A graffiti-ridden drainage channel running through the American River Parkway in Rancho Cordova is poised for a major makeover that will transform it into a cleaner and greener creek where recreational and educational activities abound.
The Sacramento County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved a contract assessing the environmental impact of the Cordova Creek Naturalization Project – a rehabilitation effort that has been in the works for nearly a decade. The approval is a major milestone in a plan that involves breaking up and burying the channel’s concrete walls and rerouting its water through a new creek, which will be surrounded by native vegetation and walking trails.
The new creek will allow the soil around it to absorb the water, which comes from a runoff watershed in Rancho Cordova, ultimately creating a 15-acre riparian area where trees and wildflowers can flourish.
“It looks like a fallow field with a concrete ditch running through it,” said Gohring. “When we’re done, it will be a meandering stream which will provide an amazing amount of habitat diversity. … For those of us who do ecological restoration work, it’s like the holy grail.”
Honestly, at this point, do I even need to say it anymore? I’ve seen your Holy Grail Rancho Cordova and it looks like this.
Wanted to share Amelia Hunter’s fantastic new design for the seventh beaver festival. Don’t you love seeing the duality of a beaver’s life? Thank you Amelia for your lovely artwork, and I hope when our ad runs in Bay Nature paying customers with great big grants flock to you in droves.
Another beaver friend is working to organize a guided Amtrak journey from Oakland hosted by the Oakland Museum Docent Chris Richards. That would be a fun way to add watershed context to the festival. Fingers crossed it will really happen. I pulled together this graphic to celebrate!
An English farmer sets out to restore the country’s wetlands, with help from nature’s most experienced engineers.
Wetlands are one of the world’s most valuable ecosystems; as well as providing a rich habitat for plants and animals, they also store carbon and help reduce floods by soaking up excess rain. But around the world, vast swathes of them are being destroyed, and in England alone, 90 percent of wetlands have disappeared in the last 400 years.
Now English farmer Derek Gow has a novel plan to restore these precious habitats – bring back beavers, the massive semi-aquatic rodents that once played a crucial role in shaping the British countryside. Using their sharp teeth, beavers chop down small trees and branches to build dams across streams, creating a large network of pools and channels to live in, which form a brand new wetland.
Sylvia Rowley travels to Devon, UK, to see what nature’s construction workers can do, and to help release a pair of beavers into their new home on Derek’s farm.
I hope this particular episode is available on the web once it airs, because this is definately news we can use. I’ll be excited to see it in person. You will remember that Derek is the farmer in Devon (Southwest England) that has been pretty outspoken for beavers. I found out he and Duncan Ramsay (Free beavers on the Tay in Scotland) are old friends so we are working the country from both ends, (so to speak). I can’t wait to see this particular work from the beaver lobby and am excited to see this making the rounds.
And just to show you I’m a trustworthy source, here’s some feedback about yesterday’s Clemson Calamity:
Mike CallahanHeidi is right on about the historic importance of the Clemson Pond Leveler and that it rightfully has been relegated to the proverbial shelf as had her original personal computer or the Model T. Flexible Pond Levelers and Castor Masters work so much better, last longer, and are much cheaper and easier to install. Coincidentally today I am going back to the Norwottuck Rail Trail, the site of my first and only Clemson Pond Leveler installation in 1998 to adjust a Flexible Pond Leveler pipe that successfully replaced that CPL.
Way back when Worth A Dam was just forming, (during the punic wars, as Edward Albee would say) I was looking for a licensed non-profit to be our receiving organization and was having conversations with an urban wildlife group based in LA. I was so excited they were interested in being involved I wrote it about it on the then nascent website and they were so annoyed I had blasted the secret liaison-in-process that they withdrew. Keeping secrets, I learned, is very important for beavers. Who knew? It was okay, very soon after their withdrawal I did a presentation for Pleasant Hill Creeks and met Bill Feil of Land for Urban Wildlife who became our official non-profit umbrella and that has worked very well for 5 years. I think it was all for the best, but I did learn something about keeping secrets.
Sarah Koenisberg
What I learned is to not talk about the thing you’re not supposed to talk about, but to keep asking for permission over and over in alternately charming and irritating ways until your requests are so annoying you are given the all clear! So when Suzanne Fouty called to ask me if I’d talk to Sarah Koenigsberg of Whitman college in WA a few months ago, I said sure. Talk beavers to a complete stranger? Of course! Turns out Sarah is an instructor working on a film project about beavers and their advocates, focusing on climate change and water. She was going to interview Mary Obrien and Suzanne Fouty and Sherri Tippie for the film, but all three insisted they talk to me as well.
It was an incredibly exciting moment to think that the three believed I had something important to offer to the film, because I admire those three women slightly more than God. I could remember the amazing article that first introduced me to Mary way back when she was described in that excellent article from High Country News. It remains one of my favorite beaver reads, even though I now realize the photo at the beginning is a muskrat – not a beaver.
Whitman College Semester in the West is an interdisciplinary field program focusing on public lands conservation and rural life in the interior American West. Our objective is to know the West in its many dimensions, including its diverse ecosystems, its social and political communities, and the many ways these ecosystems and communities find expression in regional environmental writing and public policy.
We agreed that they would come help with Festival VI, get some film of it and we’d do an interview as well. Wow! Can I tell everyone right now? I was dimly able to ask. No, Sarah said, let me get it confirmed and formalized and then it can happen. I promised to hold my tongue. Which I did. Can I talk about it now? How ’bout now?
Cat out of the bag! All I can say is Sarah should be thankful there were distracting new kits to keep me occupied! Yesterday I finally got the ALL CLEAR so now it’s official and I can formally say that Sarah of Tensegrity productions will be coming to do an interview and film the festival.
The project at hand is a documentary film with the working title, The Beaver Believers. It tells the story of several strong women and their allies, and their common cause of seeking to restore Castor Canadensis, the North American beaver, to much of its former native habitat to provide more water and habitat in the ever-warming West. We propose to tell their stories of creativity, grit, and whimsy with the same spirited spontaneity and serendipity as their activism and ecological citizenship itself. The film will be 35- to 45-minutes in length, appropriate for the “documentary short” category in film festivals.
A collaborative effort between filmmaker Sarah Koenigsberg (director of photography) and Whitman College Professor of Politics Phil Brick (director), The Beaver Believers is already well on its way into pre-production, and we have a rigorous production schedule planned for the summer of 2013. Filming will take place from May to August with shoots scheduled in Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. {eds note: AND MARTINEZ!}
Now you must hear a taste of their reporting on the subject, listen to this podcasts started at the Utah festival last year. Click on the photo to listen and imagine how the first festival in Utah might compare to the 6th in Martinez. Don’t you live their voices? Mary’s metaphor of the wildlife riding on the beaver tail is an art project waiting to happen! And Sherry’s voice always makes me want to sit in the front for and listen! Suzanne is outstanding! Oh and while you’re listening remember that painting beaver tails and pinning the tail on the beaver are all things the learned about from us.
Click to Play
They’re stuck with us now. We’re on the calendar and they are sending a team to help lift, carry and film. I’m sure they’ll want to do a beaver viewing too! I’ll do an official announcement this weekend and let Martinez know they’re going to be on camera for beavers. Again! I heard from Sarah that they just got back from Idaho yesterday, visiting some places with beautiful beaver dams and some places that should have them but don’t because they’re always trapped and killed.They also met with Carol Evans of the BLM in Nevada and checked out their amazing habitat in Elko.
I confess to you that I am deeply excited and appropriately terrified about their coming, but every contact I’ve had with Sarah has been reassuring. When I listen to the clip yesterday I realize that this is going to be a inescapably big deal and I can only comfort myself in the usual manner by thinking critically. The very young voice behind that podcast (one of the students) gets to describe Dr. Obrien’s face as being “lined with the desert”? (!) And Dr. Fouty wears “hippie clothes?” (!!) Goodness, what does Mr. ‘Sage’ look like? No comment? Why are the women itemized in narration and not the men? We would have words. That ought to keep me focused. I can do this. I’ve been interviewed in my living room before. Don Bernier filmed me and the first ever meeting of Worth A Dam and Richard Parks used an interview for his final project at UCB school of journalism. I’ll carry on as best I can. Think of the beavers.
And speaking of distracting new kits, our bravest 2013 model was out at 7:30 on Thursday night, allowing me to catch this glimpse as he made his way up from the secondary, through the primary and back home.
Okay imagine this times a couple thousand, and the following conversation over and over again with children, soccer moms, fishermen, birdwatchers, politicians, and lanky teens, so you will have some idea of what we did yesterday at John Muir’s birthday Earth day celebration.
It was a wonderful, bright, blur of a day. FRO and her daughter worked tirelessly helping children illustrate our newest idea – a giant wind sock that can hang at the beaver festival! Lory and Jean helped get things organized and answer questions. Cheryl tirelessly took photos. Jon managed better than usual with the heavy lifting, and I talked to a fairly uninterrupted stream about why beavers matter. As always it was particularly heartening to be in a community that remembered so much about the story and took such personal responsibility for it. One young woman even remembered having spoken at the November meeting as a child 6 years ago after asking for permission to speak early because of her homework and bedtime. Another teen with a lip ring excitedly explained to his friend about Grey Owl and how he had tried to teach people about beavers way back when. Even better to see the story reach new ears, and really make people think earnestly about whether beaver problems could be solved in new ways. It was exciting to connect with some key players and emphasize what a vital role beavers and their dams play for birds, fish and other wildlife.
The day flew by. It hurdled at such breathtaking speed that I could only tell how long we’d been there by the amount of water I gulped in between spiels, how full the flag was getting with children’s drawings, and where the shade moved to. I was happy to think of Enos Mills (the author of In Beaver World) having dinner at the John Muir house in 1908 on his visit, and maybe even thinking (while he was listening to the great conservationist himself talk about Yosemite or wild places) of the title for his last chapter of his book where he calls beavers “The Original Conservationists” because unlike Hetch Hetchy the dams they make do so much good for the world.
Thanks John Muir, National Park staff, Teddy Roosevelt, JMA, countless musicians and children and parents of Martinez or beyond, for an ecologically amazing day.
Until recently, the role of beavers in maintaining healthy river ecosystems was not well understood or appreciated. Not everyone wants beaver dams in their backyard! But the same things beavers do naturally—cut down trees, dam up water, flood riverbanks—are exactly what we are trying to do to improve habitat for Pacific salmon.
That’s why beaver reintroduction is identified as a priority action in the Upper Columbia Spring Chinook Salmon and Steelhead Recovery Plan. The Methow Valley Beaver Reintroduction Project is relocating them from places where they are unwanted, and moving them to places where beavers can be part of the solution to salmon recovery.
I hope this particular episode is available on the web once it airs, because this is definately news we can use. I’ll be excited to see it in person. You will remember that Derek is the farmer in Devon (Southwest England) that has been pretty outspoken for beavers. I found out he and Duncan Ramsay (Free beavers on the Tay in Scotland) are old friends so we are working the country from both ends, (so to speak). I can’t wait to see this particular work from the beaver lobby and am excited to see this making the rounds.
