The First of Many!

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Friends of Martinez Beavers May 13, 2011

Our friends Mary and Sherry at the newly-formed Sierra Wildlife Coalition have developed such a taste for saving beavers they installed their first-ever flow device in Truckee while there was still snow on the ground. This is the group who received our first -ever beaver management scholarship, and it looks like we couldn’t have chosen a better recipient! I received these last night:

Here, finally are a few photos from our flow device installation last Monday – and yes, the white dots are snow… It went very smoothly, thanks to all the good info from Mike. Ted’s in the green hat, Patrick (who arranged this with his wife Elaine) is in the yellow, and Bill, Forester for the subdivision, has the red hat. Bill is ready to install more, as needed! Tahoe Donner is the largest residential subdivision in California, and they have 2 creeks with active beavers.

Mary and Sherry went from casual involvement to full-bore beaver saving with a road trip to Oregon for the conference! They sand-painted trees in the snow and made tails with children on earthday. They swooped a community along with them and this is the result in a neighboring town. I honestly couldn’t be more pleased or proud, and reading the remark from the subdivision forester that he’s ready to install more may very well be the best news I read all month.

All this was possible because of the clear guidance from the installation DVD produced by Mike Callahan under a grant from the Animal Welfare Institute. I think this kind of beaver heroism is exactly what they had in mind!

I’m hoping the success of this installation leads to a domino of flow devices all across the sierras. Oh and I’m hoping that someone from Fish & Game owns one of the subdivisions and notices how WELL this worked!

MARTINEZ BEAVER UPDATE:

Cheryl saw two this am and snapped this liquid picture.

Partial

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Creative Solutions, Educational, Friends of Martinez Beavers May 12, 2011

“The drouth [sic] continued and by mid-October the lake went entirely dry except in the canals. Off in one corner stood the beaver house, a tiny rounded and solitary hill in the miniature black plane of lake-bed. With one exception the beaver abandoned the site and moved on to other scenes. I know not where. One old beaver remained. Whether he did this through the fear of not being equal to the journey across the dry rocky ridge and down into Wind River, or whether from a deep love of the old home associations no one can say. but he remained and endeavored to make provisions for the oncoming winter. Close to the house he dug or enlarged a well that was about six feet in diameter and four feet in depth. Seepage filled this hole and into it he plunged a number of green aspen chunks and cuttings, a meagre food supply for the long cold winter that followed. Extreme cold began in early November and not until April was there a thaw.”

Enos Mills: In Beaver World

Uh-oh. Things do not look good for our hero. You know those national geographic programs with the elephants all huddled around the drying pond and then a one gets stuck in the mud and buzzards come? i’ve decided that there’s almost no program about elephants ever that doesn’t end badly and make me cry, so my new motto is “if it has a trunk I’m turning it off”. Will this beaver’s fate be similar? Animal observers and reporters are often torn between maintaining their impartiality and intervening. I wonder what the founder of the Colorado Rockies National Park will do?

Meanwhile the old beaver had a hard winter. The cold weather persisted and finally the well in which he had deposited winter food froze to the bottom. Even the entrance holes into the house were frozen shut. this ssealed him in. the old fellow whose teeth were worn and whose claws were bad, apparently tried in vain to break out.

What do you suppose happens next, as the impartial beaver observer watches to see whether the fierce winter will finish off this lone beaver? Death and starvation are natural things that occur in a beavers life, and I told you Mills was a less whimsical writer than some. Did he come back in the spring to find the withered bones of the beaver elder? Or did the grandpa disappear without a trace?

On returning from three month’s absence two friends and I investigated the old beaver’s condition. We broke through the frozen walls of the house and crawled in. The old fellow was still alive and greatly emaciated. for some time — I know not how long– he had susbsisted on the wood and the bark of some green sticks which had been built into an addition of the house during the autumn. We cut several green aspens into short lengths and threw them into the house. The broken hole was then close.d The old fellow accepted these cheerfully. For six weeks aspens were occasionally thrown to him, and at the end of this time the spring warmth had melted the deep snow. The water rose and filled the pond and unsealed the entrance to the house and again the old fellow emerged into the water. The following summer he was joined, or rejoined, by a number of other beavers.“

Two kits & Adult - Photo Cheryl Reynolds

Beaver Heraldry

heidi08 Beaver Art, Beaver News, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental, History May 11, 2011

This morning there were at least two beavers, one at the primary and one at the secondary – I feel more comfortable using that label because a thimbleful of work had been done and more was added while I watched. This video shows a kit-yearling adding mud to its base and I was happy to see it. I saw two branches being added as well with an opportunistic muskrat chewing one and swimming away with it. I can’t tell how securely they are anchored because the tide was still very high but it looks slightly more dam-like.

I promised I’d share yesterday’s accidental find, in which I happened upon a page following beaver heraldry through out the ages. These were family crests and city emblems that represented beavers in the artwork because of the similarity in name – castor, bifru, beverlac, beverlay, kastorii…you get the gist. An example is the medieval town of Biberach in Germany, (the equivalent of our ‘beaverton’). It is noted by this crest – check out those beaver-boar tusks! They clearly knew there was something remarkable about those teeth.

Some of them were Dr. Seuss-looking comic beavers, but this next one took my breath away. Nice guard hairs and sharp eyes. Aside from the striking color, check out those toes. The back paw is webbed and the front has claws.

Is that the loveliest thing you ever saw? I’ve begged our foreign correspondent Alex of Frankfurt to translate as much as possible from the original text but I was so happy to find it!

My interview with Paul Haeder has been loaded as a podcast in case you want to listen to the Martinez Beavers on radio. I’m told the link will be good for a few years so if you haven’t time today you can catch it in the future. He also wrote this lovely post about it yesterday: which starts out with the inviting paragraph;

I’m thinking about beavers, as in Martinez, Calif., where John Muir ended up living, and where community activists have been fighting for these aquatic rodents and advocating for kids to learn about beavers’ positive impacts.

It’s a nice website all around. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page for a surprising treat.

heidi08 Beavers May 10, 2011

Imagine meeting you here!

heidi08 Beavers May 10, 2011

So yesterday google alerted me to a story that was trash-talking beavers. I strolled idly over to the website to read the latest in the castorphobe files. KCTB is a comercial radio station in Ontario. Tom apparently fills three hours before noon and has a blog to boot. Guess what he decided to write about on mothers day?

I am not a huge fan of the beaver. They are the only animal along with man that can alter its environment. We’ve had beavers up at the cottage. One constructed a small house across from us in the bay. But, because it’s not blocking moving water, it doesn’t do any damage. And that’s the case with most beavers up North.

My friend Peter in Port Loring is a beaver-trapper. The Ministry of Transportation pays him to trap beavers. Specifically, beavers that block creeks next to roads. The dams cause flooding which washes out the roads. One little beaver can do tens of thousands of dollars in damage. The problem in cottage country is that because of the geography, there are also thousands of potential sites for beavers to wreak their damage.

Hmm. A typical, NIMBY argument. Beavers are okay but just not here. They belong in the wild, not in the urban streams or city parks. In such close quarters they are destructiv and do a ton of damage. Thank goodness I have a friend whose a trapper. All fairly typical.

Well that’s a relief. Clearly you’ve thought this through, Tom. Maybe your trapper friend spent time explaining to you how beaver dams flood roads to pay his mortgage. You probably spent countless hours pouring through the population data and transportation expenditure statistics before you wrote this article or spent any time pontificating about this on the radio. You must know alot about beavers.

One of the reasons they wanted to return the creek to a more natural state was to help the local wildlife. Every fall, we take the girls down to the creek to see the salmon spawning, and anglers are now a regular sight. But, as the creek has been rehabilitated, it seems to have drawn in some predators. Namely, the beaver.

: Konrad Gesner 1551

Inclined as I can be to give beaver-foe the benefit of the doubt, I thought maybe he meant predator like Oregon means predator: as in I-wanna-kill-it-on-my-land-without-asking-permission” variety of predator. Alas no. He meant the real thing.

You learn something every day. I thought they may dine on fish. I should have used the term ‘pest’ instead of predator.

Well, its not the craziest thing I’ve ever heard with the TV off. Beavers “eating fish” and “living inside” the dam are the two most common beaver myths we encounter every day. Of course you are a media personality with access to the air waves fifteen hours a week and I assume thousands of listeners. And you do live in Canada. I’m curious, does it say ‘predator’ on the back of your nickle?

So I wrote my usual ‘here are the reasons why it’s in your self interest to let beavers stick around’ letter, and his response was .

@Heidi – I did not want this to be a dissertation on geography, but for numerous reasons THIS park is inappropriate for these beavers. I am not anti-beaver, but not in this locale. The salmon runs were there long before the beavers colonized this creek. We are next to a protected habitat for wildlife that houses dozens of species of birds. I’ll leave my knowledge of the area as the final word while acknowledging that they can sometimes be accommodated in urbanized settings. However, in Northern Ontario where we have a cottage, I’m not fully convinced you are aware of the landscape. There is a) no shortage of beavers, and b) no need to create wetlands, as that’s all there is. The beaver will long thrive in this type of environment, and so it should. But this creek, in this park, is just not the right spot for a beaver lodge. Thanks for your interest in my blog post, Tom McConnell.

“History starts with me?” “I saw the salmon before I saw the beavers so I know they were here first?” And “we have a lot of wetlands so we don’t need beavers in Ontario?” Never mind the drought years that caused massive impact because Ontario had no preparations for them….never mind that beavers and salmon coevolved and were certainly in your area thousands of years before you were….never mind that your fact-free column contains 513 words and my sober response of 110 is a ‘dissertation’.

You insist you know more about the region than I do? I absolutely agree. You argue you know more about the region than you know about beavers? Once again, I whole-heartedly agree. You must.

—-Leonard Houston’s response was so measured and compassionate that I nearly talked myself out of posting a rant about this bit of beaver bigotry. Then I read the address for ‘contact us’ and couldn’t resist.

St. Catherine’s Ontario!

You remember the grand beaver battle of St. Catherine’s right? Lots of ignorance, lots of public outcry, lots of letters, lots of discussion, and a cautious commitment to try something new. Apparently the whole debate happened without a whiff of media education because Tom lived through the story and still thinks beavers eat fish.

But thanks Tom, because while I was searching for the Gesner image I came across the COOLEST page I’ll share tomorrow. Here’s a light note to start your day from Lory.