Yesterday in Sonoma was hot. hot. hot, with surprises of the nice variety. There were many many people who knew that beavers create habitat because they had watched the documentary, read a book or heard my talk at Santa Rosa Audubon or Kate’s talk at Pepperwood. And the booth right next door was the executive director of Laguna de Santa Rosa Foundation who had formerly been the beaver management guy at Huntley Meadows in Virginia! He happened to know our friend Ann Cameron Siegal, who has been taking jaw-droppingly beautiful photos there of beaver life for years.
Crazy small world.
I came home thinking about the idea of the beaver as an ecosystem engineer, and wondering whether our next activity at the festival could help children understand that concept.
An ecosystem engineer is an organism that modifies, creates or destroys habitat and directly or indirectly modulates the availability of resources to other species.
Wouldn’t this make a cool activity for kids to earn from the different booths if we can figure it out? You know like each car links together to make the train bracelet?
Two awesome beaver birthday cards came to me yesterday that I really need to share. Love the beaver strategy meeting especially.
Ohhh and just in case you’re interested, here’s what I thought yesterday about turning 50.
Yesterday we met with Suzi Eszterhas and 5 children that were beaver regulars and did a beaver art project in Susanna Street park for possible inclusion in the Ranger Rick story. The pictures will give you some idea of how cute it looked from the outside, but you’d actually need to be there to hear how delightful it was in person. These children had been to many, many festivals and literally knew everything there was to know about beavers.
One child had brought her recent copy of Ranger Rick for Suzi to sign, since it was the issue with her incredible cheetah photos. Many of then named their beavers (B0, Violet and Jojo are some I remember.) And one girl fed hers acorns, fennel and a branch. The bags were very popular and Suzi especially liked the fork paws. If you want to make your own the patterns are here.
There’s a nice article on Napatopia this morning. I especially like the way it talks to public officials who never mention flooding or money. Life is so different on the Napa side of the creek…
Since moving to Napa four years go, Rusty Cohn has gotten into the habit of taking a daily walk along Soscol Avenue. About two years ago, he noticed that a pond had been created in Tulucay Creek next to the Hawthorn Wyndham Suites hotel.Observing the area more closely, he was amazed to see what looked like a beaver dam.
There was a moment of disbelief. Beavers in residence along Napa’s Auto Row?
The Resource Conservation District estimates that there are 10 to 15 beaver dams and at least 100 individuals in Napa County waterways, including the new arrivals in downtown and along Soscol. Beaver dams create mini ecosystems, according to Knapczyk. They, in turn, draw other wildlife like fish, birds, and the popular river otters, although the otter population in Napa is very small.
See those last three lines in bold text? Can you make the whole article like this next time? Go read the whole thing, and see how perilously little credit beavers get for this sudden biodiversity. We’ll work on it. In the meantime I wish we had many, many more articles pondering the benefits of wildlife in urban settings.
If you have thoughts or questions, you should come ask them yourself here. Because Martinez and Napa beavers will be shoulder to shoulder teaching how and why to coexist. See you there?
Beaver habitat is riparian zone, and these vegetarians are good creators and maintainers of wetlands. First they create the dam (which they can rebuild overnight if necessary) with mud, stones and timber. Once the water level begins to rise, they turn their attention to building their lodge. Interior rooms are hollowed out after the structure is finished. They take in lodgers who live in the same rooms as the beaver family: muskrats, frogs, insects, deer mice, fungus, and more. This sort of community hospitality is unique.
They can be pests to farmers currently benefiting from fertile land that was once a beaver pond. When beavers return and build a new dam, they cause flooding. But beaver whisperer Michel Leclaire has found that placing a recording of running water where you want beavers to build their dam entices them to build in places convenient for people. Other advice for farmers, road crews and the general public for getting along with beavers can be found on Beavers: Wetlands & Wildlife’s website at BeaversWW.org.
Whooohooo! Give Amanda a hand for spreading the beaver gospel AND teaching how problems can be managed. Never you mind that she doesn’t mention a certain beaver-saving group that shall remain nameless, she does a great job anyway. I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised because we had a great donation to the silent auction for the beaver festival last year from Arkansas. Remember these from our friends at ozarkmtnhomestead?
There was only one part of the article that worried me a little bit. And it came at the end.
Beavers create a wetland habitat which is great for a plethora of species but not so great for species like the endangered Arkansas darter, a small fish that does not need a beaver pond bringing in predatory species that may eat it. Beaver ponds are also not so great for climate change, contributing a small percentage of methane gas into the atmosphere from their ponds. That’s a pretty small downside for an animal that provides big benefits to North America overall – particularly in areas prone to drought.
OK, first of all you’re wrong about climate change. I mean in the big sense, the only one that matters. And second of all I’m not so sure about the darter. You might want to check out what happened to the near by state of Alabama when they removed a beaver dam and threatened the rare watercress darter. I believe their fine for doing so was in the millions.
Now it turned out that Scott didn’t start the website upgrade, because terrible things (as you know) happen when you do that sometimes. So he would never do it unexpected. WordPress just dragged me kicking and screaming into the future. And eventually we’ll straighten it out.
‘m feeling at the moment like I’m extraordinarily lucky to be able to depend on others to help the parts that I can’t reach. I was worried about making it in Sonoma yesterday and thought we’d need to cancel because of the heat.
Rusty volunteered and will be ending the day with Lory and Cheryl and bringing stuff back to Martinez after. This morning we’re off for a children’s photo shoot making beaver puppets with Suzi for RR and tomorrow I will turn 50 doing what I love to do.
First things first. Mike is sending this letter in response to the editorial I posted yesterday.
To the Editor,
The 9-15-15 Gazette editorial regarding the Lake Fitzgerald beaver issue failed the public miserably. In addition to incorrect information about the chain-link fence, the editor chose to mock the efforts of a committed group of Broad Brook Coalition and UMass volunteers, city officials and myself, with comments such as “Callahan cooked up the idea “, “beavers pretty much made sawdust of Plans A through C” and “start working on Plan E”.
In 18 years of solving over 1,200 human-beaver conflicts with water control devices I have never seen more ingenious beavers than those at Lake Fitzgerald, nor such an amazing coalition of dedicated volunteers and city officials. It is sad that the editor did not celebrate the efforts of these local citizens, but rather chose to mock them.
Also, it’s been over a month since the rocks were installed and our creative solution is working fine. The lake level remains normal and the beavers have been unable to block the drain. So editor, please avoid negative, uninformed, mocking opinions. The public gets enough of that from Donald Trump.
Michael Callahan, OwnerBeaver Solutions LLC
Take that snappy beaver critique editor! I hope it gets printed because it deserves to be read. People shouldn’t go around insulting valiant effort. Especially when it keeps getting better and better and folks are just trying to do the right thing.
Personally, I kind of love when the big players get called into the game. Like remember that time that paper dissed our historic research as a misinterpretation of the evidence in a footnote and I got happy that he was getting Rick’s dander up.
Speaking of Rick and our historial research this was released yesterday, and is the hard work of Greg Kerekes for the Guadelupe RCD. There’s someone in it you’ll recognize but I had just gotten back from another speaking job and think I sound like a lunatic with a cold. If you don’t have time to watch it now watch it later, it’s really informative and well done.
How much do you love that footage? And those under/over shots. Rick is such a great teacher, I want to read our paper again right now! Greg is doing an awesome job in the South Bay spreading the beaver gospel through his non profit (Urban Wildlife Research Project). If you don’t remember him from the festival you probably remember his wife dancing in the beaver costume a couple years ago. She was awesome.
Goodness we’ve been in this business a long time. In fact we’re about two weeks away from our 3000th post. Which is a lot of things for one woman to say about beavers. Our website has been around so long and has SO much info it’s starting to stretch at the seams so I was thrilled to hear from our webpage designer Scott Artis yesterday that he will help us get back to sailing velocity. He has his hands full with a paid environmental job now but I think he noticed the long nonprofit list for Sunday’s event and saw that his group (Audubon Canyon) was the Alpha and WE (Worth A Dam) were the Omega, and was prompted suddenly to write back. So HOORAY for updating websites!
Yesterday I immersed myself in this project, which I should share at a later date because we already have one film on this post, but I have no delayed gratification. Or very little. And I’m feeling proud.
One of the nice things about my unofficial unpaid beaver publicist job is that things drop sometimes into my mailbox that I wasn’t expecting. Like yesterday when a preview copy of Sarah Koenisberg’s documentary short on beaver reintroduction in three states arrived. It was sent with a note from a student of Mary Obrien who said Mary wanted me to have it because of all the “Transformative work” I do and to let them know if we wanted more copies.
Transformative? Me? You mean like a beaver?
It was gripping and informative, under 15 minutes long, starting with a segment on Mary and beaver reintroduction in Escalante, then a conversation with Michael Pollock about beaver reintroduction in Bridge Creek Oregon, and then Kent Woodruff and the Methow in Washington. There were lots of other voices I didn’t know before, basically saying the similar wonderful things. These animals can be our allies. Let them do their jobs and work as partners in the important job of saving water and restoring streams.
I wish I could share it but they won’t be releasing the online version for another 2 weeks. I promise to put it up just as soon as I can. For now I’ll just tell you the Very Best Part:
I watched the credits all the way to the end of course and guess who paid for it? The Grand Canyon Land Trust (of course) AND Trout Unlimited.
Sometimes beaver dams can be detrimental to fish habitat. Low elevation trout streams such as all the trout streams in Floyd County warm quickly in summer. When the water temperature gets too warm in a trout stream the Georgia Department of Natural Resources will discontinue stocking trout until the water cools, which is usually late in the fall. The DNR rarely stocks streams in the fall or winter so it is usually the following spring before the creek will get a fresh batch of trout for the anglers to catch.
One such creek that has a beaver dam that warms the trout stream is Johns Creek. The Coosa Valley Chapter has spent thousnds of man hours making improvements at Johns Creek. We have improved camping areas, protected stream banks and in addition to installing trout stocking tubes we have worked regularly to improve trout habitat in the stream. Just this weekend we worked with the U.S. Forest Service placing “large woody debris” in the stream to improve trout shelter and increase the macro-invertebrate (insect food that trout eat) habitat. We also did temperature monitoring at several locations at the stream. This temperature monitoring has been on-going for several years now and will continue for several more.
A major portion of Johns Creek originates from a series of springs at the Pocket Campground. There are several beaver ponds downstream of the campground. I have checked the temperature above and below the beaver ponds twice this year and the water upstream from the ponds the temperature has been 58 degrees both times. In August the afternoon air temperature was 85 degrees and the water below the dams was 69. Just yesterday, a cool day, the water below the beaver dams was 68.
Any temperature above 70 or so becomes closer to the critical level of trout tolerance. We need to keep a record of stream temperature levels if we want to keep a healthy population in the creek.
I came home thinking about the idea of the beaver as an ecosystem engineer, and wondering whether our next activity at the festival could help children understand that concept.
