in less than a month now i will be presenting at Mount Diablo Audubon. it’s a great group of people and a great time to talk about the importance of beavers to birds, fish and wildlife. (With an honorarium!) There is plenty to prepare to get ready. from a tailored presentation to the right collection of bird and beaver photos. i should be fine as long as things like this stop happening.
Yesterday i received a call from Leslie Brinkley of channel 7. They were filming a little story on the beaver at Lindsey and wanted me to do an interview. They came over to the house and we chatted about the likely possibilities about where that beaver came from and whether he was ‘ours’. The interview took about a half hour but you can see the entire clip takes about 2 minutes. I’m happy it happened though because nearly everything that you hear the news reporter say came out of my mouth. So we know its all accurate.
The more i think about it the less convinced i am that patient is one of our three known family members. But who ever it was i can’t imagine a beaver walks all that way on a street away from water without having neurological damage already. lindsey also shared this photo of its tail fracture. Ouch!
The tip of that tail does not look good. i brought a slide of a healthy beaver to compare. Not to get too Castor CSI on you or anything but here’s what a tail should look like on the left. You can see she’s young and thin with a fracture right at the 5th from the end. And what maybe looks like a chip farther up. Poor little gal.
i can’t tell if that little bending 4th toe on each side is damaged or not. i mean they both look the same. That definitely looks like their grooming claw though, and could explain why she’s supposedly not grooming. Ther seems to be a little notch missing in her vertibrae right there, but her other toes look good, so it’s hard to imagine a car hit just those toes and nothing else.
Any one silver lining of this injured beaver is that Leslie asked about the beaver festival and was interested in it. When I told her about Amy coming and drawing the giant beaver pond in the middle of the park she said they would like to film that and gave me her email and cell numbers. Hopefully that means we’ll get some air time this year, which would be great if it happens.
Now i just have to concentrate on birds.
