It’s been a surreal pair of days. Yesterday I saw beavers in Alhambra Creek for the first time in 8 months. I spoke with Suzi Eszterhas who said the Ranger Rick wants to go ahead with the beaver story and might want to include my paper bag puppet design as an activity. Today I opened my email to find an invitation to speak at the Placer Fish and Game Commission. (Yes, PLACER) And now this from Michigan. I can’t embed the news clip here. But you MUST go watch it, it’s that good. 
Beavers blamed for local flooding in back yards
“The beavers are doing really good habitat work,” said DNR Wildlife Biologist Mark Mills. “It just happens that they’re flooding a neighbor’s yard.”
Instead of trapping the beavers and endangering the unique wetland in which they share with many other species, Kalamazoo Christian High School students volunteered to help the DNR install a beaver pond leveler. The structure, made with pipe and fence, allows humans to control the level of water even after the beavers rebuild the dam.
DNR says a lot of rare species depend on the higher water. If they removed the beavers, the water level would drop too much, and important wildlife would be lost.
“It’s about finding an equilibrium,” said Mills.
The supplies for the beaver pond leveler cost about 100 bucks. That’s less than the cost of pest control, and only a small price to pay for protecting a popular environment.
Michigan is having a kind of beaver revival. Once regarded merely for their self-destructive habit of ripping out beaver dams to help fish, in the past year we’ve seen their beaver IQ take a hearty surge. I’m particularly impressed that DNR (which is like their fish and game) would encourage this. It makes me very curious how, for example, they adopted Mike Callahan’s design name (Pond Leveler) but not his exact design. He wrote on the beaver management forum that he was a little nervous about the look of what they built, so I doubt they used his DVD. But I’d love to track down the trickle of influence and see how it made its way to Michigan DNR. At least, they have a helpful group of curious and interested students. So if anything goes wrong, they can make the necessary adjustments.
Jon is helping Mario this morning set up to get started on the mural, and we turned in our application for the festival yesterday. It turns out the invitation for Placer is for exact hour I’m presenting in Portland, so hopefully we get find another time. This morning Moses’ beaver discovery is (sort of) in the Martinez Tribune. And I was grateful that Amelia made a few changes to our final festival poster. I figure, if we have to pay for the Bay Nature ad, why not use it to educate as well as promote?
