Today, beaver friend Igor Skaredoff will be leading a tour from the nature-appreciating group “Close to home“.
Close to Home offers a threshold into the the natural world of the East Bay. Our seventh yearlong program began in May, 2009. Our focus is Exploring the Waters of the East Bay in a series of monthly public talks. You can also join us for a year-long program of monthly field trips for a more in-depth experience.
The journey will begin at the Muir House, take in Strenzel Meadows, the waterfront park, and travel midday to the amtrak station where Jon and I will take over to help explain what we can of the beaver habitat. We meet at the footbridge in the afternoon and will describe the dams, flow device, lodges and point out any day time visitors. Maybe we’ll even show off Mitchell’s new trees or see our grebe cousins (clarks and western) who come at all hours to fish.
The very best part of today (and a part that I’m eager to share with many whether they are Close to home or just passing through) is that I get to pick up my VERY OWN pleisticine era beaver skull cast from The Bone Room in Berkeley. I was so enamored of the one brought by Chris Richards from the Oakland Museum, I just had to see if it was possible. I guess Heidi’s birthday comes early this year. TBR is a great local resource and was extremely helpful in ordering my very odd request. It will be enormously useful for teaching and displays, but honestly my motivations are more selfish. The size of this skull is cheerfully and outrageously symbolic for me of the proportions of the beaver issue in Martinez; the degree of threat their dam represented, the amount of damage they could do to the bank, the financial cost of looking after them. All these factors have all been so grandly and ruthlessly exaggerated that only the size of THIS skull makes sense. If I can resist the temptation to pull a godfather and place it in someone’s bed, you might look for me sitting in the next council meeting with this on my lap….
