HALF WAY INTO A FOREST

We have been in a beaver festival tunnel for days now. I can barely see light at the other end. We finished up 24 transactions for the silent auction yesterday and have three more to close out today. There is a pile of sorting to go through for me and some heavy lifting for Jon, and then we should be free to celebrate the fourth.

Our last transaction last day was with the beaver-supporting county supervisor of Napa who bought the “Connors Creek Beavers” book at the auction and wanted to read it to visitors at the farmers market Sunday, because – you know – Napatopia. (Hey when do you think our mayor will be doing that?) Brad dropped by the house at 7:30 for the book and stopped to admire Mario’s painting on the porch.(!)

Which all goes to say that life has been very, very busy since the big day, and really before the big day too. It meant I never got a chance to tell you about the college instructor in Rocklin who was noticing how much more wildlife was in the creek since the beavers came and alarmed that the city wanted to kill them.

Mind you, Rocklin is in Placer county, the beaver trapping capital of our state.

So even though it was the friday before the festival I stopped what I was doing to introduce him to some local beaver minds and gave him some ideas about how to intervene. Yesterday I learned that it didn’t matter because the city trapped out 7 beavers and ripped out the dam anyway.

(There but for the grace of God goes Martinez.)

Folks were very upset. Apparently there were some beavers still sighted in the area so there’s hope at least that there can be a response that will inform things next time. Sometimes it takes outrage to make folks pay attention.

The other thing I didn’t get to tell you was about Ben’s column in the Sierra Club magazine! Pretty nice to dangle beaver benefits in front of the noses of all those environmentalists. The magazine article has a great layout with an adorable beaver which I’ll post afterwards, but here are the highlights.

Beavers Are the Ultimate Ecosystem Engineers

Beginning in the early 1600s, fur trappers pillaged the continent’s streams and shipped millions of pelts to Europe for felting into fashionable hats. Not until the 20th century did conservationists begin to help beavers recover, a task that often required creativity. In 1948, for instance, biologists packed 76 beavers into crates and parachuted them into the Idaho backcountry (all but one survived the drop). These days, as many as 15 million beavers swim North America’s waterways, a 150-fold increase from the species’ nadir. As the rodents have rebounded, scientists have learned that beaver-built water features help address environmental problems, including drought, pollution, biodiversity loss, and climate change. Says Mary O’Brien, a conservationist in arid southeast Utah, “They’re kind of magic.”

Time for an army of conservationists to take up the mantel! Let’s give them some talking points, Ben.

FILTERING POLLUTION

Every year, America’s farmers use 20 million tons of synthetic fertilizers. When those chemicals reach the sea, they breed low-oxygen “dead zones” devoid of marine life. By trapping runoff nearer to its source and encouraging bacteria that convert nitrates to harmless gas, beaver ponds can help avert such disasters. In Rhode Island, researchers discovered that beavers could cut agricultural pollution by up to 45 percent, keeping estuaries healthy.

STORING GROUNDWATER

The weight of beaver ponds forces water into the ground, recharging the aquifers that we’re depleting at a breakneck pace. In the Canadian Rockies, scientists calculated that beaver ponds raised water tables by half a foot. Some researchers estimate that ponds hold up to 10 times as much water belowground as above it.

CREATING WETLANDS

Wetlands are cradles of life: In some arid regions, they support 80 percent of the species despite covering just 2 percent of the landscape. Beavers, whose dams broaden streams, submerge meadows, and raise water tables, are the ultimate wetland engineers. Between 1944 and 1997, Acadia National Park’s wetlands nearly doubled—the handiwork of beavers that were reintroduced to the park.

PREVENTING FLOODS

Although most people associate beavers with flooding, their ponds can actually help prevent catastrophic deluges by slowing, spreading, and storing water. In flood-prone England, researchers found that during rainstorms a complex of 13 beaver dams reduced runoff by about 30 percent—proof that beaver architecture can prevent widespread floods even as it submerges local fields.

ADAPTING TO CLIMATE CHANGE

As the climate warms, more precipitation falls as rain instead of snow, running off directly to the ocean rather than gradually melting throughout the summer. Groups like Washington’s Methow Beaver Project are combating snow decline by relocating beavers to headwaters on public lands, where their ponds capture rainfall and keep streams full as the planet gets hotter.

SUSTAINING SALMON

Salmon are vital to the Northwest’s ecosystems and Native American cultures, and beavers are vital to salmon. The rodents create deep, cool pools and slow-water side channels in which fry can rest, feed, and shelter from predators. In Oregon and California, scientists are building artificial beaver dams to help endangered salmon recover.

STORING CARBON

Just as forests suck carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it in wood, so beavers trap carbon in the form of organic sediment that settles to the bottom of their ponds. Before the beaver population was decimated in Rocky Mountain National Park, their complexes stored 2.7 million megagrams of carbon—the equivalent of what’s trapped in 37,000 acres of forest.

BENEFITING BIRDS

Beaver ponds furnish habitat for countless species, from boreal toads to otters to trout. Some of the most important beneficiaries are birds: Wood ducks breed in beaver wetlands, trumpeter swans nest atop the rodents’ lodges, and songbirds like flycatchers and warblers perch in stands of willows irrigated by rising groundwater.

Beaver powers to the rescue! So good to read this summary and think that all the sierra club members are reading it too. Here’s the centerfold layout in the magazine.

Sierra Club Article on Beavers 6-29-18

Isn’t that one adorable beaver? Wonderful to get this out in Sierra magazine. But you know what they say. A picture’s worth 1000 words.

REFLECTIONS ON THE WATER

heidi08 Festival July 2, 2018

Over the years I’ve learned that every beaver festival has a different mood or vibe. Nothing is permanent and everything changes. Some seem full of children, some seem full of impatient parents and some are packed with die-hard martinez beaver defenders. This one seemed thick with passionate naturalists. Many younger and older adults who were drawn by the movie, the book, or the promise of learning more. The adult-heavy crowd meant that fewer children completed the sticker program this year but the ones that did clearly loved it. One child in particular collected all the stickers but patiently kept them because she wanted to put them on herself, carefully, at home.

There were still plenty of children though, fully engaged and eager. Here’s the proof:

I don’t think its possible to over-emphasize how meaningful it was to Amy in the middle creating such a magically wild world. It was a constant reminder to everyone there that in a very real way we are all responsible every day for the nature around us, and for the wilderness we allow underfoot. Once when Suzanne Fouty asked Amy if she minded how temporary all her work was, and how subject to erosion, Amy said that’s actually what she loves about chalk art.

It was a constant reminder to “Live in the moment“.

And what a moment it was! I called our child winners of the raffle yesterday who were so excited to be chosen! 28 children completed the post test and 19 of those got the answers correct. (Many were thrown by the idea that humans were ‘animals’ too.) Today we’ll send off the beaver puppets as a reward for the winners hard work, Then we can focus on closing out the remaining silent auction items. There are about 25 transactions left to complete.

This was one of my favorite parts of the mural. I’m so fond of the ripples made on the water by beaver movements, To my way of thinking they’re kind of like a living dynamic canvas that constantly records his/her movements on the watery medium..

Of course there were other favorite parts. The exciting myriad of bees and ladybugs. The curling and popular snakes. The glorious peregrine and the constantly evolving musicians.

But the famed beaver mobile remains a perennial favorite of young and old alike. My engineer brother in law was fascinated and wanted to know at once how it worked.

There was one last amazing thing that happened on July 30th and it had nothing what so ever to do with Worth A Dam or the beaver festival. Illuminaries artist Tim Hon created this downtown about three blocks away from the park on ferry street. The talented graffiti artist known for his promient Oakland Warriors pieces happens to live in Martinez, and wanted to memorialize the beavers he personally watched with fascination when he moved here.

A DAY FOR THE AGES

heidi08 Festival July 1, 2018

Yesterday was a eye-popping, gasp-inducing. heart-warming collection of everything you ever cared about packed together in one tree-lovely place. We were exhausted by the end from staring and straightening and I won’t be able to say anything reflective about it until at least tomorrow. I thought I’d just give you a few photos this morning so you had an idea of how it unfolded.

That will do for a start. Suffice it to say this festival had the best energy, the best music, the best volunteers and the best truly fascinated and appreciative attendees of all of them. We are grateful for everyone that participated and happy to have celebrated the Martinez beavers once again!

BEAVER FESTIVAL XI

heidi08 Festival June 30, 2018

Showtime! We’re off to the big BF. Yesterday was a kind of little bf, sitting in the park while Amy chalked this and chatting excitedly to the many onlookers. Poor Amy started working at 7:30. Here’s what she had done by the end of the day.

Today she gets to the beaver part of the pond! And so very much more. If you can come see for yourself, come!

Final2018brochure

BEAVERS ON STAGE AND IN PRINT

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact June 29, 2018

Ahh last night was the lovely premiere of Sarah Koenigsberg documentary “Beaver Believers” and many of our Worth A Dam friends were there to see and support. Here is a snap shot Rusty sent of the Q&A session on stage after the film. I recognize Suzanne Fouty, Ben Goldfarb Kevin Swift and Brock Dolman sitting with Sarah on stage. The man asking questions on the right is Steve Dunsky of the Forest Service.

We were home finally finishing packing the truck and crashing on the couch. Yesterday Jon met with the parks director, picked up the Uhaul and borrowed canopies from the John Muir Association and a friend in town. Today we will meet Amy at 7:30 in the park who will try to get as much drawing in as she can before it gets unbearably hot! Come by if you’re curious to see it unfold!

You are in luck today though because an expert from Ben’s book was published yesterday in Resilience and it made me so happy to read I got that tingly feeling you get when your about to weep tears of joy. I can’t think of anything better to read the day before the beaver festival so I’m posting it here.

Oh and check out the photo btw. 🙂

Close your eyes. Picture, if you will, a healthy stream.

What comes to mind? Perhaps you’ve conjured a crystalline, fast-moving creek, bounding merrily over rocks, its course narrow and shallow enough that you could leap or wade across the channel. If, like me, you are a fly fisherman, you might add a cheerful, knee-deep angler, casting for trout in a limpid riffle.

It’s a lovely picture, fit for an Orvis catalog. It’s also wrong.

Let’s try again. This time, I want you to perform a more difficult imaginative feat. Instead of envisioning a present-day stream, I want you to reach into the past—before the mountain men, before the Pilgrims, before Hudson and Champlain and the other horsemen of the furpocalypse, all the way back to the 1500s. I want you to imagine the streams that existed before global capitalism purged a continent of its dam-building, water-storing, wetland-creating engineers. I want you to imagine a landscape with its full complement of beavers.

What do you see this time? No longer is our stream a pellucid, narrow, racing trickle. Instead it’s a sluggish, murky swamp, backed up several acres by a messy concatenation of woody dams. Gnawed stumps ring the marsh like punji sticks; dead and dying trees stand aslant in the chest-deep pond. When you step into the water, you feel not rocks underfoot but sludge. The musty stink of decomposition wafts into your nostrils. If there’s a fisherman here, he’s thrashing angrily in the willows, his fly caught in a tree.

Although this beavery tableau isn’t going to appear in any Field & Stream spreads, it’s in many cases a more historically accurate picture—and, in crucial ways, a much healthier one. In the intermountain West, wetlands, though they make up just 2 percent of total land area, support 80 percent of biodiversity; you may not hear the tinkle of running water in our swamp, but listen closely for the songs of warblers and flycatchers perched in creek-side willows. Wood frogs croak along the pond’s marshy aprons; otters chase trout through the submerged branches of downed trees, a forest inverted. The deep water and the close vegetation make the fishing tough, sure, but abundant trout shelter in the meandering side channels and cold depths. In A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean captured the trials and ecstasies of angling in beaver country when he wrote of one character, “So off he went happily to wade in ooze and to get throttled by brush and to fall through loose piles of sticks called beaver dams and to end up with a wreath of seaweed round his neck and a basket full of fish.”

And it’s not just fishermen and wildlife who benefit. The weight of the pond presses water deep into the ground, recharging aquifers for use by downstream farms and ranches. Sediment and pollutants filter out in the slackwaters, cleansing flows. Floods dissipate in the ponds; wildfires hiss out in wet meadows. Wetlands capture and store spring rain and snowmelt, releasing water in delayed pulses that sustain crops through the dry summer. A report released by a consulting firm in 2011 estimated that restoring beavers to a single river basin, Utah’s Escalante, would provide tens of millions of dollars in benefits each year. Although you can argue with the wisdom of slapping a dollar value on nature, there’s no denying that these are some seriously important critters.

Isn’t that an enormously translucent opening? Ben does such a heart-racing job of telling the story and bringing the reader personally alongside it’s unfolding. I first read this opening last year when he asked for my thoughts on the manuscript. I read the entire thing in 2 days like without stopping -like I was attending Woodstock or a revival. I knew it would change the conversation forever. and now you should understand why.

Beavers, the animal that doubles as an ecosystem, are ecological and hydrological Swiss Army knives, capable, in the right circumstances, of tackling just about any landscape-scale problem you might confront. Trying to mitigate floods or improve water quality? There’s a beaver for that. Hoping to capture more water for agriculture in the face of climate change? Add a beaver. Concerned about sedimentation, salmon populations, wildfire? Take two families of beaver and check back in a year.

If that all sounds hyperbolic to you, well, I’m going to spend this book trying to change your mind.

Go read the entire except, and be ready for your mind to be blown. What a great day for beavers and the people who throw their festivals! See you tomorrow!

So it begins!