All this week I have been thinking about the story in SFGate where a coyote was spotted for the first time swimming to Alcatraz. A visitor saw it and talked to the volunteer who didn’t believe him until he pulled out his phone and showed her the video.

San Francisco coyote swims to Alcatraz for first time ever

It was a late Sunday afternoon like any other on San Francisco’s Alcatraz Island. The day was winding down, and Aidan Moore, a guest relations employee for Alcatraz City Cruises, was at the dock of the tourist attraction helping visitors disembark. Suddenly, one of the tourists approached him, wide-eyed: They had just seen a coyote swimming to shore, something that has never been recorded before.

Mind you its a mile and a quarter swim from the city, which is why they put a prison there in the first place. The idea was that if the bars couldn’t keep you then the sharks would.

But not this coyote.

Christine Wilkinson, a conservation scientist and carnivore ecologist who has studied coyotes for UC Berkeley and the California Academy of Sciences, has a couple of theories. First, she speculated the canine was most likely trying to find a territory of its own. She thinks the animal came from the pack that lives in the Coit Tower area, a territory that has very little green space, making the jaunt particularly appealing. Though coyotes usually seek out new territory in the fall through early winter, an individual doing so in January is not unheard of, Wilkinson said, especially since it’s now mating season for the animals.

That reminded me of beavers dispersing when the are ready to start out on their own. I imagine they go a little farther a field each day exploring and then finally day they are too far from home to make it back to the  lodge by morning. They have no idea where the are headed or what they’ll find. And they are as ill equipped over land as this coyote was in the water. but still many travel across miles to find  place to settle.

Wilkinson noted the coyotes on Angel Island likely formed their pack after one of the animals swam over and called until a mate arrived. She wondered if the individual on Alcatraz will try something similar.

Isn’t that an amazing paragraph? I think of that  bedraggled coyote alone on landscape. “Island-of-the-blue-dophining it”  without a pack as he scrounges for  nested cormorants and gulls eggs and dries to find enough condensed fog to drink.

And waits for the  full moon to HOWL for a companion.

Maybe Bernie Krause made the same mistake we all do. Maybe that fellow wasn’t looking for a mate. Maybe he was just looking for SOMEONE.

A while back about I heard about this technique being tried in Minnesota. I was told that it was recommended by the Western Beaver Alliance. Okay, but I’m not sure I believe it can work. Let’s see for ourselves closer to home.

3. Beavers at Bald Hill

Nature’s engineers have been hard at work at Bald Hill Farm, but their dam-building efforts have flooded one of Corvallis’s most accessible recreational paths.

The solution? Oregon’s first notch exclusion fence, installed by Greenbelt Land Trust in partnership with the city of Corvallis, Marys River Watershed Council and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The innovative approach aims to balance beaver activity with public access to the Bald Hill paved path. While the industrious rodents have been creating valuable habitat for turtles, dragonflies, amphibians and birds, their handiwork has made the trail impassable.

Well okay your hearts in the right place and it sounds good on paper, but why would beavers stick around anywhere they can’t fix a permanent leak in their dam? Technically a flow device IS just that, but they can’t SEE it. Plus when the rains and the leak continues won’t it just get worse and worse until they have to leave?

Pregnant and homeless?

According to an article distributed by Greenbelt Land Trust, the exclusion fence works by covering a strategic notch cut into the beaver dam. Made from basic fence panels, posts and wire, the structure lowers water levels without completely dismantling the beavers’ work. The design takes advantage of beaver behavior — the animals are triggered by the sound of flowing water and typically attempt to repair leaks they can hear.

Installation required the team to wade into the pond carrying the assembled fence, then secure it with metal posts driven into the bottom. A floor panel prevents beavers from tunneling underneath, while the fence extends beyond the notch to block access from below the dam. Fish can still pass through the ponds freely.

The big question is whether the beavers will accept this compromise. While they won’t climb over the barrier, they’re known to construct mud walls around obstacles, the Greenbelt article noted.

Greenbelt Land Trust is inviting the public to watch this experiment unfold. A drop-in event on Jan. 31 from 4-6 p.m. offers a chance to see the fence and possibly spot beavers at work. A guided walk on Feb. 11 from 10 a.m.-noon will explore the beaver ponds from another vantage point.

Let’s say that I was building a house to keep my family safe and some big agency came in and installed a fence so I could NEVER build the roof. My family was welcome to stay as long as I liked in the house but open to the elements and I could never ever build the roof and stop the snow or the rain from getting in.

Would I stay?

I heard from a friend that Sherri Tippie is pretty darn frustrated lately at the mad rush to relocate beavers – and opps a few of them don’t make it. I don’t disagree at all. Beaver relocation is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise. And how often does that happen? She offers this video as a reminder.

I was trying to remember when we did this and realized it was so foggy because I planned it for 2020 which of course we couldn’t do because of covid for another 2 years. But it was still fun anyway.