FIRE, FRIENDS AND BEAVERS

heidi08 Environmental, Why We Care August 20, 2020

[wonderplugin_video iframe=”https://youtu.be/3UZkwMOTOvU” lightbox=0 lightboxsize=1 lightboxwidth=960 lightboxheight=540 autoopen=0 autoopendelay=0 autoclose=0 lightboxtitle=”” lightboxgroup=”” lightboxshownavigation=0 showimage=”” lightboxoptions=”” videowidth=600 videoheight=400 keepaspectratio=1 autoplay=0 loop=0 videocss=”position:relative;display:block;background-color:#000;overflow:hidden;max-width:100%;margin:0 auto;” playbutton=”https://www.martinezbeavers.org/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wonderplugin-video-embed/engine/playvideo-64-64-0.png”]

When I first joined the John Muir Association there a handsome, slender well spoken great grandson of John Muir served as well, Michael, was an impressive member. Having lived with multiple sclerosis since he was 15, he knew how dramatic its impact could be and how it could separate people from being in nature and feeling their own power. He started the nonprofit Access Adventure using the strength and motility of powerful horses to bring the disabled back into the world. He remains an inspiration to everyone that meets him, and I treasured those days he worked with us.

Yesterday I saw on facebook that his home and sanctuary in Vacaville/fairfield burned to the ground. He and his horses got to safety, but there was nothing left of the home and retreat he had built from the ground up. All the carriages and personal treasures, all the paddocks and fields, embers and ashes, I heard from a fellow board member that he is understandably devastated. I can’t imagine what it is like to lose the world you built in a moment.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

Slip away to something dire

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in a fire

The fire yesterday ravaged more and more places and people we care about. The air is heavy with smoke, ash, and bitter dreams. You can taste it even indoors There are going to be a million stories like Michael’s. The town of Vacaville, the very home that little rescued beaver lived in, burned out of control. The freeway was closed because of all the smoke, and who knows whether that beavers family even survived. Fire doesn’t play favorites. The homes of heroes burn along side the homes of villains.

Like cancer, multiple sclerosis, and even lace we get fire whether we deserve it or not.

[wonderplugin_video iframe=”https://youtu.be/xvgPjohwbd0″ lightbox=0 lightboxsize=1 lightboxwidth=960 lightboxheight=540 autoopen=0 autoopendelay=0 autoclose=0 lightboxtitle=”” lightboxgroup=”” lightboxshownavigation=0 showimage=”” lightboxoptions=”” videowidth=600 videoheight=400 keepaspectratio=1 autoplay=0 loop=0 videocss=”position:relative;display:block;background-color:#000;overflow:hidden;max-width:100%;margin:0 auto;” playbutton=”https://www.martinezbeavers.org/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wonderplugin-video-embed/engine/playvideo-64-64-0.png”]

BEAVER ART AND ARTISTRY

heidi08 Beaver Art, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? April 8, 2020

There;s a beautiful retrospective of Rusty Cohn’s photographs at the Napa beaver pond in yesterday’s Napa register for International beaver day. What a fine body of work! And of course I mean both Rusty and the beavers. Run don’t walk over to the paper to see every image, but here are a few of my favorites.

The first might be the finest photo I have ever seen of a beaver pair bonding.

Photos: Life at Napa’s Beaver Lodge at Tulocay Creek

Did you know April 7 is International Beaver Day? In honor of the occasion, we are sharing this photo gallery of our local beaver family at Tulocay Creek. These photos are from 2017-2019 … simpler times. Enjoy!

The Tulocay Creek beaver pond is located next to the Hawthorne Suites Hotel, 314 Soscol Ave., Napa. At the creek, you’ll find river otters, mink, muskrats and herons as well as beavers. Here are some photos of the critters taken by local photographer Rusty Cohn.

“Since beavers are nocturnal, the heat doesn’t seem to bother them,” Cohn said. “They come out a little before sunset and are mainly in the water. During the day they are sleeping either in a bank den in the side of the creek bank under a fair amount of dirt, or inside a lodge which is made of mud and sticks mainly.”

Follow the link to look at the full article. Aren’t those beautiful?There is an excellent one of an adult beaver underwater which I’m partial to by Roland Dumas. Of course he didn’t just capture beavers in all their glory, he got some wonderful shots of the crowd of wildlife they supported too. Heron, otter, mink. The usual suspects. Here is a special favorite.

Unfortunately Stacy couldn’t manage a reading. So we never got the beaver song we deserve but there is fun discussion on Emily Fairfax’s twitter feed for International Beaver Day about just exactly what’s wrong with otters. I swear to God I didn’t write this. I’m referring especially to question three.

Just remember I had NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS.

She got this lovely response from Portland artist Roger Peet. Twitter handle “Wedge tailed Oogle” who is coordinating the endangered species mural project for the Center for Biological Diversity. He told Ben how to get this print from him on the feed but I don’t see it yet in his shop. It’s incredible.

The entire discussion is very well worth reading. We are so lucky to have Emily on our team. She will be leading the way when all of us our just echoes. An amazing image was posted by someone I don’t know (YET).

Finally a sad goodbye to Mr. Prine with a special song for the petulant king who brought us here.

[wonderplugin_video iframe=”https://youtu.be/4Ho-EzrsE2U” lightbox=0 lightboxsize=1 lightboxwidth=960 lightboxheight=540 autoopen=0 autoopendelay=0 autoclose=0 lightboxtitle=”” lightboxgroup=”” lightboxshownavigation=0 showimage=”” lightboxoptions=”” videowidth=600 videoheight=400 keepaspectratio=1 autoplay=0 loop=0 videocss=”position:relative;display:block;background-color:#000;overflow:hidden;max-width:100%;margin:0 auto;” playbutton=”https://www.martinezbeavers.org/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wonderplugin-video-embed/engine/playvideo-64-64-0.png”]

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!

PISMO BEACH BEAVERS

heidi08 Educational, Environmental, saltwater October 7, 2019

Some people are surprised to find out Pismo beach has beavers. Not me. They’ve been bemoaning and complaining about them for years. The very most beaver-friendly ranger of the bunch offers a talk entitled “Beavers: Adorable Wildlife or Destructive Pests?”

Um, can I pick neither?

Well, it looks like they have decided to make a little lemonade with their lemons.

Discover the beaver’s physical adaptations, their role in our country’s westward expansion, why they were hunted, and their local history. Search for evidence of their activities during a short walk.

Dress for wind/weather with comfortable shoes. Bring insect repellent and water: binoculars a plus. Meet at Oceano Dunes Visitor Center, Guiton Hall meeting room, Oceano Campground, 555 Pier Ave, Oceano. Moderate walk, 0.5 miles, 2 hours

Gee that sounds fascinating. Dress up in a beaver coat and put on goggles while a ranger tells you about their adaptions. Then tells you how they were all killed for their fur and not native to California anyway. Can we take a hike to see some of the damage they caused too? Look Timmy, this culvert was flooded by beavers and we had to rip the dam out with a back hoe! And look, this beautiful tree was eaten by those destructive monsters!

Sigh.
Beaver education ain’t what it used to be!

I found this lovely image on reddit the other day, it has a strange gaming community origin but I think we should just pause to enjoy its wistful beauty: posted by Demiansky.
Song of the Eons is the game. The creator notes:

Ancient legends recount High Beaver civilizations damming rivers as great as the Nile or the Ganges, resulting in Beaver Lakes capable of supporting a continent’s worth of population in great beaver cities the size of the Aral Sea. These legends are known just as much for the deeds of these High Beaver cultures as they are for the inevitable, biblical catastrophes that result when the mighty dams responsible for these cultures at last rupture.

After an elder beaver lake has been destroyed, its common for other races settling the dried up beaver lake to enjoy a massive burst in population. The rich silts and clays which accumulated at the bottom of the beaver lake make for exceptional farmlands for many years.

Hmmmmmmm…

HOP ON THE BEAVER TRAIN: SAN JOSE TO LONDON TO MARTINEZ

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? August 15, 2019

Again with the good news. You must find me redundant. I’m afraid I’m going to have to tell you three very good things today. Again. You’re going to think I exaggerate or make stuff up. I swear its all true.

And I swear the last one is the very very very best.

The first comes from the Estuary magazine and stars an article written by a very good beaver friend. Talk about bringing in the big guns!

Two long-scarce freshwater mammal species are staging a comeback in Bay Area waterways.

By Joe Wheaton

Beavers are expanding in Santa Clara County. Steve Holmes of the South Bay Clean Creeks Coalition found a pregnant beaver on the Guadalupe River in 2013; others have been spotted in San Jose, Campbell, and Sunnyvale, and this spring De Anza College student Ibrahim Ismail discovered a den on Los Gatos Creek.

Nineteenth-century records place beavers in the South Bay before their local extirpation, but CDFW does not issue permits for beaver relocation because of their nuisance potential. Although there are beaver colonies in Martinez and a few other Bay Area sites, the origins of the South Bay colonies are not known; the beavers may have moved downstream from Lexington Reservoir, where they were reportedly introduced in the 1990s under unclear circumstances.

Hurray! A shoutout for urban beavers, beaver nativity and the Martinez beavers in particular! I knew this was coming because Joe contacted me on the nativity angle a while ago. I’m happy the brought him in to write this, but not quite so happy about this paragraph.

Holmes welcomes the return of the furry ecosystem engineers, whose activities have been shown elsewhere to improve habitat for salmonids. However, Santa Clara Valley Water District biologists Doug Titus and Navroop Jassal note that those studies may not match South Bay conditions, and explain that dams could affect threatened steelhead by blocking migration, increasing water temperatures, and providing habitat for exotic predators. However, they say that so far no negative impacts from dam-building or other beaver work have been observed.

Say it with me now. “That research doesn’t apply to these very specialized special conditions”. “We’re the silicon valley for pete’s sake. Nothing in the world comes close. Google it! In our habitat beavers actually HARM steelhead. So we better kill them.”

Well Steve is watching out for them, and Rick is too on the RCD, I’m going to assume good things for now. As we found, by the time you make it into Estuary magazine you’re already home free.

Onto some great mews from London. No not THAT one. This one is in Ontario just across the water from detroit.

Conservation authority baffles beavers to save city infrastructure

Some call it a beaver baffler. Others prefer beaver deceiver. In the simplest terms, it’s a pond-levelling contraption, made up of a pipe and a cage, that not only controls unwanted flooding but also tricks a beaver into thinking everything is just fine.

On Wednesday, the Upper Thames River Conservation Authority installed one in the Pincombe Drain, a tributary of Dingman Creek near a subdivision at Southdale and Wharncliffe roads in London.

It’s true enough. Some people use the proper names for things and some just make them up as they go along. But heck, I shouldn’t criticize. Not only did they do the very right thing here, they also did it for the most very right reasons.

“As we encroach on the rural landscape and farmers take back more land and they make more drains rather than creeks, beavers are coming back to the city,” Williamson said. “We’re creating all these green spaces and the beavers come in and form these wetland niches.

“That’s a positive thing and it’s an amazing habitat. The only thing is the wildlife is competing with infrastructure and human activity — things like flooding on roads, culverts, storm water management ponds and hazard trees. Those are really the only issues we have with beavers.”

Okay then, we can all see you obviously are installing a pond leveler and were trained either by Mike’s visit to London a few years back or his videos, but you’re doing it right and for the right reasons. And we just love you for it!

Okay now for the really, really good news. This was filmed yesterday morning by Nancy Fleischauer at the Ward street bridge in Martinez. Can I get an Amen?

[wonderplugin_video videotype=”mp4″ mp4=”https://www.martinezbeavers.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/nancy.mp4″ webm=”” poster=”” lightbox=0 lightboxsize=1 lightboxwidth=960 lightboxheight=540 autoopen=0 autoopendelay=0 autoclose=0 lightboxtitle=”” lightboxgroup=”” lightboxshownavigation=0 showimage=”” lightboxoptions=”” videowidth=600 videoheight=400 keepaspectratio=1 autoplay=0 loop=0 videocss=”position:relative;display:block;background-color:#000;overflow:hidden;max-width:100%;margin:0 auto;” playbutton=”https://www.martinezbeavers.org/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wonderplugin-video-embed/engine/playvideo-64-64-0.png”]