It’s not quite that time of year, but sometimes nature has her own schedule. In spring female otters come darting out of the den and look for food, letting their children swim about and see the big world. They’ve been holed up for two months, using the lodge some nice beaver left behind. She goes without a meal for a good long while nursing the kits and emerges much changed! To say opportunistic males have a minimal role in otter rearing is too long a word for their brief involvement. Last night Jon stumbled onto a churning uncountable mass of pups at the river by the power plant where he works – he was eventually able to identify 8 little heads, which seemed to divide in two directions before heading home.
lots of otterlets!!!!At least 8, not 3 feet away from me!!! The water at the bank was just boiling with little bodies and tails, then they saw me and the water was full of huffing periscoping otter heads, then they were gone. Very cool!!
Here’s some footage of another otter pup sighting to get you in the mood. The footage at the end shows some lovely pups swimming underwater.
All this means that when our massive current slows down, we should keep our eyes open for pups of our own!
I heard from Paul Ramsay of Scotland last week that three Tay beavers were killed, two shot and one caught by ‘accident’ in a snare. I told him to push for press coverage and to try and point out that Scottish National Heritage set the stage for this by drawing attention to these ‘bad beavers’ with their beaver ethic cleansing campaign. Today this article was printed in the Herald.
The impassioned battle over the future of beavers in Scotland has turned nasty. Three have allegedly been killed, angry accusations are flying, and a formal complaint has been lodged with the European Commission. But campaigners now fear that other landowners or farmers may be taking the law into their own hands and killing the beavers. According to unconfirmed reports, two have been shot and one caught in a snare on Dean Water, upstream of the village of Meigle near Blairgowrie in Perthshire.
A big shout-out to our friends at SNH who are all sitting on the edge of their seats just HOPING that farmers take up their beaver-killing hue and cry! They are apparently 300 percent better at it government officials, and at this rate it will only take 16 farmers to finish the job. Assuming it IS farmers and not impatient SNH officials who got sick of all the paperwork and protests. Come to think of it, if I worked for SNH I’d be spending a very long time investigating this just to be able to prove to the press it wasn’t me.
Unusually, the campaign is being led by local landowners, Paul and Louise Ramsay, whose family has owned the 13,000-acre Bamff estate near Alyth in East Perthshire since 1232. They keep beavers in an enclosure on their estate and helped set up the Scottish Wild Beaver Group to oppose SNH’s plans. Paul Ramsay accused SNH of bowing to pressure from the landowning and farming lobby to get rid of the beavers. “They are so blinkered, so desperately narrow minded, I feel that we must fight against them very hard,” he told the Sunday Herald.
He said that he had been told on good authority about the three wild beaver deaths, though he admitted that they couldn’t be proved. The killings were “common knowledge” locally, he claimed. Ramsay argued that the killing or trapping of the Tay beavers was illegal. He has filed a formal complaint to the European Commission in Brussels arguing that they are protected under the Habitats Directive.
Go Paul! Your American cousins support you! It’s funny how the farming lobby wants exactly the same thing as SNH does…quite a coincidence. Your implying that one panic inflamed the other, but if I were you I’d start from the other end. One problem can be fixed with education, and the other will need to be fixed with therapy. The good news is ‘Narcissistic personality disorder’ will no longer be a diagnosis in the upcoming DSM-V.
Ramsay also accused SNH of encouraging landowners to get rid of the animals. “It is really wrong of SNH to apparently give tacit approval to landowners to kill beavers when it is against European law,” he said.
There you go Paul. That’s laying it on the line. How will SNH wriggle out of this one?
But SNH described his allegation as “appalling”, and insisted that the Tay beavers had no legal protection. “If the owners of private beaver collections had kept their beavers in captivity in the first place we would not be in this unfortunate situation,” claimed an SNH spokesman.
Did you catch that? “It’s atrocious that Mr. Ramsay would accuse us of encouraging land-owners to kill beavers! We are deeply, personally offended by the scandalous accusation. And anyway even if we DID it’s perfectly legal because the beavers have no protected status whatsoever.”
Last night in Sonoma a group of wide-eyed and rained upon listeners were introduced to the tale of the Martinez beavers. It was an excellent setting and reception and Tom Rusert, who organizes the talks was charismatic and gracious. The crowd was a eco-savvy group, who understood exactly what it meant to get a city to do the right thing, or try to stop a city from doing the wrong thing! They laughed in the right places, gasped at the same things and thanked us profusely after it was over. We heard at least four rumors of beaver colony locations in the area and beyond, and Cheryl is ready for her fieldtrip to find beaver neighbors. Several pairs of inspired folk came up at the end, ready to advocate for beavers in the creek behind their house if any showed up, and challenged to think in new ways. Sonoma, as always, was a fairytale of a destination with cobbled alleys off free-parking streets and an excellent dinner for the crew at Taste of Himilaya before dashing off to the talk.
The title of this post comes from the fact that I am very pleased that I have two weeks and four days before my next talk in Yosemite. It was three weeks ago that I was presenting in Oregon and slightly less time before the State Parks Conference. It’s the four days I’m looking forward too, since it will take two weeks to figure out how to squish a talk I stretched from 40 t0 75 minutes, back into 35 minutes again while still saying what I want the park rangers to know. The four days are mine to squander and I plan on staring blankly at things for a good long while.
In the meantime, you should watch this PBS video of beaver reintroduction to improve arid habitat for fish runs. It features Michael Pollock who has confirmed he will be joining us in Yosemite. It’s a great look at the way beavers affect fish populations and I’ll try figure out how to keep it in the margins of this site for good.
Ready or not! Here we come! A cast of Worth A Dam characters journeys to Sonoma tonight to talk about beavers in Martinez, flow devices, protecting grapevines and letting beavers make homes for juvenile salmonid. The weather is not being polite and will likely rain very soon, keeping many potential attendees by their cozy firesides. Ahh well, it can’t be helped. We’ll have fun talking to each other anyway! And remember that ecology center in Ohio that advertised a beaver talk with a trapper? I am confident that this will be WAY better than that! (Sorry Josh!)
In the mean time, if you’re looking for a new way to see the world, may I suggest the winners of the beautiful Science Competition presented by the BBC. These fantastic microscopic images offer a breath-taking reminder that nature is awesome to behold at every scale. Click on the photo to go to the audio slideshow of the winners.
To see a World in a Grain of SandAnd a Heaven in a Wild FlowerHold Infinity in the palm of your handAnd Eternity in an hour(from Auguries of Innocence by William Blake)
Ready or not! Here we come! A cast of Worth A Dam characters journeys 
