To be-aver or not to be-aver

SCARED STRAIGHT: (BEAVER VERSION)

When I lay dying, probably sooner than I’d like, surrounded by strangers and IV drips, I’m likely going to remember four important things: That I helped a few special children make a path through horrific pain, that I picked the right husband and was lucky he picked me, that I helped convince our city to let 27 kits be born in Alhambra Creek and that in my own tiny way I encouraged men and women across the continent to try this also.

Like Steve Straight in Connecticut who closed his comments to the South Windsor city council last night with these incredible remarks:

Instead of wasting more money and time killing beavers nearly every year going forward, I would like to suggest that we follow the expert’s recommendations. I call on the Town Council to stop any trapping of beavers now, and to work instead toward coexistence with the next beavers, and to let the citizens of South Windsor enjoy these fascinating creatures as they go about their work creating a tremendous ecosystem that harms no one.

Let’s be clear: The beavers are not going away. And by the way, neither am I.

Powerful, awesome last line, Steve. You are, without a doubt, the single best thing that will ever happen to beavers in South Windsor. You can’t imagine how much this matters, to the community, to the council, to the next hopeful person who will try to follow in your footsteps. I’m so grateful our paths crossed and that you were ready to take up the beaver gauntlet.

Great victory after great pain.

Meanwhile there are plenty other things to be proud of in our beaver hall of fame. Like the beaver ambassadors stellar work in their promotional video for friday night’s premier of Sarah Koenisberg’s film on beavers and climate change.

The teen group is organized and inspired by Esteban Murschel who has been hard at work for two years trying to build a community interest around beavers in West Linn Oregon. He drove down for our festival in 2015 and would have come last year but for the very timely birth of his first son!

Something tells me that this friday the performance auditorium is going to be packed.

Fantastic performance! It is so fun to see you celebrate beavers and use all these talents on their behalf. I especially love your matching ‘portland weather uniforms’ (rain jacket and jeans). You couldn’t have picked a better song.

Although I’m not sure I could have avoided tinkering with the lyrics a little.

A watershed, a watershed
A watershed, a watershed
A watershed, a watershed
A watershed, a watershed

In the river
the peaceful river
the beaver swims tonight

With the fishes
And frogs and heron
the beaver swims tonight

We-e-e-e we’re the engineers
We-e-e-e we’re the engineers

AMBASSADOR TO BEAVER LAND

heidi08 Who's saving beavers now? February 9, 2018

One of the things we have struggled to do here in Martinez is make our beavers more accessible, less misunderstood, and part of the community. The lion’s share of that work was done by the beavers themselves, who chose downtown for their home and lived fairly public lives showing off their habits and preferences. They were the original “Beaver ambassadors” and we just took our cue from them. We explained to people what they did and what they were seeing and doing our best to make the city not kill them.

Steven Murschel of West Linn Oregon takes it one step farther. I can’t believe this article slipped past me nearly 3 weeks ago, but I’m so glad it was brought to my attention now.

WL ‘Beaver Ambassadors’ group sheds light on misunderstood animal

It was at that point that the West Linn Beaver Ambassadors group was born. For almost a year now, Murschel and others have led activities with schools, organizations and groups of volunteers in an effort to “increase awareness for the community about the beavers that live in West Linn and why this species is so important to the natural ecosystem.” Most recently, on Jan. 11, Murschel led educational workshops with two classrooms at Willamette Primary.

“I work with schools a lot,” Murschel said. “And I’m doing a lot of community events so that the community is more aware of the beaver population and the incredible benefits beavers can provide”

West Linn’s beavers — which have made homes at Mary S. Young Park as well as the Willamette, Robinwood and Fields Bridge parks — are behaviorally nocturnal and thus rarely seen out in the open. But their handiwork is abundant, and it takes just a short walk along the paths at Mary S. Young Park to see several beaver-made ponds sheltered by dams and surrounded by trees that have been caged to prevent further gnawing.

Steven takes his work serious and is making a serious difference. I can’t even imagine what it would be like for EBRP, for example, to have a beaver educator on board to educate folks in every park about the animal. Steven came to the festival last year and will be an exhibitor at the event this year. (If you needed further proof about the role the story of Martinez played in his work check out the photo in the presentation he is giving to that classroom. It might look familiar.)

“When they build the dam, the creek flowing through gets stocked up,” Murschel said. “Instead of a creek, you have a pond, and a pond is an excellent drinking source, so it will bring larger mammals for drinking. It’s a home for reptiles and amphibians and also for insects and smaller bugs — macroinvertebrates.

“When the smaller things start to come as a result of the slow of flow, then everything that eats those things comes, and everything that eats those things comes.”

In rainy Oregon, beavers also do their part to prevent flooding, according to Murschel. He compared beaver dams to the man-made bioswales and rain gardens that have become popular solutions for water runoff.

“People tend to think beavers cause a lot of flooding,” he said. “Flooding problems definitely happen, but in a bigger sense they’re holding back more water; they’re containing more water.”

Steven gets pretty excited about his work with kids, teaching them why beavers matter. He’s happy to share his ideas and is ready to learn from everyone. This is what it says about us on his website. Sometimes I like to imagine what it would be liked if he worked for Martinez and was hired to manage their beaver ambassador program. Then I break out into a hysteric fit of giggles and have to lie down.

“What we’re really trying to do is bring a lot of awareness to the fact that beavers are back, and we have these rare opportunities in some of our parks to showcase what they do,” Worcester said. “People — especially kids — are really interested … and we’re doing more outreach and some nighttime programs to kind of see beavers in different parks.”

I”I want to build in some mechanisms to have it continue in perpetuity,” he said. “And how you do this is certainly a challenge. But the website and all of the social media will certainly be there, so maybe they can continue to have interns work on it at a lower capacity.

“What they’ll definitely get out of it are management plans for this site and a couple of other sites in the city where beavers have impacted massively — that will be incredibly helpful to the city.”

Yes it will. And it’s incredibly helpful to every city to see what you’re doing and remember what’s possible. Steven is making such a difference in the lives of so many people and beavers I’m so glad that he was received the credit he deserves with this excellent article.

Martinez is looking forward to learning from you in June!

Did someone say you were throwing a party for me?

heidi08 Beaver Art, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Who's saving beavers now? August 11, 2017

You know how things sometimes happen when you least expect them? Well, yesterday we saw the city workers in Susanna street parking checking out something in the creek so we wondered what it was and went to have a look. We’d been noticing that the water seemed to be backing up a bit and meant to investigate but with the Festival and all we never got around to it. Guess what we saw yesterday? Go ahead, guess.

It is right in the bend in the creek and impossible to easily see either from the Susanna Street bridge or from the Henrietta Street end. But if you climb on something tall and crane your neck around the corner you will see an overgrown incised stream with a tiny little dam being started. And some of the wood appears to have beaver chews on it. The beaver itself is obviously a little loner or a poor planner because if he had any friends at all he would take out that leaning tree and let it fall on the dam to get things started in a big way!

sbdam — *Little dam behind Susanna street park: Susan Berg photo*

The funny thing is someone at the festival said they saw a beaver the morning of the festival near Starbucks, but we chalked it up to the crazy things you hear from people that you shouldn’t get excited about. Now we wonder if it might have been true. Jon looked several times last night and saw no beaver, and Susan and her grandkids came down to check it out with no luck either. But who knows? It certainly is a beaver dam, whether the builder is still around remains to be seen. Here’s a little map if you want to do your own snooping.

And in case you wondered, it’s about a block from my house, which is just neat.

Susan and her granddaughters originally came to get journal making supplies because they missed the festival because of a family reunion. I asked them to earn their journals by recording the audio for the film I might make about the project. If you want to hear bright cheerful girls talking about how beavers benefit the ecosystem, take a listen to these three minutes. They gave me lots to work with so hopefully I will be able to clip it together and make some great audio for the film.

Meanwhile, I was working on this yesterday form the idea Steve Murschel from West Linn Oregon gave me about playing ‘pin the beaver on the keystone‘ with children at our forest service event next month. I’m thinking it will be a nice way to teach kids about the idea of a keystone species and how beavers help the ecosystem. What do you think?

So quiet you could hear a piano drop…

heidi08 Beaver Art, Educational, Festival July 21, 2017

I’m not going to lie to you, yesterday was exhausting. Some days are. I’ve learned to expect a certain amount of wear and tear pre-beaver festival. But this? Well, no one is ready for the sky to fall, no matter how braced they appear to be.

It started when the solar company I had been uselessly disappointed in for raising the price 150% from what we had been paying for 5 years, suddenly sent me a friendly email that the price would be LOWERED meaning we would save nearly 300 dollars. And it just got weirder from there.

Next, the email acquaintance from Oregon who had been writing me to ask for advice about public education about beavers because he had been hired by the Parks and Rec department of West Linn to do just that, suddenly announced that he was coming to the festival to learn from the best. He showed some adorable photos from the activities he had tried last week including our paper bag puppets. And shared a brilliant game he had invented called “Pin the beaver on the Keystone!” And then said and that he was developing a new website called “BEAVER AMBASSADORS” to boot. Here’s what the main page says about us.

You should go check out the site and explore its growing delights. I honestly don’t know what is more surprising. That someone gets paid by his city to basically do what we do every day for free, OR that someone thinks our site is a valuable resource!

Shortly thereafter, a buddy of Bruce Thompson from Wyoming, who is the program coordinator for “Wyoming Untrapped” asked if we had any educational posters we might be willing to share so they could do more beaver education on their site. I sent her our recent poster and she was stunned by how helpful and beautiful it was. She’s going to use it with credit from us and the artist.

Then the brochures were ready to be picked up, then I met with a good friend who was donating beautiful things for the festival auction, then I was called by the Times who wants to do a big spread on the festival the week before, and then I went to bed and slept like I had outrun a giant snowball for days.

I get soo uneasy when wonderful things happen.