So Jon was down at the beaver dam last night checking on our heroes who made a little berm in front of the gap to stop the flow over the dam. Three tough young men were gathered there, a little bit appreciative and a little bit menacing. While he watched the three kits chewed on leaves and swam about. Then GQ came over the gap and the smallest kit swam quickly to him and onto his back and they swam together into the lodge. And everyone there said pretty much the same thing,
“AWWWWWW”
These are the essential traits that protect our beavers: understandable family attachments, understandable work ethic, understandable tragedies. Populist beavers. To the extent that people care about our beavers it is mostly do to the ways in which their behavior doesn’t take a park ranger to explain. The beavers, quite without our help, showed their value to the public and allowed their activities to be observable. Since most colonies keep their private lives private I’m not sure why ours decided to lift the curtain – maybe they had no choice because of their locale, or maybe they knew something we didn’t – but they did – and more so than any organization or media or advocate it’s what kept them safe.
I’m thinking especially about this because we are getting closer to the Santa Clara Creeks conference date where I’m going to talk about their role, and I’m supposed to have a chat with the Washington DC HSUS urban wildlife today to see if our beavers would fit with a ‘success guide’ for helping people help animals nationwide. I’m thinking over what worked and what didn’t. There are lots of things we did that helped save the beavers, chase media, write articles, put out video, work every farmers market for a year, talk to children, talk to Rotary and Kiwanis and Elks, talk to experts, and get children’s artwork and display in every single place we could imagine. But all these things wouldn’t have been nearly as effective if our beavers weren’t relatively easy to see and understand.
There are, of course, people who care about the beavers and have never seen them. Still one of the reasons beavers are a ‘charismatic species’ is that its easy to see sign of them. These people have mostly seen the dams, or the old lodge, or a beaver chew or even just footage on the news. It’s important to remember that Worth A Dam didn’t come to be until March of 2008 and didn’t generate a press release until June of that year. Most of the early coverage was pretty organic and based on luck. It was public support that got our beavers in the news, including this inexplicable report which gave us our furthest (national) reach.
I took the liberty at the time of editing the version I put on youtube to reflect the city’s obvious campaign not to call it a CREEK. But its interestesting to me now that this was reported in April of 2008 and there is no mention of the flow device or footage of it.We had already solved the problem but no one knew it. The city never really believed it was going to work three years ago, and didn’t even bring the issue up.
TRAILER: The Concrete Jungle from Don Bernier on Vimeo.
