Once upon a time we were the only beaver supporters this side of the Willamette, but now we have beaver believers in Rocklin, in Monterey, in Sonoma and Fairfield and now Alameda. That matters because me have a whole host of volunteers for festival.
Elizabeth Winstead just did our talk for Safari West and happened to reveal and artistic side in the process. So of course I tapped her for this job.
How was your father’s day? i had such mixed emotions about this article. I read it like a kid at a scary move, rapt with attention but holding hands up in front of my face ready to block out the view at any moment but fingers splayed so as not to miss anything. Mary is a science writer in Alabama do we’re grading on a curve, and maybe you can help me know what to make of it.
With Father’s Day nearly here, this seems as good a time as any to celebrate one of my favorite animals, Castor canadensis, the North American Beaver.
Male beavers are notably excellent dads. Along with their lifelong, monogamous mates, beaver dads are hands-on parents, acting as role models for, as well as defenders of, their young. As a result, beavers have one of the soundest family structures among mammals.
Okay, So far so good. Beavers make great Dad’s. I can’t disagree. This is where it started to get uncomfortable.
When I was a youngster, our dog Ziggy disrupted a family of beavers. With a head full of maternal urges having recently weaned a litter of pups, Ziggy stole two baby beavers from a beaver lodge and adopted them as her own. Ziggy made the local news with her interspecies care, nursing the baby beavers as if they were her puppies.
Soon the kits graduated to bottles. Rating a 10 on the adorableness scale, a baby beaver drinking from a bottle is unspeakably cute. Beavers are adept with their front paws, and these little beavers clasped the bottles just as human infants would and gazed into our eyes as we fed them.
We passed one of the babies on to a friend and devoted our attention to the remaining kit who we named Beave, who grew quickly. To ensure his feet developed properly, we took him swimming frequently. My brother, Robert, and I would swim apart in the lake, and Beave would swim back and forth between us, taking a rest on our shoulders, nuzzling our necks between laps.
I’m so confused. Your dog attacked a family a and stole two beaver kits. And you think beaver Dads are so important to a beaver’s education that you decided to kidnap the kits and not let them learn from their dad? And them separate the siblings so they couldn’t even learn from each other?
We eventually released Beave into the wild. My dad, the infamous snake-man Bob Mount, would visit him often, bringing honey buns from the Zippy Mart. These visits ceased one fateful afternoon when my dad showed up empty-handed and Beave attacked him.
A beaver’s teeth are covered in iron-rich enamel, giving them their trademark orange color, as well as the ability to chomp down a small tree in just minutes. My father was not willing to have a round with those teeth, no matter how adorable Beave was.
Let me get this straight, you’re saying that because the yearling never had a dad to teach it what foods to eat in the wild it was totally dependent on human food. And when your Daddy showed up without it on day he bit him? And your Dad didn’t like that so he, what exactly, i guess shot him?
Is that like what other parents in other states describe to their children as “taking him to live on a farm?”
Despite the near cult-like enthusiasm of our new Buc-ee’s, some consider beavers a pest. Environmentalists and other scientists disagree.
Beavers are a keystone species, necessary to prevent the collapse of their ecosystem. The near extinction of beavers in our nation’s history has left a scar. We may never experience the streams and ponds in the deserts our beavers once created.
Between the fur traders of the 1600s and the following colonization of North America for farms, our beaver population plummeted from 400 million to about 100,000. This brutal assault resulted in the loss of an estimated 195,000 to 260,00 acres of wetlands. While beavers are no longer considered endangered, the same cannot be said of our wetlands.
As ecosystem engineers, beavers alter their landscape by building dams, an innate behavior triggered by the sound of running water. These dams create ponds and swamps, which provide both food and shelter for beavers. Within the ponds, beavers build lodges and canals, creating intricate wetland environments which are home to wood ducks, turtles, fish, migratory waterfowl and countless other critters.
These wetlands are capable of mitigating climate change by soaking the water table which in turn helps prevent drought, creating firebreaks in areas threatened by wildfires, and replenishing waters in areas of drastic snowmelt. The ponds also act as carbon sinks, trapping and holding onto excess carbon from the atmosphere.
Well I’m guessing you really enjoyed Ben’s book, although I’m not sure what he’d think of your story.
Additionally, beaver dams improve the quality of the water downstream, filtering agricultural contaminants and other pollutants by up to 46 percent.
Armed with an appreciation and understanding of the beneficial effects of beavers on our environment, efforts have been made in the last hundred years to reintroduce beavers to the landscape.
My favorite of these was the Idaho Fish and Game’s relocation strategy in 1948. Rather than exterminate these large rodents who’d become pests in agricultural areas, they dropped them by parachute, having a stash left over from the recent World War, into a heavily forested area. Contained in crates designed to open on impact, all but one of the 76 beavers relocated by parachute survived. In flyover studies conducted the following year, scientists were pleased to see new wetlands and canals, evidence of the beavers’ hard work.
As well as gaining recognition for their important contributions to our environment, beaver engineering has proven to be a cost-effective, efficient method of restoring wetlands and managing flooding. “Let the rodent do the work,” as those in beaver restoration say.
Happy Father’s Day out there to all the dads who, like the talented beaver, get so many important jobs done!
You see why I’m confused. She ends with some strong defense of beaver benefits and quotes a couple of our favorite people. She definitely believes in beavers. But her childhood story doesn’t even give her a twinge of regret. What happened to the other kit you pawned off on a friend?
i can only imagine.
{ really enjoyed this article although I’m not sure why saying Beavers matter to amphibians is groundbreaking research anywhere. Certainly it’s old news in the west, but I guess everyone needs convincing in their home town.
A 2012 graduate of Red River High School, Stammen spent parts of four summers from 2019 through 2022 researching the impact of beaver activity on the forest community – mainly amphibians and invertebrates – within 218,200-acre Voyageurs National Park.
As part of his research, Stammen monitored 55 beaver ponds, ranging from tabletop size to a few acres, within the park, collecting invertebrate and water quality samples and documenting amphibian species both visually and through acoustic recorders programmed to record 5 minutes out of every hour throughout the nighttime hours.
Stammen now is poring through the reams of data he collected, which will be the subject of his doctoral dissertation.
“There’s very little pollution in this area,” Stammen said. “It’s a wilderness area, for the most part, and that’s a wonderful aspect to this project – it’s looking at what a really healthy ecosystem looks like, so we can make a comparison to more human-impacted ecosystems like something adjacent to an agricultural area.”
How on earth is that possible? I am nobody and have already met at least two scienctists writing about this. One was from the bay area who said that redlegged frogs were more common around beaver lodges and the other was from the forest service who said that beaver habitat was a game changer for amphibians.
How can this be ‘news’ in Minnesota?
“He designed a project that just relied on the work he could do by himself with just his canoe and his legs to get around,” said Windels, a Crookston native. “And so, he would come for a couple of weeks at a time and disappear into the backcountry and then reappear a couple of weeks later just as cheerful as when he went in.
“He did a great job.”
Maybe I’m just jealous. Gathering my dissertation data involved me walking back and forth across a psych hospital. I never even got to use a canoe of any kind, let alone one of my own making.
“
The best part of this whole project is just being out there in the woods and enjoying nature,” Stammen said. “Sometimes, it’s challenging, and sometimes, it’s just amazing.
“Not everyone gets to appreciate just the silence of it, the stars at night with no ambient light to obscure it, beautiful birdsong in the morning.”
And, of course, the sounds of wood frogs, spring peepers and other amphibian life that could be just deafening, at times.
I really really believe that. I’m imagining the memories you will take with you at your final orals and beyond. Chirp Chirp Chirp and a few bouts of lyme disease. Not your usual academic haunts.
While it’s too soon to draw any conclusions from his fieldwork, Stammen says he feels very fortunate to have worked on a project he could do by himself. If all goes according to plan, he’ll present his dissertation and receive his doctoral degree next spring.
“It was really lucky that I could find a project that was doable with just one person, but it was still a major undertaking for one person because there are a lot of parts to this,” Stammen said. “I was able to negotiate doing a really traditional field-based observational study where it’s just me out in the woods with a notebook in my canoe and boots.
“For me, it was really important – one, to be in northern Minnesota – but also to go at a slower pace because I feel like when I’m out in that system, I’m able to get to know it really well and observe closely and understand something more about it.”
His fieldwork, Stammen says, has been more about the process than the product – “getting my diploma or publishing a paper or something like that.”
Well I am glad you learned process because I generally think there needs be no ghost from the grave to tell us about this finding. But I am jealous. Mostly that you got to spend so much time with beavers.
Yesterday was silent auction day, as in the day we label and tag all the items for the silent auction. The woman on the immediate right is Barbara Patchin who used to be helped by our stalwart Leslie Mills who has wisely moved on to more free spirit activity at the art table
Barbara was the second in command at the Parks and Recreation department, and for years hers was the only friendly face I saw in the city when I went to get our event permit. She was so friendly that when she retired I asked boldly if she might want to help us. Now by virtue of a dramatic character flaw she has volunteered with her husband Richard (formerly on the PRMCC who permitted us every year) to handling the entire thing them selves. The pair are the very rare combionation of breathtakingly organized and unexpectedly mellow. They have 100 clip boards which they use elegantly on the day. We are so blessed to have their help I am still pinching myself,
So yesterday we went through all the goodies and today Jon moves them all from our house to their house where they will take them over. As always they were especially fond of the puppets which once again were an enormously generous donation by Folkmanis. Since they have grandchildren I’m imagining their home is full of dramatic reproductions for father[‘s day.
One final thanks is for our long time friend Sheri Hartstein. She is the buddy of Sherry Guzzi at the Sierra Wildlife Coalition who photographed the Sierra Beavers for years and after Ted’s death helped with their booth at the festival. This year she can’t be joining us because she was injured in a fall on the trail and is now undergoing rehab so similar to mine that we swap war stories. Since she wasn’t going to be able to be there on the day this year and still wanted to help out she stepped in to write all 71 bid sheets for the auction items – an amusingly tedius task. Think J Peterman catalogue without the photos. So thank you Sheri! Thank you Barbara and thank you Richard! Beavers get by witha little help from their friends.
Yesterday I had a very positive conversation with Maggie Fusek of Patch in Contra Costa, sonoma and solano Counties.. She was sorry to miss us last year and was so kind in her promotion of this festival to make up for it. Just look how nice.
MARTINEZ, CA — Longtime Martinez Beaver Festival organizer Heidi Perryman is excited to once again hold the beloved event that celebrates the unwelcome beavers who came to the city in 2007 and whose offspring are now thought to be thriving throughout the Bay Area.
“We haven’t had local beavers for five years, but I do think they transitioned to Fairfield and they are living their best lives,” Perryman told Patch. “We also have beavers in Napa and beavers in Sonoma; we had beavers show up in Pleasant Hill and in Walnut Creek this year.”
The original beaver father — called Buster Beaver by many — lived with two consecutive mama beavers in Martinez for 10 years and should have around 27 children and grandchildren, Perryman said. These descendants are now living in urban waterways throughout the Bay Area, she said.
“I think some of those kits [beaver babies] actually come back now that they are grown up and when they don’t see anyone here to connect with, they keep going,” said Perryman, who founded the volunteer group Worth A Dam in 2007 when a family of beavers moved into Alhambra Creek and built a lodge that some feared would cause flooding. The effort to protect the beavers grew into a yearly festival.
I forget sometimes what it’s like to be quoted and referred to as Perryman Perryman Perryman over and over. I feel so used to just being Heidi or even H that I feel a bit like I’ve been drafted or playing for the yankees.
Volunteers from Fairfield and the Beaver Brigade from San Luis Obispo — where a beaver festival was held earlier this year — will be in town to help with the 14th annual Martinez Beaver Festival.
Perryman invites people from throughout the Bay Area and beyond to come and learn why beavers are superheroes when it comes to climate change and why more cities should be teaming up with them like Martinez did.
The festival, which has become one of the most-attended nature events in the Bay Area, is from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, June 24, at Susana Street Park at Susana and Estudillo streets in downtown Martinez. There will be live music, wildlife and conservation exhibits, children’s activities and a silent auction.
The East Bay Regional Park District is bringing its lifesize mobile fish tank, and festivalgoers can see native predatory birds and a selection of bats and reptiles.
Renowned chalk artist Amy Gallaher Hall of Napa will create a sidewalk mural, and children are invited to watercolor the inside of a beaver lodge.
Goodness she’s making it sound fun! Doesn’t it sound like it’s going to be fun? Sometimes I am so worried about all the details I forget to notice what a truly fun day it is. Unlike an other.
For the first time ever, the festival starts with a performance by the acclaimed children’s choir VOENA from Benicia, followed by a packed lineup of bluegrass, Irish folk and Dixieland. Children can join a superhero treasure hunt and adults can learn from various exhibits or bid on donated items including a luxury safari for two.
“Come learn why beavers matter and why California is working harder to cooperate with them,” Perryman said. “We are hoping to teach other communities how and why to coexist with beavers.” For more information, go to Martinezbeavers.org.
That’s it in a nutshell. Nicely done Maggie.
