Tag: Eli Asarian

BEAVERS AND DIRT

heidi08 Beavers, Environmental October 9, 2018

Dirt Rich – Trailer from Passelande Pictures on Vimeo.

Back in the spring of 2015 I was contacted by filmmaker Marcelina Cravat who was working on a documentary about climate change and creative solutions. She was interested in talking about the wetland work that beavers do and wondered if Martinez would be a good place to film some sequences. She and her husband came over to survey the setting and meet the fam.

At the time we were excitedly expecting what turned out to be our last group of kits and had already arranged with Suzi Eszterhas to photograph them for Ranger Rick magazine. That had been set up at the last beaver festival so I thought I better ask her how she felt about another camera on site before I answered Marci. To my surprise Suzi said ‘no’. Because in her experience it was hard to work around two visions at once. So I introduced Marci to the good folks in’ Napa, and off she went in their direction.

Dirt Rich explores strategies that re-stabilize atmospheric carbon levels and revitalize the soil in an effort to reverse the effects of runaway global warming.

Fast forward three years later, and her film premiered this year at the SF Green Film Festival this summer, got awards at Sundance and is available to watch online for a short period. Robin Ellison of Napa has a lovely snippet of footage inside and let me know about the opportunity to watch our beaver buddies online. The 6 minute beaver segment starts around 24 minutes in and stars Brock Dolman, Kate Lundquist, Eli Asarian, Sherry Tippie and some even more beautiful furry faces. I can’t embed it, but here’s the link. Dirt Rich. Lucky for you, you have three more free days to watch the whole thing.

And here’s proof of many selfless hours spent at the beaver dam. Congratulations Robin!

The Beaver Borrowers

Imagine my surprise when I saw our friend Eli Asarian post this photo on the beaver management forum to promote his workshop at the upcoming salmonid Conference! I didn’t remember him asking me to use it, or asking Cheryl?

But I’m on vacation. Maybe it slipped past me, maybe that isn’t even Cheryl’s photo? So I politely inquired. He said that they were using it as “Place-holder” for promotional materials and were going to ask eventually. I see now that they actually were using three such “place-holders”. And really since the materials have already been released, they can no longer be accurately described as “place-holders” can it?

Screen shot 2015-10-09 at 6.11.28 AM

Now don’t get me wrong. It’s good that they credited Cheryl and Worth A Dam and we’re happy to share for the right reasons, but honestly, you would think that if ALL these people were learning to live with beavers, they’d eventually have some of their OWN photos to use for these things, wouldn’t you? How hard is it to ASK anyway?

Sheesh.

Now with that rant off my chest I have to hurry up and move to Canada in time to send out the cutest Christmas Card Stamps EVER.

A moose, beaver and polar bear celebrate Christmas on new stamps from Canada

Wouldn’t that put you in the holiday spirit? Tell Canadian Santa I’ve been good. It’s not like I’m greedy, I only need the middle one.

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Could Fish Victory become Beaver Victory?

heidi08 Beavers and salmon, Friends of Martinez Beavers, History June 12, 2014

Salmon win court ruling that ‘sets aside’ Marin countywide plan

In a sharply critical decision that leaves Marin’s planning document in legal limbo, an appellate court ordered more analysis of how development affects San Geronimo Valley’s endangered coho salmon.

The ruling by the 1st District Court of Appeal in San Francisco reversed a Marin Superior Court decision, “sets aside” the 2007 countywide plan and its environmental report pending study of the impact of creekside building on salmon, and declared that a building ban was improperly imposed in San Geronimo.

Did you read about the Marin appellate decision protecting salmon? Our friends at SPAWN took the powers that be to court with the backing of some 22 conservation organizations and won a decision that is making no friends among the developers.

Fishery activists at the Salmon Protection and Watershed Network of Forest Knolls, which contested county compliance with state environmental law and sued to get tougher creekside building rules, hailed the ruling as a triumph. “We hope that after this decision, county supervisors are ready to work together so we can save these species from extinction,” said Todd Steiner, head of the salmon network.

“The judges agreed with Spawn that the county acted unlawfully because the environmental impact report provides no help to decision-makers or the public to understand the likely consequences of allowable build out,” said Deborah Sivas of Stanford Law School’s Environmental Clinic, which represented the salmon network along with attorney Michael Graf.

If that name sounds vaguely familiar, it should. Michael Graf was the attorney who represented Worth A Dam in the failed effort to stop the sheet pile from going through the beaver lodge. Remember? He generously charged us very little and got his friend the geomorphologist to walk our creek and do the same. The city didn’t mind breaking the law anyway, but that’s blood under the bridge now. Seems like eons ago that I was worried the sheet pile would kill the beavers or drive them away. Congratulations Michael and SPAWN for a fight well won!

All this lays the foundation for the NEXT lawsuit to appear in Marin. One where trapping ‘nuisance’ beavers is considered a threat to the salmon population. What’s that you say, beavers weren’t native to Marin? (Or Alameda? Or San Jose?) Guess what was published and went online yesterday?

Here’s the abstract, but you really need to go read the whole thing. Eli’s graphs are stunning.

The North American beaver (Castor canadensis ) has not been considered native to the watersheds of coastal California or the San Francisco Bay Area. These assertions form the basis of current wildlife management policies regarding that aquatic mammal, and they date to the first half of the 20th century. This review challenges those long-held assumptions based on verifiable (physical) and documented (reliable observational) records. Novel findings are facilitated by recently digitized information largely inaccessible prior to the 21st century. Understanding that beaver are native to California’s coastal watersheds is important, as their role in groundwater recharge, repair of stream channel incision, and restoration of wetlands may be critically important to the conservation of threatened salmonids, as well as endangered amphibians and riparian-dependent birds,

The timing on this could NOT be better, as we head off to the Salmonid Restoration Conference this week. It ends with a piercing reminder of how important beavers are to salmon, which I’m hoping the timing of the Marin decision bumps into the news cycle. There are a lot of parts I love about this paper, and Rick’s son did a stunning job of pulling the whole thing together, but you’ll pardon me if this is my very favorite part:

Today California’s coastal beaver are widely regarded as the non-native survivors of twentieth century translocations, and when they cause flooding problems or fell trees, depredation permits are often provided. Understanding beaver as native to coastal ecosystems may impact this decision-making.

Of course, I would have phrased less subtly, like STOP PRETENDING YOU’RE KILLING BEAVERS BECAUSE THEY AREN’T NATIVE, IDIOTS, but this paper and the sierra ones should permanently bury the myths about beaver absence from most of California.

49 other states never believed it anyway. I’m glad we finally tackled the 50th.

Strawberry Creek Forever!

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere July 8, 2012

Restoration project seeks to outwit beavers; volunteers fence trees near Strawberry Creek to deter rodents

Jessica Cejnar/The Times-Standard

”About three months ago, they [beavers] took down a couple hundred to 300 trees in two nights,” said Bob Pagliuco, a habitat restoration specialist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service. “So we banded together to come up with a solution.”

Some people wanted to remove or relocate the beavers, Pagliuco said. Others wanted to kill them. But beavers are important to the ecosystem and to coho salmon, Pagliuco said, so they came up with another solution.

About 30 volunteers descended upon Strawberry Creek on Saturday for the AmeriCorps’ volunteer day to help fence off the trees, which include willows, alders, spruce and redwoods. The volunteers come from the California Department of Fish and Game, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the AmeriCorps Watershed Stewards Project, the California Conservation Corps and the non-profit group Pacific Coast Fish, Wildlife and Wetlands Restoration Association.

We first heard about this tree wrapping project from our beaver friend Eli Asarian at Riverbend Sciences in Eureka. He said that there was originally a request for a depredation (kill) permit and that it was denied. DENIED! The California Department of Fish and Game (North Coast) said “NO” you can’t kill the beavers until you tried another way to solve the problem. Wow! The mind reels! The jaw drops!

At that time the plan was to wrap the trees with chicken wire because they couldn’t afford much fencing wire. I contacted the project and explained that chicken wire would only work reliably on those beavers that were the same size as chickens! And thought that if they were going to undertake such a huge project and use all those volunteers it needed to be successful or otherwise folks will say its a wasted effort! I talked about the benefits of sand painting, which they could consider for the larger trees.

The volunteers will also apply a latex-sand paint to the trees to try to dissuade the beavers from eating them, said Todd Carlin, a member.

Well, okay then! Seems like folks at Strawberry Creek have all the right idea. Apparently they get this whole beaver benefit – keystone species – thing – and the Coho salmon message has hit home hard!

”We’re trying to keep mindful of the importance of beaver in the ecosystem, especially with coho salmon,” Carlin said. “We jumped on (the project) to serve as an example that you don’t need a depredation permit; you don’t need to relocate the beaver — they can cohabitate here. We’re just trying to see if this will be successful, and then we can apply it to other projects.”

”These dams they build back up water and create a pond environment,” he said. “What we’ve been finding in the winter and in summer, these pond environments are extremely productive. There’s lots of fish growing in beaver ponds, and they’re found to grow significantly faster than the fish growing higher up in the tributaries.”

In the withered desert of public opinion where minds are made up and nothing new grows, the hardened soil surrounding attitudes towards beavers has been hard packed for 50 years – but in the northern reaches of state the salmon message at least is starting to SINK IN. Good job all! Now trickle down here to the bay area, will ya?

And since you did such a good job here’s a ‘strawberry’ present for you!

strawberry1 — Yearling eating Strawberries - Photo Cheryl Reynolds

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.