Finally the article featuring last wednesday’s Worth A Dam visitors is featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. What a treat! First watch the video all the way through to see what Joe and Amanda do for a living, and then go read about it here.
“We can spend $200,000 putting wood into a stream, cabling down logs. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t,” she says. “Put in a colony of beavers and it always works.”
The believers’ beavers come from places like Tumtum, Wash., where Amanda Parrish checked beaver traps one morning early this month by the Spokane River.
What a fantastic article! Thanks so much Amanda and Joe, and everybody else for the work that you do! Now if we can just get folks to see the forest for the trees, so to speak, and realize the good that beavers do everywhere, not just on ranches!
Saturday’s festival was certainly the biggest and best we have ever had. By one o clock we had already distributed 100 bracelets, and tails were a huge hit all day. We started with 500 and there are 98 left so that should give you some idea of how popular the activity was. Gary Bogue has a nice homage today. How many people were there? It’s hard to know, but the first half of the day was unbelievably crowded. We distributed 750 brochures at the event, and the guideline was generally one to a group. It probably isn’t exaggerating to guess we had nearly 1500 people. We had visitors from Concord,Walnut Creek, Lafayette, Oakland, Vallejo, Sonoma, San Jose, Sacramento, Elk Grove, Placer and Jackson. Amtrak brought alot of attendees this year, from all along the San Joaquin line. For the first I’m aware of we took in more money than we spent for the event and two people this morning said that they thought our little nameless park had more people than the entire peddler’s fair.
Several folks have noted that our attendees this year we’re on the whole more knowledgeable about wildlife in general and supportive of efforts to care for it. There were fewer of the battle-curious and more of the beaver-curious. It was a palpable shift from a crowd eager to beat city hall to a crowd dedicated to living with wildlife, and the change was the perfect compliment to the day that included snakes, screech owls, turtles, tarantulas and bats. Corky Quirk’s amazing bat display was one of the best things about the event. I hope she comes back, but if you missed it or didn’t realize what a gift she was, this will fill you in.
I loved lots of things about the magical, exhausting day, (including the many wondrous volunteers that made our biggest event the easiest to pull off ), but one thing that I’ll remember above all else is greeting Mary O’Brien the Utah Forests Project Manager for the Grand Canyon Land Trust who came all the way to California to get ideas for a future beaver festival of her own. Mary was amazed at the crowd, touched by the children, indignant at the sheetpile, awed by the displays, enamored of wildbryde’s charms, and fascinated by every part of the story. After touring the event she walked to the Muir house and jogged back for dinner. We laughed. schemed and gossiped over margaritas and then went to see some beavers before she took the train back to Berkeley where she was staying. I dare say she’ll have plenty to say about her visit.
Mary admiring the tiles
I was relieved to see that all this fame hasn’t gone to the beavers heads this morning. Apparently it was a working day just like any other. Those are unusual construction materials. Drinking on the job?
Do you know this delightful book? A series of increasingly bossy animals appear in this hardy child’s life and she works pluckily to remove them one after the other.
What do you do with a kangaroo who hops through your window and jumps on you bed and says,“I never sleep on wrinkled sheets, so change them now and make them smooth,and fluff up the pillows if you please?
The heroine isn’t at all discouraged.
You throw him out that’s what you do! “Get away from my bed, you Kangaroo”.
This fairly amusing encounter is followed by a series of other increasingly unrealistic demands – an opossum hanging on her towel rack who requires a new toothbrush, a llama who wants her pants tailored, and finally a menacing bengal tiger who sits on her bicycle and orders she push him all the way to the circus before being eaten. She blithely dispatches every single one of these unreasonable requests with a no non-sense pragmatism and goes about her business doing what she always does.
Give that tiger a push, if that’s what he wants. You push him right off, and that’s all there is to it.
Until bedtime.
What do you do if it’s late at night but all snuggled upwhere you always sleep is a Camel, a Moose, a Llama, anOpossum, a Tiger, a Raccoon and a Kangaroo? “We’re very sorry if you want to sleep but as you can seethere is no more room. So make some warm milk and bringus a glass and find some more blankets- it’s chilly in here andremember the chocolate chip cookies.”
Of course the heroine continues to solve the problems as she always did, which is try to haul the intruding animals away and get her own bed back – to claim her territory and return to her normal routine. She tries like the Martinez City Council tried and like New Jersey tried, and like Kings Beach tried and like Latvia tried to get rid of the unwelcome animals, stop the disruption, prevent further damage and return things back to normal. There are a series of adorable illustrations by Mercer Mayer showing again and again how gallantly she persists in an effort that is rapidly becoming futile.
But in the end, it’s late, she needs to sleep, the odds are clearly against her, and she suddenly realizes the rules that she once played by have changed.
What do you do if you can’t throw them out? You let them stay.
Cue adorable illustration of plucky little girl snuggled comfortably with a camel, a tiger, a kangaroo, a moose, a raccoon and an opossum. Aww. This story is offered by way of an introduction to the remarkable update from Latvia that was sent by our famed foreign correspondent, Alex Hiller. Remember beavers had taken over the canals and the city council decided to have a contest to see who could best [fail] to solve the problem and decide what to do with them? Alex traveled to the region and had lunch with the environmental minister to talk about wire wrapping trees and flow devices.
Yesterday he sent this:
In case you can’t make out the translated headline, it reads
“ENCOUNTER BEAVERS IN RIGA!!!”
The city council received a wide range of proposals – hunting them, scaring away with vuvuzela sounds, setting up 24h patrols, or even domesticating them. Finally the officials decided to put fencing around the trees and to feed the animals.
Alex in Worth A Dam t-shirt in Riga
From all of us a at bossy kangaroo-opossum-raccoon-moose-llama-camel-tiger-BEAVER central – thank you, Alex. Very nice work.
If you like wild birds, you will love Native Bird Connections.
This wonderful nonprofit organization has a beautiful and beloved collection of live, tame, nonreleasable eagles, falcons, hawks and owls that it uses to educate groups of all ages. They work with these magnificent birds to bring the wonders of nature up close and personal to thousands of our children every year by visiting classrooms all over the East Bay.
Last year Native Bird Connections presented 584 programs that touched the lives of 17,792 people of all ages — including schools, scouts, senior living programs, after school enrichment, state and national park programs. As Native Bird Connections supports our children in their search for knowledge of the natural world around us, this organization also needs our financial support to help them survive these tough times.
To help us support this vital organization, Wild Birds Unlimited of Pleasant Hill, 692 Contra Costa Blvd. (across from Sun Valley Shopping Center) is holding “A Day for Mom & A Day for Mother Nature,” 9:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday.
Wild birds AND Gary Bogue AND the Martinez Beavers. What could possibly be better than that? We’ll be there answering questions and talking castor, so maybe you should stop by to hear the latest! Guess how many beavers we saw this morning? I’ll give you a hint. It rhymes with their favorite word.
Well, that was the easiest no-discussion approval Worth A Dam has ever received! It was a no-brainer, everyone smiled and was excited to get our event brochure from last year and then we were out the door. No persuasion necessary. Mind you, it is generally agreed that the Parks, Recreation,Marina & Cultural Commission is the very kindest and least horrible governing body in all of Martinez, and we have always had the best reception from them generally, but sitting there with their automatic approval displayed before the city’s engineer, I almost felt like the Worth A Dam tradition was a beloved part of familiar Martinez.
Almost.
Yesterday two things happened that were surprising. Regular readers might remember the lovely article about Amanda Parish and Joe Cannon in Spokane magazine. It prompted an attaboy letter to the author, Paul Haeder, from me, combined with a doubtful query about one of the facts in it. Paul wrote me back appreciatively and said something like, you know, I have this radio program maybe sometime you’d agree to be interviewed? I benignly said ‘of course’ (which is what I always say when people ask me to talk about beavers) and thought no more of it.
Yesterday I got an email from Paul saying that his guest had dropped out at the last minute and would I be willing to do a late earthday ‘restoring watersheds with beavers’ interview? We are recording it today, but it will air on Friday at 6:00 if you’re up for coffee and beavers. It will be live streamed at www.kyrs.org. I’m thinking the call letters stand for “Keep Your Rodents Safe” but I could be wrong.
Joe warned me that Paul can be a little bit quirky at times, at which I of course feigned shock and said “Eccentricity amongst beaver supporters? When does THAT ever happen?” In response Joe pointed me to this lovely picture of him from the Earthday review by the Spovangelist Blog, which he apparently spent most of in a beaver suit. Need I say more?
PS what are you doing in August Joe?
Addendum: My parents just pointed out today’s “Get Fuzzy”:
