IMMERSED IN BEAVERS

I just realized that one of the things I love about this photo is that the way it’s taken makes Amy look like she’s IN the beaver pond, part of the scenery. Maybe like she’s just about to help that beaver build a dam when she’s done drawing. Amy-and-her-purple-crayon kinda thing.

Isn’t that just beautiful? The photo was taken lovingly by her husband who knows full well how to capture her beautiful creations. I am eager to see what she designs this year. Stay tuned because the premiere is due to come out very soon!

In other news about being up close at a beaver pond, we have a snippet about Skip Lisle leading an earth day beaver walk from the Bennington Banner.

Outdoors News in Brief

WILTON, N.Y.

Earth Day Beaver Education Program

To celebrate the 49th Earth Day on Monday, April 22, Wilton Wildlife Preserve & Park and Saratoga PLAN are teaming up to offer a nature walk that is all about the largest rodent in North America, New York State’s official animal; the Beaver!

Environmental Educators from the Preserve & Park will be joining with nationally renowned beaver expert, Skip Lisle to lead this family-oriented walk. The walk will leave from the Meadowbrook Parking area of the Bog Meadow Brook Nature Trail and explore the wetland habitats that are created and maintained by this fascinating animal.

Participants will learn about the importance of the beaver to the exploration and settlement of our region, about its natural history, about how it is one of the few animals to be able to manipulate the environment to create its own habitat, and about the efforts that Saratoga PLAN has gone through to help keep the beavers as residents of the Bog Meadow wetlands. Space is limited and registration is required by April 18.

I want to go! That sounds amazing! Touring beaver habitat with Skip Lisle sounds like the perfect thing to do on Earth Day. Oddly that was something I never go to do in Martinez. He was a little intimidated by the attentive beaver public. And we didn’t know him well enough back then talk him into going down to watch the beavers – although we did have him over for a spaghetti dinner because I was hoping to keep him from lowering the dam too much.

Something tells me he would have been delighted to see a community watching beavers together.

Not sure yet of the best beaver-y way to celebrate your earth day this year? There’s an upcoming beaver management online course featuring Jakob Shockey of Beaver State Wildlife Solutions. I know it’s not the same as being at a beaver pond with Skip, but Jakob was trained by Mike Callahan who was trained by Skip, so its almost the same thing. The class is free but you need to sign up in advance for this webinar:

Ecosystem Restoration Deep Dive with Jakob Shockey: Collaborating with Beaver for Ecosystem Restoration

Jakob Shockey is an expert in riparian ecosystem restoration and beaver ecology, restoration, and conflict mitigation. He is the Restoration Program Manager for the Applegate Partnership and Watershed Council in Oregon, and the owner of the wildlife conflict mitigation company, Beaver State Wildlife Solutions.

In this deep dive, we will hear of the keystone role that beaver play in ecosystem function in the northern hemisphere. We’ll also hear how their eradication has disrupted ecology and hydrology, and how their reintroduction has led to restoration of these ecosystem functions.

While the beaver’s collaboration is invaluable as we seek to restore ecosystem function, often their hydrological designs conflict with our land use and infrastructure. Jakob will also discuss various conflicts that commonly arise, often leading to dead beavers, and how he and others mitigate these conflicts with innovative methods, enabling the beaver to stay in place and repopulate without flooded basements and blocked culverts.

When: Apr 23, 2019 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US and Canada)

COLORADO GETS IT

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Beaver Book, Beaver Chewing April 12, 2019

Ben Goldfarb is in Colorado this week, and in Idaho last week. You would think that if a book was doing well enough to hock copies all across the beavered United States that the author would at least make it to Martinez for the festival, wouldn’t you?

But no, Capybaras and South America await. Too bad for beavers. Benny’s got a brand new rodent.

Learn all about beavers April 11

In his book “Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter”, author Ben Goldfarb reveals that our modern idea of what a healthy landscape looks like and how it functions is wrong – distorted by the fur trade that once trapped out millions of beavers from North America’s lakes and rivers. The consequences were profound: Streams eroded, wetlands dried and species lost vital habitat.

Today, a growing coalition of “Beaver Believers,” including scientists, ranchers and passionate citizens, recognizes that ecosystems with beavers are often far healthier for humans and nonhumans alike than those without them.

Ben Goldfarb will present, “Beavers: Their Landscapes Our Future” on Thursday, April 11, 6:30 p.m. at the Salida SteamPlant. In his presentation he will describe beaver biology, ecology and history; detail the many environmental benefits provided by beavers, including habitat creation, water storage and pollution filtration and discuss how landowners and municipalities around the country are learning to coexist with these keystone rodents.

That presentation was last night, I wonder how it went. I’m going to imagine their are tens of new beaver believers walking around Central Colorado. As I’m sure there are in California, I keep get letters from them, Like this one from Wyoming.

Letters like these make me feel like I accidentally slid into something very important, although I’m still not sure what happened or how to tread this particular water. No matter how many ‘Ellens” there are, we could always use more.

But I’m sure Capybaras are nice too.<span style="display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;" data-mce-type="bookmark" class="mce_SELRES_start"></span>

SALMON SEZ “WE LOVE BEAVER!”

heidi08 Beavers, Earth Day, Educational April 11, 2019

April 20th is the John Muir Birthday – Earth day celebration. We’ve been doing what we can to get ready for it and the many hundreds of children that join our activity. This year we wanted to emphasize beavers importance to salmon, so we’re creating a banner that can be used in the children’s parade at the beaver festival. The idea is that kids would will pick a button with either species out of a hat and then draw that species on a 6-foot table runner. By the end of the day we should have something truly splendid, covered in memorable children’s artwork. The complete banner will be mounted on poles so it can be carried in the parade. Here’s how the banner looks before the kids decorate it. We used leftover tattoos from Coyote Studios to get them started.

Of course no American child lives past the age of 10 without having to play at least ONE game of “Simon says” – so I thought “Salmon sez” would be very familiar. There will be various beaver/salmon puppets hanging around the tent where kids are working and some images to get them inspired. This poster came out very cute so I think it will be on display as well.

As you know, the best way to get adults to pay attention to a new idea is to have them watch their children drawing it for 15 minutes. And maybe for them to snap a photo of their child in the parade featuring said idea very cutely so that the photo gets sent to grandparents.

Works for me.

I’ve been chatting about the idea with Dan Logan from NOAA Marine Fisheries in Santa Rosa who will be joining us again for this years beaver festival. He was asking me about the fish population in Alhambra Creek and who was monitoring it. I told him about our informal photos and playing ‘name that fish’ with Peter Moyle over the years.

He laughed and said he had to be careful with that game, because one time a man asked “can you tell a steelhead and a salmon apart if I send you a photo?” so of course, fisheries biologist Dan answered, yes I can.

Then the man sent him a FILET.

Earth day is always fun and exhausting, and there is so much to see and do. If you want to join the fun you should stop by and say hi, or lend a hand!

BEAVERS FOR ANARCHY?

heidi08 Beavers, Who's Killing Beavers Now? April 10, 2019

Now you know that not just any beaver-killing article is going to get my attention. This ain’t my first rodeo, after all, and I’ve written about pretty much every variation you can think of regarding beavers flooding basketball courts or storm drains. You have to exceptional these days to get MY attention, with such a dazzling array of beaver stupid.

But this from Searcy Arkansas qualifies.

Breaking down beaver dams

Residents had been complaining about their lawns flooding in Skyline Meadows, which is directly beneath the hills of Skyline Drive, due to clutter in Gin Creek and beaver problems in a privately-owned wetland.

Beaver dams were threatening to flood the Skyline Meadows neighborhood until Wednesday when Harding University students broke through them during Bisons for Christ.

Now to be clear, the article doesn’t mean actual bisons. It means youth volunteers that team up during lent to do various jobs working hard. Because you know that old saying, “work like a – bison”. (?)

Beavers had dammed up a drainage ditch for all the water runoff for the right end of Skyline Meadows into Gin Creek, and had created around an acre of standing water that varied from an inch or two in depth to about 16 inches deep as of Wednesday. There are also multiple larger dams in that piece of Gin Creek itself, which is owned by Southwest Middle School.

“We’ll get those 4-5-inch rains and you see 2 inches flowing down the street,” Leroy Painter said of water draining into the nature preserve. “You can’t even see the street [for all the running water].”

“The No. 1 thing I can think of,” Leroy Painter said of problems with beavers, “is the mosquito problem [due to still water not running off], and the concern that eventually the water will have nowhere to go.”

You understand of course, BISON may be for christ, but obviously beavers are satanists. Bringing in mosquitoes and making baptismal ponds in everyone’s garden just wily-nily. They must be stopped by actions that require all hands on deck. Remember, it takes a village.

About 1,500 students were involved in 150 projects all over Searcy and White County, but it was men’s social club Gamma Sigma Phi that went as a group to work on clearing the beavers dams and wood buildup due both to beavers chewing trees off at the trunk and trees dying thanks to being in standing water all the time.

“That’s what it’s basically all about,” Gamma Sigma Phi member Matthew Morgan of Springfield, Mo., said of working on the project for Bisons for Christ, “to give back to the community and serve others.”

Nate Ham of Marion said the project was close to his heart because a friend of his lost his home in a flood two or three years ago when the flooding had gotten very serious in the West Memphis/Marion area.

“It’s not a good thing when houses get water to them,” Ham said. “His trailer almost floated away with the water.”

Well now, an article like this comes along once in a great while and you have to treat it like the precious message it is. You have to tuck the phrase “Bisons for Christ” into your arsenal and treat it with the full glory it deserves. I’m not greedy. I don’t expect it to get any better than this.

“Hopefully we’ll solve the problem before there is one,” Gamma Sigma Phi queen, Danielle O’Shields of Cabot said. (A queen is an honorary female member of a men’s social club.)

So these particular bisons for Christ have a QUEEN which gets to be an honorary member of their fraternity brotherhood. Letting a woman be in your special man-club. Golly, it just doesn’t get better than that. Except their’s a photo of the queen hauling refuge from the satanic dam. I gotta admit,

That’s a little better.

Searcy Parks and Recreation Director Mike Parsons said the beavers have been particularly bad this year, and it has been a struggle keeping them from causing damage in the areas where beavers go, which he said is primarily in the section of Gin Creek north of Berryhill Park and in the Searcy Soccer Complex.

“When they’re by Berryhill Park we normally just break up the dams and they go somewhere else,” Parsons said. “It’s a bit more difficult at the soccer complex. They build their dams and block our drainage pipes, causing lots of issues.”

Parsons said when the parks have a beaver problem, Searcy Parks and Recreation contacts the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission for a referral for a trapper who will legally catch and relocate the beavers.

“The problem we have with beavers is, unless you get rid of them, they keep coming back to the same general areas,” Parsons said.

Game, set and match. That makes this the best beaver-killing article of 2019 and it’s only April. For those of you keeping score at home that would be a full score of five outta five on the beaver-ignorance meter.

The mistaken belief that beavers cause mosquitoes
The faulty effort to destroy beaver dam to get rid of beavers
Thinking beavers leave if their dam is destroyed.
Writing that you hire a trapper to ‘relocate beaver’
The belief that UNLESS they are trapped they will return.

That’s a full house team Searcy! You really outdid yourself and gave us beaver-heathens something to sing about. Of course if you weren’t committed to the idea that beavers are NOT for Christ, would have given you something to really sing about.

“They got the whole pond, in their hands.
They got the whole deep pond, in their hands.
They got the whole pond, in their hands.
They got the whole pond in their hands.

They got the otters and the fishes, in their ponds (etc refrain.)

They got the muskrats and the turtles, in their ponds (etc refrain.)

They got the dragonflies and crawdads in their ponds (etc refrain.)

They got the heron and the salmon, in their ponds (etc refrain.)

They got the water and the willow in their ponds (etc refrain.)

They got the watershed renewal in their ponds (etc refrain.)

They got the climate change survival in their ponds (etc refrain.)

Did I leave anything out?

BEAVER HOLD: I TELL YOU A MYSTERY!

heidi08 Beavers, Video April 9, 2019

Yesterday was a mysterious day but it started when Chris Carr posted that ‘tree-dragging’ video to the beaver management forum. I suddenly remembered that Moses had shot similar footage years ago of our father beaver, and that it used to be in the footage I used to present when I gave a talk. But over the years, what what with the documentaries and new footage it got pushed out.

Did I still have the footage?

If you had a great deal more patience I would explain that Moses shot in those early days in an ancient format that had to be converted before being used on my mac which is what I use for presentations. But there isn’t room to store past presentations on said mac so its on an external seagate hardrive. Could I find that footage in a past presentation?

Oh no I could not, not until the very last place I looked of course. And then just a sliver of it. I despaired. It as such great footage. A little dark I remember but amazing because Moses shot it directly by paying a friendly homeless man to hold the spotlight. No trail cams for Martinez beavers! I could never get it back from Moses that would be like finding a particular ant in a decades old ant colony. If I couldn’t find it it was gone forever. Leaving just a memory.

In desperation I looked again at the fragment wondering what it was and when it was shot. March 16, 2008. Damn that as a long, long time ago. For the very first time I saw and option on my mac which said “revert clip to original” and I almost laughed. I had deleted that clip many many times before Obama was president. How could the original footage ever still be somewhere findable? Just on a lark I clicked ‘revert’ anyway.

A message came up that said the entire clip was 15 minutes and would take time to recover. Okay I agreed hopelessly, certain it could never be found.

I was wrong.

Not only was the entire clip lurking somewhere on my computer the whole time, but footage I had never even SEEN before sprung forth. That third log Dad hauls is new to me, also recovered was some family bonding footage I’ll share later. Dad was using these three logs to work on the third dam, which is also featured beautifully in the lost footage. I have zero idea how it happened, but I am grateful for the mystery and was eager to share.

My old mac is one of the seven wonders.

A second mystery came from an invitation to participate in MVSD Moorhen Marsh’s reopening day in May. I had some hint about the event a while ago when someone from Orange county emailed to verify my contact info for the event. And then another stranger contacted me from Danville with details. Nowhere was I told to ‘save the date’ or notified about the event until yesterdays invite. This to an event barely more than a month away and falling three weeks after Earth day. The invite said that for a mere 20 dollars I could register to participate and would receive a tent and table.Now I had already promised our friends at wildbirds unlimited that we would be at their mothers day booth that day, and I would imagine that lots of folks they wanted to invite would be similarly committed. (like native birds, audubon and bird rescue). Obviously MVSD had hired a firm to coordinate the event that wasn’t exactly on the event circuit, so besides being very, very envious that they had event planning funds, I wondered why they hadn’t asked earlier? As a woman who for the last 11 years had planned beaver festivals, and for 7 years helped plan earth day events, I was confused about some things.

Why the late notice?
How was MVSD providing tents and tables? were they renting them? And from whom?
How had they secured Doug McConnell as Emcee?
How could they afford to pay an event planner? And if they were paying why didn’t they know about likely participant scheduling constraints?

Being as it takes me almost an entire year to plan the festival, and has always taken 3-4 months to contact and secure exhibits for the event I’m understandably curious.

You mean there are people you can PAY to do this?