BEAVERS AS NEIGHBORS

heidi08 Beaver Art June 18, 2018

Judy Atkinson of Port Moody B.C. passed on this delightful tale from CTV news in Canada of the very best burglar ever! If you didn’t watch it you should’ because this is a delightful and very Canadian story. You will remember Judy as the woman who got her neighbors to care about the beavers in Port Moody and then fought for their safety when a baby was accidentally killed. Well Judy and I have talked a lot over the year, and she and her husband are flying to San Francisco next week to attend the beaver festival.! That’s a journey of 919 miles for a beaver festival. Imagine! Make sure to tell her how amazing she is when you get to meet her in person.

Yesterday a package of these arrived at my house for Ben to sell with his book at the festival. Since I am donating my landlord services I felt justified in peaking. I had to steal one immediately and will pay for it when he gets here. You can obviously see why. If you want to buy one yourself right now now they’re available at her shop on Etsy.

Beaver Lodge Menagerie:

Sarah writes:

Beavers build landscapes. When the sleek rodents dam streams to make their homes, they create wetlands that support dozens of other creatures, including otters, moose, frogs, snakes, sawflies, songbirds, woodpeckers, and baby salmon and steelhead. Trumpeter swans even nest atop beaver lodges, like absurdly beautiful crowns. This watercolor, graphite, and ink illustration was originally commissioned for the book Eager: The Surprising Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, by Ben Goldfarb–a gorgeous read for anyone interested in the connections between living things and living things, and living things and their landscapes.

The print is made on stunningly textured archival paper and just demands to be framed. If you buy it online it is a steal at 35.00. If you buy it in person at the festival they will be slightly cheaper, plus Ben and Sarah are talking about a book/print deal on the day that should make both irresistible.

Mine already is asking to be double textured matted and framed in wide layered barn-wood. Won’t that be stunning? But that’s just me. You’ll want to get your own.

A BEAVER HEAD FOR DETAILS

heidi08 Festival June 17, 2018

The other day we suddenly noticed that there was ONE more interpretive panel stand in the park than we had counted before. How is that even possible? The same way last minute details constantly keep surprising us. We ordered another one of these and it will surely come in time. It will be a great reminder of why everyone’s gathered there in the first place!

Crazy last minute changes abound. One exhibit suddenly needs a table. One exhibit thinks its unfair of us to “rent tables” (we don’t). One exhibit suddenly announces they don’t see themselves listed on the brochure and wonder why? (Because you never told us you were coming, dear.) Exhibitors seem strangely to need a little hand-holding. I remember that from my JMA days when I had to bring snacks at Earth day for a certain group of musicians who will remain nameless. Usually Cheryl does all that because she thinks I’m less patient (ha!) but this year she’s dealing with a ton of things and it’s fallen to me to do it before hand. She can have it all on the day.

Now I’m just hoping that there will really be room for 55 booths in the park after all. Fingers crossed.

Oh, and happy Father’s day!

MARTINEZ CA, TWINNED WITH MISSOULA?

heidi08 Beavers June 16, 2018

One summer, many years ago while I was still in graduate school, we rented a car and traveled through the hills and valleys of Scotland. It was a wonderful trip, we met the very best people, stayed in farmhouses, explored abandon castles and ate some amazing food. One particular unplanned afternoon we were driving southwest of Edinburg looking for a ruined castle we were never able to find and got briefly lost in the outskirts of what looked to be miserable industrial town where we were STUNNED to a street sign that said

“Dunbar Scotland, Twinned with Martinez, CA”

Of course we later realized that Dunbar is the birthplace of John Muir, Martinez being his last home. Since then our two cities have since strengthened their ties in many ways – in fact in my last year on the JMA board some members took a trip to visit his birthplace and original stomping grounds. But that morning, when we felt so far away and beyond the reach of everything it was just a surprise.

Now I’m starting to think Martinez is twinned with Missoula too.

Ninemile Creek, straightened by gold miners, restored by humans and beavers

NINEMILE — On what he called “a scenic death march through the bomb zone,” Paul Parson cheerfully pointed out how looks can deceive in the stream restoration business.

The results of some million-dollar-a-mile geoengineering looked suspiciously like a toddler was at the controls of the bulldozer. Every tree for 50 feet on either side of the little creek was knocked over. Scraggly willow shoots poked out of No-Man’s-Land rock piles. Weird reddish-orange scum floated on stranded ponds.

“When I saw that, I panicked,” said Parson, who oversaw the restoration project for Trout Unlimited.

The project was supposed to restore 7,000 feet of stream bed that had been forced into an artificial channel by gold miners a century before. He called a consultant, certain that mine waste was leaking into the watercourse intended to host trout. She informed him that no, it was a kind of bacteria that only grows in places returning to natural conditions.

For much of the early 20th Century, this creek drainage west of Missoula crawled with gold miners using pressure hoses and dredging machines to gouge their way 20 feet down to the bed of Glacial Lake Missoula, where deposits of raw gold had accumulated.

That’s a nice story about a damaged creek being fixed, but how is it like Martinez? Don’t worry, it gets better.

NWF saw an opportunity to showcase some natural restoration methods, specifically the engineering prowess of beavers. Former Ninemile District Ranger Greg Munther had done extensive beaver transplanting in the drainage during his tenure in the 1980s and 90s. Some careful stream grading could encourage those remaining beavers to add their efforts.

But that required overcoming a lot of misperceptions about beavers. Lewis and Clark hadn’t even made it back east to St. Louis in 1806 with their report of the Voyage of Discovery when they met beaver trappers heading west. Barely 50 years later, almost all the beaver in the West were trapped out.

The remainder got constant bad reps from cattle ranchers who dried their ponds for grazing pasture, farmers who hated their meddling with irrigation canals, anglers who thought their dams prevented fish from moving around, and road builders who thought they created unnecessary drainage problem

Better biology dismissed all those concerns. Beaver ponds do take up grazing space, but they also keep cattle from degrading stream banks and promote a much wider range of plant and tree growth. The ponds actually make refuges for many species of fish, which have evolved for eons to move through them in summer and survive ice scouring in winter. As for giardia, many animals including domestic dogs can infect a waterway with the intestinal parasite, and municipal water systems have to treat for it whether the water comes from a surface or underground source.

Beavers do mess with irrigation systems and present road construction challenges. But both can be overcome inexpensively. Meanwhile, the benefits they provide turn out to be stupendous.

Don’t you love that paragraph? If this is all sounding a little familiar, don’t worry: it should! We talked about this project a while back when Sarah Koenigsberg’s film debuted and the National Wildlife Federation did such a good job promoting the story of beaver benefits by holding some community discussions.

Trout Unlimited researcher Christine Brissette studied the Ninemile water flows before and after the stream restoration and beaver activity occurred. She found more natural floodplains, enhanced by beaver ponds, stored much more water and kept tons of sediment out of the Clark Fork.

In late summer, when some parts of the stream had shrunk down to six cubic feet of water per second, the improved water storage added one more cubic foot of flow. That’s a 15 percent addition that would have been lost to spring runoff, but instead was keeping fish alive in late August.

“Without it, the streams were going dry,” Brissette said. “This allows them to connect to the river below. It was really exciting to see that it works.”

Yes it is exciting to see what a difference beavers make. And we’re glad you were there to document it even if people will forget again in three months or three years. Just like Martinez forgot how many baby ducks and turtles we used to have in our creek when the beaver dams flourished. These things come in waves, and we’re in a fine one right now. Interestingly, Jon and I are seeing more ducks fly into and out of the creek upstream where the beavers are living now. And the other day we found a huge broken duck egg in the park!

And besides this great article by Rob Chaney, how else and Martinez and Missoula twinned? The west coast premiere of Sarah’s film is just two weeks away.

TAKING NOTHING FOR GRANTED

heidi08 Beaver Art June 15, 2018

Yesterday we finished collecting auction items and picked up brochures. Erika’s talented friends at the Walnut creek civic arts clay class were very kind to us and she was pretty nice too. I spent some time making flyers for the items so I thought I’d share.

Adding these to our already received items brings the total to 88, Divided fairly equally between things to do, jewelry, wall art, toys, and household items. The total value of all the items donated tops 4000 dollars. Hopefully we’ll be able to raise half that to keep the home fires burning.

I’ve been saving this link from James Blatter of Noir poetotography in Colorado for a while, and this seems the perfect time to share.

There is a beaver pond on Garfield Creek about 4 miles from my home, three years ago there were no beavers there, they have migrated down the watershed over a course of 12 miles over six-eight years. This year in the pond system they’ve been building at the local spot now has four beavers.

Watching the ecology of this little, I’d say half mile square, area change has been amazing. Where once the water flowed freely and there was very little wildlife there are now an abundance of fish and song birds, a flock of wild turkeys, an abundance of deer, some raccoons and coyotes. Ducks wintered here for the first time the last two years. Just witnessing this has been one of the best experiences of my life.

We know just how you feel, James.

‘ANTON’ STRIKES AGAIN

heidi08 Beaver Anatomy June 14, 2018

The brochures are ready for pickup today, along with a few last minute wonders for the silent auction. I have an interview lined up for friday with a reporter from the East Bay Times. And last night at the rcd ‘beaver program’ in Napa we got a lovely plug. (Thanks to Brock Dolman and Kate Lundquist for the shout-out and Rusty Cohn for the friendly spying!)

In the meantime there are plenty of dramas to keep us engaged. Most recently the much-hailed debut of a bourbon flavored with castoreum. Yes ,you read that right.

New whiskey flavoured with beaver secretions launched

The 44% ABV flavoured whiskey, which has a Bourbon base, is described as having a “vanilla nose underscored with the addition of spice from the birch oil and wild ginger”. On the palate, the rather elaborate tasting note reads: “dry, smoky spice with fleeting hints of fresh-cracked boughs and mint that open up to reveal rustic-sweet sensations of wet hay, vanilla, wood sugar, and saddle leather interspersed by waves of red fruit”.

A yellowish secretion of the castor sac located under the beaver’s tail, castoreum can form part of a substitute for vanilla flavour although it is rarely used in the food industry today. It is listed as a safe food additive by the US Food and

Drug Administration (FDA) and continues to be used to flavour Swedish schnapps brand BVR HJT.

In an effort to source local castoreum, the distillery teamed up with a beaver trapper called Anton.

“Anton is a beaver trapper and often gets called in by the state to remove beavers. Beavers are also extremely territorial, making relocation of beavers extremely difficult. So Anton, like all good trappers, uses every part of the animal. The fur is sold, the meat is eaten and the castor sacs are used as lures for future trapping bait. This source of New Hampshire beavers makes for a responsible market practice,” the distillery reports on its website.

Eau de Musc, as the whiskey is being called, is described as a two-year Bourbon, which in addition to castoreum, has been flavoured with raspberry, Canadian snakeroot, fir needles, birch bark (tar oil and regular oil) and maple syrup.

It is reportedly being sold in 200ml bottles for US$65 a pop.

I. Can’t. Even.

As bizarre as it is to make a beaver-butt flavored whiskey and write an article about its introduction like a promotional commercial for that hot new barber in town “Sweeney Todd” – it’s the charming profile of ‘Anton’ the trapper that sets this truly apart. Anton! The name alone speaks of rugged voyageurs in the Canadian territories – bring civilization on their backs to an unruly land with their uniquely wild avarice. I especially like how they mention he devotedly uses ‘every part of the beaver’

Drink this! It will make you rugged!