Tag: Brock Dolman

Surprises

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Environmental, Festival, Friends of Martinez Beavers July 12, 2012

Remember the washout tale from Spring Farm Cares a month ago? Well things are looking up and Matt Perry is continuing to carefully observe their robust recovery. Four kits were born in his very healthy colony this year, and he’s enjoying their nightly interactions. He hasn’t seen Dad since the washout and that’s very familiar since our patriarch left after the big washout too. Actually some biologists suggest that this wandering is looking around at p0ssible suitable territory in case the family needs to move. Anyway, he’s a lovely writer and watcher, so you’ll want to go read for yourself.

Great news from the beaver festival: we just found out director of the OAEC Water Institute and winner of this year’s ‘Golden Pipe Award‘ Brock Dolman will be joining Kate Lundquist to host their booth. Brock is a permaculture expert and educates landowners, laypeople, politicians, and anyone who will listen about the benefits of beavers and better water storage. He is a dynamic and coveted speaker all over the country where he uses his uniquely curly, rhyming, thesaurus-laden, language stream that you have to hear first hand to believe to change minds and waken sleepers. In fact he would never say ‘educate’. He’d say something like ‘watershED-ucate, faciLACTate, permaCOAXE the Re-inVENTture map-italism of land-escape artisTRY. Really. If you don’t believe me come be dazzled in conversation with him yourself. You’ll never look at storm drains, beavers, or salmon the same way again.

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And for your daily dose of snark I will just add that last night we heard a rumor that someone who should know better [meaning everyone should know better, but this person REALLY should] was talking to Moses at the dam and actually asked if “This was all the kits we were going to have” or if we thought “they’d LAY MORE”.

We’ve been giggling about it all night. Lay more? Since beavers are MAMMALS, born live, nurse on their mothers and don’t actually hatch from an egg, the kindest explanation I can possibly offer is that they mixed them up with these. I guess the bill looks kind of like a beaver tail.

Beavers and Heroes

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Educational, History, In the News April 11, 2012

UPDATE:

Ian Timothy makes beaver waves in Kentucky. Out of state voices rattle the council and leave a lasting impression. Go read the whole article, you will love every syllable!

The Great Beaver Massacre occurred in the city of St. Matthews sometime in early March. That’s really the only fact everybody agrees upon. (OK, so even that isn’t an agreed-upon fact by all parties involved.) Like so many government-sponsored atrocities before it, the alleged savagery is shrouded in secrecy and official denials of knowledge. In fact, Robert Tonini, a member of the St. Matthews City Council, claims he didn’t know anything about it until mid-March when emails started pouring in. St. Matthews officials have received missives from as far away as California, Maine and New Zealand. All of them with the same claim: Someone had embarked on the demolition of beaver dams in Arthur K. Draut Park.

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Then check out the other good beaver tidings! My article as published in the spring newsletter of the John Muir Association. Click on the image for a fun read linking the city’s famous conservationist to a famous beaver advocate!

And stay tuned for some very good news for beavers in California!

At the annual conference we have an award ceremony to recognize and honor leaders in the watershed restoration community. The Golden Pipe award is an annual award presented by the Salmonid Restoration Federation for innovators in the fisheries restoration field. Usually this award is bestowed upon a pioneer in the habitat restoration field who has been a leader or unique thinker in fish passage design or innovative restoration techniques.

On March 7th, 2012 in Davis, CA the Salmonid Restoration Federation presented this award to Brock Dolman, the Director of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center’s WATER Institute for his leading role as a proponent of “working with beavers” to restore native habitat. Brock helped co-found the ad hoc California Beaver Working Group, networked with groups utilizing beavers from all over the country, and made strategic contacts with state and federal agencies that oversee wildlife and fisheries conservation and recovery efforts.

Brock has been a Paul Revere for the Beaver, shouting its virtues and mobilizing communities to consider working hand and paw with these creatures who naturally know how to restore habitat and protect instream flows.

This pushes beavers a long way into the forefront on the salmon campaign and moves us all closer to the inevitable day when any city ripping out a beaver dam will need to pay a fish – fine – and I couldn’t be happier! Congratulations Brock and keep up the good work!

Beaver Chorus

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Educational, Environmental April 3, 2012

Looks like the Pittsburg zoo is doing a spring wildlife month, where every day in April they are releasing an educational film about an animal. Guess what gets top billing?

Out of the Wild: The American beaver

Welcome to “Out of the Wild,” a daily series from The Tribune-Democrat, working with the Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium. Every day in April, we’ll introduce you to a different North American animal – with information about each species’ habitat, behavior, diet and unique or interesting features.

Not a bad choice for your first effort! I’m not sure you clarified the ‘debate’ about whether beavers harm or improve the environment. You made it sound exactly like the ‘debate’ on whether the glass is half empty or half full. Tell me a real reason people think beavers harm the environment and then we’ll have a ‘debate’, but let me warn you, beavers are excellent debaters!

There’s good news across the pacific coast, starting with the 30th Annual Salmon Restoration conference this week in Davis. Registration is closed but there will be a convergence of beaver friends making implicit and not so implicit arguments about the role of beaver dams. Oh and Chuck Bonham the new director of Fish & Game will be giving one of the opening addresses so you know this message is getting to the right ears.

Should Streams be Managed as Drainage Networks or Habitat Networks?

Michael M. Pollock, NOAA,

Northwest Fisheries Science Center

Ooh Ooh! I know! Call on me! The whole thing will start off with a bang when Brock gives a talk focused on salmon and beaver…I’m apparently not supposed to say anything but since no one really pays that much attention to what I say I will pass along his description…

Also – SRF is gonna be fun – we have my beaver focused talk on Wed., we have Michael Pollock talking, Eli, OAEC WATER and Sanctuary Forest/Mattole will all be tabling together at Friday night’s poster session – so beaver-palooza will be in full swing that night – and for your ears only there is rumor that on Sat., night of the banquet there will be a skit featuring a face off debate between a human large woody engineer and a beaver all sizes of wood engineer!

Back story: creek people used to ‘clean up’ woody debris by hauling it away, and then found out that it was VERY important to the food chain and fish. So now they are busy ‘installing woody debris’ themselves. Of course we all know who would happilydo that for free, but there is a running argument whether it’s better to install debris or let beavers do it (because you know beavers are so icky!). Here’s Pollock’s slide on the issue. LWD stands for large woody debris and ‘smolt’ are baby salmon. Oh and Eli’s poster presentation will include my slide on the different types of flow devices so we can promote effective beaver management!

Hope someone films the skit I’m not supposed to have written about! I’ll make sure to tell you all about it!

Brock also let me know that he will be Keynote Speaker for the Eel River Symposium later this month. The lineup looks amazing and since we know their are beaver on the Eel it would be good to teach people why they’re useful.

Not to be outdone, I just heard from Leonard Houston of the Beaver Advocacy Committee in Oregon that he has been asked to be on a beaver panel this month for the Oregon Desert Association coming up in September in Bend. Preach Beavers to the Desert, Leonard!

What else? Oh the charming city of Nashua of the infamous beaver incident printed my letter to the paper today. Non-suscribers can’t read it, but I’ll give you the text.

It’s stunning to me that in the entire community of Nashua there is apparently not anyone who recognizes that a young, dispersing beaver is trying to get to the water and will likely be hit by traffic if not assisted. Exposing school children to this heartless failure is unfortunate. This could have been a powerful opportunity to show children what communities can accomplish when they work together and how good it feels to help each other or another species. Instead it was a flurry of morning activity ending with a pointless death. Dispersal of young beavers seeking their own territory happens every march, and Nashua should learn from this event and have a plan to deal better with it next time.

Watershed moment, indeed!

heidi08 Beaver Art, Beaver News, Beavers, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, Why We Care June 20, 2021

Wow. Yesterday was a dazzling blur, and I’m still trying to feel my way through it. We woke up early to pick Michael Pollock up at the train station, then drove to the meeting at Occidental where we found a room full of 20+ folks I had been emailing for the past year from various government and environmental agencies all ready to work hard, talk about beavers and change the way folks saw the role of beavers in watershed.

Some of them I knew, like Brock, Rick, Lisa and our Tahoe friends, but some were a delightful introduction to someone I had swapped email with but never met. It was a positive, knowledgeable, cheerful, pragmatic and very intriguing group. Michael found out at the last minute that he lost travel funding so Worth A Dam made the decision to pay for him to come down. I figured that having him there would really make a difference and was worth the train ticket. Brock and Rick are kicking in too.

The meeting was well facilitated by the OAEC’s director Dave Henson, and started with introductions and background. Then Rick and I reviewed the historical distribution paper and talked about where beaver belonged. Pollock made the excellent point that he couldn’t think of another instance where government agencies were relying so heavily on a 70 year old paper, and we all talked about how to change the mindset of today.

Then he presented his data from the current work which is looking particularly at beavers and steelhead, having pretty handily answered any Coho questions. After which we were treated to a delicious lunch, mostly grown on site, and a tour of the gardens. I chatted with our Tahoe friends about their upcoming grant project to get funding for school presentations and their 501.3(c) application.

After lunch we talked about obstacles and made schemes for the work that needs to be done to get a beaver management plan at CDFG that recognized beaver’s incredible assets, acknowledged the damage done to habitat and wetlands by their removal, and required that certain steps be taken to try and solve the problem humanely before trapping. Then we went around the room and discussed what we had taken from the day and what we were going to do next to advance our goals.

Somewhere in the day, Eli Asarian agreed to do the hydrology graph for our article, Lisa gave me a present of a lovely antique postcard from her grandmother, Rick gave me an adorable and entirely fitting ornament of a beaver curled up in a gift box, and Pollock gave me a series of frames containing the historic 1930 article from Popular Science about beavers on Mars – along with the most whimsically charming beaver card I believe I will ever see that he bought in Montana. Here’s the Monte Dolack painting that it’s from.

Afterwards there was dinner, conversation, and wine before a stroll under a brightly jeweled cold and clear starry sky that poured the Milky Way right onto our car.

Chuck James, the archeologist who found the remnant beaver dam all those years ago and kick started the historic paper with his efforts, followed us back to Vallejo before heading off to Redding), and we got home sleepy and dazzled from the day. After a chat by the fire and look at the giant beaver skull (which Pollock had always wanted to see) and the scrapbook of our first year’s beaver story, (which he was less eager to see but he just had to look at to ‘get’ Martinez story), we brought him back to the train station where he embarked on another 22 hour journey home.

(My lost weekend was unbelievable, but his has to be something out of Salvador Dali.)

Well 2012 might not be the “year of the beaver” but I am more hopeful than ever before that big things are moving and shifting on the beaver front. This is as good an opportunity as any to thank the literally thousand of helpers that have cared about our beavers, cared about beavers in general, or taught us valuable lessons along the way.

It is said that the journey of a 1000 miles begins with a single step but when I finally fell asleep last night it felt more like we had just taken a series of sprinting leaps.

California Working Beaver Group Meeting at OAEC

The Best Laid Schemes o’ Men and Beavers…

heidi08 Beaver-themed merchandise, Beavers, Creative Solutions, Environmental, History December 3, 2011

In proving foresight may be vain;

The best-laid schemes o’ mice beavers an ‘men

Gang aft agley,

An’lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,

For promis’d joy!

Robert Burns 1785

Beaver friend Brock Dolman is getting ready for an address to the Wild Farm Alliance, and he wants to include information about how truly useful beavers can be to water and soil management, so he went surfing through the annals of history and look what he found!

That’s right, straight from the USDA a recommendation to start beaver farms along the Canadian border. That’s the father of APHIS who eliminated about 30, 000 beavers last year from California alone, not to mention all the ducks they shot at airports and woodpeckers they kidnapped from Rossmoor. Why on earth, you ask, would they recommend beaver farms? Let’s let the once-evident knowledge of USDA answer that question for us.

through storing water in the reservoirs along mountain streams, they would do much good by helping prevent floods and extensive erosion, by increasing the stream flow in dry weather, and by improving the fishing resources of streams and lakes.

Ahhh the former wisdom of the ages. Sniff. How we miss you. Don’t worry. It gets better worse. Nice to know they weren’t THAT smart about beavers….otherwise I’d get all depressed and wistful. Let’s let them keep talking. I’m sure we’ll get to something familiar eventually.

Beavers, the Survey has found, can be kept readily in a fully controlled if not a fully domesticated state. Because the animals are comparatively clumsy and slow walkers, they rarely go more than 20 or 30 rods from their home stream.To confine them to a narrow strip along a certain stream, therefore, it is only necessary to fence across the stream a short distance above and below their colony, running the fences at right angles to the stream about 30 rods on each side.

Now that I recognize! Expedient ignorance posing as research to reinforce the already foregone conclusion! Some things never change! “Don’t worry potential farmers! Beavers never wander! There’s no wind in the desert and we have pages of science to prove it.” I have to wonder what the a fore mentioned “survey” consisted of. Do you suppose it involved a researcher with a clipboard?

“On a scale of 1-5 how likely are you to walk overland away from your home stream? Choose 1 for Very Likely, 2 for Moderately likely, 3 Not Sure, 4 Moderately Unlikely and 5 Very Unlikely.”

Whoa. I’m having a Test Construction flashback. Give me a minute until the Likert dust resettles. Whew, that was close. Okay, let’s leave the cobwebbed shelves of graduate school and visit the halls of beaver research. First of all what’s a rod anyway? It’s an archaic measurement of distance that equals 16.5 feet. So 20-30 Rods would be about 300-400 feet. Hmm. That’s not very far. I thought beavers could go farther than that. What do beaver experts say?

or beaver can cross watersheds by overland travel of up to several kilometers. In a study of 46 dispersing beaver in New York, 74% initiated dispersal downstream, 35% moved to neighboring colonies, and females moved farther than males (Sun et al. 2000).

Baker, B. W., and E. P. Hill. 2003. Beaver (Castor canadensis). Pages 288-310 in G. A. Feldhamer,B. C. Thompson, and J. A. Chapman, editors. Wild Mammals of North America: Biology, Management,and Conservation. Second Edition. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.

Several kilometers, a bit imprecise but lets say that means between 5-7. That translates to about 4 miles. Or 21,120 feet. As opposed to 350 feet. Which makes USDA wrong by a power of 60.

That seems about right.

Anyway thanks for the delightful read, Brock and good luck taming the wild farmers! And btw if you’re having a hard time choosing that special gift for the beaver lover on your list, check out these adorable pillows. The knitted snugglers sold on Etsy in 2009 but there must be more out there.