Friends of Martinez Beavers – Page 85

Why Keep the Beaver When You can Have

heidi08 Beaver News, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Friends of Martinez Beavers January 12, 2010

the dam for free? Or something like that. There has been a strain of articles recently about the role that little dams have in helping wintering salmonids. (Fish of the family Salmonidae, including salmon, trout, chars, whitefish, ciscoes and grayling) The begrudging recognition is that beavers might be helpful in keeping little amounts of dammed water for these important fish. No one sounds very happy about it. It’s has been greeted with all the enthusiasm that eating broccoli can reduce your risk of colon cancer.

Recently I’ve been exchanging emails with Brock Dolman, who is the director of the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center Water Institute and has been very involved with watershed and environmental education. They are the group responsible for the “Bioneers” conferences, which we talked about in the past and which at least one beaver supporter attended. Amidst their lovely grounds you can take courses in watershed restoration or learn how to garden organically. Brock has become excited about the research linking beavers to salmon, and connected with Gordon Leppig a Staff Environmental Scientist of the Northern division of the California Deparment of Fish & Game. Together the two of them are working on a massive literature review of the relationship between beavers and salmon.

Now getting Fish & Game to think about beavers as anything other than a reason to issue a permit to trap is a big deal. So already I’m excited. Yesterday he sent me an email from a friend with whom he’d been discussing this idea and who responded, “well if dams are good for salmon, lets just dress up in beaver costumes and build some.” This proposal was hailed as avoiding beaver-driven complications such as trees and flooding and permits to trap.

Hey, maybe its just me, but you know what else is really good at dressing up in beaver costumes and buildling beaver dams? BEAVERS. They are excellent at it and their costumes are very convincing. You can wrap important trees to discourage chewing. You can install flow devices if dams get too high and block with trapezoidal fencing of culverts get blocked. You can rely on coppicing to replace the bushy willow growth that comes back making better habitat for nests. And you won’t need to have a potluck every time you get the volunteers together to make repairs.

The beavers will be on site 24/7 and do the work for free.

Still. Beavers=Salmon. Let’s all repeat that. Solidly advertising the relationship between beavers and salmon is going to be the single best thing we can do to help beavers. I told Brock I’d help in any way I could, and gave him the information we’d gathered so far. If there are 5 people in the state who care about beavers, there are 5000 who care about salmon. There are salmon lobbyists. And someday, if we do our job well enough, and support the science strongly enough, and spread the word far enough, they’ll be beaver lobbyists too.

How about a “Salmon Tax” that a city or industry would need to pay for altering their watershed including removing their beavers? That might encourage them to stop and think about which is more expensive?

There’s still time to vote:

Help us pick the right title for our Newsletter

The Kindness of Strangers

heidi08 Friends of Martinez Beavers November 23, 2009

This year we were contacted by a physician in the South Bay with an interest in beavers and beaver history. RL offered to help update our Wikipedia pages and gave us some information on his local beavers. If you haven’t checked out his lovely entries, prominently featuring our own Cheryl Reynolds photographs, I would do so. Highlights include:

The Martinez Beavers entry

Yearling Beaver in Alhambra Creek, downtown Martinez Photo by Cheryl Reynolds, Courtesy of Worth a Dam 2008

The Martinez beavers are a family of beavers living in Alhambra Creek in downtown Martinez, California. Prior to the arrival of the beavers, Martinez was best known as the longtime home of naturalist John Muir. Two adult beavers arrived in late 2006^[1], proceeding to produce 4 kits over the course of the summer. After a controversial decision by the City of Martinez to exterminate the beavers, local conservationists organized to overturn the decision, forming an organization called Worth a Dam.^[2]. Subsequently, wildlife populations have increased in diversity along the Alhambra Creek watershed.

The Alhambra Creek Entry

Beaver in Alhambra Creek: Past and Present

Belted Kingfisher eating fish above Alhambra Creek beaver pond

In November, 2009 the Martinez City Council approved the placement of an 81 tile wildlife mural on the Escobar Street bridge. The mural was created by schoolchildren and donated by Worth a Dam to memorialize the beavers and other fauna in Alhambra Creek.^[9]

The Martinez Ca Entry

Beaver controversy

Mink Returns to Alhambra Creek Beaver Pond Photo By Cheryl Reynolds Courtesy of Worth A Dam 2009

In early 2007, a group of beavers settled in a section of Alhambra Creek that flows through the city.^[11] The beavers and their dam became a local attraction. Because the six foot high, 30 foot wide dam created a potential flood hazard, local officials proposed to remove the beavers. Increased run-off from developed areas along the creek has increased flooding in Martinez, a low lying city built on a flood plain, in recent decades. Although Martinez had completed the construction of a $9.7 million dollar flood control project in 1999, the downtown was flooded in 2005, ironically two years before the beavers arrived. A City Council subcommittee was formed to consider whether the beavers could be protected and flood risk managed, and was given 90 days to issue a report to the full council for a vote.^[12] During this period, expert Skip Lisle was hired to install a flow device that could reduce the level of impounded water behind the beaver dam and mitigate flooding risk above the beaver dam.^[13] The beavers have received national attention, amateur video coverage, a webpage devoted to them, and a new nonprofit organization (“Worth A Dam”) formed.^[14] The beaver have transformed Alhambra Creek from a trickle into multiple dams and beaver ponds, which in turn, lead to the return of steelhead trout and river otter in 2008, and mink in 2009.^[15]^[16]

Back in the dramatic days of eminent beaver death, I struggled with these pages. They were changed every day (sometimes several times a day!) until they got marked as “controversial” and everything was challenged as unsubstantiated. For example, the November 7th meeting was described as being attended by “people from out of town” which any one looking at the video can easily contest. It was so frustrating making references that were deleted that I eventually gave up and decided to focus on the web page which I could control and no one else could change. Thank goodness RL came along, because these lovely, professional entries add alot of visibility to our beavers. I couldn’t be more grateful.

And if you haven’t voted in the “Name the Newsletter” survey, please do so now!

Help us pick the right title for our Newsletter

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?

Happy Anniversary!

heidi08 Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers November 8, 2009

Sorry I forgot to mention yesterday was the two year anniversary of the important council meeting at the High School. Doesn’t it seem like ages ago? We were all so young then…

Last night’s JMA awards was an amazing reminder that there are very good people doing astonishing grand things in the world. Lee Stetson as John Muir was a revelation and I was in tears by the end of it. We had been called the night before to take him out for a late night beaver viewing, and I told him I was sure when he was quoting Muir’s passion for the sentinel Sequoias he loved and worked so hard for, (“If just one of these colonels could go to Washington and argue on its own behalf, just one, we would never talk about cutting them down again”) he was really thinking about our beavers.

Well maybe that was just me.

Like that fateful day two years ago, it was a beauteous night and made me excited to be a part of something so rare and wonderous. I’m sure I’ll write more later, must dash to the Save Mt. Diablo event. Watch some of the video, skip through the 45 council minutes and just watch the people comments. They are stunning.

Happy Anniversary Martinez! It’s been a heck of a ride!