Category: History

c’imhélhe

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, History February 22, 2012

We’ve been watching the Hung a lel ti beaver habitat near Woodfords for more years than I can remember. It is on the very edge of California and Nevada in the high desert Washoe tribal lands covered with sage and pinyon pine. This past year has seen an explosion of activity and the curving dams were so plentiful and delightful I finally thought I’d ask around to see who follows it.

I ended up contacting the editor of the Washoe Newsletter, Don Johnson who thought the whole story will make a delightful column for the March Issue. When he asked for photos I asked that he please include info about our friends at the Sierra Wildlife Coalition just in case the beavers caused any problems. Here, in pre-printed form is the copy he will publish in March!

Who Cares About Beavers?

Don Johnson

Human Resources, Training, Staff Development, Safety Coordinator, Newsletter Editor @ www.washoetribe.us

Washoe Tribe of NV & CA 919 US Hwy 395 S, Gardnerville, NV 89410

We have been following an elaborate beaver habitat on tribal lands near Woodfords since early 2005. It has some of the best examples of curving dams, ‘willow farming’ and habitat rebound. Is anyone else following this colony or aware of their habits or numbers?

We don’t want any harm to come to them? Please help us preserve this natural phenomenon. There are local beaver experts with the Sierra Wildlife Coalition that would help deal humanely with any problems the beavers might cause so that they can continue to provide excellent habitat and store water in this very dry region of the country.

This is an excellent example of high sierra beaver habitat and we would love to connect with someone who has any information. Please call or email me if you have any information on these beavers. We are beaver advocates that are especially interested in the tribal relationship to high sierra beavers. We are currently working with a group to publish a research paper on historic prevalence.

If you have any information regarding this habitat or these beavers please contact Dr. Heidi Perryman, President & Founder of “Worth A Dam” at mtzbeavers@gmail.com. Their website is www.martinezbeavers.org/wordpress

What a wonderful column! I can’t wait to see who replies! We know that some folk in the area are aware of them because we saw an older couple walk down hand in hand to ‘beaver watch’ one night when we were there. Hopefully we’ll get some new beaver friends and learn some stories of their handiwork. The Washoe, as it happens, are one of the tribes that are only upland in California, any pre-1930 beaver story from the Washoe happens to matter because of the contested story of their historic prevalence.

Working on the subject, archeologist Chuck James just found a lovely bit of tribal lore in the form of Ethnographic Notes from the Washoe reported by Richard Lowie in 1939 (it was written in 1926 and beaver were “reintroduced” to the area in 1938). One of the stories is about weasel, who is looking for a playmate and when camping at the site of WOODFORDS finds a beaver who says he plays there every day!

Mind you, there is a famous restoring Carson Watershed paper that says beaver weren’t native to the sierras because there’s NO WASHOE word for beaver. Um. Wait for it. c’imhélhe which Rick found at the Washoe Project at the University of Chicago. Don’t know how that escaped the razer sharp minds who said the were no beaver in the sierras!

Anyway its a perfect place for a perfect discovery to be perfectly published in a newsletter. Thanks Don, and thanks fragrant sage and windy mountains for getting me lost there by accident in the first place!

Unexpected Journeys

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental, History February 2, 2012

How’s that for a beaver anniversary card? It’s been a full year since I went to the Oregon conference. A year ago today I was walking anxiously among the registration tables and meeting strangers I had only read about. Funny how things unfold.

Speaking of ending up places you never expected, I thought I’d give you a little tribal lore today and talk about beavers at the beach. What’s that you say? Beavers never go to the beach? Ahh, watch and learn young Jedi.

Apparently the Hočąk (Winnebago) tribe in Nebraska and Wisconsin knew all about this. The beaver is the master of water in their tales, including the ocean.

Beavers, as masters of water, play a prominent role in one of the stories about Hare. Hare was led to a mysterious man who had lost his red scalp and wanted Hare’s help in getting it back. This man was probably Redhorn, one of whose wives was She who Wears a Beaverskin Wrap, the outer garment perhaps suggestive of her inner nature. The mysterious man knew that Hare could depend on a family of beavers who lived at the edge of the Ocean Sea that surrounds the island Earth. When Hare arrived, the father beaver told him that he would ferry him across the ocean on his back, but his wife interrupted and said that if they were to get there in a decent amount of time, that she had better do it. In their ability to ferry Hare across the ocean, the beavers show their mastery of the element of water. Hare presented his hosts with a hoe as a gift, an implement reminiscent of the front teeth of a beaver as well as the beaver’s cultural preoccupation with removing trees the way a people sculpt their gardens.

Still not sure beavers belong in an ocean? Think of an area with two parallel rivers that both run to the sea. Like the Albion and the Navarro in Mendocino for instance. When dispersers are looking for new territory they could go up and over the mountains in between I suppose, but an easier way would be to follow the river downstream and through the ocean until they come to the next fresh water and then turn inwards. Sure, they need fresh water to drink, but they can go without drinking for a good long time.

Near as I can tell this unmistakable video comes to us from somewhere around Vancouver BC. (Aren’t there killer whales there? Yikes!) The beaver is clearly using the bay to get around from one freshwater body to another. When I was talking with Michael Pollock on the way to Occidental, he told me about some early research he did in Alaska, referring to island beaver colonies who could only have gotten there by way of ocean travel. And then there’s always the briney beavers from the Salty Seaside Ponds in the work of Greg Hood.

Remember a beaver has everything it needs for long aquatic voyages. Webbed back feet, and a nose, eyes and ears that sit above the water line. Around here March is disperal month! So if you’re at the ocean anytime soon keep an eye out for a unusual flat-tailed seal. It could happen!

All kinds of news…

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, Educational, Environmental, History January 31, 2012

It seems like its been ages since we talked about OUR VERY OWN beavers, but my oh my have they been busy! This weekend the tree above Reeds sleeping hole was artfully felled and polished off, then used to rebuild the now-curved secondary dam AND it turns out the long-lost third dam! Pictures will follow but you can rest assured that Martinez Beavers are no slackers!

This weekend I was able to complete a wonderful interview with Mary O’Brien of the Grand Canyon Trust, and our conversation took so many exciting directions that my head has been a little dazzled trying to follow them all. She told me about the beaver management paper they had just submitted to the forestry service, getting tuned into beavers by attending Suzanne Fouty’s dissertation defense, and Newspaper rock in Utah with hundreds of tribal images of humans and animals.

Of course this is my favorite part:→

Getting ready for the interview I went to re-visit the article that first introduced me to Mary lo these many years ago. “Voyage of the Dammed” in High Country News remains my favorite beaver article ever written. This time when I looked at the photo I saw it in a new light – an OMG-that’s-a-muskrat-light!

Of course I wrote everyone involved about the error: the author, the publisher and the hapless photographer, but they’ve made no response so far. It’s the only photo without a description, so maybe they know its not a beaver and just used it to ‘imply’ beaver? Still it’s a little like finding out Jesus on the Mount was reading from a teleprompter. Sigh.

Oh and this photo from Mike Callahan’s facebook page explains why we should be happy that our beavers are busily taking down trees and building third dams instead of occupying their time in a more insidious way:

plugged filter — Dammed up Intake Exclusion Fence on a Flexible Pond Leveler

Founding Beavers

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, History, In the News February 24, 2012

How Beavers Helped to Build America

Once abundant and widespread, beavers helped to forge the ground under our feet, making water safe to drink and the land an oasis for life. Yesterday’s update from the Discovery News blog was as good as we’re likely to see in this year or the next. It reviews the newly published research by some folks at Colorado State who have been using Ground Penetrating Radar to identify the effects of beaver dams on the substrata for the last 4300 years.

For the study, Wohl and colleagues Natalie Kramer and Dennis Harry used both ground-penetrating radar and near-surface seismic refraction to detect beaver-induced sedimentation.

My my my. The article is written by Jennifer Viegas who has been a benignly distant observer of the Martinez Beaver story for years. (I guess at one time we were fairly difficult to ignore).

The study determined that beavers contributed 30-50 percent of post-glacial sediments in the target area. “I think it very likely that our results are not unique to the Beaver Meadows study site, but also apply to other regions with relatively low rates of sediment yield to valley bottoms,” Wohl said.

She explained that beaver dams interrupt the flow of a stream, creating a backwater effect of reduced velocity. Sediment deposits in the backwater zone of the beaver pond, with this material remaining “in storage” until river erosion may mobilize it and carry it downstream.

The process is beneficial to humans, she continued, because “wet meadows associated with beaver dams have higher habitat and species diversity for plants, insects and other invertebrates, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals — pretty much all forms of life.”

Can I get an Amen? Astute readers of this blog will already know immediately where my mind headed the moment I read this article: If historic beaver dams can be identified from above ground in Colorado why not in the Sierras? Why not use GPR to prove what we’ve been struggling to document with painstaking ethnographic & archival research?

(Odd aside. I stumbled into GPR during the great sheetpile panic of 2008 when I was unsuccessfully imploring the city council they didn’t need to stick steel plates through the beavers’ living room. I suggested that they use GPR to find those alleged “tunnels” and make sure there was actually any problem in the first place. I even raised a few eyebrows when I suggested that they take a lesson from family court and if the study FOUND holes the city could pay for the radar, and if there WERE NO HOLES the property owner could pay. Of course you all know how that worked out.)

Never mind. This is an EXCELLENT article. Go read the whole thing. My very favorite paragraph comes at the end, and it kept me grinning for much of the day.

Due to intense beaver hunting, habitat destruction, pollution and other problems, the beaver population has plummeted by the millions in recent decades. Since beavers can impact human activities, their presence in areas remains controversial. Conservation groups such as Worth a Dam in Martinez, California, however, work hard to maintain beaver dams through responsible stewardship and to educate the public about the many benefits associated with beavers.

Thank you Jennifer for dropping our name at the end of such a bountiful list of beaver beatitudes! And thank you University of Colorado for showing us the beaver foundation beneath our feet! Next time you hear folks talking about our “Founding Fathers”, spare a thought for those Founding Beavers who laid rich soil across the united states, shaped our waterways and were trapped and made into hats as a thank you.

Maybe we can do better?

Three Good Things!

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, featured, Friends of Martinez Beavers, History December 18, 2011

Sometimes it is slow news here at beaver central and sometimes it is fast, thick and icky, but this weekend has been a flurry of delightful stories I can hardly wait to share. First up is a grand new discovery about our friend Castoroides Ohioensis. Remember the very large beaver that was the size of a bear and went extinct at the last ice age? Seems they just ran one through a CTscan (don’t ask why no one thought of this before) and discovered a very long chamber behind his noise that they are speculating was used for resonance. Now every archeologist is busy trying to figure out the giant beaver call that echoed through the forests of paleo-history!

LAS VEGAS – Blessed with a hidden chamber in their over sized skulls, extinct giant beavers may have created a unique Ice Age call of the wild. Detailed CT scans reveal a dead-end passageway leading from the back of the animal’s skull toward its face. That chamber connects via a long, narrow slit to another passage going straight through the beaver’s skull from throat to nose, vertebrate paleontologist Caroline Rinaldi reported November 2 at a meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.

“I don’t know of any other animal that has this,” said Rinaldi, of the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine.

Our second grand story comes from the Oregon town of Five-Rivers (which is incidentally, very near where the State of the Beaver Conference was held this February). Seems they had a meet and greet with the locals, served hot cider and Christmas cookies, and asked landowners to open their heart to beavers. “Do it for the sake of the salmon” they encouraged!

FIVE RIVERS – The sparsely settled Coast Range valleys of Lincoln County’s Five Rivers country ought to be a highly productive breeding ground for coho salmon, but logging, road-building and other human activities have altered the landscape in far-reaching ways, leaving threatened fish runs in a precarious state.

Beaver populations also have declined throughout the basin, in part because of those same human impacts. Now the MidCoast Watersheds Council is working to enlist the aid of area residents in shoring up salmon numbers by reintroducing beaver colonies in some of the places where they’ve disappeared – even if that means some inconvenience for rural property owners.

Don’t even THINK that any of this would be happening without the day-in day-out hard work of Leonard and Lois Houston who have made beaver friends out of more folks than anyone can know. When I spoke to him recently about their good relationship with ODFW (Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife – note that they don’t call just care about GAME in Oregon!) he said that one thing he had learned is that it is easier to get enthusiastic support from the fisheries biologists than from the fur-bearer folks. Hmmm. Now that was a revelation!

“Beaver and coho salmon are just inextricably linked,” said Steve Trask, a fish biologist working with the council. “We’ve noticed over time that as beaver populations have declined, there’s been a real loss of production in coho salmon habitats.”Representatives of the Siuslaw National Forest, the Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife and the Alsea Watershed Council, all potential partners in the restoration effort, also were on hand.

Coho salmon fry emerge from the gravel of their spawning beds in the spring, then spend a year dodging predators and bulking up before venturing out to sea, where they spend another year or two before returning to their native streams to spawn as adults. Beaver ponds, Trask said, provide ideal rearing habitat for young coho and other salmonids, such as cutthroat and steelhead trout. The ponds capture nutrients from falling leaves and rotting wood, forming the base for a thriving food chain.

They also perform a number of other functions, from moderating flash floods to restoring old floodplain connections and re-establishing a more natural, complex channel structure that provides a variety of habitats for aquatic life. Bringing beavers back to Five Rivers, he said, could accomplish a lot of the watershed council’s restoration goals for the basin.

“We’re talking about somehow restoring beaver to the landscape so they can be a tool for salmonid restoration,” Trask said. “If we can get it going, it’s a pretty cheap way to do it.”

Wow. Just wow. Steve, do you happen to have any relatives that work for DFG in California? Just asking. And excellent job by the reporter, Bennett Hall, who clearly gets the whole relationship very well. My guess would be this isn’t his first time reporting on the beaver-salmon relationship. All we can do here in plod-along California is plod along. Sigh. Go read the whole thing.

Which brings us to our THIRD good story, and that’s the announcement that starting NEXT WEEK an interview with a beaver expert will air here every Sunday on a podcast series that I’m calling “Agents of Change”. For the past few months I’ve been trotting about wooing the beaver world and trying to get them to talk to me about why they do what they do and how beavers changed their lives. The first interview will be with Sherri Tippie and the second with Skip Lisle. You won’t want to miss these short, remarkable glimpses into the lives of people who make a difference on behalf of the animals who make a difference.!I think you’ll enjoy it, click for a sample.

*Much thanks to David Bowie and poet Mark Seth Lender for their valued contributions!

And because man does not live by beaver alone, I’m passing along this AMAZING look at the 4 night festival of lights popular winner from Lyon, France. Mind you this just has to be the very best blending of history, pop culture and modern technology that I have ever seen.