Category: History

THE DAY WE THOUGHT WE’D NEVER SEE IS FINALLY HERE

You slog through day to day getting a little argument here a little victory there. Someone saves a beaver. Someone tried to save a beaver. Someone talks about beaver benefits in the news. But nothing prepares you for something like this. A day when everything you were hoping for finally frickin happens without any warning at all.

CDFW Awards $4.2 Million for Greenhouse Gas Reduction Grant Projects

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) [recently] announced the selection of three projects to restore wetlands that sequester greenhouse gases (GHGs) and provide other ecological co-benefits.

The awards, totaling $4.2 million, were made under CDFW’s 2017 Wetlands Restoration for Greenhouse Gas Reduction Program Proposal Solicitation Notice.

The Wetlands Restoration for Greenhouse Gas Reduction Program focuses on projects with measurable objectives that will lead to GHG reductions in wetlands and watersheds while providing co-benefits such as enhancing fish and wildlife habitat, protecting and improving water quality and quantity, and helping California adapt to climate change. Wetlands have high carbon sequestration rates that can store carbon for decades

So CDFW saves up all the money they get from fishing licenses hunting violations and they award some grants to worthy projects this year to fight global warming because they happen to live in the real world. The grant went to three stellar projects statewide but guess what the third one was? Go ahead, GUESS!

Ecosystem and Community Resiliency in the Sierra Nevada: Restoration of the Clover Valley Ranch ($680,974 to The Sierra Fund). The overarching goal of this project is to improve climate resilience at the ecosystem and community level in Red Clover Valley. Ecosystem resiliency is defined as the reestablishment of hydrologic function and mesic vegetation, while community resiliency is defined as long-term engagement and capacity building of residents of the region, including the Mountain Maidu Tribe. This project leverages Natural Resources Conservation Service implementation including construction of grade control structures, beaver dam analogues and revegetation, and proposes to evaluate the effectiveness of restoration for improving climate resilience. The on-the-ground activities will result in GHG sequestration benefits and environmental and economic co-benefits for people and species of the region, while monitoring will ensure that benefits are quantified, contributing to climate-based understanding of Sierra Nevada meadows.

Do you know what this means? Not ONLY is CDFW officially admitting the beaver dams trap green house gasses and restore wetlands, but they are ALSO admitting that beavers are NATIVE in the SIERRAS. Which means our papers worked and that battle is officially won.

It’s actually IN the valley where the carbon testing that launched the study was originally done!!!

The 2,655-acre Clover Valley Ranch is located in Red Clover Valley, at the headwaters of the Feather River watershed in Plumas County. The site has a distinctive history as a rural ranching community that pre-dates World War I. Prior to the 19^th century Gold Rush, the area was inhabited by the Mountain Maidu. Since the displacement of the Mountain Maidu from the valley, overgrazing and poor land management has led to severe degradation.

I always knew it would happen. Someday. Somehow. I just thought there’d be a parade of some kind. I’m so glad I got to be part of the team that made that paper a reality.

On a happy happy day like today I can add just one thing. Hey CDFW, do you know what else makes Beaver Dam Analogues and takes care of them day and night with zero grant monies whatsoever?

BEAVERS.

A GIANT BEAVER TALE TO TELL

heidi08 beaver myths, castoroides, History December 7, 2018

I know you read this website every day, but you’re probably thinking, wait, there aren’t enough folktales or origin myths about beavers being the beginning of everything. Heidi should write about the big stories once in a while. And I agree! So we’re grateful Frances Backhouse shared this.

The Hero of the Dene

Long ago, giant beasts roamed the Earth and people were lawless, and the Dene of the Northwest Territories tell of two brothers who set the world straight. “Many old medicine stories talk about giant animals—bats, dinosaurs, beavers, monkeys—which once roamed the earth,” wrote the late Dene elder George Blondin in his book Yamoria: The Lawmaker. “Storytellers say we came from animals and long ago there were many half-animal/half-human life forms. It seems during this period that genetic forces as we know them today were out of control.” People were starving and ate each other, he writes of this “terrible period.” But Yamoria and Yamozha came from the west to be humankind’s salvation.

People were lawless? Well, that I believe. How do beavers come into the story?

“My grandfather says, as the story goes, that people were really, really scared when they paddled, because at any time they could encounter a beaver,” says Sangris. “And beavers, they don’t have any natural enemies. They’d come to anything that’s moving on water and if they feel threatened and if they don’t feel comfortable, they’ll capsize the canoes and break the canoes. So the Dene here, the Yellowknives Dene were afraid of them. They were afraid of the beavers so they’d paddle right on the shoreline as quietly as they could go. And they would tell the children not to make any noise.”

Shhhh watch out for beavers!

Sangris says no one knows what happened to them after the fight, but perhaps where they ended up is not as important as the legacy they left behind. “It’s always said that Atachuukaii corrected things. He made things better,” Elle says. For ridding the world of giant animals, Sangris says the two brothers are heroes to the Dene. “The Dene were free after that. There were no giant beavers swimming around anymore and no big birds flew in the sky and no big animals walked on the earth that could harm them anymore.”

Well, I might be scared of a 300 lb beaver too.

Giant beavers (Castoroides ohioensis), the key antagonists in many Yamoria legends, actually existed in the swamps and lakes of the North around the time humans first arrived, between 40,000 and 16,000 years ago. And like the legends say, they may not have been all that easy to deal with.

The North of that time was host to a wide diversity of large mammals, including horses, camels and woolly mammoths. But around the end of the last glacial period, about 12,000 years ago, the giant species began disappearing.

But were the giant beavers hunted? Were they around the same time as the humans?

Theories of over-hunting by humans would back up stories of Yamoria shrinking or killing off many of the giant mammals that threatened humans at the time, but Grant Zazula, a paleontologist with the Yukon government, has his doubts, saying there’s little evidence of over hunting and no evidence that humans preyed on giant beavers at all.

“A beaver the size of a bear with eight-inch teeth. I don’t know. If I was a hunter back then I would probably go with the horse or a bison.”

So how did giant beavers make their way into Dene stories? Zazula’s theory came to him the first time he did field work in Old Crow, in Northern Yukon.“If you go along the Old Crow River in the summer, and you float down in a canoe, there’s piles of bones of ice age animals on the riverbanks. They’re just all over the place.”

So the beavers themselves might not have been around, but their bones were. Native saw those bones and came up with some pretty exciting stories to keep their grandchildren warm at night.

I remember the first time I saw a castorides skull my eyes grew bright, I immediately conjured a fantasy of sitting at a city council meeting with that giant head in my lap.

Wouldn’t that be awesome?

JOHN MUIR AND BEAVERS

heidi08 Friends of Martinez Beavers, History October 18, 2018

Beavers in the John Muir Association newsletter! If you aren’t a member yet, you really should be. I was asked to write a few word about this years festival and the association’s participation. It came out this morning in their fall newsletter.

The 2018 Beaver Festival was remarkable in many ways. Located in historic Susana Park, the John Muir Association, Mountain day Camp and John Muir National Historic Site displays all nestled under the tall trees there. They were joined by some 50 environmental exhibits including NOAA fisheries, the Forest Service, the EBRP fish mobile, and the pipevine swallowtail project from the Academy of Sciences. Co-president Bruce Campbell and board member Lynn Quinones lit the stage with the popular Alhambra Valley Band to start the day of music and festivities. Beaver tours of the new habitat near the park delighted guests, and children were encouraged to earn wildlife stickers and create their own memorable “Beaver pond” to take home.

For the first time, the event featured dynamic chalk artist Amy G. Hall of Napa who spent two days crafting a giant mural of a beaver pond and the wildlife it supports in the center of the plaza. A final dramatic first featured acclaimed environmental author Ben Goldfarb, who launched his new book by signing copies and reading aloud the Martinez chapter on stage. In addition to earning praise in National Geographic, Ben’s work has captured the attention of Science magazine, NPR, Audubon and the Washington Post, meaning the story of the Martinez beavers coming to John Muir’s home town has been proudly carried alongside its wake.

If there were ever a better way to celebrate beavers, we sure don’t know what it could be.

“Heidi is a a child psychologist who didn’t know much about beavers until 2007, when beavers showed up in downtown Martinez, California.., the former home of John Muir. She now organizes an annual beaver festival in downtown Martinez”

August 2018 National Geographic Review of Ben Goldarb’s “Eager: The secret and surprising life of beavers and why they matter”

In case you don’t recognize the penmanship. yes I wrote it. But doesn’t it look nice?

BEAVER GENEALOGY

heidi08 Beavers and salmon, History August 16, 2018

Don’t miss Ben’s interview this morning at nine on Jefferson Public Radio in Oregon.

Click photo to watch an amazing civic beaver meeting

With the news of the horrific Grand Jury report in Pennsylvania, I’ve been remembering a major player in the early story of the Martinez beavers who happened at the time to be a leader at S.N.A.P. (Survivor Network for those Abused by Priests). Joey Piscitelli is a general contractor who lived downtown in a small victorian that happened to be on the same street the beavers moved into. So he was an early observer of their arrival. When the city decided the beavers would be killed Joey used his not inconsiderable connections to the media that he had developed through S.N.A.P. and guided them to the story. I believe it was Joey who instigated the candle light vigil, but I’m not sure. I couldn’t even attend it because I had to work that evening. The city notes from the November 7, 2007 meeting read:

Joey Piscitelli thanked Council for removing the “death threat”. He asked them to listen to the people and keep the beavers. He agreed a committee should be formed to study the matter.

Unlike me, he was not afraid to issue a challenge. I remember one morning after that big meeting he and his wife stopped by to talk about their plans to pressure the state senator. In those early days I was so full of the positive energy of that meeting I completely trusted the process and didn’t want to look ungrateful. I must not have seemed enthusiastic because I don’t think we ever spoke again, I can’t remember him being involved at the april meeting or the sheetpile (by which time my outlook had entirely changed). I’m not sure I heard from him after that.

When I think back to those days I can imagine that he felt he had done a great deal of work to push the heavy rock up the hill, and I swept in a pushed it down the hill getting all the attention.

Of course neither of us could know how many, many more hills there were to come. I never forgot what a crucial role he played, or how much he contributed to keeping the beavers alive. People often misunderstand that November meeting and think it was something I made happen. But I always correct them.

I didn’t make that meeting happen. That meeting made me happen.

In other news the Salmon Coho Confab is just around the corner. With plenty of local and not so local watershed heroes. Of course we all know who will be the furry flat-tailed wonder of that meeting.

Three-day symposium focuses on coho salmon

Fisheries scientists will visit the South Fork of the Smith River next week for a symposium focusing on the endangered coho salmon.

Held Aug. 24–26, the Salmonid Restoration Federation’s 21st-Annual Coho Confab will focus on watershed restoration, techniques and efforts to help coho salmon recover. The symposium will be held at Rock Creek Ranch and will include tours of stream and valley floor restoration efforts in the Lower Klamath tributaries as well as a tour of large woody debris projects led by Dan Burgess, of California State Parks.

The people who will be presenting at the symposium include Michael Pollock, who promotes the use of beavers, which had been native to a lot of coastal streams in California and create deep pools, helping to rehabilitate lower parts of the Smith River, according to Stolzman.

You can tell not even the reporter quite believes that beavers matter to this story, but that’s why we bring out the big guns. Hurray for Michael Pollock and our friends at OAEC and we hope this can change some hearts and minds!

WHAT JOHN MUIR WROTE ABOUT BEAVERS

heidi08 History May 29, 2018

The internet is responsible for many bad things, spyware, pornography, spam, fake news, Donald Trump, etc. But there are wonderful things about it too. Because it made it possible over the weekend to track down this quote by John Muir from his paper on the Forests of Oregon. I can’t describe how pleased I was to finally find some words by Muir on my favorite subject! I had to make a graphic for emphasis.

I can’t tell you what a feeling it is to read that. Living in Martinez, John Muir’s home for 25 years and the town where he is buried it just felt SO WRONG not to hear him weigh in on the importance of beavers. You can tell in this quote that he knew beavers had the last laugh. I found it in a collection of essays and correspondence called “Steep Trails” carefully published four years after his death. Looking at this made me wonder where the phrase ‘beaver meadows’ first came from and how Muir knew it?

Viva Las Vegas –– When explorer Antonio Armijo came upon the place in 1829, he found bubbling springs, abundant beavers, and grassy beaver meadows. Armijo named the site Las Vegas – Spanish for “the meadows.” Beavers do much to shape the natural landscape. They fell trees along creeks and stack the logs and branches into dams. Before long, they’ve created wetlands that are magnets for nesting birds, from ducks and rails to warblers and blackbirds, like this one. In time, the beavers move on. The ponds fill gradually with soil and organic debris. They give way to marshes, the marshes to wet meadows, which dry a bit and, at last, to fertile expanses of green meadows. Las vegas.

It hurts my heart to read about Las Vegas as a green meadow filled with and by beavers, I doubt that Muir read Armijo, so I still wonder how he knew it. Apparently it was generally used to because Ben just wrote that it was used by in the trapping account of Black Beaver published in 1911. It was used widely enough that there are several towns called ‘beaver meadows’ so I’m still interested in how Muir came by it.

I also found this:

Indians, no doubt, have ascended most of the rivers on their way to the mountains to hunt the wild sheep and goat to obtain wool for their clothing, but with food in abundance on the coast they had little to tempt them into the wilderness, and the monuments they have left in it are scarcely more conspicuous than those of squirrels and bears; far less so than those of the beavers, which in damming the streams have made clearings and meadows which will continue to mark the landscape for centuries.

Steep Trails, John Muir
A collection of writings published in 1918, after his death
Chapter XVIII The Forests of Washington

Do you think maybe he wrote this at the ‘scribble desk’ in his home in Martinez? I hope so. I hope so. I hope so.