BEAVERS CAN HELP JEFF BEZOS AND TNC

Well, well, well, What do you know. Amazon is partnering with the Nature Conservancy on the Right Now Climate Fund to the tune of 100,000,000 dollars for natural climate solutions including forests, peatlands and wetlands. (I guess if you never pay taxes you have a lot of spare change to toss around.) The laudable part is that it will make Amazon carbon neutral 10 years ahead of the Paris accord schedule.

The Nature Conservancy and Amazon Partner to Bring Natural Climate Solutions to Scale

Today, The Nature Conservancy is announcing a $100 million commitment from Amazon to restore and protect forests, wetlands, grasslands, and peatlands around the world. Amazon is partnering with The Nature Conservancy – an organization with a proven track record of using the best-available science for conservation – to identify, design, and implement natural climate solutions initiatives.

The two organizations have entered into an exploratory phase to assess carbon reduction programs and to identify, design, and implement natural climate solutions, which will be supported by the Right Now Climate Fund. The fund is one part of the company’s efforts to achieve net-zero carbon emissions across its business by 2040 – 10 years ahead of the 2050 target outlined in the Paris climate agreement.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? 100,000,000 is a lot of money. 2 million per state. It is enough money to put BDA’s in every 10 miles in all the headwater streams in the contiguous united states. If you invested all that money in beavers they would make sure your investment paid off.

We know that TNC has done great things for beavers, and terrible things for beavers in its history. The acting director now of The Nature Conservancy is Sally Jewell, the former Secretary of the Interior under Obama. She’s a Washington-State outdoor loving former oil engineer so we have to assume she knows a thing or two about beavers.

I hope she remembers this article written in their own magazine not too long ago.

Beaver Mimicry Projects Could Be Key to Restoring Wetlands

Left to their own devices, streams are messy. They wander and wind, pushing up against one bank before turning to swirl around another. In the spring, they pour over the top of the walls created to contain them, flooding wetlands and bringing water and life to everything from willows to deer.

Recent research is beginning to show that if humans create dams to mimic those built by beavers, the final result can lure beavers back and ultimately result in the same positive effects for fish, wildlife and vegetation.

Let me just repeat again. You can build an awful lot of BDA’s with 100,000,000 dollars. And after you do beavers will move in and do the rest for you, saving water, trapping carbon, enriching biodiversity, improving habitat for hative plants.. The Nature Company knows this and has told Jeff Bezos, right?

Just to make sure I sent them both a note yesterday. Maybe you should too.

“Now is the time to think big and work toward innovative solutions to climate change,” said Kara Hurst, worldwide director of sustainability, Amazon. “We need a partner like TNC to ensure we apply the best conservation science and develop strategic programs to reach our goals.”

We couldn’t agree more, Kara.

A MISSED VOICE FOR WILDLIFE

heidi08 Friends of Martinez Beavers September 29, 2019

This one matters.

Wildlife Columnist Gary Bogue has died. “Bogue, whose legacy includes founding the country’s first wildlife rehabilitation hospital and inspiring the creation of Tony La Russa’s Animal Rescue Foundation, died Thursday in his Benicia home. He was 81.”

Gary was the original curator at the Lindsay Wildlife Museum and started up the operation lo, these many years ago, with one valiant rescue worker at his side. This happens to be our own beloved VP, Cheryl Reynolds, who regarded him as a dear friend and was heartbroken by his death. In fact it’s hard to imagine a world where Cheryl ever got interested in our beavers without that first life-shaping chapter.

Gary was the first respected voice of support for the Martinez Beavers, writing often about them in his column and nudgingpublic opinion in their favor. Beyond this he was the respected member who persuaded the East Bay Sierra Club to get involved in the first place. When I was called unexpectedly to appear before a council meeting one night in downtown berkeley and they voted to draft a position letter on the beavers one of the groups leaders told me privately they never would have gotten involved if it weren’t for Gary. Their unusual letter (At that time the Sierra Club rarely got involved with wildlife issues) was a big factor in the outcome of the beavers fate.

But the Martinez beavers are just one of the many, countless wildlife stories Gary’s compassion touched and saved. (In my narrow mind of course the most important one, but he affected the lives and hopes of many many wild things and people.) Think of all the children that grew with Lindsey Wildlife and went on to become docents and are now working in related fields as adults.

“He taught certainly a whole community, if not a whole world, how to respect and live with the natural world around them,” said Bogue’s wife, Lois Kazakoff, who retired from The Chronicle in May after 26 years at the newspaper.

Their are lives that make a difference, and lives that make a sea change. Gary was the latter. He forged a path to the wild world that countless numbers of adults and children are still following. He touched our hearts and made us remember that we ourselves were wild once and needed a kind of rescue.

However you spend your windy Sunday afternoon, take a moment to watch a seed-gathering bird, a scurrying squirrel, a lean coyote slipping over the horizon and think of Gary Bogue, who made the wide wild world familiar to us all.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Mary Oliver

WRITING ABOUT WRITING ABOUT BEAVERS

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver ecological impact September 28, 2019

Time for more good news. This article by Eli Frankovich from the Idaho based Lewiston Tribune does what few others attempt: offer a sense of context for the current and past response to beavers, and recognizes the dramatic impact of Ben Golfarb’s book.

Leave it to beavers: Relocation effort paying dividends

More than a decade ago, before a water-loving rodent with a penchant for gnawing on trees became the animal du jour — its ecological powers heralded as a climate salve, ecosystem restorative and all around tonic of hope — the seemingly humble beaver brought two unlikely allies together.

“Animal du jour” I LOVE that phrase. Remember all of you were loving beavers before it was the cool thing to do.

Joel Kretz, a rancher-politician with a penchant for theatrics and dislike of predators (cougars and wolves, in particular); and Mike Peterson, the executive director of the Lands Council, an environmentalist with the gentle mannerisms of an aged hippie and the resolve of a veteran of the Timber Wars, found themselves on the same side of an issue: beaver relocation.

In 2006, Kretz first co-sponsored a bill in the Legislature legalizing the nonlethal relocation of “nuisance” beavers in Washington. It was a progressive bill, one that acknowledged the oft-ignored importance of the world’s second-largest rodent.

While that so-called “Beaver Bill” didn’t become law until 2012, it set the stage for Washington to become the beaver leader in the United States.

I love an article that starts off with a good beaver history lesson and mentions that puns get overused in beaver stories. I’m not certain Washington, however, that Washington was the first to rethink beavers, even though it might be the first now. I would say Utah was the first first but Washington has become the new first. Does that make sense?.

Streams slowed by beaver dams and lodges create better habitat for animals and insects, collect silt, and store and cool water, among other things. In videos taken by the Lands Council in the Colville National Forest bear, moose, herons, cougars and more flock to beaver complexes.

Those successes have increased the social and political tolerance and love for the furred builders. Fueled in part by Goldfarb’s book, beavers are having a moment, their positive impact on everything from animals, to plants, to climate change being recognized.

I don’t think there has been another article discussing the impact of Ben’s book or the fate of beavers in general. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever read a reporter visiting the archives of his own newspaper to see how coverage has changed.

A trip through The Spokesman-Review’s “beaver” file in the morgue (the place where old newspaper stories are kept) is a grisly affair with more than a few bad puns and awful alliterations.

“Beaver meets end under car wheels,” reads one headline from 1956. “A beastly beaver terrorizing the Mississippi River city …” states an Associated Press story from 1994. “California firms fined for starving beavers,” goes another.

Now it’s not uncommon to walk the river bank and see those trees wrapped in a fine wire mesh, another sign of increasing respect and willingness to coexist with the industrious rodents.

Can I just pause here and say how much I LOVE this article and journalist? Eli Francovich is a true kindred spirit if beavers, I can tell you. And of this website in particular.

That isn’t to say it’s all peeled cambiums and roses. While Washington may have model beaver legislation and nonlethal removal permitting, WDFW still kills more beavers than it relocates. In 2018, 28 beavers were relocated, 1,251 were killed due to human-beaver conflict, and 730 were killed by trappers, according to WDFW.

Wow, A reporter that not only looks up the past stories on beaver trapping but visits the current information as well. If you were very naive you would think this happens all the time, but I can assure it doesn’t. Be still my heart.

That aside, the story of beavers in Washington is mostly one of cooperation and collaboration. While it may have been enshrined in law in 2012 with Kretz’s Beaver Bill, evidence of Washingtonians affinity for beavers goes back further.

Amongst the blood and gore in the beaver newspaper archives rests one 1968 article that seems to predict a more beaver-friendly future.

“Approximately 30 beavers each year are moved from one area to another throughout Stevens County,” the article states. “The beaver is important because of his contribution to conservation. By constructing his dams and ponds, the beaver provides homes and food for all forms of wildlife such as fish ducks, mink, muskrats, etc.

That’s a fantastic article. I just love thinking of Lewiston, which is right on the border of Washington, peering over the state line at its neighbors and thinking “We should be more like them!” Let’s all copy Washington and Ben’s Book, okay?

BEAVERS HELP BEARS

heidi08 Beavers and Bears September 27, 2019

Ben Goldfarb wrote last night that he had just met the author of a cool paper on the thermoregulation of bears. Apparently the animals have a lot of stored fat just in case food gets scarce and as the climate heats up they need to cool off regularly in ponds. And guess what just happens to make some of the awesome ponds they use?

American black bear thermoregulation at natural and artificial water sources

Michael A. Sawaya, Alan B. Ramsey, and Philip W. Ramsey

He sent along a great national geographic video of the pond soak phenomenon. But as it happens I already had footage of a black bear bathing in a beaver pond that was sent to me a few years ago by the VP of the Sierra Foothills Audubon. This bear is enjoying the beaver pond by his house.

Willie Hall of SFAS filmed this bear taking a dip in the beaver pond hear his house in Grass Valley. Apparently he’s enjoying a fish dinner with his swim. Because Beavers Benefit Bears.

Ben was thrilled to see it and is sharing it with the author because he thinks he’d love to see it.

Of course beavers help bears. Why wouldn’t they?

CLIMATE CHANGE MITIGATION IN PROGRESS

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beavers and climate change September 26, 2019

Good news from our friends at Wyoming Untrapped which had permission to run this ad on the last page of the Local Headwaters Magazine. The Headline reads “Climate Change Mitigation in Progress”.

I’m not able to embed the ad here but this is the excellent copy:

Beavers are born to build wetlands. Fight wildfire flooding and drought by ensuring water is available on our public landscapes. Prevent extinction of critical species by ensuring a complete ecosystem. Support a wide range of wildlife habitats including amphibians,fish and songbirds.

You may, and I think you do, recognize the photo as one taken in a certain Martinez California by our own Suzi Eszterhas. I believe that is Junior hauling off a willow branch generously provided by our own Jon Ridler. It’s pretty remarkable when you think about it all the places where the Martinez beavers have turned up. Including NOAA, USDA, and FWS. Considering all of these have photographers they pay for images, you would think people would notice the remarkable photos you are able to get when you allow beavers to live amoung you.

I’d like very much for it to catch on please.