Month: June 2017

Are you saturated with good beaver news yet?

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beaver and gbh — *Beaver and Great blue heron: Rusty Cohn*

It’s getting to be a pretty beautiful time for beavers. We have wonderful stories floating out of Cornwall, Canada and California. Need icing on your cake? Rusty of Napa just photographed one of his beavers carrying a rock to reinforce the dam. Just remember you saw it here first!

After all the excited prodding to broaden the beaver started naturally in Devon, the Wildlife Trust used some crowd sourcing and pointed messaging to get some new beavers released on farmland there. Derek Gow was excitedly posting photos of the release of one of his yearlings and it looks like a hundred photographers showed up for the event.

Beavers have been returned to Cornwall after being hunted to extinction

A partnership between the Cornwall Wildlife Trust and the Woodland Valley Farm has now reintroduced them, hoping not only to bring back the much loved creature back to its natural habitat, but also help keep create new wildlife habitat.

Farm owners, Chris and Janet Jones have spent three and a half years working towards the release, which they hope will help to combat severe flooding that the area has suffered over recent years and help enhance the wildlife.

A Crowdfunder campaign was also set up to make sure that the project could go ahead. A total of £15,000 was raised to pay for the installation of the 650m beaver-proof fence.

*The new kit: Photo and beaver thanks to Derek Gow*

Two European beavers, one male and one female, have now been reintroduced to the farm in Ladock near Truro.

Farm owner Chris said: “It was one of the best days of my life with the release of a pair of adult European beavers at our site near Ladock. The whole day progressed with excitement building up until we actually let the beavers out of their crates at 4pm, in bright warm sunshine.

“The beavers seemed to be enjoying exploring their new home, and the assembled witnesses were fascinated at having such a tremendous view of these normally shy and hard to spot animals.

“It has taken three and a half years to get this point, and followed from my thinking about natural ways to reduce flood risk following the flooding incidents in Ladock in 2012. Cornwall Wildlife Trust has been brilliant partners in getting this project off the ground, and the Crowdfunding campaign, without which we could never have got here.”

The results of the study are hoped to show whether beavers could help Cornwall combat flooding. If so, there could be a possibility of beavers once again returning to their native land to live wild in Cornwall.

Well, good luck to the second beaver brigade in Devon! Of course there would be important news about beavers from the home of my ancestors, because why the heck not?

Now on to the bigwig anthropologist in Canada who took some time to promote his upcoming TED talk to mention about Elephants and Lions to mention the animal the country should love best. And I’ll give you a hint. It ain’t the polar bear.

Going Wild with anthropologist Brian Keating

Honourary Conservation Advisor, Calgary Zoological Society and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Calgary Brian Keating was the featured speaker at a very well attended event at Heritage Acres on the evening of June 9. His presentation, titled ‘In Our Backyard, The Last of the Great North American Plains’ was hosted by Livingstone Landowners Group (LLG). LLG board member Kevin Van Tighem acted as MC for the occasion.

Keating’s talk was interspersed with several videos that he narrated live, covering a small portion of his travels to over 49 countries, and one from his own riverfront yard in Calgary following the fearless construction efforts exploits beavers there. He also gave a warm recommendation for the book ‘The Beaver Manifesto‘ by University of Alberta Professor of Environmental Science Glynnis Hood. “Every Canadian needs to read this book, because the beaver represents us,” said Keating, explaining beavers change the landscape around them and create biodiversity.

HA! You don’t say, Brian. I think saying every Canadian should read it is thinking just a little too small, don’t you?

Here are the lovely promised rock-setting photos by Rusty Cohn of Napa, along with one of my all time favorites. I decided to do them as a gallery so you can see the sequence. Double click on a photo to see it full sized. And Thank you Rusty

And here’s looking at you, kit.

seeing nose to nose — *Here’s looking at you, kit: Photo Rusty Cohn*

There can even be beauty inside tragedy

heidi08 Beavers June 19, 2017

If I lived in a my beautiful former, beaver world, here’s what I’d be watching right now. It’s nearly solstice and that is always a wonderful time to see new kits. This footage is from 2010, the year mom died. This was taken when we were worried about her health.

Which looking back means that sometimes wonderful things happen in the darkest times.

Father’s Day good news

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Well what do you know, folks are finally getting around to opening the memo on beaver benefits to trout. Do you think this came as a shock? Now I dearly wish this had been reported in Wisconsin, but hey, North Carolina isn’t bad either.

Beaver ponds actually keep the water cooler, study says

Now scientists and conservationists realize that beavers and the dams they make across streams have a lot of benefits. Most recently a study showed that the big pools of water backed up by beaver dams actually help keep the water cool, and cool water is important to a lot of different types of fish like native trout, steelhead and salmon.

To figure this out, scientists built fake beaver dams and recorded the water temperatures. Although it would seem like a pool of slow-moving water would get warmer, this study found that the water actually was cooler. Why would that be? One reason was there was more and deeper water backed up by the dams. What’s more, the big pools of water seem to help feed water that’s in the ground which also circulates back to the surface, keeping the creeks cool.

Knowing that beavers can play an important role in nature, humans are now putting beavers back in wild places. The Forest Service hauled beavers on horseback into Buffalo Fork Creek, which flows into Yellowstone National Park’s Lamar River. Idaho game biologists dropped parachuted beaver in cages into a remote wilderness area in the 1950s.

Lot’s of generous gifts this week. Starting with a wonderful collection of puppets from Folkmanis which include some delightful hedgehogs, an english badger, a wild-toothed crocodile and a delightfully soft white dog. Thank you a million times over puppet wizards for supporting our beavers since the very, very beginning.

And a wonderful donation from San Francisco author Mary Ellen Hannibal with a fine copy of her recent book where people like us do remarkable things for wildlife.

“For me the most compelling reason to do citizen science is the sixth mass extinction of plants and animals currently underway. In the book I do a lot of reporting and research on this scourge, but contextualize what’s happening within a broad framework. “Extreme citizen science” often focuses on indigenous traditions for caring for the land, and I learn a great deal from the Amah Mutsun tribal band. I take great inspiration from three literary figures who contributed to citizen science—John Steinbeck, Ed Ricketts, and Joseph Campbell. While the hero’s journey as discerned by Campbell needs updating for dealing with today’s global issues, he still provides a model for aggregating individual efforts on behalf of nature to achieve collective impact. That’s the job of the citizen scientist.”

The book is signed. Mary has also been a supporter of the Martinez Beavers since the beginning, and I am grateful that she will continue to encourage citizen science by donating it for the festival.

Of course the beaver problem isn’t extinction, it’s depredation. But I’m sure she’s working on that book next. Thanks Mary!

Finishing the Last of the Mohican’s last night, I thought of my own dad with this quote by the affable, skilled and boyishly cheerful Hawkeye,

“Think of me sometimes when on a lucky trail, and depend on it, boy, whether there be one heaven or two, there is a path in the other world by which honest men may come together again.”

Beaver teeth carving: Shigir Idol

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Three times older than the pyramids and twice as old as Stonehenge, the statue was originally dug out of a peat bog by gold miners in the Ural Mountains in 1890. The remarkable seven-faced Idol was carved with a beaver jaw and is now on display in a glass sarcophagus in a museum in Yekaterinburg, Russia.

Beaver’s teeth ‘used to carve the oldest wooden statue in the world’

New scientific findings suggest that images and hieroglyphics on the wooden statue were carved with the jaw of a beaver, its teeth intact. Two years ago German scientists dated the Idolas being 11,000 years old.

At a conference involving international experts held in the city this week, Professor Mikhail Zhilin said the wooden statue, originally 5.3 metres tall, was made of larch, with the basement and head carved using silicon faceted tools. ‘The surface was polished with a fine-grained abrasive, after which the ornament was carved with a chisel,’ said the expert.

‘At least three [sets of teeth] were used, and they had different blade widths.

The faces were ‘the last to be carved because apart from chisels, some very interesting tools – made of halves of beaver lower jaws – were used’.

Zhilin, leading researcher of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Archeology, has spoken previously of his ‘feeling of awe’ when studying the Idol, more than twice as old as the Stonehenge monuments in England.

‘This is a masterpiece, carrying gigantic emotional value and force,’ he said. ‘It is a unique sculpture, there is nothing else in the world like this. It is very alive, and very complicated at the same time.

‘The ornament is covered with nothing but encrypted information. People were passing on knowledge with the help of the Idol.’ Only one of the seven faces is three dimensional.

While the messages remain ‘an utter mystery to modern man’, it was clear that its creators ‘lived in total harmony with the world, had advanced intellectual development, and a complicated spiritual world’, he said.

The professor has found such a ‘tool’ made from beaver jaw at another archeological site – Beregovaya 2, dating to the same period.

Studying the Idol, he believed the tool is consistent with its markings, ‘for example when making holes more circular’, said Svetlana Panina, head of the archaeology department at Sverdlovsk Regional Local History Museum.

The idol was put on a stone basement, not dug in the ground, said Zhilin. It stood lik

e this for around 50 years before falling into a pond, and was later covered in turf. The peat preserved it as if in a time capsule.

I know I have very specific tastes in news, but that is sooo cool. Of course if there were ready made carving tools all around you would use them, rather than make your own. I’m assuming the fact that there were three sizes of tools means that they were three ages of beaver harvested?

Regular readers of this blog will know right away why it was the bottom mandible and not the top used for carving. I used to think this tusk-beaver from a bavarian crest was so silly -but it actually makes more sense than our modern bucktoothed cartoon.

Despite what the funny-papers tell us, lower teeth are much larger (which is why it’s so rare to get photos of the upper ones). One fine exception to that rule of castor is this wonderful photo taken by my facebook beaver buddy Sylvie Biber. That may not be her real name, considering, but I believe she’s eastern European, living in Scotland, where she took this wonderful photo.

Top Teeth Sylvie — *Beaver teeth: Sylvie Biber*

You can bet I’d chose the bottom ones for my carving!
This also made me remember the research I did of the bay area tribes that lived near Brentwood and Antioch. In their burial grounds archeologists found beaver mandibles buried with the bodies and all their posessions. The paper I read said that no one knew why. Psychologist that I am, I always assumed it was because beaver teeth changed things and what do folks want to change more than death? But maybe they were precious tools, just being tucked away with the owner?

Too many good things for beavers

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Some days I just can’t keep up with the hot number of good news stories reported about beavers. I’m already over the moon because Jon picked up the generous puppet donation from Folkmanis yesterday and we received our posters back from the printer. Didn’t this illustration of Alex Riley’s quote, my design and Coyote Brush Studios‘ beautiful artwork turn out extraordinary?

The plan is to sell these at the festival and by mail, although we haven’t settled on a price yet and technically they’ll be thank you gifts for donations, not sales! They are 18 x 24 and would make a wonderful classroom or visitor’s center poster!

As if that wasn’t exciting enough, this morning there’s a fantastic story out of Alberta about the always inspiring Cows and Fish teaming up with the Miistakis institute to undertake a massive survey an beaver education project, to learn how best approach the landowners.

Is Canada’s national animal a boon or a pest?

Beavers: love them, hate them or ambivalent?

A recently launched survey seeks to learn Alberta landowners’ attitudes about one of Canada’s national symbols. Alberta’s Cows and Fish society has partnered with the Miistakis Institute, a non-profit research group associated with Mount Royal University, on a survey to assess landowners’ knowledge and perception about beavers, their habitat and their management.

There are benefits and drawbacks to having beavers on the property, and survey results will be used to further develop education and outreach on the role of beavers in the ecosystem.

“Beavers are a really important keystone species in our ecosystems and they provide some really critical function within our watersheds, and people don’t know a lot of that,”said Miistakis executive director Danah Duke. “We recognize that beavers cause a lot of damage. They take down trees, they flood areas. We recognize that and we recognize that in order for people to be able to coexist with beavers, we need to be able to manage beavers.”

Duke said she suspects many people don’t realize all the benefits beavers provide, such as raising the water table, slowing stream flow, creating habitat for biological diversity and making stopgaps against drought.

“Beaver ponds retain water 50 percent longer than stream sections with no beaver activity, so in times when water is scarce, we find places that have beavers and beaver ponds, water stays on the landscape longer.”

Anyone in Alberta is welcome to take the survey, but the project is aimed at southern Alberta for the moment, said Duke. Organizers are hoping to receive at least 400 responses so that they have statistically significant results.

I am so beyond impressed with the good work Cows and Fish is doing and has been doing since long before Martinez started to play. You can check out the great survey here, I was already their outlier this morning. It’s well done and obviously sneaks in a little education at the same time as it asks questions. Just check out this question which must come as close as a beaver survey can to being a push-poll.

I sure hope during their data analysis they recognize me and wave hello!

A final burst of good news just came from author Ben Goldfarb who is writing the newest book on beavers. He just found out he is the winner of the Aldo Leopold Mi Casita fellowship which means he gets to write his book at Leopold’s home in Taos. It’s a huge honor and beavers and Ben couldn’t deserve it more.

Leopold’s ‘Mi Casita’ residents focus on environment projects

Wolves, beavers and the land ethic are the areas of interest for this year’s participants in the Aldo and Estella Leopold Residency Program, which is now in its fifth year. The residents will spend a month in late summer at the Leopolds’ first home located on U.S. Forest Service land in Tres Piedras.

Ben Goldfarb, a science and environment writer from New Haven, Connecticut, will continue working on a book project about the ecological and hydrological benefits of North American beaver restoration.

In fall 1912, Aldo Leopold, then the newly appointed supervisor of the Carson National Forest, married Estella Luna Otero Bergere, a prominent daughter of Santa Fe. They moved into their new house, called “Mi Casita.”

It was at Mi Casita that Aldo Leopold found his footing as a leader in forestry and conservation. He once described conservation as “the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land.”

The U.S. Forest Service restored the Leopold house in 2007 and has joined with other residency partners to make it available for the Aldo and Estella Leopold Residency Program.

The sponsors of the residency program aimed to promote a transformative “unfolding” by inviting conservation-minded writers, artists, teachers, professionals and practitioners to Mi Casita. Each resident receives a stipend of $500 to help defray travel and living expenses.

Ben says the residence committee was certain Aldo would approve, and we of course agree. He notes that Aldo’s son Luna who wrote so much about fluvial geomorpology never mentioned beavers. But here’s a secret fun fact. Luna was the dissertation chair of Ann Riley who’s recent book on restoring neighborhood streams has a chapter on the Martinez Beavers.

So I think this was all meant to be, don’t you?