The urgency of climate change provides an unexpected opportunity for new partnerships and creative solutions in watershed restoration.
This inspiring yet whimsical film captures the vision, energy, and dedication of a handful of activists who share a passion for restoring the North American Beaver (Castor Canadensis) to much of its former habitat and range. Although this goal might seem esoteric or eccentric, The Beaver Believers shows us how this humble creature can not only help us restore streams and watersheds damaged by decades of neglect, beaver can also show us how to live more harmoniously with nature in an era of destabilizing climate change.
When beaver come into a watershed, they transform the stream system to meet their own needs for food and security. In so doing, their dams and ponds also create the conditions necessary for many other species to thrive. It’s a kind of generosity that is born of self-interest yet results in flourishing for all. What better metaphor to take to heart as we face the challenges that climate change brings?
In the end, our film is about much more than beaver and the people who believe in them, it’s about a new way of understanding our watersheds and our role in nature. By “thinking like a beaver,” we can create more bountiful ecosystems and more plentiful water resources, while also providing for our own needs and enriching our human communities at the same time. Beavers can show us the way and do much of the work for us if we can just find the humility to trust in the restorative powers of nature and our own ability to play a positive role in it.
Say hello to the launch of the new documentary ‘the beaver believers”. If it all looks vaguely familiar it should since they were filming last year at the beaver festival. They’ve been hard at work interviewing the other players and now are ready for film. Won’t you send them a little support to get post-production moving along? It couldn’t be easier and they have some adorable thank you gifts. I got the DVD of bloopers and out-takes because THAT’S what I really want to see! (Suzanne Fouty stepping in a cow-pie, or Sherri Tippie swearing like a sailor! hahaha) Go choose your own and show the world you’re a ‘beaver believer’.
Did you notice Cassy and our own Beaverettes in the promo? You better go watch it again. Go check out their slick website to see how it all fits together. I can’t put my finger on it, but this girl looks kinda familiar.
Easthampton, Mass. (WGGB)- There is a flood in one Easthampton yard, and the city says wildlife is to blame. It’s the result of a clogged culvert that flows under South Street.
“I haven’t dared go over there,” sams homeowner Dan Laflamme as he points to his backyard.
Laflamme has lived in his Crescent Street home for almost 30 years. The city says that beavers are the cause of problem because they keep blocking the culvert with debris. Now special permission is needed to clean it up;approval from the Conservation Commission that the City Engineer, Jim Gracia says they received this morning.The city says that beavers are the cause of problem because they keep blocking the culvert with debris. Now special permission is needed to clean it up;approval from the Conservation Commission that the City Engineer, Jim Gracia says they received this morning.After returning from Florida a few days ago, he came home to more than half of his property under water.
“There’s about 3 acres,” Says Laflamme. “And how much do you think is underwater now?” asks ABC40′s Brittany Decker. “About 2 acres,” he responds.
The city says that beavers are the cause of problem because they keep blocking the culvert with debris. Now special permission is needed to clean it up; approval from the Conservation Commission that the City Engineer, Jim Gracia says they received this morning.
Today I finally realized that when cities, highway authorities or cable companies say “Beavers are to Blame”, they aren’t looking for an excuse to kill the animals because they hate them. The beavers are entirely incidental and don’t actually matter at all.
What they are really saying is “It’s not our fault!”
It finally dawned on me when I realized that the incident involving Mr. Laflamme’s floating property is about three miles from Beaver Solutions. That’s right, Martinez could bring in an expert 3000 miles to solve a problem and Easthampton couldn’t manage three.
The misguided mayor of Easthampton is Karen Cadieux and Mike Callahan says she has his business card. She needs the proper motivation to solve this particular problem. You just know the special permission they just got from the Conservation Commission was not in fact to conserve anything, but was to trap – Either shelling out $$$ for some live trapping (which under MA law will still result in dead beavers) or going to the health department for an exemption to use some conibears to kill them faster and cheaper.
I’m thinking Ms. Cadieux needs a few emails to point her in the right direction. Won’t you help me set her straight by politely reminding her that her neighbor could solve this problem for the long term and save Easthampton money?
I had a long conversation yesterday with Kat Milacek and Rhonda Burkhardt-Thomson from the DFW wildlife coalition over the beaver issue in Irving Texas. If you haven’t heard anything about it, here’s a fairly recent report.
They got word of the contract the park issued to take out ALL beavers from ALL wetlands. But when the media started poking around they revised it to say they were relocating beaver only from the pond. (Insert Grinch explanation to Cindy Loo here). Kat and Rhonda started an online petition that got 800 signatures from around the nation, and the park department got so defensive they adapted their own web page in response.
There is misinformation and a petition circulating regarding Irving’s beaver trapping program. The City of Irving would like to correct the misinformation and provide our residents an accurate account of this story.
Yayaya. I’m sure it was all a complete misunderstanding…
Apparently three beavers (one adult and two yearlings) have already been captured and released onto private land. This is less than ideal timing, to say the least. Since kits are probably going to be left behind as they may not be able to dive out of the lodge/bank hole without adult help. My guess is that mom will stay with them as long as she can, but eventually succumb, leaving them alone.
I talked with Kat and Rhonda about solutions, about wrapping trees and getting media, they expressed frustration over how slanted the news was and how many of the park department’s lies it broadcast. Was it worse because they were in Texas? (Hahahahaha) Sadly no, I sympathized. The media is deeply naive and will be believe what officials tell them to the ninth degree. The only things on your side are cute pictures and compelling stories. Which you have so far, so buck up I told them!
Given that three beavers were already captured, I advised that it was going to be better to get the rest as quickly as possible. Try and find out where they were living to make sure none get left behind. In the mean time try and get video or night video and send that to the news station in order to pressure the park to sit down with you and make a beaver management plan for the NEXT beavers that come along. I thanked them for caring about beavers and wished them a hearty good luck!
It’s hard for me to wrap my head around the thought that there are people who want to save beavers in Texas. But I’m grateful for the chance to be proven wrong. It’s a big state, and they need the water. They should all care about beavers. Just look how good that’s working in California! (Not.)
Onto beaver defense in New Hampshire where this great letter was published in the Valley News.
Letter: What About the Beavers’ Ecosystem?
I have lived in the Upper Valley all of my life and for 53 years have traveled 12A, where on numerous occasions the beaver dams have been altered to prevent flooding. I just wonder why we always have altered the beaver dam, a dam that builds a viable ecosystem for aquatic life and waterfowl. We continually use destruction to solve the immediate crisis. I ask the state to propose alternative solutions before the next crisis.
Throughout all the election years of the past, I have listened to campaigners boast about their achievements in passing bills that have millions of dollars set aside to preserve and maintain habitat. Can we apply some of those funds in Plainfield to a solution that allows for a viable Route 12A and a thriving aquatic ecosystem? Upper Valley residents need to say we want a chunk of the money to preserve this ecosystem now! Do you believe that money spent regarding our encroachment on wildlife habitat is better than money spent to preserve wildlife habitat? If so, I ask you to help by writing or calling our state legislators about this issue. Let’s stop responding to a crisis and start finding a permanent solution.
William Monette
Wow! Asking for action at the state level! That’s dreaming big William! I like it! But you might start with your own city or county to get the ball rolling. Why not talk to your neighbor Art Wolinsky who installed a culvert protector a few years back. Now the beavers are building on the other side of the culvert, but he’s committed to solving the problem the right way. Just look at this video from this morning: (watch all the way to the end for essential commentary).
Cheryl was down last night and saw lots of activity but no kits. We’ll all be watching tonight just in case…..
There’s a great read this morning on beavers from the nearly 100 year-old Pine Cone in Carmel. This energetic reporter started out by contacting me last week, and followed up with Rick, our coastal paper and some requisite heavy weights at Fish and Game and the Forest service. It’s a very good article. Reading through it sounds like he really listened to what I said.
Aren’t you excited? Can’t you tell already that this is going to be a very good read? Oh yes, that second paragraph could only have be written by talking Heidi, because I’m a girl with a regional beaver overview.
Well not the city exactly – but thanks for the mention! He really goes head to head on the nativity issue when he talks to Tom Murphey of the USFS who says they don’t belong in the watershed.
Somebody’s been doing their homework! And talking to Rick obviously. The whole paper is obliging filled with the non-arguments of the “beaver-bad” school of thought, the gaping holes in which are repeatedly and cheerfully shown. I was worried when we checked in one last time on the phone. He said he had to present ‘both sides’. But one side clearly has research and resources and arguments, while the other sidehs….what exactly?
Hurray! Worth A Dam gets a mention! As a final note it is pointed out that the reintroduction of beavers would require an Environmental Impact Report, to which I say that’s fine.
A few hundred yards off the road, the creek’s waters slowed to a stop amid a grass-shrouded mound of branches and mud, forming an unexpectedly placid pool amid the strip malls and car lots. Two hundred feet upstream sat a mound of earth and twigs, and the willow trees from which the branches had grown — the telltale sign of a pair of beavers who have made this obscure stretch of water a home, for themselves and other wildlife.
“Further up the creek it’s dry and overgrown with trees,” Rusty Cohn, a Napa resident and frequent beaver watcher, said during a morning stroll along the bank. “Here you might see a large bass, or five or six turtles sunning themselves on a tree. It’s like an oasis here.”
Beavers have formed at least 20 dams on the Napa River and its tributaries, according to Shaun Horne, watershed and flood control resource specialist for the Napa County Flood Control and Water Conservation District.
A very positive beaver-article from Napa this morning, offered with great enthusiasm by reporter Howard Yune. In addition to getting the details and facts right, he doesn’t make a single beaver pun, which is well worth a wine tasting trip in gratitude! It’s hard to believe how different Napa is behaving in response to its beavers than Martinez once did. Do you think we paved the way in some small measure?
The return of beavers to the Bay Area reached its peak of attention starting in 2007, when a mating pair dammed Alhambra Creek in downtown Martinez, formed a den and toppled trees the city had planted during a $9.7 million flood control campaign.
A proposal by engineering consultants to euthanize or relocate the beavers sparked an outcry from naturalists and residents, who formed the nonprofit group Worth a Dam to spare the water dwellers and call attention to their benefits. Eventually, the city spared the beaver family, which has produced at least 19 offspring since, according to Heidi Perryman, founder and president of Worth a Dam.
“We’ve seen improvements in our creek,” she said Friday. “We see otter, steelhead, wood ducks, turtles, even mink, all because of habitat the beavers make”
No such human-vs.-beaver conflict appears imminent around Napa, Horne said while viewing the Tulocay Creek dam, where the water level of the resulting pond is about 6 feet below an adjoining hotel’s parking lot.
Despite the animals’ reputation for choking waterways, Horne said the county flood district generally restricts its intervention to annually surveying streams and removing thicker fallen trees, or surrounding others with wire to shield them from gnawing. Cattails and other vegetation are considered a higher risk for increasing silting, and the district trims back cattails and prunes some willows every two years.
“Generally we leave them alone,” he said. “Usually, beaver dams will break up when you have high enough flows, and then the beavers come back and rework the sites again.”
I don’t know about you, but after an article like that I’m so well satisfied I feel I might need a cigarette. (And I don’t even smoke.)
Last night in Martinez amazing photographer Steve Zamek of Featherlight photography made a trek to donate to our silent auction and do a little beaver watching in the city. Before he came he pragmatically asked how close the beavers would be and if he should bring his long lens, which kept us chuckling for a long, long time. We started off watching by the primary dam and were rewarded by this early arrival. It must be three years since we saw muskrats at the primary. I was so happy to see this HUGE specimen gracing our waterways again! The lightening shutter you hear clicking to my left is Steve. Apparently this muskrat was so efficient at his job that he convinced several families that they were seeing a baby beaver. We were told over and over again that they had watched a kit “with his tail going back and forth”. Ahh, brings back memories!
Steve generously donated four amazing prints to the silent auction and wrote about us on his Flickr account today, so I added the copyright mark to protect his good work as much as possible. If you want to see it in its gloriously unmarked state, go here. And if you haven’t gasped in awe yet this morning, go look at Steve’s website here.
Last night at the beaver dam the air was humming with excited comments about the beaver documentary on Nature. Two little girls told me cheerfully that beavers were “attracted to the sound of running water” could “hold their breath for 15 minutes and “Timber just chewed leaves, he didn’t know how to chew sticks!” I was so impressed with how much they remembered I asked them if they wanted to record a video letter to the producer.
She very kindly wrote back to all of us this morning.
Oh, Heidi–that’s why I do it! That they saw, watched, cared and remembered details! Thank you so much for capturing that and sending it my way! It made me smile. I watched it many times. Thank you so much, April, Alana (sp?) and Heidi!!! Girls, I am so delighted to know you watched, enjoyed and cared about what you saw on Leave It To Beavers. It means so much to me to hear from you! ~Jari
You are more than welcome. And now that the beaver-muskrat refresher course is once again needed, I will end by posting this reminder.
Did you notice Cassy and our own Beaverettes in the promo? You better go watch it again. Go check out their slick website to see how it all fits together. I can’t put my finger on it, but this girl looks kinda familiar.
