NUMBER TWENTY-SEVEN

heidi08 kits June 28, 2018

It is far, far too early for me to coast. What was I thinking yesterday? My living room is insane as all the items which have to go to the festival line up to wait there turn to be loaded into the truck. I slept a sliver last night. There are lists to be made and details to be attended too. Oh and there’s this. On Tuesday I implored Moses to see if he could get that huge wheel out of the creek for unsightly reasons. And while he was there he thought he’d have a little look around. Guess what he saw? Go ahead guess! Turn your sound WAY WAY up and I bet you’ll know the answer in the first couple of seconds.

LOOK at how TINY s/he is! Yesterday I spent the first 4 hours just saying OMG OMG over and over. Moses has captured some incredible moments with the beavers over the years, but this might be my very favorite. That kit is so little it can’t even dive to follow mom. It just pops back up like a cork.

He filmed this tuesday at 10:30 at night, and it took some doing to get it uploaded. We would love to be able to play it at the festival for folks, so that meant spending time figuring how to get it on our portable screen. Assuming we have a place to plug it in it should work out nicely.

And meanwhile Martinez has another kit! Stop worrying so much. Everything will work out fine. That makes him number twenty-seven!

It’s surprising how lovely the habitat is down there. It almost looks like a tropical forest. I can definitely see why folks brave the flooding and buy homes on the creek. Check out the morning footage from earlier in the week. Martinez is quite the urban utopia. There’s a car horn at the beginning and a pair of warblers trilling in the middle. Quite the place to raise a family.

Say it with me now: Baby baby baby! Martinez has a baby! There is precious little that matters more than that.

There was also a fine article about our friends in the North and the quest to bring beaver back to California. Oh and it mentions the festival too! Rusty was kind enough to supply the photographs.

Leave It to . . .

The first step is getting past California’s “beaver blind spot,” as the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center’s Brock Dolman puts it. Dolman is co-director, with Kate Lundquist, of OAEC’s WATER Institute (Watershed Advocacy, Training, Education and Research), established in 2004 to study and promote watershed issues. The award-winning duo’s “Bring Back the Beaver” campaign, started in 2009, went back on the road in the North Bay last month with a talk in connection with a screening of the environmental documentary Dirt Rich in Novato; appearances continue through June in Napa, Sonoma and Marin counties.

“A lot of people just don’t know that we have beaver in California,” says Lundquist, who says that their current presentation is an update on a 2015 talk they gave in Sonoma to help answer the question: “That’s an East Coast thing, right?”

Although a historical account from General Mariano Vallejo found the Laguna de Santa Rosa “teeming with beaver” in 1833, by 1911 California had about 1,000 beavers left before legislators passed a law briefly protecting the aquatic rodents. Following a quarter-century-long campaign to reintroduce beaver to erosion-threatened habitat (the highlight of the “Bring Back the Beaver” show is the parachuting “beaver bomb” developed during the time), they were determined non-native and invasive for decades thereafter.

Bring Back the beavers campaign! Hurray for Brock and Kate! It’s great to see the regional history of beavers in California outlined in this article. The author even takes time to focus on the depredation permits issued in the state. But you know by now I am very self-centered – so of course this was my very favorite part.

This business as usual for beavers started to change after a pair of them wandered into Alhambra Creek in the middle of the city of Martinez in 2006. They built a dam and had yearlings, called kits, but the city’s application for a permit to make them go away did not sit well with locals who could see the kits playing as they drank their coffee. Resident Heidi Perryman formed the beaver advocacy group Worth a Dam, which holds its 11th annual Beaver Festival on June 30 in downtown Martinez.

Okay, yearlings are not called kits, any more than teenagers are called children. The mention is short and sweet. But still,,,always leave them wanting more. It’s followed by a lovely intro to the beaver situation in Napatopia. And then does a nice job of promoting Kevin Swift, who worked with Mike Callahan a while back to learn the trade.

“They’re ignored, underappreciated, reviled and mismanaged in equal measure,” says Swift, who emphasizes that beavers, for all their engineering abilities, are not intellectual powerhouses. “It’s got a brain the size of an acorn. If you can’t work it out with them, could be you’re the problem.”

“It seems to me that all the laws are backwards,” he says. “You don’t need a permit to destroy a beaver dam that makes critical habitat for rare, threatened and endangered species—but you might need a permit to put in a float-control device that’s hydrologically invisible and maintains the habitat for rare, threatened and endangered species. How does that work?”

Hmm indeed! Good point Kevin.

And if the beaver believers are right, as the numerous scientific studies they point to suggest, there is no better way to be fish-friendly than to be beaver-friendly. The beavers are not going away. There are some intractable parties, such as the absentee landowner on Sonoma’s Leveroni Road who, according to state records, refuses to consider alternative options to repeated depredation permit requests. But ultimately this approach is doomed to fail, says Swift.

“A story you often hear in California,” says Swift, “is, ‘I’ve been going down to that place for an hour every day for X number of years, and I’ve shot and trapped Y number of beavers, and they’re still there!’ Yeah, you’re in beaver habitat! Geology drives beaver habitat. Unless you can literally move mountains, you’re not changing anything about beavers’ attraction to your site.”

Lundquist says killing beavers is neither a viable nor economical strategy. “For one, people hold candlelight vigils, like they did in Tahoe. And it can be really bad press if you’re trying to do the right thing—or be seen as doing the right thing, anyway.

Um, not to be a stickler for detail or anything, but actually they didn’t have a candle light vigil in Tahoe for beavers. That was in that OTHER city. What’s its name again? sheesh Go read the whole article, it’s worth your time and author James Knight did a lovely job pulling it all together. Learn all about the ‘Bring back the Beaver campaign’ Then come to the festival in two days and meet Brock and Kate in person!

Then watch this video again because it’s awwwwwww…

EAGER BEAVERS ALL

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact June 27, 2018

We’re just about the part where I start coasting. All year I’ve been peddling frantically, applying for grants, making plans, coaxing auction items, encouraging musicians and securing volunteers. It is not a lie to say that planning a beaver festival literally takes nine months. It was harder this year because of the earlier time and less resting in between. Well, I’m nearly full term now. There’s a certain point where all my work is done, and it’s up to everyone else, I get a strange, glassy look in my eyes and start to shrug a lot.

There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come.
If it be not to come, it will be now
If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all.

Hamlet V:ii

And now that the coasting begins, let’s truly enjoy the ride. This is an extraordinary year for beavers. I found out yesterday that Ben Goldfarb will get to author a column soon in the Washington Post. And this morning there’s this from author Kate Wheeling.

How Beavers Can Save Us From Ourselves

Since I first picked up Ben Goldfarb’s Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, I haven’t been able to stop talking about these semi-aquatic rodents.

Illustration of a beaver, c. 1800. (Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Beavers are not content simply to survive in the environment that nature provides them. Instead, the animals engineer it to ensure access to things like food and shelter, reshaping entire landscapes in the process. Sound familiar? Humans, for better or for worse, may be the most planet-altering species—but beavers did it first. To quote Goldfarb, “We are living in the world that beavers created.”

Before their numbers were devastated by the fur trade, North America looked much different. For one thing, it was a much soggier landscape. Beavers don’t just build lodges and dams, but entire wetlands. Thanks to the beavers’ efforts, streams back up behind their dams, forming ponds, marshes, and swamps, filled with stumps and dead or dying trees and bustling with frogs, fish, and otters, to name just a few of the countless creatures that rely on beavers to make their habitat possible. Beaver ponds help store water, recharge aquifers, filter out pollutants, mitigate floods, and stop wildfires in their tracks.

I guess some very spiritual people feel this way when they read the bible: Every time you hear the familiar story it’s precious and you learn or feel something new. Well, that’s how I feel about beavers. I LOVE that we’re going to be hearing this story over and over for the foreseeable future.

You make the point that beavers are not endangered, they don’t need us, but that we need them. What can beavers do for us?

One great example is water quality. There’s a huge problem in this country with agricultural pollution with nitrogen and phosphorus from chemical fertilizers ending up in rivers and estuaries and oceans and leading to dead zones. It’s critical that we keep that pollution from reaching the ocean, and beaver ponds are incredibly effective at settling out those pollutants.

But the biggest example is climate change: As the climate warms, more precipitation is falling as rain rather than snow. Instead of remaining in snowpack and gradually melting throughout the course of the spring and summer and fall and keeping rivers and streams wet well into the dry season, now all that precipitation is falling as rain. Any entity that can store water on the landscape, that can keep water high in some of these mountain headwaters in places like the Cascades or the Sierra, becomes incredibly valuable. What stores water better than a beaver? Basically nothing.

Ahh do you know that feeling you get when you just slip into a hot tub on a deck at the ocean on a starlit night and your head is cool and your body is gloriously relaxed and warm? I’m having that feeling right now. Thanks SO much Ben for your excellent work on this book!

What do you hope readers will take away from Eager?

First and foremost I just want people to appreciate the incredible role that these animals played in the development of our landscapes and our history as a people and a culture. I think that lots of the ecological and hydrological problems that we’re confronted with now can be, to some extent, addressed with more beavers. I don’t want to portray beavers as some kind of silver bullet because, for example, climate change is obviously a problem that’s so vastly beyond the scale of beavers to address that sometimes I feel a little bit silly suggesting it. But they can absolutely put a dent in some of these issues, like water storage. So they’re not a panacea but they are certainly a help to us, and they’re an incredibly cost-effective help. If you think about how much money we spend, for example, retrofitting irrigation infrastructure or installing new gray-water systems or no-flush toilets, this water-saving stuff can be pretty cost-ineffective sometimes. Getting more beavers on the landscape is something we can basically do for free.

It literally makes me light-headed to think about the number of readers who are getting the message around the country. I can’t imagine anything better, honestly.

How about seeing our name mentioned?

I imagine you had some fun picking out the title for this book. Can you share some of the other titles you considered? Obviously beavers lend themselves to puns. There’s a million different dam puns: Give a Dam and Worth a Dam.

I will tell you a secret because we know each other so well. Shh come closer. Ben told me privately after lunch on the back porch of our home that our name was the very best beaver pun of all, and the one he wished he had thought of. Shhhh. Yes you can feel proud of that. I certainly do.

We humans tend to regard ourselves as kind of unique in the ways that we modify our own surroundings to maximize our own food and shelter. But beavers do that too. They build dams, they create ponds and wetlands that they use to protect themselves from predators, to irrigate their own food supply. They almost act as rotational farmers; they’ll raise the water table to increase the growth of willow and other water-loving plants. That’s one of the things that always drew me to them: They just remind me of people in a very real way.

Ahh Ben, we are SO lucky to have you in the world and writing this book and coming to our festival. I am so excited about the ripples this this change is going to cause. What excellent timing for it all to happen now. Especially since I just got some very exciting news about our own meager beavers that I’m going to tell you all as soon as its confirmed.

One last thing. Yesterday I finished the post test for the kids doing our sticker activity. I wanted something more visual for the younger kids. How do you like it?

BEAVERS WANT FAMILIES TOGETHER, TOO

heidi08 Friends of Martinez Beavers June 26, 2018

Yesterday I got a very kind email from a beaver supporter who had attended every festival and was planning on bringing her family and friends to this one, but she was torn to realize the festival was on the same day as the Keep Families Together rally/marches around the country. She wondered whether the festival could show its support in some way or at least register its concerns.

I thanked her very much for this and have echoed her worries in recent days, So many supporters of beavers are intimately connected with this issue, and all of us have the humanity to be alarmed by it. There is a rally in Concord at 10 am, one in Vallejo at 11 and certainly no reason why supporters stand together and can’t come to the festival afterwards. Maybe the big chainlink fence on the edge of the park would be a great place to post all their signs.

I’ll start.

Many were the happy days we spent canoeing up or down the river and enjoying the wildlife and wonders we would meet on the way. Our favorite were the five tidal rivers around Mendocino, where you might canoe all day and have a better equal chance of meeting a seal or an otter than another person. The joys of the river were endless unfolding blue herons nesting in trees, or kingfishers diving into the water.

The was only a single thing in all the world to fear. And that was so terrible and induced such terror I wouldn’t even allow Jon to mention it for fear of waking its wrath:

wind

Until you’ve canoed against a strong headwind from the sea. paddling as hard as you can to literally keep from going backwards. you cannot even being to understand. My arms have been so painfully sore that I couldn’t comb my own hair for days afterwards. The worst was big River, whose wide mouth allowed for great gusts that wreaked hours of havoc on our journey home. It was in big River where I started the practice of pacing myself by singing into the wind long before I understood that this is what the voyageurs were famous for on their many beaver-trapping expeditions.

The wind is he who will not be named when you’re in a canoe.

Jon never quite got the superstition – and was often guilty of saying half way through in very confident tones, “Well at least it’s not windy today”.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I mention this because this is exactly how I feel about the weather on the day of the festival. Jon checks it religiously before the day, alternately boasting and bemoaning as he sees fit. I don’t think he understands what it means to “Jinx” something. Even Amy said brightly when we met her in the park, “the weather looks likes it will be great” to which I sharply replied

“Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”

I have learned the hard way that weather gods are all-powerful and will ultimately decide what kind of day to give us. NASA and the weather station mean nothing to them. They will do what they want. They know there is nothing we can do about it anyway.

We will beaver on.

Now on to some brighter things, we got a paragraph in Joan Morris column in the yesterday. I’m always happy when her readers are reminded of us since I think we are easy friends. Thanks Joan for the kindly words!

Celebrate the 11th annual Beaver Festival, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. June 30 at Susana Park — a new and larger location for the festival this year — on the corner of Susana and Estudillo streets in downtown Martinez. There will be beaver tours, more than 50 nature exhibits and a display by Napa artist Amy G. Hall, who is doing a 2-day street mural of a giant beaver pond and the wildlife it sustains.

NPR PROMOTES BEAVER BENEFITS

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact June 25, 2018

Yesterday I saw Maine pick this up, and today New Hampshire. Now Luke Runyon’s great story makes it to weekend edition. Maybe you didn’t have time to listen when I posted it last week. Listen now. It’s worth it.

The Bountiful Benefits Of Bringing Back The Beavers

Don’t you feel better? I know I do. Yesterday we met and marked the items for the silent auction, and now they are all tucked safely into Leslie’s care, so our house seems empty by comparison. Jon trimmed the grass so the dam is more visible which gives everyone a better view of the car wheel which floated against it Saturday. Nice.. We also resigned ourselves to the terrifying fact that its going to be cool all week and HOT-HOT-HOT on Saturday.

I’m sorry Amy.

Never mind. However hard you might think you’re working, you’re really not. Rusty sent this photo yesterday and I realized by comparison I’m not working hard at all. Stop complaining already!

Beaver building dam with two rocks: Rusty Cohn

BLAME THE BEAVER (PART XMXIIC)

heidi08 Who's blaming beavers now? June 24, 2018

Ahhh, that was fun. Author Ben Goldfarb and his wife Elise stopped by yesterday for the books on their way to the upcoming events in Healdsburg. They were excited because they had never Sarah Gilman’s great print and even more excited because they had never seen the hard0=cover published version of all his hard work. It was kind of delightful towatch their giddy recognition of the dawning reality: This is really happening! There were clouds of proud feelings emitting from them when they reviewed what was vitually a boxfull of Bens.

Today there is time to share a fun beaver tale and some more adorable kit photos from Rusty Cohn at the Napa Creek dam downtown. Here’s one of my favorites to get us started. The beaver nose to my mind is one of the hallmarks of beaverness and marks it distinctly from nutria, muskrat or otter, The button-nose of childhood is one of my favorite sites in all the world.

And, honestly, can you blame me?

Native Insight: A hole in the Great Beaver myth

The Pocumtuck Range is the site of the giant Pleistocene beaver and the super-human Eastern Algonquian earth-shaper or transformer figure Hobomock, who’s known by other names among various related Northeastern dialects. What’s constantly changing is the motive for killing the beast and the lesson to be learned from the act that left behind a distinctive range, which to this day from many directions resembles the carcass of the petrified giant beaver of indigenous lore. Though the genesis and 19th-century resurrection of this well-known story can be loosely tracked, it remains difficult to make sense of at times.

This popular, colonial version of the tale was retold with attribution to Field by Edward P. Pressey, author of the 1910 “History of Montague.” By this time, the Montague historian slightly embellished the tale by being more specific than either Field or Sheldon. Pressey wrote: “The great beaver preyed upon the fish of the long river. And when other food became scarce, he took to eating men out of the river villages.”

This is a particularly striking reconstruction of history and myth. When you read Ben’s book it will be very very clear to you how decimated the streams, fish and fauna were after the devastation of the fur trade. There were indeed fewer fish to catch. Not because of the beaver mind you, but definitely because of the beaver trade! Turning that around and blaming the victim is the height of atrocity and very familiar to us todayl

Now, right here and now, it must be said that beavers are not and never have been meat- or fish-eaters. They are herbivores, eating tree bark and plants, not pond critters such as fish, frogs, snakes, salamanders, ducklings or any other wetland creatures. They are plant-eaters, plain and simple, and so, according to cursory online research, were their giant Pleistocene beaver cousins.

I find it odd that I have never seen this potential myth-dispelling fact stated anywhere in print associated with the Great Beaver Tale. And to be honest, me myself, an outdoor columnist for nearly 40 years and an outdoorsman, hunter and fisherman for even longer, wasn’t sure of that fact and never checked until my naturalist brother-in-law from Maine raised the issue over the weekend. Just one simple query by him really got my wheels spinning. Told the details of the tale, the professor emeritus suggested that it made no sense because, “I don’t think beavers eat meat or fish, and the Indians surely would have known that.” Though quite sure, even he, an astute observer and nature lover for almost all of his 73 years, didn’t know that beavers ate no fish or meat.

People are always surprised when they learn that they’ve been told lies about beavers. It happens all the time and should surprise no one anymore. This article did make me curious about the Pocmutuck Range. Does it really look like a giant sleeping beaver? Maybe a little.

One last photo from Rusty Cohn’s adventure downtown last night in Napa. The kit is getting brave enough to come out on his own. I love to see those clear eyes looking so healthy and alert.