The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are co-sponsoring a beaver event as part of the FWS monthly guided nature walk series on Wednesday, Aug. 16, from 10 a.m.–noon, at Upper Greenhorn Park.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are co-sponsoring a beaver event as part of the FWS monthly guided nature walk series on Wednesday, Aug. 16, from 10 a.m.–noon, at Upper Greenhorn Park.
Donald Flickinger from NOAA will talk about local beaver activity, how beavers benefit riparian habitat, methods to protect streamside trees from damage, and beaver dam analogues to restore wetlands when beavers aren’t present. Come learn about the challenges and opportunities of co-existing with this North American native – right here in Siskiyou County!
Hurray! It is wonderful that NOAA is talking about the benefits of beavers and how to wrap trees. Even MORE wonderful is that this is taking place in YREKA California. Sure it’s just over the border from Oregon where they’re LOTS smarter but it’s a start. A start. A start. I don’t know Donald Flickinger, but I plan to look him up right away. Honestly, do you think this is the kind of thing that would ever have happened if the whole involving the public with beavers in Martinez didn’t make show off how wonderfully the two things work together? I really doubt it. Even in Siskiyou county. And yes, I am indeed full of myself.
That’s all for now, as the day is full of important beaver business. Don’t believe me?
You know how things sometimes happen when you least expect them? Well, yesterday we saw the city workers in Susanna street parking checking out something in the creek so we wondered what it was and went to have a look. We’d been noticing that the water seemed to be backing up a bit and meant to investigate but with the Festival and all we never got around to it. Guess what we saw yesterday? Go ahead, guess.
It is right in the bend in the creek and impossible to easily see either from the Susanna Street bridge or from the Henrietta Street end. But if you climb on something tall and crane your neck around the corner you will see an overgrown incised stream with a tiny little dam being started. And some of the wood appears to have beaver chews on it. The beaver itself is obviously a little loner or a poor planner because if he had any friends at all he would take out that leaning tree and let it fall on the dam to get things started in a big way!
Little dam behind Susanna street park: Susan Berg photo
The funny thing is someone at the festival said they saw a beaver the morning of the festival near Starbucks, but we chalked it up to the crazy things you hear from people that you shouldn’t get excited about. Now we wonder if it might have been true. Jon looked several times last night and saw no beaver, and Susan and her grandkids came down to check it out with no luck either. But who knows? It certainly is a beaver dam, whether the builder is still around remains to be seen. Here’s a little map if you want to do your own snooping.
And in case you wondered, it’s about a block from my house, which is just neat.
Susan and her granddaughters originally came to get journal making supplies because they missed the festival because of a family reunion. I asked them to earn their journals by recording the audio for the film I might make about the project. If you want to hear bright cheerful girls talking about how beavers benefit the ecosystem, take a listen to these three minutes. They gave me lots to work with so hopefully I will be able to clip it together and make some great audio for the film.
Meanwhile, I was working on this yesterday form the idea Steve Murschel from West Linn Oregon gave me about playing ‘pin the beaver on the keystone‘ with children at our forest service event next month. I’m thinking it will be a nice way to teach kids about the idea of a keystone species and how beavers help the ecosystem. What do you think?
Pretty tough-sounding talk from Napatopia, until you actually read the article. This a headline is talking about for protecting trees, not killing beavers. It’s like telling the bad guys they better watch out because “The entire police for is wearing their seatbelts!”
California’s Napa Valley is home to about 400 premium wineries but Richard Thomasser, operations manager of the Napa County Flood Control and Water Conservation District, is more concerned with beavers.
“Wildlife management — monitoring beaver activity and protecting against excess tree harvesting by beavers for dams — is an important part of our work,” Thomasser said.
Beavers are just one of the things the district deals with. He wouldn’t say they are a “big” problem because many actually create beneficial habitat in riparian areas. Thomasser said he doesn’t want them to chew down all the riparian trees, so the district protects some of them to prevent that from happening.
The district doesn’t own any water supplies. It provides flood and storm water services within Napa County, including five cities: Napa, American Canyon, Yountville, St. Helena and Calistoga.
Besides beavers, these include homeless encampments in the city of Napa reach, invasive species and erosion in several areas.
Even when Napatopia tries to talk tough they still sound pretty ecologically minded! We’ll see about this threat to hide trees from beavers, but in the wine country we’re always going to worry most about the other threat.
Remember this is for the CREEK coalition, so the idea of a beaver is less important than the idea of water, which I think is accurately reflected in this toothy mural. But I love the size of this mural. Apparently they do nothing in half measures in San Jose.
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Do you want to tell them the truth about beaver teeth, or shall I? Either way we’ll get a chance to talk it over with them at the festival, because they’ll be booth 37 and handing out beaver tattoos! Here are the flags for each participating booth I made yesterday.
In the mean time let’s appreciate the lovely photo by Cheryl Reynolds that was included with permission in this month’s issue of the Canadian magazine “Saltscapes“. It has a modestly nice article about beavers authored by Bob Bancroft. The current issue is only available to subscribers but they mailed us a copy as a courtesy. It’s mostly about the history and biology, but does a little work learning about the benefits they provide -(then goes on to promptly list all the mosquitoes they cause, so it’s not the best) – but it does have Cheryl’s name and OUR WEBSITE so truly curious minds can come learn the truth if they want. Here’s the photo and I scanned the article.
Yesterday was an unbelievably delightful and challenging journey through the year’s accumulation of goodies getting everything ready for today’s meeting with Leslie and Deidre for the important ‘bagging and tagging’ of items for the silent auction. We were reminded how many, many unbelievable treasures we received courtesy of enormously generous souls from as far away as Rhode Island, Kent, Calgary and Melbourne. Here is our small and precious collection of beaver jewelry which we were eager to display. This year we were given less jewelry and more art. Far more. There are 38 stunningly creative images this year in the auction, with everything from beaver ballerinas to otter notepads and avocets in flight.
The hardest job of pulling and sequencing is done. Believe me when I say some colorful language was spoken yesterday. Today will be reviewing, oohing and ahhing, and sticking numbers on items. 89 in total. Not bad for a beaver charity!
In the meantime there is PLENTY of good news this sunday, starting with a fairytail report from Calgary where folks are protesting the removal of a beaver dam and subsequent loss of habitat because of a proposed road building. I like every single thing about this story, but especially the name of the town, which sounded almost like candid camera was trying to see how I’d react.
Protestors concerned about wildlife habitat loss due to construction of the southwest ring road led a walk to a popular beaver pond in the Weaselhead area Saturday.
The biggest issue is the realignment of the Elbow River and construction of a bridge overtop, which could mean the loss of a popular beaver pond, said Diane Stinson, a bird watcher who regularly frequents the area in the southwest corner of Calgary.
“They’ve proposed to fill in 24 wetlands between Highway 8 and Highway 22X,” she said.
“Four of those wetlands directly impact the beaver pond and the beaver pond is a local treasure. People go there all the time to see the wildlife and if the wetlands are filled in as the contractor has applied, the beaver pond will cease to exist.”
Ahh the chills up my spine when I read a sentence like that! You can’t imagine. Or when I see a photo like this:
“People are obviously concerned,” he said during Saturday’s protest organized by the group, YYC Cares. “Any damage that might happen to any wildlands, we compensate it three-to-one. We work with Ducks Unlimited and other organizations.
“In the original plan, our project would have come much closer to the beaver pond, but we’ve actually moved the road and changed the plan, so we’re going to have a pretty wide buffer between the two.” Johnson said trees and other vegetation will also be planted to strengthen the buffer between the road and beaver pond.
That’s right. We work with Duck Hunters to trade the destruction of habitat by our bulldozers for some more wetlands for duck hunters. That seems fair, right?
The $1.42 billion southwest ring road project will link Highway 8 with Highway 22X and is slated to be completed in the fall of 2018. The resident group has also filed letters with the province’s Environmental Appeals Board about the design, without success.
“We’ve had two different levels of appeal and our first appeal was dismissed,” Stinson said. “We just heard [Friday] that our second appeal was rejected. They’re saying we’re not directly affected by this.” The style of bridge being used to cross the Elbow River is also a problem for some members of YYC Cares.
“We were never aware until just recently that instead of an open-span bridge like Stoney Trail in the northwest, this is a cut-and-fill earth and berm dam,” Stinson said.
Something tells me there’s a reason you weren’t informed about this, Stinson.
Founded in 1965 by Grant MacEwan, the Weaselhead is one of three protected parks in Calgary — the other two being the Inglewood Bird Sanctuary and Griffith Woods Park. The Weaselhead is a source of Calgary’s drinking water and is “incredibly biodiverse,” said Paul Finkleman, president of the Weaselhead Preservation Society.
“We at the Weaselhead Society call it Calgary’s largest outdoor classroom,” he said.
“We have thousands and thousands of kids every year learning about water ecology, forest ecology, water biology and environmental stewardship. It’s just such a wonderful place, not just for families to enjoy, but for children to learn… right within city limits.”
Thousands of children, and some very wealthy-looking protestors. My odds are on the beaver dam. Great work friends of the beaver pond! You have all our support and spirit! Send your happy thoughts to the plucky folks of WEASELHEAD which, in addition to being the kind of name a newspaper loves to write over and over, is also about 3 hours over the border from Montana.
A protester, left, speaks to Ian McColl with KGL, the company building the southwest ring road, during an event Saturday organized by YYC Cares. The group says construction of the southwest ring road will negatively affect wildlife in the Weaselhead area. (Julien Lecacheur/CBC)
There are two more prizes this sunday, the first will be adored by all, and the second might mean nothing to anyone but me. Here’s the first, which was posted on my FB page by beaver buddy Lee Lawrence of Oregon. No back story provided, but honestly, none needed.
There are cute babies an there are oh-my-god-I-wanna-die cute babies. And I believe you know how I would classify this one.
Now onto the Heidi amusement, which comes because I stumbled across this nursery rhyme in the context of our current presidential administration. Everyone knows the first line but few remember the poem it comes from.
Birds of a feather, Flock Together And so do pigs and swine Rats and mice shall have their choice And so will I have mine.
There were two things that struck me about this jingle. The first was that it should obviously be about beavers, which I’ll get to later. The second was that its rhyme is SO off. Obviously there’s an internal rhyme scheme in the first line with feather and together, but what happens to that in line three? In what crazy world do ‘mice’ and ‘choice’ rhyme?
Jon and I brainstormed a bit about this mystery and he thought there was a chancethey rhymed in the Cornish dialect. So of course I marched straight to beaver expert Derek Gow and asked him. Guess what he said?
“Here in Devon and Cornwall there is a tendency to pronounce things like mice as moice. Same applies to the other words so maybe the connection is there.”
Ah HA! Mystery solved! Rats and Moise will have their Choice! Heh heh heh…Thank you, Derek! Now for the other problem.
Birds of a feather, flock together Both closely and beyond Bugs, frogs and fish, are all they wish Beside a beaver pond.
