Hmm Ben shares our horror about the beaver destroying ponds story, and says that I’m not the only one who suggested a companion piece to his book but written for children is worth doing. Gosh, it’s too bad he doesn’t know a nice child psychologist who can help.
In the meantime the National Geographic beaver headline is making the rounds and I keep getting emails from people who are happy to see my name come up in the article, which is fun. And there are more beaver headlines just waiting to be explored.
“Beaver engineering at Combeshead, particularly the building of dams has transformed the environment, increasing water storage and creating diverse wetlands,” Dr. Alan Puttock of the University of Exeter told the Daily Mail. “Our research has shown that beaver activity can slow the flow of water following rain storms potentially providing a valuable component to future flood and land management strategies.”
The study found that the beaver dams prevent nutrients and soil from being carried downstream during by trapping sediment, benefiting soils both upstream and downstream.
A study released in May found that 70 percent of the sediment trapped by the dams had eroded from grassland fields farther upstream.
“We are heartened to discover that beaver dams can go a long way to mitigate this soil loss and also trap pollutants which lead to the degradation of our water bodies,” Dr. Richard Brazier, who led the study, said in a press release.
Me too! I am heartened by the good beavers can do and the good you have done in broadcasting it. Thank you!
Now a great dose of ‘heartening’ watch this video sent to me by the watchful eyes of Robin Ellison. Tell me honestly if that isn’t the sweetest thing you will see all week. I mean sitting in a tubby turtle pool is always wonderful, but this just takes all the cakes.
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.
Dylan Thomas
Yesterday a neighbor sent the sad news that there was a dead beaver in the creek near Starbucks. Jon went down and found it was truly horribly our newest kit, first filmed in late June, whose dam had been destroyed by someone impatient with the water. Jon retrieved the little body and checked it out for injuries but there was no obvious sign of trauma. There is no way to know whether this death was the result of the water loss leading to an exposed home,, some disease unique to him or whatever affected our 2015 kits. But we have a few things we can rule out, It wasn’t salt water because of how far upstream they were. It wasn’t human feeding or poison because so few people knew about it. And we had one kit survive since then and grow up fine, so I assume its unrelated.
I have to guess for now there was some illness in the kit. I did think it a little odd that Moses filmed it with its parent so late in the year. Usually by late June our kits were swimming on their own and had the run of the creek. Maybe this one was weaker or need more care? We will never know. We can only observe and do our best to understand.
I know, its not enough.
But however dangerous our creek is to beavers, we have to remind ourselves that it is much, much safer than most creeks where most beavers find themselves. Rest now, little one.
There’s good news too, because life is like that – terrible and joyful mixed together. Ben’s book was reviewed in Audubon magazine yesterday and beaver benefits extolled for the world to see. Let’s hope everyone takes a moment to realize that beavers help birds.
Leave it to beavers . . . to fix the environment for us.
For millennia, Castor canadensis have shaped landscapes with their dams, turning scrub into meadows and flood waters into wetlands. But the rodent’s role has long gone unappreciated. So unappreciated that in the late 1800s, beavers nearly went extinct in the United States and Canada due to decades of fur trapping and extermination. The European species faced a similar plight, dropping to just 1,200 individuals around the same time.
Beavers bring order to the chaos by pooling water into wetlands, producing benefits for wildlife and humans alike. For example, ponds created by the four-foot-long rodents in Rocky Mountain National Park have cached an estimated 2.7 million megagrams of carbon. Photo: Enrique R. Aguirre Aves/Alamy
And then there are the beaver-loving birds. Trumpeter Swans, which have faced their own up and downs across North America, like to stack their 11-foot nests on top of the rodents’ fortresses. Farther west, Greater Sage-Grouse sip at beaver meadows, and Yellow-billed Cuckoos seek shade in cottonwoods, watered by their fat-tailed friends. In total, beavers are credited for enhancing bird diversity on three different continents. Without them, the forests would be less musical, and birding would be way more frustrating.
Appreciation is the key to keeping beavers—and everything they’ve built—around in the landscape. When we don’t understand our most common creatures, our world becomes smaller; we lose sight of nature’s complexity and all that’s irreplaceable. “While organisms have evolved to fill niches provided by nature, neither beavers nor people are content to leave it as that,” Goldfarb writes. “Instead we’re proactive, relentlessly driven to rearrange our environments to maximize its provision of food and shelter. We aren’tjust the evolutionary products of our habitat: We are its producers.” These are the words of a beaver believer.
What an excellent review from Purbita Saha, I’m always so happy when Audubon picks up the beaver baton. They have a lot of voices all across our nation and know how to pack a room. As a rule they are more friendly than feisty but if we can convince them that ripping out a beaver dam means kill a host of bird species as well, that should help.
I’ll remember to bring this up when I present to our own Audubon chapter this March. Reminding folks to be good to beavers is a great way to help all kinds of wildlife.
It is far, far too early for me to coast. What was I thinking yesterday? My living room is insane as all the items which have to go to the festival line up to wait there turn to be loaded into the truck. I slept a sliver last night. There are lists to be made and details to be attended too. Oh and there’s this. On Tuesday I implored Moses to see if he could get that huge wheel out of the creek for unsightly reasons. And while he was there he thought he’d have a little look around. Guess what he saw? Go ahead guess! Turn your sound WAY WAY up and I bet you’ll know the answer in the first couple of seconds.
LOOK at how TINY s/he is! Yesterday I spent the first 4 hours just saying OMG OMG over and over. Moses has captured some incredible moments with the beavers over the years, but this might be my very favorite. That kit is so little it can’t even dive to follow mom. It just pops back up like a cork.
He filmed this tuesday at 10:30 at night, and it took some doing to get it uploaded. We would love to be able to play it at the festival for folks, so that meant spending time figuring how to get it on our portable screen. Assuming we have a place to plug it in it should work out nicely.
And meanwhile Martinez has another kit! Stop worrying so much. Everything will work out fine. That makes him number twenty-seven!
It’s surprising how lovely the habitat is down there. It almost looks like a tropical forest. I can definitely see why folks brave the flooding and buy homes on the creek. Check out the morning footage from earlier in the week. Martinez is quite the urban utopia. There’s a car horn at the beginning and a pair of warblers trilling in the middle. Quite the place to raise a family.
Say it with me now: Baby baby baby! Martinez has a baby! There is precious little that matters more than that.
There was also a fine article about our friends in the North and the quest to bring beaver back to California. Oh and it mentions the festival too! Rusty was kind enough to supply the photographs.
The first step is getting past California’s “beaver blind spot,” as the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center’s Brock Dolman puts it. Dolman is co-director, with Kate Lundquist, of OAEC’s WATER Institute (Watershed Advocacy, Training, Education and Research), established in 2004 to study and promote watershed issues. The award-winning duo’s “Bring Back the Beaver” campaign, started in 2009, went back on the road in the North Bay last month with a talk in connection with a screening of the environmental documentary Dirt Rich in Novato; appearances continue through June in Napa, Sonoma and Marin counties.
“A lot of people just don’t know that we have beaver in California,” says Lundquist, who says that their current presentation is an update on a 2015 talk they gave in Sonoma to help answer the question: “That’s an East Coast thing, right?”
Although a historical account from General Mariano Vallejo found the Laguna de Santa Rosa “teeming with beaver” in 1833, by 1911 California had about 1,000 beavers left before legislators passed a law briefly protecting the aquatic rodents. Following a quarter-century-long campaign to reintroduce beaver to erosion-threatened habitat (the highlight of the “Bring Back the Beaver” show is the parachuting “beaver bomb” developed during the time), they were determined non-native and invasive for decades thereafter.
Bring Back the beavers campaign! Hurray for Brock and Kate! It’s great to see the regional history of beavers in California outlined in this article. The author even takes time to focus on the depredation permits issued in the state. But you know by now I am very self-centered – so of course this was my very favorite part.
This business as usual for beavers started to change after a pair of them wandered into Alhambra Creek in the middle of the city of Martinez in 2006. They built a dam and had yearlings, called kits, but the city’s application for a permit to make them go away did not sit well with locals who could see the kits playing as they drank their coffee. Resident Heidi Perryman formed the beaver advocacy group Worth a Dam, which holds its 11th annual Beaver Festival on June 30 in downtown Martinez.
Okay, yearlings are not called kits, any more than teenagers are called children. The mention is short and sweet. But still,,,always leave them wanting more. It’s followed by a lovely intro to the beaver situation in Napatopia. And then does a nice job of promoting Kevin Swift, who worked with Mike Callahan a while back to learn the trade.
“They’re ignored, underappreciated, reviled and mismanaged in equal measure,” says Swift, who emphasizes that beavers, for all their engineering abilities, are not intellectual powerhouses. “It’s got a brain the size of an acorn. If you can’t work it out with them, could be you’re the problem.”
“It seems to me that all the laws are backwards,” he says. “You don’t need a permit to destroy a beaver dam that makes critical habitat for rare, threatened and endangered species—but you might need a permit to put in a float-control device that’s hydrologically invisible and maintains the habitat for rare, threatened and endangered species. How does that work?”
Hmm indeed! Good point Kevin.
And if the beaver believers are right, as the numerous scientific studies they point to suggest, there is no better way to be fish-friendly than to be beaver-friendly. The beavers are not going away. There are some intractable parties, such as the absentee landowner on Sonoma’s Leveroni Road who, according to state records, refuses to consider alternative options to repeated depredation permit requests. But ultimately this approach is doomed to fail, says Swift.
“A story you often hear in California,” says Swift, “is, ‘I’ve been going down to that place for an hour every day for X number of years, and I’ve shot and trapped Y number of beavers, and they’re still there!’ Yeah, you’re in beaver habitat! Geology drives beaver habitat. Unless you can literally move mountains, you’re not changing anything about beavers’ attraction to your site.”
Lundquist says killing beavers is neither a viable nor economical strategy. “For one, people hold candlelight vigils, like they did in Tahoe. And it can be really bad press if you’re trying to do the right thing—or be seen as doing the right thing, anyway.
Um, not to be a stickler for detail or anything, but actually they didn’t have a candle light vigil in Tahoe for beavers. That was in that OTHER city. What’s its name again? sheesh Go read the whole article, it’s worth your time and author James Knight did a lovely job pulling it all together. Learn all about the ‘Bring back the Beaver campaign’ Then come to the festival in two days and meet Brock and Kate in person!
Then watch this video again because it’s awwwwwww…
Maybe you are like me and didn’t really notice when the Contra Costa Times went broke and was sold. Maybe you hardly noticed when it became the ‘East Bay Times” its slew of seasoned reporters who lived in the communities they wrote about were let go, and the youngest and cheapest were left to man the boat. After ten years of struggling to hang on for dear life I had finally begun to develop a comfortable working relationship with my favorite reporters – all of whom are lost fired. One of them I talked to was working as a substitute teacher. One was getting ready to start a blog. You can imagine.
If you wonder why the mayor of our town can say anything he wants about any policy and no one challenges him about the pesky truth its because our local paper has become a ghost town with one overwhelmed reporter and one overwhelmed editor handling the bulk of the work.
MARTINEZ — The festival that sprung from a successful 2007 grassroots effort to save a family of beavers is coming to town this year with promises of a live painting, readings from a new beaver book, and new locations where organizers say the semiaquatic critters have moved.
The festival’s June 30 date just so happens to coincide with the West Coast premier of the film “The Beaver Believers,” which covers the struggles of the American beaver in the wake of climate change. The film will premier June 28 at the Empress Theater in Vallejo.
The festival, now in its 11th year, blossomed from a 2007 controversy over what to do with a group of beavers that had built a dam blocking Alhambra Creek. The first thought was to kill them, but community outraged ensued. Eventually, a flow device was used to move the dam.
Well, ahem. no actually. Not MOVE the dam, just move the water past the dam. But hey, Nate did a pretty nice job. Once in charge of just the court story’s in Martinez, now he has to cover everything. He started out in our conversation thinking the beavers lived IN the dam – so baby steps, right?
“I don’t think it’s an accident that Martinez is the hometown of John Muir and all these people grew up taking field trips to his house and being informed about nature,” Perryman said. “I think that really helped.”
This year’s Beaver Festival will feature a live chalk painting by artist Amy G. Hall, and a live reading by author Ben Goldfarb of his new book, “Eager: The surprising, secret lives of beavers and why they matter.”
Beaver Festival 2018 will start at 11 a.m. on June 30 and go through 4 p.m. It is at Susana Park, near the intersection of Susana and Estudillo streets.
Ahh, he liked that quote. I could feel it register in our conversation. There are a lot of parts I wished could have made it into the article. Like the fact that the Martinez beavers and the festival were actually IN the film. Or that we were also IN the book too. Or the fact that Amy will be working on her giant painting for two days. But hey we’re lucky to get that, The fun part about the article is that it has multiple mis-atributed photos – stolen equally from Cheryl, myself, and even Rusty I think! It is true that some indeed are by Susan Pollard their photographer as stated but they have no idea which, and now they never will.
They first shocked me by stealing that tail up photo in 2007 and now it’s in their vault and isn’t coming out. Never mind. We know the truth, right?
Speaking of the truth about beavers, 100 copies of Ben’s book were delivered to the house yesterday for all the events when he’s here. I told him I would be happy to baby sit. Now I’m surrounded by beaver boxes just waiting for the big day.
And speaking of really being surrounded by amazing things, our good friend Rusty Cohn sent these from yesterday morning when he had a most wonder-filled visit to the Tulocay creek beavers. Rusty bemoaned his limited lcamera and talked about the bitter choice between a new lens and a new car.
I scoffed and said which one I obviously thought was more important.
2018 Napa kit and adult: Rusty CohnKit season in Napa: Rusty CohnKit season in Napa: Rusty CohnRusty CohnTwo in tow: Rusty Cohn
This was recently shared by beaver-friend Bob Armstrong (Mendenhall Glacier beavers) on his Nature Alaska website. Which is very nice because I needed my kit-fix this morning. Trust me, you do too.
Eager beavers could benefit British agriculture
The study found that the beaver dams prevent nutrients and soil from being carried downstream during by trapping sediment, benefiting soils both upstream and downstream.
The first step is getting past California’s “beaver blind spot,” as the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center’s Brock Dolman puts it. Dolman is co-director, with Kate Lundquist, of OAEC’s WATER Institute (Watershed Advocacy, Training, Education and Research), established in 2004 to study and promote watershed issues. The award-winning duo’s “Bring Back the Beaver” campaign, started in 2009, went back on the road in the North Bay last month with a talk in connection with a screening of the environmental documentary Dirt Rich in Novato; appearances continue through June in Napa, Sonoma and Marin counties.
