Category: Why We Care

Coincidence

heidi08 Beavers, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Why We Care May 15, 2011

: Rainbow at secondary dam

I thought I’d risk being labeled as a crazy new-age twinkie and discuss an alarming and impossible by-product of beaver research. It seems to happen in inexplicable moments and without recognizable patterns but I’ve been noticing it more of late. It is the type of data that most scientists never report because it just makes them appear too bizarre and fanciful. But you, dear readers, already know the worst so we may as well have a candid discussion of the phenomenon.

Coincidence.

Now there are typical everyday coincidences that surprise your life such as running into your principal at the gym or finding out your old boyfriend exactly drives the same make and color of car as you do. And there are rarer personally meaningful coincidences that hum in your awareness like realizing that your locker combination is actually your mom’s date of birth or finding out that you got married in exactly the same town as your best friend from the army got divorced. These things happen. We never expect them, but we are prepared for them. They are like cosmic puns and they usually make an excellent story over a pitcher of margaritas.

But then there are beaver coincidences, random violent streaks of destiny that are so truly alarming that all the hairs on your arms keep standing up even after you’ve had to sit down. I wasn’t planning to mention this at all, bit it seems the time has come. Please be assured that my ridiculous claims are completely true, and that if I had given myself license to fabricate I would have come up with something a little more believable. Our story begins with Longfellow.

Remember a few weeks back when I was talking about how reading Enos Mills pointed me to a section in the poem Hiawatha that I hadn’t paid attention to before? It was the section on Puk-Puk-Keewis who asked to be turned into a beaver so he could hide from Hiawatha in the lodge. When I read it I planned to blog on it the following day, and was excitedly looking about for graphics. It turns out there are sadly no images of turning into a beaver on the internet(s) so I nearly despaired of having the right picture to put with the story.

Then I remembered that in my living room is a very old copy of Volume ! of the Collected Works of Longfellow. I bought it ages ago because it was such a lovely tome (and yes, tome is the right word – huge, heavy, illustrated, leather raised binding ) – that I couldn’t resist. So I thought, gosh maybe there’s a drawing of puk-puk-keewis in that copy and I can scan it and put it on the website. I used the internet to find exactly where the passage was and marched in to track it down. Mind you, the 500 page book is lying opened on a book stand I picked up at a thrift shop. We don’t really use it but every now and then we turn the pages to keep it from looking too dusty.

What exact page do you suppose that book happened to be open to?

I didn’t dare post about it at the time, as it was too much even for me to explain. We slunk around the house suspiciously for hours after that, trying to think what well-read visitor to my house might have done it on purpose and struggling not to feel like some tiny cog in massive beaver machinery. In the end I decided to take it as an affirmation that I was doing the right thing, and at the very least the universe didn’t object.

Yesterday I heard from our research buddy Rick Lanman, M.D. whose working on the historic prevalence paper. He had been buried in some dusty volumes researching the fur trade for slivers of information about the west coast when he came across this magazine article from 1840. Guess what he found? Nothing startling about beavers in the sierras but something much more unexpected.

That’s pretty small print. Let me see if I can make it bigger for you.

Look who wrote the article on the history of the fur trade 171 years ago.

What a shock to run across this article written by James H. Lanman in 1840 – wonder if he’s a direct ancestor? This is a real trip. It’s not like our surname is that common! Rick

Ah Rick, I know just how you feel. Every now and then I can almost hear this low groan as the gears shift into place and I realize we are in the grip of something important, something that seems to have a life of its own. Well, in for a penny in for a pound I say. It could be worse. At the moment we’re keen on the flat-tail of some beaver sightings in Port Costa, which could theoretically be our dispersers. I’ll keep you posted. The next coincidence we can only anticipate but certainly not imagine.

: Destiny

It Takes A Village…

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Earth Day, Educational, Environmental, Recent Sightings, Uncategorized, Why We Care April 17, 2011

Yesterday Worth A Dam appeared for the fourth time at the John Muir Earth Day celebration. It was a lovely day, with beautiful spring weather and a chorus of noisy frogs rising from the rapidly flowing creek. Last year 2300 people made their way to the park, I have no idea how many showed yesterday. i only know that hundreds of people stopped by the booth, anxious for news of the beavers. Were they washed away? Are they altogether? Are the kits okay? Will they rebuild?

Answering these questions over and over again, I was reminded of something which was more surprising than it should have been. These beavers are an important milestone for Martinez, a deep and remembered achievement on the part of this community and every neighboring town who was touched by their story. They are remembered like a baptism, a surgery, a graduation, or a new birth. The beavers were something that happened to Martinez, for good or ill, and people remember it. They remember where they were working or who told them about them or how they used to walk past the dam after lunch to check on things. Whether it was the thrill of seeing them for the first time, the somber determination of the candlelight vigil, the triumph of the November 7 meeting, the futility of the April 16th meeting, the stony inanity of the sheetpile wall or the many friends and neighbors who asked them every news cycle about what was happening. The beavers were part of the community history, of the story of Martinez. People marked dates by them (oh right I had just gotten married then,)or “Janie was at Hidden Valley”, or “Bob had just graduated”, or as one reporter put it “Oh right, my daughter is three now and I was pregnant when the story broke!”

Children recognized their artwork on the banner from previous years, and mother’s recognized their much younger children in the scrapbook that covers the first year of the beaver campaign. One woman described having seen the rescue of the blind kit who was captured before he could swim out to sea, and was startled to find the exact photo when she turned the page. She was even more surprised to see the certificate of appreciation to hero Kevin Ormstein for detaining the beaver until animal control could gently carry it to Lindsay. She was especially startled because she works with Kevin at the county and he had never mentioned it! Several children had attended the recent field trip to the beaver dam and recounted their adventure with the fearless mouse, as well as startling beaver fact-retention. Our congressman’s aid stopped by to confirm that we will be visiting her daughter’s classroom in May and one stalwart supporter proudly displayed her keystone charm bracelet.

If a community can feel ownership of a sports franchise or an elementary mascot, why not a family of beavers? I can’t tell you how many people had followed the story and demanded an update, correcting me with what they had read or seen on the news. I would say a third of the people who stopped at the booth wanted the lastest information on THEIR beavers and had a story to tell us about what they had seen or heard or done to help them. Another third just liked animals in general and wanted to learn about them. A sliver of bitter folk asked wistfully if the beavers were finally gone, and I had a wickedly delightful time disabusing them of the notion. But the most important third of the day were the children, who sometimes knew nothing about beavers, but wanted to paint and learn. They wistfully clutched their pictures as if they were the most precious treasures they had ever seen and held on to the schedule for the beaver festival with Christmas morning eyes begging their parents to take them. These children insisted on staying and painting with our supremely gifted and tirelessly overworked artist, FRo, who, as always, helped each child feel they had created a masterpiece and gently forced parents to see their children’s work through her eyes.

Oh you can’t imagine the paintings they left with us, but you will have the chance to appreciate them up close when each one becomes a stunning personalized greeting card at the beaver festival.

People, people, people, you’re probably saying by now. What about the BEAVERS! Enough social commentary! What’s new with the currently most important residents of our town? Well, after working hard all day yesterday snapping all the photos you see here, and staggering out of bed for a work day at IBRRC, our own Cheryl Reynolds stopped in Martinez this morning to catch some beaver activity above the primary dam by the Escobar bridge. A kit was taking branches into the area by the washed out lodge and working on what appears to be a rebuild.New Lodge! New Lodge! Who now can resist getting out of bed in the morning to see that! She says the dam looks sturdier and the almost-yearling darted back to sleep in the bank. I’m expecting grand things.

Happy International Beaver Day!

heidi08 Educational, Environmental, Uncategorized, Why We Care April 7, 2011

Our friends at Beavers: Wetlands & Wildlife selected this day as International Beaver day, and the good news is it’s catching on. I’m told that today is a great day to give a beaver talk, write a letter to an editor about beavers or set up a display. Hmmm. I already do that on the other 364 days of the year, so I thought I’d do something truly special today. I’ll teach you a brand new thing. I learned about the concept from Michael Pollock on our Yosemite trip, and have been waiting for the right moment to share. Of course the unflattering story line is entirely my own responsibility. I figure a time when we’re waiting for beavers to build is a good time to learn.

‘Only it is so VERY lonely here!’ [without the beaver dams] Alice said in a melancholy voice; and at the thought of her loneliness two large tears came rolling down her cheeks.

‘Oh, don’t go on like that!’ cried the poor Queen, wringing her hands in despair. ‘Consider what a great girl you are. Consider what a long way you’ve come to-day. Consider what o’clock it is. Consider anything, only don’t cry!’

Alice could not help laughing at this, even in the midst of her tears. ‘Can YOU keep from crying by considering things?’ she asked. ‘That’s the way it’s done,’ the Queen said with great decision: ‘nobody can do two things at once, you know.

Consider this then:

A long time ago a tired researcher sat on his lawn chair and glared at the beaver dam in his stream and thought, I really need to blow that thing up, but first I’ll justify it. He took out the thermometer his wife had used to check his daughter’s temperature that morning and he measured the top two inches of water in the pond.

“Ah ha!” he said, comparing it to the top two inches of running water on the other side of the dam. “Beaver dams raise the water temperature and this hurts trout and salmon!” “Beavers destroy habitat for fish!” He trotted back into the house and wrote a paper which was published in the journal of wehatebeavers and soon the paper was quoted in ever other scientific paper on beaver dams known to man kind. (Then he blew up the dam which had been his goal all along, and alot of people were encouraged to blow up their dams too.) Soon every biology, hydrology and icthology student was taught that beaver dams raise the water temperature and regional agencies like Fish and Game or Department of Natural Resources wrote it into their policies and it became the great truth of the land. It was even quoted by the letter I responded to from LADWP yesterday. When a lone graduate student scratched his head and said, how do you know? He was nearly laughed off the campus and his thesis adviser had a tense conversation with his mother in the laundry room.

Hyporheic Exchange (Pronunciation: hi-poe-REE-ick)

So it turns out that when you look at a stream there’s the water you CAN see, the ground water you CAN’T see, and this layer of soggy silt & pebbles that acts as a sponge between the creek bed and the water table. This layer is constantly moving water into the ground, and pulling groundwater back into the stream. Water in the ground is naturally cooler because it gets no sunlight at all so every time it seeps into the creek bank it lowers the water temperature a bit, and when water is returned to the creek bed it is cooler.

Michael Pollock, of NOAA northwest fisheries was interested in this dynamic, and particularly what it meant to that old story about beaver dams choking out salmon and trout. He decided to set up some thermometers at different layers in the water, and also below the subsurface of the stream to find out the truth, then he repeated this at different points along a stream. Before I show you what he found, you need to know that the headwaters of any stream is cooler than the mouth. So we expect the temperature to gradually go up as the water moves down stream.

So reading the river from the headwaters on the right, the blue line is the subsurface temperatures and the lowest, which we would expect. The red line is the surface water of un-dammed areas, and the green line is the surface area in beaver pools. As you can see the red line is consistently higher than the green line, meaning that the surface area of beaver ponds is cooler than the surface area of free-flowing stream, the opposite of what our lawn chair researcher observed. Why is this?

I’m told the next graph has not yet been published so I shouldn’t post it on the web. Okay just imagine that the three measurements are combined we see this gradual sawtooth incline with a huge gap showing that the temperature suddenly falls. And guess where? There’s a huge temperature drop as tons of upwelling water seeps into the banks of the creek. It’s a beaver dam, whose deep pools increase the contact area of the water with the hyporheic zone, so there’s greater exchange and cooler temperatures. Say it with me now, “hyporheic exchange.” This is what the fish like. This is what enlivens the water and makes the creek more healthy. And this is why that researcher in his lawn chair all those years ago should be scornfully forgotten along with his entire findings.

Here’s the take home sentence for you to use in your next beaver argument, and you know you’ll have plenty. “Beaver dams cool streams by maximizing hyporheic exchange.”

Happy International Beaver Day! Celebrate by telling someone you know. Or everyone.

The New Gold Standard

heidi08 Beaver News, Educational, Why We Care February 19, 2011

For the longest time, the very best beaver article ever written was featured in the High Country News and described the ‘working beaver conference’ in 2009. It introduced me to heroes like Mary O’Brien, Michael Pollock and Suzanne Fouty and set in motion a discussion of beavers as an restorative species that I don’t think could have been possible otherwise.

Well now, Kevin Taylor’s breathtaking article finally has some competition. Today’s Globe and Mail features a truly stunning look at beavers as ecosystem engineers with extensive reports from Glynnis Hood, Steve Zack and Duncan Haley. The benefits of beavers to water, pollution, fish, birds, soil and carbon storage are discussed in two full pages of good news. There is even a section on flow devices and their value in tricking beavers to prevent flooding.

Our bucktoothed icon is hard-working and monogamous, steadfast and stable in the Canuck way. But beloved? Not when one drops a tree on your cottage or floods your land with its dam. These days, however, the beaver has a new brand: eco-saviour. An increasingly vocal group of scientists and conservationists believes the dam-building rodent is an overlooked tool to mitigate climate change – a natural remedy for our sick rivers and ravaged wildlife. Fly away with that, bald eagle.

Did anyone else just get chills? Well this increasingly vocal group of scientists clearly came back from the state of the beaver conference fired up and ready to go! This is a fantastic read, and I just took a moment to write Erin and thank her for the most thorough bit of beaver reporting I have seen in 5 years.

The challenge, the researcher says, is to find a balance with the beaver – to put them where they happily improve the environment, in healthy numbers, without clashing against urban sprawl. “It’s as though two control freaks are competing for the same environment, and there’s been this ongoing battle ever since,” says Dr. Hood, who has just completed the manuscript for a new book, The Beaver Manifesto: In Defence of Tenacity. She spent 19 years on the front lines as a warden for Parks Canada while humans and beavers tussled over land – when the phone rang, she says, you could usually count on a beaver being involved somehow. “We like nature as long as it’s well behaved,” Dr. Hood says, “and once it starts getting the crayons and running loose, then we get worked up about it.” Except that now may be time for one control freak to step aside – and let a few well-placed beavers run loose with the crayons.

Well there’s my reading list in waiting. I can’t wait to read that book. I think she should sneak us a chapter for preview right away. I may not be able to wait until it comes out. The article is a beautiful look at what beavers do best. Go read the entire thing. There is even a page of ‘Fun facts‘ that are actually fun (and actually facts!).

Deceiving beavers

Trap one beaver family, and another will inevitable move in. But beavers build dams where they hear running water, so devices have been designed to reduce the noise with pipe and fencing around culverts to prevent the flooding of roads and farmland. The animals also don’t climb very well, so fencing trees tends to stop beaver activity.

I ‘m not sure why I feel so exhilarated by this article. It seems like so many beaver threads are coming together at once: I did a delightful interview with the Sonoma Tribune yesterday for a beaver article that’s coming out on Tuesday to talk about the presentation Thursday night. The Michigan radio program is still buzzing in my ears and I’m definitely proud of my beaver service over the past three weeks. Maybe its the faint echo of Egyptian triumph against tyranny I’m feeling, or maybe it’s the Wisconsin-feuled notion that beaver voices are finally using their collective bargaining rights! “Hey-hey! Ho-ho! Killing Beaver’s got to go!” Or something like that…

Beaver Consortium

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, Why We Care October 17, 2010

You might remember that last year I wrote about the “State of the Beaver” Conference in Oregon organized by the South Umpqua Rural Community Partnership and the Cow-Creek Umpqua at their casino in Canyonville, Oregon. Everyone of beaver note was there, including Skip Lisle, Sherri Tippie and Michael Pollock. I very much wanted to be there too, and I wrote Leonard Houston begging for 15 minutes of space for the famous Martinez Beavers. He promised to make room but in the end our timing didn’t work out and we mournfully decided not to go.

Guess what came in the email box Friday?

I wouldn’t exactly describe it as an invitation. It was more like a royal summons without the letter head. It said “Heidi, we have added you onto the schedule on the second day of the conference, along with Sherri Tippie, Glynnis Hood and Steve Zack. We’ll pay food and lodging and if Worth A Dam covers your travel expenses we’ll add your organization as a sponsor.” He went on to add,

We are targeting Traditional Ecological Knowledge, wetlands, climate change, beavers birds and wildlife and breakaway brainstorming sessions on day 3. We will of course be including non-lethal management and alternative solutions for problematic beavers. Lot to squeeze in but we are going too.

Now, dear readers, let me just say privately to you how enormously affirming it is to be formally on the schedule and granted accommodations. (Come to think of it, I have, in my vast professional career – for which I went to college for ten – count them ten years and received a license from the State of California – I have as a psychologist attended many conferences from Louisiana to Michigan where I’ve presented and even been paid for my time but have been given accommodations for exactly ONE of them.) Hmm. Apparently my psychological skills are a dime a dozen. But my beaver skills, for which I received no formal training whatsoever, might be worth investing in! Who knew?

Readers of this website must all know Sherri Tippie, but the other names might be less familiar. Glynnis Hood is the Canadian researcher who has been the driving force behind the argument that beavers can mitigate the effects of climate change.

“Removal of beaver should be considered an environmental disturbance on par with in-filling, peat mining and industrial water extraction,” said researcher Glynnis Hood, lead author on the study and an assistant professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Alberta’s Augustana Campus in Camrose, Canada.

Not to be out done, Steve Zack is the co-author behind the “Beaver Dams increase songbirds” research. I remember when his article came out the folks at Wild Birds Unlimited laminated several summary pages for us and were very pleased to finally have a formal reason to explain their friendliness to the beavers. Being in the same lineup as these remarkable heroes from the beaver-research frontlines is intimidating in the extreme, but also very, very exciting.

(What do I know about beavers really that’s worth a an hour of anyone’s time in that setting? These folk don’t need to be told that beavers mate for life and don’t eat fish! What does an accidental beaver advocate have to contribute to the conversation? I mean besides having a lot of great footage and images of them, observing their effects close at hand every day for the past four years, organizing opposition to local government, coordinating support, using research to combat ignorance, endless education and outreach, seeing the beavers make a difference in hundreds of children’s lives, and seeing hundreds of children make a difference in the beavers lives, maintaining a website that has become a global hub of beaver information, helping launch a DVD about beaver management, reviewing and advising countless cases of beaver activity across the nation, instigating a research project to document historic beaver prevalence in california, and getting famous beaver folk to spend a little more time talking to each other.)

Come to think of it, I guess I have rather a lot to say.

Okay, I won’t be intimidated. This is a great club to be invited to. I’ll sit in the front row, write everything down and ask a hundred questions. I’ll sing the praises of Worth A Dam and argue that any city smarter than a beaver can keep a beaver. I’ll show how beaver families interact and if anyone asks me my ideas about charging property owners a ‘salmon tax’ for killing beavers I’ll make sure I let them know where I stand.

Thanks, Len.

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On a separate note, GTK wonders how many beaver mom’s can possibly die in one year?