And of course you know Rick, and recognize our historic beaver paper. Well it’s nice to see things come to fruition. Only a decade after we published it. Nothing with beavers happens fast.

Now beavers are back, in a long-overdue homecoming.

They’re unlikely celebrities: they’re nearly blind, eat their poop, and have anal glands that emit musky yellow-tinged oil to mark their territory. Reclusive, they’re rarely seen in the wild because they tend to work in the dark, avoiding people.

But they’re increasingly cherished for their role as civil engineers, creating complexity in a landscape by building ponds that serve as safe habitats for fish, otters, herons and other wildlife. In celebration last April, supporters gathered for the first-ever California Beaver Summit. Every June, the town of Martinez hosts an annual Beaver Festival.

The Palo Alto beaver was first spotted one morning by a nature-lover who was meditating on the creek bank. Startled out of his reverie by the three-foot swimmer, he told Leikam about the sighting. Leikam set up a network of camouflaged trail cameras to confirm the animal’s presence.

Now, twice a day – at dawn and dusk — Leikam, 82, weaves through dense thickets of willow and fennel along the banks of Matadero Creek on a two-mile-long route to inspect his 14 cameras, memory cards and batteries.

Discarded plastic bottles, aerosol cans and other trash litter the ground. The nearby freeway creates a constant din. But the creek’s water, as dark and rich as chocolate cake, is clean.

Beaver signs are abundant: Gnaw marks are inscribed into small ash trees, and long-toed claw prints are jumbled through the mud. Bent grasses reveal the beavers’ routes.

What can I say? People love to be shocked by the poop-eating. I swear we didn’t discuss it and I truly doubt Rick or Bill did. It’s just something she saw that stuck.

They’re pretty hefty animals,” weighing up to 50 or 60 pounds, Leikam said. This is a second career for him: After teaching English for nearly four decades in Cupertino, he vowed to document the behaviors of the region’s wildlife. His Urban Wildlife Research Project, comprised of thousands of video files, is based at his Mountain View home.

“It’s exciting,” he said, pushing through the brambles with ease. “It’s been 160 years since there been any beavers along any of these creeks. It speaks of the health of the creeks.”

There’s not yet evidence of a beaver dam or a lodge, the “wooden igloo” that the animals sometimes build as homes. Instead, he said, the Palo Alto beavers likely live in burrows submerged along the creek bank.

Leikam gazes at the water, noting a sudden swirl of spherical ripples. A big brown head emerges, then vanishes.

Its forebears were “problem beavers,” who clogged up canals in the Central Valley, according to Lanman’s research. A California Department of Fish and Wildlife staffer told him that long-ago crews had surreptitiously released the animals in Los Gatos, rather than killing them, Lanman said.

Meanwhile, a different population was making its way west from Sacramento, eventually building homes in Alhambra Creek in Martinez.

Oh good. It’s about us now.

While freshwater dwellers, beavers can tolerate brackish or salty water during travel, Perryman said. Our Bay and Delta “is basically a big water highway.”

The Martinez colony has perished, but over the years they raised 27 kits, who have since dispersed. Now there’s a colony in Fairfield and Oakley. On the Napa River, there’s a colony next to the busy Hawthorne Suites Hotel. In Sonoma County, colonies in Sonoma Creek have expanded into the Santa Rosa Creek watershed.

“They’re pioneers,” said Perryman, capable of traveling 10 to 20 miles over land and 100 miles by water. Beavers have moved into the radioactive Chernobyl Exclusion Zone spanning the border of Belarus and Ukraine, reclaiming an area that’s empty of humans. They were killed by the 1980 explosion of Mount St. Helens in Washington, but have since returned.

Okay I said they were the FIRST ones back after Mt st Helen’s erupted, as in they came back and made it habitable for the rest of us eventually. But the best laid plans of mice and men…

They can’t live in creeks that have been turned into concrete flood control channels — but in natural settings, they find ways to survive. During the worst of our recent drought, a beaver was spotted inside a small pipe in Los Gatos Creek. It had built a little dam around a steady drip, and sat in the puddle.

As the nation’s beaver population makes a comeback, the animals are incurring the wrath of some farmers and city planners. That hasn’t happened here. And there are techniques to offset any harm from newly green, lush and flooded spaces, Perryman said.

We should enlist them as our ally in environmental restoration, she said.

Instead of just a few new locations, “let’s multiply that by 10 different cities, or 100 different cities,” she said. “Our urban spaces would look really different if we allowed beavers at the edges, where we could tolerate them.”

Well now that is good anyway. You finished strong Lisa! Smelly little fat poop-eating engineers that could save our planet. This article also has a link to the beaver festival. a link to Worth A Dam AND a link to the California Beaver Summit. I am incapable of complaining about that.