UPDATE: Baby otter seen at 9:30 above the primary dam this morning! Same size as the 8 Jon saw yesterday! Mom is getting breakfast and he’s fending for himself! Keep your eye out for visitors.
Sometimes a glimpse of the past is shocking in its ignorance. I have a book from the 1700’s on how to raise a good wife, for example, that says girls shouldn’t be praised for being clever or competent. (Just had to buy that one.) Other times we can only wonder why yesterday’s wisdom took so long to catch on. This is an issue of Life Magazine from Nov 1943 extolling the contribution beaver make to our soil by preventing erosion and raising the watertable.. 68 years ago the major publications in the country were talking about the value of beaver to the watershed and discussing their reintroduction to arid western regions. Why do attitudes about beavers have such a slow learning curve? It’s important to note that Donald Tappe had just finished his seminal paper on historic prevalence of beaver in California. I’m sure he would have followed up with a second that corrected some of his mistakes about beavers-only-living-above-1000-feet but he was drafted that year and never got around to it.
Well, don’t feel bad. Martinez is way ahead of the curve on this one. I received an email this morning from a downtown merchant who had just read about the Placer County Beavers being killed in the Tahoe Wildlife Care Newsletter and wanted to let us know that we should help! Mind you this is a merchant who at one time had been so afraid of beavers flooding the city they were committed to avoiding that eventuality through any means necessary. Now Skip’s battered Castor Master, (and our cooperative beavers0 have eliminated those fears and we find friends in unexpected places. It’s been quite a ride, but I thought you want to see what America was thinking about beavers in 1943.
