Category: History

A wrinkle in beaver-time

heidi08 Beavers, City Reports, Friends of Martinez Beavers, History, In the News, Who's blaming beavers now?, Who's Killing Beavers Now? March 3, 2015

This weekend I was working on putting together my presentation for the Salmonid Restoration Conference in Santa Rosa and thought I’d try to find some photos of the big multi-million dollar creek fix done in 1999 that everyone said the beavers threatened. Considering the fact that the work is talked about all the time, and changed our creek-scape fairly dramatically, it’s surprising that there is not a single photo of it on the internet(s). You would think Martinez would be proud of this accomplishment?

While I was looking about I came across a website discussing some OTHER work done in our creek, which is often dramatically added to the price tag of how expensive the beavers were to Martinez. The work was done in 2008 but was posted by the engineering firm in 2012. Maybe they were waiting for the dust to settle or for everyone to forget what actually happened?

I certainly never will.

Project: Alhambra Creek Beaver Dam

In 2008, litigation was brought against the City of Martinez for damage to private properties caused by beavers living in Alhambra Creek (owned by the City). Cal Engineering & Geology reviewed the site conditions and met with the City’s attorney regarding the merits of the claim.

The litigation put the City in a politically difficult position since the beavers were not a protected species but were greatly supported by the politically active environmental community group called, “Worth a Dam-Martinez Beavers.org”.

rIn the interest of striking a balance between nature, public interest, the City’s liability, and private property, CE&G suggested use of a sheet pile wall to both support the private properties and to act as a barrier against beaver dens extending below private properties.

Based upon conversations with a beaver expert retained by the City and the City Attorney, the sheet pile wall concept was approved.

You can understand at once why this got my full attention. Right off the bat I’m curious why this article is titled the Alhambra Creek beaver dam since even by their own definition this work had nothing to do with the dam. It had to do with the [completely fallacious] argument that they were tunneling out from their lodge like coal miners and undermining the property beside the creek. It’s surprising to see our name (or at least our name as it might appear on the internet) used. But the really interesting statement is the one in red. Exactly what beaver expert did the city confer with to hatch the sheetpile idea?

You understand. there is a sequence problem here. Obviously the city attorney isn’t routinely involved with creek maintenance. I’m sure she’s busy with abutments and ordinance challenge. Neither she nor any expert were part of the decision which was made in some secret back room, I’m sure. The city attorney got involved when we tried to challenge their willfully misguided decision in court and failed. The beaver expert was hired as a result of our outcry in attempt to mollify public opinion.

Credit where credit is due – the city council hatched that horrific idea all by themselves (actually I heard from several sources that one of the few members no longer on the council came up with the idea in conjunction with the disgruntled party). This member later had an ex parte conversation with someone on the subcommittee and that member later called me saying would be no big deal to open the lid of the lodge, gently tap some sheetpile through, and then close it back up. Like a can of beans.

That terrifying phone call followed a closed door meeting on a Thursday night. The following Friday the action was proposed, we hired an attorney, and paid a geomorphologist to walk and assess the creek on Saturday. The following week Worth A Dam went to court and our request for a temporary restraining order was denied. If the whole thing wasn’t burned into my memory, it would be helpful to look at the blow by blow available on this website. Next wednesday the entire proposal was approved and retained and I was invited to participate on a citizen oversight committee that would have zero capacity for oversight of any kind. I declined and left the meeting in tears.

City Approves All Resolutions

Including the exemption from CEQA. Bids for the work open at 11 tomorrow. Sheet pile will be driven through the beavers lodge. Council responded to comments for citizen inclusion with an offer to set up an oversight committee including Worth A Dam, but then discussed it with the attorney and city engineer who advised that any oversight body could not make decisions, slow decisions or influence them in any way. I declined to participate under those conditions.

Supporters were in tears at the meeting’s end, including myself. Gary Bogue offers his condolences and wisdom.

Ahh Gary, we miss you. Sniff.

Dear Readers:

In other words, the city invited beaver lovers to sit on an oversight committee … that had no oversight. That kind of says what this is all about, doesn’t it?

The city now plans to charge ahead on their “emergency bank stabilization,” causing a MAJOR impact on the beavers’ environment and their home … and of course on the beavers themselves.

I guess we’re going to find out how tough those little guys are, whether we (or they) like it or not.

That was easily the darkest hour in beavertown, maybe of my life because I felt so personally responsible for failing to avert the decision that I believed would kill them. But Gary was right, we did find out how tough our beavers were. Pretty dam tough is the answer. Every beaver survived and adapted pretty well to the intrusion.

The whole thing introduced an element of freedom to how politely constrained I needed to be in dealing with the city. Up until then, I felt my hands were tied by always feeling obligated to assume they meant well. Now I understand better whose interests they really serve. After the shock and heartbreak wore off, the clarity was truly liberating. With the benefit of hindsight I can look at my remarks and Gary’s remarks and think they probably had something to do with this creative narrative:

Additionally, the beaver expert, who monitored construction at all times and had the authority to stop work, was satisfied with the project.

I’m so glad that our website was able to put together enough information so that Cal Engineering would know intimately how to lie about in their post. We tried not to leave anything out. I’m rankled that they are offering this whole dangerous charade as an example of their environmental engineering. Although to be fair, I’m not mad at CE, they were just getting paid. I’m mad at the liars and schemers who used the excuse of the beavers as a way to turn a legal award from an old oil spill into a personal flood protection barrier for one property owner.

But that’s all blood under the bridge, now.

Funny thing, it turned out the only thing really being undermined in this whole process was my faith in the city. But no amount of sheetpile will repair that.

In the end, they won the battle. But beavers won the war.

Beaver Pioneers

heidi08 Festival, Friends of Martinez Beavers, History January 21, 2015

Nice find this morning from Rickipedia who came across this article from 1983 showing that human settlements were chosen because of beaver landscaping. I would follow where the beaver colonized, wouldn’t you? They proposed that beaver were essential in determining not only water course, but deforestation that allowed both farming and rancing to begin. Read full article here:

Homo sapiens or Castor fiber?

This article shows how environmental evidence for European stone age fore st clearance may require re-interpretation, and that change need not be attributed only to climate or man. Observations in North America and Europe show the beaver to be a significant agent of land transformation. The authors suggest that both hunters and farmers took advantage of the opportunities thus presented, and a few hints are provided about their detection and the implications for the Mesolithic and early Neolithic of north-western Europe.

J.M. COLES & B. J. ORME

Now something really delightful to mark your day. I just wish we were all invited to the party of Mr. Knuckles. But who knows? What do you think they’ll do with this invention after the party’s over? How about a tax deductible donation to a certain beaver festival?

Stars, indie films and a mechanical beaver: What to watch for at the Sundance Film Festival

And Canadian coat company Moose Knuckles is hosting a party where guests are invited to ride a mechanical beaver. (If that doesn’t scream photo op…)Ooh, Scary.

A final word of welcome to stalwart beaver hero Rusty Cohn from Napa who generously volunteered to learn in the following weeks how to post photos and articles on the website to take over for me during the conference, when I’ll be sans wifi. It’s harder than you might think to do this every morning, but Rusty has some great stuff to share and I know you’ll be in good hands. Just giving you a heads up in case he decides to start practicing any time soon.

Thanks Rusty!

Now THAT’S a giant beaver!

heidi08 Beaver Anatomy, Beaver Art, History January 18, 2015

MCCD worker finds prehistoric giant beaver tooth outside Marengo

The McHenry County Conservation District maintenance worker was out with a crew not long before Christmas, walking through a field in the nearly 3,000-acre Kishwaukee Corridor near Marengo and looking for concrete foundations of long-gone buildings.

Parpart’s unexpected discovery sat in the maintenance shop for a few days, everyone taking a stab at guessing what it could be. A tusk – maybe from a mammoth? A Tyrannosaurus rex bone? A cow bone?

Eventually, it made its way to the Illinois State Museum where JJ Saunders, a curator and chairman of the museum’s geology department, identified it as a fossilized giant beaver incisor, a prehistoric beaver that was about 8 feet long from tail to snout.

The incisor likely came from the right side of the beaver’s lower jaw, Saunders said in a news release.

“The giant beaver was the largest Pleistocene rodent in North America,” Saunders said. “It was an animal the size of a black bear inhabiting lakes and ponds bordered by swamps. We know from its teeth that the giant beaver did not fell trees, and thus did not construct dams to modify stream courses.”

What a beautiful find! You can’t help but think that this AP story and the bogus Arizona AP story of the giant beaver got merged in some key folks minds. I’m still getting headlines of GIANT BEAVER found as joggers watched in awe. A beaver the size of a bear is giant. This tusk makes me think of that old beaver family crest from Germany, which we always thought of as more artistic than correct. Now I realize it’s no more wrong than our cartoons of their huge top buck teeth, and given this discovery, actually fairly representative.

Is it just me? Or is this medieval crest beautiful?

crest boar-beaver — Southern Germany 1450

Just in time for a Nativity Scene!

heidi08 Beavers, History December 9, 2014

I‘ve been hard at work on my presentation to the waterboard next week, but I had to add a new section on our papers about historic prevalence for this particular audience, and I didn’t want to lose much of my original info so I wanted it to fit in five minutes. This meant I couldn’t wander about looking for the words so I wrote a little passage to insert, that I thought it could double as a post. Hopefully it will be new to you or at least interesting.

Martinez was eager to teach other cities in California what we learned. But before we could really share the wealth we had to deal with a 70 year old mistake. The confusion started with Joseph Grinnell, the first director of vertebrate zoology at UCB and the author or the important work on the states fur-bearing mammals. In his chapter on beavers he noted that they didn’t live above 1000 feet in the Sierras and were absent from our Coastal Rivers. According to Grinnell beaver didn’t belong in Tahoe or Berkeley and before we talk about how this was possible I need to say a little bit about the history of the fur trade.

Just like our thirst for oil has driven the economy and the politics for that last century, our need for beaver fur was the “oil” of the previous 800 years. Beaver were so important to trade that they were entirely trapped out of Europe by the end of the middle ages. The Russians trapped the California Coast in the 1700’s. Folks came to Canada looking for new sources of the valuable fur and trapped west and south at a great rate. Beaver were extinct on the East coast of America by the 1800’s and sought steadily west by the French, the Dutch, and the Americans. By the time that the 49ers arrived in them thar hills looking for gold in California the once ubiquitous beaver gold was long gone.

In 1900 there were nine known colonies of beaver left in CA. Fish and game, to their credit was concerned that zero beaver would mean more erosion, fewer fish and less waterstorage. They began a period of reintroduction in the late 20;’s and 30’s. This lead Grinnell to think that beavers in the sierras or coastal rivers were introduced, rather than reintroduced. We were particularly interested in this confusion because it lead people to say that beavers weren’t native. We wanted to challenge that idea.

The first place we started was with the work of an archeologist at the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He came across a paleo beaver dam during a dig in the Sierras and had the sense to carbon test three parts of the dam. As you can see the oldest tested at 580 AD and the dam was continually maintained until the 1800’s. We then looked at secondary data including anthropological information, place names and a reevaluation of trapping records. We found numerous evidence to contradict Tappe and Grinnell. This Rock painting by the Chumash Indians is at 1600 feet above Santa Barbera, The Emeryville Shell mound contained beaver bone fragments, After his good service Kit Carson was rewarded with the right to trap all beaver in Alameda Creek.

The fossil record for beaver contained a skull from Sespe creek in Santa Barbara that didn’t ft with Grinnell’s theories, so he marked on his map with a question mark. Recently digitized correspdence however made available to us the letters better Naturalist John Hornung and his friend Dr. Grinnell. He wrote that he himself had found the beaver in question floating down the creek on a log, and like any good naturalist of the time would do with a rare animal, killed it himself and sent off the skull.

At this time the book was already in press and this discrepancy was dismissed. The misreport of Grinnell was copied by every other author and taught in science classes for 70 years.

What do you think, convincing? If you want to read more the links to these published papers is in the right hand margin about halfway down the page under the section “Solving problems”. Happy reading!

Beaver, Nutria, Otter, what’s the big diff?

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, History, In the News November 13, 2014

Our retired librarian from the University of Georgia beaver friend tracked down the entire video from that beaver clip yesterday. And the mistake wasn’t a bug, it was a feature. Apparently no distinction is made between beaver and nutria at all. Well, they’re both rodents I guess.

No wonder people can tell them apart. And when you realize the the word “Nutria” in Spanish actually means “Otter” it gets even more exciting. In fact, when the Spanish were settling in California they killed lots of what they were calling Nutria, that was probably beaver. The confusion just spreads in every direction.

Turtle Bay’s new beaver gets acquainted with aquarium

So the orphan of Torture Bay has now been stuffed into a tank for children to peer at through the glass. Apparently he’s so lonely he’s chasing fish. I particularly love her response when the children express concern that he has hit his head on the glass. She explains that beavers have very hard heads because trees fall on them all the time. Obviously, the whole thing is very educational.

And just in case you wondered, I hate this with the white-hot heat of a thousand suns.