Month: January 2017

‘Dome Sweet Dome’

heidi08 Beaver Art, Beavers, Educational, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? February 7, 2018

The inside of a beaver lodge has captured the fancies of folks from Lewis Carol to Ian Timothy! I have been interested in art describing this because we’re thinking about doing some over/under art for our activity this festival. I thought I would show you some of my favorites so far.

Art by Greg Newbold- www.gregnewbold.com -Used by permission

Greg Newbold is an illustrator in Salt Lake City Utah who created this wonderful glimpse of the inside of a beaver lodge. The colors are amazing, but even his sketch for the finished piece is pretty great. I particularly like the adorable young inhabitants inside. On his website “Life needs Art” he says about this,

I just finished up this one for an educational publisher. It’s fun to dig into details on something like this and create a feeling of reality even though this view is impossible to see in nature. I enjoyed the challenge of making the submerged portion of the beaver abode look like it was underwater which I achieved by shifting colors and values to reflect the effects of the water. Once again this is rendered in Photoshop over a graphite drawing. Size is 16″ x 11″ at 400 dpi. This one will print in the student edition as well as an oversize teacher edition to be used in group reading.

Fantastic job, Greg. I love watching the family members swim home. Let’s just hope the book says in HUGE red LETTERS This is NOT a beaver dam. Because some people really need help telling them apart, apparently.

I did find a couple illustrations that shows the lodge, the dam, and the important food cache. This is from Miles Kelly publishing.

Or this nice peek from M.H. Peterson, although I’m not sure what that hole is at the base of the lodge. A place to turn around?

And that fun one in the snow from the Adirondack book I posted earlier this week by Mike Storey:

And of course there are a few fanciful ones that just grab our imagination. I came across this last year from an illustrator who’s name escapes me. I know it was a female and I didn’t find it with the usual suspects looking for ‘interiors’ or ‘inside’ lodge. I will keep trying, because she deserves credit for this wonderful work. Aren’t the colors lovely?

I came across this yesterday and fell in love all over again. It is a watercolor by artist Jodi Lynn Burton of Detroit Michigan.

Get ready for some awesome inside artwork this summer I think!

Surviving the Storm

heidi08 Beavers January 9, 2017

When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.

William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

Yesterday it rained and rained, so much that we parked across the street on a higher curb to avoid the runoff. Folks armed their driveways with sandbags and there were no beavers in Martinez to blame for the flooding. Just the sky, which decided we needed a two-day dousing.

Rusty in Napa was undaunted and boldly went to see how their soggy beavers were holding up in all that rain. Of course the broken dam was topped, but the lodge too was underwater in the worst of it. Remember if there is water over the lodge, there is water IN the lodge, and the beavers were rudely awoken out of their days slumber and had to find another bed.

drybeaverflooded — *Beaver atop lodge in flood: Rusty Cohn*

Sometimes they crouch in a cluster of trees, or have a little bank hole they can reach. Sometimes they decide to use the lodge like snoopy uses his dog house. And that’s what Rusty was hoping to photograph.

The amazing part to me, is that not only does this beaver look wonderfully calm and composed –

Dry yearling in storm: Rusty Cohn

(Nothing like we would look if we were flooded out of our home in the middle of the night) but he is also completely DRY. Look at his fur and consider the wonders of beaver weatherproofing.
On days like these we remember the countless worried storms we trudged down to our own beaver dam to see how our beavers were faring.

together — *Beaver sleeps on bank while beaver swims below: Rusty Cohen*

I remember the only beaver ‘swear word‘ I ever heard, watching a kit come out of the old lodge during very high current and immediately getting washed downstream in the flow. He was so surprised and alarmed he tailslapped loudly before swimming back. Which I’m sure has got to be the forensic equivalent of honking very loudly at a snow storm.

I’ve seen our beavers swim effortlessly upstream in a torrent, and move aside as terrible debris washed thru their ruined pond. Rain doesn’t hurt beavers. Snow doesn’t hurt beavers. Drought doesn’t hurt beavers. Really. Only we do that. Rusty had to work hard to protect his camera in the storm. But he was able to capture this later in the day so you could see for yourself that they are coping.

Sleepy and soggy, this beaver handles things just fine. Cue the “I will survive” soundtrack will you?

Time to talk about the Birds and the Beavers

heidi08 Beavers and Birds, Beavers and climate change January 8, 2017

One of the most amazing beaver benefits that gets overshadowed by their help for the loudly-worshiped salmon and trout, is the way that beavers and their ponds benefit birds. It is absolutely true that they take down trees, where birds might nest, and for that many a mistaken Audubon has decided to kill beavers. But that makes about as much sense as banning girl scouts because they eat too many of their cookies. Beavers create ponds that birds need to survive, and when beavers chew at trees the natural regrowth makes dense bushy places that are better to nest in. And don’t forget their increase of invertebrates which the birds either eat directly, or eat the fish that eat them directly.

One of the few groups that will say openly how important beavers are to birds are duck hunters. And while we may not love hunting we can appreciate hunters who care about beavers and make habitat for ducks, and by extension everything else that needs water. Given these strange bedfellows, I wasn’t at all surprised to find these two articles this morning:

Winter is prime time for South’s “summer duck”

While wood ducks have never been listed as a threatened or endangered species in modern times, the combination of overhunting, clearcutting forests and removal of beavers and beaver ponds nearly drove the species to extinction by the early 20th century.

Wood ducks were saved from the fates of the extinct passenger pigeon, Carolina parakeet and ivory-billed woodpecker due to protections from the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and later the use of nesting boxes.

Before the latter, wood ducks made their homes in the cavities of old and dead trees.

Historical society to host annual duck hunt benefit

On Jan. 21, members of the Saluda County Historical Society will hold their 17th annual duck hunt, with proceeds of the hunt benefiting the preservation of the Marsh-Johnson house, the Bonham House and the Saluda Theater, which are properties of the society.

The hunt will take place at Padgett Pond and Clouds Creek in Saluda County, held on beaver ponds owned by the Randy Barnes family. According to board member C. E. Berry, the hunt has been largely successful in the past.

“We’ve been very fortunate in the past that we’ve had a wide variety of ducks harvested, and also we’ve had a lot of large numbers,” Berry said. “Generally, we try to limit it to about 20 hunters, and generally, they usually harvest at least 20 ducks, generally.”

That’s right, whenever we want to find a duck we go looking for a beaver dam. Because enough of one is required before we get enough of the other. It’s amazing to consider the losses that must have stacked up when the beaver population was eliminated at the end of the 1800’s. Birds, bats, frogs and streams must have all started fairly immediately to disappear. Some of the species, like otter and muskrat, were also trapped out so people probably didn’t realize the impact for a while. It must have taken years for them to see the effect on drying streams and flashy floods. Probably there were few enough who knew what it USED to be like that no one really connected the dots for a while. There must have been those who argued it wasn’t a permanent change, and insisted the beaver and bird populations would bounce back after a natural correction. Maybe they even insisted the devastation couldn’t be caused by man.

Beaver-change deniers, we’ll call them.

But we can put it all together and make it clear. We know exactly what isn’t an animal but an ecosystem. I’ll make sure to bring the message to my next talk at Marin Audubon. Things were finalized yesterday and the timing couldn’t be better given that recent article by Jerry Meral about bringing beavers back to Marin. Richardson Bay Audubon Center & Bird Sanctuary is part of National Audubon and pretty much bird central. I think it will be a grand place to spread the beaver gospel.

Underneath that lodge so snowy white!

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Environmental January 7, 2017

We’ve learned to appreciate friends where we find them. It’s not every day that we hear positive things about beavers from Illinois.
WSIL-TV 3 Southern Illinois
I’m guessing that’s a personal best for the prairie state, who isn’t always ready to share with their furry flat-tailed friends. Great work, wildlife biologist Andy Stetter,

People seem to appreciate beavers in winter, I guess because when you’re outside in the snow its something to look at. Here’s more fine writing from Mary Willson in Juneau.

On the Trails: One thing leads to another

As we pondered the floating skunk cabbage, we noted a pile of sticks, just a little way down the shoreline. We quickly saw that this was a winter cache made by beavers — sticks neatly cut and stacked. The cache held branches and twigs of several species: lots of rusty menziesia, some alder and blueberry and a few hemlock branches. An unusual assortment, in my experience. When they can get them, beavers really like cottonwood and willows, but these were not available in this area.

*Cross section of lodge and dam: Mike Storey*

beaver reaching snow — Reaching for food: John Warner

If there is a cache, there should be a beaver lodge nearby. But we could find no conventional lodge built of a mound of sticks and mud. Maybe these beavers lived in a bank burrow, under the roots of a big spruce tree. The beavers had built a small dam a short distance downstream of the cache. By raising the water level, they would keep the entrance to their living quarters underwater, protecting their “doorway.”

As we meandered along upstream, after our detour, we began to note the stubs of cut-off shrubs in several areas. These cuts, and those on the cached sticks, looked quite fresh. Soon we saw several narrow trails running from the creek-edge up into the woods, where there were more cut stubs. A few cut branches had been left along the trails, perhaps to be hauled later to the cache. Some of these trails had been made after a snowfall, and there were dollops of mud and footprints as evidence of recent use. Beavers had used some of these trails repeatedly, so they were well trampled. But we could find a number of clear footprints of beavers’ hind feet. And otters had used the trails, too.

beaver and kits in snow — Kits in snow: John Warner

These signs obviously meant that the beavers had been active outside of their winter quarters, even though they had a cache. This is known to happen, but usually beavers spend the winter months snug in their houses, the adults living partly off stored body fat, and the young ones, still growing, feeding on the cache. If you stand, very quietly, close to a beaver lodge, you may hear the family members talking to each other, murmuring and chuckling.

I’ve been beaver blessed in so many ways, and able to hear endless beaver voices discussing the quality of cottonwood and who found it first, but one thing I deeply envy is this: listening to their voices in the lodge under snow, and seeing steam rise from the opening in the top. If I got to have one beaver wish, (I mean besides safety for all beavers and recognition of their value on a national level, and new kits born in our creek this summer, besides all those wishes) that would be it. Thanks Dr, Willson for describing it.

All the pretty little foxes

heidi08 Beavers January 6, 2017

Yesterday while I was busy writing about how we were lucky that rare individuals took on certain species and protected them, this was published about our good friends Bill Leikam and Greg Kerekes in Palo Alto. It’s not about beavers, but you will recognize immediately why it merits discussion here.

Palo Alto: Gray foxes decimated by disease in December

PALO ALTO — For seven years, Bill “The Fox Guy” Leikam has kept close tabs on the gray foxes that lurk largely unseen amid scrub and marshland near the edge of San Francisco Bay. So he was quick to notice that they’re in trouble.

The 17 foxes belonging to four skulks, or groups, that Leikam has studied as a retirement hobby and given names like Dark, Sideburns and One-Eye, have gone missing or turned up dead in the last month, victims, he believes, of a fast-spreading disease.

“It was like a black wind swept through the area and infected all of them,” said Leikam. “They’re all gone now.”

Twelve dead gray foxes have been found, with two sent to the state Department of Fish and Wildlife for analysis. Five more are missing and believed dead. Wildlife officials say they are victims of canine distemper syndrome — a common virus that afflicts carnivores, including man’s best friend. But while the family dog is usually inoculated against the disease, wild relatives including foxes, coyotes and wolves as well as raccoons and skunks, are very vulnerable.

Other possible culprits wildlife officials considered before tests confirmed distemper included speculation that the animals could either have been poisoned deliberately by people who consider them pests, or accidentally by eating poisoned rodents or even toxic mushrooms.

Dr. Deana Clifford, a lead veterinarian with Fish and Game and researcher at UC Davis, said that such numbers are “unfortunately very typical of a localized outbreak” and that the virus can “dramatically reduce the number of animals in an area and even make it seem like they’ve disappeared altogether for a while.”

Leikam been called the “Jane Goodall of gray foxes,” and said he was the first person to do a comprehensive assessment of gray fox behavior in the country since he first happened upon a specimen while on a bird-watching hike in 2010. Unlike the invasive red foxes that are also found in the area, the gray fox is native and has the unusual ability of being a canine that can climb trees.

Recently, Leikam and Kerekez have been talking with other conservationists about the need for better wildlife corridors. David Johns of the Wildlands Project said that when Leikam told him about the die-off, he thought it was a clear example of the need for animals to have more room to roam.

“You have this small population, they’re often very genetically similar, and very easy to wipe out if they are susceptible,” Johns said. “That’s why connectivity is so important — it’s a reach for these foxes to find other populations that are bigger and wilder and that might bring in some new genes.”

All the foxes in an entire city wiped out by distemper, and two guardians left with nothing to guard. This article gave me a total flashback of our lost kits, and Junior. I think I even called the high tide a ‘wave of death’ that took them away at the time. Deanna Clifford was the same veterinarian who was investigating our kit mortality. And many locals logically assumed poison. Or rat poison. It was hard not to.

But for us there were no causes to pinpoint: no culprits to blame and identify. Beavers can’t get distemper and what they could get and they knew to look for was never found. We couldn’t even say a wildlife corridor would protect them, because our beavers had all Carquinez Strait as their corridor and we think that’s where death came from. (Come to think of it, maybe that’s what our beavers think too and that’s why they moved so far up stream?)

He has single-handedly changed the way we see foxes, and those lost 11 souls helped him. Bill is attentive to the issue, be he says not heartbroken. Maybe it’s a boy thing, or maybe it has to do with watching them on camera instead of in person, or maybe I’m just a big baby. He and Greg will be at our next festival so you can ask him then. In the mean time we can just be sorry and watch Moses wonderful video again of the young foxes down near where the beaver dam was,