Beavers are showing in all the best neighborhoods and more and more often people who live creeks and streams know enough to be excited about it. This article is so close to being positive I should have my head examined for being annoyed by it, but it grates like chinese water torture after the 15th day. Especially because it doesn’t even reference what it wrote itself about this issue 5 years earlier!
Maybe we should make a game out of it. Play “spot the line that bothers Heidi” or something and give free tshirts to the winners.
Okay stop. The headline already is irksome. Beaver reintroduction is illegal so no one “reintroduced” beavers to the south bay.
A newly discovered den on Los Gatos Creek. Documented sightings of beavers and dams from Sunnyvale to Coyote Creek. Evidence that a new generation of beaver kits is about to be born. It has been a good spring for the South Bay’s recently returned and now blossoming population of buck-toothed river rodents.
On May 24, Ibrahim Ismail, a student and teaching assistant at De Anza College, was conducting a lab with his class on Los Gatos Creek when they discovered the den. This was very near the spot where an individual beaver was captured on a camera-trap in 2014, the first seen on this watershed in a century and half. Ibrahim has spent a lot of time there in recent months.
He says he and his class were looking for tracks in the creekside dirt and watching three beavers swimming up and down in the creek. “And then we found what looked like a mountain of mud and sticks and twigs and large branches,” he says. “And in the back of my mind I’m like, ‘Wow, that really does look like a den.’ But I’ve been up and down this area so many times, and I’ve never seen any new activity.
“And then we saw all three beavers dive, and we could see through the water that they dived under and then crawled into the log pile.”
Okay relax. This is my favorite part of the article. A nice story about someone watching beavers. There’s nothing really annoying. Let’s just bask in the idea that beavers are welcome somewhere they show up. And this, This doesn’t bother me either.
Holmes, whose passion as a fly fisherman led him to found the Friends of Los Gatos Creek, which later became the SPCCC, understands that beaver can dramatically improve the ecology of a creek. That’s why conservationists throughout the region and the state are excited to witness the return of the beaver to watersheds throughout Northern California.
That’s perfect. You should be very happy about this paragraph.
The first colony of beaver to reappear in California set up camp on Alhambra Creek in downtown Martinez in 2010. Since that time many long-absent species including steelhead trout, river otter and mink have returned to the watershed. Holmes says he has witnessed evidence that the dam that was recently discovered on Coyote Creek is having a similar effect.
OW OW OW! The stupid it hurts us it hurts us! It hurts us!
Nasty reporters with their pretend facts and not even checking their OWN newspaper to see what they said before. Now I know the paper has been purchased and regrouped since then, and changed its name several times but Google is still the same. It was 2007 the first article appeared on our beavers in the Contra Costa Times. You not only got the date wrong by three entire years, but by the birth of 11 entire beavers.
Kate Lundquist began researching the beaver with her colleague Brock Dolman because of the critter’s habit of improving habitat for other riparian species. Lundquist and Dolman, who work at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, were at the time working toward the recovery of another totemic California animal, the Coho salmon.
Lundquist had learned that biologists in Oregon and Washington were re-introducing breeding pairs of beaver to creeks and rivers in their states, where they were creating pools that were helping the Coho. No such program exists in California, where beaver re-introduction is not permitted.
“The Coho are blinking out in this state,” she says. “They are very endangered.”
Beaver re-introduction is not allowed in California because for a century it was believed that the beaver was not native to the Sierra, the Coast Range or most of the rest of the state.
Okay, we’re generally happy that a reporter is talking to Kate and talking about salmon. Even though if he had talked to me I could have corrected that 201o thing, and reminded them that they wrote about beavers in the south bay 6 years ago, but okay. As long as the message gets out I certainly don’t have to be the one who tells it.
Lundquist and Dolman, conservationist and wildlife biologist respectively, later proved that was a fallacy in a peer-reviewed study published in the journal of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, which details evidence of beaver going back more than 1,000 years.
Lundquist says that by the time the two primary surveys of mammals in California were taken in 1937 and 1942, the beaver population had already been slaughtered.
“They had been trapped persistently since the 1700s,” she says, “and when the mountain men arrived in the 1830s, they finished them off.”
Lundquist and Dolman’s paper is a work of “historical ecology.” Its key finding is a piece of physical evidence: an ancient buried beaver dam that was discovered in the Red Clover Valley in Plumas County in the late 1980s. Carbon dating shows that it was built in three phases—the most recent layer in 1850, the layer beneath it in 1730, and the base layer in AD 580.
My mouth keeps opening and closing again. I want to complain but I don’t even know where to begin. Neither Brock nor Kate were authors on the paper about carbon testing the beaver dam. That was wikipedia Rick, who by the way started his very own think tank at the time called The Institute for Historical Ecology which I guess is where you got that name. Kate wasn’t author on the Sierra paper either. 
But sure, it takes a village, right?
Back in the South Bay, Ismail reports that there may be even more good news. A few weeks ago, while tracking the Campbell colony, he took note of some changes.
“I noticed that one of them has started to grow, and her body’s changing. And we are 90 percent sure that she’s pregnant. So in the next month and a half or so, we should have a new set of kits. And hopefully we’ll be getting some of those on camera.”
Now now, It’s June, And if your rare south bay beaver had kits I’ll bet you all the money in my pocket that they’d be born already. And I’d like very much to know how you can tell the beavers apart so that you are certain this one is ‘bigger’ and not just a different beaver. Of course if they talked to me I could tell them that. And could tell them our history tracking beaver family dynamics over a decade.
Here’s the thing. It’s very good to have beaver benefits and our nativity work discussed in the news and to get California thinking. That part I’m very happy about. Never mind that 6 years ago the Mercury News published a story about beavers in San Jose talking about their history in California with lead author Rick Lanman talking about this very subject.
SAN JOSE — A family of beavers has moved into Silicon Valley, taking up residence along the Gd yards from freeways, tall office buildings and the HP Pavilion represents the most high-profile Bay Area sighting since a beaver family settled in Martinez in 2006. The discovery of those beavers sparked national headlines when city leaders at first tried to remove them and then backed down after public outcry.
The appearance of the furry mammals in downtown San Jose is believed to be the first in 150 years.
“Whether these beavers came from the bay or Los Gatos Creek, I don’t think we know,” said Rick Lanman, a Los Altos physician who has published scientific papers on California beavers. “As long as we keep improving our environment, we are going to see more recolonization. It is a really cool story.”
Just to clarify. this is the exact same paper talking about the exact same research and being excited about beavers showing up in the South Bay 6 years earlier.
But that’s fine. Tune in next week when the Mercury news reports on the important new discovery of fire.
I know. I’m too picky. An article that doesn’t frustrate me appeared in the Mt Diablo Audubon Newsletter this month. Let’s end on a friendly note.
Missouri River Corps of Rediscovery #1
Mickey the Beaver
