A PICTURE’S WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS

heidi08 Beavers April 25, 2019

This morning there are three items of interest. Two great photos and a reminder of what’ve beavers mean to salmon. Let’s start with cute.

I don’t know about you, but is I had to pick one animal to dedicate my life too, it would be THIS cute exactly. And if I got to chose who’s on my team, I’d pick Sherri first. Wouldn’t you?

Sherri is getting her well-deserved run of fame with the airing of Sarah’s film. And it couldn’t happen to a nicer girl. This photo appeared in a review in whoa magazine’s crush Wednesday. Awwww. I gotta crush on you too!

Now onto serious salmon-saving matters.

Increased Protections Sought For Coho Salmon In Oregon Coastal Rivers

Twenty environmental groups are calling on Oregon to protect imperiled coho salmon with more restrictions on logging and roadbuilding in coastal forests.

The groups delivered a rule-making petition Wednesday to the Oregon Board of Forestry. It calls for designated “resource sites” for coho salmon on state and private forestlands.

Sounds important! Gee I wonder what they could do to help salmon?

In their petition, environmental and fishing groups say these activities have degraded water quality, blocked fish passage and led to the loss of favorable habitat, such as rivers with large #wood debris, deep pools, and connections to off-channel waters that rearing salmon need, such as beaver ponds, lakes and wetlands.

Save the beavers, save the salmon! We know that. Let’s hope the message gets a little broader delivery in the coming months!

Now on to a wonderful photo from one of our favorite beaver photographers taken in. Vienna, by Leopoldo Kanzler in Nature Highlights.

KUOW BEAVERS KNOW BEST

heidi08 Beavers April 24, 2019

Of course now that I restored service to the website at home. I’m not at home. I’m on my parents very old computer in the sierras because my travelling mac actually split its seams and ceased to function.

The good news is that there is an EXCELLENT news story from KUOW in (of course) seattle staring our good Bens (Ben Dittbrenner of beavers Northwest and Ben Goldfarb of everything else). If you don’t have time to listen this morning, book mark this for later. It’s THAT good. There’s even a discussion of the good urban beavers do!

Leave it to beavers, seriously

BACK TOGETHER AGAIN

heidi08 Beaver Book, Friends of Martinez Beavers April 23, 2019

Just look at this beautiful website! Oh how i’ve missed you! I swear my journey back has taken three days, seven techs, two specialists and a new modem. It got so bad and i was on the phone with comcast so much that everyone knew and was talking about my problem. Apparently it had never happened before, and the specialist they sent out monday had spend hours searching for possible clues on the internet because he’d never encountered it. His hail mary pass was to install a new modem because he said sometimes there were tiny switches that got reset.

And what do you know, it worked!

The punchline? When we finally got this website back up, he looked at the page of flat-tailed heroes and said, “there used to be some beavers in martinez on the news that were causing trouble and people saved them, did you have anything to do with that?”

Oh, a little, I smiled.

And just in time for the momentous restoration, there is a wonderful review of Ben’s book this morning AND a great article about Skip Lisle. Since I’m no longer on the ipad you can have both!

Review: “Eager: the Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter

Goldfarb is an environmental journalist who has trekked with “beaver believers” around the U.S., covering much of the North American Beaver’s (Castor canadensis) modern range. He also reports on three Eurasian Beaver (Castor fiber) reintroduction sites in Scotland and England.

“Eager” is this year’s winner of the PEN/E.O. Wilson Award Literary Science Writing Award. This honor goes to writing of literary excellence, which also communicates complex scientific concepts to a lay audience.

Goldfarb meets a couple of enterprising beaver advocates who have developed various flow devices to allow beavers and humans to better co-exist. They go by catchy names like beaver baffle, misery multiplier and beaver deceiver. Skeptics and frustrated municipalities have been won over by their success.

On the list of beaver blessings, water storage may be most beneficial to those requiring a purely practical reason to believe. In the chapter titled “California Streaming,” we meet an authority-activist who even created the beaver pledge: “One river, underground, irreplaceable, with habitat and wetlands for all.”

Sniff. That’s me! I’m so proud!

Aside from the gratuitous validation, this is an excellent review that really deals with the substance of why beavers matter. And being that it’s from beavers’ favorite state, I’m not at all surprised.

When beavers are allowed to set up housekeeping, streams spread out of their degraded, incised path to include side channels and ponds, holding precious water. And a stream in the desert, which includes beavers slowing it down, recharges low water tables, too.

Another benefit is the improved fish habitat resulting from beaver dams. In contrast to nearly impenetrable and enormous concrete dams, semi-permeable stick dams allow juvenile fish to meander through; slower flows and eddies provide resting areas and protection from predators. Fish evolved to co-exist and benefit from beaver meadows. Goldfarb delights in this truth found on a beaver believer’s bumper sticker: “BEAVERS TAUGHT SALMON TO JUMP.”

Yes they did, and we’re pretty happy Ben’s book is reminding folks of that fact. We also appreciate this well-written review by Amy Halvorson Miller who works for Inklings Bookshop. She definitely paid attention to all the right things.

Pausing again, to appreciate having this website back again. Ahhh

Now onto our second wonderful story of the day. This time about this city’s first very first beaver hero,Skip Lisle.

Beaver Deceivers: System protects animals, prevents flooding

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. — Skip Lisle has a spent a lifetime trying to outwit beavers in an attempt to keep them alive, protect their habitats and save people millions of dollars.

His Graftton, Vt.-based business, Beaver Deceivers, employs a clever system he designed that allows the animals to build dams without causing flooding, which triggers expensive property damage.

“It’s essentially a way to control the problem non-lethally,” Lisle said. “There’s still a lot of beavers being killed out there, mostly because of clogged road culverts. This eliminates the need to do that.”“All kinds of plants and animals can live here because of these few families of beaver,” he said.

If beavers are killed off, their dams eventually decay and give way, which causes wetlands to drain and eliminate habitat for many different kinds of insects, birds, reptiles and mammals.

“Thousands of species depend on these wetlands,” Lisle said.

Yes, they do, and thanks to you Skip all these wildlife tenants have a shot. And the wildlife in martinez had a shot. You gave our beavers the chance they needed to make a difference and survive long enough to become chapter 6 of ben’s book and this website. There needs to be a million more Skip Lisles in every state in North America. So far we have 5,

It’s a long way to go, but we’re well on our way.

SALMON DAY FOR BEAVERS

heidi08 Beavers April 22, 2019

Cheryl’s a busy woman, but she found time yesterday to send off some of her excellent photos of our project With the kids on Earth day. I thought you’d want to see the enchanting concentration of children hard at work on their tribute. Formatting on cannot be helped at the moment, but they are worth sharing away.

The watching parents would encourage kids or discourage scribbling. I chatted with several about how beavers helped salmon. I especially liked the father of the adorable twins who, when I asked them if they wanted to help us with our banner, cleverly scoffed, “oh no, we don’t like to do art at all, do we?” And they jointly exclaimed their protest and rushed to the table to start right away. Meanwhile other cities are learning to appreciate beavers too, like Dunkirk, New York where Audubon will be soon hosting some of our friends.

Beavers: a peculiar animal that can change its habitat

Close encounters with wildlife seem to go one of two ways: amazement or annoyance. A beaver that is awesome in a close-up encounter in the wilderness might be annoying in a close-up encounter, while cleaning out a drain plugged with beaver debris. Audubon wrestles with the problem of beavers that are awesome for visitors to the trails; but they are annoying for the volunteers and staff that try to keep the beavers from flooding the grounds.

Audubon will host a program on how to live with beavers on April 27 at 10 a.m. Owen and Sharon Brown, founders of the Adirondack non-profit Beavers: Wetlands and Wildlife put this program together. Their combined degrees in material engineering and biology give them the perfect insight in how to work with and around the beavers that cause flooding and other problems.

Wonderful, Sharon and Owen. I’m glad you’ll be teaching Audubon about beavers, but good lord you better start with this reporter, who in the entire article never even mentions WHY beavers are valuable to have around! Especially at some place like Audubon. Ahem.

BEAVERS ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS

heidi08 Beavers April 21, 2019

Yesterday was splendid, and thanks to the fortunate help of two of Lorena Castillo’s awesome new leaf students, and the help of Susan and her two stalwart grand daughters everything came off without a hitch. No thanks to the weather of course, which was freezing and windy much of the day. So windy entire booths were blowing over and rangers came around with sand bags!

On the home front, I am still unable to access this site with my WiFi because my IP address has been frozen for martinez beavers. Last night I was lucky enough to find a tech who knew what the problem was, and actually fixed it for two glorious minutes, but then it froze again and he said he needed to talk to an engineer and get back to me, which never happened. So too bad for me. This morning I’m using my IPad and a city hotspot to post, but g since it’s Easter hopefully we’re closer and my intenet will rise again.

There was good beaver news yesterday though,so there’s plenty to talk about. First the tragic story of a beaver pioneer who swam the ocean from Connecticut to Long Island to find a new home, survived sharks and stingrays only to be stuck by a vehicle when he finally walked ashore.

Environment

Beaver sighting in Orient is Long Island’s first in nearly a decade

A North American beaver was discovered in Orient last Tuesday morning, the first reported beaver sighting on Long Island in almost a decade.

Two New York State Department of Transportation employees found the dead beaver near the intersection of Narrow River Road and Route 25 around 9 a.m. while on patrol. They said the sighting was unusual; they had never seen beavers in the area.

A spokesperson for the state Department of Environmental Conservation said they responded to the report of a suspected beaver carcass last Wednesday. DEC wildlife staff confirmed that the carcass was a male beaver, weighing 15.7 kilograms. The spokesperson said it is suspected that the beaver swam to Orient Point from Connecticut.

‘It made it all the way from Connecticut to out here, only to get killed on the road,” said one of the DOT employees who found the beaver. “It’s a shame.”

Yes it is a shame. But the good news is that if you read through the comments you’ll see folks have seen this many times in the years, because just between you and me the DEC is never the first to see anything.

I would say more, but using an IPAD for this is really annoying so that will do for this morning. Wish me smart techs and fewer black holes.