Month: October 2016

The good news and the bad news…

heidi08 Beavers October 21, 2016

We haven’t seen our wayWard™ street beavers since the last week of September. Jon has been down faithfully in the evenings and we have looked all over in the mornings from Green street to the corp yard. I was starting to feel like they had left us and getting a little sad.

Then I got an email yesterday from “Leslie” who wondered how to discourage beavers from chewing her trees. I get these kind of queries all the time from the web site so I thought nothing of it. I wrote back about how to wrap them and asked her as an afterthought what part of the country she was in just in case I had a local contact that could help her more.

MARTINEZ, she answered.

Turns out she lives around the junior high where our AWOL beavers have been hanging out for the last week. Jon went to check out the damage. The beavers had taken two rough barked willow trees from the bank near her house. Meanwhile I scrambled to contact the maintenance crew there and get something out to the neighbors about protecting trees.

Here is what I sent out as post cards yesterday.

beaver-advice

Our two beavers were there last night and this morning again. Our friendly beaver-spotter volunteer can watch them from her deck. While we’re happy they’re still around we aren’t exactly thrilled about the odds of getting every single resident in the area excited about having beavers, and there is really nothing we can do to make them move down stream where its safer. She said they took the trees 5 days ago which would have been during the heavy rain when it must have been easy for them to swim up far.

Lets hope the next big rain doesn’t leave them at Arch street!

In the mean time I assume this means they didn’t have offspring because I can’t imagine they’d go exploring with kits. I’ve racked my brain to think how to get them down here and can’t think of anything yet. I guess they might try building a dam up there because the walls are so narrow and steep it will seem easy, but the first big rain will blow it out because there’s just too much water pressure up there. And that might eventually convince them its a bad idea.

That’s about all we have in our favor at the moment.

In the meantime if you have any friends or contacts in the area please give them a heads up and we’ll cross our fingers. And I’ll keep trying to make friends with the Junior High.

Really nice beaver reporting from Vermont Public Radio, the home state of Skip Lisle. You really should find time to listen.

Outdoor Radio: Inside A Beaver Lodge

Praise beavers from sea to shining sea

heidi08 Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and Insects, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Who's saving beavers now? October 20, 2016

Nice description from Ruth Grierson of the Mount Desert Island in Maine. Even though they’re east coast and not very far from solutions they aren’t exactly floating in beaver wisdom and coexistence up there, so this is nice to read.

Eager beavers help selves, others

Many have noticed lately that the water level in island beaver ponds is way down. Someone asked me what the beavers will do this winter if we don’t get more rain before winter starts. This could be a problem for them. I know my pond is quite low at the moment. The beaver ponds are interesting to see now, for you really can check out their lodges and dams and realize what wonderful structures they have made. They are excellent engineers. The term “busy as a beaver” has real meaning.

Beavers are the largest living rodents in North America and among the mammals living on this island that are easy to see and observe as they live their lives. Other wildlife benefit considerably by their presence, for they create an excellent habit supplying food, shelter and water, the requirements for life. Plants also benefit from their presence. Migrants find the many beaver ponds excellent places to stop, rest and eat on their long journeys. You sometimes even come across geese or ducks nesting on the top of a beaver lodge, for it makes a safe place for a home. The trees that have died because of the flooding of an area provide great nesting places for many birds and mammals.

Well said, Ruth. It’s a good point that is never made often enough. In fact I think it deserves a poster. What do you think?

Jeanette Carroll from Redding has some similar thoughts. Here’s a recent letter she published in the Record Searchlight which is part of USA today. Redding is famously beaver danger zone, so we are thrilled about this.

Please help the salmon.

Thousands of dollars are spent restoring salmon habitat and pouring suitable sized gravel into the Sacramento River for the salmon to use as they migrate upriver to spawn. All efforts to increase the salmon species are very worthwhile.

I sincerely hope the Department of Fish and Wildlife will provide some guidance to the Department of the Interior so the waters from Shasta and Keswick dams are not abruptly curtailed as was the case in 2014 and 2015. The salmon no sooner completed their spawning efforts and their depleted and decaying bodies began to wash downstream in the Sacramento River when the water flow stopped so abruptly that not enough water was left to allow their eggs to hatch.

Their nicely cleaned gravel spawn beds were exposed to the elements and their eggs would have never hatched into tiny fry had not our local pair of beavers quickly rebuilt their dam just in time to inundate the salmon eggs in their redd. So, the 2014 and 2015 eggs did hatch but there are not enough beaver and suitable sloughs in the Sacramento River to save other vulnerable spawning grounds. If the same thing occurs this year, will the beaver come to the rescue again and save the 2016 salmon eggs?

This is a fine reminder of what NOAA fisheries research has been pointing out for 20 years. Beaver ponds are salmon nurseries. And ripping out beaver ponds is salmon genocide. If you’re going to save one, you have to cooperate with the other. Shorter column: When Jeanette writes “Please help save the salmon’ what she is really asking is “Please help save the beavers”.

Mountain men didn’t ask for directions, either.

heidi08 Beavers October 19, 2016

There’s going to be another historical post. It cannot be helped. There is only one way this works and that is if I get to write about what I’m thinking about beavers every day. Even if I’m thinking about something that happened 175 years ago that affected beavers. Trust me, this is going to be fascinating.

I had suspected that reading through Zenas Leonard’s account of the passage through the Sierras would be like reading the Odyssey – dry with details and slumber-inducing. Instead it was like taking a kayak through the rapids. Zip! Zip! Zoom! So much amazing distance covered in such a little time and very hard to climb out of.

One of the first things I noticed is that mountain men didn’t ask for directions, either.

While they’re starving on the mountain skree, struggling to find a pass, and eating their starving horses at a considerable rate, a scouting party comes across an indian hiking purposefully through the snow. Do they ask him how the heck to get over the mountain? Or where he is going? Or maybe just follow him and see for themselves?

No, they shoot him and creep back to camp.

Another pair of Indians they meet later are so startled they drop the basket of acorns they were carrying and run away. They don’t follow these either. But they do take the basket and eat roasted acorns that night, which made a nice change from horse. They had very little regard for or interest in the native peoples, describing them as ‘slothful’ ‘ignorant’ and ‘filthy’. This is even though they marveled at the pumpkin, corn and squash they saw being grown once they made it over. Zenas was especially suspicious of the tribe he meets later in SF because even when the troop rode closer the natives continued with their fishing and didn’t pay attention to the white men at all. (Imagine!) At one point Leonard observes that they ‘all seemed to be from the same tribe‘ since they were the same shade and spoke the same language.

(Sure. I’m pretty sure that common native tongue was later identified by the scholars as ‘Notenglish‘).

But back to the Sierras, eventually they crawl through enough snowy terrifying spaces that they find themselves on the other side and Zenas notes tellingly,

Ahh this is what made folks think they were in Yosemite. But there are four other stands of Giant Sequoia and historians have argued over whether they might have ended up at Calaveras instead. They quickly started thinking about trapping again to pay for their trip, and hunted about for beaver sign. Leonard describes beaver as ‘scarce’ in the area. But never mind, I got more interested in what they saw as they headed down that mountain. The night of November 12 the sky seemed to explode with falling lights and the men and horses were terrified of certain death.

Apparently, coming out of the trees they had the bizarre fortune to witness the largest meteor shower the country has ever known. Starting a little before midnight on the November 12th, 1833 and continuing until dawn that morning, a meteor shower occurred that was visible across the entire United States. Typical Leonid showers have a rate of something like 5 meteors an hour. This had more like 100,000. Famous poets, abolitionists and pastors all described it in horror and awe. Fathers woke their wives and children to pray because they were sure it was the end of days. Even Abraham Lincoln wrote about it years later.

And even though you didn’t think you knew about this amazing moment in history it is captured in a famous song you did know, with a title from the book of the same name published shortly after the event.

The odds of them surviving the Sierra pass at all are pretty incredible. The odds of them living on cricket and starving horseflesh and acorns aren’t good. But the odds of them arriving out of the dense redwoods in time for this extravaganza were stunning. Consider that for a moment. The very next day the men were terrified to hear a great crashing all around them, and were sure some huge animal was bursting through the trees to chase them. It seemed to get louder the faster they rode away from the treeline.

But we know what it really was, right?

The crash of ocean waves was proof of the success of their journey and divine assurance that America really did have a “manifest destiny” after all. They rushed down to the shore in time to see a very rare three mast ship far out to sea. Again the odds of such a meeting were stacked against them. There weren’t many ships sailing around the Pacific coast at the time. This was a whaling ship named the Lagoda from Boston. When they hailed it by fashioning a large flag the captain sent out longboats and invited them aboard for dinner.

Most of the 57 men went aboard and had a grand feast drinking cognac from Captain Baggshaw’s private reserve. Later Zenas commented that it was the first bread, butter and cheese that any of their company had eaten in two years.

So they made buddies with the crew and captain and agreed to meet up again in Monterey. They got all the gossip on the natives and the Spaniards they were likely to meet along the way. Leonard doesn’t say whether they talked about the Meteor shower but they must have. It had to be at least as terrifying at sea as it was coming out of the forest. Maybe even more so.

Afterwards they slept off the cognac and started their way down the peninsula through what is now the Bay Area. And the craziest coincidence of all? When they were leaving San Francisco and picking their way over the marshlands they came across the skeleton of a narwhale.

No, really.

Beaver in a camel suit!

heidi08 History October 18, 2016

Zenas Leonard is best known for his eye-witness account of the Walker expedition (which was the first westward pass) over the Sierras. The account was serialized in his home town paper in PA the Clearfield Republican when he got back and published in book form in 1839. Despite dying before his 50th birthday, Zenas did alright for himself. His account has been republished several times since and is readable online in several places. His writing is concise, frank, and gives a richly detailed account of a pivotal moment in American History. In fact, the original printed first edition sold last year at auction in San Francisco for a cool 125,000.

Yesterday I had the very fun fortune to come across this: First some context, the troop of 58 men is starving at the Nevada foot of the Sierras trying to find a way over in very deep snow, and sent a hunting party to look for anything they could find to eat. (Although not cactus, because unlike the natives, mountain men were strictly Paleo in their diet). The narrative writes that the unsuccessful hunters came back only with a “colt and a CAMEL“.

The footnotes are from a later reprinting explaining that the great California Camel experiment didn’t occur until some 20 years later, so Leonard must have gotten it wrong since camels are in Africa and not California.

Which leaves a bit of a mystery with something like three possible solutions.

Zenas was wrong and it was some other animal that he didn’t recognize.
Zenas was right but his manuscript was illegible in places and the word is some related other word that makes more sense – like ‘cattle’ or ‘ram’
There really was a camel in Nevada in 1832 because it got left behind or lost from some forgotten expedition.

Robin of Napa and I had a fun chat about what it might have been and she suggested maybe a llama that had straggled behind. And, honestly if the potato could make it here from Peru, why not a llama?

Rickipedia’s more serious answer thinks its explanation #1. He believes the animal was a pronghorn.

I would wager the “camel” was our pronghorn Antilocapra americana. They had nothing like it in Europe or the eastern US. They knew deer and they knew elk (which they call red deer in Europe) but not pronghorn. It is commonly called antelope, although incorrectly, because of pronghorn’s vague resemblance to African antelopes.

Well, I am almost always prepared to trust Rick’s instinct but a camel with horns? Even female pronghorn have horns so it must have had them. Of course not every 19th century illustration of a species actually looks like the animal in question. We all know that right?

Here’s some personal history that migt be relevant: Jon and I had the odd fortune of actually riding camels to a monastery in Egypt many years ago, I can testify that they are fairly LARGE and unmistakable – intimidating even without the horns. I can’t imagine there was ever one lost in Nevada. But then, we’ve never ridden pronghorn.

OW! The stupid! It hurts us!

heidi08 Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, stupid solutions, What's killing beavers now? October 17, 2016

There are precious few articles about beaver that shock me any more. Remember, I’ve been doing this a long time and written nearly 4000 columns about the way a city responds to beavers. Sure, every once in a while a city makes the right decision for the right reasons and that shocks me a little, and sometimes entire regions make bad decisions that are so destructive it catches my breath, but often I’ve seen it all before. This, as they say in the cattle trade, ain’t my first rodeo.

But just when you think you’ve seen it all, something can come up that you never in a million years would have expected. Something that is so antithetical to all logic, research and instinct that it makes me groan so loud I frighten the neighbors.

Most severe drought restrictions imposed in this Georgia county

North Georgia’s searing drought has forced Haralson County, 35 miles west of downtown Atlanta, to impose the state’s harshest watering restrictions. No outdoor watering (except for irrigation of family food plots). No car washes. Football fields must remain dry. And, please, don’t run the water while brushing your teeth.

The Tallapoosa River is so low that the county water authority dismantled beaver dams Sunday. Preachers used the pulpit to spread the water-conservation word. And nearby Anniston, Ala. is sending water Haralson’s way.

Haralson is the first Georgia county to trigger a Level III — the most severe — drought. Yet 50 counties across North Georgia are experiencing, at least, an “extreme” drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. A handful of counties in far Northwest Georgia are experiencing an “exceptional” — the worst — drought.

It’s up to everybody to do their part,” Walker said. “If you don’t need to use water, don’t use it. We’re asking everybody to conserve.”

He’s also aiming for those pesky, river-clogging beavers. About 30 volunteers targeted four beaver dams along the Tallapoosa River Sunday morning. They’ll try to tear down the dams by hand or, possibly, with back hoes. Wood and other debris dislodged from a dam the other night filled three dump trucks.

That’s right. You read that correctly. Haralson county is experiencing the worst drought they ever faced. Their lawns are dying and cars are dirty, even by California standards. And the most important water official in this entire dusty land is addressing the crisis by using work parties to rip out BEAVER DAMS because they HOG all the water.

I bet you didn’t know that all those years you turned off the tap to save water you were actually HOGGING IT!

Well, I wrote everyone a letter last night, including the reporter and all the mayors in Haralson county, and you can imagine how full my mailbox is this morning with heartfelt thanks appreciating the many articles I sent them. Because the entire state is so interested in research and learning. It’s hard to believe out here on the backwards west coast.

(Did you get that? Or is my sarcasm too subtle?)

I told them that ripping out dams to save water is like removing traffic lights to reduce accidents. I think of that beaver with a leaky pipe on the dry Guadalupe River just sitting there building his little dam and waiting for his pond to accumulate.

Beavers are so selfish. If he hadn’t hogged all those drips to himself they would have rolled into the cracked ground and disappeared entirely and the drought could have belonged to everyone.