Christine Mclaughin – Worth A Dam

Up close and personal with the beavers of Martinez

If you have never been introduced to one of wildlife’s greatest ambassadors, go visit the folks at Martinez Beavers and get up close and personal with the original engineer.

Good places for beaver viewing is at the Escobar, Marina Vista and Amtrak Station footbridges. Remember, beavers are nocturnal, so your best bet to catch some action is to show up in the early mornings or late evenings.

From 680: Exit at Marina Vista and go downtown to Castro Street.
From Hwy 4: Exit Alhambra Ave., go downtown and make a right onto Marina Vista. Make another right onto Escobar.

Ahhhh thank you, Christine! I wonder when you came and what you saw? Our beavers have been dam busy lately, so you might have seen quite a lot.

Christine McLauglin is the garden columnist for the Examiner and a Master Gardener herself. She recently worked on a beaver column for Suite101 which I think I told you linked to us as a further source of information. Well now she’s also the wildlife columnist for the Examiner so she wrote this about the creek seekers contest yesterday:

The San Francisco Estuary Project and River of Words presents, “The Creek Seekers: Exploring East Bay Creeks Contest”.

Go read the story, and notice the “insert stock beaver photo here” part. I wrote her that we could get her some realllllllly amazing worth a dam photos and her stories could have a truly unique and local flaire. She was very excited about that idea.

One of my favorite Cheryl Reynolds photograph is this early glimpse of a new 2008 kit. I still can’t believe how little they were.

By the way, the title is a reference to a famous (apocryphal?) line from the notorious Algonquin table…challenged to use the word “horticulture” in a sentence the brilliant Dorothy Parker quipped

“You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think”. I‘ve always been in awe of it.