Category: History

The Napa River B.W. (Before Winetasting)

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental, History July 14, 2012

Napa Valley and River, 1885, by Manuel Valencia. Collection of the Hearst Gallery, Saint Mary's College of California. Gift of James J. Coyle and William T. Martinelli

Check out Robin Grosinger’s lovely new piece on the history of the Napa River in this issue of Bay Nature and online here. Its an except from the recently published book Napa Valley Historical Ecology Atlas: Exploring a Hidden Landscape of Transformation and Resilience. The magazine describes it thusly:

The following is adapted from the Napa River Historical Ecology Atlas, a new book by Robin Grossinger, director of the Historical Ecology Program at the San Francisco Estuary Institute. The book is the result of 10 years of study of the Napa Valley, combining exhaustive research into historical documents and exploration of the landscape today. It is perhaps the most in-depth look at the historical character and transformation of any river in our region.

High praise indeed and well deserved. Love the part where it mentions the skimpy riparian tree borders and how wide they SHOULD be. Our historian friend Rick Lanman swapped some collaborative emails with Robin as we worked towards our historic beaver prevalence article. A dramatic graft that produced some very nice fruit! Go read the full article and think about buying Robin’s excellent book.

Beavers have recently been found in the Napa River for the first time in years–in the vicinity of Rutherford and downstream of Oak Knoll. But were they there historically? Early naturalists speculated not. And John Work, one of the earliest trappers to come through the North Bay, wrote of the Napa River in 1833: “The little river where we are encamped at appears very well adapted for beaver yet there appears to be none in it.” But six weeks later, the expedition sent a side party to the river, where they had earlier “found a few beaver.” Work also reported beavers a few miles away in the Sonoma Creek watershed; other sources also support the historical presence of beaver on the river. Trapping likely removed most beavers from the watershed by the 1840s. Before then, beaver dams would have increased the extent and persistence of wetlands along the river even beyond the amount documented in the 1850s and 1860s. In other regions, the importance of beaver ponds to salmon populations and overall stream function has been increasingly recognized, and their return can potentially help speed river recovery.

Nice! The article also reprints this excellent painting from Joseph Grinnell’s seminal “there are no beaver above 1000 feet AND California beavers don’t leave footprints or build lodges” chapter. It doesn’t say who painted it, and I don’t think it was him or Hilda, but I’d like to know because it’s lovely.

Speaking of lovely, there was a generous mudding show this morning at the secondary dam.Here’s a sampling of it. It’s so convenient when your building materials are so located so close to your project and even better when they’re so affordable! But if they also happen to be delicious, well, that’s just a bonus!

Moses had footage today of two young River Otters that visited the dams yesterday around 6:30. They chowed down some very glorious fish meals and then were chased off by a big beaver coming from above the primary to hasten their exit. Keep your eyes peeled because they may show up again.

Don’t look at me, I didn’t say it….

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental, History July 13, 2012

A dam fine letter: West Michigan man embraces Internet fame 14 years after defending beavers

By Jonathan Oosting

I would like to challenge you to attempt to emulate their dam project any dam time and/or any dam place you choose. I believe I can safely state there is no dam way you could ever match their dam skills, their dam resourcefulness, their dam ingenuity, their dam persistence, their dam determination and/or their dam work ethic.

All regular and occasional readers of this website should recognize this paragraph immediately. It is from the finely saucy letter sent in response to the Department of Environmental Quality in Michigan when they claimed a dam was built without a permit on his property. The clever writing of Stephen Tvedten has become something of an old chestnut on the internet(s) and more often than you can possibly imagine I am sent a copy by someone I know, or who knows me. Often they are folks who should know better than to assume I haven’t seen this many, many times before. (In fact, I’m contemplating a t-shirt and a beaver tour for the millionth person to repeat the action.)

Well today’s Michigan Live has a nice article on the author of the famous missive. Check it out.

Stephen Tvedten has dedicated his life to serious research, but the Marne resident is best known for a funny letter that took him all of 10 minutes to write. Tvedten, now in his 70s, continues to generate Internet fame for the letter, which he fired off in 1997 after the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality accused a tenant on his Montcalm County property of constructing two dams actually built by beavers.

Why has Stephen’s letter survived the test of time and maintained such a long ‘forward’ record? Besides being well written, artfully making fun of bureaucracy (which everyone loves) and the need for permits (which everyone hates), I would argue that it also taps into the undercurrent of growing disconnect between man and nature that we all feeling a little worried about. As we get farther and farther away from the land and its native inhabitants we are a little less certain of our future. Remembering that beavers build dams better than bureaucrats build dams makes us smile and feel centered again.

It turns out that Stephen’s life work has been research on Natural Pest management, and the production of an exhaustive encyclopedia which is online at his website here. He calls it “Intelligent Pest Management” (a play on the term Integrated Pest Management which has the same goal). Because all roads lead to beavers I learned about IPM from Susan Junfish of Parents for a Safer Environment who contacted me about possibly combining our interest in protecting the beavers home with her interest in removing pesticides from the watershed. PFSE will be at the beaver festival this year. All I’m sayin is that it’s a very, very small world.

“I wrote that letter in about 10 minutes,” he said. “The funny thing about it is, I’m more famous for that than all of the other things I’ve done in my life, and I’m a research guy.”

Tell me about it, Stephen! You do one dam thing for beavers and all of a suddenly the rest of your life pales by comparison. I know just how you feel.

Bank Lodge e-VENTS

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, History June 13, 2012

This fascinating picture is from the photoblog Along the Airline Trail by Stan Malcom of CT and captures the surprising and watery moment when a cozy beaver lodge stopped being a cozy beaver lodge. It makes me think of those images from Katrina of folks retreating to roof, waiting for help . This can’t be an uncommon occurrence for beavers given that they live in water and water changes with the season. As good as they are at controlling and directing water, there must be moments like these, when even beavers have to wait out the floods in relative discomfort.

This makes me think of that big storm back in March of 2011 which washed out their dams and their beautiful lodge. The next morning we saw footprints in the mud where there home had been and I imagined our kits coming back and saying, where is our house? Kind of like how the inside of a tent, which could be a child’s cozy fort, disappears when the tent is collapsed and folded away.

Since our beavers lost their lodge, and the hardworking mother who always made them for them, they have become ‘bank dwellers’. Which, I’m learning, brings mysteries if its own.This illustration is from the chapter on beavers by Joseph Grinnell, published in 1937. He gets a lot of things woefully wrong in this chapter, saying California beavers don’t live above 300 meters elevation or leave footprints, but I have always thought this is an excellent drawing. Recently I got to wondering how beavers breathe in bank lodges. Island lodges have vent holes on the top so that fresh oxygen can get through. Sometimes I read descriptions of lodges in winter with steam rising from the vent, as if the beavers were inside smoking! Do bank lodges have vents? With all those hot bodies breathing into the same space, they must need fresh air from time to time!

Of course I did what I always do with these questions, and passed them around. I thought this morning I would share what wiser folks had to say about the answers. Enjoy!

Skip Lisle: Beaver Deceivers International

They make the tops of the chambers close to the surface of the ground so they “breath.” Because the ceilings are thin they are relatively easy to break through and therefore chambers often “open up” and can be viewed from above.

Owen Brown: Beavers: Wetlands and Wildlife

Yes, but they are hard to find. Many lodges start out as bank burrows on a stream and then the sticks are placed on top of the vent holes on the bank. Then once the lodge is well under way they dam the stream and voila a lodge seems to have been built in the middle of a beaver pond.

When we raised 4 babies in our farm pond they built a bank burrow without me knowing since the entrance was under water. I noticed a pile of sticks on the shore and I moved them to a nicer location. The next day they had moved them back to the original location and that is how I found the vent hole. It is not very big at the surface and hard to find.

Mike Callahan: Beaver Solutions

Often the lodges are dug out under the root canopy of a bush or small tree which prevents the roof of the den from collapsing as well as allowing ventilation to occur. On rare occasions I’ll see sticks laid on the ground above the burrow as a “roof”. However, sometimes the ground seems thick where there does not seem to be a root system or roof of sticks for ventilation. On those occasions I am baffled as to how fresh air gets in.

Sherri Tippie: Wildlife 2000

Well, I’m sure they do because they’ve been doing it like that for a long time. I have seen however, I don’t know exactly how to explain it . . . . places behind the opening to a den where there are openings with sticks laced together – like an air hole. And, I’ve seen bank dens with nothing of the sort. The thing I’ve realized about beaver is, they really are all different. Some beaver do things one way,others do it differently. It really gets interesting when it comes to scent mounds. I have a slide of a scent mound that is so interesting!! I didn’t know what it was until I climbed down the bank and smelled it! It was a purple area in the sand, and it looked like a human had taken their four fingers and made a ran it criss crossed them. There were NO sticks! Just this purple place in the sand. But I would know that smell anywhere! It was really neat.

Joe Cannon: The Lands Council

Hmm. .. good question. I’ve been assuming that they don’t raise the kits in the type of bank lodge without the branch cover/ reinforcement on top (and venting). So you’re only seeing the bank holes with the Martinez beavers? I’m curious about this also.

Bob Arnebeck

Whenever I’ve explored abandoned bank lodges the extensive burrows in the bank have exhausted me — or I should say my kid, I used to push him into them with a flashlight. I’ve never pried in the winter looking for vent holes but the coyotes seem to have no trouble finding a place to dig in and I assume got a scent. In some cases the beavers seemed to be paying attention because they covered any holes that were dug. Of course in high water the entrance to burrows might be below the water but my impression is that the burrows are generally dug with part of the burrow entrance being open to the air which is why the beavers then pile on logs to hide the entrance. That said, I have seen beavers torpedo out of burrows entrances completely below the water, but that was in pretty porous bank of loose soil with several burrows with some completely open to the air. I think beavers are probably more comfortable in burrows than in lodges, at least my kid seemed to be.

Leonard Houston: Beaver Advocacy Committee

If the beavers are living in there then there is ventilation this is how the lodge or den is dried and vent holes often double as plunge holes allowing beavers to escape predators without making it back to the water

I have attached two photos one is a vent hole into a bank den as you can see it is to small for the animals to enter, the second is inside the bank den photoed by sticking the camera down the vent…….. there was two underwater entrances and a plunge hole and tunnel some 15 ft from the waters edge…..no kits were present at this site but we did have a breeding pair living here

It appears that the consensus of the experts is that bank lodges DO have vents to let in fresh air. So think of that the next time you’re watching the creek for movements!

The Worst Beaver Festival Ever…

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Festival, History June 10, 2012

Fur trading days make a comeback at 4-H Center

Men made fortunes during those boom times. Few people realize that John Jacob Astor built his multimillion dollar empire by outfitting trappers and buying and selling animal pelts and hides. Fewer folks know that 13 of the 16 recognized rendezvous were held west of the Continental Divide.

Six of the gatherings took place in territory belonging to Mexico and six more at Horse Creek near what is now Daniel, Wyo. The sites were chosen to accommodate almost 2,000 men and were named for the site area.

Fast forward to the present day: the lost tradition gets reborn June 14-16 at The Furtakers of America Rendezvous at Evansville’s Vanderburgh 4-H Center. Trappers, traders and woodsmen will gather to conduct demonstrations of woodcrafting, trapping, hide preparation, root and herb identification, skinning techniques, nuisance animal control, predator calling and much more.

Talk about reliving the glory days! Evansville Indianna is having a three day rendezvous extravaganza to teach families and children all about the glories of beaver trapping – and no I’m not kidding. Tickets for all three days are 10 dollars each. That’s a bargain at twice the price! Remember that historic rendezvous combined some of the most dangerous, greedy men without social skills in an open space with gunfire and alcohol – you can see why they’d want a rerun to teach the kids about!

It was fur, not gold, that opened the American West.

After the United States acquired the massive Louisiana Purchase in 1803, fur trappers began banding together for sojourns into unknown territory. They risked their lives in quest of beaver pelts.

European fashion dictated that “gentlemen should wear top hats made only from beaver plews (pelts).” Europe soon ran out of beavers, so the task fell to American trappers to fill the orders. However, it was one thing to get the pelts and a different matter to sell them and obtain supplies without lengthy journeys back to civilization.

To solve the problem William Ashley staged the first Trapper-Trader Rendezvous in 1824 on the Green River near the Wyoming-Utah border. It was an uproarious success, and for the next 16 years trappers, traders, Native Americans and mountain men eagerly awaited these rowdy encounters.

Don’t miss this opportunity to celebrate our greedy heritage of slaughter and unintended consequences! No word yet on whether Evanston plans to hold a similar ‘draught festival’ or corresponding ‘silent spring jubilee’ later in the year.

The general public is invited to join in the scheduled outdoor activities, games and crafts designed to interest children of all ages and women who are interested in participating in things like trap setting, turkey calling, knife sharpening and wildlife identification.

Rhymes with “Hidden”

heidi08 Beavers, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, History May 21, 2012

So this was a research-y weekend with tales of Russian sea captains, HBC fur traders and early Mendocino names to sort through. Tappe and Grinnell of course said that beavers were not native over 1000 feet elevation in California or in any coastal streams. Which pretty much means they were in the Delta. Period. If we’re going to be able to argue that protecting beaver in our coastal streams is good for salmon populations we have to prove they belong there first.

After Kate’s proud discovery in the Russian River I wanted to contribute, so I heaved and ho’d for the weekend searching around the state by river, by tribe, by historic name. I came up with a lovely creation myth recorded by [of course] Kroeber from the eastern Pomo (Clear Lake) about a flood that changed the rules so that “beaver and otter could marry”. I thought it was adorable but Rick said it wasn’t coastal enough and to keep looking.

The beaver family and the otter family were not destroyed. These families were named that way, because they could turn into these animals when they desired. They could not turn into any other kind of animals. They survived because they could live amidst the waters. From that time on the beavers could marry into the otter family, or the otter could marry into the falcon family, but one family could not intermarry with each other. That is the way in which the second people started.

There was the diary of John Work first explorer of the Hudson Bay Company to the California Coast. He went to Eureka, Mendocino, and Russian River looking for beavers. Either the natives were lying to him or he wasn’t looking very hard, but he trotted back whining about only having killed a few beavers. Okay, no beaver myths, no beaver skins documented. Where to look next?

What’s that old saying? One man’s trash is another man’s treasure?

California has but few characteristic archaeological remains such as are found in the mounds of the Mississippi valley or the ancient pueblos and cliff-dweller ruins of the South. In the shellmounds along this section of the Pacific coast it possesses, however, valuable relics of very ancient date. These are almost the only witnesses of a primitive stage of culture which once obtained among the early inhabitants of this region. One of the largest and best preserved shellmounds was selected as the object of the present investigation, The mound selected is situated on the eastern side of the Bay of San Francisco at Shellmound Station near Emeryville, and is commonly known as the Emeryville mound. At present it forms a conspicuous feature of the recreation grounds known as Shellmound Park (pI. 1).

Emeryville_Shellmound1 — Southern wall of the Emeryville Shellmound being leveled to build a paint factory (photo: W.E. Schenck & L.L. Loud, 1924)

The occupants of the mound at Emeryville at all periods were huntsmen to a great degree, besides being fishermen; those of the mound at West Berkeley seem to have depended largely upon fishing; hence the stone sinkers were far more numerous in that mound than at Emeryville.

So far the fauna of only the lowest strata up to 3 feet above the base have been studied. The following species obtained in this horizon were determined by Dr. W. J. Sinclair.

Deer, Cervus sp.

Elk; Cervus canadensis.

Sea-otter, Enhydrus lutris.

Beaver, Castor canadensis

Ding Ding Ding Ding! We have a winner! Beaver in Emmeryville! Beaver in Berkeley! Beaver in middens stretching as far north along the coast as the Russian River! A finding which was notable enough even at the TIME (1909) to merit this defensive footnote:

21 Extinct in California and in fact south of Washington; J. Wyman found the remains of elk, wild turkey, and large auk in the shellmounds of New England. The elk, though still in existence, is no longer to be found·east of the Allegheny Mountains; the wild turkey is still in existence, but is not to be found in New England, while the auk lives only in the Arctic regions, or at least not farther south than the northern part of Newfoundland (Amer. Naturalist, I, p. 572).

Thanks to the Ohlone we have our beaver evidence. Seems early Californians didn’t care enough about the animal or the early humans to pay attention to either.