Tag: Amanda Parish

Good News!

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers August 10, 2012

Does good news come in threes? It does this morning! We’ll start with the successful unanimous passage of “THE BEAVER BILL” in Washington State. Thanks to the excellent work by our friends at the Lands Council beaver management is now part of state law and everyone will be reminded that their efforts mean water and it is smarter to move them than to kill them.

The Washington legislature has unanimously passed HB 2349, a bill concerning the sustainable management of beavers. The new law will help to improve the state’s water management infrastructure by relocating and maintaining healthy beaver populations. This proposed law is not only sensible, but also cost-effective. Instead of spending billions to construct concrete dams, this bill supports utilizing natural mechanisms to improve and restore Washington’s riparian ecosystems with families of beavers.

Congratulation Amanda & Joe! California is Green with envy – (green meaning the jealous shade, not the environmental friendly shade, because we’re idiots still when it comes to beavers!) I knew when I saw your ‘beaver solutions’ cartoon so many years ago that you were headed in the right direction. Lets hope some of your wisdom seeps down as far as Eureka or dare I Say San Bernadino!

More good news from our Kentucky Beaver friend Ian Timothy, who had worked all year to advocate for the beavers in Draught Park. He writes “The same city that once sternly said ‘This is not a beaver park!’ is now rolling out the welcome mat for the beavers. There is an article in the St. Mathews newsletter about the beavers being able to stay in the park, as long as they are being monitored by the local beaver enthusiast (me). The people in St. Mathews really seem to be embracing the beavers and they have gained a small fan club of people watching them most evenings.”

Before laying out the welcome mat, The City of St. Matthews Park Committee met June 4 with a wildlife scientist from the Humane Society of the United States and the City engineer. The group consensus was to monitor the beavers’ activity for six months to see how it might affect the park and Beargrass Creek. Ian Timothy, a local beaver enthusiast,will help document the family’s industry to track the beaver dam height.

Excellent work Ian! Very well done! We couldn’t be prouder of you and can’t wait for this success to inspire your next ‘Beaver Creek’ Episode!

Finally some SHOCKING good news out of Scotland, a country that had the foresight to assume that just because the ‘gravity thing’ works in every other country it doesn’t mean it works in argyle and spent hard-earned money putting there scientists to work analyzing and testing to make sure. Their shattering findings are reported today in the Scotsman.

Beleaguered beavers are fishermen’s friend, claim scientists

The research by scientists at the University of Southampton suggests that the overall impact on fish of reintroducing European beavers is more positive than negative. While the creatures’ dams do block fish from reaching local spawning grounds in the short term, experts say the same dams also increase habitat diversity, creating new areas that attract other wildlife which many fish feed on and providing refuge for them during periods when river levels fluctuate.

Are you telling me that the last decade of research out of NOAA and the Pacific North West was actually true? I mean NOAA is such a fly-by-night organization, no one EVER listen to their rambling assertions! Gosh, now that Scotland has shown that the theory of gravity holds true for the land of the thistle, what’s next? The sun rises over Ayr and sets over Edinburgh?

Beavers on NPR

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver-themed merchandise, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental October 10, 2011

Beaver friend Brock Dolman was alerted to this weekends beaver news by one of HIS beaver friends! Beaver restoration was discussed in Living on Earth – it happens to feature OUR beaver friend Amanda Parish from the Lands Council who came to dinner and a Martinez Beaver viewing last month!

Eager Beavers Engineer Ecosystems

GELLERMAN: For the past few weeks, Living on Earth has been reporting on the efforts to remove dams around the country. Well, this week, we talk about building them. On a tributary of the Spokane River in Washington state, new dams have gone up – helping to raise the water table, remove pollution and pesticides, attract fish and wildlife, and they cost: nothing.

Because we’re not building the dams, beavers are! Amanda Parrish has been busy with the new dams – busy as a, well, you know! She’s director of the Beaver Solution – a program run by Spokane’s Lands Council to protect beavers, and promote their engineering talents. We caught up with Amanda Parrish while she was knee deep at work.

Go listen to the interview which starts at 24:30.

The next segment was a reading from author Mark Seth Lender, author of Salt Marsh Diary. His description of the beaver and pond was so lovely I had to put it with footage (see below).

More treats, you ask? Well, okay “Oliver”, how about this? Remember the visitor from Utah who came to the beaver festival this year, Mary O’Brien? She just wrote me about this new site they are developing for beaver-assisted restoration. Click on the banner to check it out.

Not impressed yet? Well have a good look around and then stop off at the section titled “Interesting Web links on Beaver”. Hmmm, I wonder what’s there?

Now that’s what I call product placement! Thank for the plug, Utah!

Thank you from the Lands Council

heidi08 Educational, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers August 28, 2011

Pull Up A Chair

heidi08 Uncategorized March 19, 2011

Maybe not that chair….

Joe Cannon of the Lands Council sent me a note about this lovely article yesterday, so I would highly recommend sitting somewhere cozy and enjoying it.

Beaver Fever – How Spokane’s Lands Council is Deploying Nature’s Dam Builder to Help Save Water

by Paul K. Haeder

It’s pretty compelling to hear that a Spokane-generated and managed program is catching the notice of scientists and state agency environmental wonks. That is what is happening with a local relocation program called the Beaver Project. This is a story about nature re-invigorating the land that humanity has so deftly razed, dredged, paved over and cemented in.

“I hope people agree to look to nature for low cost and low impact solutions to manage our environment,” says Amanda Parrish, one of the Beaver Project’s aficionados and leaders. She’s had a direct hand in putting those sentiments directly to work in remote forests and soggy riparian areas in our neck of the woods.

How’s that for an overture! The article is delightful to read and, what’s more, says that beavers live for 7 years instead of 50 which is always appreciated. Never mind that it also says females are larger than males (?) — its mostly accurate and well worth your time.

With 90 percent of the animal’s number reduced, so were the dams they constructed. This near extirpation caused the first major shift in the country’s water cycle. Let’s follow the numbers—if each of those pre-Columbian beavers had built a measly acre of wetlands, then an area of more than 300,000 square miles—a tenth of total land area of the country—was once beaver-built wetland from sea to shining sea.

Now that’s a stand alone paragraph. Let’s just savor it for a moment. I wish it was included on every water bill mailed in the United States. Ten percent of the beavers we once had, and USDA still killed 28000 beavers in 2009.

The 24-year-old Parrish, who grew up in San Diego, ended up in Spokane two years ago, with a degree in environmental sciences from University of San Francisco, to try her hand as an AmeriCorps volunteer attached to the Land’s Council, the well-established Spokane-based environmental group dubbed TLC for short.

Now she’s leading the effort of live-trapping beaver families, tending to them temporarily in her South Hill yard where she fusses over mothers, fathers and their young with water and fresh cut alder and aspen branches while waiting to get an entire family unit reunited to then be “relocated” to a stream on land at four relocation sites outside of Republic, Chewelah, Newport and Valley.

Honestly, don’t you wanna go to Amanda’s house? Twenty Four. I dimly remember 24. Maybe Worth A Dam needs to pay for Amanda and Joe to spend a fortnight with Skip Lisle and Mike Callahan so they can learn first hand about installing flow devices. Hmmm with the understanding that they would do the same for other 24 year olds in ten years. Joe just posted photos of his first attempt on Facebook the other day. He couldn’t find any 12 inch pipe so he had to make do….

The Lands Council does good work, and I’m particularly happy Joe & Amanda are part of it. I’ll finish this post by suggesting you watch this video again, which was produced a few years back. It’s an excellent piece of beaver gospel.

Oregon-ized

heidi08 Educational, Environmental, Uncategorized February 6, 2011

My mind is still buzzing with beaver echoes from the dazzling conference. The above is a neat trick Brock introduced me to, called ‘Wordle‘. It analyzes text and produces word clouds based on frequency of use. The more a word shows up the bigger it gets. This is from the ‘our story’ section of the website. Isn’t it beautiful?

I would love to do as good a job as Alex Hiller did reporting as our foreign correspondent on the Lithuanian conference, but for much of the time I was too awestruck to take notes and too excited to write them down. I can’t tell you what it was like to be amongst brilliant minds who knew far more than me about beaver science and advocacy. Here’s a brief summary of some of the presentations I enjoyed the most. They are in order of appearance, because honestly if they were in order of preference, Sherri would probably be first the last and the middle. No offence.

Dennis Martinez started the conference with a discussion of TEK (Traditional Ecological Knowledge). He was very interested in the interface between science and TEK and how true environmental solutions blended the two. He talked about the fact that as science grew more about calculation and less about OBSERVATION everyone lost out. He had remarkable things to say about fire and water, and observed that one of the biggest mistakes the settlers made when they came to America is that they assumed the land was ‘naturally’ that way, and not carefully tended by native peoples.

Glynnis Hood has produced such remarkable research that she has become the go-to scientist on beavers. She teaches at the University of Alberta and presented research on a remarkable project documenting the way beaver habitat augments surface water and storage – even without dams. She showed a map of four isolated ponds that beavers eventually connected with a system of canals, increasing interactivity and flow between ponds. She and her researchers mapped the floor of those ponds and found that beavers dug and carved in the bottom, creating differing zones and augmenting biodiversity. In colder areas beavers dig holes in ponds so that when they come out of the lodge during a freeze they have room to get to the food cache. We were both thrilled to wonder what the bottom of ponds in temperate zones look like. It’s never been studied.

Yet.

Dr. Hood is so famous that I was afraid to talk to her at first. Then I had the weird good fortune to be stranded at the airport with her for 90 minutes waiting for the plane that didn’t take me. She told me that after the article on our website about her presentation in Lithuania she had wondered ‘who these martinez beavers’ were and what was the story. I made sure she left with a Worth A Dam hat, and plenty of gossip. Since she was interested in beaver canals I told her about the Popular Science article of beavers on Mars and sent it to her. I just got a note back that she loved the picture and will send her paper when its done.

Mary O’Brien has been on my beaver radar since the seminal article in High Country news a few years back. I was excited to find out she was coming and hoping for great things. I wasn’t disappointed when she presented a work in progress about identifying the economic value of beavers for things like water management and silt trapping. She apparently has decided to do a beaver festival in Utah next year and wanted lots of ideas for involving the community. She decided that she will come to our festival this summer and see for herself.

Sherri gets her own post, but for now I’ll just say that she is a powerful, compassionate, humble speaker with a truly awesome gift for taking a roomful of people intimately into her world of caring for beavers. I am quite certain that not a single person in that conference was unchanged by the experience. Myself included.

The very best part of Mike Callahan‘s presentation was his pragmatic invitation for others to practice his craft. “Flow devices work and anyone can learn to use them” was his message, and his style was to sit down and answer questions with anyone at any time. His excellent images showed me things I had not understood before, and he generously promised that any attendee at the conference could receive a free copy of his DVD. I first wrote Mike on November 4th, 2007 when I was consumed with a great sense of panic. Meeting him after so many years was powerful in ways it will take me a while to process.

Joe Cannon and Amanda Parish are the beaver division for the Lands Council and gave a delightful presentation on their beaver relocation and community education program. one idea I particularly enjoyed was the concept of the beaver picnic, where families gathered to learn about the animals, see the habitat and have some fun. Amanda also talked about a delicious children’s activity making ‘candy beaver dams’ using m&m’s, pretzel sticks and frosting to stick it all together.They had a long drive back to Washington but I’m so glad they came! Hopefully at least one of them will make it for the festival this year.

Chris Vennom was the biologist for the Methow beaver project. This bit of genius ecology is using fish hatcheries to house beavers before reintroducing them at carefully selected sites. We swapped beaver stories for much of the conference, I loaned him my mac when his didn’t work, and he was kind enough to repay me with remarkable footage he had take of a beaver underwater in the raceway. Trust me, it’s nothing you’ll forget.

Of course I already knew Brock Dolman and had heard him speak before, but his presentation was truly dynamic. His basic idea is that as global warming escalates the effects in communities are going to be felt keenest in the watersheds. Your watershed was your ‘lifeboat’ that would either buffer you or exploit you and it was in your self-interest to take care of it. Brock referenced our historical prevalence study and provided this excellent graphic which he graciously sent me last night. He also introduced me to a couple from Marin whose land may become the site of the next huge beaver reintroduction study. Stay tuned.

All this could never have been possible without the thoroughly gracious attention of Leonard and Lois Houston, who must have slept 5 hours in four days. They were the first at every event and the last to leave, provided countless introductions and made every single person feel like this particular conference was going to be especially better because they were there. There were a hundred details they saw to, and they rarely enjoyed the luxury of just sitting and listening to the wonders. It is their vision, wisdom and tenacity that made it all possible

A final mention for Stanley Petrowski, president of SURCP. He was the ’emcee’ for the entire event, and seemed inexplicably good at everything: ecology, technology and psychology. He introduced every speaker, kept things running on time and made sure the electronics were agreeable. He greeted me with such enthusiasm I felt like a rock star and any time he needs a vacation I am certain he can fill in for the finest cruise director in the Bahamas.

Okay, that’s it for now. Don’t think for a moment that I am giving these folks anywhere near the credit they deserve, but I hope this gives you a flavor of what I experienced. Unfortunately, Michael Pollock had an urgent situation and wasn’t able to attend, so I will have to look forward to meeting him. It will take an enormously long time for me to sort through everything, but in the meantime let me just say that on the way home I was stuck waiting for a shuttle with a man from the Georgia Railroads who said, sagely, “Beavers? Beavers aren’t a problem. They’re easy to take care of. You just shoot them.”

Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.