All about beavers in Washington

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver Conference, Beavers, Beavers and climate change, Beavers elsewhere, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Who's saving beavers now? September 30, 2017

Hurray for Ben Dittbrenner and Samantha Everett who will be presenting on our favorite topic on Monday Night.

Meet Seattle’s Urban Beavers

October 2nd, 6:30-7:30pm

Since their near eradication in the early 20th century, beavers have made a surprising comeback. Today, beavers have returned to many streams and waterways of Seattle, including Yesler Swamp in the Center for Urban Horticulture’s backyard. Come join us as we discuss beavers, tour their work, and potentially view some busy beavers in action. , Ben Dittbrenner (UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences), will provide a presentation on beaver life history and ecology. Samantha Everett, local beaver expert, will lead a tour through Yesler Swamp, stopping at active beaver areas with some potential beaver viewing at dusk.

If you are interested in the tour portion, please bring a flashlight!

Doesn’t that sound enormously fun? I first met Ben when he joined me and Mike Callahan for a quick lunch at the state of the beaver conference before we presented that afternoon in 2011. At that time he was working as a watershed Steward in Sonomish County in Jake Jacobsen’s old job in Sonomish. Beavers were definitely on his mind and he knew they were the direction he was headed.

Now he is Executive Director of a beaver nonprofit called “Beavers Northwest” and operates a website and relocation project in Washington. Jake who was one of our very first beaver friends back in the drama, is on the board as Treasurer.

Meanwhile I received an alarm call from Cheryl yesterday who stopped by the Concord Dam on her way home from work. A not very appreciative homeless woman was ripping out the dam with her crutch. Seems too many people were stopping to look at the dam and giving them less privacy for their encampment. So she got rid of the attraction.

Of course the beavers will rebuild and it will all happen again, but it’s frustrating. It was such a beautiful dam.

What is in a name?

heidi08 Festival, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Who's saving beavers now? September 29, 2017

Yesterday I handed in the goliath special event application necessary for the new beaver festival which felt great to do. You can’t imagine what the response was. (I’ve attached the map and short description they ask for). Description-of-proposed-event

We have gotten to be very good friends with Parks and Rec folk after 10 years and they give us quiet pieces of invaluable advice when we need it. (Psst you forgot to do this or sign this…) This time it was whispered that when we advertise f or the event we should be careful to call it SUSANA PARK and not SUSANA STREET PARK because some were sensitive about the issue.

!!!!!!

I will call it anything you like if it means I get to have a beaver festival there, of course. But who on earth calls it SUSANA PARK? Even the listing of parks on the city website calls it Susana Street Park, the Gazette calls it Susana Street Park, and it’s known locally as Susana Street Park. But I guess Art in the park [and that squatter] Shakespeare in the park called it Susana Park as they’ve been advised, and it’s offially listed on google and map quest as Susana park, so I guess like everything else in Martinez, it’s complicated.

Meanwhile in the normal beaver news Rusty Cohn’s Photo Essay reappeared in the Napa Register today, and I am always very happy when people get to look at his awesome photos.

Photos: Life at Napa’s Beaver Lodge at Tulocay Creek

The Tulocay Creek beaver pond is located next to the Hawthorne Suites Hotel, 314 Soscol Ave., Napa. At the creek, you’ll find river otters, mink, muskrats and herons as well as beavers. Here are some photos of the critters taken by local photographer Rusty Cohn.

“Since Beavers are nocturnal, the heat doesn’t seem to bother them,” Cohn said. “They come out a little before sunset and are mainly in the water. During the day they are sleeping either in a bank den in the side of the creek bank under a fair amount of dirt, or inside a lodge which is made of mud and sticks mainly.”

This is my favorite of course, but go and look at the rest, they are all wonderful.

New Time: New Place: New Beavers.

heidi08 Beavers September 28, 2017

Alright, I am committing our rascally beaver resources to having the festival next year in Susanna Street Park in June and featuring the chalky and amazing talents of Amy Gallaher Hall. There were a lot of pluses and minuses to add in in finally picking a date, the helpers on vacation this date and fiddlers on vacation another. I’ve had no response from our sound guy, but I’ve connected with another and it’s finally done. DONE. (I mean except for all the actual preparation and organizing.) Decisions are the hardest part. Now point me in a direction and it can happen. What was once the first saturday of August in a scruffy park filled with homeless will now be the last saturday of June in a historic and shady park filled with old trees.

In the meantime I heard from a city council member that it was definitely NOT city staff that took out the dams, and was probably a neighbor who was concerned about them. I only know one neighbor whose property touches both dams and that’s the Junior High. So my efforts to soften things last year weren’t as convincing as that big tree the beavers took down and hit another neighbor’s garage, which was very convincing indeed.

Ouch.

In the meantime there was no depredation permit, the beavers are safe and just starting over which they know how to do. And there are lots of beaver explorers hiking around concord wanting to check out that new dam, including Moses and Cheryl so that’s exciting. I made a poster for our upcoming wild birds event, because I figure if there are any people who will protect beavers in Concord, it’s them.

Willow Pass Beavers

heidi08 Beavers September 27, 2017

Good news from the destroyed Martinez dams. Last night Moses went out to check on their stewards and saw the little beaver calmly swimming about. I also heard back from our local CDFG warden that no depredation permit had been requested in the area, which is very good news. He speculated it might be the last effort by the city to clean up the creek before the rains came and their not allowed in. Of course there were still felled trees, shopping carts and bags of trash in the area, but at least they got rid of that pesky pair of beaver dams!

We’re just glad the little fellow is fine. I’m going to assume the parents are too. Thanks, Moses.

I personally found the news of a new beaver dam in Concord too irresistible and made Jon drive us out there to explore. Turns out the VERY best place to see this new creation is on the Willow Pass Rd bridge which stretches across the actual walnut creek. There aren’t many trees (willow or otherwise) in the area so these beavers must be living on reeds and grasses. The dam on the left is more established, but the one on the right is just starting out and letting a lot of water through. Very cool to see in the middle of shops and freeways though.

Whenever I see a dam like this, obviously done in two stages, I wonder if two different beavers were working at the same time? Or if a parent was working and the youngster just wanted to copy? I especially wonder about them not meeting up in the middle. Is it wisdom or haphazard that makes the dams constructed on a jagged line instead of a straight one? I have to assume it’s better in some way for them, easier or more durable, since they are not known for wasting energy! Here’s a closer look at both halves, but I can’t imagine you not going to look for yourself, because it’s very close to REI and World Market anyway.

Of course it made me think of this song, written and performed by Lynn Quinones with some of our favorite festival friends.

Beavers in News

heidi08 Beaver Chewing, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Who's Killing Beavers Now?, Who's saving beavers now? September 26, 2017

One of my favorite segments of Sesame Street when I was a child wasn’t cookie monster or oscar the grouch. It was the silly attention Bert paid to pigeons, treating them as if they mattered and were worth attending to. He collected jokes and stories about them and even watched a favorite media segment called in an echoing broadcaster voice saying “Pigeons In The News!“.

I can’t imagine why that pops into my head now.

There’s local beaver business to report first. Our two little dams near Susanna Street were ripped out last week by Wednesday morning. I’m not sure by whom, but Moses left a note on my door when we got home from vacation, and when we went to look it was sure enough torn out, although not by heavy equipment. No word on what happened to our beavers but I have contacted folks to find out.

Stay Tuned!

Also I got an email from our old friend Glenn Hori who used to photograph the Martinez Beavers and spied a beaver dam in Concord near 680 and Willow Pass Rd. He couldn’t get a glimpse of actual beavers last night but that lovely dam isn’t maintaining itself.

FullSizeRender — Concord Beaver Dam: Photo By Glenn Hori

This is right near the Willows so one images the name might have attracted them?

Meanwhile newslines are abuzz this morning with the story of valiant beavers being brought in to save English cities from flooding. I always get nervous when beaver promises are made, but we better just enjoy this while it lasts.

English town enlists beavers to prevent floods

In 2012, the center of Lydbrook, a village skirting the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, England, was deluged with several feet of water. The flash flooding, unleashed by torrential rainfall across the region, sparked a mandatory evacuation and left badly damaged homes and businesses in its wake.

This wasn’t the first time this bucolic burg has been devastated by rapidly rising waters. Nestled between the River Wye and one of its tributaries, the flood-prone Greathough Brook, Lydbrook and surrounding parishes in the Wye Valley have long been vulnerable to inundation. In 2015, villagers collectively breathed a sigh of relief when it was announced that a section of an aging culvert meant to tame the flow of water through the village would be replaced as part of a flood defense overhaul costing 290,000 pounds (nearly $400,000).

Now, two years later, the Forestry Commission has decided to bring in the big guns to further prevent flooding: beavers.

As the Guardian reports, a scheme to release a family of Eurasian beavers within an enclosed area at Greathough Brook has been embraced enthusiastically by villagers and, most importantly, received a governmental go-ahead despite one report that it was blocked by a minister at the Department of Environmental, Food and Rural Affairs.

The idea is that once released, the clan of industrious semiaquatic rodents will get to work doing what they do best: constructing an intricate network of dams, ponds and canals that, in this instance, will slow the flow of Greathough Brook and prevent upwards of 6,000 cubic meters (1.6 million gallons) of water from rushing into the valley-bound village below.

While a qualified team of engineers that don’t have webbed hind feet could be brought in to dam the stream, the beaver is, well, cheaper and can get the job done in a swifter and less intrusive manner.

What’s more, there’s the chance that the beavers’ presence could be a boon for eco-tourism in the region as the animals, hunted into extinction across Britain and now being strategically released back into the wild, are still a relatively rare sight. A village that’s reintroduced beavers and put them to work to help prevent catastrophic flooding certainly could draw wildlife lovers to this sleepy northwestern section of the Forest of Dean.

Here’s a nice look at the Devon beavers from back in 2012. I shared this 5 years ago but it’s worth watching again.