FRIENDS TO THE WILD

heidi08 Beavers or Social Ambasadors, Why We Care June 7, 2020

It’s a dire time. With dire things happening everywhere you are unfortunate enough to look. In addition to the police horrors and the recent spike in infections there was a fire Wednesday night in Suisun that burned the home of our friends at the Wildlife Center, Several residents didn’t survive that fire, although others were freed by volunteers and the firemen.

Fire that killed wildlife, devastated homes in Suisun was arson, officials said

Blackened debris and soot-covered marshland defined the Suisun Wildlife Center Thursday, where a massive wildfire the day before had damaged outbuildings and taken the lives of three resident raptors and four gray squirrels being readied for release.

Thanks to the actions of amazing volunteers and firefighters, Executive Director Monique Liguori said, the center’s other animals and the main building were saved.

“We’re hurt but we’re grateful,” she said. “It could have been so much worse.”

Maybe its the stress of everything else, but the thought to me of a captured owl dying in a fireand unable to get away to protect itself was just heartbreaking.I wanted to help if there was any way I could. Monique Liguori is the director and lifeblood of the center. She bravely was one of our first ‘legitimate’ displays at the beaver festival and has joined us ever year since 2009 I think. When I reached out to convey my horror and support she said that lots of the center had been saved and that they would rebuild. The mayor of Suisun even started a Go Fund me page for the effort.

Just three volunteers were at the wildlife center when danger presented itself, and they swiftly worked to evacuate the animals. Many went home with the volunteers, while firefighters opened the outdoor cages and encouraged the creatures to leave.

Kaiu the one-eyed coyote hid in his house, where he was later found safe and sound.

But Griffin and Gwen the Great Horned Owls perished, the flames boring holes into their enclosures. Four gray squirrels also died, their enclosure a pile of rubble behind the owl house.

“I raised them from babies,” Liguori said of the squirrels, who were in the pre-release stage.

I know you’d want to contribute. Click here to go to the GOFUNDME started by the mayor.

Oh and here’s your reward for kindness. Photographed last night by Rusty Cohn of Napa. Two kits, one much larger but both siblings starting their explorations together.

ELEGIAC FOR BEAVERS

heidi08 Beavers or Social Ambasadors April 16, 2020

In addition to this Saturday’s earth day festivities at the John Muir site, add this to the list of things that didn’t happen yesterday because of Covid-19. Sigh. Will there be a beaver festival? I’m starting to doubt it.

In the meantime we are keeping up with the beaver story in our own way. Since I needed to scan every beaver article from 2007-2008 for the master’s student, I thought I should use those scans along the way. Feel free to skim through these. They will be featured permanently on the Our Story tab “In the Papers”.

2020-04-13 13-23

THE SUN SETS ON THE MORNING NEWS GAZETTE

heidi08 Beavers or Social Ambasadors, City Reports, In the News December 19, 2019

This isn’t strictly Beaver News but I’m going to go out on a limb and say the Martinez Beavers could never have existed without the Gazette that first promoted them. This a great report from KQED on its demise which I think is profoundly relevant and worth sharing.

I learned to read making out letters from the headlines on my dad’s lap. Now I am a mere 54 years young and the Gazette has been part of my life as early as I can remember. because my mom worked there once I started preschool. In fact when I started Kindergarten it was on Jones street which was the very same one the Gazette office was located on. Early in September I terrified her by ditching the neighbor and walking all the way to her office by myself at age 4. She had left for the day so I then had to walk home. I think today that it is stunning that nobody insisted on driving me or called the police.

54 years is a long time. But it’s pretty dam humbling to think the paper existed for an entire century century before that.

After 161 Years, An Era Of Local News Ends In Martinez

THE NATURE OF STEWARDSHIP

heidi08 Beaver Art, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, Creative Solutions, Who's stealing photos now? December 11, 2019

The creator of the wonderful image is Catrin Welz-Stein of Germany who is an alarmingly talented graphic artist that creates digital collages. Doesn’t it make you want to look at things more closely? Good. I added Amelia’s awesome hobo-beaver and the headline because I wanted to use the image in our activity for the festival. It seemed like destiny that the beavers kit-sack matches she-sherlocks cl0ak. Isn’t that just a marriage made in heaven?

Destiny also released this study in time for my grant writing. How unbelievably lucky am I that this meta-analysis came out with exactly the right results?

Nature May Boost Learning Via Direct Effects on Learners

Kuo M, Barnes M and Jordan C (2019) Do Experiences With Nature Promote Learning? Converging Evidence of a Cause-and-Effect Relationship. Front. Psychol. 10:305. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00305

What emerged from this critical review was a coherent narrative: experiences with nature do promote children’s academic learning and seem to promote children’s development as persons and as environmental stewards – and at least eight distinct pathways plausibly contribute to these outcomes. Below, we discuss the evidence for each of the eight pathways and then the evidence tying nature to learning, personal development, and the development of stewardship.

This entire study was so wonderful you should really go read the whole thing. Very well laid out and a summary of the 8 learning paths that change in contact with nature. A paragraph on cause and effect towards the end had me in tears. I swear.

And second, spending time in nature appears to grow environmental stewards. Adults who care strongly for nature commonly attribute their caring to time, and particularly play, in nature as children – and a diverse body of studies backs them up (for review, see Chawla and Derr, 2012). Interestingly, the key ingredient in childhood nature experiences that leads to adult stewardship behavior does not seem to be conservation knowledge (knowledge of how and why to conserve). Although knowledge of how and why to conserve, which could presumably be taught in a classroom setting, has typically been assumed to drive stewardship behavior, it is relatively unimportant in predicting conservation behavior (Otto and Pensini, 2017). By contrast, an emotional connection to nature, which may be more difficult to acquire in a classroom, is a powerful predictor of children’s conservation behavior, explaining 69% of the variance (Otto and Pensini, 2017). Indeed, environmental attitudes may foster the acquisition of environmental knowledge (Fremery and Bogner, 2014) rather than vice versa. As spending time in nature fosters an emotional connection to nature and, in turn, conservation attitudes and behavior, direct contact with nature may be the most effective way to grow environmental stewards (Lekies et al., 2015).

Read that again, will you? Contact with nature drives learning about nature which in turn fosters stewardship. It isn’t lectures about biology, but outdoor positive experiences – like beaver festivals and watching beavers themselves, for example – that drive children to later care for the environment.

We care about what we know. Not ‘know’ like books. But ‘know’ as in play in, discover in, spend joyful time in – breathe in.

MARTINEZ SHOWS OXFORD A DAM GOOD TIME

heidi08 Beavers or Social Ambasadors, Educational, Environmental December 1, 2019

I suppose I mentioned that Martinez is a small, small town. Not Stars Hollow small but pretty damn close when you compare to neighboring commutable behemoths. It’s no stretch of the imagination to say that the beavers are the biggest thing that ever happened in this little enclave in the last 50 years. And I guess that’s why they earn a visiting masters student from Oxford.

Yes that Oxford.

Annie Weldon is the president of Keble college (shown above) at the University and doing a masters in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance. She also happened to grow up in Walnut Creek, so of course she wanted to do a project on the great Martinez beavers and is coming for a visit tomorrow. The title of her study is:

Wading in Wetlands: Animal Infrastructures and Conservation in Natural Flood Management

She’s coming to our house for coffee and a chat and then Jon will take her around to show her where the beavers lived. Do you think Martinez has anything to say about natural flood management? Do you think our house will look shabby by comparison? This is the dining hall at Keble.

But have no fear, our story is sure to impress. Just the right time to be thinking about living with beavers and whether its good for a city or not. Annie will be right at home. Too bad we can’t show her actual beavers at the moment, but I something tells me we’ll show her a dam good time.

And not a moment too soon! I just finished touching up this yesterday. Thank you so much to all our authors and editors! And welcome to our visiting scholar!