There’s a nice mention of our urban beaver friends in the Bronx River in a different episode of the Chicago program I showed you with Riley earlier. I can’t believe they’re doing a whole program on urban wildlife without mention US but go figure. We definitely are there in spirit. Go here, to watch the whole thing.
Urban Nature takes a look at both unmediated ecosystems and places where humans are stepping in to save nature that is threatened by urban development. Host Marcus Kronforst catches a glimpse of San Francisco as it appeared before human settlement by venturing into a redwood forest in Oakland and by hiking through the Presidio, where a rocky outcropping shelters a shrub that’s the last of its kind in the wild. He encounters endangered birds in the salt marshes of Brooklyn’s Jamaica Bay, and canoes down the Bronx River to spot eels, herons, and beavers.
I sent yesterday’s horror story to every one I could think of that might ‘pitch’ some grief for the beaver-killing monsters at the golf course in Alabama. I managed to get a new friend who’s in charge of watersheds for 8 southern states very interested, and an author researching a ‘beaver book’.
I’d like to think of it as my “Fly my pretties” moment. But we’ll see what happens.tt
And it should be, it should be it SHOULD be like that Because Horton was faithful, he sat, and he sat. And he meant what he said, and he said what he meant, and they sent him home happy
ONE HUNDRED PERCENT!!!!
For some reason this sprang to mind with what I’m about to share. This was taken Sunday evening looking towards town from the Granger’s Wharf Bridge over Alhambra Creek. The beaver (BEAVER!) came in from the strait and headed upstream. It was sent to me by Brendon A. Chapman, who I don’t believe I ever met. If you turn the sound UP you can hear him say my name while he’s filming it. Because obviously you’d tell Heidi about this. Why wouldn’t you?
Another resident who walks everyday at the Marina, Bill Nichols, said he saw a beaver in a side channel at Granger’s wharf this very morning. And you can just GUESS where we’ll be tonight keeping an eye out. Does this mean our upstream beavers have moved down? I wish they had but I’m not sure. That beaver Brendon watched was coming IN from the strait at an odd hour to be a resident – since our beavers usually start in the creek in the evening and go OUT towards the strait at night to feed…. But who knows, maybe the weird weather on Sunday flushed him out of where ever he was living? And maybe the fact that a beaver was seen this morning is a sign that they’re moving back?
Or maybe it’s another beaver entirely? Looking for a new place to settle down and turn Martinez into a veritable Beaver City! Or maybe it’s an old family member looking to visit the ‘hood where he grew up? Could be? Who knows? The possibilities are endless!
For the past two years, Friends of Los Gatos Creek, an affiliate of South Bay Clean Creeks Coalition, has been conducting cleanups along creeks in Santa Clara County. We have tallied an astounding 76 cleanups. On our most recent event, June 4, we had 55 volunteers from Google, Santa Clara County Parks and the Friends team leaders converge on Los Gatos Creek in downtown San Jose.
With very little fanfare, our small grass-roots effort has surpassed a milestone: 100 tons of trash removed from the Los Gatos Creek — with over 85 percent of it linked to encampment activity.
Sometimes Steve uses the removed trash in artistic sculptures, (because man does not live by bread alone). A recent clean up struck such a fancy he had to send it my way. I met Steve at the creeks coalition conference in 2010 and we have swapped emails ever since. Isn’t this beautiful? The fur is cigarette butts, the tail is an old tire, and the ‘creek’ is an rusted box spring. I told him he should really come to the beaver festival and share his work and his message.
Steve Holes: South bay clean creeks coalition.
There might be very exciting news soon, but I won’t jinx anything by sharing it. For now we can delight appreciation of this inspiring article in the LA Times about an elementary’s school appreciation of the appearance of a burrowing owl. Because urban wildlife matters.
Principal Brad Rumble took a photo of the burrowing owl that has been spotted on the grounds of Esperanza Elementary. (Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times)
Nathan, 9, had no idea how the bird found its way to the courtyard of his school, Esperanza Elementary, near MacArthur Park in the middle of the city.
“This is a big deal,” he thought.
Nathan told a teacher, who then told Brad Rumble, the school’s principal and a man who takes bird matters very seriously.
Rumble pulled a few students out of class to observe the visitor, identified as a burrowing owl. In a neighborhood of asphalt, street vendors and crowded apartment buildings, this was their closest encounter yet with nature.
Decades ago, before buildings and cars covered Los Angeles, burrowing owls were a common sight, said Kimball Garrett, an ornithologist who manages bird collections at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Now, sightings are rare. The last one spotted near downtown Los Angeles was six years ago, near the museum.
Rumble thinks he knows what attracted the bird. In mid-November, he teamed up with the Los Angeles Audubon Society to transform more than 4,000 square feet of asphalt on campus into a native habitat.
High school students helped Esperanza families lay down a bark path and plant California golden poppies, an oak tree and a sycamore.
“It’s not natural around here for kids to come down from their apartments and walk down to the creek and play,” the principal said. “But if the neighborhood is lacking, at least the school campus can serve as a living laboratory.”
He created something similar once before — with remarkable results. A few years ago, at Leo Politi Elementary in Pico-Union, he had 5,000 square feet of concrete ripped out and replaced with native flora.
The plants attracted insects, which attracted birds, fascinating students. They learned so much, their test scores in science rose sixfold, “from the basement to the penthouse,” Rumble told The Times in 2012.
Since the owl showed up on campus, peculiar things have happened: Students have skipped recess to stay in the library, poring over books about falcons, swallows and hummingbirds. Some have pulled their parents out of their cars after school to hunt down the owl’s droppings. Teachers watched in shock one day when two crows tried to attack the school’s honored guest.
Rumble encourages students to use an observation board he set up outside the main office to document each owl sighting. There have been more than a dozen so far — on drainpipes, rooftops, PA speakers, even a library rolling cart. For more than a week, the owl frequented a jacaranda tree located next to the lunch tables, amusing the 200 kids who munched on pizza and sandwiches below.
The bird has caused such a stir, the student council is considering changing the school’s mascot from a dragon to an owl.
On a recent morning, teacher Elizabeth Williams talked with her third-graders about the bird’s diet, markings and nesting habits. She introduced new vocabulary: perch, burrowing, conservation, habitat.
“It likes to burrow in nests underground,” said Emily Guzman.
“It bobs its head up and down to protect itself,” said Yonathan Trujillo.
“It makes sounds like a snake,” said another student.
Some students are getting quite savvy about birds. They see them soar overhead, dark specks in a blue sky, and know them by name: a yellow-rumped warbler, a red-tailed hawk, a common raven.
When he asked Jose what he thought of the bird, the boy’s eyes glowed and he smiled.
“It’s made me very happy,” Jose said.
The arrival of a simple burrowing owl delights and energizes an entire public school. Are we surprised? And the principal is smart enough to know how special this is. If you doubt its value go to Martinez California and read how some children responded to beavers. Urban Wildlife reminds us that there are things alive and precious besides roads and freeways. Children are reminded that there are wonderful things the adults don’t control. And adults are reminded that not everything has been formed in concrete and shaped by convenience.
I think it reassures us of that special place inside each one of us that isn’t molded by expectation and responsibility. Something wild and free even amidst the most tangled constraints.
Let 2017 be a year of firsts. Our wildlife friends in New Hampshire worked on a bill to make beaver depredation a last resort. They asked me to weigh in on language and used Cheryl’s adorable kit photo for the petition. As far as I know this is the ONLY state where ‘last resort’ has ever even been considered.
Rep. Carolyn Matthews, R-Raymond, wants to boost the protections for beavers in state law. She explained that Voices for Wildlife, a conservation organization, asked her to sponsor a measure that would make killing the animals “a solution of last resort.”
“Right now, anybody, in order to prevent damage to their property, can have a beaver trapped and killed,” she said. “And the group wants to really rearrange the emphasis in the existing law so that people take an honest look at other options before jumping right to destroying the beaver.”
Matthews said her town has had success using dam flow devices to manage beaver ponds.
This is momentous and we should all be extremely grateful to Rep Matthews for carving the way. She’s a new republican in the house. The reference to flow devices is referring to Art Wolinsky’s wonderful work! I can’t really imagine that this will pass, but I want this law considered and discussed in five more states next year. And five more the year after that. Obviously what this article doesn’t say is that the reason to try something else before you trap beavers is that it makes a huge difference to your state’s waterways, fish and wildlife. Removing beaver is like an amputation. The law is asking you to try first to save the leg.
That sounds pretty reasonable to me.
More firsts. This takes up a lot of space and it should. Because it took a lot of space in my brain to finish. This is our one and only newsletter celebrating our decade (yes decade!) of beavers in Martinez. I will be printing some too. It is wonderful that we get to read some other voices in here, so be sure to read Fro and Jon’s column and Cheryl’s interview. But the very best part are the quotes in the left margin which I am beyond grateful for, so make sure you use the slider at the top to zoom in on those. Thank you to everyone who helped get us here, and to Jane Kobres who painstakingly edited my gibberish with enormous patience. Give it a second to load and then click once to make it full screen. I am really pleased with this.
You’ll understand why I held my hands before my eyes the entire time I was reading to potentially shield myself from this article. I could just sense things were going to end badly, though I was understandably intrigued by this headline.
Under cover of darkness, stealthy beavers are gnawing down trees and damming creeks — all within the city limits of Springfield. Their most visible work can be seen at Lake Drummond at Nathanael Greene-Close Memorial Park, where sharp-toothed beavers have downed willow trees and even defeated metal fencing placed around tree trunks to deter them.
“There’s a whole lot more beavers than you’d think in the city, especially on South Creek and near the Darr Agricultural Center,” said Ashley Schnake, urban wildlife biologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation. “They’ve probably never left but have adapted to the changes we’ve made as the city grew.”
At Darr Agricultural Center just east of Nathanael Greene park, Schnake said a bevy of beavers set up shop by building several dams across South Creek. The dams backup water and flooded some of the Darr Agricultural Center’s fields, prompting a nuisance complaint.
According to MDC, there’s no way to easily or safely capture beavers and relocate them because the local department doesn’t have the equipment needed to catch them alive. The beavers had to be dispatched.
Springfield is in the bottom left corner of Missouri – a state that has never been very advanced in beaver knowledge. I wasn’t surprised to see that they used the pelt of one they killed as an educational tool rather than let the living beavers teach their children about maintaining healthy creeks.
Yeah, yeah yea. Beavers eat trees and block culverts. Who knew? But imagined how surprised was surprise to read this:
Kromrey, an avid trout fisherman, said beavers even play a key role in preserving the rare McCloud rainbow trout that were introduced to Crane Creek southwest of Springfield in the late 1800s. They were imported by train all the way from California.
“On Crane Creek, beaver dams are holding water in pools where McCloud trout habitat wouldn’t otherwise survive when the water gets low,” Kromrey said. “They are real natural conservationists. They were the original detention-basin builders. A lot of soil sediment gets filtered out of a stream because of the dams beavers build.”
Now there are two paragraphs worth reading. Firstly a Missouri trout fisherman understanding why beavers matter, but secondly this real surprise about trout being transported by train from California in the late 1800’s. I originally read this as a story about beings being relocated from CA which is even more interesting because we had none then.
Brock Dolman of OAEC says we did replenish their rainbow stock with our healthy one years ago, so its sadly not a beaver mystery that needs solving. Sigh. I’m sure there are more out there that just need finding.
Yesterday we met photographer Suzi Eszterhas and a group of Martinez children and did a small tree planting photo shoot for Ranger Rick. You will have to make do with our grubby photos for now, but hers will be wonderful I’m sure. The kids did an awesome botanical job, and afterwards they all posed for photos in front of the mural. It was a perfect end to summer.
