There were fun celebration wishes from our beaver friends yesterday on. This came from Emily Fairfax, who reminded us all to stay safe. Happy Easter from the Easter Beaver!
Not to be outdone or denomenational Ben Goldfarb posted back his own greeting. Beavers respect all cultures. Happy Passover from our Jewish colony! (Snacking on some homemade matzah.)
To which I would only add that beavers are fairly practical agnostics, which will take any port in a storm, or even make their own.
There;s a beautiful retrospective of Rusty Cohn’s photographs at the Napa beaver pond in yesterday’s Napa register for International beaver day. What a fine body of work! And of course I mean both Rusty and the beavers. Run don’t walk over to the paper to see every image, but here are a few of my favorites.
The first might be the finest photo I have ever seen of a beaver pair bonding.
Did you know April 7 is International Beaver Day? In honor of the occasion, we are sharing this photo gallery of our local beaver family at Tulocay Creek. These photos are from 2017-2019 … simpler times. Enjoy!
The Tulocay Creek beaver pond is located next to the Hawthorne Suites Hotel, 314 Soscol Ave., Napa. At the creek, you’ll find river otters, mink, muskrats and herons as well as beavers. Here are some photos of the critters taken by local photographer Rusty Cohn.
“Since beavers are nocturnal, the heat doesn’t seem to bother them,” Cohn said. “They come out a little before sunset and are mainly in the water. During the day they are sleeping either in a bank den in the side of the creek bank under a fair amount of dirt, or inside a lodge which is made of mud and sticks mainly.”
Follow the link to look at the full article. Aren’t those beautiful?There is an excellent one of an adult beaver underwater which I’m partial to by Roland Dumas. Of course he didn’t just capture beavers in all their glory, he got some wonderful shots of the crowd of wildlife they supported too. Heron, otter, mink. The usual suspects. Here is a special favorite.
Unfortunately Stacy couldn’t manage a reading. So we never got the beaver song we deserve but there is fun discussion on Emily Fairfax’s twitter feed for International Beaver Day about just exactly what’s wrong with otters. I swear to God I didn’t write this. I’m referring especially to question three.
Just remember I had NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS.
She got this lovely response from Portland artist Roger Peet. Twitter handle “Wedge tailed Oogle” who is coordinating the endangered species mural project for the Center for Biological Diversity. He told Ben how to get this print from him on the feed but I don’t see it yet in his shop. It’s incredible.
The entire discussion is very well worth reading. We are so lucky to have Emily on our team. She will be leading the way when all of us our just echoes. An amazing image was posted by someone I don’t know (YET).
Finally a sad goodbye to Mr. Prine with a special song for the petulant king who brought us here.
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So do you remember how we’re always looking for reasons to cooperate with beavers so that the people in power will stop killing them? And remember how our friend Emily Fairfax recently presented on the important topic of beavers and fire prevention to the forest service and just recently at our last beaver conference? Well hot off the virtual presses in this months Landscape Architecture Magazine….
Isn’t that awesome??? Click on it to zoom closer or the above link to read in the magazine. Emily gave such excellent quotes too. And if you look very carefully you might also notice that the author of this fine article is Lisa Owens Viani who is one of the very special guests at our annual winter ravioli feast and has been for the past decade.
Because sometimes when you want the very best you have to work for it.
I was allowed to see something wonderful yesterday. Dr. Emily Fairfax recently did a killer presentation for the forest service about beavers and fire.
For her research she compared large fires across 5 states (including California) and found that in areas that there were beaver dams the vegetation was lusher before, during and after the fires. Part of the reason was the many complex dams they maintained making ponds and part of it was the canals they dug spreading water around the landscape. She argues persuasively and with all the right statistics that we need to let beavers do their thing more often.
Oh and she mentioned me, which was kind of surprising.
I spent all day trying to get the presentation shareable so you and everyone else could know what an AWESOME job Emily did, but it failed for some reason. I will try again but just know that her presentation is AMAZING and should be on the governors iphone in the morning.
Now it appears to be working again, but if for some reason it stops just know I will work to bring it back. It begins with the facilitators voice and then cuts to Emily. I would listen all the way through if you have time.
It’s that good.
When you finish your dissertation and present the results at a conference of your peers it can be thrilling, affirming, daunting, terrifying. It can make all those late nights worth it, all the statistics and the slogging. You might get praised by someone you really respect, or get to shake the hand of a hero you referenced a million times in your lit review. You might get some crabby question from the competition who doesn’t agree with your findings. You might spill cheap coffee on your new suit and have to change in the car. You might get a million different outcomes.
You almost never get this.
It’s about dam time: Beavers are acknowledged for their firefighting skills in five recent blazes.
When a wildfire tears through a landscape, there can be little left behind.
A new study, though, suggests that beavers may be protecting life around streams, thanks to their signature dams. Satellite images from five major wildfires in the United States revealed that corridors around beaver habitat stayed green even after a wildfire.
Millions of beavers live in forests across North America, and they make their homes in a particular way: By stacking piles of branches and rocks in a river’s path, they slow its flow and create a pool of calm water to call home. They even dig little channels radiating out from their pools to create “little water highways,” said Emily Fairfax, an assistant professor at California State University Channel Islands who led the study.
Emily presented her research THREE DAYS AGO at the conference in San Francisco. Three DAYS!!! That’s how long it takes for star research to find its way into a front page article. Please tell me that someone is putting this on the governors desk with his coffee and making sure he pays attention.
Fairfax wondered whether beaver dams would insulate riparian vegetation, as well as the fish and amphibians that live there, from wildfire damage. Wildfires course through landscapes naturally, but blazes will become more frequent as climate change dries out forests.
Fairfax sifted through records of past fires in the U.S. Geological Survey’s database and chose five recent fires that occurred in beaver habitat. She then analyzed the “greenness” of vegetation before, during, and after the fires. She used measurements from NASA’s Landsat satellites, which use red and near-infrared light to detect the lushness of vegetation.
Fairfax found that vegetation along sections of a river without dams burned straight to the river’s edge. But for sections with a resident beaver, “essentially, the plants don’t know a fire is happening.” The channels dug by beavers acted like irrigation channels, said Fairfax, keeping vegetation too wet to burn, even during drought. In all, stretches of river without beavers lost 51% of their vegetation greenness, compared with a 19% reduction for sections with beavers.
EMILY you rising star of beavers! We knew you’d be making a difference. With your embrace of technology and your love of nature it was destiny. We never even doubted it for a moment.
But we never even hoped how quickly it would all happen.
