On the right you’ll find a link to the new article in Landscape Architecturethat describes a CA beaver powwow I attended in January. Looks like our beavers needed just a little more time in the limelight!
Then a lovely letter to the editor from Stephan Schekel in Iowa City afterthe Gazette wrote the customary ‘Gosh trappers are really cool I wish I was a trapper‘ article. Nice to see it mortified someone else for a change!
I was very disappointed to see the front-page picture and story regarding an individual who “relieves stress” by trapping and killing animals (“Top trapper,” March 24).
People may differ about trapping but it is cruel and tortuous for the animals and should not be treated in such a nonchalant fashion.The pictures of numerous animal skins, including fox, which are struggling to make a comeback, and beaver, whose habitat is increasingly threatened, was appalling.
I hope and believe that the featured individual’s values and lack of regard for animal suffering are not shared by many of your readers. Apparently the editors of your paper don’t regard compassion for animal suffering important. I would expect that most of your readers do and are outraged by this article.
Stephen Scheckel Iowa City
Nicely said, Stephan! Have you ever thought of starting a beaver festival in Iowa? Then a happy beaver sighting in Arizona at the boat docks. This beaver looks SO much like our ‘Dad’ beaver that I nearly spat out my coffee. I know beavers look mostly like other beavers, but Dad has always had such pronounced ‘teddy bear’ ears he’s been fairly unique. Apparently not any more!
A final discovery this weekend comes out of Connecticut, where some buddies were apparently camping near a beaver dam and had the idea to make a beer that embodied the hard-working/hard-playing beaver spirit! No, really. Click on the photo to go to their delightful website and make sure you suggest a tagline! Of course I already asked them to sponsor the festival and suggested ‘Beer that’s Worth A Dam’. I’ll let you know what happens!
The beavers are on the warpath in North Carolina, kicking ass and taking names building dams and taking trees along the 70 mile stretch from Cary to Greensboro. This picture was snapped by someone enjoying Bond Park and sent to a columnist who wrote that the beavers were ‘being relocated’, which I’m sure you understand as well as I do. (You know like when your parents told you that puppy went to ‘live on the farm’.)
I did a little searching for the Beaver Man and found the number is linked to the home of a 77 year old man in Stantonsburg NC. No business listing but his (?) son is listed as the rifle safety coordinator for the North Carolina Trappers Association, so that’s nice. Gosh, I can’t tell you how surprised I am that someone with the name ‘beaver man‘ on his truck turns out to be a trapper!
Well apparently they have lots of feelings about beavers in NC because look at this clip from Greensboro where they are worried that beavers will ruin their water quality.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but are you saying that this town rips out beaver dams over and over, tipping mud and silt and debris into the water again and again and then worries about water quality? Apparently the terms ’cause’ and ‘effect’ are not well understood in the area. Dear, challenged Greensboro. Don’t you know that beaver dams are sometimes called the ‘earth’s kidneys‘ because their filtering actually improves water quality?
Well, the benefits of beavers bandwagon may not have reached North Carolina yet, but it certainly has been making the rounds. Yesterday I received a call from Guelph, Ontario about printing my letter to the editor, a call from Maine from someone who wanted to save some beavers in the city park and start their own beaver festival there, and an email from Kentucky where a certain young stopmotion filmmaker we are fond of spent an hour with a reporter walking through bulldozed beaver habitat and talking about their benefits to the ecosystem.
To paraphrase for our friends in North Carolina: the arc of restoration may be long but it bends towards beavers!
Susan Kirks, an acupuncturist by day, became mesmerized by the plight of the American badger. Photo by Elizabeth Proctor.
Recognize this smiling face? Susan Kirks of PLAN and badger fame was the featured article recently on the Bay Nature Website. It is such a grand read I am sure your heart will feel better at the end of it than it does right now. I may have to start a whole new podcast series! Badgers of Change!
By Elizabeth Proctor — published February 20, 2012
In west Petaluma, a hilly, treeless plot of land will be declared the Paula Lane Nature Preserve next month because of the tenacious work of local residents who were inspired by an equally tenacious creature — the American badger.
At the forefront of the effort is Susan Kirks, who co-founded the Paula Lane Action Network (PLAN) in 2001 in order to keep the 11-acre property out of the hands of housing developers. The 10 year land battle is coming to a close, but to Kirks there’s still work to be done. At 58, Kirks, an acupuncturist by day, has made a life’s mission out of studying, protecting, and providing PR for this much maligned member of the weasel family.
Inspired yet? You all understand by now what it means when someone gets summoned by an impulse to make a difference and devotes their life to it even when it has nothing to do ostensibly with their own self-interests or training or day job? I recognized Susan as a familiar (s)hero many years ago when she wrote some lovely articles about the Martinez Beavers.. She’s been an indispensable display at the festival for three years now and her cheerful articles first from Petaluma 360 and now from Petaluma Patch have been a reliable beaver defense from the North.
Always willing to provide a pithy quote to the media, beaver friend Brock Dolman (who is basically Susan’s neighbor but the pair had never connected until I introduced them) had this to say to the reporter.
“I think there is a symbolic connection to make around the tenacity that she has shown, that badgerly spirit of digging in and not being deterred,” said Brock Dolman of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center. “She could see the value of Paula Lane, and the badger became the totem species that represented a lot of that value.”
Badgerly spirit indeed! Susan’s spirit is the uber-badger! Her persistance never fails to take my breath! Long time readers of this blog will already know the surreal story that as a toddler I was given a stuffed real badger by a quirky neighbor. I’m not sure I knew it was dead, but I thought it was the most furry, beautiful and ferocious thing I had ever seen. I of course demanded to be allowed to carry it everywhere – even to bed. Calvin and Hobbes had nothing on Heidi and her badger. As weird as it is, I have often thought that that early badger alliance imbued somehow a tenacious spirit. Of course its one of the first things I ever told Susan which immediately made us fast friends.
No word yet on whether she ever had a stuffed beaver…
Just how Kirks fell in love with badgers, of all creatures, dates back to her arrival in the neighborhood 12 years ago. Having moved to west Petaluma with her two rescued horses, it wasn’t long before Kirks began to notice holes in the ground. A friend told her they were badger dens, which piqued her curiosity. She began to spend much of her time observing the land.
Kirks said her connection to the badgers at Paula Lane is healing and has reignited her childhood passion for the outdoors.
“The funny thing is, I never intended to become a naturalist that has a body of knowledge about the American badger,” Kirks said, laughing. “But the more I came to understand the species, the more I realized what a significant role it plays in ecosystems.”
Go read the entire, lovely article and tell your friends to do the same. It’s a beautiful description of what graceful tenacity looks like up close. I’m so glad Bay Nature has started to give her the credit she deserves, and so very happy Susan is in the world taking care of badgers!
Now just in case you can’t face Monday without your daily dose of beaver-trivia, I have a great story from Florida. This weekend I happened upon the tale of an unexpected visitor in Tallahasee, where apparently Luke Barnhill came home to find a beaver cooling in his swimming pool. He promptly called the St. Francis Wildlife Association which came and removed the animal and will find it someplace better to reside I hope. (Can’t you hear the beaver now? You want me to go where? There’s alligators out there!) I gave them a donation this weekend and told them where to look for more information, but this fun story is as good an excuse as any to post my Very Favorite Beaver Photos Ever.
Years ago they were posted on the internet by a couple from Dallas who may have started out bemused about the visit but were told by a wildlife company that beavers carry disease and eventually chased this little fellow out of their yard with a pool scrape. Never mind their mean-spirited response. These lovely photos make the entire episode worthwhile. Whenever I fear beavers may have taken over my life I always look at them fondly. I especially like the one of the beaver at the bottom of the pool. Remember when you were two and you’d close your eyes and think no one could see you? He’s hiding from the photographer! Sneaky huh?
Staff at the Evanston Ecology Center, 2024 McCormick Blvd., discovered trees with fresh chewing marks and a dam along the bank of the canal last week, said Claire Alden, environmental educator at the center. Beavers disappeared from the area during the construction of waste tunnels underneath the canal in the 1990s, she said. “It’s exciting for us because it just shows the overall improving health of the canal,” Alden said.
Now that’s what I call a warm welcome! Looks like beavers are back in Evanston Canal just up the shore from where our own Wikipedia Rick went to med school! This is actually the very response EBRP had to our beavers! Privately. They knew it was a compliment for 50 years of restorative work, but they never wanted to say so out loud and enter the fray. The late and truly remarkable Hulet Hornbeck told me so himself.
(Beaver Swimming: Ayla Bouvette)
The area has a complicated history with beavers at best, displaying them happily in the zoo, killing them dramtically at Lincoln Park, theneventually earning the protection of countless advocates across country! Still this is a very good sign!
She said she invites Northwestern students to participate in the center’s canoeing programs to take a close look at the wildlife. “I’ll show them exactly where the dam is,” she said.
I’m betting that if she takes 16 students three times out in canoes to show them the dam, that these beavers stand a pretty good chance at being protected. Which is great, because the Evanston needs beavers and Illinois needs beaver education!
Al Dornisch
(One Beaver Creek Place- Rachel Buller)
Maybe a beaver festival? Or a beaver Art Festival? Looking at the images on this page you can see the creatures inspire! Stranger things have happened! I just read this morning about a Beaver Festival in Georgia! Well, almost.
Oh, it’s good to be home! That was too close for comfort! How I missed you! Attentive readers may have noticed that the website was disabled from Saturday morning until last night at 9:15, (but who’s counting) with all sorts of horrific happenings in between, including a starter site from WordPress inviting me to start all over again! When I logged in for help and it said ‘welcome NEW user’ I thought I was done for. Then I couldn’t even log in at all. It was like I never existed.
This time it wasn’t my fault as I’m told the servers crashed and our overlords at Bluehost spent superbowl weekend trying to fix them, then trying to restore all the websites they had erased in the process. During the long, bleak tea-time of the soul where my work for the past 4 years was erased, I wondered what I would do if it was never restored. I wondered if I would start over or simply move to another state and pretend none of this had ever happened. What would you do?
Most of the website was recovered last night, but all links were broken and all links to the website were still dread 404’s. I called this morning and got that fixed so now we can visit the menu bar and the archives. There may still be a few unconnected surprises down the road to deal with, but the worst is definitely over. Sunday I went down to visit beavers and remember how it all began, with no website, no camera – just my curiosity and two beavers. Reed was swimming about at the footbridge and went to sleep in the bank hole under the missing tree. Another yearling joined him. They didn’t seem upset about the server.
What’s remarkable to me, is that after all that happened and all the panicked tech calls all the distressed emails I returned from readers this weekend and all the angst and stress I tried not to feel – we appear to have lost ONE DAY of our 4-year chronicle. One. Saturday’s news.
So in the interest of full restoration and harmony allow me to repeat that we will be at the Flyway Festival in Mare Island next weekend teaching folks about the relationship between beavers and birds. You should stop by and say hi, its a great place to learn about birds, try some new binoculars or hear about the Martinez Beavers!
How Martinez saved its beavers and helped its birds In 2007, the town of Martinez was faced with a problem. Beavers had built a dam in a downtown creek already prone to flooding. No one expected the massive public response which forced the city to control the beaver dam, humanely. New wetlands made and maintained by the beavers since that time have created remarkable habitat for steelhead, otter, mink and a variety of new birds. Come see how a community allowed beavers to restore its wetlands, increase the fish and wildlife populations and broaden its bird count. Beavers really are Worth A Dam!
Heidi Perryman, Ph.D.is an “accidental beaver advocate” who began filming the beavers in 2006, served on the subcommittee that addressed beaver management and started the organization “Worth A Dam” to deal with their continued care. She presented in Oregon at the State of the Beaver Conference and is currently working with a multidisciplinary team on beaver historic prevalence and the role of beaver-assisted salmon recovery in California.
A final discovery this weekend comes out of Connecticut, where some buddies were apparently camping near a beaver dam and had the idea to make a beer that embodied the hard-working/hard-playing beaver spirit! No, really. Click on the photo to go to their delightful website and make sure you suggest a tagline! Of course I already asked them to sponsor the festival and suggested ‘Beer that’s Worth A Dam’. I’ll let you know what happens!
