Tag: Joe Eaton

Success of Friends

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Earth Day, Educational, Friends of Martinez Beavers January 10, 2013

Do you remember the character of ‘Slapper’ the giant beaver from the exciting young adult tale of climate change from Leaf and the Rushing Waters? The author Jo Marshall is publishing the next volume which will reportedly have my endoresement on the back cover, and she just wrote me with the exciting newsflash that the character of ‘Slapper’ was so popular it has been picked up by a comic book company in Chicago and they want her to write the first episodes. We wish her and slapper all success!

And of course our other rising star, the now-18-year old Ian Timothy, is getting ready to transcend our trajectory entirely. He recently asked me for a letter of recommendation for college, so I know well the heights he is marching towards. This week he is in Miami at the YoungArts Week immersed in more creative youth than you can imagine. That’s him holding the camera, and watch the short film for an introduction to what’s going on.

Ian you are definitely not in Kansas Kentucky any more. Gosh, we are so proud of you. Have a wonderful time, make remarkable inspiring friends, and broaden and deepen every one of your dreams.

Other successes? Well, in the past three days I’ve got Michael Pollock interested in a beavers-and-salmon article for Bay Nature, which has done a great job about reporting on salmon, but not yet picked up the beaver gauntlet. I may have been able to lure science writer Joe Eaton into pursuing it and the difference it will make for salmon (and Beavers) all over the state. Joe is a free lance writer/naturalist and the editor of SFEP newsletter who has written my favorite articles about mom beaver, ever. He would be the very best man for the job, if we can just get him intrigued enough! On a related note research Rick says we’re two weeks away from the rough draft of the historic prevalence of beavers in the coastal rivers article, so things are moving in a very good direction!

Blame the Rodent[icide]

heidi08 Beavers, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental May 13, 2012

Silent spring for Bay Area’s raptors?

Rodenticide-related wildlife mortality may seem an abstract issue until your child finds two dead hawks in the backyard wading pool. That happened to Berkeley resident Dan Rubino on the Fourth of July in 2007. Rubino sought out his neighbor Lisa Owens Viani, who has a background in wildlife rehabilitation. She identified the birds as juvenile Cooper’s hawks, the offspring of one of 13 local pairs.

Owens Viani suspected rodenticide poisoning: “When Dan told me they were going to the pool, I knew right away what it was. I knew they would be bleeding internally and looking for water.”

Joe Eaton & Ron Sullivan

Thus begins part one of the two part series describing the danger that second generation anti-coagulate rodenticides (SGAR) pose to birds of prey. See, folks use the poisons to kill rats, but the rats take a while to die. Raptors eat the toxic rats and get killed themselves. In 2003 the EPA responded to growing concern and litigation by requiring that SGARs would stop being sold to the public in 2011. They wanted them marketed only to wildlife control specialists, but that hasn’t exactly happened. In the mean time, children are finding cooper’s hawks in their wading pools.

So long-time beaver friend Lisa Owens Viani (formerly of SFEP and now of Golden Gate Audubon) has taken up the gauntlet and is marching city by city getting them to agree not to use or sell SGARs. She has started the aptly named organization Raptors Are The Solution (RATS) and is working hard to raise awareness. Go read the entire article and give RATS a thumbs up on facebook. This is just another example of narrow thinking having very broad consequences that cause unanticipated results. More vicious poisons to kill more rats leads to more raptors dying leading ironically to more rats because there are no more predators and the demand for even more vicious poisons to control a booming population. Repeat as necessary.

The article is written by Joe Eaton and Ron Sullivan. Joe wrote my favorite article about mother beaver’s death and is a long time beaver supporter. In March, we attended a St. Patrick’s Day Dinner with them at Lisa and Riley’s home in Berkeley, it was a wonderful evening with stories about bird watching, wildlife rescue, and city council struggles of epic proportions. Riley (author of the most famous creek restoration book and working on her second) is top tier of the water boards where people send really thorny problems. She told very amusing stories of a certain Hollywood royalty mogul in the Bay Area once asking for permission to fill in the creek behind his house with cement so his children could cross it easily to get to school!

Bridges are SO passe.

The second installation of the article comes next week and will talk about what citizens groups can do and are doing. Don’t miss it. I keep telling Lisa that RATS needs a booth at the Beaver Festival to raise awareness and connect with folks out here, but does she listen?

Assorted Goodness

heidi08 Beaver News, Beavers, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, Environmental July 7, 2010

:Yesterday beaver-friend Joe Eaton published a column in the Berkeley Daily Planet that was the very best memorial article yet written about mom beaver. (And I say that as somewhat of a connoisseur.) Go read the entire, painfully comforting piece.. A small taste of what awaits you follows,

Mom, as she was generally known, was thought to be about six years old. (The longevity record for a North American beaver, according to the Animal Ageing and Longevity Database genomics.senescence.info/species, is just over 23 years.) Recognizable by a distinctive notch in the side of her tail, she had been observed in the Alhambra watershed before she paired with her mate and got down to the business of dam construction in the fall of 2006.

I first connected with Joe when he was writing an article on the Martinez Beavers for the San Francisco Estuary Partnership Newsletter. That article has always been one of my favorites as he is the only reporter who included my oft-repeated quote ‘Any city that’s smarter than a beaver can keep a beaver’. We met at the Creek Seeker’s Express last year. I am heartened by his thoughtful attention to wildlife, but even more by his knowledge base and effort to connect with experts and references. His article on the mink last year was a thing of beauty. He concluded yesterday with,

In her short but prolific span, the female beaver was an effective good-will ambassador for her species. The Martinez family, just by being beavers, did a lot to enhance consciousness of the beaver’s role as an ecosystem engineer. Public support forced city officials to back off from an initial plan for lethal control and to work out a modus vivendi with the rodents. What happens now? Will the two-year-old sibling stay on as a parent-surrogate? Will the widowed male mate again? Will one of the dispersers return? Stay tuned.

More good news? The Director of the Montana Zoo wrote me back yesterday and is excited about taking the opportunity presented by the orphan baby beavers to teach about the value of beavers in the watershed and educate the public about effective and humane beaver management. I put her in touch with Mike Callahan who offered to help in any long-distance way he could and showed her the successes we have had using art projects to educate children about beavers. I also offered my children’s beaver powerpoint and several helpful articles. Looks like Montana is going to have a little beaver-teachable moment.

And the final piece of good news? Ahh I’ve been saving the best for last. A while back I wrote about NOAA’s March draft of the 2010 “Recovery Plan for the Evolutionary Unit Of Central California Coast Coho Salmon“. The document outlines policies and procedures for helping the suffering salmon population. Guess what it doesn’t mention? At all? I’ll wait. Honestly, beavers are such an unpopular solution that saying they can help the fish population is like discovering you can cure impotence with feminism. “Really? Isn’t there another way?” The unwanted answer hardly recruits followers.

Still, the document is a ‘draft’ so they are still accepting comments, and a host of very smart minds have written back about the missing piece of the puzzle. Last night I read the comments of a certain prominent beaver-salmon researcher who can remain nameless. The whole thing was an exhaustively sourced thesis that makes my meager endorsement seem silly. I don’t have permission to quote but my favorite part is something like “Given that salmon depend on beaver ponds for two stages of their development, we will need the beaver population to recover before the salmon can.“

Swear to God.

Be still my heart. Wow! We are inching towards the promised land where salmon people and beaver people have actual conversations and listen to each other and where commenting aloud that ‘beaver dams hurt salmon populations’ is a punchline that makes everyone in the room burst out laughing. I’m waiting for the day where every time a city or property-owner decides to kill some beavers they have to pay a salmon-tax and face the consequences of their destruction of habitat.

Fingers crossed. I’ll keep you posted.

Friends Underground

heidi08 Burrowing Owls, City Reports January 15, 2010

Beaver friend and science writer Joe Eaton has a powerful article in the Berkeley Daily Planet. In it he highlights the failure of Fish & Game to take regional scarcities into account in deciding that the Burrowing Owl wasn’t “endangered”. Apparently if we have a pile of them on crop lands in Fresno that means that species is doing fine. Kind of like taking the bald eagles off the federal list because there are so many in Alaska.

Some context first: As recently as the 1920s, this small semi-diurnal ground-dwelling owl was described as a “fairly common resident in the drier, unsettled parts of the [bay] region; most numerous in parts of Alameda, Contra Costa and Santa Clara counties.” Whatever their status may have been in the other Bay Area counties, they’re mostly gone. Surveys in 1992-93 found no breeding burrowing owls in Napa, Marin, and San Francisco counties, and only a few in San Mateo and Sonoma. The Santa Clara County population is declining and restricted to a few breeding locations. That leaves Alameda, Contra Costa, and Solano as the remnant breeding range.

Got that? “Help me Contra Costa County! You’re my only Hope!” Time is running out for the owls. The Mayor of Antioch is sticking his heels in and taking care of the developer. I wrote him an imploring letter asking him to do the right thing and just happening to mention that Antioch has been in the news cycle for exactly two reasons this year, and wouldn’t he like to forget the other one by doing the noble thing this time? Funny what gets a mayor’s attention. He wrote back within seconds saying that Jaycee Drugard had been held on unincorporated land so technically it wasn’t an Antioch story. Gosh, I guess he told me.

Although their presence would appear to require a fresh environmental analysis, Kiper is now moving to clear the site by blocking the owls’ burrows with one-way doors. Once the birds are gone, the burrows will be collapsed and backfilled and the burrow architects—the ground squirrels—will be gassed. There’s a standard protocol for passively relocating burrowing owls from development sites, which involves providing alternate habitat nearby. Kiper is not following the protocol. This is eviction pure and simple, not relocation. One of the developer’s hired guns told the Contra Costa Times the owls “will all find happy homes.” That’s nonsense. Burrowing owls are remarkably site-tenacious. The displaced birds will probably hang around until they’re picked off by predators.

Cheryl’s lovely photo adorns the article. If you want to support the owls in their increasingly less likely quest for salvation, drop a note or a phone call in the Mayor’s and council’s direction.

Mayor James D. Davis (925) 757-2020

Mayor Pro Tem Mary Helen Rocha (925)207-7220

Councilmember Brian Kalinowski (925) 584-5430

Councilmember Reginald L. Moore (925)706-7040

Councilmember Martha Parsons (925)890-2665

Christmas Eve, Eve

heidi08 Friends of Martinez Beavers December 23, 2009

Ahhh. Even when I was a child, with no responsibilities but opening presents happily and remembering to say “thankyou”, I preferred Christmas Eve to Christmas Day. Very very soon I realized that the anticipation was (for me) better than the event itself. Thinking about what I would be given or the expression my sister would make when she opened her whatever, was always better than the actual experience itself. In part because imagination is Infinite and the event is finite. (And don’t even get me started talking about the depressing void of boxing day) So Christmas Eve was at the heart of the holiday season for me.

Now as an adult, Christmas Eve is more like the event itself. Because there are dinners to prepare, guests towels to assemble and counters to keep tidy. I have officially moved the glorious anticipation day up by 24 hours: to Christmas Eve, Eve. I invite you to try this as well.

Think about it. Christmas Eve, Eve, has almost no responsibilities, and if there are things that need to get done, there aren’t yet people they need to be done for. It’s buffered by a pleasant warm sense of good things to come, and a cozy fullness of life and possibility.

Beavers, on the other hand, are definitely Christmas Morning kinda of creatures. They don’t seem burdened much with anticipation or disappointment. They live in the “now” and have an enviable enthusiasm for whatever it is they’re doing at the moment, even though they’re able to plan ahead and work on future goals. A beaver can come the next day to a job sight carrying tools he decided he needed the day before, but never once during the intervening time worry about meeting his goals. S/he makes the plan. Executes the plan. Revises the plan. Shares the plan. And eats the plan.

Happy Christmas Eve, Eve. If you need more good cheer, check out beaver friend Joe Eaton’s article today in the Daily Planet about the otters in Jewel Lake. A certain beaver pond is mentioned.