Tag: Beaver Festival

Nobody tells you

heidi08 Festival July 21, 2015

Nobody tells you when you decide to save some beavers that things are going to change dramatically. I mean, how could they? We’re just talking about a handful of rodents, and the whole thing will be over in a few weeks. Or months. It’s harder than you expect. A lot harder. So you try to make the job a little easier by starting a non profit to carry the load and throwing a festival to tip the scales in the public eye. You imagine that it’s like planting a tree, lots of tending for the first 6 weeks or so and then it will lay down deep tap roots and tend itself.

Nobody pulls you aside and says, listen kiddo, you’re taking on something really, really big. I know it seems like fun now. But it will take less time than you think to completely transform the way your life looks. Down to the last detail of when you wake up, what’s in your living room and who you talk to. And you have no idea how much of you it will consume. Honestly.

And then there are these vibrating crystal days like Monday, where the first thing you do in the morning is connect with a favorite reporter who wants to cover the festival, the button project, and the importance of having a major wildlife photographer on hand to teach other people about beavers, and as the day unfolds you arrange a meeting with her editor who wants to profile your work in a feature before the festival, which is really, really good. While you’re finishing the display board for the jewelry in the silent auction, you find you have to repair a blunder you made while trying to be polite that ended up causing possible harm to people you never met, and after you fling about trying to correct the harm, you get reassured by the people who noticed the mistake in the first place that everything is fine now. the mini-crisis actually made two different forces connect that were unaware of each other and that could turn out very, very good for beavers. Oh. Okay, then. Meanwhile you manage to wheedle three companies into arranging their service for the festival more conveniently for your needs without a surcharge, call the printer about the brochures, confirm the fiddlers and the solar unit, and contact everyone you know with children about Saturday.

And finally, when the mail arrived it has a grant from Martinez Kiwanis.

I realized in the buzzy hum of yesterday, that there are parts of all this work I like. There are parts of all this that feel just right. Like I’m using every conceivable piece of whatever talent I might have in just the right way. The funny thing is that there are days like today in my professional life, when you spend all day on the phone with CPS or Probation and have to talk your way up the ladder to get your patient into a different placement, or into the hospital, or blessed with another chance. But those days, when they come, are unbelievably draining. Maybe not in the moment, but afterwards. I always feel later like I could sleep for a week. Maybe because someone’s life is at stake and in the moment you are the only one who can help.

It’s all very different. But familiar.

Anyway, I’m off this morning for an interview with the editor. I heard last night that Suzi had an excellent conversation with the freelance reporter, Jennifer Shaw, who wrote the great article last year. So I’m expecting another wonderful feed to the festival this year, and a great reminder in the public eye about the importance of beavers.

Which is the point.

Whenever there’s a good day like yesterday a part of me crouches in panic that something awful is coming. I’ll let you know if it does. But for now I have to do a thank you note for Kiwanis. They have been so very good to us over the years! I have said before and I’ll probably say again, that all the nice people in Martinez belong to Kiwanis. (Aand all the other ones belong to Rotary.)

Appreciations

heidi08 Beavers or Social Ambasadors, City Reports, Educational, Festival, Who's saving beavers now? August 6, 2014

It’s been a week of treasures and it’s only Wednesday. Yesterday I received this email from a family we met at the dam two weeks ago. They were from Long Beach and eager to see the famous Martinez beavers. Of course our mascots did not disappoint. Since our visitors were so delighted with the show I suggested they might write the mayor and let them know how pleased they were.

Yesterday Michelle sent the entire city council this:

Dear Mr Mayor,

My name is Michelle Lee and I live in Southern California with my family. We’ve done a couple of great American Road Trips in the last twenty years, but this year, we were privileged to witness one of the most emblemic of all Northern American wildlife: the hardworking, family-oriented and stoical Martinez Beaver.

Prior to setting out on our trip this summer, a few weeks ago, we had only ever seen American beavers on film in movies. There is apparently one homed in the Singapore River Safari theme park, but knowing beavers to be highly social animals, we were disappointed but not surprised when we failed to spot it in its enclosure during our visit last year. Imagine how thrilled we were, then, to discover, while researching for our summer trip, http://www.martinezbeavers.org/wordpress, the Worth a Dam web site put up by Heidi Perryman. We have beavers, thriving in their natural environment, right here, in our own backyard!

Martinez was immediately included on our itinerary. Your location was perfect, for us visiting college towns like Stanford, Berkeley and Davis. You have one of the best Thai restaurants in all of California, north through south: the Lemongrass Bistro. Muir Lodge, which provided us with a most tastefully decorated and comfortable room, was just what we needed for our layover. Sal’s Family Kitchen was the perfect breakfast wake-up in the morning.

And you have the beavers. And they were wonderful. We waited at the secondary dam right by the Amtrak station on 14 July 2014, around 6:30pm, and managed to see three beavers, including the kit. Not knowing as much as we could about the habits of these nocturnal mammals, though, we were pretty bummed we didn’t stay till 8 🙁 That said, the beavers we saw kept us entranced for a good hour or so, just swimming about, nibbling in the rushes, doing generally beaverly things.

Now that we’re home, and able to more fully process our summer vacation, which included visits to the Carlsbad Caverns and the Grand Canyon, we can honestly count the Martinez Beavers as one of our most satisfying wildlife experiences. We in Southern California are used to the arid desert, even in this ongoing drought, with our well-watered landscaped city and suburban lawns, so it was quite distressing to see how devastated the land around us was while driving through NorCal. Those tenacious beavers, as corny as it sounds, gave us hope that this drought will eventually pass. Our only regret was we were not able to spend longer in your lovely town than one night. Now, our true regret is having missed this year’s Beaver Festival!

The fact that Martinez has a Beaver Festival indicates that many people do share our fascination with these enchanting animals. However, we were a little surprised, that, of the people we talked to in town, only one person was able to point us in the right direction to the beaver dams, because you have a real treasure in the beavers, and in Worth a Dam. This is such a unique situation you have in Martinez that people are able to observe outside of the artificial and expensive set up of a zoo. We are hopeful that continued education and increased appreciation for the Martinez Beavers will be encouraged to perpetuate and grow. We cannot thank Worth a Dam enough for their information-packed web site. We came from Long Beach just to see this happy beaver family!!

Thanks for taking the time to read this!

Michelle Lee, with Kevin Traster and Loyalty Traster-Lee

Long Beach, California

5 August 2014

Now tell me that wasn’t the best letter you EVER read! Not only did it remind the mayor that the beavers and Worth A Dam are an asset, it must have made those little dollar signs appear in his eyes like on cartoons. She did such a good job that I told her to share it with the local papers so I’m hoping we see it again very soon.

The only part that kind of bugged me was that only one person in town could tell her where the dam was. But when I thought about it I realized that’s actually wonderful. In 2007 when every shop owner on main street was terrified of being flooded every, Susie, Stacey or Sam could have told them. Now the fact that the story isn’t news anymore means that the beavers are no longer a threat and that’s just what we wanted to happen. I thought of Carl Sandburg,

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.

Shovel them under and let me work—

I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg

And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.

Shovel them under and let me work.

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:

What place is this?

Where are we now?

I am the grass.

Let me work.

Carl Sandburg

Well, I suppose the grass has worked in Martinez. Even I can barely remember the injuries of a city who wanted to destroy its treasures. Now I simply bask in the glow of a job well done and a chapter well written.

And this delightful epilogue about “Joe” made me smile.

Martinez Beaver Festival celebrates beaver family living in downtown creek since 2006

Dam fun

Children parade to the strains of Bruce Maxwell’s bagpipe, above, at the start of the seventh annual Beaver Festival on Saturday, in Martinez, that celebrates the beaver family that has been living in Alhambra Creek since 2006. The event, sponsored by Worth A Dam, attracted visitors from everywhere for activities, music and tours of the beavers’ environment by Joe Ridler, right center.

They don’t show the photo on line, but something tells me I’ve seen Joe before.

Countdown and Good will

heidi08 Festival, Who's saving beavers now?, Why We Care August 1, 2014

Today is the day we pick up the U-haul and get the stage from the John Muir Historic site, and then Jon loads the pile of everything into the truck to be ready for tomorrow.

It’s a long day for Jon (especially since he had to meet the restroom delivery at 7:00) but honestly I can’t help but feel relieved it’s finally here. Everyone works terribly hard the day of the beaver festival. The entire day is practically a blur and everyone’s exhausted by the end, but my personal, 6 month trial will be mostly over before the day even begins. All the planning, promoting, wheedling, scheming, arranging and rearranging will be finished. Once I make sure that every item on my many lists gets into that truck, and gets unloaded to approximately the right places tomorrow, my work is pretty much finished. Every single one of my arrows, such as they are, will be fired. Now it will be everyone else’s job to get the baton across the finish line.

I just have to sit in the shade and talk about beavers all day. How hard is that?

So let’s celebrate my impending emancipation with this lovely article. It ran in the Martinez Gazette yesterday and I was surprised to see it because we already got our ‘official’ plug. Vivian Roubal’s inviting writing style makes the entire column a must read, but her finishing paragraphs brought tears to my eyes.

Take a walk on the wild side

A Beaver Festival? By golly, there’s always something going on in Martinez! A day in Martinez can be a wild adventure! A wildlife adventure, that is.

One particularly fine morning in March at about 6 a.m., I stopped on Marina Vista Avenue near Castro Street to check out the beaver dam. Sometimes I get lucky and see the famous Martinez beavers swimming or walking along the creekside, but that morning the waters were fairly calm; a water skeeter-bug here or there and that was it. I was about to continue my walk when I heard a small splashing sound. It seemed to come from right under me, so I got up on tippy-toes and leaned over the chest-high railing on the bridge. I looked straight down, hoping to catch sight of a beaver or whatever made the splash.

Plunk! My brand new glasses (with rhinestones!) fell right off my head and dropped straight down into the creek. A small brown cloud swallowed them up whole. Son of a gun.

Don’t worry her daughter and husband manage to get those glasses back, (with the help of a kind stranger) and the entire operation makes for excellent story-telling. (And explains some footprints!) But this was obviously my favorite part. It starts by recounting the beaver history and then launches into the prose of our good friend Rick Lanman (Rickipedia).

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.”

And the “Worth a Dam” website (MartinezBeavers.org) says, “Beaver experts from across the country have come to Martinez to appreciate this unique setting and learn about our community response. The beavers have become a unifying symbol for an expanding town that can often be uncertain of its center. This represents a unique opportunity to demonstrate humane environmentalism in the home town of John Muir.”

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 7th annual Beaver Festival on Saturday, Aug. 2, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., at Beaver Park (corner of Marina Vista and Castro streets). There will be live music, wildlife exhibits from seven counties, children’s activities and beaver tours. The first 100 children can earn a charm necklace.

Go ahead. Walk on the wild side! Don’t be square, see you there!

How sweet is that? Honestly I was all kinds of touched. It really is a joyful place to be. And this year I feel the benevolence more strongly than any other except maybe the first. The beaver festival seems to unlock generosity in people. I feel like I keep getting lovely surprises that were not at all the result of my planning. Like Deidre Martin organizing the Wetland Express from Oakland, or a volunteer from Auburn contacting me out of the blue to help with two of her relatives, or this email from Faith of the Beavers Rowing Team at Mare Island;

Hi, my name is Faith and I am a member of The Straits of Mare Island Rowing Association. I row for a mixed team that we proudly call The Beavers. This year our youngest team mate was told she has stage 3 breast cancer. In an effort to help her with expenses we has a fundraiser selling green silicon bracelets with the phrase Beaver Believer with beaver prints on each side. We where able to raise $1300.00 for our dear friend, but have quite a few bracelet left over. As a team we decided we would like to donate the remaining bracelets to a great beaver cause. Let me know if you are interested.

So do you think I was interested? The next morning she dropped off about 200 of these at my house.

Those are front and rear foot prints, just so you know. Everyone who volunteers and everyone who picks up at least a 10 dollar item from membership will take one home.Thanks so much Faith and your generous team, I hope your youngest member is doing excellent and sticks around until she becomes your oldest member!

Oh and the truant in me loves the idea that she invites us all to the beaver festival and adds “as long as you have a parking place, you might check out the peddler’s faire.”

And as long as you’ve already found a parking space, might as well enjoy the Peddlers Faire on Main Street where you’ll find plenty to choose from. There will be a huge variety of antiques and collectibles, from glassware to pottery and furniture to Native American wares and much more. Enjoy the downtown stores and the over 50 local craft vendors. Then treat yourself to a fabulous lunch in any one of our great restaurants.

Considering the beaver festival has always been the red-headed step child of the peddler’s faire, once expressly advised to stay clear and now with a greater attendance, TV promotion and better press than it’s patron, I think we’re doing okay. Good will is on our side.

Beavers in the News

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver Rehabilitation, Beaver-themed merchandise, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Environmental July 31, 2014

Chip Ward’s article is marching through the liberal hemisphere – now on Salon and Axis of logic. I’m very thrilled for the promotion but I sure hope it gets picked up by a conservative website soon. We don’t want liberals to be FOR beavers. Because then of course conservatives will be AGAINST them. Let’s emphasize their money-saving, small business owner expertise and get them on National Review Online or Red State soon!

On Axis of logic the editor offered these remarks:

Editor’s Commentary:

Timber is a Canadian beaver. That might not be his real name, but it’s what we call him nonetheless – and he responds to it. Timber was orphaned and successfully raised by a friend of mine, Michele.

It was once thought by scientists that beavers orphaned at a young age could not survive because of the intense family structure of these critters, and the fact an orphan would be shunned by other beaver families. We learned through another friend, Audrey Tournay, that this is untrue. Audrey is renowned worldwide for defying the biologists and showing that beavers can indeed survive and thrive with human nurturing.

Timber became one of the stars of two television programs.

I am in the process of working with Michele to write Timber’s biography and it should be ready later this year (I’m the writer, she’s the story teller – the tentative title is Beavers Never Read the Operating Manual). It will be a book aimed at encouraging young people to learn about, and develop a concern for, the environment all around them. It is not yet too late to save ourselves from ourselves, but we’ll need to engage young people to do it.

– prh, Editor

I’ll look forward to the Timber-files soon. I loved Audrey Tournay’s beaver tales (Audrey was the founder of the Aspen Valley Wildlife Sanctuary where Michelle Grant worked) and I know you did too. In the mean time, two behind the scenes reveals are that the editor PRH is actually Paul Richard Harris who is the husband of Debbie Harris who we helped with beavers in Ontario way back in 2012, (because it’s a very small beaver world and all roads lead to Martinez).

And btw his original editor’s note credited David Suzuki for the documentary and didn’t mention Jari, which I replied to. So this old comment

Timber became one of the stars of two television programs. One, here in Canada, was a David Suzuki produced program called The Beaver Whisperers. The second was produced in the United States by PBS and is called Leave It To Beavers. Go find them: they are both fascinating.

Got magically edited into this one:

One, here in Canada, was a program aired on CBC called The Beaver Whisperers. The second aired in the United States on PBS and is called Leave It To Beavers. Go find them: they are both fascinating. Both documentaries are produced by Jari Osborne.

Which is a kind of reminder that one can make a difference in this topsy turvy beaver world, if you needed one. I myself made a snippet of difference last night on channel 7, but was disappointed my “amazing” interview in the blazing sun was shortened to 15 seconds. Still, its a great plug for the festival anyway, and they snagged tuesday’s footage, gave us credit, got our name right and linked to the right page of the website so I’m very happy.

MARTINEZ, Calif. (KGO) —

The famous beaver family in Martinez is still at it and now officials say they’re actually good for the drought.

Experts say the beaver dams are helping water stay in the creek year round, despite the drought and that’s helping preserve fish and other wildlife.

The group “Worth A Dam” is dedicated to maintaining the beavers in Alhambra Creek.

The president and founder of the group, Heidi Perryman, Ph.D., says, “They’re kind of doing a restoration job for the town of Martinez. They working 24/7. And they’re doing it for free.”

A “Beaver Festival” is planned for this Saturday. It’s taking place from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at Marina Vista and Alhambra Avenue in Martinez.

‘A’ Beaver festival? A? Not THE beaver festival? I guess we should be proud of the fact that there are now SO many beaver festivals in the world we don’t merit the definite article anymore. Hrmph!

Beavers busting out all over!

heidi08 Beaver Art, Beavers and Birds, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers June 30, 2014

Our ad in Bay Nature’s August issue just came out. We’re nicely placed in the upper right hand corner of page 17. Thanks Bay Nature for promoting our beavers! And Amelia for the awesome artwork.

And just in case the nature crowd misses the ad in BN, check out the article in this month’s newsletter for the Mt. Diablo Audubon. The editor kindly allotted me 300 word to convince bird lovers to come to a beaver festival. I am very proud of this particular work. In addition to being one of the most carefully crafted and pithy things I think I ever wrote, it is also exactly 300 words.

Except for the last sentence about MDAS having a booth. Ellis added that.There’s a new chapter of meet the characters for the Beaver Believers film, and it’s not me, but it should be someone you know. In case you don’t recognize her right away, this is the beaver magician Mary O’brien who attended our festival in 2010. She has, along the way inspired me, delighted me, encouraged me, exasperated me and terrified me. Not necessarily in that order.