Bill LEikam – Worth A Dam

The beaver is back: Pair of the semiaquatic rodents spotted in Palo Alto

More than 160 years ago, the sight and sound of beavers in local creeks was likely common, splashing their paddle-like tails with their brown bodies gliding through the water with noses just above the water line.

But now, the beaver is back. In April, the first beaver was spotted in a remote stretch of Matadero Creek. Today, there are two of the chubby herbivores. If they successfully reinhabit local creeks, the presence of these large, semiaquatic rodents could herald a return of other long-disappeared species, including salmon, endangered amphibiasemins and birds, according to scientists.

The beavers might also play crucial roles in recharging groundwater, repairing stream-channel erosion and restoring wetlands, said Dr. Rick Lanman, a Los Altos-based physician scientist, historical ecologist and president of the Institute of Historical Ecology.

For Lanman, whose groundbreaking work found that beavers were native to Santa Clara County, the journey to rediscover beavers began in 1987. His Los Altos home is located near Adobe Creek.

Oh goodness, Hi Rick! Great t0 see you back in the papers, I’ll share just one more quote and then you have to go read the whole thing yourself.

Nine years after Lanman and the Institute of Historical Ecology published their findings, in April, Palo Alto resident Bill Leikam, co-founder and board president of the Urban Wildlife Research Project, documented the first modern evidence of beavers in a remote section of Matadero Creek. Leikam, who is known for his research on the celebrated baylands gray foxes, captured images of a beaver on trail cameras after being alerted by a friend. First one, and then two beavers appeared in the ghostly black-and-white images.

The two beavers spotted this year in Palo Alto, if a compatible pair, could potentially mate and start a colony of little beavers with the potential to inhabit San Francisquito Creek and move into adjacent San Mateo County. At a certain point, in favorable habitat and with an open corridor, the population could jump, Lanman said.

“It’s gonna get real interesting. When they reach there, they’ll be able to come upstream, and that’s a big system. And it’s important because beaver provide important ecosystem services. Beaver ponds are insect cafeterias for coho salmon fry. Survival increases like 200 times when there’s a beaver pond for them. It’s a sheltered place filled with bugs,” he said, and provides shelter for steelhead trout and for Chinook salmon.

Beaver footholds across the landscape are making a huge difference. And creating a kind of scaffolding that allows support for the next beaver step across the landscape. We are building as we go.

In the city of Martinez, beavers colonized Alhambra Creek and turned the waterway from a trickle to multiple rich ponds and dams. The creek now hosts steelhead trout, and river otter, mink, green heron, hooded mergansers and tule perch, a species of fish likely not previously seen in Alhambra Creek, according to the website martinezbeavers.org.

Lanman and Leikam hope the Palo Alto beavers will also usher in an enriched ecosystem.

“It’s so exciting for me to see. Ten years later after we published these papers, finally they show up a couple of miles from my house,” Lanman said.

Yesterday while I was busy writing about how we were lucky that rare individuals took on certain species and protected them, this was published about our good friends Bill Leikam and Greg Kerekes in Palo Alto. It’s not about beavers, but you will recognize immediately why it merits discussion here.

Palo Alto: Gray foxes decimated by disease in December

PALO ALTO — For seven years, Bill “The Fox Guy” Leikam has kept close tabs on the gray foxes that lurk largely unseen amid scrub and marshland near the edge of San Francisco Bay. So he was quick to notice that they’re in trouble.

The 17 foxes belonging to four skulks, or groups, that Leikam has studied as a retirement hobby and given names like Dark, Sideburns and One-Eye, have gone missing or turned up dead in the last month, victims, he believes, of a fast-spreading disease.

“It was like a black wind swept through the area and infected all of them,” said Leikam. “They’re all gone now.”

Twelve dead gray foxes have been found, with two sent to the state Department of Fish and Wildlife for analysis. Five more are missing and believed dead. Wildlife officials say they are victims of canine distemper syndrome — a common virus that afflicts carnivores, including man’s best friend. But while the family dog is usually inoculated against the disease, wild relatives including foxes, coyotes and wolves as well as raccoons and skunks, are very vulnerable.

Other possible culprits wildlife officials considered before tests confirmed distemper included speculation that the animals could either have been poisoned deliberately by people who consider them pests, or accidentally by eating poisoned rodents or even toxic mushrooms.

Dr. Deana Clifford, a lead veterinarian with Fish and Game and researcher at UC Davis, said that such numbers are “unfortunately very typical of a localized outbreak” and that the virus can “dramatically reduce the number of animals in an area and even make it seem like they’ve disappeared altogether for a while.”

Leikam been called the “Jane Goodall of gray foxes,” and said he was the first person to do a comprehensive assessment of gray fox behavior in the country since he first happened upon a specimen while on a bird-watching hike in 2010. Unlike the invasive red foxes that are also found in the area, the gray fox is native and has the unusual ability of being a canine that can climb trees.

Recently, Leikam and Kerekez have been talking with other conservationists about the need for better wildlife corridors. David Johns of the Wildlands Project said that when Leikam told him about the die-off, he thought it was a clear example of the need for animals to have more room to roam.

“You have this small population, they’re often very genetically similar, and very easy to wipe out if they are susceptible,” Johns said. “That’s why connectivity is so important — it’s a reach for these foxes to find other populations that are bigger and wilder and that might bring in some new genes.”

All the foxes in an entire city wiped out by distemper, and two guardians left with nothing to guard. This article gave me a total flashback of our lost kits, and Junior. I think I even called the high tide a ‘wave of death’ that took them away at the time. Deanna Clifford was the same veterinarian who was investigating our kit mortality. And many locals logically assumed poison. Or rat poison. It was hard not to.

But for us there were no causes to pinpoint: no culprits to blame and identify. Beavers can’t get distemper and what they could get and they knew to look for was never found. We couldn’t even say a wildlife corridor would protect them, because our beavers had all Carquinez Strait as their corridor and we think that’s where death came from. (Come to think of it, maybe that’s what our beavers think too and that’s why they moved so far up stream?)

He has single-handedly changed the way we see foxes, and those lost 11 souls helped him. Bill is attentive to the issue, be he says not heartbroken. Maybe it’s a boy thing, or maybe it has to do with watching them on camera instead of in person, or maybe I’m just a big baby. He and Greg will be at our next festival so you can ask him then. In the mean time we can just be sorry and watch Moses wonderful video again of the young foxes down near where the beaver dam was,