Meet Joe Cannon & Amanda Parrish from the Lands Council in Washington. Amanda is the Director of the Beaver Project and Joe is its Senior Ecologist. They came to the Lands Council as Americorp volunteers and now are golden employees running a prestigious program that California needs to copy. Together they run an all expense paid relocation resort program for beavers in Washington. I met them in Oregon at the State of the Beaver Conference where they presented on their community outreach programs and work with the public. (Amanda likes making candy dams with children which is a delicious way to learn ecology!) They had planned to come down for the beaver festival, but missed it by ten days. Instead they will come tonight for a meet and greet and get to sit in on the Worth A Dam post-mortem of the event.
These are beavers in Hancock (live) traps
Amanda & Joe with two beavers in transport cages ready for their new home.
This is what the back of Joe's car looks like when he's working...
Welcome to your new home little beavers! Good Luck!
Tonights conversation should be fascinating! No word yet from Brock on how yesterday’s capital Coho meeting went, I’ll keep you posted.
But this mornings Gazette reminds me they flooded it in a GOOD way – as in “flooded” with thousands of visitors over the weekend. Nice coverage in both the morning’s Gazette (link will come when they post it) and Martinez Patch, who also shot this charming video of the day.
(You have to excuse me for looking exhausted but I had already done about 1oo of these…)
It was great to have so much interest in wildlife and such remarkable turn-out. Cheryl shot 2000 photos and is still wading through them. Lory’s husband sent a few today that I thought I’d share. The bread to my right in the above photo was a gift from Bob Rust (the kayaker who cleans the creek) who also came up with this idea and somehow made it come true…
He made some amazing ceramic paperweight beavers too that were delightfully displayed at the Friends of Alhambra Creek booth. He’s been a true beaver friend since the beginning, and as near as anyone ‘discovered’ the beavers in late 2006. Apparently he has no monopoly on creativity though because check out the table at the Sierra Wildlife Coalition
Now that is truly inspiring. They drove down from Tahoe for the event and Lory put them up for the weekend. Beaver friendships are for life I believe. One of our attendees was a colleague and friend who brought her grandchildren and bid valiantly at the silent auction. On the day a message was forwarded to me of her having her children say what they learned. The usual beavers eat leaves and live in the lodge was repeated, and then the youngest piped in cheerfully with the unexpectedly somber axiom
Saturday’s festival was certainly the biggest and best we have ever had. By one o clock we had already distributed 100 bracelets, and tails were a huge hit all day. We started with 500 and there are 98 left so that should give you some idea of how popular the activity was. Gary Bogue has a nice homage today. How many people were there? It’s hard to know, but the first half of the day was unbelievably crowded. We distributed 750 brochures at the event, and the guideline was generally one to a group. It probably isn’t exaggerating to guess we had nearly 1500 people. We had visitors from Concord,Walnut Creek, Lafayette, Oakland, Vallejo, Sonoma, San Jose, Sacramento, Elk Grove, Placer and Jackson. Amtrak brought alot of attendees this year, from all along the San Joaquin line. For the first I’m aware of we took in more money than we spent for the event and two people this morning said that they thought our little nameless park had more people than the entire peddler’s fair.
Several folks have noted that our attendees this year we’re on the whole more knowledgeable about wildlife in general and supportive of efforts to care for it. There were fewer of the battle-curious and more of the beaver-curious. It was a palpable shift from a crowd eager to beat city hall to a crowd dedicated to living with wildlife, and the change was the perfect compliment to the day that included snakes, screech owls, turtles, tarantulas and bats. Corky Quirk’s amazing bat display was one of the best things about the event. I hope she comes back, but if you missed it or didn’t realize what a gift she was, this will fill you in.
I loved lots of things about the magical, exhausting day, (including the many wondrous volunteers that made our biggest event the easiest to pull off ), but one thing that I’ll remember above all else is greeting Mary O’Brien the Utah Forests Project Manager for the Grand Canyon Land Trust who came all the way to California to get ideas for a future beaver festival of her own. Mary was amazed at the crowd, touched by the children, indignant at the sheetpile, awed by the displays, enamored of wildbryde’s charms, and fascinated by every part of the story. After touring the event she walked to the Muir house and jogged back for dinner. We laughed. schemed and gossiped over margaritas and then went to see some beavers before she took the train back to Berkeley where she was staying. I dare say she’ll have plenty to say about her visit.
Mary admiring the tiles
I was relieved to see that all this fame hasn’t gone to the beavers heads this morning. Apparently it was a working day just like any other. Those are unusual construction materials. Drinking on the job?
A flooded Highway 9 in Blue River during July’s high water hearkens back to a Western landscape governed by beavers.
It’s been said that the West we’re accustomed to — the “fast-flowing streams and invitingly open banks, celebrated in photographs and songs and pickup truck commercials,” Kevin Taylor wrote in the June 2009 issue of High Country News — is an illusion. It’s a message Grand Canyon Trust project manager Mary O’Brien preached in Taylor’s story.
Gosh it’s nice to see a reminder ofTaylor’s seminal article again after all this time. I love that it made enough of an impression to get a mention two years later. I remember being so excited to read it and learn about heroine Mary O’brien preaching beaver gospel with “her thick rope of a gray braid” that when I travelled to Oregon for the conference I scoured the 200+ attendees looking for that rope.
(I quickly realized there were far too many gray ropes to identify hers in particular, and had to wait until we were properly introduced. Now she’s coming to the beaver festival to see about starting her own in Utah, and you’ll have a chance to see for yourself!)
Looks like at least half the gospel was heard in Colorado, since everyone is willing to admit that beavers are a Keystone species but no one seems willing or able to install a flow device.
“There’s been some pesky ones up there by Highway 9,” he said of the beavers — and Blue River second-home owner Mark Ronchetti agrees. Speaking on a drive to his Albuquerque, N.M. broadcast meteorologist job, he said when he bought his 9-acre property the area was “so choked off by beavers building dams that it stopped up the water to make it like wetlands.”
He said he found 10 to 15 dams “clogging the flow” that he’s since broken up. He’s also relocated some of the architects because beavers are such hard workers, they’ll rebuild a dam within days, sometime hours.
“Without that, the house would’ve been flooded,” Ronchetti said. He’s noticed properties north of his lot that are vacant, and where beavers are happily abiding. “It’s been ignored,” he said. “I understand having beavers and habitat, but we can’t just let it go. Some wetlands is good, but there must be some control of what’s going on. The Blue River has got to be able to flow through there.”
Hmm. “We only need so much of this habitat business. A river has to get where its going, otherwise they’ll be anarchy! I can’t be held responsible for ripping families apart when there are young to take care of. I’m a meteorologist for gawdsake. Never mind that if I move THESE beavers I’ll just get new ones. You can’t expect me to think of past tomorrow’s forecast.”
Taylor called the rodent a time shifter, “having the power to extend the release of water late into summer, saturating the ground and healing watersheds. It has the power to re-create the primordial, wetter West that existed for millennia — a West we just missed seeing.”
Beaver activity can transform an ephemeral stream that traditionally runs for just a few days in spring into one that lasts for several months. The present disconnect with the beaver comes largely from the trapping era, when beavers were extensively eliminated. North America had an estimated 60 million beaver before European settlement, which eventually dropped in a century of trapping to roughly 100,000, common figures show. According to Taylor, the West held just a fraction of that. They’ve since made a comeback that beaver-restorers believe still has a long way to go.
They are a keystone species that restores riparian habitat and raises the water table. Their fur was used for felt in beaver hats, a fashion later replaced by silk hats — a shift that likely saved the beaver from extinction, according to the Colorado Division of Wildlife.
“No mammal other than humans has a great an influence on its surroundings. This is a ‘keystone species’ in riparian communities; without them the ecosystem would change dramatically,” states the Colorado Division of Wildlife. The ponds that well up behind their dams create navigable waters beneath the ice so they can be active year-round.
Ahh Kevin, we missed you. It’s great to read you again. Come to think of it your article never mentioned flow devices. That might have been a mistake. Not quite sure the state of Colorado is quite ready for your vision. They seem to be missing a lot of the point.
Further north, in Silverthorne, public works director Bill Linfield and his crew spend hours, days and sometimes up to a month in spring breaking dams at Straight Creek as it approaches the outlets and Willow Creek upstream from the Willowbrook neighborhood.
Wetlands in Willow Creek require Linfield’s crew to go in with wader and pull the dams apart “one stick at a time,” Linfield said. “By the next morning, the beaver has rebuilt the dam. It’s a constant battle.”
Which is why he’s relocated several of the beavers. This year, no trapping took place, but it’s been an almost annual occurrence since public works took on the task of protecting the outlet buildings and the Willowbrook houses.
“We don’t want to kill them. We just want them to go somewhere else,” Linfield said.
Once again for the folks at home,you want these beavers to stay just where they are. Honestly. If you move them out new beavers will move in and you’ll have to deal with this problem all over.Figure out what are the conditions you require to maintain safe roads, properties,ranches and find out what tools will allow you to have those conditions EVEN IF THE BEAVERS STAY. A flow device? A culvert fence? A dam reinforcement? Figure out the right tool(s) for the job and then build it. Then thank your lucky stars that those beavers will keep any others away.
Nice article, but missing key points of the sermon kinda reminded me of this,
This weekend’s press release generates two stories so far….
Beaver Festival IV Promises Dam Good Time!
Q: Why did Martinez keep the beavers?
A: Because they were Worth A Dam!
Actually the answer is a little more complicated and involves a civic uprising rivaling the last 10 minutes of It’s a Wonderful Life. You’re sure to learn the whole story if you join the Festivities on August 6th in downtown Martinez. In addition to live music and unique wildlife displays, this free festival will offer a “paint your own tail” activity complete with a contest/fashion show at 1:30 awarding prizes for the most creative entries.
“At our first festival we did a paper tail art project that was enormously popular” Said the group’s founder Heidi Perryman. “Later we met children who had carefully kept that artwork and wore it religiously when visiting the beaver dams. It was incredible!” She said, noting that this year volunteers pre-cut 500 leatherette tails that children can uniquely paint. “They’ll be a much better keepsake”.
If there aren’t any artists in your family, you can take a tour of the beaver habitat and invest your time at the silent auction – where you can bid on generous donations from Folkmanis, Safari West, or Beaver Creek Vineyards. While supplies last children can “earn” charms for a keystone species charm bracelet by explaining how beavers improve the environment for other wildlife. No one will want to miss out, as this year the charms, paid for by Martinez Kiwanis, were hand designed by Wild Bryde Jewelry.
Past Festivals helped Worth A Dam give a beaver-management grant to fellow beaver supporters in Tahoe, who went on to save beavers in their own city as well as nearby Truckee. Perryman travelled to Oregon to present at the State of the Beaver Conference and connected with the Grand Canyon Land Trust who will be sending beaver representatives to learn about starting a festival of their own!
2011 has been an eventful year for the Martinez beavers, with hard storms washing out their dams and lodge, separating the family for several months. You will have to come in person to learn how the 2010 kits managed on their own and find out about this summer’s surprising family reunion.
