Jari Osborne – Page 5

Nothing Succeeds like Success – (Beaver Edition)

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Environmental October 16, 2013

I’m guessing you recognize the hardworking smile on the left, which belongs to Mike Callahan of Beaver Solutions in Massachusetts. The one with the shovel is Kevin Swift, of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center who is working with Mike to learn the trade and eventually apply it in California. Kevin came to this year’s beaver festival with Kate Lundquist of the OAEC and we couldn’t be happier that solutions will be closer to home. Great start, men! Apparently yesterday’s job was ripping out a Clemson and replacing it with a Flex pipe. How symbolic is that? Here’s Mike’s rundown:

Good news. Kevin Swift arrived here in Massachusetts today to learn how to start his own business installing effective flow devices in his home state of California. Here he is performing maintenance on a Flexible Pond Leveler pipe. This is the site of my first flow device installation in 1998. The original Clemson Pond Leveler was eventually replaced with a Flexible Pond Leveler, and the fencing on that pipe was replaced last week. Beavers are still there and continue to maintain the dam. We’re doing three new flow device installations the next three days. We’ll keep you posted!

But wait, Heidi, maybe you’re saying. That’s not enough good news of people living with beavers. California and Massachusetts are crazy liberal states with campuses full of tree-huggers and tofu! Who cares what they do? This just isn’t enough to float my beaver boat, so to speak.

Well, then, how about Idaho?This is Mike Settell who you might recognize as the man from Pocatello who got the local chapter of Audubon to fund his beaver count a few years back because the animals affect bird population so significantly. He came to the state of the beaver conference last year, met the gang, and presented on his hard work in the granite state. Like all the attendees he was graciously given a copy of Mike’s DVD, and after reading and watching and learning went on to do his first install this weekend. I am very happy that Idaho is willing in this instance to apply a long-term solution instead of a short term (trapping) bandaid. Congratulations Mike!

There was a bundle of good news yesterday, I can barely keep up. We’re off to the Boys and Girls club today to talk beavers, which should be fun. And I just got an email from Jari Osborne of the Beaver Whispers that her excellent documentary (which you will see on PBS next year) is up for a digi award for Best in cross-platform nonfiction. GO VOTE RIGHT NOW. I know you haven’t seen it yet, but trust me, it should win. It will save the planet. You can help. GO VOTE

And my all-time favorite news I can’t share just yet but I just found out last night and it has to do with a a topic that rhymes with “weavers in postal quivers.”

Beam.

New Kits in Argyll!

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers August 13, 2013

The official Scottish Beaver trial has been very happy to announce that this year they have observed 5 new beavers in their pond! If the trial is “can beavers thrive in Scotland” I’d say they have their answer. If the trial is “can humans possibly tolerate how well they thrive?” the answer is more iffy.

New born beavers pictured at trial site aimed at bringing the animal back to the UK

NEWLY born beavers have been spotted at the site of a five-year trial aiming to reintroduce the mammal into the UK. The five youngsters or “kits” have been spotted at the Scottish beaver trial site at Knapdale in Argyll, the only licensed reintroduction scheme for beavers – and the first attempt to reintroduce an extinct mammal – in the UK.

Their appearance means beavers have bred every year since the trial started with the arrival of animals from Norway to Knapdale in 2009, the managers of the scheme said. Eurasian beavers were once native to the UK but were wiped out by hunting by the 16th century.

Roisin Campbell-Palmer, field operations manager for the trial, said: “The arrival of new kits means that the beavers have bred every year of the Scottish beaver trial.

“We are now attempting to establish how many there are in total – but five have been observed so far.”

The appearance of the beaver kits was welcomed as a boost for tourism as well as for the trial. Visitors to Knapdale can go on evening guided tours for a chance to spot the mammals on Dubh Loch, home to one of the project’s four beaver families.

The trial’s project manager, Simon Jones, said the sighting of the kits was “great news for the Scottish beaver trial – and for local tourism as more people will want to travel to Argyll to come on our guided walks for a chance to see the new arrivals”.

Five blessed events so far! I’m so jealous. We never got five. (Except an uncomfirmed 5th kit that was found dead in 2007. Never was sure if the report was accurate or not, but she swore she saw the tail and I counted four kits that night, so who knows?) The good news is that Argyll is going in the right direction. This formal trial is acting like a kind of cow-pusher on a the beaver-train and clearing out all the fears and objections that would be hurled at the much larger free beaver population along the Tay and beyond. Good!

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I heard from Michael Callahan that he was heading to Sonomish WA (home of retired watershed steward Jake Jacobsen who is practically a founding father of beavers and helped tremendously with our early questions in Martinez) to install some special flow device adaptions for fish passage. I passed this news along to our Beaver Believer documentary friends and they were excited about the idea of connecting with Mike and including him in the film, which I’m very happy about because even if beavers help climate change, or save salmon, or rotate your tires, no one will ever let them stick around unless human interests can be protected. We want solutions to be visible and obvious. On an even better note, a little bird told me that one of the good folk at OAEC will be heading out to Massachusetts in October to learn installation, which going to be excellent news for California!

Before you ask why, I will just say that I got an email yesterday from Canada from a farmer who had been trapping the beavers on his land and recently saw the documentary “The Beaver Whisperers” and was stunned to learn that beavers could be effectively managed by Michel LeClair and how could he go about doing that on his land? Of course I sent him info on Mike’s DVD and Sherri’s book and forwarded his email to Jari Osborne, the filmmaker, who had what I imagine is the best day ever thinking that she had made such a dramatic difference in peoples thinking.

What can I say, I’m have no actual skills or training, but I have had the strange fortune of becoming a kind of beaver hub. Which beavers apparently need.

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Now for some very good news. The grown-up in charge of these excellent workers is Kimberly Robertson, who lives on site at Safari West in Santa Rosa and is the official animal registrar and manages the Jr. Keeper program. She was very excited about our festival and has already made plans to attend next year. We got to talking about the beavers and getting kids interested in wildlife and she said she would like to be involved with Worth A Dam. Of course we would like that very much. So welcome to our new board member! I just know that our two organizations will benefit each other. Teaching kids to love what’s wild and free around them requires many voices, from the exotic to what’s right in their own back yard. Welcome aboard!

Three good things

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions June 25, 2013

More and more when I stumble towards the computer in the bleary hours and try an decide what to write about beavers, it is like being a raja sorting through a pile of rich jewels and deciding which to wear for the party. This morning I feel positively indulged with treasures. Let me assuage my Catholic guilt at having too much good fortune by sharing all of it with you! The first is from Melanie, who I met at the beaver dam Sunday night, and got her permission to post this morning. This is an example of how nurtured kits are by family members. We couldn’t even say if this is mom, because that’s a pretty big tail for our little mom. It might be dad or uncle for all I know, but I am certain beyond any doubt that beaver kits are loved.

Kit-adult nuzzle — Photo by Melanie 6-23-13

Many of you may be following the rodenticide-raptor problem which is killing and sickening hundreds and thousands of birds around the world and even prompted the EPA to rear its head in response. Our friend Lisa Owens Viani started the organization RATS {Raptors Are The Solution} to help educate and get cities to ban the poisons that are killing hawks an owls at an alarming rate. She has been hard at work to get the word out an asked me a while back if I thought Ian Timothy might be interested in helping and would I introduce them? So it turns out that Ian’s first natural passion was raptors and he was VERY interested. In the midst of going to Carnegie Hall and graduating from high school he agreed to work on this which was just released. Remember that telling the story is the most important thing we do, and Ian just made Lisa’s job a lot easier!

Isn’t that amazing? One of the things I love about his work, besides his delightful humor and artwork, is his compassion. He has the judgement not to show the dying hawk on camera just like he had the wisdom to show the teddy bear [and not its owner] get stuck in the trap. He gets the point across without shocking the viewer, which is very, very rare. I can’t wait to see what he does to improve Pixar!

A final jewel in today’s crown of beaver activity is this. The Beaver Whisperers aired in Canada in March this year, but the International Version is still being finalized. It will include a great segment on Sherri Tippie and have less of a Canadian focus. The producer has promised to generously donate a copy for the silent auction, but she let me watch the entire thing yesterday, which is where I saw this. I can’t tell you how irrationally happy this makes me.