It’s summer and we’re all busy planning our vacations. Worth A Dam thought we’d visit England, courtesy of Cheryl Reynolds awesome photo which has traveled the globe via wikipedia for nearly a decade. To be honest, back when we gave Rickipedia this photo to use on his updates we had no idea it would show up in Bavaria or Wales for over a decade. But it’s nice to see its shining face time and time again.
The report published this morning by the Environmental Audit Committee exposed the Government’s knee-jerk reaction to flooding. During the last Parliament funding was cut just before floods, only to be “increased” after the floods. The funding has fluctuated year by year.
The Committee has demanded an action plan from the Government.
Beavers are famous for creating dams with ponds of deep quiet water. One of the many purposes of these dams is to slow the flow of water, to stop beaver homes being washed away. Further downstream, these networks of upstream dams work like big sponges. They provide a slower, steadier flow of water into our towns and lowlands. Our current policy of dredging does the opposite – forcefully deepening and widening riverbeds to provide a faster and at times perilous flow of water into our towns and lowlands.
The water trickling out from beaver habitat is also cleaner, with sediments retained upstream. Just last week the Environmental Audit Committee declared that more action is needed to protect UK soil health. Rewilding these semi-aquatic rodents could help prevent soil erosion.
Beavers also create a variety of habitats for fish (which as herbivores they won’t eat), mitigate dry summers, create ecotourism opportunities, boost plant life and local populations of birds, amphibians, mammals, insects and other animals. They are a win-win-win-win situation.
Vote Beaver.
Of course everyone who walks by my home for the next century will know how WE voted. Mario is almost finished and I could not be happier. I especially love to think that every time the mayor is late for a meeting and decides to block our parking space he will see this staring back at him.
Here’s a closer look at who’ll I’ll be drinking my morning coffee with for the rest of my life.
Four orphaned beaver kits are testing out their growing strength as they learn to swim, weeks after they arrived at Salthaven Wildlife Rehabilitation West as cold and weak newborns. The young beavers arrived at Salthaven in early May after trappers found them next to their mother, which they caught in a trap near Fort Qu’Apelle.
Because that’s what trappers do: “trap some, save some” It’s like a lethal daisy petal-plucking game of he loves me he loves me not. Some day I might have to sit down with beaver rehabbers and say, you realize this is kinda futile, don’t you? Why not spend some of your donations on education so people realize they have other options next time?
But there’s no denying the pictures are cute.
Speaking of cute pictures, a few of you might remember Brian Murphy from Walnut Creek Open Space and Audubon at the beaver festival. He’s been with us since our VERY first festival and he is a great champion of wildlife. Well, he’s been watching a fox den under his porch and caught the kits hiding out in the drain pipe the other day. I know we’ll want to thank him for these photos personally at the next beaver festival!
Your final dose of cuteness will await me every day I step onto my porch for the rest of my life. Mario will be finishing up the great blue heron and the dam today. Just in time for the festival planning meeting this weekend! Just admit it, you’re jealous.
You notice that despite the city’s goal of ‘coexistence’ they still managed to find a few folk who call beavers pests for the interview. Journalism! Then there was this lovely article from Oregon yesterday. When it was published it had the photo listed as ‘courtesy’, I wrote the managing editor that we weren’t feeling particularly ‘courteous’ and he needed to change the credit immediately. All better now enjoy.
While some see the beaver, officially a semiaquatic rodent, as destructive, beavers are “woefully misunderstood,” says Esther Lev, the executive director of The Wetlands Conservancy, a statewide group based in Portland.
Beavers got more than their usual share of attention in May, during the 24th annual celebration of American Wetlands Month. The beaver was a headliner this year.
The North American beaver (Castor canadensis) — Oregon’s official state animal — possesses an instinctual work ethic that is closely connected to the way it builds its habitat. Beavers create stick-and-branch structures with underwater entrances for protection from predators, and in the process expend an enormous amount of energy gnawing and gathering wood. If their lodge gets destroyed, they’ll rebuild twice as fast and twice as sturdy.
Lev, a widely respected expert in wetlands education and conservation with more than 30 years of experience, says beavers make a multitude of important contributions to our ecosystem. “Beavers not only create wetlands, but also create spawning and rearing habitat for salmon and steelhead,” she says. “Their ponds help filter water and moderate fluctuations in water flow downstream.” They also provide habitat for a wide array of insects, birds and amphibians.
While research shows that beavers make ecosystems more complex, they’ve long been incorrectly blamed for flooding, Lev says.
She calls them “nature’s hydrologists.”
Streams and rivers where beaver dams are present show high clarity and low pollution levels. As beavers build their dams across waterways — with their lodge at the center of it — a pond is created. As the water flows and filters through the dam, water quality improves and nutrient-rich sediment collects in the bottom of the pond, creating a food source for bottom feeders. Eventually, the beavers move on, their dam breaks down, and the pond slowly percolates into the surrounding terrain, leaving behind a lush meadow composed of nutrient-rich soil.
Studies suggest that there are a number of species whose survival is dependent on beavers’ “engineering” their environment. Typically, when beavers fell a tree, more light gets to the forest floor, which, in turn, helps remaining trees grow and thrive. Better light also encourages a diversity of plant life. And as the remaining stump grows new shoots, that serves as food for moose and elk.
Research shows there’s a greater abundance of birds, reptiles and plant life in areas inhabited by beavers. Migratory birds prefer the safety of landing on beaver-created ponds to open bodies of water.
Fantastic article! And following nicely on the heels of the Portland talk. Lev is the woman who was grateful my talk ‘ wasn’t delivered by a biologist’. So I know she received excellent reminders of beaver value in the landscape fairly recently if she needed them. I’m so old I can remember when talking about beaver benefits raised many an eyebrow, now we get two examples on the same day! What will tomorrow bring?
But the very best part of yesterday had to be this, which almost brought me to tears when I opened the door. That beaver and I have been through a lot together.
We loved the mural Mario Alfaro did for the bridge, and we loved that it made people pay attention to the beavers again. We have a habit of having morning tea on the porch and staring at this one narrow wall near our front door and thinking, gosh a beaver would be lovely there. So when Mario was finished painting we asked him to consider a smaller job for friendly beaver loving folk and showed him the space. Monday he went to work marking off the space. I’m fond of the location because its really not visible from the street, and just for us or our guests!
After he drew the oval he primed it for painting. I can’t wait to see how’s its going to look today, but here’s what we have so far. Doesn’t it remind you of an old fashioned country story front saying ‘eggs 12 cents a dozen?’ Down the block used to be an old store that children would flock to after school to drop a penny or two. This would have fit right in!
Immature Great Blue Heron at the footbridge: Photo – Mary Long
The plan is to fill it with my favorite beaver kit photo, a beaver dam and a great blue heron. And if you were going to say, ‘hey Martinez doesn’t have those’ you’d be wrong. We’ve never had them very often but we have had them. I believe this was snapped on the morning of a beaver festival lo these many years ago. This silly young bird is not likely to catch much from the footbridge, but he obviously didn’t know that.
Yesterday we shared some tea with Mario and talked about our vision. We found out he’s from El Salvador and not Mexico like I had assumed. Also he has four children in college! (One in pre-med!) He obviously can’t make enoug on murals to pay for their tuition and as a contracting business on the side. Here’s a mock-up of what we’re shooting for in the mural approximately. You know I’ll keep you posted.
The Olympic Village Beavers in Vancouver are currently enjoying some well-deserved fame and sport their own twitter account. You can follow along here, but this made me smile this morning.
There’s been such a flurry of news since I got back from Portland I never really wrote about the beaver event I traveled all those miles for. I guess like any thing you prepare for months in advance, you’re so focused on your preparation the event itself kind of feels unreal or like it happened to someone else. (Much like a beaver festival for instance). Your mind is busy doing a million things and attending to details so doesn’t really have time to experience the event fully.
I was surprised to see how much like a big city and how much like a little neighborhood Portland was. It reminded me of the way you are startled in San Francisco to come out of these busy streets where everything is shaddowed by towering offices to suddenly be in Noe Valley where mothers push strollers and ride bicycles on wide sidewalks.
.0.
Portland had flavors of Berkeley and San Francisco layered together like fused glass. There are endless one way streets with stoplights or dead ends so you can’t fix mistakes easily, but sudden restful places of four way stops, were you have all the time you need to look at a map. There are brightly beautiful homes where children leave toys in the yard and dogwoods are bursting in bloom.
The Village Ballroom where I spoke was in this adorable young neighborhood were parents stopped for a pint with their toddlers on outside benches, and the toddlers were pulled in bicycle trailers sporting polka dotted helmets fringed with curls. The only scary thing about that neighborhood was finding a place to park. The ballroom itself had burnished wood floors and hallways scattered with pews. It felt like the place where many weddings had been before you. It was already set up with wooden chairs and we embarked on arranging the equipment as people filled in. The sound equipment was at the other end of the room from me so Jon needed to hold the mic into my computer to get audio, which actually worked well but meant that he couldn’t snap as many photos as I hoped during the talk!
I already felt like I knew Kaegen Scully-Englemeyer who had invited me in the first place and had worked with me on the urban beaver chapter. But it was nice to put a friendly face with a voice. He introduced me to his boss the Esther Lev executive director of the wetlands conservancy who was really excited to have me there. The lead author on our chapter Greg Lewallen was also there and introduced himself. There were others I met in that performance anxiety haze where you instantly forget what you are told. But they all seemed nice and eager to remind me that in Portland it was the officials who wanted beavers, and the people who needed convincing.
When the room was mostly full, there was a short welcome and I launched into the talk. Since I was the only speaker I took time for all the parts, including the drama of the beavers, the festival, the paper on historic prevalence, the discovery that Enos Mills had come to Martinez, the mysterious deaths, the mural, and the joyful new arrivals. I ended with my top ten list of advice for advocates, which made for a little more than an hour. Folks laughed almost everywhere I expected and oohed at the children and gasped at the footage of mom walking on her hind feet to work on the lodge.
When it was over there was warm applause and questions from the audience. About the beavers, about the deaths, and one about mussels (?) that confused me a little. Then some folks came up to talk in person, including Alexandria Costello the Geology grad student who had included the Martinez story in her beaver poster session at the conference in SF, then visited Napa and met Robin and Rusty. She brought her friends who were fellow students interested in water and beavers. One was Erin Poor, on the Watershed Council for Tualatin basin the source of that wonderful beaver newt photo. They gave me a gift of a set of coasters made from a beaver chewed tree, which was still sticky with varnish since they made it themselves! They were off immediately for a ropes course and training in some beautiful oregon backcountry.
Afterwards Greg came up to congratulate me (he couldn’t believe the images) and was accompanied by his cheerful girlfriend who burst with the news that we had actually met before! She had visited her grandmother in Walnut Creek a few years back and talked her into visiting the John Muir House on what just happened to be earthday! She was so happy to see Worth A Dam there working with the kids on bag puppets! I actually remembered her very clearly because she had told me her boyfriend worked on a beaver project in Portland and was studying their role in streams! I thought it especially funny when she blushed, smiled at Greg, and said embarrassedly, oh that was a different boyfriend.
Obviously a girl with a particular taste in men!
There were a few more appreciations, one especially memorable from Esther who offered what I’m sure must have been intended as a compliment but came out rather oddly when she said “Oh, its so wonderful to have that talk not delivered by a biologist!”
Um, thanks?
And then we packed up our equipment and headed back into the neighborhood night where there were still late families and sleepy children sitting at the outside tables. Jon said he thought it was the best talk I had ever given, and repeated again how surprised he was at how much it changed every time. I was happy my voice held up and I didn’t forget anything. We treked back to our little room and drank wine on the porch knowing that we had an early morning the next day with Clean Water Services in Beaverton.
They call Portland the city of bridges, and it occurs to me now that the beavers themselves have functioned as bridges in many stages of my life. Bringing me places I had never been and talking to people I would never have known without their influence. In almost every relationship or room in my house there is something that wouldn’t have been there without these ‘bridges’. I have lived in Martinez all my life, but the beavers introduced me to this community in ways I never would have known without them: the politics, and the homeless, and the social structure of a city I had always ignored while focusing on my work.
The experience of Portland is still unfolding in my mind, but at least now I’m paying attention.
Here’s a closer look at who’ll I’ll be drinking my morning coffee with for the rest of my life.
on outside benches, and the toddlers were pulled in bicycle trailers sporting polka dotted helmets fringed with curls. The only scary thing about that neighborhood was finding a place to park. The ballroom itself had burnished wood floors and hallways scattered with pews. It felt like the place where many weddings had been before you. It was already set up with wooden chairs and we embarked on arranging the equipment as people filled in. The sound equipment was at the other end of the room from me so Jon needed to hold the mic into my computer to get audio, which actually worked well but meant that he couldn’t snap as many photos as I hoped during the talk!
