I got a call last night regarding a Miwok elder who might be willing to give a blessing for the Beaver Festival. He wants me to come meet him at a sunrise ceremony this Saturday. The t-shirts still aren’t ready, two of the auction items haven’t arrived, and I didn’t get any calls from the papers about my press release yet. Since doing THIS seems unlikely,
I better do this as soon as possible…(Click for a lovely website)
This weekend’s press release generates two stories so far….
Actually the answer is a little more complicated and involves a civic uprising rivaling the last 10 minutes of It’s a Wonderful Life. You’re sure to learn the whole story if you join the Festivities on August 6th in downtown Martinez. In addition to live music and unique wildlife displays, this free festival will offer a “paint your own tail” activity complete with a contest/fashion show at 1:30 awarding prizes for the most creative entries.
“At our first festival we did a paper tail art project that was enormously popular” Said the group’s founder Heidi Perryman. “Later we met children who had carefully kept that artwork and wore it religiously when visiting the beaver dams. It was incredible!” She said, noting that this year volunteers pre-cut 500 leatherette tails that children can uniquely paint. “They’ll be a much better keepsake”.
If there aren’t any artists in your family, you can take a tour of the beaver habitat and invest your time at the silent auction – where you can bid on generous donations from Folkmanis, Safari West, or Beaver Creek Vineyards. While supplies last children can “earn” charms for a keystone species charm bracelet by explaining how beavers improve the environment for other wildlife. No one will want to miss out, as this year the charms, paid for by Martinez Kiwanis, were hand designed by Wild Bryde Jewelry.
Past Festivals helped Worth A Dam give a beaver-management grant to fellow beaver supporters in Tahoe, who went on to save beavers in their own city as well as nearby Truckee. Perryman travelled to Oregon to present at the State of the Beaver Conference and connected with the Grand Canyon Land Trust who will be sending beaver representatives to learn about starting a festival of their own!
2011 has been an eventful year for the Martinez beavers, with hard storms washing out their dams and lodge, separating the family for several months. You will have to come in person to learn how the 2010 kits managed on their own and find out about this summer’s surprising family reunion.
Fingers crossed we’ll get some more!
If you happen to keep an eye on the margins of this web site, you’ll notice a new toy I implemented to celebrate the charm bracelet activity. Click on the picture of the bracelet at the left to go to an interactive page where each of the charms can be accessed for more information. As it turns out, I didn’t have dragonfly footage for the task, so I ended up searching around and finding this:
Of course I looked them up and extended beaver greetings immediately. Neghiborhood-Naturalist is a lovely site with some great wildlife information from the Willamette, just south of Portland. They wrote back that their city was concerned about dam height and was controlling pond height by ripping out the work fairly regularly. This worried him because the changing water height upset the pond and had I heard anything about those new fangled beaver deceivers all the kids are talking about?
I sent Don & Lisa a host of information, and introduced them to Leonard Houston whose lives about 100 miles away. Hopefully they’ll learn so much about flow devices they’ll soon be helping three friends install them in the neighboring towns. In the mean time, check out the website, its really lovely.
This morning I was pointed towards this article from Alaska Public Radio. Apparently there might be a relationship between Coho and Beavers. You don’t say!
Anecdotal reports from the public have revealed that beaver activity has grown in northern Alaska and looks to have an impact on salmon.
Steve Ivanoff is a lifelong fisherman and resident in Unalakleet. He says the increase in activity he thinks is due to both the warming climate and a decrease in beaver hunting and trapping. The meat was often used to feed sled dogs – now mostly replaced by snowmachines and Ivanoff says North Face and Mountain Hardwear has replaced some of the prevalence of the traditional beaver hat.
With the increased activity, there are more dams, which bring an increase in still ponds. Biologists and fishermen believe that the increase in the amount of still water has benefited one species of salmon – the coho – or silver salmon. There hasn’t been a formal study on the correlation, but observation from biologists and subsistence fishermen make a strong argument.
Anecdotal? 20 years of research at NOAA and the finding is anecdotal? Honestly, any port in a storm, and I’m grateful for the mention, but I can’t help looking forward to future “anecdotal” findings, such as Gus noticing that when you drop things they tend to fall downwards, and Norman pointing out that no matter how far you walk around the earth you never seem to fall off. You can read or listen to the whole report here:
And weekend before last weekend a newcomer at the dams sent some great photos and his greetings. Now Randy Finley has posted lots of these on Facebook.
He said he’d definitely be back and looking at his handiwork I honestly can’t wait. Now he has started a new nature website (“Wildlifist”) and is encouraging your photos and participation. Go check out his work and say hi to Randy from the Martinez Beavers!
Hmm, is that everything? Well, I couldn’t help noticing that last nights 60 minutes segment could have easily been retold as a tale of “Good Iraqi beavers” and “Bad Iraqi beavers”. The fertile crescent is surprisingly beautiful. Don’t miss it.
Just an old ditch where the flood waters run, brought to you by the Alhambra drainage channel…trash and debris, no wildlife to speak of, certainly not a baby muskrat the size of a potato…
Or turtles lurking about…
Or beavers…or that other weird thing that doesn’t show up at .23.
No fish could live in that storm drain, or anything that eats fish.
I don’t know what you’re all looking at. Haven’t you seen a storm drain before?
Here’s another story where crazy folk insist there’s wildlife at a beaver dam.
The Toll Bar Park stormwater management pond is scheduled to be drained this week and that doesn’t sit well with neighbourhood resident Raman Katari.
The Town of Richmond Hill will assume control of the pond, but not before sediments on the bottom are removed and the pond is cleaned. Therefore, the eco-system in and around the pond will need to temporarily move, which includes, beavers, blue heron, ducks and fish.
At least ducks and herons can fly to different water options in town and the hope is the resident Toll Bar beavers will relocate further down the German Mills Creek, which feeds into the pond. Fish on the other hand, might have a bit of a problem.
“There are no fish living in there,” said Lynn Barkey, Baif development manager. “Everything else can move.”
