UNSOLVED BEAVER MYSTERIES

heidi08 Beaver Art January 31, 2018

A month ago I stumbled on this illustration while searching for possible donations to the silent auction at the beaver festival. It was offered by a very unfriendly sort of woman on Etsy who told me crisply to never contact her again. Bob Kobres of Georgia found other illustrations like it, but we still didn’t know their origin. Originally I assumed it was from Canada because of the wildlife, but no Canadian I asked recognized anything about it.

I checked with the library of congress and the national archives who decided they didn’t recognize it either. That made me think it wasn’t from this hemisphere after all, so I showed to our European beaver friends. Along the way I learned how to do a reverse image google search and I looked that way as well. The only place the images came up was the etsy site I originally saw them on and our website!

Except for the bat. The bat one was offered as a card also on this website.

I contacted the owner of the sight and asked her about the image. She said she had come across it in a secondhand shop the 70’s in Massachusetts, sold as a single 9×7 print with no other information but a line of text reading “At the low dark entrance to the cave she stopped”.

She loved immediately that the girl showed no sign of fear entering the cave, because she herself was interested in encouraging more young woman to go into natural sciences. She noted it was an old yellowed print already, and reproduced it as a card.

Polly Pearhouse of the Scottish beavers group didn’t recognize the artwork but thought the clothing looked Germanic (Bavarian) especially. That prompted me to ask my German beaver contacts. Our old friend Alex Hiller wrote that he didn’t recognize it, nor did Dietland Muller-Swarze when I asked. Gerhard Schroder didn’t know. Duncan Haley of Norway agreed that it could be German but suggested any Scandinavian country also.

This brave little girl who stumbled into the forest has been all around the world in such a short time now. Everywhere she has gone people fall in love with the illustration even thought they know nothing at all about its origin. I am reminded of William Golding’s book The princess bride which opens by saying “This is my favorite book in the world, though I have never read it.”

My fondness for this mystery maiden has grown over the search, and I remain committed to resurrecting her story!

In the meantime, our friends taking care of the beavers in Devon shared this on youtube after it aired recently on the BBC. I like everything about it but the part where they examine the yearling which made me squeamish. The rest is excellent. Enjoy!

OH, SUSANA!

heidi08 Beaver Art, Festival January 26, 2018

Amelia Hunter is the Martinez artist who has generously donated her talent for the past seven beaver festivals. She has been hard at work on the new poster for the next. It has the hugely hard job of announcing our new location. I know it seems like summer is miles away but the artwork for our Bay Nature ad in the April issue is due mid February. Plus we want to get ready for the banners in the park to take advantage of the new venue,

We usually do a quarter page ad, but this year we are adding an larger section to promote Amy G. Hall and her street painting. This hasn’t quite been finished yet, but enjoy the first section. (I admit it took me a long time to accept the loss of that yellow aged framed wood, but now I’m loving the green and the vibrant look of this now). It says “things have changed for the better.” Don’t you think?

Our plan is to pay for a bigger ad and incorporate this image and text of Amy to make it even MORE compelling. Watch this space and see it all come together.

MYSTERIOUS GIRL ATTENDS BEAVER FESTIVAL

heidi08 Beaver Art January 22, 2018

I thought the mystery was bad before, but Bob Kobres of Georgia has made it so much worse! He found other images from the same story book that are just as endearing – if not more so because now we know the entire book is about a girl interacting with wildlife! (Or coming to the beaver festival.) But we STILL don’t know what book. Come on people! Some one’s grandma read this as a child. Keep asking until we find out!

Yesterday was quite a labor love, but still a work in progress. I worked on the repaired Library section of the website trying to get all the beaver papers into some kind of searchable order. There is much left to do, but this is a fine start, I’m sure it’s one of those jobs that it’s easier to keep up with than it is to start. Go check it out if you would by clicking the “library” dropdown menu. I added two sections. General ecology and beaver behavior. Remind me what I forgot to include, please.

UNEXPECTED TREASURES

heidi08 Beaver Art January 20, 2018

It’s that time of year when I am madly begging for donations to the silent auction. Sometimes people respond in heart-warmingly generous ways that affirm the essential goodness of mankind, and sometimes they do the other thing, which is never fun. But not un-useful, as the woman who was offering this print wouldn’t donate OR tell me where it was from, but WOW I love this image, and now I have my own mystery!

She said did say it was from the 40’s, but it doesn’t look American to me. Since the English haven’t had beavers for 500 years I’m thinking maybe its from a Canadian children’s book? I know what you’re thinking, those beavers are kind of zombie like, but still its SO cute with the little girl helping them mud, don’t you think?

Anyway I tried to hunt around for it and the only other image I came across of children with beavers was this one, which made me smile and think of Skip Lisle. The mystery continues. Ask your moms and grandmas if they ever saw the image before, will you?

I’m happy to say I received a wonderful note from author Judith K. Berg (and her husband) after I wrote her thanking her for that fantastic letter to the editor. They were both pleased and impressed with our story and the website and had so many good things to say about beavers, I was very chuffed. I think she is going to donate signed copies of her books to the auction so you will get to read all about it!

Yesterday this article caught my eye, and I heard from a group that is talking to the lawyers involved to do the same thing in California. I’m wondering how all this is going to play out. Although if the government shut down continues it won’t make much of a difference!

How to Successfully Threaten Legal Action Against the Government

In a move that has left beaver, salmon, and wildlife advocates pleased, the federal government and state have agreed to stop killing beavers in the state of Oregon in response to a threat of litigation by wildlife groups.

If you’re wondering how wildlife groups can get what they want by simply threatening litigation, then you should probably take a look at their Notice of Intent to Sue. The notice letter goes to painstaking detail to explain exactly why beavers need to stop being killed, and how animals like beavers serve important roles in helping the threatened salmon population. Given that the letter worked, it seems worthwhile to examine a few of the things it did right.

Deterrence in the Details

In the letter, there is no shortage of details about how beavers modify the habitat of salmon, and other animals, to all the species’ benefits. By helping the salmon thrive, the wildlife groups claim that the beavers should be protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Basically, by creating dams, beavers help salmon by creating bigger pools for them to rest and feed, as they make their way up or down stream. Also, proposed alternatives to killing the beavers are included, since beavers do cause quite a bit of trouble for landowners, public utilities, and sometimes, even roadways (that are near rivers or streams, or connect to bridges).

In addition to all that, the very important detail about there being no environmental impact analysis seems to have played a big part in prompting the government to take action. In addition to the immediate cessation of the killing of Oregon’s beavers, an environmental impact analysis will be completed.

Make Compliance Easy

In addition to listing out all the reasons why the government should agree to their demand, it made compliance rather simple. All the government needed to do was simply stop killing beavers until after it conducted an assessment on the effects of doing so. There was no astronomical damages demand, and attorney fees were not even sought for putting together the required demand. When you want a demand (or any request for that matter) to be accepted, making sure it’s a simple ask can go a long long way.

I love how this article lays out what they did RIGHT. It’s practically a recipe for doing this again in other states.I can’t imagine Washington and California will be far behind, I showed it to our retired attorney friend who argued the land-breaking case in Riverside on the grounds that removing beaver required a CEQA analysis, and he was very pleased as well.

There’s more to this than meets the eye, and maybe it will make more of an impact that I guessed. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a mystery to solve.

Good Beaver News

heidi08 Beaver Art, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and Ice, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, Who's saving beavers now? November 5, 2017

It’s Sunday! Time for two great photos and some very good news! The first is from Austria’s Leopold Kanzler who has taken amazing photographs of beavers for years and is credited with many of my favorites. He just announced he is winning second place in a wildlife photo contest for this:

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I think the courage necessary to hold very still under that particular tree deserves first place, don’t you?

I’ll share the second photo later, but for now let’s appreciate this sunny article about the beaver dams at Amy’s park, shall we?

Outdoors: Busy beavers unsung heroes at Amy’s Park

I’ve been oohing and aahing over beaver dams lately. There’s just something about them — maybe the feat of engineering achieved by a furry creature with a big tail and some really tough teeth, or the dams’ remarkable ability to reshape the landscape — that wows me every time!

We saw our most recent beaver dam at Amy’s Park in Bolton Landing.

The uneven little parking lot for the 500-acre preserve had just a single car in it when we pulled in around lunchtime one weekend. We set off along a woodsy trail under an overcast sky, stopping at a rocky outcrop to admire the view over a pond. We eventually hiked all the way around the preserve’s two ponds, finding a beaver lodge and numerous gnawed stumps.

The conservancy deserves a lot of credit for its work to protect the big lake. But I think we need to give the beavers a hand, too. Without them, there would be no ponds at Amy’s Park. The conservancy protects wetlands, but the busy beavers are the original architects of those environmental filtering systems.

Nicely put, Gillian Scott of the Time Union. We agree that beaver dams are a constant WOW. Thanks for the nicely written reminder. I assume you’re a friend of Beavers: Wetlands and Wildlife which isn’t far away. New Yorkers who care about beavers have to stick together. Speaking of which this ran recently in the New Yorker and of course has to be shared.

stuck

Ha! Now for the REALLY good news. We have been noticing that the water in the creek at Susana street is ponded up again, and that little visible dam has been nicely rebuilt. Yesterday we heard from two sources that they saw beavers in the area. One is our friend whose back deck opens up to the creek, and she took this with her phone on Friday. Hopefully she’ll get us more soon.

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