Category: featured

KV5 Beavers

heidi08 featured, Friends of Martinez Beavers April 16, 2011

The Valley of the Kings is a massive trove of hidden treasures that were riffled long before the 1900’s. As a woman who hiked through it in the largely unvisited period six weeks after 9/11, I can tell you It hums with the feeling of undiscovered things even though Howard Carter and his buddies before him pretty much took everything away but the pictures on the walls. There are 62 identified tombs, to date. To share the wear and tear of visitors, different tombs are open to the public each day. You buy a ticket that allows you to visit three, although often a kindly bribe will get you into more. KV5’s only claim to fame was the massive dumping of clutter from the excavation of the nearby tomb of KV3 (more famously known as the tomb of Tutankhamun).

In the 1980’s Kent Weeks left UC Berkeley to take a job as curator at the university of Cairo. He envisioned a massive photography and mapping project that would record the dimensions of every tomb. He even introduced hot air balloons to check the area from the sky. To get the specifics of unimportant KV5 he started to remove the clutter and check the tiny site thorougly. Sometimes little laborious actions have huge unintended consequences. He found a massive corridor lined with more than 70 tombs of the sons of Rameses II, and filled with some of the most important treasures ever discovered.

I tell you this story (and its a fantastic story if you’re interested) because every now and then in beaver-dom, a hundred separate unsuccessful excavations where we’ve forever been toiling without sunlight or water, suddenly touch upon treasures all at the same time. There is this massive and startling outpouring of good will, and we have to take a moment just to compose ourselves, make sure we’re in the right place, and appreciate our good fortunes.

This is a KV5 kinda week, with good luck, unlooked for friends, and wild coincidences. I will start from the top in no particular order. This weekend a sighting of five beavers was reliably reported. The voice of John Muir (Lee Stetson) called me up for a beaver tour late friday night. The editor of Bay Nature said at the awards ceremony that Worth A Dam had done amazing work and he was very excited about pursuing the overlap between beaver dams and salmon. Sunday we had a great conversation with JMA conservation award winner about a project he would like to take on that could benefit Worth A Dam. The physician from Los Altos who has expressed interest in our beavers has taken on the thankless job of editing and updating our Wikipedia entries. A new beaver friend has taken on the significant job of organizing a newsletter to distribute to our supporters twice a year. Our volunteer contractor doing the tile bridge project will be meeting with the director of public works this week.Thinking we needed a logo for the organization we placed another ad on craig’s list for an unpaid graphic designer and got a bevy of fantastically gifted artists who cared about these beavers and wanted to be included. I have a presentation for the Rotary Club of PH tomorrow and it looks like I’ll be in charge of the entertainment portion of JMA’s Earth Day event which will likely be a great way to connect with potential performers for the Beaver Festival.

As we flutter around in all this good fortune, I like to think of the excitement Weeks and his team felt when they stumbled into that first corridor. Can you imagine? Finding a place that no one knew existed with treasures that no one had dared imagine? And seeing the corridor stretch in front of you long beyond the shadowed lighting could possibly reach? Did he stop and check one room thouroughly? Or did he run along the corridor and see as much as he could?

Or did he just stand there in awe and thank the spirit of Amun-Ra?

The Opposite of Camouflage

heidi08 Creative Solutions, Environmental, featured October 18, 2010

The word camouflage comes from the French camoufler which means to veil or disguise. Animals use camouflage to elude predators and hide from danger, or to deliver a sneak attack and creep up on a meal unannounced. Both the hunted and the hunter benefit from its obscuring defenses, and evolution has taken care of the animals that are best able to blend into their surroundings. Hiding means success.

Unless you’re a Martinez Beaver.

We were talking this weekend about how the work of Worth A Dam has been almost entirely about visibility: public events, conversations, photos, videos, letters, tours, activities, lectures, displays. We have done more outreach in the past year and a half than most organizations do in a decade. Our mission statement begins with “maintaining the Martinez Beavers” but mostly they maintain themselves just fine. The work we do is to try constantly to keep them from being meddled with so they can get on with their furry beaver lives.

Sometimes that takes the form of direct advocacy work, like when we took the city to court last year to challenge the sheetpile. Ultimately it was the spotlight of public opinion that got the city to hire a biologist to supervise the work, and protect our beavers during the action our lawyer could not stop. Talking to the Rotaries and Kiwanis clubs of the world help calm peoples enormous fears about this issue. Teaching children about wildlife and the watershed has been our secret weapon against beaver prejudice, and I cannot tell you how many police, council members, biologists, and country workers have ruefully offered their support because their children “love the beavers”. A cheerful community presence has made all the difference for our beavers lives, across the city, and across the nation.

It’s the opposite of Camouflage.

If our beavers had chosen a less visible home, outside the center of town, without access or easy observation they would have been long ago exterminated. Seeing their actions and efforts has made them part of the public conversation. Caring people instinctively worry about the accessibility of our colony. Will people harm them? Do they mind the interference? But honestly their public presence is the only thing that has kept them alive.

I hear whispers of lots of “secret” beaver dams that are allowed to exist only because the “authorities” have never seen them. This is a risky option, because all water flows into someone else’s property eventually. People tend to notice if you have an illicit beaver dam some how. Making sure no one knows about them is one way of assuring that beavers continue to survive. Worth A Dam has added another.

Making sure everyone knows about them.

Are we there yet?

heidi08 City Reports, Educational, featured May 9, 2010

How many miles to babylon?

Three score miles and ten

Can I get there by lantern light?

Aye, and back again.

I was thinking of this nursery rhyme today in terms of where we in the process of getting the city to accept/embrace the beavers. It’s been a year and a half. This is almost my 500th column. We’ve had the top watershed minds in the county working on this problem, and the top beaver experts in the world finding solutions. We have vast public interest, an active volunteer group, constant outpourings of good will. All these things should have fitted together and convinced even the most waivering of minds that these beavers belong in this city.

We should be in Babylon, and back again, already.

Instead we are still arguing with public works about the right to plant trees, explaining how our drought has nothing to do with the fact that the beavers haven’t made it flood yet, and getting snapped at by council members who would rather not have to deal with us.

Every time I think we have earned the last necessary support or found a “game changer” so compelling that the city will not be able to ignore the valueable role that these beavers have in this community, things snap back into tension state with elastic zeal. It seemed like the beaver festival changed everything, but it is clear that isn’t true when the city manager tells me over breakfast that the habitat shouldn’t be replaced so that the beavers will just move on. It seemed like my being on the board of directors for the JMA would cement the beavers respectibility for the city, but of course that isn’t what happened at all.

At first night this year, when we were officially “on” the city schedule, Linda asked me happily “did you ever think this day would come?” And I answered without hesitation. Honestly? I thought it would come ages ago.

Babylon isn’t any closer it seems. It has greatly saddened me to think that we might never get there, but this morning I thought, maybe that’s the point. Maybe its the journey, and not the destination, that matters. For the city, and for myself personally.

Maybe we’re not talking about Babylon, but Ithaka.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

C.P. Cavafy

When First we Practice to Deceive

heidi08 City Reports, featured November 7, 2010

ADDENDUM:

So the city must have issued an “Alls Well that Ends Well” press release, because in addition to the merry KCBS report that says as far as we know the beavers are fine (never mind mom’s eye injury or the fact that she hasn’t been seen since last Thursday) a major media outlet checked the blog and was interested in the photo and post. They followed up with Ross for comment, who said the photo changed nothing because it was the other bank that was of concern, not the Bertola’s wall.

The mind reels. The jaw drops.

Never mind that the Cal Engineering report specifically describes the “broadening gap” between the bank and the Bertola’s wall as the emergency change that justifies exemption from CEQA. Never mind that there is video available of him testifying as much at the Council meeting. (Go to 52:30)

Never mind two city attorneys marched into Superior Court and persuaded Hon. Zuniga that the Bertola’s wall separation from the bank could result in imminent collapse and cause a domino effect flooding for the entire downtown.

This is not about what’s true. It never has been.

________________________________________________________________________________

So Tuesday Jon spent a very interesting day at the Martinez Museum and Martinez History Site. He was looking for a particular photo printed in the “Images of America: Martinez” of the creek next to Bertola’s. The picture was taken nearly ten years ago, during the flood project, when the creek was “de-watered” and work was done in the area.

The photo clearly shows the same wall and solid concrete footing which our expert identified and the city denied. Note that if the wall had a concrete footing the threat of the sagging bank would be rendered meaningless. The wall existed before the bank, and is not dependent on the bank. This is why there were so many snickers on the bridge when the sheet pile hit concrete.

Looking at the photo the footing is obvious. The picture also shows the central crack in the firebrick above, which has been blamed on beaver damage. These photos were taken during the Clinton Era – way before beavers. At the museum they found a whole folder of creek photos, two of which show the area in question much more clearly. In conversation with our attorney and the fluvial geomorphologist involved, they both expressed that these photos could have changed the CEQA ruling.

One intrepid beaver friend saw Mark Ross with Skip Lisle Tuesday night enjoying a farewell dinner. She showed him the image and he reacted without surprise. “I’m aware of that photograph” was his response, along with the recognition that this could be used to blame him later.

I have no wish to blame him personally. This photo is an albatross I want hung around the necks of the entire council and director of public works. Each one knew there was no need for this action. They had the perfect rebuttal to any legal threat. They had options, and even if they feared for their election chances or worried about opposing their colleagues they could have privately “leaked” reference of these photos to Worth A Dam, allowing us to serve as the bad guy and stop the project in court.

Instead, they met in secret, voted in secret, omitted in secret, and lied in public. They spent nearly half a million of your tax-payer dollars on a Faustian contract that had nothing to do with public safety. Don’t be fooled by the spin that this is money from the Texaco settlement and therefore not depleting Martinez coffers. It was money we had, and now we don’t, and it was spent for nothing.

They knew it at the meeting. They knew it during apologetic phone calls to beaver supporters. They knew it in court. They knew it every minute they had city staff uselessly poking through the soil to find beaver tunnels.

They knew. Now we know too.

Mervyn Peake: The Mariner & the Dead Albatross, from The Ancient Mariner. Illustrated 1949

Ah ! well a-day! what evil looks

Had I from old and young !
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“Let Nature Take its Course”

heidi08 Beavers, Creative Solutions, Educational, featured September 27, 2009

Every animal advocate has heard this admonishment, usually when they supplemental feed in some way. The philosophy is offered as if it were a genuine respect for the value of non-interference in wild lives; a Muir-like admiration for unspoiled nature. But this fatherly advice is just selfishness wrapped in green paper with a pretense of being eco friendly.

Notice WHEN it is said.

“Let Nature Take its Course” is only said after the dam has been lowered by three feet, the forest has been harvested, the tract housing has taken the last hunting ground, the bird nest has been disturbed, the whale has beached on landfill, and the elk have starved because the field they used to graze became a parking lot. It is offered with no acknowledgment or awareness of how enormously humans have altered that natural course. In some ways it bothers me more than the man at the farmer’s market who said outright that beavers should be shot. At least that is obvious and frankly intolerant. “Let nature take its course” is much more pernicious because it offers an illusion of concern for the enviroment, and pretends to argue against any intervention out of that concern.

Humans build, encroach, destroy and interfere all the time, interrupting populations, feeding ranges and life cycles. It is only when some pesky advocates attempt to fix the effects of our actions we hear this line delivered. “Let nature take its course”.

Truly letting nature take its course would mean keeping the dam at its original height, not protecting trees and letting the beavers feed and travel wherever they liked. Of course that isn’t going to happen. The advice is offered with all the compassion of a BMW driver who ran over a bunny that was injured but not killed. His tearful child asks him if they can take it to the vet. “Let Nature take its Course” is the answer for someone who doesn’t want to admit their responsibility. Let the animals die, move, starve. Let the young be orphaned, eaten, scattered.

It’s “natural”.

If only we really let nature take its course. If we let streams go where they planned to go, and let animals have their spaces back, didn’t get upset when gophers took our tulips, and didn’t cut down trees to build more houses and walmarts. If only we had beavers every couple of miles up every river and creek in the nation like we did 200 years ago, with a system of dams that regulated water in drought and flood and maintained an even flow. If only.

It is no longer possible (if indeed it ever was) for us to “Let Nature Take its Course”. Our footprints have changed and continue to change the landscape in every possible habitat, on land, in the air and under water. Since we can’t be observers, we must become stewards, and take care of what we have altered. In the words of Colin Powell, “You break it. You buy it”. Or Antoine de St. Exupery “You are responsible forever for what you have tamed”.

From now on when people say “Let Nature Take its Course” I’m going to say, “Great idea! Help me unwrap these trees, will you? And then we can work on uninstalling the flow device.”

Heidi P. Perryman, Ph.D.