REFLECTIONS ON THE WATER

heidi08 Festival July 2, 2018

Over the years I’ve learned that every beaver festival has a different mood or vibe. Nothing is permanent and everything changes. Some seem full of children, some seem full of impatient parents and some are packed with die-hard martinez beaver defenders. This one seemed thick with passionate naturalists. Many younger and older adults who were drawn by the movie, the book, or the promise of learning more. The adult-heavy crowd meant that fewer children completed the sticker program this year but the ones that did clearly loved it. One child in particular collected all the stickers but patiently kept them because she wanted to put them on herself, carefully, at home.

There were still plenty of children though, fully engaged and eager. Here’s the proof:

I don’t think its possible to over-emphasize how meaningful it was to Amy in the middle creating such a magically wild world. It was a constant reminder to everyone there that in a very real way we are all responsible every day for the nature around us, and for the wilderness we allow underfoot. Once when Suzanne Fouty asked Amy if she minded how temporary all her work was, and how subject to erosion, Amy said that’s actually what she loves about chalk art.

It was a constant reminder to “Live in the moment“.

And what a moment it was! I called our child winners of the raffle yesterday who were so excited to be chosen! 28 children completed the post test and 19 of those got the answers correct. (Many were thrown by the idea that humans were ‘animals’ too.) Today we’ll send off the beaver puppets as a reward for the winners hard work, Then we can focus on closing out the remaining silent auction items. There are about 25 transactions left to complete.

This was one of my favorite parts of the mural. I’m so fond of the ripples made on the water by beaver movements, To my way of thinking they’re kind of like a living dynamic canvas that constantly records his/her movements on the watery medium..

Of course there were other favorite parts. The exciting myriad of bees and ladybugs. The curling and popular snakes. The glorious peregrine and the constantly evolving musicians.

But the famed beaver mobile remains a perennial favorite of young and old alike. My engineer brother in law was fascinated and wanted to know at once how it worked.

There was one last amazing thing that happened on July 30th and it had nothing what so ever to do with Worth A Dam or the beaver festival. Illuminaries artist Tim Hon created this downtown about three blocks away from the park on ferry street. The talented graffiti artist known for his promient Oakland Warriors pieces happens to live in Martinez, and wanted to memorialize the beavers he personally watched with fascination when he moved here.

BEAVERS ON STAGE AND IN PRINT

heidi08 Beaver ecological impact June 29, 2018

Ahh last night was the lovely premiere of Sarah Koenigsberg documentary “Beaver Believers” and many of our Worth A Dam friends were there to see and support. Here is a snap shot Rusty sent of the Q&A session on stage after the film. I recognize Suzanne Fouty, Ben Goldfarb Kevin Swift and Brock Dolman sitting with Sarah on stage. The man asking questions on the right is Steve Dunsky of the Forest Service.

We were home finally finishing packing the truck and crashing on the couch. Yesterday Jon met with the parks director, picked up the Uhaul and borrowed canopies from the John Muir Association and a friend in town. Today we will meet Amy at 7:30 in the park who will try to get as much drawing in as she can before it gets unbearably hot! Come by if you’re curious to see it unfold!

You are in luck today though because an expert from Ben’s book was published yesterday in Resilience and it made me so happy to read I got that tingly feeling you get when your about to weep tears of joy. I can’t think of anything better to read the day before the beaver festival so I’m posting it here.

Oh and check out the photo btw. 🙂

Close your eyes. Picture, if you will, a healthy stream.

What comes to mind? Perhaps you’ve conjured a crystalline, fast-moving creek, bounding merrily over rocks, its course narrow and shallow enough that you could leap or wade across the channel. If, like me, you are a fly fisherman, you might add a cheerful, knee-deep angler, casting for trout in a limpid riffle.

It’s a lovely picture, fit for an Orvis catalog. It’s also wrong.

Let’s try again. This time, I want you to perform a more difficult imaginative feat. Instead of envisioning a present-day stream, I want you to reach into the past—before the mountain men, before the Pilgrims, before Hudson and Champlain and the other horsemen of the furpocalypse, all the way back to the 1500s. I want you to imagine the streams that existed before global capitalism purged a continent of its dam-building, water-storing, wetland-creating engineers. I want you to imagine a landscape with its full complement of beavers.

What do you see this time? No longer is our stream a pellucid, narrow, racing trickle. Instead it’s a sluggish, murky swamp, backed up several acres by a messy concatenation of woody dams. Gnawed stumps ring the marsh like punji sticks; dead and dying trees stand aslant in the chest-deep pond. When you step into the water, you feel not rocks underfoot but sludge. The musty stink of decomposition wafts into your nostrils. If there’s a fisherman here, he’s thrashing angrily in the willows, his fly caught in a tree.

Although this beavery tableau isn’t going to appear in any Field & Stream spreads, it’s in many cases a more historically accurate picture—and, in crucial ways, a much healthier one. In the intermountain West, wetlands, though they make up just 2 percent of total land area, support 80 percent of biodiversity; you may not hear the tinkle of running water in our swamp, but listen closely for the songs of warblers and flycatchers perched in creek-side willows. Wood frogs croak along the pond’s marshy aprons; otters chase trout through the submerged branches of downed trees, a forest inverted. The deep water and the close vegetation make the fishing tough, sure, but abundant trout shelter in the meandering side channels and cold depths. In A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean captured the trials and ecstasies of angling in beaver country when he wrote of one character, “So off he went happily to wade in ooze and to get throttled by brush and to fall through loose piles of sticks called beaver dams and to end up with a wreath of seaweed round his neck and a basket full of fish.”

And it’s not just fishermen and wildlife who benefit. The weight of the pond presses water deep into the ground, recharging aquifers for use by downstream farms and ranches. Sediment and pollutants filter out in the slackwaters, cleansing flows. Floods dissipate in the ponds; wildfires hiss out in wet meadows. Wetlands capture and store spring rain and snowmelt, releasing water in delayed pulses that sustain crops through the dry summer. A report released by a consulting firm in 2011 estimated that restoring beavers to a single river basin, Utah’s Escalante, would provide tens of millions of dollars in benefits each year. Although you can argue with the wisdom of slapping a dollar value on nature, there’s no denying that these are some seriously important critters.

Isn’t that an enormously translucent opening? Ben does such a heart-racing job of telling the story and bringing the reader personally alongside it’s unfolding. I first read this opening last year when he asked for my thoughts on the manuscript. I read the entire thing in 2 days like without stopping -like I was attending Woodstock or a revival. I knew it would change the conversation forever. and now you should understand why.

Beavers, the animal that doubles as an ecosystem, are ecological and hydrological Swiss Army knives, capable, in the right circumstances, of tackling just about any landscape-scale problem you might confront. Trying to mitigate floods or improve water quality? There’s a beaver for that. Hoping to capture more water for agriculture in the face of climate change? Add a beaver. Concerned about sedimentation, salmon populations, wildfire? Take two families of beaver and check back in a year.

If that all sounds hyperbolic to you, well, I’m going to spend this book trying to change your mind.

Go read the entire except, and be ready for your mind to be blown. What a great day for beavers and the people who throw their festivals! See you tomorrow!

So it begins!

FEELING FESTIVE?

heidi08 Festival June 19, 2018

Let the media promotion begin! The hard-working salmon spends an awful long time banging into the rock before it finally succeeds. And that is exactly how I have felt about getting attention for our whopping festival this year. Well, let this be the first sign that the tides are changing.

Beaver Festival gets new home at Susana Park

MARTINEZ, Calif. – After 10 years of annual appearances at a downtown area that became known as Beaver Park, the Martinez Beaver Festival is moving to Susana Park, organizer Heidi Perryman said.

It’s date has been shifted to the end of June, as well.

And in a fortuitous coincidence, a family of beavers have moved into the creek that runs near the park, she said.

“The 11th Beaver Festival will be full of surprises,” Perryman said.

“The improved venue has boosted interested in the festival, too,” Perryman said. This year’s edition will have more than 50 nature exhibits, making it the largest event since it was begun as a way to celebrate,. rather than condemn, the beavers that had been building a dam in Alhambra Creek in the city’s downtown shopping district.

Why is the festival so much bigger really? Is it just the nicer park? Is it the cumulative effect of being around for a decade finally making people feel like you’re for real? Is it because it’s earlier in the year and fewer people are on vacation? I just had to notify chairs for affairs yesterday that we’ll be needing twice as many tables as usual!

But the beaver dam and the nature exhibits aren’t the only things eventgoers will see.

Amy

Amy G. Hall, a noted chalk artist, will be creating a beaver-themed illustration on the concrete in the park.

Hall is a lifelong fan of beavers, and her home town, Napa, has some, too. Her chalk painting will be of a beaver pond, and it illustrates how beavers benefit other wildlife.

Children attending the festival will be invited to pick up some colored chalk and create their own artwork in spaces near where Hall is working.

HURRAY! Great job plugging Amy. Honestly in September I was worried that she and I might be the only one in the park that day. Now I’m starting to think that might not be so bad.

Ben Goldfarb, an award-winning environmental writer who covers wildlife conservation, marine science and public lands management, will be launching his book, “Eager: The Surprising, Secret Lives of Beavers and Why They Matter.”

He will read excerpts on the festival stage, and Chapter 6 focuses on California, beginning and ending with the story of the Martinez beavers.

The book is published by Chelsea Green, and will be released at the end of the month.

No more pre-orders. It’s out. I just got a notice from Amazon that its on its way. Hurray!

The festival also has inspired the west coast premiere of Sara Koenigsberg’s documentary, “Beaver Believers,” which looks at the animals in light of climate change.

The premiere will take place before the festival, Thursday, Jan. 28, at the Empress Theatre in Vallejo.

Koenigsberg and her students from Whitman College came to Martinez in 2013 to interview Perryman before filming the festival that year. The documentary also looks at how beaver damming could help prevent water loss in the west in addition to telling Martinez’s beaver story.

TAfter the article there is a nice section of how to buy tickets for the premiere!

While many new things are happening this year, those who have visited the festival in the past will see many familiar and popular things, from a day-long musical lineup that includes bluegrass and Dixieland bands, a nature-themed silent auction, the return of beaver tours and special activities for children.

This year, the first 100 youngsters to arrive at the festival will get to build a “beaver pond” of their own, by collecting wildlife stickers from exhibitors and learning how beavers help other animals, Perryman said.

This sticker adventure will mirror Hall’s beaver pond mural design, she said.

While Perryman praised the previous venue as a park that “served us well for a decade alongside our original beaver habitat, she said, “This new home is ideal for the everything we’ve become./” And since the new venue comes with its own dam a short walk away, she added, “it’s like the beavers showed us the way!

The Martinez Beaver Festival will take place from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. June 30 at Susana Park, at the intersection of Estudillo and Susana streets. Admission is free. Those interested may visit the website www.martinezbeavers.org/wordpress.

Whooohoo! It used to weirdly bug me when reporters used my wording from a press release with their name as if THEY had written it. Now I love it. That’s growth, right? There are good things in the works and hopefully the East Bay Times article will follow soon.

Oh and just to keep me feeling relevant, I got a distressed email yesterday from a woman looking for help defend beavers to her HOA in a very large, notoriously unfriendly beaver state. Because of this website my beaver rolodex is large and growing every day, so I was able to introduce her to a local ally who agreed to help her going forward.

Put THAT in a mission statement.