’d like it embroidered into the lining of the suits of our council members. Obviously the author had an affection for beavers and enjoyed watching them from time to time. He writes beautifully about kits and the experiences of folks who had the fortune to raise them. He describes what its like to see a beaver making a “V” in the water as it approaches and it is clear he’d feel right at home in Martinez.

Of course, he also notes that Golden Beaver don’t live above 300 feet elevation in California, that our beavers have lost their construction skills and don’t leave footprints, that dam building indicates no signs of intelligence in general and that beaver males fight to the death to mate with the “herd”. He added that, while females were home-loving and family oriented, males mated with everything they could score and had more injuries because of this.

Sigh. More beaver myths.

He ultimately talks about the good that beavers do in the environment and notes that some ranchers were particularly fond of their presence. When beaver dams caused damage to their crops or roads, they tried to discourage building by using a pipe to drain water. Apparently the clever creatures dammed up the pipe pronto. He writes of a particular landowner taking some rather usual measures,

Steel traps were then set in the shallow water of the irrigation canal where the beavers had a dam, and several of the animals were caught. These trapped beavers were soundly spanked by the rancher, who used a good stout board for this purpose. He had protected them on his ranch for years and still did not want to kill them. After they had been spanked and turned loose they stayed away for a while, but a few weeks later some of the same beavers, identified by the trap marks on their toes, were again caught in this canal.

For the record, beating a prone, helpless 40 lb animal with a board is called “clubbing” not “spanking”, and thank God it didn’t work…Good lord, don’t let the council read this. I can see one particular property owner right now out there with a paddle. This goes into the next article on “the history and invention of flow devices”. I’m sending it to Mike and Skip right away! Mind you, it’s all relative. Yes the beavers rebuilt the dam, but I’m sure they were really sorry about it.

Can we just say that there are flaws with the Grinnell article and leave it at that? Obviously California beavers build dams, leave footprints, eat vegetables, care for young, and lived in elevations over 300 feet. All those trappers weren’t in our rivers for the view. If you’re interested in my longer notes on the article drop me a line and I’ll send them to you.

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