Out For A Swim

Season’s Greetings

heidi08 Friends of Martinez Beavers December 20, 2009

This was sent to beaver supporters on Friday. In addition to being full of good cheer, we are getting ready to launch a newsletter in January and wanted some address practice. If you didn’t get a copy and you’d like to receive the newsletter, write me here (or if the link doesn’t work for you mtzbeavers@gmail.com). Likewise, if you received an unwanted copy, (or too many copies) let me know so I can struggle to take care of it. Turns out Comcast only lets you send 50 addresses at once BCC. Who knew? I chunked them into 8 painstaking batches of 50 and was able to send them out in stages, like soldiers headed to the front. Help me make corrections and please be patient with mistakes while I get this down.

Mysteries at the dam-let

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beaver News, Friends of Martinez Beavers May 28, 2010

My my my. We are getting more curious every day what kind of beaver developments are going on at the little tulle dam next to the footbridge. The purpose of the dam is obviously access to a deeper channel so the beavers can swim in safety to a remaining tulle stand in the corner near the amtrak parkinglot. They have clearly been digging trenches of mud so that the sometimes shallow water would cover them, and using the mud to build the dam-let. I’m happy to see that because when we lowered the dam by three feet I sometimes worried the water wouldn’t be deep enough for them to feel safe or get around. I always hoped they were digging passage ways to make the water deeper, and no one can complain about that.

This new channel is all about tulles and the dam-let protects it. Remember the little hole that dad dug through the birm into the scrape last summer? We never saw it used, but knew it was there for a reason. Now it leads to the dam-let and the channel and the beavers have expanded their territory by several square feet.

Which leaves the mystery of scenting to account for. Now scenting is essential beaver behavior, and the reason for those precious Castoreum glands that the horrible video yesterday showed perfume industries pirating. Scent marks can say “I am here” or “leave me alone” or “can I buy you a leaf?”. On several occasions a large beaver has been seen marking the dam-let as if he’s scenting. We wondered before if this were dad, but now we know it was a yearling engaging in the practice. Maybe he’s “practicing” for when he gets a place of his own. Or helping the family keep unwanted beavers away. Or just imitating what he saw Dad do. But I like to think of it as “pre-mating”. He’s telling the world who he is and what he has to offer, in the hopes of attracting some lucky beaver of his dreams. The imagined other would still need to take off with him in search of new territory, but its much easier to start out adult life with a partner.

Brave souls who can stand the cold might toddle down in the dark for a glimpse of the mystery in progress. Our friend at Allied Waste who wanted to donate blankets to the homeless as a thankyou for “keeping an eye on the beavers” just dropped off a lovely bundle yesterday and Cheryl helped them get distributed. Maybe they’ll share!

Not Lazy

heidi08 Beaver News, Recent Sightings November 29, 2009

Photo: Cheryl Reynolds

One thing you have to admire about beavers is their commitment to work. Oh its nothing like our TypeA/driven/greedy/soulless workaholic-ism. It’s completely different. Do you remember inventing a new game as a child? It was wholly absorbing until mom brought grilled cheese sandwiches and then you were munchingly engrossed in lunch and laughing about emily’s hair sticking straight up, and then after lunch back to the game only you made three changes so that new people could play and instead of a butterfly restaurant you were a zoo keeper whose crocodile could paint.

This is the ambling, creative, purposeful way that beavers work. They don’t ever expect to be finished, and they don’t mind at all stopping to munch a willow branch or wrestle with their brother. They are happy to work alone, and equally happy to share the load. They might do very little, or an exhausting lot, depending on the materials, the moment and their mood. If there is a way to be a “zen workaholic” beavers have found it.

Which is offered by way of introduction to the new goings on at the footbridge lately. Cheryl went down yesterday to help a visiting Humbolt student make plaster casts of beaver footprints, and noticed some new activity in the first scrape, upstream of the footbridge. The photo is of a new dam-let to the right of the creek in the scrape, entirely made of mud and tulles, and bordered by a lovely new channel the beavers have dug right to the center of the tulles. The picture above is taken from the upstream corner, facing the footbridge, with the actual creek not shown but running along to the left.

Beaver canals are an important addition, and one we’ve been waiting for. Also a mysterious pile of dirt that I think is a scent mound, which is another expected (but until now not seen) addition. Jon saw what might have been “scenting” behavior yesterday as a large beaver climbed onto the dam several times. We recently learned that these mounds can be both a “keep out” sign to other beavers, and a “SWF” personal ad for a beaver whose lost its mate or is looking for one. All in all its a pretty exciting development for the end of November. Maybe you’ll want to stop by and see for yourself.

KV5 Beavers

heidi08 featured, Friends of Martinez Beavers April 16, 2011

The Valley of the Kings is a massive trove of hidden treasures that were riffled long before the 1900’s. As a woman who hiked through it in the largely unvisited period six weeks after 9/11, I can tell you It hums with the feeling of undiscovered things even though Howard Carter and his buddies before him pretty much took everything away but the pictures on the walls. There are 62 identified tombs, to date. To share the wear and tear of visitors, different tombs are open to the public each day. You buy a ticket that allows you to visit three, although often a kindly bribe will get you into more. KV5’s only claim to fame was the massive dumping of clutter from the excavation of the nearby tomb of KV3 (more famously known as the tomb of Tutankhamun).

In the 1980’s Kent Weeks left UC Berkeley to take a job as curator at the university of Cairo. He envisioned a massive photography and mapping project that would record the dimensions of every tomb. He even introduced hot air balloons to check the area from the sky. To get the specifics of unimportant KV5 he started to remove the clutter and check the tiny site thorougly. Sometimes little laborious actions have huge unintended consequences. He found a massive corridor lined with more than 70 tombs of the sons of Rameses II, and filled with some of the most important treasures ever discovered.

I tell you this story (and its a fantastic story if you’re interested) because every now and then in beaver-dom, a hundred separate unsuccessful excavations where we’ve forever been toiling without sunlight or water, suddenly touch upon treasures all at the same time. There is this massive and startling outpouring of good will, and we have to take a moment just to compose ourselves, make sure we’re in the right place, and appreciate our good fortunes.

This is a KV5 kinda week, with good luck, unlooked for friends, and wild coincidences. I will start from the top in no particular order. This weekend a sighting of five beavers was reliably reported. The voice of John Muir (Lee Stetson) called me up for a beaver tour late friday night. The editor of Bay Nature said at the awards ceremony that Worth A Dam had done amazing work and he was very excited about pursuing the overlap between beaver dams and salmon. Sunday we had a great conversation with JMA conservation award winner about a project he would like to take on that could benefit Worth A Dam. The physician from Los Altos who has expressed interest in our beavers has taken on the thankless job of editing and updating our Wikipedia entries. A new beaver friend has taken on the significant job of organizing a newsletter to distribute to our supporters twice a year. Our volunteer contractor doing the tile bridge project will be meeting with the director of public works this week.Thinking we needed a logo for the organization we placed another ad on craig’s list for an unpaid graphic designer and got a bevy of fantastically gifted artists who cared about these beavers and wanted to be included. I have a presentation for the Rotary Club of PH tomorrow and it looks like I’ll be in charge of the entertainment portion of JMA’s Earth Day event which will likely be a great way to connect with potential performers for the Beaver Festival.

As we flutter around in all this good fortune, I like to think of the excitement Weeks and his team felt when they stumbled into that first corridor. Can you imagine? Finding a place that no one knew existed with treasures that no one had dared imagine? And seeing the corridor stretch in front of you long beyond the shadowed lighting could possibly reach? Did he stop and check one room thouroughly? Or did he run along the corridor and see as much as he could?

Or did he just stand there in awe and thank the spirit of Amun-Ra?

Bi-yearlings?

heidi08 Beaver News, kits October 26, 2009

Worth A Dam has been quietly mourning the fact that we had no kits that survived this year. It is hard to know why that was, but we know some reasons why it wasn’t. It was not because of inadequate food supply, because the rest of our family is looking quite fat and happy. Our beavers are eating mainly tulles with a side of willow, and with the entire marina at their disposal they aren’t running out of cattails any time soon. It was also probably not because the mink ate them. A beaver kit, even newborn, is the size of a guinea pig and a mink is smaller than a cat. Also mink are notoriously messy eaters and would likely leave clues. Jon has been checking the creek in the kayak and hasn’t seen signs of what happened. One benefit of the mink is that they are very high on the food chain, so if they were here and thriving it gives us an important clue about creek health, which suggest that it probably wasn’t something bad in the water either.

It may have something to do with mom’s eye condition, and her not being well enough to care for them. From what we could see she stopped milk production early and she may have just been unable to feed them. Or maybe they weren’t around anymore so milk production wasn’t triggered. A good portion of beaver watching is guesswork, and to be honest, we just don’t know why we didn’t have surviving kits this year. We hope its a one-time event, and that we get a new batch next year, but we just don’t know what will happen.

Photo: Cheryl Reynolds

Which brings me to the title of this post. What happens next year? Normally kits hang around and become yearlings and last year’s-yearlings take off and become adults. What happens when you skip a generation? Our three yearlings are still here and healthy and almost ready for the world. Will 2008 beavers be “failure to launch” yearlings? Will they stick around for an extra lesson in dam building and become bi-yearlings? The research says they can stay with the colony 2-3 years, so this could be the three they’re talking about. How will Mom and Dad feel about them sticking around? Aren’t you curious?

Speaking of curious, if you want to know more about the origins of algae bloom that is causing so much grief for the north coast’s seabirds (and our VP of wildlife!) check out this slideshow and lecture from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. It’s a great introduction to the issue.