Month: September 2015

And again

heidi08 In the News, kits September 25, 2015

O Gertrude, Gertrude,
When sorrows come, they come not single spies
But in battalions.

Hamlet Act IV: Scene 5

Sick baby beaver rescued in Martinez has died

WALNUT CREEK — A sick, malnourished young beaver found on Mt. View Sanitary District property in Martinez this week has died.

The kit appeared to be on the mend, but succumbed early Thursday evening. Experts still have no idea what caused the recent mysterious deaths of four other beavers living in nearby Alhambra Creek.

Two sanitary district employees found the three-month-old beaver kit on Tuesday. It appeared to belong to a family of beavers in Moorhen Marsh, a 21-acre wetland area where the sanitary district discharges treated wastewater that is home to beavers, river otters and western pond turtles. They brought it to Kelly Davidson Chou, district biologist. The tiny critter had a runny nose and appeared lethargic and unsteady on his feet, she said.

“I was expecting a much larger beaver because it’s not the time of year you see kits of this size,” said Chou, who took the ailing animal to the Lindsay Wildlife Rehabilitation Hospital in Walnut Creek for treatment.

The young beaver was two to three pounds underweight and most likely had an upper respiratory infection, according to Guthrum Purdin, director of veterinary services at the Lindsay. Purdin was treating the kit with antibiotics and hand feeding him rodent formula containing pureed grass, soybean hulls, wheat germ and other plants.

Four Alhambra Creek beavers, including three kits born this year, have died since July. The sudden deaths have perplexed veterinarians at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife who have ruled out rabies, pesticides, toxins, poisons and tularemia, an infectious disease commonly found in rodents.

“All we know is what it isn’t, we don’t know what it is,” said Heidi Perryman, executive director of Worth A Dam, a Martinez nonprofit dedicated to protecting and promoting the beavers.

Yesterday that kit from Mt. View Sanitation took a turn for the worse and died. They have no idea why. It’s not unreasonable to think it might be related to our kits’ cause of death. Lory is picking up the little body and taking it to UCD for necropsy this morning. Everyone is heartbroken about this little death, even the reporter I called with the bad news last night.

What is happening to beavers in Martinez?

At the edges of the heartbreak is something else: a stony relief. Maybe the fact that our kits died wasn’t our fault: I’ve been trapped under anvils feeling weighed down with the notion that I’m supposed to protect them and I didn’t. Maybe it wasn’t our dirty creek, our scary homeless, our public feeding. Moorhen Marsh is about 4 miles away and much less trafficked. Maybe it wasn’t anything I could have/should have controlled. Maybe death is gripping our beavers for reasons we can’t understand. Maybe this baby will give us answers.

But it still sucks.

While we’re discussing pointless tragedies, here’s one I encountered last night on the way home from work. NPR in its infinite wisdom was running a story about some entrepreneurs who are making some money off the feral hog problem in Texas by selling helicopter rides to shoot them from the air. No I’m serious.

Now I don’t want to be a save-everything, or start the first chapter of Worth A Hog, and I believe feral hogs can cause problems. But selling tickets to an all-you-can-shoot air ride is beyond horrific. And the fact that it was promoted on National Public Radio was outrageous. You can listen to the story here and share your outrage here. Or even better yet directly with the suits here :.

Trial Run

heidi08 Beavers September 24, 2015

Trying to post with new iPad. I’m using dictation, let’s see if it works.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver Rehabilitation, Beavers and water, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Who's saving beavers now? September 24, 2015

Oh sure. No beaver news for 5 whole days and then an EXPLOSION of stories to share. Well, we have to start with this, because I told you it was coming 10 days ago.

Beaver: Back to the Future

Beaver, whose dams help slow the flow of water, play a key role in the health of our forests. They create wetlands, reduce the force of floods, and expand riparian habitat for wildlife. In our new 13-minute video “Beaver: Back to the Future,” four Forest Service employees and a retired Regional Forester eloquently and enthusiastically praise the power of beaver to beneficially restore and manage national forest water flows in the face of climate change.

Beaver: Back to the Future from Grand Canyon Trust on Vimeo.

Wasn’t that awesome? Everyone did such a fantastic and compelling job. And Trout Unlimited funded. How long must we wait for it to catch on. The smartest beaver folk in three states. Now only 47 more to go!

Maybe Coca cola can help. Beaver: the paws that refreshes!

Coca-Cola Leaves It to Beavers to Fight the Drought

What do Coca-Cola and beavers have in common? It sounds like the setup of a bad joke, but the fates of beavers and bottlers look increasingly intertwined. Coke is funding the deployment of beavers in the United States to build dams and create ponds that can replenish water supplies for local ecosystems and ultimately, people.

Coke’s deployment of engineering rodents has a similar goal: getting water into the ground. Before Europeans’ arrival on the continent, beavers lived in nearly every headwaters stream in North America, and they shaped the continent.

“They were everywhere and having a huge impact on the landscape and the hydrology,” said Frances Backhouse, a Victoria, British Columbia–based author whose book, Once They Were Hats, about the history and environmental role of beavers, will be published Oct. 1.

“Beavers mean higher water tables and water on the landscape throughout the dry seasons as well wet seasons,” she said. They are, according to Backhouse, “the only animal in the world that can rival us in terms of engineering the landscape.”

The funding repairs stream crossings and restores streams damaged by wildfires in California, New Mexico, Illinois, Michigan, and Colorado. It is helping to pay for the beaver project, which seeks to boost water retention in the Upper Methow River watershed in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest in Washington state.

Natural solutions like deploying the beavers are a good value, said Radtke. An earlier project in the Sierra Nevada Mountains used heavy equipment to install a series of plugs to contain water so it could seep into sediment. “It was fantastic,” he said. “It was working. But it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

The Upper Methow Beaver Project, a joint effort of five organizations, accomplishes the same thing for less. Coke’s investment in the project in 2014 was around $40,000. Total project cost for that year was $271,000.
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“It turns out that beavers work cheaper than big, heavy, yellow equipment,” said Radtke.

Ya think?

Alright, credit where credit’s due, relocating beavers to save water is MUCH better than killing them, and kudos to Coke for having the sense to fund a winner. But really the ideal place for beavers to be improving water is everywhere there is water and people to drink it, and I’ll be happiest when they are allowed to relocate themselves.

smile-again-1 — Smiling beaver kit by Cheryl Reynolds

Update on the little munchkin at Lindsay who survived the night and was looking healthier today. He’ll be ready to leave in a couple days, and if they can’t locate his family he’ll go to our friends at Sonoma Wildlife Rescue to mature and learn to be a beaver. This morning Cheryl and Kelly went out looking for his family and may have seen another kit and some chewed tulles. Fingers crossed he’ll be reunited with loved ones soon.

A bucketful of hope…

heidi08 Beaver Rehabilitation, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Who's blaming beavers now?, Who's saving beavers now? September 23, 2015

Great video from Joe Wheaton and the beaver smarties in Utah. This came out in July but I must have been buried under a pile of festival preparations and I missed it. Don’t make the same mistake! It’s worth your time.

Any ideas how we can get the governor of California to watch this every night before bed? Come on Jerry, do we really want to be behind Utah in water management skills?

Our good friend Deidre sent this to me yesterday and I was happy to see good beaver news out of the Dakotas again. I mean almost entirely good news. They still have some work to do. See for yourself.

A Pond to Call Home: How Beavers Pick the Best Dam Water

Beaver ponds are a good indicator of beaver activity as well as beaver colony density, according to recent findings. Carol Johnston, lead author of a new study published in the Journal of Wildlife Management and professor at South Dakota State University, first examined how shallow marsh helps predict declining beaver numbers in Minnesota’s Voyageurs National Park in the late 1980s. More recently, she set out with her co-author Steve Windels to see if this is still the case.

What? I’m sorry. What? Could you say that again? Beaver ponds are good indicators of beaver population? Are you kidding me? Like spider webs are a good indication of spiders? Or gopher holes are a good indication of gophers? And someone published this in a journal? Seriously?

It gets better. (Worse).

how shallow marsh helps predict declining beaver numbers

Am I reading this wrong? Shallow water predicts fewer beavers? You mean like less money in your 401K predicts a ‘decrease’ in the stock market? Or hiring fewer policemen predicts an ‘decrease’ in crime?

Are you maybe confusing cause and effect here? Should you maybe replace the word “predicts” with the word “reflects”?

“Now, it looks like pond water is more of a predictor of active beaver colonies,” Johnston said. “When beavers create dams, they impound water. It’s intuitive that beaver ponds are related to the number of beavers.”

Ohh good. Whew. It’s intuitive for some of us apparently. Not the Journal of Wildlife Management or The Wilderness Society I guess. Maybe the reporter misunderstood. Carol Johnston is a beaver believer from way back and a name we’ve talked about before. I’m guessing the whole thing is a misunderstanding and what she’s basically saying is if you want more water you need more beavers. Or something like that.

I hope.

I had to play with my toy again yesterday, although this was WAY more work that it seems because I had to splice up the audio first before I even approached the visuals. I hope you feel inclined to share it with some concrete thinkers who need very clear beaver education.

There was a exciting beaver drama yesterday. Kelly Davidson Chou of Mt. View Sanitation contacted me saying she had a tiny beaver kit at the visitor’s center looking unwell. She didn’t even know there was a family on sight (although they’ve had beavers historically and probably were the parents of our original beavers.)

She brought it to Lindsay wildlife hospital and it weighted in and just under 3.5 lbs. (Which makes it too small to be our 4th kit who disappeared, although there was a brief moment of crazy hope.) We’re trying to locate his family at the moment, but I thought you’d want to see his adorable tiny self, that fit so easily into a 5 gallon bucket. The photos are from Kelly, who I’m SO JEALOUS OF at the moment that she got to retrieve and transport this little heart-breaker. We’ll keep you updated when we learn more.

Papyrus

heidi08 Beavers, Educational, Friends of Martinez Beavers, History September 22, 2015

This weekend someone commented on our logo with the perfect sentence “Oh because beavers are the KEY to the creek, right?” And it got me remembering how it all came together.

Once upon a time, many years ago, Worth A Dam needed a logo. I fiddled with some primitive images and asked around the best I could and got the suggestion to look for a volunteer on Craig’s list. I was told to advertise for a “Free gig” and say what we needed.

The truly amazing thing is that I immediately received more than a dozen offers. I actually had to review applications for an unpaid job drawing a beaver logo. It was 2009 and the time the Martinez Beavers were bigger news than they are now. I reviewed cute graphics, manly graphics and gothum graphics. I got offers from the Southbay, the Northbay and San Francisco.

The woman that finally intrigued me was Kiriko Moth, a graphic artist in the city. She’s has gotten bigger and her website is amazing if you want to catch a peek. She had just finished some lovely illustrations for a book on bees that compelled me. We had a conversation about my ideas and she sketched a host of designs which I liked – including one with children’s faces. I wish I had the sample sheet she sent just to remember. But at the time I asked her to think about incorporating the key idea, and maybe a stream.

She came back with a stream dividing the beaver (in blue and reversed with the wide part at the top). I suggested we do uncolored and offered the idea of flipping it so it looks like you’re looking into the distance. Then we chose fonts to go around it. And Voila the logo was born. When mom died she was kind enough to notch the tail.

One thing she said as we were discussing fonts was to avoid papyrus. She said TOO many non profits used it already. I thought at the time that was an odd thing to say, because I happened to love papyrus. Maybe you do too. But now years later I have seen over and over that she was right. Here’s a little sample, but keep your eye out and you’ll find millions.

I have to ask myself what quality we all possess that draws us to this font? Even many of the logos that were professionally designed and avoided the danger of using the font actually chose fonts that look LIKE papyrus.