Tag: Beaver Festival

New Time: New Place: New Beavers.

heidi08 Beavers September 28, 2017

Alright, I am committing our rascally beaver resources to having the festival next year in Susanna Street Park in June and featuring the chalky and amazing talents of Amy Gallaher Hall. There were a lot of pluses and minuses to add in in finally picking a date, the helpers on vacation this date and fiddlers on vacation another. I’ve had no response from our sound guy, but I’ve connected with another and it’s finally done. DONE. (I mean except for all the actual preparation and organizing.) Decisions are the hardest part. Now point me in a direction and it can happen. What was once the first saturday of August in a scruffy park filled with homeless will now be the last saturday of June in a historic and shady park filled with old trees.

In the meantime I heard from a city council member that it was definitely NOT city staff that took out the dams, and was probably a neighbor who was concerned about them. I only know one neighbor whose property touches both dams and that’s the Junior High. So my efforts to soften things last year weren’t as convincing as that big tree the beavers took down and hit another neighbor’s garage, which was very convincing indeed.

Ouch.

In the meantime there was no depredation permit, the beavers are safe and just starting over which they know how to do. And there are lots of beaver explorers hiking around concord wanting to check out that new dam, including Moses and Cheryl so that’s exciting. I made a poster for our upcoming wild birds event, because I figure if there are any people who will protect beavers in Concord, it’s them.

Like waking from a dream

heidi08 Festival August 10, 2017

Did Saturday really happen at all? It seems like a million years ago or underwater very far away. But it must have taken place be cause it got a nice write up in the Gazette this morning with charming photos.

Beaver Festival attracts adults, children, other animals in environmental celebration

MARTINEZ, Calif. – A breeze ruffled the feathers of a great horned owl that blinked at children from his tall perch. A peregrine falcon flapped his wings while Angela Mazur from Native Bird Connections held his jess leash. Both birds, who can’t return to the wild after being injured, were on display Saturday during the 10th annual Martinez Beaver Festival.

While there may be no beavers this year in Alhambra Creek near Beaver Park, at Alhambra Avenue and Escobar Street, others represented the aquatic animals during the celebration.

Most notably, the award-winning biologist Brock Dolman, dressed and portraying his character Buster Beaver, drawled a folksy explanation of the importance of beavers in the ecosystem and how they are affected by the sequences of drought and winter rains.

Dolman is part of Occidental Arts and Ecology Center of the WATER Institute, who often appears at serious or scholarly conferences, such as a recent multi-day meeting about the environment and its effects on salmon. There he tackled such serious subjects as climate change and how restoration projects should adapt for those changes.

In a more casual style, he reminded festival attendees that the Earth is the only habitable planet we can reach, and so it deserves our care. He also described how beavers’ routine activity becomes part of that care that helps many other types of wildlife.

Many other organizations promoted the same message. The Oakland Zoo described the many threats to California’s native pond turtles by letting children play a pachinko-styled game with bolt pegs and ping pong balls, then asked the children to describe how beavers can help turtles.

Other organizations promoted recycling, such as The Garden at Heather Farms booth, where visitors could learn to weave using natural materials, and the Republic Services booth, where R.C. Ferris took old badges, covered them in double-faced tape and showed visitors how to decorate the sticky badge faces with stickers, moss, leaves and other materials to turn them into works of art.

Youngsters small enough to squeeze into small carts decorated like beavers rode around the park, and Julian Frazer, riding his horse, Joey, let his mount join in the day’s theme by decorating his tail to look like a beaver tail.

Plenty of children lined up for the program books that guided them through nine booths where they learned about water, frogs, otters, herons, fish and dragonflies in addition to the beavers and pond turtles. Those who completed their visits collected tattoos they could use in making nature journals.

Bidders had an array of items they could buy, from vacations and excursions to stuffed animals and artwork. The money raised in the silent auction is paying for the festival.

Yes it is, Beth. Thanks for a lovely article. And thanks every person who bid on the silent auction and everyone who donated to it. We got received our last checks yesterday from lucky winners, as well as a very sweet note from ‘Joey from Utah’s‘ sister. So all that means it really happened, right?

And you were there? And you, and you, and you!

Never send a city worker to do a beaver expert’s job…

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, Festival, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Who's saving beavers now? August 8, 2015

Northampton will install rocks to baffle beavers at Fitzgerald Lake

Hark back to 2013, when beavers dammed the area around the outlet pipe that sends water from the lake under the dam and into the Broad Brook. The lake rose about two feet that year, forcing the city to install a wire-mesh fence around the pipe, temporarily holding the beavers at bay.

Ever industrious, the beavers eventually burrowed under the fence, clogging the system again and raising the level of the lake. Some of the trails along the shore were even submerged this year.

Wow, Northampton MA is 20 minutes away from Mike Callahan. I can’t believe he installed a fence beavers burrowed under in 2 years, can you? Let’s use the search function on the website to see if it gives any clues. Here’s one from 2013:

“Once the new fence is in by the city’s contractor I’ll be installing a Flexible Pond Leveler through their fence.”

Ahhhh so it was a “I’ll-save-some-$$-by-doing-this-myself, how-hard-can-it-be” job. Gosh and now you have to spend a grand lowering rocks into the lake to hold down the silly fence that you installed, because otherwise Mike’s excellent flow device will get plugged. Have you learned anything by this? Are you going to stick to the experts next time?

Mike said at the time that this lake was the site of the FIRST flex pipe he ever installed – in 1998. How’s that for a history lesson!

Our dinner guests last night were Bob & Jane Kobres from Georgia. Here they are at the table with our awesome chef and FRO’s beautiful beaver watercolor in the background. He’s the retired librarian from UGA that always sends us beaver research and discretely points out egregious typos so that your reading experience will be slightly less marred. He and his wife made their first trip to California (first time ever) for the beaver festival. (No, really)

Every business they visited in Martinez they made a point of telling was stunned. And they just did a beaver presentation at the children’s program in their church. How awesome is that? At dinner we realized they are truly unique folks: Jane is the daughter of a white baptist deacon from Tennessee that voted for Obama twice.

(How small is that demographic?)

They had a great time watching Bob Rust put together the wattle beaver, and Bob filmed most of it so I hope we can get it on the website soon. They shared a similar knowledgeable quirkiness that I am starting to recognize in beaver lovers. (Myself included). It’s amazing that we have had three separate visits from Georgia in the past few years, and the Blue Heron Preserve in Atlanta is now talking about possibly doing a beaver festival. (Be still my heart!) They went to Muir Beach on their visit and boldly put their bare feet in the Pacific, as well strolling around Muir Woods and the John Muir house here in Martinez.

We’re just about finished with the final exchanges for the silent auction, meeting a lot of folk wednesday at the bridge, and everything is finally put away or tallied. I sent the followup receipts and paperwork for the grants yesterday, and am finally starting to feel done with everything. I got this fun photo from our bag piper yesterday, Dave Kwinter, who said he had a great time at the festival.

Of course I warned him to use caution when saying he enjoyed it, or else we will certainly ask him again!

A Day of Wonders

heidi08 Festival August 2, 2015

Yesterday was amazing, very crowded, very cheerful, very full of children and parents eager to learn. Just how eager? Mark Poulin’s adorable buttons were an astounding hit. Kids were thrilled to learn and EVEN take the post test. Here’s an idea of just how proud they were of their work. Honestly look at those faces and tell me they aren’t beaming.

The musical line-up was amazing, the solar panels beloved, and the help of sound wizard John Koss was invaluable. We had California visitors from San Francisco, Alameda, Auburn and Winters, as well as national visitors from Virginia and Georgia. I didn’t see a single impatient parent or crabby child this year. They were all remarkably helpful, appreciative, and glowing. Everyone said the activity was enormously fun and educational. FRO’s art project was a huge success, and Martinez enjoyed the work of many new painters. Jon’s tours were well attended as always and his voice was thrilled with the assistance of his brand new personal amplifier.

Everyone said the children’s parade was the best organized ever. The Watershed Steward interns were amazing handling the buttons all day and the junior keepers from Safari West were uniformly helpful down to the last tattoo and tent removal. The silent auction was a huge hit and very well staffed, and membership enjoyed the extra helpers as well. Honestly, we had our best helpers ever this year, with sometimes more hands then even WE could put to work!

And no beaver festival would ever be complete without the wildly creative inventions of Beaver devotee and Martinez resident Robert Rust, who this year, after the giant inflatable beaver of 2012, the tail slapping beaver of 2014 decided to blow our minds with a wattle and daub beaver, formed entirely on site of willow and mud – just like a real beaver would make. (If you need a science and history lesson reminder on this technique, look here:)

There were a million other surprises I am forgetting to mention, but suffice it to say it was our best festival yet, and I’m sure all our volunteers could sleep for weeks. Enjoy your quiet sunday and THANKS!

A little more Beaver recognition…

heidi08 Beaver Chewing July 31, 2015

This has been a very BEAVERY week in the news. Yesterday the Gazette chimed in.

At Home With Vivian: Vintage Beavers do Shakespeare

Yay for the Beaver Festival! The annual festival will feature live music, children’s activities, beaver tours and more than 40 ecological booths. Beavers in down town Martinez? Of course. Martinez has something for everyone.

According to my friend Wikipedia, “Now protected, the beaver have transformed Alhambra Creek from a trickle into multiple dams and beaver ponds, which in turn, led to the return of steelhead and North American river otter in 2008 and mink in 2009. The Martinez beavers probably originated from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta which once held the largest concentration of beaver in North America.”

Jeff and I enjoyed the Beaver Festival last year. There were lots of wildlife informational booths, many activities for children, and guided tours of the beaver habitat. It was a joyful place to be.

So do something out of the ordinary. Come to the 8th annual Beaver Festival on Saturday, Aug. 1, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., at Beaver Park (corner of Marina Vista and Castro streets). First 150 children attending will be able to collect 19 wildlife pins designed by Oakland artist Mark Poulin. The charms were purchased with a grant from the CCC Wildlife Commission. According to the Worth a Dam website (MartinezBeavers.org) “The activity will highlight the new wildlife seen in Alhambra Creek since the beavers arrived, and emphasize their role as a Keystone Species.”

To be honest, nothing makes me happier than when folks use Wikipedia to write about our beavers. Since our great friend Rickipedia is the one who wrote it, and he tells the story the exact same way I would. It’s a long column about cool things to do in Martinez and of course the peddler’s fair gets top billing, but never mind. It’s been a GRAND media week.

This morning I got an inquiry from the Martinez Tribune. Tribune? Apparently they saw a beaver near a wooden palate at Ward Street and wonder if we gave it to them to eat. (!) (Obviously they’re going to be another prescient media source in the metropolis.) Here’s the Tribune’s fun photo which is on their Facebook page this morning.

Finally a big article in the National Wildlife Federation this week about the science involved in beaver chewing trees. This has caused a little debate in the beaver world and I was waiting until there were clearer answers from the author. But in the meantime, you might as well enjoy the icing on the cake of a beaverly week.

Beavers: Masters of Downfall

How do beavers fell trees in a preferred direction? A 10-year study reveals the answer.

For the past 10 years, I have come here every summer with my research team from the University of Arizona to study the beaver’s most iconic yet poorly understood behavior: tree felling. Studies have shown that more than 70 percent of all large felled trees crash in the direction of the water where a beaver’s lodge is located, which is to the animal’s advantage. But the question I hoped to answer was: How do beavers make the complex calculations required for such accuracy? After a decade of study, hundreds of tree measurements and thousands of hours of direct observations and camera recordings, we now know the answer.

In beavers’ work, just as in human logging, the directionality of a tree fall is produced by the “hinge”—uneven cuts on opposite sides of the trunk. A tree with a cut on just one side, no matter how wide, can collapse in any direction. But an additional small cut on the opposite side will make the fall strongly directional, with the direction depending on whether the second cut is above or below the initial cut. If it’s above the first cut, the tree will fall in the direction of the initial cut; if below, the tree will fall the opposite way.

Making that second cut uneven in height to produce the hinge depends on changes in the beaver’s posture (sitting or standing) and the slope on which the tree is growing. On a tree that grows uphill from the water, for example, if a beaver starts cutting on the uphill side then simply circles the tree without changing its posture, it will produce a second cut below the first one—and a directional fall of the tree towards the water. Likewise, if the beaver starts its work on the downhill side of the tree and maintains its posture as it circles the tree, the tree will also fall toward the water.

We discovered that nearly all large trees in the area, especially those farther from water, had circular cuts of uneven heights and depths or directional hinges. In flat areas, beavers typically started their work on the side closest to water, gradually widening the cut over consecutive nights. Notably, as they circled the tree, they would rise on their hind legs, producing a second cut on the opposite side that was higher than the initial one. In just a few days, such trees would crash directly towards the water.

So beavers use directional cutting like loggers. Which surprises us not at all. But sparked a debate on whether trees fall towards the water naturally because they lean towards the open light. It seems to me that some trees don’t lean at all, and the research takes that into account in noting that they had directional cutting. Also that trees on the slope did NOT have it, because they didn’t need it to fall towards the water. It’s an interesting article, you should go read the whole thing.

And if you want to JOIN the National Wildlife Federation and maybe sign up for a subscription to Ranger Rick, you can do that tomorrow because Beth Pratt of the California chapter will be exhibiting there.

You’re coming tomorrow, right?