It is far, far too early for me to coast. What was I thinking yesterday? My living room is insane as all the items which have to go to the festival line up to wait there turn to be loaded into the truck. I slept a sliver last night. There are lists to be made and details to be attended too. Oh and there’s this. On Tuesday I implored Moses to see if he could get that huge wheel out of the creek for unsightly reasons. And while he was there he thought he’d have a little look around. Guess what he saw? Go ahead guess! Turn your sound WAY WAY up and I bet you’ll know the answer in the first couple of seconds.

LOOK at how TINY s/he is! Yesterday I spent the first 4 hours just saying OMG OMG over and over. Moses has captured some incredible moments with the beavers over the years, but this might be my very favorite. That kit is so little it can’t even dive to follow mom. It just pops back up like a cork.

He filmed this tuesday at 10:30 at night, and it took some doing to get it uploaded. We would love to be able to play it at the festival for folks, so that meant spending time figuring how to get it on our portable screen. Assuming we have a place to plug it in it should work out nicely.

And meanwhile Martinez has another kit! Stop worrying so much. Everything will work out fine. That makes him number twenty-seven!

It’s surprising how lovely the habitat is down there. It almost looks like a tropical forest. I can definitely see why folks brave the flooding and buy homes on the creek. Check out the morning footage from earlier in the week. Martinez is quite the urban utopia. There’s a car horn at the beginning and a pair of warblers trilling in the middle. Quite the place to raise a family.

Say it with me now: Baby baby baby! Martinez has a baby! There is precious little that matters more than that.

There was also a fine article about our friends in the North and the quest to bring beaver back to California. Oh and it mentions the festival too! Rusty was kind enough to supply the photographs.

Leave It to . . .

The first step is getting past California’s “beaver blind spot,” as the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center’s Brock Dolman puts it. Dolman is co-director, with Kate Lundquist, of OAEC’s WATER Institute (Watershed Advocacy, Training, Education and Research), established in 2004 to study and promote watershed issues. The award-winning duo’s “Bring Back the Beaver” campaign, started in 2009, went back on the road in the North Bay last month with a talk in connection with a screening of the environmental documentary Dirt Rich in Novato; appearances continue through June in Napa, Sonoma and Marin counties.

“A lot of people just don’t know that we have beaver in California,” says Lundquist, who says that their current presentation is an update on a 2015 talk they gave in Sonoma to help answer the question: “That’s an East Coast thing, right?”

Although a historical account from General Mariano Vallejo found the Laguna de Santa Rosa “teeming with beaver” in 1833, by 1911 California had about 1,000 beavers left before legislators passed a law briefly protecting the aquatic rodents. Following a quarter-century-long campaign to reintroduce beaver to erosion-threatened habitat (the highlight of the “Bring Back the Beaver” show is the parachuting “beaver bomb” developed during the time), they were determined non-native and invasive for decades thereafter.

Bring Back the beavers campaign! Hurray for Brock and Kate! It’s great to see the regional history of beavers in California outlined in this article. The author even takes time to focus on the depredation permits issued in the state. But you know by now I am very self-centered – so of course this was my very favorite part.

This business as usual for beavers started to change after a pair of them wandered into Alhambra Creek in the middle of the city of Martinez in 2006. They built a dam and had yearlings, called kits, but the city’s application for a permit to make them go away did not sit well with locals who could see the kits playing as they drank their coffee. Resident Heidi Perryman formed the beaver advocacy group Worth a Dam, which holds its 11th annual Beaver Festival on June 30 in downtown Martinez.

Okay, yearlings are not called kits, any more than teenagers are called children. The mention is short and sweet. But still,,,always leave them wanting more. It’s followed by a lovely intro to the beaver situation in Napatopia. And then does a nice job of promoting Kevin Swift, who worked with Mike Callahan a while back to learn the trade.

“They’re ignored, underappreciated, reviled and mismanaged in equal measure,” says Swift, who emphasizes that beavers, for all their engineering abilities, are not intellectual powerhouses. “It’s got a brain the size of an acorn. If you can’t work it out with them, could be you’re the problem.”

“It seems to me that all the laws are backwards,” he says. “You don’t need a permit to destroy a beaver dam that makes critical habitat for rare, threatened and endangered species—but you might need a permit to put in a float-control device that’s hydrologically invisible and maintains the habitat for rare, threatened and endangered species. How does that work?”

Hmm indeed! Good point Kevin.

And if the beaver believers are right, as the numerous scientific studies they point to suggest, there is no better way to be fish-friendly than to be beaver-friendly. The beavers are not going away. There are some intractable parties, such as the absentee landowner on Sonoma’s Leveroni Road who, according to state records, refuses to consider alternative options to repeated depredation permit requests. But ultimately this approach is doomed to fail, says Swift.

“A story you often hear in California,” says Swift, “is, ‘I’ve been going down to that place for an hour every day for X number of years, and I’ve shot and trapped Y number of beavers, and they’re still there!’ Yeah, you’re in beaver habitat! Geology drives beaver habitat. Unless you can literally move mountains, you’re not changing anything about beavers’ attraction to your site.”

Lundquist says killing beavers is neither a viable nor economical strategy. “For one, people hold candlelight vigils, like they did in Tahoe. And it can be really bad press if you’re trying to do the right thing—or be seen as doing the right thing, anyway.

Um, not to be a stickler for detail or anything, but actually they didn’t have a candle light vigil in Tahoe for beavers. That was in that OTHER city. What’s its name again? sheesh Go read the whole article, it’s worth your time and author James Knight did a lovely job pulling it all together. Learn all about the ‘Bring back the Beaver campaign’ Then come to the festival in two days and meet Brock and Kate in person!

Then watch this video again because it’s awwwwwww…

Beaver Fever

In Glen Ellen, a colony of beavers arrives—and this time, they’re a little more welcome

by James Knight

Brace yourselves. Here at Martinez beaver central we’ve been called a lot of names in our 6 years. But this just might be the best.

A HARDY TAIL Popular beavers in Martinez set a game-changing precedent for a new family of dam-builders in Glen Ellen. – Cheryl Reynolds – Worth a Dam

In the mid-1990s, a family of beavers found their way up Sonoma Creek and settled in Glen Ellen. Although they were the first beavers that had been seen here since the animals were extirpated decades earlier, they got the same welcome that is traditionally offered to beavers: they were trapped and killed.

Then in 2006, a mating pair wandered out of the Delta and constructed a dam on Alhambra Creek in the middle of Martinez. “You could sit at Starbucks and watch the kits play,” says resident Heidi Perryman. The city council, worried about flooding, first considered the quiet, business-as-usual approach. But with so many people watching and protesting, the beavers got a stay. Perryman formed the nationwide advocacy group Worth a Dam, to help people navigate similar situations. (Her next talk on the issue is Thursday, July 11, at San Francisco’s Randall Museum.)

This article by James Knight for the Bohemian is an excellent read, you should go check out the whole thing. This is what happens when you take a little time to get the story right. (I first connected with him way back on May 3!) I suggested he follow up with Brock Dolman of the OAEC and that really gave a regional back bone for the article. Now when wine country folks spot a beaver problem, they know just who to turn to for help.

In Martinez, it isn’t just about beavers anymore. When the pond filled with fish, river otters returned to the area. Mink also turned up, along with a host of waterfowl and songbirds.

That kind of result could improve habitat for the North Coast’s federally endangered coho salmon, says Dolman. “Having grown up in Idaho and back East, I loved to fish in beaver ponds because there were a lot of fish in there. So I got to thinking: Why aren’t we talking about beavers?” While state agencies and landowners are trying to slow down stream flow and erosion with costly projects, “beavers can do it better, faster and way cheaper.” Dolman’s organization was invited to contribute beaver language to the 2012 Coho Recovery Plan.

If beavers pop out of the creek into another vineyard, it may not play out the same as last time. In Siskiyou County, Dolman says, the Department of Water Resources had requested a trapping permit almost annually for 30 years, because beaver activity interfered with a data collection point. “Two years ago, they were doing the same thing, and the biologist said, ‘Wait a minute, we’ve got to talk about this.’ They had a community meeting, created a beaver technical group, and for the first time the DWR didn’t get that permit.”

I’d really like to think James was right, and that Martinez was a ‘game-changer’ for how we deal with beavers in northern California. Certainly some things were changed. But even in Martinez it is clear that everyone isn’t playing the same game, so changing the rules of that game just won’t effect them. If new beavers showed up in the city tomorrow do you think that they would ask Worth A Dam what to do? All we can hope is that enough folk read smart articles like this and know to hold their leaders feet to the fire long enough to nudge things in the right direction.

Speaking of nudging, the 6th beaver festival was approved last night and the game is definitely on. Also our lovely artist Amelia Hunter was kind enough to tinker with the flyer and make the adult a little bigger.

Speaking of which, it was very high tide last night, and both dams were totally flooded. An adult beaver filmed pulling a branch through the gap of the primary and down towards the secondary!

One kit was finally spotted last night around nine. He also swam through the gap and was totally spooked by the fact that the water was rushing the wrong way! (Can solstice come any faster? This extended daylight thing is starting to get out of hand.)