How many surprisingly-heavy dead beavers does the media have to report on before we cease being surprised?
APALACHIN, N.Y., Dec. 27 (UPI) — A New York man says he got a surprise when he retrieved his animal trap from the Susquehanna River to find a record catch — a 70-pound beaver. Bryan Lockman of Apalachin said the monster beaver was in one of several traps he set last week.
“This was only the second day I’d ever gone trapping,” Lockman, 18, told the (Binghamton, N.Y.) Press Bulletin. “When I saw how big it was, wow, it was unbelievable.”
My goodness, such success on only your second day of killing! You must be very proud. Enjoy the champagne. In the meantime I would like to have a conversation with the Department of Natural Resources out your way.
The average adult beaver weighs 35 to 60 pounds, with most coming in at around 40 to 45 pounds, the state Department of Environmental Conservation said.
I’m just curious, but how exactly do you determine the average weight of an adult beaver? I mean, how would you know they were an adult in the first place? You obviously weren’t there when they were born. You probably aren’t testing their reproductive organs. Why wouldn’t you call a 35 lb beaver a yearling or a sub-adult?
Apparently people are very surprised that big animals are big. Who knew?
Oh, and guess whose parents are driving him to Martinez on his way to the Wild and Scenic Film festival where he will be the youngest filmmaker entered? He just had to see the home of the Martinez Beavers! Here’s his recent beta test for ipad and just in case you think this is easy a behind the scenes look at how he made it!
It’s that Christmas time of year again when children press their noses to the glass looking for reindeer, mailmen carry a heavier load and people blame beaver dams for washing out and causing flooding for no reason whatsoever.
Takethis story from Mousam lake in Maine where winter drivers found a low spot in the road impassable.
On Friday, Dec. 2, motorists traveling a short distance from Route 109 on Route 11 faced a dangerous situation when water cascaded down the hill toward Mousam Lake. Striking a low point in the road, the water quickly made the road impassable with water topping the guard rails on either side as flooding occurred. Washouts along the shoulders of the road did nothing to slow down the deluge of water and debris headed for the lake.
Horrors! A washout! What happened? Tell us the culprit of this dastardly deed!
The flood was caused by a beaver dam being breached on property abutting Simon Ricker Road, draining much of the swamp which covers many acres on either side of that road.
The damn dam! I guess it has been a rather mild winter. 38 in Maine this morning. Martinez certainly knows a beaver dam could break if there’s too much water action. Check out the very next sentence.
The action was allegedly the result of some earth-moving equipment being used without a permit having been issued by the Town of Shapleigh.
As in – some genius with a back hoe ripped out the dam and sent the pond it maintained spilling down the hill and into the road below.Merry Christmas to you, too! Maybe he wanted to kill the beavers and thought they lived in the dam. Or maybe he wanted to ruin the dam himself so that the winter storms wouldn’t be a risk. Of course the beavers winter food was stored under that pond and now they’ll have nothing to eat when it freezes.
So the flooded road wasn’t really “caused by” a beaver dam washout at all. It was caused by this guy.→
Why isn’t THAT the headline?
Well, maybe you need something cheerful to look at, a feel-good story after all that beaver blame. Check out this live action video from Ian Timothy which he used for creating his Beaver Creek Footage. I think he prepared this for the film festival he is headed for in January. Seems Beaver Creek episode 4 was accepted to the Wild and Scenic Film Festival. It will be featured Saturday January 14, and the entire lineup looks amazing so you should check it out. (Tickets are cheaper for the whole event if you buy them before the end of the year.) He and his family plan to fly into SF for the event and drive to Tahoe after stopping by in Martinez to meet our very own beavers! I will be busy most of that weekend doing something I’ll talk about soon, but you can bet our Tahoe beaver friends will be there to give this beaver hero the welcome he deserves!
Young Ian Timothy released episode six of his Beaver Creek series, yesterday. So of course I had to drop everything and watch. I won’t tell you the most adorable part, because you’ve read enough of me by now to spot it for yourself. And I won’t tell you which part I wanted to come true for our beavers because you will probably exactly feel the same way. Just watch it, at least once. When you consider the ratio of two hours of filmaking for two seconds of footage, you realize how impressive it is for a teen to make this in his spare time AND go to high school. If you want to remind yourself a little about the artist, go here and read what a remarkable young man he is.
Look at Mom's tail
UPDATE: I wrote Ian this morning, is that mark on mom’s tail what I think it is? He just wrote back. Yes it is! Just for the Martinez Beavers! Wow. sniff. Make me cry at work….sheesh…..
Cheryl just pointed out what appears to be ‘en hommage‘ to mom in the dining scene. Hmmm. Looks possible. I have written the creator for verification, but wouldn’t that be lovely? A memorial in film as well as sheetpile? This makes half a dozen episodes making Twig charming and accessible without being threatening. Still there is almost no part of this series that brushes the grim reality for beavers in general. Is it just me or do you think its time to put a little well-placed pressure on human responses to beavers? The morbid realist in me says that Episode 7 could feature a farmer who rips out the repaired dam and waits to shoot the beavers that come and fix it. Mom, Dad and Snappy would of course be killed leaving the kits orphaned to starve on their own. Twig could adopt them to save the day. But everything would brighten when the farmers’ cousin ‘Slip Kisle’ could come show him how to install a flow device next time?
It’s just a suggestion…Once again great work Ian. Martinez has your biggest fans!
Okay, yesterday I promised only good news and some new ideas about our beavers. We’re due. I have a couple thoughts based on recent observations. The first is on our smallest kit. Dubbed ‘Dainty’ by a local homeless man, this kit is often referred to as the runt or the female because of its diminutive size. Don’t worry, good things come in small packages. Observation has shown that this small kit is also the boldest. It was the first to go over the dam. It was the first to initiate ‘push’ matches with its siblings. It was the first to lose interest in the branches provided by Worth A Dam and go seek out its own.
Recently (the beaver formerly known as) ‘dainty’ has begun showing some remarkable dam instincts/training. When the first hard rain flooded the gap it was dainty who first noticed and went to investigate. In fact “investigating” is the behavior we most often see from her/him. The other day a square of flat plywood appeared at the dam and dainty was seen swimming around it, poking it, pawing it. Nothing escapes notice. When stalwart beaver supporter Jon went onto the dam recently to retrieve a trashy ice chest that had floated down stream his noises drew dainty out of the lodge. The kit swam in a zigzag across the pond and back and forth past the dam after he left making sure that everything was the way it was supposed to be. When ‘dainty’ comes out of the lodge upstream, she/he swims first to the area near the gap as if to check the dam. When the larger kits emerge they always go to the nearest corner of the dam to see if there’s anything good to eat.
I remembered that Hope Ryden in Lily Pond described in particular that father beaver was the first one out of the lodge every night and that he went straight to the dam and checked his handiwork to make sure no repairs were needed. That pattern certainly hasn’t been true for our patriarch, but he is often seen working on the dam in ways no other beaver attempts. We’ve seen him below the dam, plugging holes while the others work from above. We’ve seen dad ripping up hand fulls of tules by the roots and using them in an emergency. Dad has always seemed more focused on the dam than his family members. Which brings me to my new theory.
‘Dainty’ is a boy.
Which means, among other things, that he needs a new name! It is true that beavers are equal opportunity employers and that all beavers do all things, but there do seem to be patterns. When we see Dad it is most often during major dam work, and he’s always doing the most important thing. We’ve seen him following the kits and changing the placement of their sticks after they leave. Mom was the only beaver we ever saw carrying mud or sticks onto the lodge. There do seem to be slight preferences in gender roles and this little beaver seems very ready to learn Dad’s trade.
Two Year-old Beaver - Photo: Cheryl Reynolds
So if dainty – manly – our smallest kit is a boy, it naturally leads to a second theory I’ve been having about GQ, who seems to have stopped staying in the old lodge with Dad and is sleeping in a second lodge down stream near the footbridge often with 1-2 kits. I have heard and read that male yearlings shouldn’t be housed with adult males because they will fight. It suggests that one reason GQ has stopped staying in the lodge mom built is because he’s a male and needs space away from Dad. It makes sense that he’d want his own territory, and I suppose the kits needing him has delayed his taking off on his own. Our littlest beaver seems to spend a lot of time with GQ, and often when you see one you see the other.
Although sunday night it definitely seemed like GQ came from the old lodge, which is where I always thought Dad was, which makes me think that either my theory is wrong or Dad is on walkabout.
Enough with my theories, here’s lovely fact for you. Ian Timothy’s episode IV and V of beaver Creek have one for 2011 Scholastic Regional Award and will go on for consideration in the national competition. Congratulations Ian! We’re so proud! We always new you had it in you. My goodness, its hard work waiting for episode 6!
Ian Timothy, 16, videotapes episodes of Beaver Creek in an attic studio set up at his family’s home. (Photo: brianbohannon.com)
You can almost smell the clay. A putty-like beaver leaps into the thick, blue waves of a stream. Other malleable creatures – a baritone, wide-mouth bass and a sidekick duck – look on, while a banjo plunks along in the background. My olfactory senses take me far from my old canisters of Play-Doh and into a forest floor of pine needles, tooth-marked limbs, cascading water, and mud … not to mention singing animals who buy home improvement products online. Where am I? Beaver Creek.
What a fantastic introduction to our old friend Ian Timothy of Kentucky whose now all of 16. This article is better press than most of us will get in our lifetime, and you can tell its just the beginning for this rising star who loves nature and has a persistent patience that must be awesome to behold. It apparently hooked the author of the article, who will be appearing as the voice of Twig’s ‘mom’ in the next episode.
Upon visiting the attic, I see that the whole set for Beaver Creek is just sitting there on … a door? “It was the door to this room,” Joel confesses, “And we were about to get rid of it when Ian thought it would be a great work table.” So, a door on top of two sawhorses opened itself to a world it never thought possible. Across its 50-year-old frame is the lay of the land for Twigs and friends. Blue water, green trees, brown critters … Ian approaches with the four-inch Twigs character and delivers him into my sweaty, fanatical palm. Soon, a display case of dentures and lips are presented. “This shape is a vowel, this one a consonant,” Ian points out from the array of individual mouth parts.
How entirely appropriate that Ian’s work station is a door. Clearly his clay photographs are magical portals that open up “doors” to as many new realms as he can imagine. And he can imagine a lot. I love seeing the space where ‘Twig’ comes to life and I love that a charismatic young man in Kentucky (I won’t say ‘of all places’ because we have never had a ‘who’s killing beavers now’ entry from the state) champions beavers as the heroes of his epic tale (tail?).
Ian works with dad Joel Timothy in Joel’s basement recording studio, where voices, music and sound effects are added to the production of Beaver Creek. (Photo: brianbohannon.com)
“Ian has always loved nature and animals. For a few years he would ask to go to the zoo almost every day,” Joel {his Dad} recalls. “On many occasions he would go directly to a certain animal, observe it in detail and then say, ‘Okay, we can go home now.’”
A few years later, requests for a video camera were granted on Christmas. “He learned very quickly that the camera could shoot video one frame at a time,” Joel continues. “First, there were amusing little animations of a clay ball rolling across the floor; then there was a piece he called ‘Chuck The Worm,’ in which a clay worm crawls toward a clay apple, chews a hole in the apple and then comes out on the other side. From there, the evolution gets a bit hazy to me. It seems like I blinked and Ian was building a set and starting to create Beaver Creek.”
What a great kid! What a great Dad! What a great description! ‘Blink’ is a fantastic way to describe the necessary and mysterious development that happens with leaps and bounds just beyond the parent’s loving field of vision.Ian grew (and is still growing) into his art. It’s exciting to see it unfold and is obviously exciting to observe up close.
Videotaping Beaver Creek is labor intensive and tedious, and on an average school day, Ian is able to produce only two to four seconds of animation, with each episode taking three to four months to produce. “I usually try to work a few hours after school,” he says. (Photo: brianbohannon.com)
I can’t really remember how I met Ian. I think he sent the first episode of Beaver Creek what seems to be a million years ago. I know I heard from him again when he won the science award for the beaver film. Last year he made a special compilation of all his episodes for the silent auction which was a hit. This year he whispered that Twig might get some new characters and I am excited to see what comes next.
Before the winter thaw, Beaver Creek Episode Six will be released into the mainstream. It is the story of Twigs and Drake going to help Twigs’ parents. Twigs’ dad is played by Will Cary, Twigs’ brother is played by Max Harrington, and the storekeeper is played by Mike Cook. The part of Twigs’ mother is played by yours truly, Cindy Lamb. My entire three lines will provide me with the opportunity to add “castor canadensis” to my studio resume.
Go read the whole article for an uplifting New Years Eve. One more piece of good news: last years bridge tile project was listed in the Tiimes as one of the ‘bright spots’ of 2010. As I recall we were the best ‘Citywide rebranding effort’ of 2009, the best ‘Urban wildlife viewing of 2008’ and the ‘most Unexpected news story’ of 2007. Nice work.
