Our beaver-wikipedia friend Rick sent me this today, a pamphlet on Laguna Creek in Wilton, CA. It’s a very nice and glossy brochure about protecting the watershed by reducing pollution and encouraging folks to volunteer time and money to keep their creek healthy. So far so good. It was this next section that got my attention:
Did you know it was dangerous for creeks when they flood? Neither did I. I always assumed it was kinda natural, apparently its very bad for creeks when water flows all over them, erosion on one bank prompts meandering onto another and soil is deposited on the opposite side. Who knew? Certainly not the Egyptians who for thousands of years relied on this nutrient deposit cycle to grow their rice on the fertile Nile.
Ohhhhhhhhh that makes sense. So flooding isn’t a problem to the CREEK but to the roads and properties along the creek. And too much woody debris is bad because it leads to flooding. Got it. And Beaver dams have to be ripped out and if for some reason this uniquely brilliant intervention isn’t successful beavers have to be killed which means they’re always, always killed.
We have to protect our creeks from beavers!
Where is this place anyway? Who ever heard of Wilton CA? Let me google it and see. Hmm, Southeast of Sacramento. What’s near there?
Ahhh well that explains it. New readers may not remember that Elk Grove is the famous location where USDA killed 51 beavers and the beaver ‘expert’ who allowed them to do it, Mary Tappel, was repeatedly consulted by our fair city shortly afterward. Mary is a botanist who would never come and talk to us on the beaver subcommittee directly because she felt we were too adversarial, she did tell the papers that beavers breed for 50 years and mention to public works that the father beaver should be killed so that the mother would need to mate with one of her sons. About 250 residents met her when she showed up unannounced at the Council Chambers meeting in April 2008. If you don’t remember her testimony, you might watch this for a colorful reminder at 02.28, which is probably worth viewing just for the expression on my face in the right hand corner.
For the record Wilton, protecting creeks from beavers is like protecting banks from money. It’s like protecting Whole Foods from Vegetarians, or protecting Stanford from bequeaths or protecting Steve Young from footballs. The creek you’re working so hard to defend will never have a better or more tireless advocate than the furry animals you’re struggling to discourage. If you need some real advice about managing beavers and controlling flooding, why don’t you give us a call or look here or here for real solutions.
On a lighter note, this morning Dad was hard at work on the primary, which is looking air tight. I met a man who told me he is ‘mayor’ of the beaver dam on the foursquare app for Martinez. Who knew?
