Of Not Voting on the fate of the beavers, Martinez City Council! And Happy Anniversary of saying the beavers were leaving any moment, Mary Tappel. It’s been a heckuva year.

Happy Anniversary! It’s been a year since the city of Martinez heard the report delivered by the beaver subcommittee, and a year since the city’s “expert” reported that the lodge was abandoned and the beavers were leaving the habitat. During that time Martinez enjoyed a beaver festival, beaver presentations at the elementary and High Schools, and the publication of a beaver book. Worth A Dam has lectured at the Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, and will be teaching a class for Wild Birds Unlimited. In twelve months Worth A Dam raised over ten thousand in donations to maintain the beavers, planted 30 trees, developed a popular web site, pursued a grant for interpretive signs, and had original photos entered in the EPA curriculum for state wide use.

The city, for its part, installed a sheet pile wall through the beaver lodge and still hasn’t voted on their continued presence.

The 2007 yearlings have officially “dispersed”. Three 2008 kits are alive and well. Mother is quite pregnant with the 2009 brood, and father and is seen daily. Stop by Earth Day at the John Muir Site, or visit the dams and wish the beavers and their supporters a happy anniversary.

Last night I was treated to dinner and conversation by the retired board of “ANTS”, which stands for Audubon Nature Training Society. It was organized by Ellis Myers, who is the editor of Mt. Diablo Audubo Quail Newsletter. He had heard my Audubon presentation and wanted to follow up with something more up close and personal. The eight avian experts at the table packed a considerable environmental weight, one of them a retired photographer who was recently featured on PBS. While my host sipped milk, I drank a nicely blended margarita and talked beavers. One couple lived at Rossmoor and had lots to say about the woodpecker controversy and its parallels to our beaver-madness. There were a host of questions both about the animal activities and the human response they elicited. I brought the mighty scrapbook which held their attention and discussed the emerging science behind the relationship between birds and beavers.

My host thought that was a great topic for the Quail newsletter and I said I would be delighted to write it, so look for me in the finely designed pages some time to come. MDAS will have a fellow booth at the Muir Earth Day, which always has delightful nest displays as well. We talked about wood duck boxes and their likely location, and I reminded them that our photographer Cheryl Reynolds had some lovely bird images of the dam site. Ellis thought he might want to connect with her since he “has almost run through all his own” for the publication.

After dinner we bundled up and walked down to the dam site. I explained sadly that it was too early for beavers but showed them the lay of the land and explained how they use their habitat. I was reminded for the millionth time that talking to people who care about the earth’s creatures is much much better than attending a subcommittee meeting. Beaver regular LB by chance met us at the site and quickly adapted to help out explaining things and keeping folks on the path. Worth A Dam was asked for more t-shirts and praised for our very hard work at protecting these beavers and raising awareness of the environment in general.

For the first year of this ‘campaign’ nearly every conversation I had about beavers was a fight. I was struggling to deliver data that would persuade unbelieving beaver foes that this was worth doing, and it was like pushing a grand piano through a transom. Yet since April nearly every conversation I’ve had about beavers has been an inspiration, a revelation, or just a delight, like rolling a snowball downhill in freshly fallen powder. It always becomes something newer and larger by the time it reaches the bottom. Maybe I’ve earned the right to talk to audiences who can appreciate the beavers, and appreciate Worth A Dam in general. Last night I was reminded about how I called the Sierra Club, and Audubon in a panic back when the city said the beavers were going to be killed. I got very little response at the time, because no one could see how the fate of two beavers had much to do with their concerns and focus.

We can safely say that now they get the connection.

Photo: Cheryl Reynolds