Last Chance to Crickett…

heidi08 Educational, Environmental October 9, 2011

Last night’s glorious moon kept me awake long enough to notice the cricket chorus that has been getting stronger and will soon be dying with the season. (This is a picture of a Katydid, not a cricket, but they’re prettier so I thought I’d use one instead.) This very noticeable chorus catches our attention in Autumn, because I’m told the male is trying to attract a female to get her pregnant so she can lay eggs before dying in winter. The eggs will hatch in March and go through about 7 transformations before working up to their own cricket status a few months later.

The cool thing you must try about crickets before they are silent until next summer requires a second hand and a child’s mind. One of these is fairly easy to find, the other you can borrow if you need to.

Did you know you can tell the temperature with crickets? Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is to count the number of chirps in a 14 second period. (While you do this you’ll notice that they’re ALL IN Sync which should be a clue.) Then get the number and add 37 to it and that will be the temperature in Farenheit!

So last night there were about 19 chirps in 14 seconds, and adding 37 means the temperature was about 56 -which google tells me it actually was. Try it yourself before they slip away for the season, and think about what it might mean to be born, transformed, mate, give birth, and die all in about nine months.

Speaking of which, it made me think of this, (and in terms of the random things of value you might pick up from this quirky beaver website, the tales of archy and mehitabel are truly among the most vivid.) (Typo alert: these important names are typed without capital letters on purpose, since archy was a cockroach who could only jump on one typewriter key at a time – a free verse poet in a former life he left poems on don’s typewriter at night including tales of his good friend mehitabel the alley cat, the story goes), Oh! he was a fine invention and muse for author Don Marquis in 1916.

whirl mehitabel whirl

leap shadow leap

you got to dance till the sun comes up

‘cos you got no place to sleep

Leftovers for Breakfast

heidi08 Beaver News, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, City Reports October 12, 2011

I couldn’t resist looking for other mentions of the beaver-mural-teapot-tempest-fest so I raided the google. Lucky for the city the story cleverly broke at the end of the month so there are only two pages of articles under “October News”. But if you wander about a bit, there are lots of odd treasures to be found.

Close to home the Bay-Area Observer got my attention with this nice introduction

You’ve got to feel for artist Mario Alfaro, whom Martinez officials last week ordered to paint over the beaver he included on a public mural because some of the town’s leaders didn’t think it belonged on the same canvas as hometown heroes John Muir and Joe DiMaggio. (That’s the mural, before the beaver was painted over, from the pro-Beaver MartinezBeavers.org’s blog, Worth a Dam. You almost have to squint to see it near the lower right corner.)

Thanks for the shout-out Ron! We appreciate our beaver brothers by the bay! There’s also the quirky animal-symbology and UFO blog collection by Regan which includes this:

I wasn’t sure where to post this (maybe I’ll post it at Pulp Jello which badly needs to be updated anyway) but since it has to do with animals, in a round about way, sort of, I’m posting it here. It seems art has offended bureaucrats in Martinez, Calif who commissioned an artist to paint a mural for the city. They demanded the artist, Mario Alfaro, paint over a beaver he included in the mural:

Or this oddly worded (I assume translated?) piece on the Global Topic Blog here

Officials in Martinez, Calif., systematic an artist to paint over a picture of a beaver he enclosed in a picture he was consecrated to emanate for a city. Martinez officials pronounced they had artist Mario Alfaro paint over a beaver since a animal, while dear by city residents, does not go on a downtown picture alongside images of Martinez locals including John Muir and Joe DiMaggio, a San Francisco Chronicle reported Friday. “Everyone’s observant we hatred beavers, though this is not about fondness beavers or not fondness beavers,” Public Works Director Dave Scola said. “We went by a extensive formulation process, and never once did anyone ask for a beaver. Not one chairman said, ‘Hey, we have an idea, let’s put a beaver in there.’”

A San Francisco Chronicle? Which one have I been reading? And I guess if the ‘chairman’ doesn’t say it, then don’t come crying to us! The thought of that sentence coming directly from our DPW is so enjoyable I may have to read the article aloud again and again.

Looking for that picture seemed to get a lot of folks to the website, and its always nice to have visitors, even the kind you wouldn’t necessarily invite to stay for dinner. This rough and tumble thread at Livejournal – (most of which reminded me why members of the 14 year old male community don’t actually have many dates) – eventually made me smile at this post under the handle ‘Layweed’:

“The mural’s like 3 feet high and on the side of a fricken fence? Good grief, I thought it was like a wall mural or something. Someone really hates beavers.”

Yes, Layweed. Yes they do.

So much so that I’m pretty sure the only beaver mural that would ever be approved in Martinez is this one from the Washington Post office, this is a study for its design on file with the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas. It’s titled “Trapper with Beaver”.

Friends in High Places….

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental October 7, 2011

About 7050 feet high, that is….

heidi08 Beavers October 6, 2011

Secret Weapon

heidi08 Beavers October 6, 2011

One of the hidden tools of saving beavers took me a while to understand. It used to be that I would rankle every time the infamous beaver pun was repeated, and bristle at the endless comments at the news stories. (In case you didn’t speak english in 7th grade or have never visited this planet before, I will clarify that I am referring to the fact that the word ‘beaver’ in slang usage is a reference for vagina) (Not sure about the history of that and would love to trace it back to the fur trappers or farther but that’s a post for another day.) So remarks about saving the beaver, helping the beaver, or leaving the beaver in a mural produce an echo-snigger far and wee.

My heart softened a little to this outrage when I was asked to help the John Muir Association take distinguished actor Lee Stetson around the beaver habitat one night. He was doing the conservation awards the next night and was staying in town. Lee is the actor who played John Muir in Ken Burns important national park’s documentary, and many many other places for the best part of 25 years. He is as spry as the real thing but he must be pushing 70. We trotted back and forth along the creeks looking for our quarry and saw a raccoon swimming but never what we sought. In the end we called it a night and went back home without a sighting.

The next night was the awards, and Lee’s impersonation of Muir was so dramatic and inspiring I cried through most of it. Afterwards I thanked him for his talent and for helping Muir come to life. He hugged me and said that he had a great time the night before, but that “his wife had been very upset to learn that he had been out all night chasing beaver”,

Ba-dum-dum.

For the first time, cosidering the source, that remark made me smile, and I said, “I guess no matter how grown up you get that joke is still irresistable, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” he laughed stroking his beard with pleasure. “Yes, it is.”

Beavers are serious business, and worth saving and worth fighting for for all the wildlife and watershed reasons we discuss every day, but let’s face it: People laugh at beaver jokes. They just DO. The truth is that Martinez beaver story would never have gotten the press it did if it weren’t for the titilation factor – the story just sounds funny. And in this particular case, forcing an artist to remove a beaver because it doesn’t belong next to the famous Marilyn-Monroe-seducing Joe Dimaggio cracks people up. They aren’t laughing in Chicago because Martinez spent money on sheetpile it didn’t need, or because the people rose up and made the city listen – they’re laughing because our director of public works is basically saying “i don’t hate beaver – I’m as straight as the next man.”

This morning there was a long discussion on the SNOPES messages board, of all places, about this very topic, but I’m pretty sure this radio program out of Chicago enjoys it the most.

Would it be a terrible thing if the powers that be in Martinez were made more cautious by the likelihood of ridicule for the any decision they made about the beavers before they committed it to paper? I don’t think so. At this rate thinking twice might improve their results twofold. I’m reminded of the immortal words of Mahatma Ghandi

“First they Ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”