So a very nice woman approached us the day of the beaver festival and asked Worth A Dam to be part of this years Amazing Bay Day for the Girl Scouts. You can reserve your space now. This year’s event will be held at Sugarloaf Open Space in Walnut Creek, and sponsored by the Lindsay Wildlife Museum. Our job was to offer some kind of craft or activity that would appeal to 500 girl scouts and teach the values of stewardship and respect for our avian wildlife.
Could we do it?
Luckily for us, beavers have been shown to have a direct impact on bird density and variety. In fact, one research project showed that as the number of dams in an area goes up, the number of migratory songbirds also goes up. So any Amazing Day that teaches about birds, has to be a day that teaches about beavers, right?
What if there were a way to visually show the links that beavers have to wildlife? Something tangible that you can touch and carry away with you. Something that you might have earn, like scouts earn badges all the time. And something cute. For 500 girls from 6-18 it would have to be cute.
How’d we do?
So the idea is that girls will be encouraged to learn about the relationships between beavers and birds, fish, and wildlife. Worth A Dam will have teaching materials and volunteers to help them understand, and then with a short quiz they can “earn” a charm to be added to the bracelet. We’ll introduce a new charm every hour until they’re all gone, and it will be a permanent reminder of why beavers are important to the habitat. Worth A Dam found some persuadable donors to pick up the cost for the charms, so they’ll be free for the first 100 girls. The grown-ups we’ve shown them to so far have only three words to say in response.
“I want one!”
