I’ve been gloating for a couple days. Time to be crumpled with envy again as we watch other beaver advocates enjoy the sweet success of their efforts for which we can never hope. This time it’s from our friends in San Luis Obispo who recently had a very special visitor. Dr. Emily Fairfax came for a beaver visit and brought her favorite equipment with her.
What a treat, I got to show our beaver dam to Dr. Emily Fairfax, Assistant Professor, California State University Channel Islands, Environmental Science and Resource Management. She was the researcher that studied large-scale wildfires and beaver habitat and made a great stop-motion video demonstrating her findings.
It was so fun to walk around the beaver dams and beaver lodges and learn so much about an area that I visit regularly. First, she called our beaver dam a “Jewel” of a beaver complex. She pointed out all the ways the beavers have committed themselves to this area, the 7-foot deep moat around their bank den, the beaver lodge (ie. second story) they were adding on to the beaver den (that I never even noticed before), the series of micro-dams on the hidden back side of the den that were widening the river and creating a safe hidden path to food sources.
As we walked in the water, we would occasionally pass through really cold patches of shallow water, she said these were places where the ground water was coming up, cooling the water and recycling the river water back into the ground (something like that), keeping the river water at that perfect fish-loving temperatures. She took a thermal image of the water and the dams also, which are sooooo cool.
Oh I remember having ‘experts’ come to the beaver dam. And how we would hang on their every word and ply them with endless questions. Experts from out of state or across the country. We learned so much from them. In retrospect though from years of experience I can say that nobody really knew our beavers better than we did. No matter how much they knew about beavers.
And the best part!?!?!?! She wants to do a study of this beaver complex, watching, recording, capturing photos, as the seasons change, gathering data within the beaver complex and comparing to data outside of the beaver complex. Is that the most exciting news ever or what!? I can’t even believe it.
That is VERY exciting. For you. I sooo wish that had happened for us. Sniff. I whimpered to Emily and she said gamely “I can still come and study your beavers!” But I sobbed
“No you can’t because we don’t HAVE any beavers. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa”
But still. Still. It’s GREAT news for our friends in SLO and great news for beavers in general. I’m so glad Emily is on the job! You MUST go to the website to see the AWESOME 360 image of the beaver habitat. I can’t embed it here but it’s amazing!!! Those are some happy beavers munching on all those cat tails.
Oh and speaking of great news, Robin of Napa had an excellent sighting at Pearl Street.
[wonderplugin_video iframe=”https://youtu.be/F7tbxG2rMEE” lightbox=0 lightboxsize=1 lightboxwidth=960 lightboxheight=540 autoopen=0 autoopendelay=0 autoclose=0 lightboxtitle=”” lightboxgroup=”” lightboxshownavigation=0 showimage=”” lightboxoptions=”” videowidth=600 videoheight=400 keepaspectratio=1 autoplay=0 loop=0 videocss=”position:relative;display:block;background-color:#000;overflow:hidden;max-width:100%;margin:0 auto;” playbutton=”https://www.martinezbeavers.org/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wonderplugin-video-embed/engine/playvideo-64-64-0.png”]
