Tag: Kate Lundquist

FIRST, DO NO HARM

If I were queen of the beaver world, (and don’t tell me it can’t happen), I would make dam sure that any article that was supposed to be teaching about how important they are for water storage and biodiversity wouldn’t have stay mistakes or non-facts. Like saying that they eat fish

Or that they live in the dam.

Beavers use their dams as their homes. However, the dam also creates deeper water, making it easier for them to use their strength as swimmers to evade predators.

AS THEIR HOMES is the problem, Cole Hersey. If he had only said “For” their homes I would have even given him a pass. No, Cole they don’t use them AS their homes. They use them to raise the water so they can make build their homes in a completely different structure. Of course if you and I were trying to build a beaver dam in the middle of the creek we would find out pretty darn quickly that it doesn’t work really well if it’s hollow with a center space to live in. But you knew that, right? (more…)

OLEMA WATERSHED GETS ITS SUMMIT FIRST

heidi08 Beavers March 12, 2021

One of the very first canoe trips we took back in the 90’s was along Tomales creek outside Pt Reyes National Park. It was so early in the story and we were so ignorant of everything that we were not surprised to learn from one of the old timers we met along the way that a beaver dam that would have blocked our progress was just ripped out the day before by a neighbor.

This stands out in my mind because we haven’t since run into beavers in the area and Marin has been hungrily exploring beaver benefits. There was a talk last night in Olema by our friends Brock Dolman and Kate Lundquist. Jerry Meral was governor Brown’s water tzar and he’s eager for beavers to come back to Marin.

Beaver Restoration Feasibility: A Webinar for Olema

The following video is a recording of the informational webinar Brock Dolman and Kate Lundquist (Occidental Arts & Ecology Center WATER Institute Directors) gave on March 4, 2021 to those living and/or working in the Olema Creek watershed near Point Reyes National Seashore in California.

Co-hosted by the Environmental Action Committee and the Olema Association, webinar topics include the fascinating history, ecology and benefits of beaver in California and the initial results from the West Marin Beaver Restoration Feasibility Assessment Brock and Kate have been carrying out with the help of their Marin County based steering committee. The 45-minute presentation is followed by a question and answer session.

Please note, the recording begins a couple of minutes after the start of the webinar. Apologies to our co-host and esteemed Steering Committee member Jerry Meral for not capturing his warm welcome and introduction.

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HALF A CONSERVATION ATTEMPT IN P.E.I.

heidi08 Attitudes towards beavers, Tree-Wrap Rap October 27, 2020

Do you remember playing “telephone” when you were a kid?

A first child whispers something through their cupped hand hotly into the ear of the child next to them. No repeats or clarifications allowed, that child needs to repeat the best they can to the next child beside them, in progression so that, eventually, (with all the giggling and spitting) the words get get slightly more garbled with each telling. By the time the message got to the end of the line it usually made zero sense so that when you repeated it aloud the room burst into laughing.

It was a fun classroom activity for rainy days. And I think describes as well as anything what happens with animal advocacy in Prince Edward Island.

Beaver evades capture, Summerside residents concerned for its welfare

SUMMERSIDE, P.E.I. —

Users of a Summerside park have been sharing the space with a beaver for the past few weeks. Trees chewed down make for a telltale sign. What didn’t have a sign were the traps set nearby to remove it.

The traps are gone for now, thanks to some Summerside residents who spoke up.

Jane Pitre and Jamie Donovan-Gallant found the two conibear-style traps just off the edge of the trail in Heather Moyse Park.

“No beaver should die like that, in a conibear trap,” said Pitre. “There’s other ways to get the beaver out of there.”

Scaring him away? Closing all the liquor stores? It’s a long way across the length of Canada to P.E.I. Messages are bound to get slightly muddled along the way. The “Conibear bad” message made it through. That’s a start.

“A licensed trapper was hired, and I was advised a live trap would be used, however we’ve learned that the live trap method was not successful and the trapper under direction/approval of the department of environment was using a snare method,” Desrosiers wrote in an email. “Once we learned that a snare method was implemented, we asked the trapper stop this practice.

“What we are doing now is reconnecting with the department of environment on what options exist, what considerations should be given, what level of risk and damage could occur if not dealt with and we will go from there,” said Desrosiers. “This is very much outside of our area of expertise.”

He added, “We do need to ensure that tree destruction in this park is limited and public safety issues aren’t created.”

Of course you know that if the primary issue is protecting your trees the answer is not to put the beavers in a wire cage but to put the TREES in a wire cage. Surely that made it through the telephone game?

While not a wildlife expert, she has also read about other options like wrapping the trees with heavy wire mesh or modifying the dam to let a channel of water pass through.

“I understand they want to save the trees and the trees cost a lot, I get that, but I kind of just think the wildlife have a right to be here and we need to live with them better.”

Well that is as good as you can expect, but hey maybe you could lead with that next time. Not “conibears are horrible” but “Here’s an easy way to protect trees“.

It’s just a thought.

Some what less unclear is Kate Lundquist’s beaver presentation to the Escondido Creek Conservancy talking about the importance of beavers in our state. It’s a good overview on the issue and deserves a listen.

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BEAVERS AND DIRT

heidi08 Beavers, Environmental October 9, 2018

Dirt Rich – Trailer from Passelande Pictures on Vimeo.

Back in the spring of 2015 I was contacted by filmmaker Marcelina Cravat who was working on a documentary about climate change and creative solutions. She was interested in talking about the wetland work that beavers do and wondered if Martinez would be a good place to film some sequences. She and her husband came over to survey the setting and meet the fam.

At the time we were excitedly expecting what turned out to be our last group of kits and had already arranged with Suzi Eszterhas to photograph them for Ranger Rick magazine. That had been set up at the last beaver festival so I thought I better ask her how she felt about another camera on site before I answered Marci. To my surprise Suzi said ‘no’. Because in her experience it was hard to work around two visions at once. So I introduced Marci to the good folks in’ Napa, and off she went in their direction.

Dirt Rich explores strategies that re-stabilize atmospheric carbon levels and revitalize the soil in an effort to reverse the effects of runaway global warming.

Fast forward three years later, and her film premiered this year at the SF Green Film Festival this summer, got awards at Sundance and is available to watch online for a short period. Robin Ellison of Napa has a lovely snippet of footage inside and let me know about the opportunity to watch our beaver buddies online. The 6 minute beaver segment starts around 24 minutes in and stars Brock Dolman, Kate Lundquist, Eli Asarian, Sherry Tippie and some even more beautiful furry faces. I can’t embed it, but here’s the link. Dirt Rich. Lucky for you, you have three more free days to watch the whole thing.

And here’s proof of many selfless hours spent at the beaver dam. Congratulations Robin!

NUMBER TWENTY-SEVEN

heidi08 kits June 28, 2018

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…