I’m sorry this isn’t complete. I wasn’t patient enough to add all the steps but you get the idea.
I’m sorry this isn’t complete. I wasn’t patient enough to add all the steps but you get the idea.
I’ll give you a hint. It starts with a “b”. Three guesses, go ahead, I can wait. He reportedly went for his camera but when he came back the beaver had slipped away. I’m guessing they’ll both be back this morning at low tide. I’m too emotionally beaver-scarred to be excited by this, but against my better judgement, I’m very hopeful.
For mural updates, let me say that the final contract has been signed by everyone, and now we are just waiting for the updated language on the insurance that the city needs and then we can mural! I won’t even start talking about how enormously frustrating this has been, because what would be the point? I’ll believe the waiting is over when it actually happens and not a moment before. Fortunately there is a very kind soul at the city in the middle of all this and she has been cheering me through it. Last week we had a good laugh at my wicked idea to finally just spray paint “F*@# the beavers” on the bridge, because in addition to expressing my frustration:
(Insert story from Heidi’s childhood here, where older sister vandalizes family furniture by cleverly writing the initials of younger sister. Younger sister had nothing to do with it but gets punished anyway and older sister gets away with it.)
On to the impressively named “Clatskanie” at the very northern tip of Oregon, who received an award from the governor for working with beavers to restore their watershed.
Governor Kate Brown, chair of the Land Board, presented the award and praised the collaborative effort as a “wonderful example of how non-profit organizations worked with a private landowner to voluntarily preserve wetlands” for fish and wildlife habitat. She also commended the property owner for including people in the equation: Hunt allows camping on the property, which has 14 tent sites and kayaks available for campers.
Olsen-Hollander said the project planners used innovative restoration strategies from “The Beaver Restoration Guide Book” which touts modeling beaver behavior for restoring habitat for fish, waterfowl, amphibians and reptiles. Olsen-Hollander said that if the techniques prove to be successful over time, there could be significant cost savings in using them in designing future conservation projects.
Congratulations Clatskanie! You let the beavers do the restoration and collected an award for it. That’s harder than it sounds, because it means hours of meetings and hand-holding with anxious stakeholders who are worried that beaver will flood their driveways or eat their petunias. The beavers, frogs and fish are lucky to have you.
A final note on what a very bad influence I am on Mr. Cohn of Napa. He sent me this photo yesterday of a beaver suspended animation feat and I was most appreciative. I told him he needed to go back and cut off the branch to use for display. He replied that it was in a seedy area with a lot of transient activity and he was worried it might be unsafe. I understood. Don’t think I pressured him. I very distinctly remember how we had to get our current chew on Easter Sunday because it was the only time everyone was in church and the creek was neglected.
But a few hours later he sent me this.Wouldn’t one of those be AWESOME in the silent auction? If only we could figure out how to make it into a lamp.
Do you remember those books you loved before you could read easily? We called them ‘picture books’ and they were illustrated in such an understandable way that you always knew exactly what was happening without a single written word?
Well think of today’s post as a ‘picture book’.
I just learned how to make a GIF of some of my favorite 2008 Dad footage. Most of the tailslapping I saw from the beavers happened in their first two years with us. Obviously they grew more accustomed to people in their lives and it was directed at us less frequently. Maybe it was never directed at us anyway. There were nearly always otters around when they slapped and it was nearly always spring. I’m guessing they were protecting these:
I consider Peter Smith of the Wildwood Trust in Kent a major beaver ally. He also happens to be my most reliable ally when it comes to finding beaver information in the UK. He’s wonderfully intelligent and earnest on camera and absolutely emphasizes the right things when talking about beavers. Apparently his dedication even won over journalist and Countryfile star Ellie Harrison, who surprised him this weekend with this.
Well deserved! Could NOT happen to a better beaver defender!
Finally Rusty of Napa photoghraped his first beavers together yesterday and his enviable fortune is our good luck this morning. Enjoy!
Sometimes I think about our tiny creek and dainty little dam and how disproportionately worried Martinez got when the beavers came. Even before the flow device the dam was never that big. I remember kicking the street-side mudded edge out with our feet in the morning because we didn’t want the city to be upset that it was growing. What would it have ultimately looked like if Skip had never come? Would Castro Street be under water? Would the creek Monkey? Would the county recorders office? You really get an idea of how much they can change things when you see things like this.
“It’s an ongoing battle with the residents of Ridgefield versus the beavers,” said Beth Peyser, Ridgefield’s inland wetlands agent and conservation inspector.
“We have a lot of beaver activity and questions in Ridgefield,” she said. “Any homeowner that has a watercourse or water body could have a resident beaver. They kind of come and go.”
Beavers’ work can create flooding problems.
“The flooding happens directly above the beaver dam — when the beaver backs up the water, there’s a pond,” Peyser said.
“Flooding is always a concern when water is backed up by beavers. The term ‘busy as a beaver’ — they say that for a reason. Once you knock it down, a beaver’s going to rebuild it twice as fast and twice as sturdy.”
The town has sometimes gotten creative in responding to the beavers’ ceaseless dam-building, according to Marconi.
“I know in other parts of town we break them down quite a bit, and we put in what’s called a ‘beaver deceiver’ with a pipe — PVC pipe — and as the water backs up it flows into the pipe,” Maconi said. The pipe drains water away and limits the amount of flooding.
Jeff Yates, a Wiltonian who is director of volunteer operations for Trout Unlimited in the area, appreciates the beavers’ work.
“Ecologically, beaver dams are great for rivers and any kind of natural river system, because they help distribute the nutrients from soil and sediments across the floodplains, and cause new growth,” Yates said.
“All the sediments get slowed down when they hit beaver ponds because the water slows. … It’ll rebuild and regenerate the soil in the floodplain.”
Not bad for Connecticut in terms of accepting the things they can’t change. Beavers build things that save water, and if we rip them out they build again. And apparently some of them even know why it matters. Its all good for the fish, says Trout Unlimited. That’s about as good as we can hope for in that neck of the woods. I’m saving this article in my ‘good news’ hope chest.
Rusty of Napatopia has been enjoying better and better luck at the pond. Yesterday he saw three beavers at once, and one brave soul stayed to eat the new grass and allowed excellent photos. Thanks for sharing!
One last sweet before I leave you. And its from Barbara of Marin via her friend JFG. It makes me very happy, and I’m pleased to think that it definitely proves that Nature is more powerful than Science. At least some of the time.
The world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator has been brought to its knees by a beech marten, a member of the weasel family, that chewed through wiring connected to a 66,000-volt transformer.
The Large Hadron Collider on the outskirts of Geneva was designed to recreate in miniature fireballs similar to the conditions that prevailed at the birth of the universe, but operations of the machine, which occupies a 17-mile tunnel beneath Switzerland, have been placed on hold pending repairs to the unit.
The collider, which discovered the Higgs boson in July 2012, is expected to be out of action for a week while the connections to the transformer are replaced. Any remains of the intruder are likely to be removed at the same time.
In an in-house report on the incident, managers at Cern, the European nuclear physics laboratory that runs the LHC, described the incident at the transformer unit as being caused by a “fouine” – a beech marten native to the region. The report concluded it was “not the best week for the LHC”.
Hehehe…