Yesterday was literally absorbed with details about other people’s beavers. I spent the first half working on my response to the ominous Wildlife Services plan to kill 500 beavers a year in Massachusetts, and then looking up all the sympathetic players I should send it to as well. Here are my comments if you’re the kind of person who’s interested.
Then I got an email from Mary O’brien of the Grand Canyon Trust who will be holding their first-ever beaver festival in Escalante this September. Could I help with a conference call for her and her interns sometime that afternoon so they could ask me questions? There were lots of details for the festival that they needed help with. Of course, after I got over my crippling intern-envy (thinking what it would be like to have hard working brilliant grad students to help with all this) I said absolutely!
What kind of fabric did we use for the tails? Can I send her the designs for them? What kind of paint did we use? How much did we buy? Were there more children or adults at the festival? How did we teach about the Keystone Species idea? Could I send her the sheet we used for the charm bracelet? Could I give her contact info for Mike? How many shirts did we make? How did we divide the sizes? What kind of promotions did we use? How did we advertise the festival? How did you keep one child from painting over everything? Did children ever ruin community artwork?
Well, I loaded her up with information, but I actually never realized how much we did on our own until I heard Mary’s team taking notes on what I worried and puzzled out all by myself during sleepless hours between December and July every year. I had a moment of being very proud of myself, and then a moment of being very jealous when I heard they were having Sherri Tippie come out and do a lecture the night before. (Sigh) One cool idea that they came up with all on their own was to give monetary prizes for an art contest to children, teens and adults. Winning entries will be added to a calendar for a sale next year! The entries from older contestants all need to be done on site in Utah, but little ones from all over are welcome to enter the children’s contest. Here are the rules if you have any budding artists in mind.
After seeing Saturday’s idea of how to visually explain the importance of a keystone species,
Mary found an artist who is going to work on a large scale display. We both liked the idea of having an archway people had to walk ‘through’ to get to the festival! Of course she’s still using her fantastic sound booth concept for having people tell their stories of individual beaver sightings. Honestly, the two-day affair sound like a BLAST!!!
This morning I heard from Lega working on Maine ‘Beaver Daze’. While Mary is committed to not reinventing the wheel, Lega is a veritable wheel-inventing machine!. Here is her graphic for Sharon and Owen’s upcoming talk;
Don’t you want to be there AND Utah AND Colorado? Not to mention her design for a coupon called a ‘beaver buck’ which folks can spend for a 15% discount at participating stores that day! Smart!
Honestly, why is this darn country so big anyway? If these women were my next-door neighbors imagine what we could accomplish together! We would have the biggest, grandest most persuasive beaver festival yet! Even with all the extracurricular activity, our own festival is still coming along. This weekend I had the donated artwork framed, the t-shirts contracted, and the initial map layout completed.
Also I heard from the very generous Chris K. that he had finished our ‘plywood beaver’ silhouette for children to paint on! Imagine this with 500 birds, turtles, and otters painted in! This is about 8 feet wide and should look familiar. Recognize her?
Today’s the big day for Lega and “Beaver Daze” in Maine. She wrote this week that the name felt apt because she was certainly in a daze herself since the preparations were underway. Sharon and Owen came yesterday and will present today on living with beavers. What I wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall! GOOD LUCK! Win new beaver friends and change hearts and minds!
Gosh, can you remember our first beaver festival? We had maybe 7 booths and fewer than 300 people. Children made beaver tails out of paper and FRO, who was just getting to know us, brought clay for an activity. The documentarian Don Bernier was there filming the “Happy Ending” and the rest of us knew better than to think anything was over. In between snapping photos, Cheryl endeavored to work the video camera for our “Video letter to the Mayor.” The first festival was only three hours long. Now here’s a walk down memory lane!
