Month: June 2019

BEAUTY AND THE ‘BEAST’

heidi08 Beavers June 25, 2019

Things are starting to clutter in preparation for Saturday. It’s time we remember that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. This comforts me

The artist Amy G, Hall wasn’t afraid of that big empty square last year. She just sat down and begin to work. She just focused on her goal and went one step of a time. And it didn’t matter if Cert just let me know that they were doing a ‘stop the bleed” training in city hall Saturday morning and needed the parking lot even though we signed up six months ago or five people just wrote to ask for a space even though they hadn’t registered for the festival.

She just stayed focused and did her job creating beauty out of empty space.

Amy is ready to do it all again. She is excited for the chance to create something from nothing. Here I am stressing about parking spaces and booth size but she is just quietly practicing her shading.
And in the end she has this to show for it all.

It all starts again Friday morning. I can’t wait.

FOLLOW-UPS WITH FRIENDS

heidi08 Beaver Grooming June 24, 2019

First a followup from yesterdays cool story about the foundation that funds flow devices. Mike Callahan says this:

Yes, his estate’s foundation has been critical in helping to fund flow device installations in western MA over the past 9 years or so. The Robert Theriot Foundation grants have been hugely successful in incentivizing towns and property owners to try nonlethal management. It has been the spark that got the ball rolling in an area that was traditionally trapping only. The grant is administered by the MA Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals which they do at their own cost. See ://www.mspca.org/animal…/berkshire-beaver-grant-funding/
In fact, this flow device grant program has been so successful that it was one of the main reasons I started the Beaver Institute. My hope is that our nonprofit can raise grant monies to incentivize flow device installations across North America! Now to find a grant funding source….. :-

Wow!

Here’s the program website. Click on the image for the link. And think for a moment about the wonderfully small world we live in.

Now onto today’s business. I see Ben Goldfarb’s national geographic article got picked up by NatGeo Australia. So that’s gotta to be $ in his pocket. Also his book got a dynamic review from the editor of the Baker City news in Oregon. Obviously the editor feels about this book the same way the exact same way you felt about your second boyfriend in college. He’s crazy about it and loves it more than any book he ever read and he hates himself for loving it a great deal. Over and over.

We can all understand that, right?

COLUMN: Book highlights the many benefits of beavers

I recently read a book-length ode to the beaver, and as is typical with such works I was in some passages caught up in the author’s adoration and in others a bit fatigued by his fandom.

Mostly it was the former.

This isn’t just a book-length account, but an actual book. And a fine one. Indeed I don’t recall enjoying more any book about wildlife biology and natural history that I’ve come across in the past few years.

Besides their potential to keep smaller streams from going dry — obviously a benefit for fish and other aquatic species but also potentially a boon for downstream farmers and ranchers — beavers’ constructions can also contribute to higher water tables and to lower water temperatures.

It doesn’t seem to me an exaggeration to describe beavers’ capabilities as miraculous.

And yet, by the time I reached the halfway point of Goldfarb’s book I became just slightly annoyed. Not enough to stop reading, to be sure — the story was compelling, and Goldfarb’s prose a pleasure, from start to finish.

But his constant extolling of the beaver’s virtues began to strike me as a bit of overselling. The thesis was just too pat — that the slaughter of America’s beavers in the 18th and 19th centuries, though absolutely lamentable, transformed idyllic places into wastelands, and that merely restoring their populations can cure so much of what ails our parched and eroded lands.

You see what I mean? He loves the book. LOVES it like his toes curl when he stretches out with it on the couch. But its just too darn lovable, and makes those rotten beavers, whom he also says he loves, too lovable.

The poor man is in a quandary.

I don’t mean to suggest that Goldfarb ignores the potentially problematic effects of beavers — the flooded fields and clogged culverts and submerged paths.

But it seemed to me that the author’s confidence that relatively simple, if not always cheap, solutions exist for every beaver-caused problem minimizes the reality that the world into which he — and I — hope beavers will once again thrive is quite a different place than it was when fur companies were decimating the populations.

I understand that some people think of that bygone era as not only different but better. Yet even if you consider as scars the roads and cultivated fields and homes and parking lots that replaced beaver ponds, it is not realistic to act as though these things are unimportant.

I know I know. You thought when I alluded to that tempestuous romance of your college years I was joking or exaggerating in that way I sometimes do. But no. He’s honest to god in a classic approach-avoidance conflict with this book, and possibly with Ben himself. Scouts honor.

There is of course nothing wrong with passion. Indeed it is often an admirable quality, one that encourages so many of us to do good work in the world.

This is a man pulling on his jeans in the morning and thinking maybe things went too far. I recognize the signs.

But I am ever suspicious of the mixture of hyperbole and simplicity that sometimes accompanies passion. Which is to say I’m skeptical of anyone who boasts of all but universal solutions to vexing and complex problems — which, after all, is what very many problems are.

At this point he goes on to describe two similar situations that people get passionate about but are kind of meaningless. He stops just short of mentioning that girl he let get away. There’s nothing wrong with passion. It’s just TOO passionate.

And although I both appreciate and largely share his excitement about what beavers can do for mankind, I believe I would have enjoyed his book even a bit more if was a trifle less breathless in its affinity for the wondrous rodents.

The problem Ben is that you are too positive about the positive thing you’re talking about! He needs more doubt and negativity in his gospel! You’re a trifle too breathless for the man. You need to breathe more. Breathe more.

Something tells me that this man didn’t breathe a whole lot while he was reading. He’s an editor and it shocked and shamed him to read such remarkable prose. You are the writer he always dreamed of being.

No wonder he’s not sure whether he loves you or hates you.

Finally a last visit to our good friend Leopold Kanzler in Austria, who posted this luscious photo of mutual grooming this morning and called it “Die Umarmung” or”The hug”,

Mutual Grooming Click here to watch our beavers “Hugging”.

BEAVER-SAVING FOUNDATION

heidi08 Who's saving beavers now? June 23, 2019

Sometimes people’s hearts are in the right place, but there simply aren’t fund to pay for a flow device. Well now if you live in the right place there might be a foundation to help.

Lauren R. Stevens: Living with our friend the beaver

Thanks to Nion Robert “Bob” Theriot’s Foundation, the MSPCA in Boston accepts requests for assistance from individuals or entities in the four western counties of Massachusetts “to humanely, non-lethally and ecologically mitigate beaver-related flooding.” The property owner is asked to share the cost. The local Conservation Commission must give permission.

Theriot, who died December 31, 1998, owned Tall Pine Farm in Monterey. He helped conserve many acres in Massachusetts and California, working here with the Berkshire Natural Resources Council and Monterey’s Preservation Land Trust, of which he was a founding member. Clearly he was also a friend of beavers. So may we all be.

This was a pretty surprising group of sentences to read. I never knew that there was a foundation that could help install flow devices. I had to go look up its benefactor. But I was pretty blown away by what I found.

Nion Thieriot — Conservationist

Nion Robert “Bob” Thieriot, a dedicated conservationist and a great-grandson of Chronicle co- founder Michael H. de Young, died yesterday at a hospital near his home in Massachusetts after a five- month battle with brain cancer.

Mr. Thieriot, 52, had a lifelong passion for the outdoors and for working with his hands, leading many efforts over the years to preserve open space and woodlands in Massachusetts and California.

Mr. Thieriot also helped create the Sonoma Land Trust in Sonoma County, dedicated to preserving open land and forests in the county. He ran a vegetable farm on more than 300 acres there, in Cazadero, in the 1970s. When it burned in a forest fire in 1978, he donated the land to the land trust.

So this man first formed a preserve and then when it was burned to the ground in the made one of the biggest donations to the Sonoma land trust asking that they continue to expand and preserve more land.

The Thieriots left their mark on geography and history by donating Little Black Mountain to Sonoma Land Trust, anchoring our conservation efforts on the Sonoma Coast and presence in the region. Their intent was to preserve Little Black Mountain as open space and dedicate it to the community. The grant agreement includes a request that SLT expand the preserve whenever possible, which we have since accomplished through our acquisition of the 5,630-acre Jenner Headlands property and recent 238-acre Pole Mountain purchase, creating a 6,368-acre protected landscape.

After the fire the couple move to the east coast and start a new foundation and historic farm and continued to focus on conservation.

From a young age, he was enamored of the forest and wild spaces,” said his brother, Peter E. Thieriot of San Francisco. In his conservation work, “he tried to move strategically just in advance of the developers” to preserve as much open land as possible.

This effort was so successful that through the Berkshire Natural Resources Council in Pittsfield, Mass., alone, Mr. Thieriot bought and either donated or restricted for preservation more than 4,500 acres of land. Mr. Thieriot was a director of the council as well as a founding member of the Monterey (Mass.) Preservation Land Trust. Through his estate, 3,600 more acres of land will be preserved, including his Tall Pine Farm.

He cultivated vegetables for sale on his 200-acre Tall Pine Farm in Monterey, Mass., living there in a historic 275-year-old farmhouse and specializing in craftsmanship with antique hand tools.

He also maintained a sawmill, and was so skilled in traditional carpentry that when he built a vegetable stand on his farm a decade ago he did the whole thing from scratch, handcrafting the boards out of trees and constructing the sturdy stand with pegs instead of nails and screws.

I’m guessing that MSPCA pursued a grant from the foundation for preserving habitat and wildlife by preserving beavers. I sure wish I could read about that story and how it happened.

WILLIAMSTOWN — It might not be a good idea to fool Mother Nature, but fooling beavers might be in their best interest. And, thanks to the generosity of a former Berkshire resident, financial help is available—for people and beavers.

In fact Bob never, ever stopped working to make things better. Before he died the governor of Massachusetts presented him with THE award for saving open space in the state. Earlier in his life he started another foundation to help children called “Janet’s fund”.

His brother, Peter, said that at the time of his death, Mr. Thieriot was halfway through negotiating, in conjunction with the Berkshire council, for the preservation of a 430-acre milk farm in north Berkshire County. His family and the council intend to continue the negotiations, to buy development rights ensuring the farmland will have logging restrictions and protection from subdivision.

What a thrillingly fulfilled life that was stupidly cut short by brain cancer. How incredible to have a foundation that helps install flow devices. Have you ever noticed how all the wrong people seem to die of cancer? And the useless nasty ones survive to be president of bomb Iran?

And hey, if you are sitting back and feeling kind of useless like you’ve never done anything in your entire life even the tiniest fraction of good compared to Bob, you’re not alone.

WOLVES AND BEAVERS PART XCMXVII

heidi08 Beavers June 22, 2019

One of the places I always imagined going with our canoe was the Boundary waters. The Kabetogama Peninsula, which lies entirely within Voyageurs National Parkd makes up most of its land area, is accessible only by boat. To the east of the park lies the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. It’s on the edge of Minnesota among the great lakes. There are trails and campsights only accessible by boat or canoe, and some of the most remote camping the US can offer.

Yesterday a headline crossed my newsfeed that I declined to write about. I figured readers of this website didn’t need to know how prominently beavers featured in the wolf diet. Then I saw a post on facebook that made me take notice.

Guess who the AUTHOR is?

The secret lives of fish-eating, beaver-ambushing wolves of Minnesota

That’s right. The author of Eager. The man who came to our festival last year. The winner of the Pen science writing award. Beaver Ben. OUR Ben. Writing for national geographic!

Sniff. They grow up so fast.

“This wolf’s been on a beaver-killing rampage,” Gable says as he inspects a low branch snapped in the struggle. “He’s already killed at least four this spring.”

Comparing the beaver’s scattered remains with the GPS points transmitted by V074’s collar, Gable reconstructs the attack. The wolf, it appears, had hunkered down in the wetland and waited. As a beaver trundled past during its nightly dam maintenance, the wolf sprung, subdued his prey after a brief battle, and consumed the body in a spruce copse—bones, fur, and all. (Meet the rare swimming wolves that eat seafood.)

Picture Canis lupus on the hunt, and you likely imagine a pack racing across a Yellowstone valley on the heels of an elk, not an individual wolf skulking through a swamp to ambush a rodent. Over the last seven years, however, a research initiative called the Voyageurs Wolf Project has revealed that the region’s wolves have surprisingly eclectic tastes.

Do you recognize that inviting prose and deft turn of phrase? I was mighty surprised when I saw this come up on Ben’s facebook feed and read that National Geographic sent him to Minnesota for this story. I guess that’s a sort of reasonable explanation for not coming to the beaver festival. But just barely.

Gable and colleagues have detected wolves chowing down on swans, otters, fish—even blueberries. What’s more, rather than exclusively chasing their prey, wolves lean on a diverse repertoire of hunting strategies, some of which hint strongly at advanced cognition and even, perhaps, culture.

“We’ve seen that wolves are far more flexible than most people had realized,” Gable says. “That gives us a new understanding of how they’ve proliferated across the Northern Hemisphere.”

I can believe wolves fish. I had a labrador once that fished.

But I’m thrilled that Ben gets to be the one that breaks the news to the public, National Geographic is an awesome place to write, and you can fully imagine that once they have your name on one byline it will show up again and again,

Go read the rest of the article to learn more exciting facts about wolves, but here in Martinez we’re going to selfishly focus our our own local headline.

Beaver Festival returns to Susana Park June 29

This year, the 12th Martinez Beaver Festival once again will celebrate the aquatic animals that are a key species in California and other states.

In announcing the 2019 edition of the festival, founder and president Heidi Perryman said, “A decade ago, Martinez found itself at the center of controversy over some furry neighbors nobody expected.”

Beaver supporters also formed “Worth a Dam,” an organization that has become a longtime advocate for both the animals and the humane approach that allow the beavers to remain in Alhambra Creek while preventing their dam from aggravating the downtown flooding.

Besides meetings and advocacy, advocates decided to plan a gathering to celebrate the aquatic animals that gradually have become one of Martinez’s iconic symbols.

“Defenders guessed the beavers would be harder to kill after residents threw a party for them, and in 2008, the first Beaver Festival was born,” Perryman said.

Hurray Gazette! Fingers crossed I can get something in the Times next week. One of the things that will never cease to amuse me about seeing my name in a news article is the way reporters refer to you by your last name. Like suddenly after years as a civilian you’re in the military or on the Broncos or something. “Perryman get out there and make Colorado proud“.

Napa artist Amy G. Hall will return to Martinez to spend two days creating a chalk mural showing beavers and the other wildlife species they sustain. This will be displayed in Susana Park’s central plaza.

Attendees can watch as she paints.

Each year, the festival has a special event for children, and this year, youngsters can participate in a special treasure hunt to find the “Lost Key to the Waters.” Those participating on the quest will be awarded a commemorative key.

“They say when life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade, but when life gives you beavers, you should definitely celebrate with a ‘dam’ fine festival like this,” Perryman said. “Come see for yourself what only Martinez has to offer!”

Lovely! Great job reporter Donna-Beth Weilenman, whom I just learned is retiring this week, We will miss you! That makes it official. Just about every media contact I made during the great beaver bruhaha is fired or retired. It’s a new world baby. But it’s still a beaver world.

Set the clock. This time next week we’ll all be floating in it!

SOLUTIONS UNDER OUR FEET

heidi08 Beavers and groundwater June 21, 2019

It happens pretty often, Some article in phys,org exactly profiles a problem beavers could help with if we just stopped killing them but the article itself never once mentions this actual solution. We call these the beaver-articles-without-beavers and this example sent by Bob Kobres of Georgia is an excellent demonstration.

Groundwater pumping has significantly reduced US stream flows

Groundwater pumping in the last century has contributed as much as 50 percent to stream flow declines in some U.S. rivers, according to new research led by a University of Arizona hydrologist.

The new study has important implications for managing U.S. water resources. Laws regulating the use of groundwater and surface waters differ from state to state. Some Western states, Arizona among them, manage groundwater and surface water separately.

The scientists focused particularly on the Colorado and Mississippi River basins and looked exclusively at the effects of past groundwater pumping because those losses have already occurred.

The U.S. Geological Survey has calculated the loss of groundwater over the 20th century as 800 cubic kilometers, or 649 million acre-feet. That amount of water would cover the states of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico, plus most of California, with water one foot deep.

Imagine everyone in your state is sharing an ice cream soda by sipping from a straw at the counter. Only this ice cream soda feeds humans and crops and tap water for the entire state Would it matter if more people came to share the soda or if some folks were sipping twice as hard? You bet it would.

If only there were some kind of natural way to replenish and recharge groundwater. Dam.

“We showed that because we’ve taken all of this water out of the subsurface, that has had really big impacts on how our land surface hydrology behaves,” she said. “We can show in our simulation that by taking out this groundwater, we have dried up lots of small streams across the U.S. because those streams would have been fed by groundwater discharge.”

Groundwater helps provide water to existing vegetation, including crops, Condon said.

Receding water tables and dwindling streams can make irrigating crops more difficult and costly. Some native vegetation including cottonwood trees will eventually die if the water table drops below their roots.

Groundwater is often the slowest component of the terrestrial hydrologic system to recover from losses, Condon said.

Gosh, groundwater sure sounds important. I bet if there were some kind of simple solution folks would JUMP at the chance to recharge it. RIght?

The regions most sensitive to a lowering of the water table are east of the Rocky Mountains, where initially the water table was shallow, at the depth of 6-33 feet (2-10 meters), she said. In those regions, groundwater and surface water are more closely linked, and depleting the groundwater is more disruptive to vegetation, streams and rivers.

Other research has shown that parts of the Midwest where the amount of precipitation used to equal the evaporative demand—meaning plants didn’t need irrigation—are becoming more arid, she said. Those are some of the regions where groundwater pumping has reduced surface waters.

You mean all those arid, farming states that are so intolerant of beavers? Like Oklahoma and Kansas? They’re the most vulnerable to drought because they have the weakest groundwater? And they kill beavers the fastest?

It’s darn ironic isn’t it that the places that need water-savers the most tolerate them the least.