This film was made by last night’s dinner guests. The narration is by Sharon Brown and the filming by her husband Owen. Owen is a doctor of Chemistry and Sharon a biologist, who became friends with Dorothy Richards of ‘BeaverSprite’ and inherited her preserve and work to form Beavers: Wetlands and Wildlife. Amongst their many adventures teaching, writing, and advocating for beavers they once adopted orphaned set of four kits and raised them for two years before setting them free on their own. You can see it was a fairly memorable experience.
The couple came first to our house for lemonade and beaver talk, and then came with us down to see Junior and Mom swimming about the dams, before joining us for dinner at Lemongrass. Most of Worth A Dam was there, and Kate from the OAEC water institute drove down from Sonoma to meet them. It was a strangely familiar meeting, in which many beaver tales (tails?) were swapped. I tried to put Owen to work finding a scent mound for us, because he has a great nose for castor! But sadly none were forthcoming. They are off for an adventure in the city today and heading next for the sierras to meet Mary and Sherry and check out their flow devices. Worth A Dam is thrilled they made the trip and wishes them the happiest of trails!
Martinez has now had interstate beaver pilgrimages from Washington, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Kentucky and New York. Not bad for a small town! (Still waiting for Alberta and Colorado!)
Now its off to Canton PA where some beavers are willfully rebuilding their dam even after a backhoe has generously removed it three times. The nerve! It’s like they think they have a right to exist and feed their family or something!
CANTON – There’s some persistent beavers in the borough. At Canton Borough Council’s meeting this week, councilman Kurt Bastion, the street superintendent, spoke on the issue during the street department report. The problem isn’t new. State officials have been involved in the past, trapping the beavers, but they keep coming back. The dams are a danger because they can exacerbate flooding.
He said a beaver dam was torn out three times with a backhoe, and “the next day it was right back there again.”“We’re going to have to address that issue some other way,” he said.
Ooh, I know, I know! call on me!
“Mike Lovegreen from the Bradford County Conservation District had talked to one of the residents on Lycoming Street about this, I want to say maybe at the beginning of summer or end of spring,” she said. “There is a grant available to the residents that the municipality would apply for, but the residents need to come up with a plan, prior to us being able to apply for that.”
Well, okay, you tried “Quint” and it didn’t work. How about trying Mike or Skip? Beaver Solutions is 5 hours away and Beaver Deceivers International is 7. Either one could install aflow device that controls dam height and prevents flooding but keeps a pond high enough for these beavers to store food for the winter freeze. Gosh you could even buy the DVD and do this work yourself! Maybe get the community to volunteer and have a potluck with the rest of the grant money that night?
Or you could keep doing the exact same thing over and over again and acting surprised when it fails? Lots of folks choose that option.
Look what came in the fall newsletter forthe John Muir Association! Nice! We are actually getting ready to plan this year’s Birthday Earthday celebration on April 20th. If you would like to be part of this heroic effort, drop me an email because we are looking for event helpers! Maybe you are handy with the spread sheet, have an eye for details, or are good with your hands and can help put a stage together? Call me one-minded but if more helpers come from the beaver circle it can only be a good thing!
Immature Great Blue Heron at the footbridge: Photo - Mary Long
A beaver carries twigs to its lodge along Taylor Creek near Lake Tahoe on Thursday, October 4, 2012. The state Dept. of Forestry has been tearing down beaver dams in the Lake Tahoe area to ease passage for coho salmon. Beavers use such dams to store food for winter, so their destruction puts the beavers' future in peril.
Sure we might have worked two solid years researching the nativity of beavers in the sierras, and sure Rick bought every historical volume from Aubrey to Zeiner but even though the papers were published with almost no challenges, and even through the editors at fish and game thanked us personally for our hard work, they might easily have gone unnoticed by everyone in the scientific community who isn’t a regular reader of this website. No one might have known. If a beaver-chewed tree falls in the forest and no one hears it – well, you know how it goes.
What we needed was some massive regional event, pitting beaver nativity against a large scale federal agency. Highlighting in stark profile the issue that beavers were once native in all the places where they’re now routinely killed. We needed a local advocate, some fantastic spokeswoman to sound sincere but intelligent, a white-hat who knows better. We needed a vocal non-believer, and maybe someone salt-of-the-earthy like a farmer or a trout fisherman. But where are we going to get a money shot like that? What are the odds that such a tempest in a tea pot will boil over just when we need it? Sure we could hire actors to stage this whole drama hope some news crews picked it up, but that takes cash and production value. And where are we possibly going to find actors to play the crazy federal nay-sayers, to say that beavers aren’t native over 1000 feet? No one could pull that line off believably.
LAKE TAHOE – To Sherry Guzzi, the beaver dam on Taylor Creek was more than a watery jungle of sticks and branches. In that snarl of debris, she saw hope for a species long regarded as non-native in the Sierra but which new research claims has occupied the range for centuries and is key to ecosystem health. Late last month, her hope was extinguished when the U.S. Forest Service tore down the dam to protect a tourist facility celebrating a non-native species: kokanee salmon.
“They are doing all this to showcase an introduced species,” said Guzzi, co-founder of the Sierra Wildlife Coalition, a local environmental group. “It’s a little nuts, isn’t it?” The Forest Service, which is holding its 23rd Kokanee Salmon Festival this weekend, defended the action. But spokeswoman Cheva Heck said the agency hopes to make its facilities and festival more beaver-friendly in the future.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the best setup for announcing beaver research that you will ever have. To remind you, Sherry Guzzi and Mary Long are the women who were trying to save the beavers in Kings Beach a few years back. Worth A Dam gave them a scholarship and they founded the Sierra Wildlife Coalition and have been working installing flowdevices all over the sierras. Now the stage is set, bring in the scientist.
What’s happening here is more than a flap over a furry, flat-tailed rodent with a penchant for gnawing down trees and damming up streams. It is part of a wider controversy over the role of beaver in nature and their provenance – native, non-native or both? – in the Sierra Nevada.
“A beaver can go 10 kilometers by land or 50 kilometers by water in a day. What would keep them out of the Sierra?” said Richard Lanman, a historical ecologist from Los Altos and co-author of two new studies concluding beaver occupied the range long before settlers arrived.
“Every mountain range from northern Mexico to the Arctic tundra, from the Atlantic to the Pacific” had beaver, Lanman said. “And they were supposedly never native to the Sierra? This makes no sense.”Lanman and his colleagues also write that beavers help “fish abundance and diversity in the Sierra Nevada” and their dams “reduce (the) discharge of nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment loads into fragile w” ater bodies such as Lake Tahoe.”“!
Rick Lanman historical ecologist! Sometimes referred to on this website as our friend “Wikipedia Rick”. He became interested in the nativity issue for the very local reason that he purchased his home from an 80 year-old gentleman who said that he used to be able to ‘fly-fish’ in the stream behind his house all year round. Of course that stream was now ephemeral and Rick wondered if beavers might have something to do with it, but was of course assured by the authorities that they ‘weren’t native there’.
Rick wrote me years ago and we got chatting about beavers and where they belonged. I met a USFS hydrologist at the Flyway Festival who was interested in proving beavers were native in the sierras because they were useful for meadow creation. He introduced me to Chuck James the archeologist who had carbon tested the dam in Plumas county, and a cluster of us started work on the research.
“They have a right to be here,” said Heidi Perryman, founder of Worth A Dam, a beaver conservation group in Martinez. “There is a way to manage their difficult behavior. And there is a reason why you should bother to do it.”
“Killing them is an extreme response to managing their behavior,” she added. “It’s like shooting all the cars that speed. It would work, but at what cost?”
Perryman is one of the researchers whose articles in California Fish and Game, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, challenge the long-held view that beaver did not inhabit the Sierra above 1,000 feet on the west slope.
Some of the most persuasive evidence in the articles comes from a beaver dam found buried along a creek in Plumas County. Samples sent to a laboratory for radio-carbon dating showed the structure was built at the dawn of the Middle Ages, around A.D. 580, and used and reused until around 1850.
Did anyone else just hear a crescendo? What a delicious lead-in to a scientific paper that would otherwise only be dustily published in a journal nobody ever heard of! Fantastic writing by Knudson, who wrote the USDA articles published earlier. If Galileo had just had a good reporter working on his side, maybe that whole helio-centrism thing might have gone better for him.
In recent days, the Taylor Creek beavers have been busy with matters of their own – gnawing down more aspen and willows to repair the dam the Forest Service tore down. By Thursday, the dam had been rebuilt. But when Guzzi returned to the site Friday, she said it had been destroyed again.
“On some level, (the Forest Service) must realize how ludicrous a situation this is,” said Guzzi. “It’s so counterproductive. They are wasting tax dollars and harassing an animal that is good for the lake and its clarity.”
And that is as good as a button as you are ever going to get out of a beaver article in the northern hemisphere. Great work Sherry! And great work Rick! Great work Thomas Knudson for seeing the forest for the beaver-chewed trees and working the recent publication into your story! It was January 24, 2010 (‘‘Don’t cause a Nativity Scene“) when I first posted about this issue and just the next month met the hydrologist from USFS at the Flyway Festival, tracked down Chuck’s phone number, and had a thrilling phone call that became a ride on the tail of a leaping dragon from there. Not a bad result for two years of effort.
A Beaver Who’s who from out meeting this year at the Occidental Arts and Exology Center: Sherry Guzzi second row second from the left, Rick Lanman, tallest man in baseball cap on the right, to his right Chuck James the archeologist who carbon tested the dam. back row left – me!
Also in that picture (and not in the article but hugely important to the process) are Brock Dolman (center) Mary Long (beside Sherry) Lisa Owens Viani (beside Mary) and Eli Asarian (one ‘s’) who did the watershed figure for the article. Every other person not mentioned you can be sure you’re hear about soon.
All in all a great delivery for a pretty timely message. Go, team California, go!
Great news out of London Ontario where the residents are banding together to pressure the mayor not to relocate some beavers in a creek the city is calling a ‘storm drain’ (IMAGINE THAT) and deal with natural wetlands in humane and intelligent ways. Click on the movie to go to a short news clip that will make you want everyone of them for neighbors. Or go here and read the whole thing.
The city promises to move the beavers in a humane manner, but that doesn’t make sense to Anna Maria Valastro, who organized the hike to raise awareness of the issue.
Moving the beavers this late in the year will doom them over the winter, because they will not have time in their new home to lay in sufficient food to survive, she said.
Saving the beavers isn’t the only point, Valastro added.Beavers are a “keystone species” creating wetlands that provide for even more species.
“We should be embracing the fact that beavers are returning, and occupying their ecological niche,” she said. “It means the environment is recovering. It’s a sign of health.”
My my my. Very aptly put. I may just need to take a vacation to London to meet such smart men and women in person! I received a heads up on this from Donna Dubruelle yesterday, and am very proud of their effort and their media. Endless pressure endlessly applied indeed!
A dashed word this morning from Mary O’brien of Utah who organized the first ever ‘leave it to beaver’ festival at Escalante petrified forest state park yesterday!
The festival for a first year was much fun. Kids LOVED the tail painting and earning a hat by answering the keystone beaver questions. Two times a hike was led to active beaver dams; music all day; etc. A dozen stories were recorded for our Beaver Story Corps….maybe we can get some of those to you, too. Sherri Tippee gave her presentation Friday night; The Biggest Dam Movie You Ever Saw was shown twice.. Someone from the 22 Whitman College students that helped me will be sending some photos to post, ok? One of the students, Aviva, lives in the Bay area and after the semester ends, wants to come visit you and see your beavers. She’s been so enthusiastic, and led the group that sewed eyes and teeth on the beaver hats.
And while we’re waiting for photos, here’s a reminder of our first one.
Oh and last night beaver visitors from Oakland (one of them a vetrinarian) who just got back from Yellowstone and were bemoaning to friends that they had not seen beavers. The friends told them sagely to GO TO MARTINEZ! And they did. Mom and Dad were working on a new tree down by the corp yard where they have been laboring on a third dam. Jr came along for some on-the-job-training.
While The Eye understands the giddiness the new kit has caused among Martinez beaver enthusiasts, we wonder about all the breathless news coverage. After all, wild animals reproducing is hardly unusual.
First of all, referring to yourself as “The Eye” borders on delusional and is furthermore deeply, deeply annoying. Second of all, people are happy about the beavers because they overcame adversity. Like the eentsy weentsy spider. Like the ant on the rubber tree plant. Like the youngest billy goat brother. See first the city wanted them dead, then they wanted them gone, then the mom was actually dead AND gone, and still despite all this we have a new kit! The new kit we never expected! It’s called HOPE. It’s that thing with feathers!
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune–without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
But not the Contra Costa TimesBecause “The Eye” can’t see.
Apologies to Emily Dickinson
Hrmph. Now that I got that snark outta my system, I will tell you that we saw the baby last night! After the fourth of July bruhaha we saw nothing on Thursday, nothing on Friday, nothing on Saturday, and were almost in despair. But last night the baby made an appearance by the bank hole and again by the secondary dam! Cheryl snapped some photos that we’ll try and get up soon. I got video of his little beaver butt diving underwater again, but am expecting better things will follow. I’m just glad he’s still there, and healthy.
We were buoyant when we left, and the beavers seemed shiny and bright. A young couple drove from San Jose just to see them and were rewarded with several sightings! She said that beavers were her favorite animal and that she was from Texas. I can’t think of a better place to spread the beaver gospel, so I hope she talks about this magical night forever!
