Am I a zealot?
I mean I’m obviously passionate about the water-stewards, but am I a puritan? Am I unreasonable? I don’t feel like a purist – but maybe that’s just how being a zealot is – you always think your crazy beliefs are reasonable and everyone else is just wrong.
Yesterday I found out a few things about the Napa project that helped me understand why no one had filled me in before hand. Seems the flow device is temporary while some bank work gets done. See the fancy new hotel being built wants stronger banks. But they can’t put in rip-rap or sheetpile or concrete because it’s Napatopia. And they can’t dig it up and replace it because its Wappo tribal land and protected. So they plan is to stabilize the land with a willow fascines and huge boulders to grab the bank, which I guess, environmentally speaking is better than sheetpile.
Only they can’t do it now because the pond has too much water.
So the plan is for Kevin to lower the water by 4 inches a day to give the beavers ‘time to adjust‘ and then when the water’s all gone drop in the huge boulders and do the planting and then have Kevin take OUT the flow device, let the water come back, and fix the dam a little until the beavers come back and fix it better.
Seriously.
The idea is that the beavers have an upstream bank lodge they’ll probably relocate to for the time being but if these were MY beavers I’d be freaked they might just relocate for ever. I certainly can’t imagine they’ve been included in the plans. Maybe the young wouldn’t be up to the change. Or there might be a dog attack when the water levels were down. Or the sudden change will bring curious raccoons and round worm parasite? OR OR OR.
You can see why no one talked to me about this. Supposedly they’ll be a wildlife biologist standing by on site. And a cultural heritage expert just in case. I’m told lots of care went into this plan. But if you ask me we might just need to change the city’s nickname from Napatopia.
Sigh.
More evidence of my unreasonable unpragmatic beaver purism came yesterday in an email from author Ben Goldfarb who sheepishly wrote to warn me that the Washington Post blog had wanted him to do a story on the South American beavers and it was coming out in a couple days. He had tried to talked about other subjects but they wanted the “bad-beavers-ruining-south-america” story because you know how people love a good invasive tale.
Another one? Ben’s our ringer. We don’t need him to help the enemy. They have plenty of their own team members to do their dirty work. I could have written back a number of things. But I think of Ben as a buddy so I just sent back this photo and figured he’d get the message.
I guess he did because later he sent back this:
I still enjoyed his interview on Mongabay this morning though. But what do I know?
I’m a zealot.
