Loving how this turned out. You have to imagine it as a folded brochure. Make sure you click using the arrow to see the inside. It looks luminous. Glowing. Like a forest in late afternoon with golden light coming through the aspens. Thank you so much Terre Dunivant at Gaia Graphics who had a rotten cold and cranked this out anyway.
MartinezBeaver Festival2024 12x8 - 1Our upcoming festival did fairly well with media attention this yea so far. Patch, Daily Republic, Diablo Gazette and now the Pioneer! Not exactly sure why Concord gets two papers and Martinez can’t even keep one but I guess that’s for another day.
MARTINEZ, CA (June 16, 2024) — What started off as a controversy ended up becoming a teaching moment for how an entire state can cooperate with beavers.
Now valued for their benefit to water storage, wildlife, and fire prevention, beavers will celebrate their 15th festival in the city that was first to learn about them. On June 29, over 50 nature groups will gather in historic Susana Park to celebrate urban wildlife.
Amy’s picture and Amelias cover was pretty irresistable and folks couldn’t resist. I thought it was especially nice of the Pioneer to take a crack at the history on their own.
Way back in October 2007, some beavers built a dam on Alhambra Creek. This reportedly posed a flooding hazard to downtown Martinez. The solution at first seemed simple and the animals were slated for extermination. However, a flood of public sympathy led the City Council to form a “beaver subcommittee” looking at the possibility of allowing the beavers to stay.
This committee brought in a beaver expert from Vermont. He reviewed the situation and installed a flow device so that the pond’s water level could not become excessive. Debate on the impact of the animal’s activity continued. Soon, beaver supporters formed a non-profit organization called Worth A Dam. This group advocated for co-existence between the city and beavers.
Worth A Dam helped with habitat replacement and community education. They also created the beaver festival in 2008 to foster continued support for the animals. They even offered financial assistance and education to other cities figuring out how to co-exist with beavers.
Isn’t that nice? A real reporter who looks into things. Good work, Pioneer.
There has been progress along several fronts regarding beavers. First the state of Oregon finally laid its ridiculous dual beaver policy to rest meaning they are protected furbearers everywhere and there are actual rules about killing them.
Commission adopts rules to implement the “Beaver Bill”
CHILOQUIN, Ore.—The Commission today adopted rules to implement HB 3464 passed by the 2023 Oregon State Legislature, aka the “Beaver Bill,” which remove the complicated dual classification of beavers so they are now solely managed as furbearers (rather than predatory animals in some situations).
The new approach encourages coexistence (and less lethal take) of beaver and provides tools to more effectively manage and prevent damage caused by beaver. The rules establish a permitting process for take of beaver that are causing damage, require reporting of all beaver take and provide an opportunity for ODFW to give guidance to landowners on non-lethal methods for reducing conflict. They will help close data gaps by collecting more information on damage, complementing the agency’s Beaver Action Plan. Data collected will help determine beaver distribution, identify conflict hot spots, quantify when take does occur and reasons why.
Suzanne Fouty said it was imperfect news adding what the cheery reporting omitted:
They also approved 2 more years of allowing folks to kill beavers on public lands as a recreational activity. More later.
Rats, but it’s slightly better than it was, You know how it is. Two webbed footsteps forward, one back.
Also on the progress meter is some movement on the google action to develop tools to count beaver populations as shown with this article on Saturday:
A few years back, former Google employee Eddie Corwin started a passion project centered around the most unlikely of subjects: beavers.
As Wired reported, Corwin was looking for a way to help the company become a better steward of water. After researching the sizable impact of beaver wetlands — they can hold millions of gallons of water — he and a sustainability consultant who worked with Google, Dan Ackerstein, started sculpting an ambitious plan to use satellite imagery to detect beaver dams and ponds.
The pair eventually teamed up with programmers to develop an algorithm. Then, in May 2023, a team of beaver researchers published a scientific paper showing that the model was correct 98.5% of the time.
The applications are numerous and could help scientists estimate beaver populations and calculate these rodents’ ecosystem services — among other things, beaver ponds can provide other species with refuge during wildfires and can even stop fires in their tracks.
That’s why the new beaver-infrastructure search model will be getting its first test run in the Golden State — The Nature Conservancy and Google will be running the model this year to look for every beaver dam and pond in California.
“All of our efforts in the state should be taking advantage of this powerful mapping tool,” Kristen Wilson, the lead forest scientist at the Nature Conservancy, told Wired. “It’s really exciting.”
After the California run, the model’s developers aim to train it for other geographical areas with different types of landscapes.
“That’s the challenge for the future — how do we make this more universally accessible and usable?” Corwin told Wired.
I am pretty darn curious how many beavers there are in California, aren’t you? Maybe we should have a national guessing contest, like how many marbles are there in this jar and the winner gets to hold a baby beaver for a full minute?
It’s June so you know what that means. Time for kits and father’s day. I honestly don’t know which one I miss more.
Just a reminder that the first time I saw our beavers I was with my own father walking by the creek.
On Thursday I was happy as a cloud because this article appeared and I knew everything about the festival was going to work out fine. Two wholly unexpected compliments were dropped in my lap and I started to feel uneasy. When is the other shoe going to drop?
I got my answer the following day when a key player withdrew from the festival and I was left scrambling to cover. Everything felt bleak, like the festival could never succeed, like it wouldn’t even happen.
And then I remembered the annual bipolar event planning.
MARTINEZ, CA — What started as a controversy turned out to be a teaching moment on how an entire state can cooperate with beavers.
Now valued for their benefit to water storage, wildlife and fire prevention, beavers will celebrate their 15th festival in the city that was first to learn about them.
From 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, June 29, over 50 nature groups will gather at the historic Susana Park in Martinez to celebrate urban wildlife and invite the public to join them.
I felt better remembering I have been here before. Every year for 17 years in fact. It’s practically a tradition.
Renowned chalk artist Amy Gallaher Hall from Napa will create a beaver mural in the plaza, and the Acorn MusEcology Project will come from Sonoma County to perform “original beaver music,” according to Heidi Perryman, longtime organizer of the event.
The beloved event celebrates the unwelcome beavers who took up residence in Alhambra Creek in 2007 and caused a flood of concerns about the wildlife often seen as pests. The result: an outpouring of support for Buster Beaver, the original beaver father who co-habited with two consecutive mama beavers in Martinez for 10 years, resulting in 27 kits (beaver babies). Beavers believed to be his descendants have shown up in recent years in urban waterways in Walnut Creek, Fairfield, Sonoma and Napa, Perryman told Patch.
“The beaver population is rebounding all over the Bay Area, and we believe the 27 kits born in Martinez had a huge part to play in that,” Perryman said. “Plus, the Martinez success story influenced new beaver policies from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.”
Sure there are ups and downs along the way but we usually muddle through.
She encourages families to bring their children to the festival for an education about beavers and other area wildlife and their contributions to the local ecosystem.
“Take a photo with the Martinez Beaver mascot and let your child solve a wildlife puzzle while browsing the gift-laden silent auction,” said festival founder Heidi Perryman. “It’s a dam [sic] good time you won’t want to miss!”
You know how it is. If things go well I feel uneasy and if things fall apart I get stubborn.
