Category: Friends of Martinez Beavers

And the winner is – UTAH!

heidi08 Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, featured, Friends of Martinez Beavers, In the News, Who's saving beavers now? October 13, 2015

The states of Washington and Utah have been running a neck-to-neck competition to be the beaver Mecca of America. They are both brilliant at beaver management in so many ways and light years ahead of their border cousins. For a while it looked like Washington, (with heavy weights like NOAA, Michael Pollock and the Methow project) was in the lead. But now Utah, (with beaver Shamans Mary Obrien of GLCT and Joe Wheaton at Utah State), has just made a giant leap forward.

Utah: Even their WALMARTs are smarter than yours.

Project helps protect Logan beavers, reduce threat of flooding

LOGAN — A project in Logan may be a lifesaver for beavers, and it may help Wal-Mart get along better with its furry neighbors. Workers have installed a system intended to reduce the threat of flooding caused by beaver dams.

“Killing beaver just didn’t seem like the right way to go,” said Dan Miller, chairman of the Bear River Watershed Council. “There was a better solution, and this is definitely it.”

The new system regulates the level of a beaver pond, functioning more or less like the overflow drain on a bathtub. It prevents the beaver pond from rising too high and overfilling.

Beaver dams store water in the springtime and allow it to trickle downstream in the late summer, a process that benefits downstream water users, he said.
“They help with the water quality,” Bouwes said, “by capturing a lot of sediment and other materials that we would have to clean up otherwise.”

Okay, Utah has some crazy ideas about women and minority rights and wants to sell back their national parks, but HEY they install flow devices at WALMART, so watch out America. This is what visionary looks like! Now Walmart needs to donate a field cam and install it on sight so they can see some photos of the wild creatures they just saved. (Better photos = more media = and more advertising of their good deed.)

I would send a thank you note to the good folk who approved this project, but I can’t find any details about management. Guess we better send our thanks to Nick Bouwes at Utah State and Dan Miller of the massive Bear River Watershed group. That should keep us busy.

Forestry Beavers

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers, kits, Who's saving beavers now? October 11, 2015

Our Georgia-based beaver friend BK sends this 1906 forestry text on beavers. He is looking for reference on the amount of water stored by beaver ponds, so send anything you have my way. I love reading this lost wisdom. It has so much hope for the future and a mistaken faith in our recognition of doing the right thing. Here’s the awesome conclusion:

How touching the author wants a closed season for beaver. Ahem. Let me be the first to tell you that’s never going to happen. Actually, I don’t worry about beaver trappers. I worry about depredation. At least recreational trappers have to COUNT the number of beaver they kill. Property owners and cities don’t.

All I want is for the number of inconvenient beavers killed every year to be COUNTED. Is that so much to ask?

In honor of the flow device removal and our 3000th post, I finally got around to making a video about this year’s kits. It was hard work editing through all that weeping. But I’m glad the monument to their brief lives is done. A few folks sent comments and were willing to share them, so I thought I’d pass them along. If you want to add some email me or post them directly to the website. I guess the lesson of all this is that loving anything means you let yourself risk the pain of losing it. I’m sure there’s wisdom to be gleaned from that somewhere.

At the moment I pretty much just think it sucks.

Oohh, just beautiful, Heidi. Can’t speak, can’t type. Wishing you lots of pennies from heaven. Oooh those sweet babies…If I could wave a magic wand and bring them back, I would. I don’t know how you have made it through, Heidi, but that is the sweetest little film ever. RE of Napa

Thank you so much for making this for all of us. Many tears fell but I agree it needed to be done. LB Martinez

Yes, thank you, too ….you do such great work for both man & animals! Tears tears tears. CB Martinez

That was very beautiful, Heidi. Thank you. Please, let’s hope Alhambra Creek becomes home to more beaver families in the near future. Once this drought is over and the creek flows normally again, the willows grow, and the tullies flourish, and the homeless have homes, we will sit together again at the creek side and marvel at how magnificent the beavers are. I know this isn’t the end, even though it feels like it might be for awhile. Because of your initial interest and attention those many years ago on our wonderful Martinez beaver family; and subsequently, your stewardship and your educating the world about them, more beavers everywhere are being appreciated and saved. I’m so sad as I know you and Jon are too. But what a beautiful tribute you made to them, and for us all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Know I love and appreciate you and Jon, and all your hard work for our Martinez beavers, and beavers everywhere. I will educate anyone, anywhere about the beaver, and their incredible engineering for the environment. Yes, they are definitely Worth A Dam, and much much more.
JO Martinez

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver Rehabilitation, Beavers and water, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Who's saving beavers now? September 24, 2015

Oh sure. No beaver news for 5 whole days and then an EXPLOSION of stories to share. Well, we have to start with this, because I told you it was coming 10 days ago.

Beaver: Back to the Future

Beaver, whose dams help slow the flow of water, play a key role in the health of our forests. They create wetlands, reduce the force of floods, and expand riparian habitat for wildlife. In our new 13-minute video “Beaver: Back to the Future,” four Forest Service employees and a retired Regional Forester eloquently and enthusiastically praise the power of beaver to beneficially restore and manage national forest water flows in the face of climate change.

Beaver: Back to the Future from Grand Canyon Trust on Vimeo.

Wasn’t that awesome? Everyone did such a fantastic and compelling job. And Trout Unlimited funded. How long must we wait for it to catch on. The smartest beaver folk in three states. Now only 47 more to go!

Maybe Coca cola can help. Beaver: the paws that refreshes!

Coca-Cola Leaves It to Beavers to Fight the Drought

What do Coca-Cola and beavers have in common? It sounds like the setup of a bad joke, but the fates of beavers and bottlers look increasingly intertwined. Coke is funding the deployment of beavers in the United States to build dams and create ponds that can replenish water supplies for local ecosystems and ultimately, people.

Coke’s deployment of engineering rodents has a similar goal: getting water into the ground. Before Europeans’ arrival on the continent, beavers lived in nearly every headwaters stream in North America, and they shaped the continent.

“They were everywhere and having a huge impact on the landscape and the hydrology,” said Frances Backhouse, a Victoria, British Columbia–based author whose book, Once They Were Hats, about the history and environmental role of beavers, will be published Oct. 1.

“Beavers mean higher water tables and water on the landscape throughout the dry seasons as well wet seasons,” she said. They are, according to Backhouse, “the only animal in the world that can rival us in terms of engineering the landscape.”

The funding repairs stream crossings and restores streams damaged by wildfires in California, New Mexico, Illinois, Michigan, and Colorado. It is helping to pay for the beaver project, which seeks to boost water retention in the Upper Methow River watershed in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest in Washington state.

Natural solutions like deploying the beavers are a good value, said Radtke. An earlier project in the Sierra Nevada Mountains used heavy equipment to install a series of plugs to contain water so it could seep into sediment. “It was fantastic,” he said. “It was working. But it cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

The Upper Methow Beaver Project, a joint effort of five organizations, accomplishes the same thing for less. Coke’s investment in the project in 2014 was around $40,000. Total project cost for that year was $271,000.
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“It turns out that beavers work cheaper than big, heavy, yellow equipment,” said Radtke.

Ya think?

Alright, credit where credit’s due, relocating beavers to save water is MUCH better than killing them, and kudos to Coke for having the sense to fund a winner. But really the ideal place for beavers to be improving water is everywhere there is water and people to drink it, and I’ll be happiest when they are allowed to relocate themselves.

smile-again-1 — Smiling beaver kit by Cheryl Reynolds

Update on the little munchkin at Lindsay who survived the night and was looking healthier today. He’ll be ready to leave in a couple days, and if they can’t locate his family he’ll go to our friends at Sonoma Wildlife Rescue to mature and learn to be a beaver. This morning Cheryl and Kelly went out looking for his family and may have seen another kit and some chewed tulles. Fingers crossed he’ll be reunited with loved ones soon.

Papyrus

heidi08 Beavers, Educational, Friends of Martinez Beavers, History September 22, 2015

This weekend someone commented on our logo with the perfect sentence “Oh because beavers are the KEY to the creek, right?” And it got me remembering how it all came together.

Once upon a time, many years ago, Worth A Dam needed a logo. I fiddled with some primitive images and asked around the best I could and got the suggestion to look for a volunteer on Craig’s list. I was told to advertise for a “Free gig” and say what we needed.

The truly amazing thing is that I immediately received more than a dozen offers. I actually had to review applications for an unpaid job drawing a beaver logo. It was 2009 and the time the Martinez Beavers were bigger news than they are now. I reviewed cute graphics, manly graphics and gothum graphics. I got offers from the Southbay, the Northbay and San Francisco.

The woman that finally intrigued me was Kiriko Moth, a graphic artist in the city. She’s has gotten bigger and her website is amazing if you want to catch a peek. She had just finished some lovely illustrations for a book on bees that compelled me. We had a conversation about my ideas and she sketched a host of designs which I liked – including one with children’s faces. I wish I had the sample sheet she sent just to remember. But at the time I asked her to think about incorporating the key idea, and maybe a stream.

She came back with a stream dividing the beaver (in blue and reversed with the wide part at the top). I suggested we do uncolored and offered the idea of flipping it so it looks like you’re looking into the distance. Then we chose fonts to go around it. And Voila the logo was born. When mom died she was kind enough to notch the tail.

One thing she said as we were discussing fonts was to avoid papyrus. She said TOO many non profits used it already. I thought at the time that was an odd thing to say, because I happened to love papyrus. Maybe you do too. But now years later I have seen over and over that she was right. Here’s a little sample, but keep your eye out and you’ll find millions.

I have to ask myself what quality we all possess that draws us to this font? Even many of the logos that were professionally designed and avoided the danger of using the font actually chose fonts that look LIKE papyrus.

Apparently the advice NOT to use papyrus has to be sternly administered from lots of sources. It is all over google.

There’s a psychological paper there just waiting to be written.

Never send a city worker to do a beaver expert’s job…

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, Festival, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Who's saving beavers now? August 8, 2015

Northampton will install rocks to baffle beavers at Fitzgerald Lake

Hark back to 2013, when beavers dammed the area around the outlet pipe that sends water from the lake under the dam and into the Broad Brook. The lake rose about two feet that year, forcing the city to install a wire-mesh fence around the pipe, temporarily holding the beavers at bay.

Ever industrious, the beavers eventually burrowed under the fence, clogging the system again and raising the level of the lake. Some of the trails along the shore were even submerged this year.

Wow, Northampton MA is 20 minutes away from Mike Callahan. I can’t believe he installed a fence beavers burrowed under in 2 years, can you? Let’s use the search function on the website to see if it gives any clues. Here’s one from 2013:

“Once the new fence is in by the city’s contractor I’ll be installing a Flexible Pond Leveler through their fence.”

Ahhhh so it was a “I’ll-save-some-$$-by-doing-this-myself, how-hard-can-it-be” job. Gosh and now you have to spend a grand lowering rocks into the lake to hold down the silly fence that you installed, because otherwise Mike’s excellent flow device will get plugged. Have you learned anything by this? Are you going to stick to the experts next time?

Mike said at the time that this lake was the site of the FIRST flex pipe he ever installed – in 1998. How’s that for a history lesson!

Our dinner guests last night were Bob & Jane Kobres from Georgia. Here they are at the table with our awesome chef and FRO’s beautiful beaver watercolor in the background. He’s the retired librarian from UGA that always sends us beaver research and discretely points out egregious typos so that your reading experience will be slightly less marred. He and his wife made their first trip to California (first time ever) for the beaver festival. (No, really)

Every business they visited in Martinez they made a point of telling was stunned. And they just did a beaver presentation at the children’s program in their church. How awesome is that? At dinner we realized they are truly unique folks: Jane is the daughter of a white baptist deacon from Tennessee that voted for Obama twice.

(How small is that demographic?)

They had a great time watching Bob Rust put together the wattle beaver, and Bob filmed most of it so I hope we can get it on the website soon. They shared a similar knowledgeable quirkiness that I am starting to recognize in beaver lovers. (Myself included). It’s amazing that we have had three separate visits from Georgia in the past few years, and the Blue Heron Preserve in Atlanta is now talking about possibly doing a beaver festival. (Be still my heart!) They went to Muir Beach on their visit and boldly put their bare feet in the Pacific, as well strolling around Muir Woods and the John Muir house here in Martinez.

We’re just about finished with the final exchanges for the silent auction, meeting a lot of folk wednesday at the bridge, and everything is finally put away or tallied. I sent the followup receipts and paperwork for the grants yesterday, and am finally starting to feel done with everything. I got this fun photo from our bag piper yesterday, Dave Kwinter, who said he had a great time at the festival.

Of course I warned him to use caution when saying he enjoyed it, or else we will certainly ask him again!