Portlandia has always struck me as a memorably insane show with whimsically pointed hyperbole that is mostly endearing in small doses or retrospect. But there is something about the season 4 finale I really am drawn too, (something in addition to KD Lang, I mean). I can’t quite put my finger on it. Maybe you can help me figure it out?
As is its custom, “Portlandia” finished out its season Thursday night with an episode that brought several characters together in one continuing story. And as with previous season-ender shebangs, the Season 4 finale, “Getting Away,” felt like an affectionate temporary farewell to Portland.
3) Beavers: Though I could have lived without the obvious double-entendre at the end, when the feminist weekend women form a “beaver dam” to stop the flooding river, the other beaver references were only fitting, considering Oregon is the Beaver State (and proud of it!) As we learned from the droning New Beavertown Walking Tour guide (Graham Wagner, who’s also one of the show’s writers), the community used to be flooded with beavers, until the growing population pushed the beavers out into the woods. Without the beavers’ dam-building, we hear, the whole place would be under water.
Kimtopher!
Oh and Happy Father’s Day to all the hardworking Dad’s out there! Especially this one…
Fantastic new promotion this morning for the beaver festival from our friend Sarah Koenisberg of the Beaver Believers. It will get your toe tapping and your incisors chomping at the bit for this year’s festival. Feel free to share.
Another great article this morning from Cows and Fish in Canada
Beaver dams can slow the flow of water and cool it for fish to spawn. Sediment can also reduce the speed of water during a flood. | Mary MacArthur photo
Natural water management | Studies show that ponds with beaver dams had more water during periods of drought
PRIDDIS, Alta. —
Rempel helps manage the 4,800 acre Anne and Sandy Cross Conservation Area. He said beavers should be part of a holistic conservation plan on the former ranch south of Calgary.
The ecology groups Miistakis Institute, and Cows and Fish, collaborated to reintroduce beavers to the watershed in 2011.
“Wherever habitat is suitable, beavers change the watershed,” said Lorne Fitch with Cows and Fish, the Alberta Riparian Habitat Management Society.
The change can be good when beaver dams and ponds increase groundwater, slow the flow of water and cool it for fish spawning, he said at a May 29 workshop in Priddis.
Sediment captured by beaver ponds broadens stream valleys with rich soil deposits over time. Up to 6,500 sq. metres or 382 tandem truckloads of sediment can be stored in each pond.
Beavers build ponds in a stair step style that can change the land gradients and reduce the speed of floods.
Good job Western Producerr! But honestly do we really require any more research to know that beaver ponds have more water in drought conditions? Honestly? Maybe we should also do some research on it being harder to see through a doorway when the door is closed? And children preferring jellybeans to green beans? And the canine inclination to rely on olfactory stimuli for information rather than social media?
Meanwhile, did you hear the great news in downtown Martinez? We were one of the 20 winners in North America of the Benjamin Moore contest to repaint downtown. Sauciey’s bakery made a cake-sized replica of main street to celebrate. Guess what they included?
MARTINEZ — It really is exciting to watch the paint dry on Main Street. That was the consensus when a crowd gathered to celebrate a colorful face lift for downtown.
Martinez is one of 20 cities across North America chosen for a free, fresh coat of paint by Benjamin Moore & Co.’s Main Street Matters program.
The public, local notables, business owners and shopkeepers joined Benjamin Moore executives for a full-blown party with music, balloon bouquets, drinks and a remarkable cake.
Martinez News Gazette – cake and baking team.
See that little ally in between the buildings? It’s the best part:
“It is the pinnacle part of the celebration,” Theresa Doolittle, owner of Saucie’s Bakery & Cafe said about the eight-foot long cake replica of Main Street Martinez, garnished with edible wetlands, a beaver and trees.
How delicious! I hope you save that piece especially for the mayor!
Come to think of it – maybe it would be better if he didn’t even notice. He just might send down Dave Scola to re-frost it?
(WGN in Chicago no long has this clip in their archives- but don’t worry. Heidi always will. Do yourself a Saturday morning favor and listen again.)
Great beaver viewing last night – but no baby sightings. At one point we were closely inspected by three beavers who came to the other side of the flow device near our bank to investigate!
Great news from our friends at the Sierra Wildlife Coalition. Seems they were asked to help out a nursery in Truckee. (That’s Truckee California where they once happily killed many beavers because “they were not native.” ) She posted these pictures on the Beaver Management Forum yesterday.
We installed a Pond Leveler (2 smaller 8″ ones) for a Nursery in Truckee, CA, that has a beaver pond in its back yard. With a couple of minor adjustments, it’s working perfectly, the pond has lowered about 9″-10″ and re-exposed stone steps to an island in the pond…. the owners and beavers are happy.
Apparently the beavers had raised the pond so much that their beautiful path stones were submerged in the water. No matter. Ted and Sherry Guzzi knew just what to do!
A good days work and a few tweaking touches and things were all squared away. The beavers were fine with the adjustment and the nursery could get back to normal. Another problem solved.
Just in time for the duck to take a nap! Oh and in case this awesome tale (tail) of beaver success isn’t inspiring enough, here’s the Very Best Part.
Best part is that our group was recommended by both the Town of Truckee and CA Dept. of Fish & Wildlife!
Great work, Sherry and Ted! Can I get an Amen?
One more job today (that I will do several times in the days to come as penance) is to correct a mistake. I apparently posted the wrong graph for the recent historic prevalence article and Eli wishes I could fix it so it would stop coming up on google searches. I deleted the bad one from every place I could think of, but apparently it’s still in the ether and pops up from time to time. I’m thinking that if the right one gets clicked on a few hundred times over the next few days it will supplant the interloper. So I’m posting it here and asking you to please click here and help rescue me from my incompetence. Then again, maybe you know a secret way to get rid of the wrong one, in which case you should email me.
This fantastically educational tool was created by Olwen Hemmings for the kids program in the now-concluded Scottish Beaver trial. When I saw the photo I was in awe and wrote Simon Jones to know how it was made. He passed my email along to Olwen and she wrote back this morning.
Hi Heidi
The arch was a bit of a home-made job. I used 4inch thick upholstery foam (from Dunelm Mill, or the like) and doubled it up. Then cut the blocks using a fine toothed Japanese pull saw (a bread knife works just as well). Working out the angles for the blocks was a bit of a nightmare to be honest, and I ended up on the floor with a giant piece of dressmaking pattern paper, a long rule and a protractor trying to make a template!
Once the blocks were cut I sewed covers for them with a durable heavy cotton canvas (just some fabric I had lying around) and the pictures were put on with computer printable iron on transfer paper.
Glad you like them, they do go down well with the children who find them fun and I think they illustrate the ‘keystone arch’ concept very well.
Please feel free to give me a shout if you want to know any more.
Kind regards
Oly HemmingsEducation RangerScottish Beaver Trial
Of course the idea of such blocks at the beaver festival for kids to shape and play with loomed large immediately. As well as having blank ones that kids can paint! (Every cube has 6 sides you know…) And a tall arch that you walk under to enter the festival.
Oh and when I mentioned the possibility that they had a little help coming up with the idea, Simon didn’t deny it. This is the back page of our festival brochure.
Beaver Festival – Amelia Hunter
And speaking of Amelia, yesterday we arranged for the beaver festival ad to run in the July Issue of Bay Crossings and our beautiful artist once again made it possible. Look for us at transit stations everywhere near the bay. Thanks Amelia!
I also heard from Ellis Myers, the editor of the Mt. Diablo Audubon newsletter, that he wanted an article and photo for the next issue of the Quail on why birders should come to the beaver festival! Perfect! Just the place to run this amazing new photo from Cheryl – thus confirming the coveted title of BBPEW (Best Beaver Photographer in the Entire World).
Beaver swimming past great egret – Cheryl Reynolds Worth A Dam
Apparently Channel 7’s news agreed that Moses footage was the cutest thing ever. I shared it with the reporter who interviewed me on the bridge earlier this year, and she passed it to the team. Good credits for Moses! I can’t embed it but click below to get to the story – and tell me btw another feel-good story that has a shelf life of 7 years?
Apparently it took a team of engineers to solve the problem! Who knew? I thought it was one shirtless man with a shovel?
A series of lovely ponds created by beaver dams in Alberta is shown to us in “Hiking with Barry“, a breath-taking blog about the trekking adventures of a hardy Canadian.
It’s wonderful to imagine beavers having all this space to themselves. This particular adventure goes through old beaver habitat in pristine country and pieces together what must have been a multi-family beaver operation. What we know is that beavers are smart enough to use the bitter-tasting furs for building material and the leave the delicious Aspens for dinner!
But maybe it wasn’t entirely left to the beavers, because there’s a gravel road, a near by research facility and he finds this rusting near a pond:
Looks to me like a ‘beaver baffle’ which is a Canadian invention meant to protect culverts from beavers. Maybe that gravel road needed some protecting. Then again, maybe the fact that it’s lying here and there are no more beavers left with a pristine road means someone gave up on the baffle idea and took matters into their own hands.
Last night’s beavers did not disappoint – although they are clearly thinking we don’t yet deserve to see the baby head at a reasonable hour. I think we counted all 6 beavers. At times it was hard to know where to film. There were beavers to the left and right and more emerging and diving every moment. Nancy Jones from the Blue Heron Preserve in Georgia was enormously impressed. She is a former high school art teacher who created the preserve after a particularly ill-intentioned developer lost the land, (which is a story I love very much).
The Lake Emma Wetlands property was added to the Preserve due to an EPA action in 2002. The developer owner, filled the original stream channel, a violation of the Clean Water Act and also diverted the water flow into a new hand dug channel. The Army Corps of Engineers permitted him to lower the level of the dam that held the original lake waters and all of these actions combined accelerated the demise of the wetlands.
She is dedicated to the health of her slice of ‘nature in the city’ and has the good sense to realize that beavers are a big part of that. She wanted to come to Martinez to see how we managed. She and her friend were amazed to see beavers swimming right under them, and even hear them at times. Her preserve is right in the middle of Atlanta but she has been thrilled and excited to watch their progress. She showed me the photo of the beautiful island lodge they have and talked about wanting to make starter dams to encourage them to build in more of the preserve. She couldn’t believe how anti-beaver all of Georgia was, but she was loving learning about them and trying to get others to do the same. Did the beavers need trenches dug for them through the channels so they could be sure of more water?
I smiled, hardly believing that such beaver benevolence could happen in that particular state. Remember, this is the state where I first read about the shocking tail bounty when I was a young and tender-hearted beaver reporter. I was so upset by the story I sent the original children’s drawings from our very first Earth day event directly to the commissioners who made the decision. (Even better, I arranged for the friend of a friend who lived in Georgia send them herself, so I could be sure they would be opened!) Remember these?
Now here I was, talking to a woman from Georgia on our bridge who was asking me if the beavers she cared about needed trenches dug for them?
Trust me, I smiled. If the beavers need trenches they will dig them all by themselves.
