Showtime! We’re off to the big BF. Yesterday was a kind of little bf, sitting in the park while Amy chalked this and chatting excitedly to the many onlookers. Poor Amy started working at 7:30. Here’s what she had done by the end of the day.
Today she gets to the beaver part of the pond! And so very much more. If you can come see for yourself, come!
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Ahh last night was the lovely premiere of Sarah Koenigsberg documentary “Beaver Believers” and many of our Worth A Dam friends were there to see and support. Here is a snap shot Rusty sent of the Q&A session on stage after the film. I recognize Suzanne Fouty, Ben Goldfarb Kevin Swift and Brock Dolman sitting with Sarah on stage. The man asking questions on the right is Steve Dunsky of the Forest Service.
We were home finally finishing packing the truck and crashing on the couch. Yesterday Jon met with the parks director, picked up the Uhaul and borrowed canopies from the John Muir Association and a friend in town. Today we will meet Amy at 7:30 in the park who will try to get as much drawing in as she can before it gets unbearably hot! Come by if you’re curious to see it unfold!
You are in luck today though because an expert from Ben’s book was published yesterday in Resilience and it made me so happy to read I got that tingly feeling you get when your about to weep tears of joy. I can’t think of anything better to read the day before the beaver festival so I’m posting it here.
Oh and check out the photo btw. 🙂
Close your eyes. Picture, if you will, a healthy stream.What comes to mind? Perhaps you’ve conjured a crystalline, fast-moving creek, bounding merrily over rocks, its course narrow and shallow enough that you could leap or wade across the channel. If, like me, you are a fly fisherman, you might add a cheerful, knee-deep angler, casting for trout in a limpid riffle.
It’s a lovely picture, fit for an Orvis catalog. It’s also wrong.
Let’s try again. This time, I want you to perform a more difficult imaginative feat. Instead of envisioning a present-day stream, I want you to reach into the past—before the mountain men, before the Pilgrims, before Hudson and Champlain and the other horsemen of the furpocalypse, all the way back to the 1500s. I want you to imagine the streams that existed before global capitalism purged a continent of its dam-building, water-storing, wetland-creating engineers. I want you to imagine a landscape with its full complement of beavers.
What do you see this time? No longer is our stream a pellucid, narrow, racing trickle. Instead it’s a sluggish, murky swamp, backed up several acres by a messy concatenation of woody dams. Gnawed stumps ring the marsh like punji sticks; dead and dying trees stand aslant in the chest-deep pond. When you step into the water, you feel not rocks underfoot but sludge. The
musty stink of decomposition wafts into your nostrils. If there’s a fisherman here, he’s thrashing angrily in the willows, his fly caught in a tree.
Although this beavery tableau isn’t going to appear in any Field & Stream spreads, it’s in many cases a more historically accurate picture—and, in crucial ways, a much healthier one. In the intermountain West, wetlands, though they make up just 2 percent of total land area, support 80 percent of biodiversity; you may not hear the tinkle of running water in our swamp, but listen closely for the songs of warblers and flycatchers perched in creek-side willows. Wood frogs croak along the pond’s marshy aprons; otters chase trout through the submerged branches of downed trees, a forest inverted. The deep water and the close vegetation make the fishing tough, sure, but abundant trout shelter in the meandering side channels and cold depths. In A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean captured the trials and ecstasies of angling in beaver country when he wrote of one character, “So off he went happily to wade in ooze and to get throttled by brush and to fall through loose piles of sticks called beaver dams and to end up with a wreath of seaweed round his neck and a basket full of fish.”
And it’s not just fishermen and wildlife who benefit. The weight of the pond presses water deep into the ground, recharging aquifers for use by downstream farms and ranches. Sediment and pollutants filter out in the slackwaters, cleansing flows. Floods dissipate in the ponds; wildfires hiss out in wet meadows. Wetlands capture and store spring rain and snowmelt, releasing water in delayed pulses that sustain crops through the dry summer. A report released by a consulting firm in 2011 estimated that restoring beavers to a single river basin, Utah’s Escalante, would provide tens of millions of dollars in benefits each year. Although you can argue with the wisdom of slapping a dollar value on nature, there’s no denying that these are some seriously important critters.
Isn’t that an enormously translucent opening? Ben does such a heart-racing job of telling the story and bringing the reader personally alongside it’s unfolding. I first read this opening last year when he asked for my thoughts on the manuscript. I read the entire thing in 2 days like without stopping -like I was attending Woodstock or a revival. I knew it would change the conversation forever. and now you should understand why.
Go read the entire except, and be ready for your mind to be blown. What a great day for beavers and the people who throw their festivals! See you tomorrow!
So it begins!
It is far, far too early for me to coast. What was I thinking yesterday? My living room is insane as all the items which have to go to the festival line up to wait there turn to be loaded into the truck. I slept a sliver last night. There are lists to be made and details to be attended too. Oh and there’s this. On Tuesday I implored Moses to see if he could get that huge wheel out of the creek for unsightly reasons. And while he was there he thought he’d have a little look around. Guess what he saw? Go ahead guess! Turn your sound WAY WAY up and I bet you’ll know the answer in the first couple of seconds.
LOOK at how TINY s/he is! Yesterday I spent the first 4 hours just saying OMG OMG over and over. Moses has captured some incredible moments with the beavers over the years, but this might be my very favorite. That kit is so little it can’t even dive to follow mom. It just pops back up like a cork.
He filmed this tuesday at 10:30 at night, and it took some doing to get it uploaded. We would love to be able to play it at the festival for folks, so that meant spending time figuring how to get it on our portable screen. Assuming we have a place to plug it in it should work out nicely.
And meanwhile Martinez has another kit! Stop worrying so much. Everything will work out fine. That makes him number twenty-seven!
It’s surprising how lovely the habitat is down there. It almost looks like a tropical forest. I can definitely see why folks brave the flooding and buy homes on the creek. Check out the morning footage from earlier in the week. Martinez is quite the urban utopia. There’s a car horn at the beginning and a pair of warblers trilling in the middle. Quite the place to raise a family.
Say it with me now: Baby baby baby! Martinez has a baby! There is precious little that matters more than that.
There was also a fine article about our friends in the North and the quest to bring beaver back to California. Oh and it mentions the festival too! Rusty was kind enough to supply the photographs.
The first step is getting past California’s “beaver blind spot,” as the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center’s Brock Dolman puts it. Dolman is co-director, with Kate Lundquist, of OAEC’s WATER Institute (Watershed Advocacy, Training, Education and Research), established in 2004 to study and promote watershed issues. The award-winning duo’s “Bring Back the Beaver” campaign, started in 2009, went back on the road in the North Bay last month with a talk in connection with a screening of the environmental documentary Dirt Rich in Novato; appearances continue through June in Napa, Sonoma and Marin counties.
“A lot of people just don’t know that we have beaver in California,” says Lundquist, who says that their current presentation is an update on a 2015 talk they gave in Sonoma to help answer the question: “That’s an East Coast thing, right?”
Although a historical account from General Mariano Vallejo found the Laguna de Santa Rosa “teeming with beaver” in 1833, by 1911 California had about 1,000 beavers left before legislators passed a law briefly protecting the aquatic rodents. Following a quarter-century-long campaign to reintroduce beaver to erosion-threatened habitat (the highlight of the “Bring Back the Beaver” show is the parachuting “beaver bomb” developed during the time), they were determined non-native and invasive for decades thereafter.
Bring Back the beavers campaign! Hurray for Brock and Kate! It’s great to see the regional history of beavers in California outlined in this article. The author even takes time to focus on the depredation permits issued in the state. But you know by now I am very self-centered – so of course this was my very favorite part.
This business as usual for beavers started to change after a pair of them wandered into Alhambra Creek in the middle of the city of Martinez in 2006. They built a dam and had yearlings, called kits, but the city’s application for a permit to make them go away did not sit well with locals who could see the kits playing as they drank their coffee. Resident Heidi Perryman formed the beaver advocacy group Worth a Dam, which holds its 11th annual Beaver Festival on June 30 in downtown Martinez.
Okay, yearlings are not called kits, any more than teenagers are called children. The mention is short and sweet. But still,,,always leave them wanting more. It’s followed by a lovely intro to the beaver situation in Napatopia. And then does a nice job of promoting Kevin Swift, who worked with Mike Callahan a while back to learn the trade.
“They’re ignored, underappreciated, reviled and mismanaged in equal measure,” says Swift, who emphasizes that beavers, for all their engineering abilities, are not intellectual powerhouses. “It’s got a brain the size of an acorn. If you can’t work it out with them, could be you’re the problem.”
“It seems to me that all the laws are backwards,” he says. “You don’t need a permit to destroy a beaver dam that makes critical habitat for rare, threatened and endangered species—but you might need a permit to put in a float-control device that’s hydrologically invisible and maintains the habitat for rare, threatened and endangered species. How does that work?”
Hmm indeed! Good point Kevin.
And if the beaver believers are right, as the numerous scientific studies they point to suggest, there is no better way to be fish-friendly than to be beaver-friendly. The beavers are not going away. There are some intractable parties, such as the absentee landowner on Sonoma’s Leveroni Road who, according to state records, refuses to consider alternative options to repeated depredation permit requests. But ultimately this approach is doomed to fail, says Swift.
“A story you often hear in California,” says Swift, “is, ‘I’ve been going down to that place for an hour every day for X number of years, and I’ve shot and trapped Y number of beavers, and they’re still there!’ Yeah, you’re in beaver habitat! Geology drives beaver habitat. Unless you can literally move mountains, you’re not changing anything about beavers’ attraction to your site.”
Lundquist says killing beavers is neither a viable nor economical strategy. “For one, people hold candlelight vigils, like they did in Tahoe. And it can be really bad press if you’re trying to do the right thing—or be seen as doing the right thing, anyway.
Um, not to be a stickler for detail or anything, but actually they didn’t have a candle light vigil in Tahoe for beavers. That was in that OTHER city. What’s its name again? sheesh Go read the whole article, it’s worth your time and author James Knight did a lovely job pulling it all together. Learn all about the ‘Bring back the Beaver campaign’ Then come to the festival in two days and meet Brock and Kate in person!
Then watch this video again because it’s awwwwwww…
We’re just about the part where I start coasting. All year I’ve been peddling frantically, applying for grants, making plans, coaxing auction items, encouraging musicians and securing volunteers. It is not a lie to say that planning a beaver festival literally takes nine months. It was harder this year because of the earlier time and less resting in between. Well, I’m nearly full term now. There’s a certain point where all my work is done, and it’s up to everyone else, I get a strange, glassy look in my eyes and start to shrug a lot.
There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come.
If it be not to come, it will be now
If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all.
Hamlet V:ii
And now that the coasting begins, let’s truly enjoy the ride. This is an extraordinary year for beavers. I found out yesterday that Ben Goldfarb will get to author a column soon in the Washington Post. And this morning there’s this from author Kate Wheeling.
Since I first picked up Ben Goldfarb’s Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, I haven’t been able to stop talking about these semi-aquatic rodents.
Beavers are not content simply to survive in the environment that nature provides them. Instead, the animals engineer it to ensure access to things like food and shelter, reshaping entire landscapes in the process. Sound familiar? Humans, for better or for worse, may be the most planet-altering species—but beavers did it first. To quote Goldfarb, “We are living in the world that beavers created.”
Before their numbers were devastated by the fur trade, North America looked much different. For one thing, it was a much soggier landscape. Beavers don’t just build lodges and dams, but entire wetlands. Thanks to the beavers’ efforts, streams back up behind their dams, forming ponds, marshes, and swamps, filled with stumps and dead or dying trees and bustling with frogs, fish, and otters, to name just a few of the countless creatures that rely on beavers to make their habitat possible. Beaver ponds help store water, recharge aquifers, filter out pollutants, mitigate floods, and stop wildfires in their tracks.
I guess some very spiritual people feel this way when they read the bible: Every time you hear the familiar story it’s precious and you learn or feel something new. Well, that’s how I feel about beavers. I LOVE that we’re going to be hearing this story over and over for the foreseeable future.
You make the point that beavers are not endangered, they don’t need us, but that we need them. What can beavers do for us?
One great example is water quality. There’s a huge problem in this country with agricultural pollution with nitrogen and phosphorus from chemical fertilizers ending up in rivers and estuaries and oceans and leading to dead zones. It’s critical that we keep that pollution from reaching the ocean, and beaver ponds are incredibly effective at settling out those pollutants.
But the biggest example is climate change: As the climate warms, more precipitation is falling as rain rather than snow. Instead of remaining in snowpack and gradually melting throughout the course of the spring and summer and fall and keeping rivers and streams wet well into the dry season, now all that precipitation is falling as rain. Any entity that can store water on the landscape, that can keep water high in some of these mountain headwaters in places like the Cascades or the Sierra, becomes incredibly valuable. What stores water better than a beaver? Basically nothing.
Ahh do you know that feeling you get when you just slip into a hot tub on a deck at the ocean on a starlit night and your head is cool and your body is gloriously relaxed and warm? I’m having that feeling right now. Thanks SO much Ben for your excellent work on this book!
What do you hope readers will take away from Eager?
First and foremost I just want people to appreciate the incredible role that these animals played in the development of our landscapes and our history as a people and a culture. I think that lots of the ecological and hydrological problems that we’re confronted with now can be, to some extent, addressed with more beavers. I don’t want to portray beavers as some kind of silver bullet because, for example, climate change is obviously a problem that’s so vastly beyond the scale of beavers to address that sometimes I feel a little bit silly suggesting it. But they can absolutely put a dent in some of these issues, like water storage. So they’re not a panacea but they are certainly a help to us, and they’re an incredibly cost-effective help. If you think about how much money we spend, for example, retrofitting irrigation infrastructure or installing new gray-water systems or no-flush toilets, this water-saving stuff can be pretty cost-ineffective sometimes. Getting more beavers on the landscape is something we can basically do for free.
It literally makes me light-headed to think about the number of readers who are getting the message around the country. I can’t imagine anything better, honestly.
How about seeing our name mentioned?
I imagine you had some fun picking out the title for this book. Can you share some of the other titles you considered? Obviously beavers lend themselves to puns. There’s a million different dam puns: Give a Dam and Worth a Dam.
I will tell you a secret because we know each other so well. Shh come closer. Ben told me privately after lunch on the back porch of our home that our name was the very best beaver pun of all, and the one he wished he had thought of. Shhhh. Yes you can feel proud of that. I certainly do.
We humans tend to regard ourselves as kind of unique in the ways that we modify our own surroundings to maximize our own food and shelter. But beavers do that too. They build dams, they create ponds and wetlands that they use to protect themselves from predators, to irrigate their own food supply. They almost act as rotational farmers; they’ll raise the water table to increase the growth of willow and other water-loving plants. That’s one of the things that always drew me to them: They just remind me of people in a very real way.
Ahh Ben, we are SO lucky to have you in the world and writing this book and coming to our festival. I am so excited about the ripples this this change is going to cause. What excellent timing for it all to happen now. Especially since I just got some very exciting news about our own meager beavers that I’m going to tell you all as soon as its confirmed.
One last thing. Yesterday I finished the post test for the kids doing our sticker activity. I wanted something more visual for the younger kids. How do you like it?
Yesterday I got a very kind email from a beaver supporter who had attended every festival and was planning on bringing her family and friends to this one, but she was torn to realize the festival was on the same day as the Keep Families Together rally/marches around the country. She wondered whether the festival could show its support in some way or at least register its concerns.
I thanked her very much for this and have echoed her worries in recent days, So many supporters of beavers are intimately connected with this issue, and all of us have the humanity to be alarmed by it. There is a rally in Concord at 10 am, one in Vallejo at 11 and certainly no reason why supporters stand together and can’t come to the festival afterwards. Maybe the big chainlink fence on the edge of the park would be a great place to post all their signs.
I’ll start.
Many were the happy days we spent canoeing up or down the river and enjoying the wildlife and wonders we would meet on the way. Our favorite were the five tidal rivers around Mendocino, where you might canoe all day and have a better equal chance of meeting a seal or an otter than another person. The joys of the river were endless unfolding blue herons nesting in trees, or kingfishers diving into the water.
The was only a single thing in all the world to fear. And that was so terrible and induced such terror I wouldn’t even allow Jon to mention it for fear of waking its wrath:
Until you’ve canoed against a strong headwind from the sea. paddling as hard as you can to literally keep from going backwards. you cannot even being to understand. My arms have been so painfully sore that I couldn’t comb my own hair for days afterwards. The worst was big River, whose wide mouth allowed for great gusts that wreaked hours of havoc on our journey home. It was in big River where I started the practice of pacing myself by singing into the wind long before I understood that this is what the voyageurs were famous for on their many beaver-trapping expeditions.
The wind is he who will not be named when you’re in a canoe.
Jon never quite got the superstition – and was often guilty of saying half way through in very confident tones, “Well at least it’s not windy today”.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I mention this because this is exactly how I feel about the weather on the day of the festival. Jon checks it religiously before the day, alternately boasting and bemoaning as he sees fit. I don’t think he understands what it means to “Jinx” something. Even Amy said brightly when we met her in the park, “the weather looks likes it will be great” to which I sharply replied
“Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”
I have learned the hard way that weather gods are all-powerful and will ultimately decide what kind of day to give us. NASA and the weather station mean nothing to them. They will do what they want. They know there is nothing we can do about it anyway.
We will beaver on.
Now on to some brighter things, we got a paragraph in Joan Morris column in the yesterday. I’m always happy when her readers are reminded of us since I think we are easy friends. Thanks Joan for the kindly words!
Celebrate the 11th annual Beaver Festival, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. June 30 at Susana Park — a new and larger location for the festival this year — on the corner of Susana and Estudillo streets in downtown Martinez. There will be beaver tours, more than 50 nature exhibits and a display by Napa artist Amy G. Hall, who is doing a 2-day street mural of a giant beaver pond and the wildlife it sustains.
