Lindsay Wildlife Museum

Believe it or not, this program aired this very Saturday on the Children’s BBC program “Wild”. It was obviously filmed before DEFRA had made up its mind to ruin everything so there is no mention of beavers being illegally released or carrying parasites. It’s just an irresistible story of beaver adventure. I’m guessing someone at the BBC got a memo Monday morning and scrubbed it because if you search for the program online you get this.

Fortunately for us, stalwart beaver protector Peter Smith had already uploaded it to Youtube and we get to watch it first hand. I think I have a crush on host Naomi Wilkinson, because her enthusiasm for beavers is entirely infectious. Meanwhile pay attention to the language. This is alarmingly accurate for beaver-TV! If I were you I’d watch it today because tomorrow British government television might come lumbering along and swallow the youtube version next.

Wasn’t that amazing? The other amazing thing that came across my desk this weekend (besides a memory card problem, did you know your computer can actually send telegraphic messages and beep to tell you why it broken? Me neither!) was the Moorhen Marsh Study done in 1998 on the beavers at Mt. View Sanitation. For years we’ve been running into the odd person at displays who has mentioned that they were on the volunteer beaver study group between the Lindsay Museum and Mt. View Sanitation. I was fascinated by this and stunned that no information or observations about this study existed or ever found its way to our beaver sub-committee. That is until Kelly Davidson was cleaning out her desk and sent us this.

There’s a description of their methods and the some 15 volunteers who participated, as well as an excellent species list of 26 in all. It doesn’t say much that is startling about beavers and sadly there are no photos attached, but it did have a description of the behaviors they observed, all but one of which we see in Alhambra Creek. See if you can spot they outlier?

Beavers were observed swimming, chewing, diving, eating reeds, laying on their backs to eat, carrying stick or weeds in their mouth, patrolling or circling the ponds, shaking their heads, wiggling their ears, rubbing their faces with their paws and splashing.

Those beavers built a full lodge in the marsh and two kits were observed at the site. What I love best is thinking that one of those kits was probably one of our original parents. Bear with me here, but those beavers didn’t live in the bank and none of our 22 beavers have ever built a lodge but our original mom. In fact she built two in the span of three years and no one has done it since she died. This would make her 12 when she died, which is a nice life span for a wild beaver. So I’m going to assume it was mom that grew up in Moorhen Marsh. I’m reading this report as if I were looking at her baby pictures, which is a lot of fun. I will upload it to the website or you can read it here yourself.

So a very nice woman approached us the day of the beaver festival and asked Worth A Dam to be part of this years Amazing Bay Day for the Girl Scouts. You can reserve your space now. This year’s event will be held at Sugarloaf Open Space in Walnut Creek, and sponsored by the Lindsay Wildlife Museum. Our job was to offer some kind of craft or activity that would appeal to 500 girl scouts and teach the values of stewardship and respect for our avian wildlife.

Could we do it?

Luckily for us, beavers have been shown to have a direct impact on bird density and variety. In fact, one research project showed that as the number of dams in an area goes up, the number of migratory songbirds also goes up. So any Amazing Day that teaches about birds, has to be a day that teaches about beavers, right?

What if there were a way to visually show the links that beavers have to wildlife? Something tangible that you can touch and carry away with you. Something that you might have earn, like scouts earn badges all the time. And something cute. For 500 girls from 6-18 it would have to be cute.

How’d we do?

So the idea is that girls will be encouraged to learn about the relationships between beavers and birds, fish, and wildlife. Worth A Dam will have teaching materials and volunteers to help them understand, and then with a short quiz they can “earn” a charm to be added to the bracelet. We’ll introduce a new charm every hour until they’re all gone, and it will be a permanent reminder of why beavers are important to the habitat. Worth A Dam found some persuadable donors to pick up the cost for the charms, so they’ll be free for the first 100 girls. The grown-ups we’ve shown them to so far have only three words to say in response.

“I want one!”