Category: Friends of Martinez Beavers

Urban Beaver Bonanza

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Shameless Self-promotion, Should I pet beavers?, Urban beavers, Who's blaming beavers now?, Who's saving beavers now? July 3, 2017

Sometimes the stars align and a great deal of good news comes to the forefront at once. Sure, days and weeks and sometimes years of hard work went into it. And sure it’s just random now that its finally coming together in sync. There isn’t really a reason for it, except folks want to tie up loose ends before the long weekend of celebrations. But let’s just celebrate the independence of some urban beavers and their founding fathers, shall we?

Beaver sightings reported in Los Gatos Creek in Campbell

Steve Holmes, executive director of the South Bay Clean Creeks Coalition, said he’s seen beavers along the creek stretch in Campbell—in person and on video shot with a camera stationed where they primarily reside.

Back in 2013, Holmes said he saw a small family of beavers in the Guadalupe River near the SAP Center in downtown San Jose. At the time he wasassessing the area for potential creek cleanups.

“We’re down there and looking down from a bridge in the downtown. I looked down and saw a tree had been chewed,” he said. “It looked like someone was chopping it down with an ax. We went down for a closer inspection, and it turned out it was a beaver. Not just one, but a whole family.”

Hurray for beavers in San Jose! And hurray for Steve for being happy about it! We’re not going to say hurray for this reporter because she’s a little lackluster on the subject and doesn’t talk to the right people or do nearly as good a job as the 2013 stories. Just look at this cartoon stick figure of a biologist from fish and game who is SO out of her element!

Terris Kasteen, a biologist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, confirmed that beavers were reintroduced into Lexington Reservoir and said some may have been pushed down from the reservoir during the heavy winter rains and subsequent flooding in the area.

“One wandering downstream is not surprising,” she said.

Navroop Jassal, a Santa Clara Valley Water District biologist, said beavers were introduced to the reservoir in the 1990s, and the ones seen in the creek could be from there or possibly from the family of beavers seen in 2013 that Holmes spotted as well.

“The history of beavers in the area isn’t well known,” Jassal said.

The water district monitors certain species in creeks, but does not have an active program for beavers and does not plan to start one, according to Jassal. Instead, it will keep an eye on the fallout from potentially destructive beaver behavior such as fallen and chewed trees or damming. The district would then alert the Department of Fish and Wildlife.

“We would be concerned if it’s damming up areas and backing up the flow of the waterway,” Kasteen said.

Kasteen said a beaver presence in the creek over time could affect waterways and result in trees dying and not regrowing. People are advised to keep their distance from the animals and their habitat.

“More or less stay away from them,” Kasteen said.

I’m sorry but that’s HILARIOUS!!! Not only haven’t you read our articles published in your OWN journal Terris about the history of beaver in coastal rivers in including Campbell, but are ready to depredate them now before they do anything because they’re going to build a dam one day, and you warn folks not to approach them because beavers are like furry hand grenades with the pin pulled out.

They could go OFF at any moment.

Goodness gracious, Terris. I think you get a letter. And guess what else? Now that we’re all talking about URBAN BEAVERS I found out yesterday that our chapter on urban beavers was published in the restoration guidebook 2.0 yesterday. I know you will want to read every word but I’m not yet sure how to just publish that section, so check out the entire document and get ready to spend a great deal of time on chapter 7. I would just post what we wrote but of course the slasher editor fairy altered much (but not ALL) of my beautiful prose, and the original no longer relates entirelt. There is stuff in this chapter I’m not thrilled about – like the word MANAGEMENT for one, and a sentence that is so horrifying I’m still trying to get it shaved off. (Go find it yourself). But the fact that it exists at all is a Martinez miracle, and the sections by Dr. Wohl are breathtaking, the accounting of beaver solutions prodigious, my own humble tweaking of psychology and ecology is pretty darned effective, and the silly sheet is gone, so let’s look on the bright side, shall we?

The very first case study is MARTINEZ whooo whoo and makes us seem pretty dam plucky, and kind of adorable I must say. I do get the feeling that our story has changed the playing field forever, and that’s a pretty sweet legacy.

What are you still doing here? Go read it!

It’s up to us now, let’s create a new Hope for beavers

heidi08 Beaver Art, Beavers, Friends of Martinez Beavers, History June 28, 2017

One of the things I’ve learned over the years about trying to change folk’s minds about beavers is that people don’t change their minds about beavers. All the science data from Michael Pollock or all the facts from Dietland Muller-Swarze doesn’t actually translate into policy changes regarding beavers unless another important organ is altered as well.

Hearts.

That’s why the intelligent, heartfelt, observant, tear-inducing writing of Hope Ryden’s Lily Pond was so powerful. She told a story as a compelling, factual and feeling woman who read her history and was gradually was touched by beavers. And I defy anyone who read through her book to ever disdainfully call them ‘rodents’ again.

Hope Ryden, Wildlife Protector and Photographer, Dies at 87

Hope Ryden, whose lifelike photographs of North American beavers, coyotes, mustangs and other wildlife helped elevate them into poster animals for conservation campaigns, died on June 18 in Hyannis, Mass. She was 87.

The cause was complications of hip surgery, her brother, Ernest E. Ryden, said.

An English major who later developed a passion for photography during breaks abroad as a Pan Am flight attendant, Ms. Ryden, in 1961, joined Robert Drew & Associates, a noted documentary production company, where she and her colleagues were in the vanguard of cinéma vérité filmmaking.

By the early 1970s, she had become a full-time naturalist and animal-rights advocate, publishing books for adults and children lushly illustrated with her own photographs.

Her advocacy was credited with encouraging Congress to pass legislation in 1971 protecting the populations of wild horses and burros in the West; their numbers had dwindled to an estimated 17,000 in 1970 from a peak of two million. She also helped persuade New York’s Legislature to name the beaver the official state mammal in 1975.

Ms. Ryden wrote two dozen books on wildlife, including “America’s Last Wild Horses” (1970), “God’s Dog: A Celebration of the North American Coyote” (1975), “Bobcat Year” (1981) and “Wild Animals of America ABC” (1988).

In addition to her books, Ms. Ryden wrote for National Geographic, Audubon, Smithsonian and The New York Times Magazine.In addition to her books, Ms. Ryden wrote for National Geographic, Audubon, Smithsonian and The New York Times Magazine.

Hope changed minds. True to her name. She gave beavers the best chance they ever had to survive in an indifferent and inconvenient world. Grey Owl may have softened things a little, Enos Mills got folks to listen, but Hope made people love them. And that was a game changer.

She was a naturalist of the highest order and wrote many wonderful books on many wonderful topics, but to my mind this was her crowing achievement. The introduction was written by Dr. Jane Goodall. For years Hope was an email buddy and would donate signed copies to the Silent Auction. She always said that the Martinez beaver story made her happy and made her feel as if new options were possible. She was friends with Sherri Tippie and knew the good folks at Beavers: Wetlands and Wildlife. She never stopped caring about beavers even after her amazing 4 years.

I put off reading Lily Pond because I didn’t want to save the Martinez beavers with sympathy in the beginning. I had the crazy idea that just explaining the science would make everyone understand. Silly me! I read it in the winter the year after mom’s illness, and the passage when her matriarch died literally made me erupt in tears. We were driving back from the mountains and I could literally only read a 10 words at a time before I had to put the book down and weep. Her beautiful words were carved across my aching heart; “Oh, Lily! Is this how you leave us?” And I will thank her forever for saying how it felt to watch the beaver heroine you have sat with in the dark for years, suddenly leave the world where she brought so much life.

Hope told stories. And taught me that stories Save Beavers.

13 Reasons Why you should always film in Beaver Park

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, featured, Festival, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Who's blaming beavers now? June 13, 2017

Yesterday all of Martinez was a buzz with the excitement of Paramount pictures filming season 2 of the netflix series “The 13 reasons why” in our streets, courtyards and parks. The busy Perryman’s had to go to Vallejo yesterday and on our way out we saw maybe 7 huge white trailer trucks with equipment inside, the street blocked off at the financial courthouse, and beaver park blocked and barricaded. There were film crews literally everywhere and people running around with sound equipment, scene props makinglast minute touches.

It must of went on all day, because when we got home at 3:30 they were set up on main street filming in a restaurant with outside dining and there and watchers were lined up on the opposite wall across the street. Lots of cellphones photos were snapped of all the drama, including this lovely shot of them in Beaver park.

The production has made its share of news both because of the subject matter (a young girl leaves audio tapes to her classmates about why she committed suicide) the quality of the work, and the bay area-centric locale. Because major scenes have been shot in San Rafael, Sebastopol, Petaluma, Vallejo and now Martinez. We first heard about it when a note was left on our door asking if we would be interested in having our house in the filming, they might want to use both the exterior and interior shots over the summer, and we would be paid for our trouble. As exciting as it was to think about, my second life as a child psychologist probably wouldn’t have worked well with having my house filmed for a teen suicide production, so we politely declined.

Obviously, by cleverly filming in beaver park, they got me anyway. Smile.

Kinda fun story from Kitsap Washington this morning. I’m never horribly worried about Washington beaver stories, because even if they don’t always end well for the beavers, I know there are folks close to home pushing for the right solutions. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Road crews and beavers busy working on Brownsville Highway

BROWNSVILLE — Eager beavers — both real and figurative — are making life challenging for drivers on Brownsville Highway in Central Kitsap.

For some time now, hardworking road crews have been prepping that stretch of highway, filling dips and doing “grind outs” where the old surface is badly cracked, in preparation for putting down a new layer of asphalt, according to Kitsap County Road Superintendent Jacques Dean. The goal is to roll down the new layer towards the end of this week, “depending on the weather and completion of the repairs,” Dean said.

Curing the chronic flooding in the dip in the Brownsville Highway below the county’s sewer treatment plant will be more difficult, Dean said. Water over the highway there, in addition to damaging the asphalt and washing out the west shoulder, was also the cause of several accidents last spring.

“We were just out there,” Dean said. He explained that the problem is beavers building dams. The debris from their construction projects plugs up the inlet to the culvert designed to carry runoff from the uphill wetland to the east under the road to the wetland on the lower west side of the road.

Fixing the problem is complicated by several problems.

“[The dams are] on private property. It’s on wetlands. And we can’t work off of the right of way,” Dean said. To get permission to do any work, he said he is going to have to go through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, state Fish and Wildlife, and Kitsap County Public Health.

An added challenge to clearing the channel is that it is probably going to involve a lot of handwork. “You can’t get standard equipment in there,” Dean said. “It would sink right down into the peat bog and mud.”

Too bad your big machines don’t work in mud. Because beaver’s certainly do.

Now, if you’ll excuse me Vista Prints is offering me 50% off again and I’ve been waiting to make signs out of these graphics I put together for that Tattoo booth (Where Erika and the Watershed Steward Interns will be helping kids put the wildlife tattoos they earned on leather covers) and the journal-making booth (Where Jon will be helping the kids make nature journals with the covers). They generally tell the story fairly well and I’m pretty happy with them.

Beavers in San Diego?

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Environmental, Festival, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Who's saving beavers now? June 7, 2017

Right now in San Diego they are having a megalith of an international conference on urban wildlife that is gigantic by ordinary human measurements. It is hosted by San Diego State and the SD urban wildlife working group of the Wildlife Society. Lots of our friends are there including Travis Longcore, Beth Pratt and Glynnis Hood. Glynnis is the author of the ‘beaver manifesto’ and the researcher behind all the major beaver research.

Guess what Glynnis is presenting on? Go ahead, guess.

What’s old is new again: Cost-effective management of human-beaver conflicts

Glynnis A. Hood, and Varghese Manaloo

Human-wildlife conflicts result in ongoing and costly management by all levels of government. We installed and evaluated 12 pond-levelers to counter flooding by beavers and developed a cost-benefit analysis for these sites in a protected area in Alberta, Canada. We also documented beaver management approaches in municipalities throughout Alberta. Over three years, one pond-leveler site required regular maintenance until we designed a modified pond-leveler; another required minor modifications, and the remaining 10 sites required little to no maintenance.

Installing 12 pondlevelers resulted in a present value (PV) net benefit of $2,680,640 after only three years. A sensitivity analysis, without the contingent valuation included, still resulted in an $81,519 PV net benefit. Municipalities employed up to seven methods to control beavers: with the most common being lethal control and dam removal. Total annual costs for beaver management provided by 48 municipalities and four provincial park districts was $3,139,223; however, cost-accounting was sometimes incomplete which makes this a conservative estimate.

This research has led to further installations and research in a nearby rural municipality (14 pond-levelers) and the city of Camrose, Alberta (2 pond-levelers), where we have seen similar results. Alternative management approaches can provide cost-effective and long-term solutions to human-beaver conflicts in rural and urban areas.

What? Cities save money by installing flow devices rather than constantly trapping? You’re kidding! Of course we’ve been saying this for years but it’s wonderful to have the hard data to back it up.I knew Glynnis was working on research about the success of flow devices in urban areas, but I’m so glad the numbers are in!

Just in case you’re wondering, Glynnis did hear the Martinez Beaver story at the very first state of the beaver conference I presented at in 20011. She was so famous already then I was afraid to talk to her at the meeting, but as fate would have it we were stuck at the airport together in a log jam and chatted away for an hour before her plane came. She was wonderful of course, and very supportive of our work. I’m so very interested in the presentation she did, and how the topic of ‘urban beavers’ has become so ubiquitous! Their great logo was missing something. So I fixed it.

You probably never listened to our interview, but you really should.

Interview with Glynnis Hood

My only regret is that this conference is taking place in a region hasn’t had urban beavers for more than a century, why couldn’t they hold this conference at the Sierra College in Placer county instead?

Extra, Extra! Read all about the beaver good news!

heidi08 Beaver-themed merchandise, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and Ice, Beavers and Insects, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, featured, Festival, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Who's saving beavers now? June 4, 2017

There’s great news from three nations today just in time for our Suday funnies. First there’s the fantastic announcement that Frances Backhouse (author of Once they were Hats) will be doing a lecture in 2 weeks for idea city (which is the canadian equivalent of TED talks). If you live near Toronto and have a spare 300 you might consider being in the audience. Us poor California folks will have to wait for the vide0,

Award-winning Canadian author Frances Backhouse is a former biologist whose curiosity about the world enticed her into a writing career. Her 2015 book Once They Were Hats: In Search of the Mighty Beaver, was heralded by The Globe and Mail as one of the “20 books you’ll be reading – and talking about – for the rest of the year.”

Speaking the morning of Friday, June 16th – buy your tickets now!

Frances was kind enough to donate another copy of her beloved book for our silent auction, and we are eager to see how the dynamic ideacity event success. Hopefully it will remind folks, like Glynnis talk back in the day, that beavers really matter.

Lots of good work in this country too, where beaver friend and Geology Student Erin Poor just posted about the project she’s working on in tualatin. Remind me again, how many people were talking about the Pros and Cons of Urban beaver before Martinez and Worth A Dam? Oh that’s right. Zero!

Beavers are known as environmental engineers because of their ability to change the landscape to fit their needs. Beaver activity, such as dam building, can increase stream and floodplain complexity, which may create a more diverse habitat for wildlife in the area.

Many scientists are curious to discover how beavers affect impaired urban streams. The USGS recently began studying the effect of beaver populations on urban streams in Tualatin River basin, located in the Portland, OR, metropolitan area. Scientists are studying whether beaver activity can improve the health of city streams. Insights from this study will provide a good foundation of the “pros and cons” of beavers in urban areas, thereby allowing local agencies to make management decisions based on science. This research is a collaboration between the USGS Oregon Water Science Center and Clean Water Services of Washington County, Oregon.

Tualatin_beaver_study_WithinOurReachPoster_2016

Bring back beavers to fight flooding and pollution, expert claims

Further proof that one person can make a difference? Here’s a slapdash beaver article from one of the silly English rags that will steal any story and photo off the internet and call it ‘news’. Case in point? How about my photo that I mocked up before Brexit? This was on USA news today along with an assortment of dimly related beaver images from around the globe, including the shop lifting beaver at Christmas in Maryland. Never mind, at least folks are talking about it.

We have some wonderful new auction items to mention this fine sunday morning, and I’m thinking we should start with Jennifer Lovett’s smart book for teens and tweens “Beavers away“. It’s a great way to look at the issue and she does an excellent job talking about the importance of beaver to biodiversity. I especially like this graphic. I met Jennifer on the beaver management forum on Facebook set up by Mike Callahan in Massachusetts. (It’s a good place to hear about beaver work and if you aren’t a member you should be.) She is a big supporter of all things beaver and became a good beaver buddy.

Thanks Jennifer!

Beavers-Away

Finally we have a much anticipated donation from Marcella Henkles in Corvalis Oregon. You will remember she was the amazing raku tile artist who featured two lovely beaver tiles to the Beaver tales art exhibit both of which sold almost immediately. I’m sure she was surprised to hear from me begging at her door but she generously agreed to send me one of the works she had recently fired. The complex technique demands carving the image on wet clay then glazing it into color. You really have to see it in person to understand how the colors, textures and rough barn wood all work together. It’s gorgeous. Doesn’t this need to be on your wall immediately?