What if there was just one beaver festival in all the world every summer for fourteen years. And then, suddenly there were two!
This graphic was dropped yesterday by the San Luis Obispo Beaver Brigade. It’s the creation of Terre Dunivant, the artist who helped with our flyer last year when Amelia could not. I love the language “Habitat Creator”. It’s like the term job creator for wildlife.
Isn’t that marvelous? Turns out Wes and Margie the two helpers who came to our festival last year will come up in March and get whatever materials we can share, like our beaver lawn signs and some larger artwork so that we can be there in spirit, showing them 14 years of support and cheering them on.
California needs a cascade of beaver festivals. Don’t you think?
The great news is that I heard from EBRP last wee that they want to come and bring their mobile fish tank to the festival again this year! Remember how cool that was? Whoo hoo!
Things are in the crazy planning stage for the festival. I was sad to hear that the Alhambra Valley Band isn’t going to be joining us again this year. There was a generous offer from Hope Savage for her new trio “Savage Bond” to join us, and the UnConcord will of course finish the day. I did a bit of begging and got Extended Roots to play in the middle.
Dave Kwinter will kindly bag pipe us again through the children’s parade.
But how to start? I was in a quandary until I thought about asking the dynamo that is Voena. A famous children’ chorus from Benicia, they have performed at the Whitehouse and at the 2012 Olympics. I thought for sure they should visit a beaver festival. I dusted off my manners and pitched my best volley and guess what? The visionary director Annabelle Marie wants the children to be there! So for the first time in our history they will start the day.
So far so good, but I still hadn’t heard from our sound guru John Koss that he could be there again. Since there’s so many things to set into motion at the same time that there’s a part of organizing a festival that is a bit like the story of “Stone Soup”. You ask people for things based on the promise of other things coming that haven’t actually been secured yet. And if that doesn’t work you just ask for something else until it does work. Just between us. The pessimist in me thought wouldn’t be ironic if I got the full day of music lined up and then we had no audio? hahaha.
But of course he called the other night and wants very much to join us. So there art thou happy!
Here they are singing for Dr. Maya Angelou…
Meanwhile are valiant artist FRogard Schmidt is back after knee surgery and ready and willing to help, We schemed about the idea of having children water color the INSIDE of beaver lodges for the art project and when I suggested making the outline of the lodge for kids to fill in she roared with laughter and insisted no no no they would tear the paper themselves just like beavers into the correct shape.
She just sent these that some students did last week to practice.
Something tells me that part is going to come out just fine…
It’s not just Chernobyl where beavers are reclaiming huge wastelands for their own and slowly making it habitable for other wildlife. They’re doing it in Detroit also.
Shoreline bushes chewed back. Nearby trees felled and demolished. Hundreds of branches piled near a mound damming up a river and flooding the area. To some people the scene looks like environmental havoc.
To the beaver, it’s home.
Using trail cameras, FOX 2 photojournalist Coulter Stuart caught one of these rodents building his own den. It was spotted at an inlet on Stony Island in the Detroit River. In one scene, the beaver can be seen packing mud into the side of a mound – fortifications for his hut.
In another clip the beaver is seen walking on his hind legs, carrying sticks from one end ot the other.
Capturing this ingenuity on display can be tough since the rodents are nocturnal and only build at night. During the day, the only evidence are their footprints in the dirt and the discarded wood that surrounds their homes.
There’s evidence of another kind of activity on Stony Island, too. Scrap metal and sunken barges now shape the shoreline, while beer cans and shotgun shells litter the land. One dilapidated building has a message spray-painted on its side telling visitors the island smells like urine.
Yup trashy metal and a creek that smells like urine. That’s not so far off from the fine home our beavers once enjoyed. From the beaver perspective large chunks of metal aren’t that different from heavy wood and rock. They’ll do just fine to keep things anchored to the dam.
Once the home base for a massive project that transformed the Detroit River and Great Lakes shipping traffic, the 100-acre plot of land is slowly being reclaimed by wildlife.
“Wildlife is resilient. If you give it half a chance, you’d be surprised,” said Bob Burns who does conservation work with the Friends of the Detroit River group.
It may be a surprise that beavers have returned at all. They were harvested to near-extinction when fur trappers arrived from Europe during the colonial era. The added pressures of pollution and habitat loss from Southeast Michigan’s rapid growth in the early 20th century would have made any return to the area extremely difficult.
But in the past 10 years, he’s also seen mother nature’s response when it’s offered an opportunity to recover. The reemergence of beavers is a sign of that progress.
“I’m not saying things are perfect, far from it,” he said. “But from the days of dumping oil and grease and having fires on the river to now with improvements in water quality – it’s really starting to pay off over the past decade.”
Mr Burns is my favorite kind of naturalist. One whose eyes and ears are fully opened to the here and now of wildlife. I really enjoyed this short video with clips of Ben and Dan Flores talking about what the landscape was and could be again.
We ruin a waterway so badly that no one wants to live anywhere near it. And then because its neglected and free of human threats beavers move in and start to improve things so it looks nice again. And then people move BACK because it they want their pretty river back and suddenly they want to get rid of the pesky rodents.
Of course you know how the story goes. First it’s WOW BEAVERS ARE BACK! and then its Ugh Beavers are back. Those rats ruining our culverts or eating our cherry trees.
Their population growth has also led to an increase in nuisance complaints related to beavers – though not to the point they’re management requires a larger response.
“It’s still not to the point that it’s a growing problem, but it’s a tight rope to walk,” Cooley said. “People like having beavers around. It’s a good indication you have good habitat. But there does come a point where they start backing things up. That’s in their nature.”
Beavers are now regular sight at the Bayview Yacht Club. They’ve also found suitable habitat at the Conner Creek Power Plant where the Rouge River opens into the Detroit River. The DNR keeps watch of them on Belle Isle while a few have prompted animal trapping calls on Grosse Ile.
The environment’s conservation will likely spur more interactions between humans and beavers as their numbers continue to grow. But Cooley says the beavers taking up residence on the islands that border Grosse Ile may not be such a bad thing.
“Being in the Detroit River, there’s not as many opportunities to cause problems. So that’s a good place for them to live,” he said. “If you build it, they will come.”
You know how it is, you have to strike a balance. Just like they did when they filled the river with ships bringing toxic supplies and then turned the entire boatway into a rusted dump. I guess that was a balance between pocketbooks. His and Theirs.
This new idea you’re suggesting, a balance between humans and nature, that sounds a little crazy to most people.
First you find out where they are and where they aren’t. And then you do things to make them more likely to stick around, like planting trees and kicking out the trappers. And then you sit back and let beavers do the work.
A beaver census is just downstream, to be administered by the White River National Forest this summer through October.
The Pitkin County Board of County Commissioners on Wednesday unanimously approved an agreement to allocate $50,000 of the Healthy Rivers and Streams Fund to partially finance a study into beaver activity and habitats Roaring Fork Valley headwaters.
“This agreement is to investigate and implement actions to promote beaver utilization of our headwater streams up on federal land in order to promote watershed health and occupation by native aquatic species,” said Lisa Tasker of the Healthy Rivers and Streams Citizen Advisory Board.
The money will go to hire two seasonal employees to visit high-elevation sites across federal land in the valley. Clay Ramey, a fisheries biologist with the White River National Forest, said he compiled 200 randomly generated sites, including Thompson Creek, Castle Creek, Snowmass Creek, eastern Maroon Creek, Hunter Creek, Woody Creek, and the upper Frying Pan area.
Now that and a beaver festival to teach everyone why it matters sounds like a really really good idea. Heck talk to Ellen Wohl and fund a couple graduate students doing the same thing while you’re at it.
“I’m really enthusiastic about this,” Commissioner Greg Poschman said. “And it’s this sort of activity that helps, you know, turn our kids on to preservation in the natural world and protection of important resources.”
“I imagined that we might use it for getting some beavers introduced into some river areas that maybe used to have them in the past but don’t have them now,” he said. “Because I see beavers as a way of backing the water up and helping the high-elevation wetlands become more of a sponge to hold water for later in the summer. To me, it’s really a good thing to do to keep the water back and up in the high country as long as possible.”
Ecologically, beavers dams and the pools they produce allow a healthy, vibrant riparian zone in areas they might not otherwise exist. And they hold runoff water at higher elevations for longer.
Ramey said that once the U.S. Forest Service knows where beavers already live and where they would improve the ecosystem, they can relocate beavers to sites that make ecological sense.
Okay I can tell you right now where they make sense. EVERYWHERE. And including all those nice places you’re relocating them from too. Every place where you want the water cleaner.
Sure if you have some places where you want to keep the water dirty, good ahead and move those beavers.
“Beavers were native here. And so, before the gringos showed up and killed them all, there were beavers everywhere. And more or less every stream that’s less than something like 5% slope was just chock a block with beaver dams. The animals adapted to that, and the plant communities adapted to that. And the water that came out of these watersheds probably a lot slower than it did once we took all the beavers out,” Ramey said. “It’s using beavers as a management tool in this way; it’s attempting to re-create what was the existing natural, ecological context for the way water came off of the mountains here.”
Beaver dams also help in wildfire mitigation, as their pools encourage greater ground water retention and a refuge for wildlife in the event of a fire.
Once USFS has a complete data set of beavers and potential habitats throughout the forest, Ramey said that he will be able to inform Colorado Parks and Wildlife where to relocate beavers that have set up shop in residential areas.
“It’s not a beaver re-introduction project,” he said. “We’re just looking around.”
Well sure. First look around. And find out what’s currently happening in these places. Maybe streams are so damaged by the beaver shortage that you’ll need to help them along with some beaver dam analogs. Maybe there’s some scrubby places that could use a little more willow or aspen before you get a healthy beaver population.
The entire discussion was pretty congenial, even when one commissioner talked about disscecting a road kill beaver in his daughter’s fourth grade class…children love to learn about nature ya know.
‘Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet, To give these mourning duties to your father: But, you must know, your father lost a father; That father lost, lost his,
Ten years ago on this very morning two very significant things happened at once. I was waken by a telephone call telling me my father of 84 years had died during the night which was not unexpected and while I was waiting for dawn to be able to meet my mother and sister at the home where he died I was sent a hot-off-the-presses advance copy of the just-completed beaver documentary by the Jari Osborne. Even now hearing the haunting initial tones of the theme song reminds me viscerally of that morning.
I had been corresponding with Jari and her assistant producer ever since they started the original documentary in Canada “The beaver Whisperers“. I was thrilled to help ‘Amercanize’ the story and enjoyed passing nuggets along that they might want to follow up on. At one time there had been discussion of including our Martinez beavers in the story, but that never transpired for reasons you couldn’t possibly believe even if I bothered to explain them.
The odd thing is that during the filming of the piece Jari’s father had also died which I only knew because of the strange coincidence that the father of her assisstant producer died around the same time. The double loss slowed production and upended the lives of both women. So in a weird way it made absolute sense to me that this would arrive in my inbox on the very morning that my own father had died. And of course I had to wait a few hours before meeting my mom and sister, and I did exactly what you would think I would do in those calmly suspenseful hours.
I cried lightly the entire time. Partly with sorrow for my Dad, and partly with joy that this story was finally being told. I knew when I saw it was the beginning of seismic change. Remember that this is the documentary that Emily Fairfax quotes as convincing her to change majors that lead to her amazing fire research that lead to beaver policy being changed in California. The rest of the world would see it the following year and my morning would get significantly worse from there but it will be forever ingrained on my mind, how the best and worst possible things happened at exactly the same time.
Because life is like that.
It doesn’t really make any difference at all, but I was still pleased to see this when it finally aired, We make what ever difference we can in this world while we’re in it, one stick at a time.
Isn’t that marvelous? Turns out Wes and Margie the two helpers who came to our festival last year will come up in March and get whatever materials we can share, like our beaver lawn signs and some larger artwork so that we can be there in spirit, showing them 14 years of support and cheering them on.
Something tells me that part is going to come out just fine…
