Tomorrow is President’s day and it mostly seems like we don’t even have one. I’ve been so grumpy lately I figured I might not be the only one. I thought we might need cheering, so here’s a good news story that’s sure to please.
UPDATE: Four fishers were released Thursday afternoon and “ran away really well” into habitat around Bedal Campground, about 15 miles southeast of Darrington, said Jeff Lewis, lead biologist on the program with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
The new animals are Neville (juvenile male), Katie (juvenile female), Kendra (adult female), and Niffler (large adult male).
Hey you know what’s really good at making fisher habitat? Of course you already guessed the answer. Beavers!
Yesterday I came across this willow fairy print and was so happy to think beavers live lives surrounded by this kind of beauty. Of course beavers are the original Willow Fairy, but this has to be a close second.
Amy Gallaher Hall creating chalk art centerpiece in the Park at 12th Annual Martinez Beaver Festival 2019. Photo by Cheryl Reynolds 6/29/19.
I’m starting to get my vocal chords back again. Yesterday Jon returned the Uhaul and unpacked everything. I started finishing touches on silent auction items that hadn’t been claimed and Cheryl sent a beautiful bundle of photos of the day. It’s always both delightful to remember and wonderful to see everything I missed.
Like any advanced society it begins with the artists. And there was plenty of talent to go around on that glorious day.
I just love to see how many kids were inspired by Amy’s artwork to try their own. There were such an army of sidewalk beavers it must be a record! I also love how the artwork, the signs, the activity all pounded the same theme over and over. No one could leave the event that day without knowing a little bit why beavers mattered.
My favorite job of sunday is reviewing the post-tests and seeing how children performed. There were a LOT takers this year, 45 which is our nighest sample size ever. A whopping 95% were entirely accurate so you know things were sinking in. True, there were plenty of helpful parents that gave them the answers but educating parents is kind of the point too, so it’s a win-win. You can see the thinking that went on in some of these photos of the children’s activity.
There are, of course, many more pictures as you well know and much more happened on the day, but I thought that would get you started. Now for a surprisingly timely treat here’s an interview I did last summer with Timothy Sexauer of Muse Ecology which was dropped to a podcast on Friday before the festival. He does such a great job. It’s a surprisingly fresh look at the Martinez Beaver Story. Very well done and worth your time. Enjoy.
The term “Press gang” applies to the British custom of seizing unsuspecting eligible men with force and depositing them on ships to work as hostage-sailors. It was used largely in war time but regularly through the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. It represents the very opposite of the term “All volunteer army.” And usually happened to poor or unimportant men that no one was likely to miss.
I often think that at it’s most extreme edges, animal advocacy operates the same way. Something hijacks your attention and then your will and before you know it you’re hopelessly at sea, saving beavers even when that was never anything you set out to do.
Diane Stopyra’s recent article in the Washington Post appealed for this reason.
I’ve never been able to tell the difference between a warbler and a wren, and I never was compelled to try. I endured one oppressively humid birding tour a few summers back and quickly grew frustrated by the difficulty of locating an osprey through my loaner binoculars. Plus, I’ve never felt like I fit in with the birder crowd. Even as the birding community has expanded to include a younger, hipper set — which makes generalizing based on age, socioeconomic status or propensity for fanny-pack-wearing difficult — there are commonalities I don’t share. Seemingly limitless patience is one. A remarkable preference for the Prius is another. (Common bumper stickers in my town include: “Bird nerd,” “I always tern up for birdwatching” and “Birding gives me cheep thrills.”) Then there’s the impressive, almost terrifying commitment on display. Every spring, this place is home to the World Series of Birding, a 24-hour competition that kicks off at midnight. Midnight! I don’t care how special a scissor-tailed flycatcher is, I’m horrified if I have to stay up past 10 p.m. to see it.
I share Diana’s sense of horror at the patience necessary to tell one warbler from the next, but I was never adamantly against it, I just had much more important things to do. I went to college for 10 years to be able to do them after all, and glancing at nature was a pastime, a flirtation, never anything remotely like a calling.
But I could never be a real birder, I tell myself. I don’t have a field guide, and I don’t keep a “life list,” birdwatcher-speak for a personal catalogue of sightings. My hobby is an unconscious sort of thing, less about studying wingspan or beak shape and more about passing the miles of a long run or dog walk mindlessly comparing birds to the humans in my life. That leggy egret with the long neck that weighs two pounds? Totally a Jennifer. That stocky merlin with a square head? Just like the rugby player I dated in college. And that aggressive peregrine falcon that goes after anything that moves? Okay, wait, that’s the rugby player, too.
Of course there is a series of well established traits you must possess to be a real birder. The path is well understood and easy to trace. The road to becoming a beaverer is much more murky. You never know when you’re going to slip from the blithely casual observer into something more alarmingly committed. It happens so gradually at first.
Noticing birds means you’re just a short step away from admiring them; not because they’re so exotic but precisely because they’re not. Birds — vulnerable and territorial and grumpy and affectionate and curious — are a lot more humanlike than we probably care to admit. Oystercatchers decorate with seashells, and there’s a quahog in my bathroom. Empathetic magpies hold grudges against mean people, and I’m working on that. Parrots have temper tantrums when sleep deprived, and who doesn’t?
>Noticing anything is the beginning of a commitment. You know well that once you notice that not-unattractive young man in your chem class changed his hair you’re doomed to the certain crushing behaviors that inevitably follow. So it is with watching beavers. Noticing the bonds in a beaver family or the way siblings steal from each other without resentment speaks of a similar fate. You can’t just stop noticing. It just isn’t an engine you can turn off once it’s been revved.
That’s the thing about this place. It forces even the most reluctant to confront the natural world in all its beauty and drama and comedy. (Try Googling a yellow-crowned night heron, or at least its mohawk, without cracking a smile.) Will I ever be the kind of person who’s toting a spotting scope, chasing birds at midnight or working to identify a muffled call while eight miles into a tempo run? Nah. But I do know this: Resistance is futile. Sooner or later, that natural world grabs you by the shoelaces and doesn’t let go.
You can probably see from the last line why this article appealed. Well done, Diane. Although I wouldn’t say beavers grabbed me by the shoelaces. More by the heartstrings, which are easier to tangle and harder to take off. Maybe it’s the city’s fault. Maybe if they hadn’t plan to kill them I would have been free to get over my crush and move on to something else, like knitting or basketry.
But that’s the way of press gangs. They keep you cruelly occupied and never let you find out what life would have offered up instead.
Five years ago this morning at exactly 4:48 two very important things happened. The first was that I received a private link and password from Jari Osborne to the site where her just complete documentary for CBC “The Beaver Whisperers” was waiting for my preview. We had corresponded a great deal during its making and she wanted was excited to share the finished product. This allowed me to watch what Canada would view months later in all its glory.
I remember starting to cry with happiness during the opening sequence.
Then the phone rang. (Nor a common thing at 5 in the morning.) It was my mother calling me to let me know my father, who had been ill and worsening, had died during the night. The facility where he was had just let her know and we were all supposed to meet there at 6:30 to pay our respects before they collected the body.
The tears changed considerably, but I actually remember that I finished watching the documentary while I was waiting for the sun to rise and Jon to get off night shift.
The irony is that during the course of the film’s production I had learned that the assistant producer’s (who originally contacted me) had lost her father, and as I got to know Jari the producer better I learned that her father had also died during the making of the film. And here I was watching the film and learning my own father had died during the night.
My father, who was the very first person on this earth I happened to see our beavers with.
Well, five years have passed. I am much older and maybe a little wiser. The Canadian documentary was well received and resulted in the adapting of one for PBS. What else has changed? The beaver story has moved a football field in that time and our own beavers went through so much that I can’t even begin to list it all. Our website looks better. Jon is happier now that he’s retired. And I like our new deck.
One of things Jari told me a year after her father passed was that her family all got together to eat her his favorite foods, do the things that he loved and remember him. It sounded like a good idea to me, so family and friends are coming today to do the same.
UPDATE: Four fishers were released Thursday afternoon and “ran away really well” into habitat around Bedal Campground, about 15 miles southeast of Darrington, said Jeff Lewis, lead biologist on the program with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. 
The term “Press gang” applies to the British custom of seizing unsuspecting eligible men with force and depositing them on ships to work as hostage-sailors. It was used largely in war time but regularly through the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. It represents the very opposite of the term “All volunteer army.” And usually happened to poor or unimportant men that no one was likely to miss.
