Category: History

“Too much of a good thing can be wonderful”

heidi08 Beavers, Educational, Environmental, History October 10, 2012

Thanks to Mae West for presciently foretelling this morning’s beaver news cycle. Obviously all the beaver dramas in the world know that Beavers: Wetlands and Wildlife visit Martinez today and they’re trying to show off their best problem solving and thoughtfulness. Let’s start with Montana where Audubon outside Yellowstone was thinking about trapping some beaver because they were eating their trees.

(Yes, Audubon.)

Apparently lots of folks objected, wrote letters and probably sent them this article over and over again because Audubon is apparently having a change of heart. Just check out this morning’s headline from the Billings Gazette:

Beaver gets trapping reprieve

The trapping of a tree-eating beaver from a pond at the Audubon Conservation Education Center has been delayed for now.

“We’re exploring other options,” said Roger Williams, president of the Yellowstone River Parks Association, which owns the property where the center is located.

“This gives us the time to work out a solution without killing the beaver,” said Steve Hoffman, executive director of Montana Audubon.

A story in The Billings Gazette on Saturday about the planned trapping led to a public outcry that prompted the YRPA to postpone its plans. YRPA officials wanted the beaver removed because it is toppling trees valued at thousands of dollars. The trees were planted by volunteers to reclaim the area, which is an old gravel pit.

Well if any of you wrote letters telling them about fencing and sand painting, thanks! The bird folk will try a little harder to see the FOREST for the TREES, and realize that beavers are birds best friends. Brock Dolman of the water institute and I will be speaking at Madrone Audubon on monday night, and I’ll make sure to mention tree protection!

Then we have this column:

Nalcor watched the ‘V’ in the water as the nose of a beaver sliced through the mirrored stillness of the pond’s surface. The little muskrat admired the beaver.

In truth he wished he could be more like him. Beavers worked tirelessly and they accomplished a lot. Not just a lot, but they accomplished things that were good for others and not just for beavers.

This swampy pond where Nalcor had been brought up would not exist, if the beavers had not worked so hard to build a dam across the little stream that was a tributary of the Big Cigar River, the one the people wanted to dam.

The beaver dam created a large pond in the little stream that was both home and food source to creatures other than beavers. Birds lived here and the pond served as a stopping point for many different species, as they migrated north in the spring and returned south again in the autumn.

In fact, Nalcor had just spotted a pair of Greater Yellow Legs strutting along the margin of the pond just where the wake of tiny ripples that marked the beaver’s passing lapped against the marsh grass. The long beaks of the tall birds were probing the shallows for the tasty morsels they craved. They needed to bulk up for the long flight south.

Without the beaver dam the stream would be moving too fast for grass to grow; without grass and its decaying roots to eat there would be no reason for the yellow legs to stop here on their journey of migration.

The calm of the beaver pond allowed all manner of other shoots, leaves and flowers to grow and Nalcor loved the delicious salads they provided him.

The beavers were good neighbours. Their work benefitted everyone, though Nalcor sometimes found himself feeling ashamed for how little work he did compared to his industrious rodent cousins, always happy to share the benefits of their labour. The beavers destroyed nothing and their work created a windfall for so many.

Beautiful Prose right? Marystown, where the gazette is from is on the eastern side of Canada over by Newfoundland. Nice attention to detail describing the classic V in the column but it’s sneaky genius too. See NALCOR is an energy company that wants to build a hydroplant flooding out acres and acres through the town that will look like this

So the parable of the beaver building a dam that benefits everyone is offered in stark contrast to the story of the massive dam that destroys much in its path. The slick energy company has completed its EIRs and started a community blog and named its project after the wildlife it will displace and the author of the column in return has named the wildlife after the enegycompany. Awesome. I love this man.

It reminds me of the tale I heard of the proposed dam years ago that would have flooded the gold country near where my parents live. The town took massive steps to prevent themselves from being underwater, including organizing a campaign that must have embedded itself in my subconscious when i chose our name

because obviously some projects aren’t WORTH A DAM and some projects ARE.

Beaver Front Lines Moves NorthEast

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Friends of Martinez Beavers, History, Who's Killing Beavers Now? October 5, 2012

Well the publication of our articles on the historic prevalence of beavers could not have come at a better time, because it’s beaver dam removal season in the Sierras. The dams are ripped out on Taylor creek because ‘the non-native beaver dams’ allegedly interfere with the passage of the kokanee salmon in the area, (which were also introduced, by the way). The Kakonee festival is this weekend and Ted Guzzi of the Sierra wildlife coalition was on hand to talk to the reporter Thomas Knudson (Sacramento Bee – remember the USDA fiasco reporter) who has taken an interest in this story. Ted was showing around a photographer from the Bee. The story will run on Sunday’s front page , and it throws the entire beaver nativity issue into the crosshairs because folks have been defending their annual atrocities by saying beavers aren’t native since before Eisenhower was president. We have already had a few amusing letters of outrage which I am not at liberty to discuss but suffice it to say that the Sierra Wildlife Coalition is now the frontlines of the battle and we in war torn Martinez are watching the action while sitting comfy in the back row.

Nice.

Oh and here’s another reason to value beaver ponds, thanks to our apparently-not-so-mortal-enemies-after-all over at this South Carolina Hunter site

Beaver Ponds and Ducks

If there was ever the perfect recipe for small water duck hunting it is found with our friend the beaver. A match made in proverbial heaven. When beavers dam creeks they flood large amounts of crop fields and or woods. This provides the perfect habitat for the beaver and for all types of waterfowl. The flooded timber will quickly succumb to the flood waters and the trees will die. This allows for cavity nesting birds to carve out homes in these dead trees. The edges of the flooded timber will provide ample food, and the typically shallow water allows for the perfect recipe for aquatic vegetation to grow and provide quality food for mallards, widgeons, gadwalls, and others. These cavities and surrounding mast producing trees draw wood ducks, like ants to a picnic. Beaver cause an estimated $22 million dollars of damage in South Carolina annually. There is little doubt this large rodent is a menace. But for the water fowler, the beaver is perhaps his best friend.

Wow….what can one say to that but…um thanks?

Where Credit’s Due…

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, History September 30, 2012

Remember how I wrote about the McLeod Report last sunday? Well, he decided to write about us in return! Check out the Martinez beaver story being discussed in Canada:

Even if we don’t, someone likes the beaver

Londoners owe the beaver much more than a bit of space along some neglected creek. This industrious rodent is a good part of the reason there’s a country called Canada here at all. Which makes it all the more shameful that the city which really knows how to pay homage to the beaver isn’t even in Canada; it’s in California.

Martinez, a community of 36,000, is just east of San Francisco. According to a Wikipedia entry, in 2007 a group of beavers settled in a section of Alhambra Creek that flows through the city and built a six-foot-high dam. Worried the dam created flood hazard, city officials proposed moving the group. Instead a committee was formed to consider alternatives.

The end result was installation of a flow device that could reduce the level of water behind the dam and mitigate the flood risk.

And then, well, they became a huge tourist attraction. Their engineering has transformed Alhambra Creek, attracting steelhead trout, river otters and mink. The Martinez beavers also have a website where, would you believe it, news about the fight faced by London’s beavers was top news on Sunday.

Wow that story sounds familiar! (Although it reads a little nicer than the dog fight I remember). I was surprised to come upon this article but happy that our happy ending was nudging the story in London. Not to mention that thousands of Canadians had to read the words FLOW DEVICES several times!

That should be enough good news for us on a sunday, but I’m very spoiled and I received more this morning. Our Wikipedia editing friend Rick Lanman received his copy of the spring issue of Fish and Game journal yesterday, and we are officially publiished: California Fish and Game 98(2) 65-80 2012

Let the official re-education of every ranger and warden for Fish and Game and California State Parks begin!

To-le-vah-che

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, History August 30, 2012

Would you believe this idyllic image is from Los Angeles? What it used to look like before cars and smog and business lunches and photographers. This is a painting of the Tongva tribe who lived for thousands of years on the sea shore and mountains of San Gabriel. They hunted and fished and collected acorns and told stories and got married and worshiped a complex deity of six gods. And then some neighbors moved in.

The San Gabriel Mission we know today was erected in 1771 under fathers Cambon & Somera. It was originally slated for another location, flooded out and found its way to its present address after some false starts. It is the beginning of what is now called Los Angeles. Of course an undertaking so massive required massive labor and crops and food and workers. Plus more workers to replace all the ones that contracted diseases and died in a steady unending wave. Fortunately there was a good supply of those near by.

They called them ‘Gabrieleño’.

Which is kind of like America describing its slaves by saying they hailed from a tribe called “We-like-to-work-for-white-people” – (which we certainly might have if we thought of it). There are horrific stories about the Gabrieleno people starving and dying and killing their own infants rather than have them sentenced to a life of slavery, but this is a beaver web site so we will push past those gory details. We won’t mention the mysterious unearthing a few years back when they were installing an Arco station and found 50 violently killed bodies including women and children from 200 years ago that no one could explain.

Lets talk instead about the Blackskill Mountains where the Tongva would retreat from the heat and gather acorns to use for grinding bread. It also happens to be the sight of one of the most violent battles between the natives and the fur trappers who came to steal their you-know-whats. This battle (substitute ‘massacre’) took place in 1831 and was described to the narrator by someone who was there. We have to wonder if the ‘horse-eating-allegation’ might actually be a transparent justification, because the odds of it being true seem pretty slim. As in why court trouble when your life makes sure trouble finds you anyway?

“The story of the battle, the bloodiest in the history of the Santa Ana Mountains, was told seventy years ago by William Wolfskill to J. E. Pleasants, and was repeated to us by Mr. Pleasants. The Indians were very fond of horseflesh. Ranchos were lacking in means of defense in the days when the missions were breaking up and Indians from the mountains and desert used to have no trouble in stealing herds of horses from the Spaniards. A party of trappers came across from New Mexico in 1831. Their long rifles and evident daring offered to the troubled dons a solution to their horse-stealing difficulties. Americans were not any too welcome in the Mexican pueblo of Los Angeles, and it was with a desire to please the Spaniards [Mexicans] in this foreign land a long way from the United States that the American trappers agreed to run down the Indian horsethieves.

The trail of the stolen band of horses was followed across the Santa Ana River, eastward through what is now Villa Park and up the Santiago Canyon to the mouth of Canyon de los Indios… Here, the trail turned into mountain fastnesses, into the unknown mountains, covered heavily with brush. With every turn a favorable spot for ambush, the frontiersmen made their way carefully. The trail took the men up a steep mountainside, and, after two or three hours of climbing there was laid out before them a little valley with grassy slopes and hillsides [today called Hidden Ranch], upon which horses were quietly grazing. Smoke was coming from fires in the age-old campground of the Indians at the lower end of the valley. The Indians were feasting on juicy horseflesh. Perhaps it was the crack of a long rifle, the staggering of a mortally wounded Indian that gave the natives their first warning of the presence of an enemy. Among the oaks and boulders an unequal battle was fought. There were no better marksmen on earth than these trappers. They had killed buffalo. They had fought the Comanche and Apache. They were a hardy, fearless lot, else they would not have made their way across the hundreds of miles of unknown mountain and desert that laid between New Mexico and California. The Indians were armed with a few old Spanish blunderbuss muskets and with bows and arrows.

The battle was soon over. Leaving their dead behind them, the Indians who escaped the bullets of the trappers scrambled down the side of the gorge and disappeared in the oaks and brush. Of those who had begun the fight, a few got away. The stolen horses were quickly rounded up. Some of them were animals stolen months before. The herd was driven down the trail to the Santiago and a day or two later, the horses were delivered to their owners. In the battle, not one of the frontiersmen was wounded.^

[1930, Shadows of Old Saddleback, T. E. Stephenson, 105-06]

Hmm, okay let’s review our who’s who. Wolfskill who funded the expedition from Taos to Los Angelos ended up buying a lot of land and experimenting with agriculture. He’s the one that introduced the Valencia orange and came up with the bright idea of selling citrus to gold miners and whose fortune became the eventual name of Orange County. Are you with me? Orange money comes from beaver money. On his team was the famed Jebediah Smith, Kit Carson and George Yount. If Yount sounds vaguelly familiar it should bring to mind YOUNTVILLE in the wine country because Yount is considered one of the first vintners of the Napa valley. As in wine money also comes from beaver money.

Everything starts with beavers.

Heck, even the gold rush starts with beavers. John Marshall (who worked for Sutter) is credited with finding the first gold in Coloma and Sutter made his money from the trade of beaver through Sutter’s fort in what is now Sacramento before that. There are accounts saying that Jebediah Smith found gold while trapping beavers in the Molumne before that but he was really only interested in fur. Everyone was looking for the beaver bounty, and they were looking in Los Angeles, and Monterey and Point Reyes, and Mendocino and Eureka – all the coast rivers where Tappe and Grinnell said they couldn’t be.

So I thought, lets look up the poor harassed Tongva and see if they had any dealing with beavers, or made clothes out of beavers, or maybe had a word for beavers. William McCawley is credited for the seminal account of their existence in “The Gabrielino Indians of Los Angeles” first published in 1952. I was able to buy a used copy and venture through. Look at that, an appendix at the back lists the scattered remnants of their lost vocabulary:

Ta daa! We can assume if they had a word for beaver it means they had a reason to talk about beaver, and that means there were beaver in Los Angeles. Period. In fact, there was even an actual beaver skull found in Sespe Creek that Tappe described as an ‘anomaly’ but that’s a subject for another day. Beaver were everywhere in California before we killed them. Just like they were everywhere in New Mexico and Colorado and Oklahoma and New York. They were shaping American soil and American waterways that we depend on to this day. Here endeth the lesson.

And because you have been very good historians, we will finish with a beautiful photo of our new kit Cheryl took last night. Enjoy!

side view — Have you seen my tail? Photo - Cheryl Reynolds

Excitements

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Burrowing Owls, City Reports, Environmental, Festival, History July 24, 2012

Beaver concerns boil over in London at city hall meeting

By Angela Mullins Metro London

Call it a battle for the beavers.

Animal activists, including those on the city’s Animal Welfare Advisory Committee, want to see councillors pass new rules for how the woodland creatures — and their dams — are handled in the city.

“Typically in London, trapping is used. That’s the archaic method,” said Deb Harris, who until last month sat on the committee and is continuing to work on the issue. “Other municipalities have employed non-lethal alternatives successfully.”

No no no, you haven’t gone back in time 5 years and history is not repeating itself. This story is from Guelph Canada. (And I just met someone who explained that this doesn’t rhyme with ‘elf’ just so you know) Ahh it brings back memories though doesn’t it?

Tempers flared in the beaver debate Monday when city staff asked council’s planning and environment committee for permission to continue trapping the animals if they pose harm to infrastructure, like drains.

That, members of the animal welfare committee, flies in the face of a June council decision requiring that administrators trap no more beavers until a report on other means of warding off the creatures is heard.

Coun. Bud Polhill, chair of the planning committee, pulled administrators’ request off the consent agenda, asking that a report come back at a later date with more information.

Members of the animal welfare group, who said they didn’t know about the staff request until late Sunday, hope that means they’ll get a chance to state their case. They’re prepared to make a report, recommending the city consider using tools to ward off the wildlife instead of removing those that pose a threat.

Oh how exciting! Tempers flaring! City staff pontificating! Passionate pedestrians protesting! Are these meetings video taped? I’d love to watch with some popcorn and a nice bottle of this…

Need more good news? The proofs came this weekend for our historic beaver prevalence articles…we are really being published – which means a century of misunderstanding is really about to be overturned!