Let’s start out with some momentous news. Last night in Napa they almost certainly saw three kits. HURRAY THREE KITS!!! One appears to charge off with the adults to feed, so missed his photo opportunity in his rush to maturity, but they are pretty sure it’s a brave little kit they’re seeing. Congratulations Napatopia, we’re excited for you!
Two kits – Rusty CohnClose up – Rusty Cohn
Now its on to some inspiration from our great friend Camilla Fox who lent full ‘Project Coyote‘ voice recently to the Bobcat hearing in Santa Rosa. Great work team bobcat!
Finally an update and a short poll. I know you all recognize the fellow on the left, but the gentleman on the right might be less familiar to our new readers. This is Alex Hiller a beaver supporter from Germany who once came to america to visit a beaver family with Hope Ryden of the famed Lily Pond book. Alex was an early and dedicated supporter and attended the beaver symposium in Lithuania, shocking the heck out of Skip and Glynnis by wearing his Worth A Dam t-shirt shown here.
I hadn’t heard from Alex in a while and I thought I’d send him the Geo article in case he hadn’t seen it and wanted to help with a translate. This morning he wrote back sighting an old German saying, “Some people you assume to have perished only got married.” He announced that he met and married a wonderful woman from Sri Lanka who was passionate about elephants so they were focusing their energies there for the time being. How cool is that? Congratulations Alex! We wishing you every happiness but we will miss our reliable foreign correspondent!
Lastly. if we were offering recycled bags for sale at the festival would you prefer a green bag with a logo or a khaki bag with this in brown? I like them both so you’re vote is needed. Let me know here. Thanks!
GEO magazine is a sleek international kind of National Geographic.It is currently published in Germany and France but has moved around the EU fairly deftly. And last year it had a particularly stunning look at beavers from photographer Ingo Arndt who is struggling to show people the value (and beauty) of these important animals. Remember the beaver population in Europe was destroyed by the middle ages, and reintroduced after some folks started to understand their value. Currently the population has recovered enough to be persecuted, which is a kind of victory.
The beautifully pro-beaver article is called”The Beavers are Back”.
My German is pretty much limited to my name, so I relied on Google translate to get an initial read. Basically it describes the valuable work these animals do and how they restore aquatic ecosystems, but farmers hate them and shoot them on site. (As if we needed a translator to know that!) I especially like the paragraph about Bavaria which called them the Gemütlicher Anarchist. Translate the first word as “pleasant or cozy” and the second literally. A pleasant disregard for your rules, roads and infrastructure.
Doesn’t that exactly describe beavers?
Ingo Arndt
Check out that blissful mum lying on her back to let kits nurse. This may be the lodge shot to beat all lodge shots. Not sure what kind of amber lighting they used, but she is obviously feeling safe and maternal. The article contains an interview with Gerhard Schwab, a staunch advocate who traveled with Derek Gow and the Ramsays to the State of the Beaver Conference this year. It ends with the words of a famous German naturalist.
For a moment, the words of pioneering conservationist and beaver friend Michael Succow are remembered: “It’s not about having perfect ecosystems. It’s about leaving dynamic systems in peace.” The beaver is one of its messengers.
I live in Winters, a small town in northern California, with less than 8,000 residents. With a large lake and a creek near Winters, agricultural areas and a small human population, it’s perfect for wildlife to appear in this area. I wasn’t prepared for what I found that afternoon along Putah Creek.
I saw something moving in the water close to the ravine. My first thought was that someone’s pet escaped. At first glance it looked like some sort of rodent, maybe a guinea pig… but then I quickly realized that I was in the presence of something truly amazing: a piebald beaver!
Piebald Beaver: Alejandro Garcia Rojas
This beavers home is slated for bulldozing, and there is much concern and little chance he will be saved. When something this rare happens there is always hesitation about publicizing it in case it draws trappers. But things have progressed to the point that they are ready to risk publicity. Maybe you can write the mayor and city council to let them know how special this is.
And in the mean time, here’s some kit-licious footage from Rusty Cohn in Napa. It’s all wonderful, but I’m starting it where the two kits eat side by side. Just in case I haven’t shown you enough beautiful beaver images today.
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The usual image of a beaver is of an animal that lives in its lodge in the center of a small pond formed behind its stick dam. That is not always the case. Beaver only build dams to enlarge the underwater habitat to insure it will remain open in winter. Beaver also live in riverbank dens. The deep water of a permanent river pool provides adequate river bottom storage for winter food and underwater access to the den secure from predators, no dam needed thank you very much.
Great start! This author, David Deen, from the Battleboro Informer must be friends with Patti Smith. Why does all the heavy beaver IQ roll downhill towards Vermont?
Native Americans called the beaver the sacred center because when beaver do dam small streams much of the flooded area becomes wetlands with biodiversity that rivals tropical rain forests, creating rich habitats for other mammals, fish, amphibians and birds.
Yes they do, David. They also improve things even in larger streams with their chewing and digging. But we’ll leave that for another day.
Beavers live up to 12 years in the wild and continue to grow throughout their lives. They can reach four feet in length including tail and weigh up to 100 pounds. A beaver takes only one mate for life and a pair will have one litter, averaging three kits, each May or June following a 100-day gestation period. Both parents care for the kits and although kits are furred, have teeth, can see, walk and swim when born, they generally do not venture out of the lodge for at least a month. Yearling kits act as babysitters for the new litter while the 2-year-olds leave home each spring to find their own territories to insure the family does not overpopulate an area.
Finally an author that understands population dynamics and size! I think I’m in love. Just wait until he gets to the new paragraph. You will be amazed. I’m putting it in large font because it’s so fascinating.
according to Dr. Donald Griffin, the father of animal cognition. An experience in point happened on a spring fishing trip. Although the strong April sun had melted the ice from the middle of the small beaver pond, it still had ice ringing its shore. This beaver was obviously tired of winter as it would swim to the ice, chisel out a dinner plate sized piece with its teeth, push it into the center of the pond and then wallop it with its tail. After three hard whacks it would turn, inspect its handiwork and if satisfied with the disintegration of that piece would go to bite off another piece of ice and do it again. Dark came before the pond was ice-free but you knew that beaver would be back at it tomorrow.
Do you understand what that means? Not only was the beaver aware of the annoyance of the ice and willing to change it just like beavers change everything else, but that beaver also knew that he could BREAK ICE with his tail! Which means he could use his tail as a tool and Disney might be right after all! (Ian will be so happy.)
Now one might dismiss this ice tale as fancy, if it were from anyone else. Dr. Griffen graduated from Harvard in the field of zoology and we have to take him somewhat seriously. He died in 2003 and was important enough to make the New York Times. I sure wish we could sit down and have a long conversation about beaver behavior. I’m sure he’d love to hear about Reed and his woven dams, and we’d all learn many more amazing things.
Just imagine what the napa kits could do with their tails!
What a fun night! It was warmer in Pacifica than we expected because the fog had not yet spilled down into the city. The drive was merciful and the ocean majestic. We slipped easily into the jewel of a park, nestled among steep hills, green with thick with alder and buckeye. A parking pass was provided at the gate, but we weren’t quite sure we were in the right place until we say the visitor’s center was plastered with signs about the beaver talk. Someone obviously had fun promoting this. I could imagine the classic Don LaFontaine voice in the movie promos, “In a world, where beavers don’t belong, and cities never want them, this unlikely family found their home.“
We met our host Carolyn Pankow and were taken inside where all the equipment was ready in the visitor’s center. Attendees trickled in at first, and then suddenly it was a packed room. Full of smart environmental folks, some of them who had seen the beaver in person or at least on TV. There was even a mother with two children at the back, so I made sure to keep things as engaging as possible. They laughed and groaned in all the right places, and afterwards I realized that my last two talks (salmon and trout) had been such challenging crowds I had forgotten how much fun it could be to talk to people that were really eager for beavers. There were about 45 people in the packed space.
Afterwards there were questions and praise, an honorioum for the talk and we were taken to an excellent companionable dinner at the local beloved Chinese place by the board of Friends of San Pedro Valley. They were all fascinating individuals, docents at point lobos or otter spotters for Elkhorn Slough. The myriad varied plates and ecological conversation passed around, and we delighted in each. They were especially eager to hear stories of nearby beavers to figure out how soon they could get their own. Then it was time for a moon lit drive bacl over the hills, along the coast and through the city to get back to Martinez at ten that evening. We had the familiar, pleasant feeling that we truly had been beaver ambassadors and paved the way for success when the lucky colony finally comes to town.
That’s the last talk of the year. Now it’s on the Beaver Festival planning in earnest!
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My mom called Saturday to say she had heard a clip about the beavers two times on KCBS radio. It was presented as a fun novella describing the soap opera story of dad’s remarry. Did you year it? A final note, I picked up this new photo from facebook where it was the winner of a Missouri wildlife photography competition for obvious reasons.
Springtime has brought out wildlife at Alhambra Creek in Martinez, Calif. Right at dusk, beavers were spotted swimming about and chomping on a fallen arroyo willow tree. Heidi Perryman and her husband Jon Ridler make a comfy spot with camping chairs as they wait to see the beavers. Perryman, president of Worth A Dam, and Ridler, treasurer, were perched quietly hoping to see a newborn kit. On its website, Worth A Dam describes itself as a citizens group that fought to protect the beavers and sponsors the annual Beaver Festival that will take place on Aug. 1, 2015.
This was a nice surprise after meeting photographer Susan Tripp Pollard at the dam on Wednesday night. Follow the link to see all the photos, because it won’t allow me to embed. Nice to see that she got the name WORTH A DAM and the date of the Beaver Festival correct! Of course it prompted other media outlets to contact me yesterday and say “oh the beavers are back”? I did an interview with Doug Padilla of KCBS at the dam trying to explain that the beavers never actually left, just the media did. Ahem.
Looks like the Oregon discovery was big enough to make the Smithsonian.
Fossils of a squirrel-sized from in eastern Oregon may be related to modern beavers; Oregon was once home to rodents of unusual size.
Paleontologists have unearthed fossilized remains from 21 ancient rodent species in eastern Oregon, including the skull and teeth of a previously unknown miniature beaver called Microtheriomys brevirhinus. At about the size of a squirrel, this particular beaver would have been ten times smaller than modern relatives, as Tara Kulash reports for The Oregonian. The finds appeared in the May issue of Annals of Carnegie Museum.
In 2012, the beaver fossils were unearthed less than a mile from the visitor’s center for the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, reports Jeff Barnard for the Associated Press. Nine other new species of rodents have been found in the area — some in the same fossil beds, most on nearby government lands. Some of the fossils are more than 20 million yeas old. The sediment surrounding the beaver fossils contains layers of volcanic ash, and by dating radioactive elements within the ash suggests the fossils are from the Oligocene period between 28 and 30 million years ago.
While the burrowing beaver’s line went extinct, it’s also possible that this ancient aquatic mini beaver has modern relatives.
You mean there might have once been many mini beavers? Hey I know what news from John Day about beavers belong in the Smithsonian and National Geographic and Time and every other magazine you can think of. It’s the news that the normal-sized beavers we have right now could save our salmon and restore our incised creeks if we could stop killing them for a while.
How about leading with that story for a change?
Fun footage from Rusty in Napa last night. That’s a yearling and adult in back and a night heron in front. Because beavers, as you know, build the neighborhood for everyone to move in.
Off to San Pedro Valley Park in Pacifica tonight to talk about the ecology of urban water-savers. Wish beavers luck!
Finally an update and a short poll. I know you all recognize the fellow on the left, but the gentleman on the right might be less familiar to our new readers. This is Alex Hiller a beaver supporter from Germany who once came to america to visit a beaver family with Hope Ryden of the famed Lily Pond book. Alex was an early and dedicated supporter and attended the beaver symposium in Lithuania, shocking the heck out of Skip and Glynnis by wearing his Worth A Dam t-shirt shown here.
