Video – Page 3 – Worth A Dam

BEAVER MEMORY LANE

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Video August 12, 2019

Lately I’ve been browsing through some very old files trying to find what I can of my original beaver footage on the newish computer. I first filmed father beaver in January of 2007 when I accidentally got lucky enough to stumble upon him at the bridge. I could not believe what I’d seen and wanted desperately to share it. Just around the time I bought a new mac and thought it would be a great idea to store my beaver footage there. Eventually I used that footage in my very first video about the beavers, but sadly the original footage got corrupted and I have no actual record of seeing the beavers until May of that year.
It wasn’t without some labor that I managed to make a short video and stick it on youtube. I knew NOTHING about these things back then, In fact You Tube itself was barely two years old which should blow your mind. It was so little used that during the first year I actually received a couple ‘most watched animal video‘ notices, which thinking about in today’s standards was a complete impossibility.

Here was the maiden voyage.

Things happen, I realize that computers come with hazards, but I was especially sad to lose that original footage. In those days I was filming with a very very old camera so those movies were stored on .avi files which my windows 10 PC now is not friends with. I thought the best moment I ever shot was lost to the wind and only available on a squished youtube upload.

Yesterday I found out that wasn’t true

Please enjoy this footage taken June 15 2007. It will still be squished by Vimeo but not as much. Pay special attention to the narrators dialogue which indicates how very little Jon and I knew at the time about these foreign beavers who were just starting to introduce us to their lives. In those days I thought the kits might be born at different times. Like chickens apparently?

I guess I can sort of understand the confusion. One kit was filmed by itself a week earlier (also lost) and seemed to be fatter than the others. In hindsight I would say he just happened to be the most pushy. But the point is that we were completely smitten. And we that turned out to be a very good thing.

Hopefully I will turn down some dark corner one day and find the missing footage that I remember as vividly as my first day of school. For now I’m pretty grateful for this much.

And a special shout out to the man whose been my partner in beavering for more years than I even spent in college including graduate school and who’s voice you hear in the discovery. Happy birthday to the partner in all things beaver and otherwise.

BEAVERS STAND UP FOR THEMSELVES

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Video May 19, 2019

It’s Sunday and high time for another round of only good news. It’s been a hell week of root canals and abortion laws so we all deserve this. We have the festival planning meeting today and I wanted to share my idea for the children’s parade so we put a protest sign together to demonstrate.

Jon makes an excellent protestor.

Someone on facebook corrected that it should be ‘fewer’ not ‘less’ – but I’m not sure that beavers would actually use correct grammar. (Plus there’s only so much room on a protest sign.) Thinking about it I’m sure if beavers were going to protest they would carry a sign just like this. Only there’s be chew marks all over it…hey that gives me an idea…

Then Robin Ellison of Napa found this excellent commercial and passed it along. There is so much going on I had to watch it twice and slow down the action. Remember to keep an eye on your work when there are beavers around.

See what i mean? Isn’t that delightful? And here’s a nice look at what beavers use all that wood for after they snagged it away.

Chris Carr of New Hampshire posted this recently to the beaver management forum. Check out this over-achieving beaver! Look how tall that lodge is already.

Beavers work so hard. i think humans are enormously lazy by comparison.
Except maybe these humans.

BEAVERS: BOTH SIDES NOW

heidi08 Video May 14, 2019

Everything should be this easy, Wildlife photographer Suzy Eszterhas talked her talented boyfriend Jak Wonderly into doing some underwater video of the beaver in rehab at Sonoma Wildlife Rescue. I’m not wild about the audio, but It’s pretty dam special

Talk about adept in the water! You really start to understand how beavers swim for a living when you watch this immersive look at their lives. I love how the back feet and tail work together. And this is just a youngster. imagine how skilled an adult beaver would look! love the whisker shot too, you can really see how those sensitive vibrasae provide all kind of information about any unexpected water movement or leaks.

Yesterday I worked on the protest signs for the children’s parade at the festival. Eventually they’ll be double sided with a pole for children to carry in the march. I was happy with this one and was racking my brain for another clever rhyme and laughed out loud when this next slogan fell into my mind.

i couldn’t help it. I HAD to send that photo Michael Pollock at NOAA, who immediately wrote back that it was excellent. Tell me you won’t be hearing that rhyme on some lips from now on! this of course goes on the other side.

Ahh if life were limited to finding clever rhymes for things I’d be in business!

THE BEST BITS AND PIECES

heidi08 Beavers, Video May 6, 2019

Many, many years ago. when Reagan was president, i had no degree of any kind, and Jon was unemployed, we were of course as poor as church mice and couldn’t afford a honeymoon at a fancy hotel. We packed up the champagne and the leftovers from the simple gathering and drove to my parents land in the sierras which at the time had only a tiny 1950-‘s trailer to sleep in. That night we sat outside by the fire pit until the snow drove us in, drinking champagne from the bottle and picking bits of rigatoni and cold chicken out of foil wrapped paper plates.

It was a smorgasboard of special leftovers. And that’s what you get this morning. Tasty leftover treats from our friends and family.

The first is from our friends at the Sierra Wildlife Coalition, which has been taking full advantage of their trail cams in this late ending winter season.

It’s it nice to see family members working side by side and getting about their business? Which at the moment includes getting ready for more mouths to feed. I can’t help it. After spending 10 years eagerly waiting for our first glimpse of kits I still get excited as we get closer to summer.

The second is from A new England facebook page made up of footage from different wildlife cams. This of a beaver making a scent mount.
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Scent marking remains the single beaver behavior we haven’t filmed in Martinez, which means they must be plenty careful about when and where they do it. We’ve filmed mating twice, but never scent marking OR chewing trees. I guess it has to do with the on land versus in the water thing.

The third appeared in yesterday’s Contra Costa Times and was sent by several beaver friends.

Heh, heh, heh.

This of course seems as good a time as any to report the highlight of my favorite Cinco de Mayo ever. Salud!

BEAVER HOLD: I TELL YOU A MYSTERY!

heidi08 Beavers, Video April 9, 2019

Yesterday was a mysterious day but it started when Chris Carr posted that ‘tree-dragging’ video to the beaver management forum. I suddenly remembered that Moses had shot similar footage years ago of our father beaver, and that it used to be in the footage I used to present when I gave a talk. But over the years, what what with the documentaries and new footage it got pushed out.

Did I still have the footage?

If you had a great deal more patience I would explain that Moses shot in those early days in an ancient format that had to be converted before being used on my mac which is what I use for presentations. But there isn’t room to store past presentations on said mac so its on an external seagate hardrive. Could I find that footage in a past presentation?

Oh no I could not, not until the very last place I looked of course. And then just a sliver of it. I despaired. It as such great footage. A little dark I remember but amazing because Moses shot it directly by paying a friendly homeless man to hold the spotlight. No trail cams for Martinez beavers! I could never get it back from Moses that would be like finding a particular ant in a decades old ant colony. If I couldn’t find it it was gone forever. Leaving just a memory.

In desperation I looked again at the fragment wondering what it was and when it was shot. March 16, 2008. Damn that as a long, long time ago. For the very first time I saw and option on my mac which said “revert clip to original” and I almost laughed. I had deleted that clip many many times before Obama was president. How could the original footage ever still be somewhere findable? Just on a lark I clicked ‘revert’ anyway.

A message came up that said the entire clip was 15 minutes and would take time to recover. Okay I agreed hopelessly, certain it could never be found.

I was wrong.

Not only was the entire clip lurking somewhere on my computer the whole time, but footage I had never even SEEN before sprung forth. That third log Dad hauls is new to me, also recovered was some family bonding footage I’ll share later. Dad was using these three logs to work on the third dam, which is also featured beautifully in the lost footage. I have zero idea how it happened, but I am grateful for the mystery and was eager to share.

My old mac is one of the seven wonders.

A second mystery came from an invitation to participate in MVSD Moorhen Marsh’s reopening day in May. I had some hint about the event a while ago when someone from Orange county emailed to verify my contact info for the event. And then another stranger contacted me from Danville with details. Nowhere was I told to ‘save the date’ or notified about the event until yesterdays invite. This to an event barely more than a month away and falling three weeks after Earth day. The invite said that for a mere 20 dollars I could register to participate and would receive a tent and table.Now I had already promised our friends at wildbirds unlimited that we would be at their mothers day booth that day, and I would imagine that lots of folks they wanted to invite would be similarly committed. (like native birds, audubon and bird rescue). Obviously MVSD had hired a firm to coordinate the event that wasn’t exactly on the event circuit, so besides being very, very envious that they had event planning funds, I wondered why they hadn’t asked earlier? As a woman who for the last 11 years had planned beaver festivals, and for 7 years helped plan earth day events, I was confused about some things.

Why the late notice?
How was MVSD providing tents and tables? were they renting them? And from whom?
How had they secured Doug McConnell as Emcee?
How could they afford to pay an event planner? And if they were paying why didn’t they know about likely participant scheduling constraints?

Being as it takes me almost an entire year to plan the festival, and has always taken 3-4 months to contact and secure exhibits for the event I’m understandably curious.

You mean there are people you can PAY to do this?