Out For A Swim

You’re never too old…

heidi08 City Reports, Recent Sightings April 5, 2009

To ride on mom’s back in the beaver world, apparently. Last night a kit saw her approach and swam to hitch a lift. It was very sweet to see Mom and Junior together, sharing treats. All three kits made an appearance and only Dad was too sneaky to show his face. Some appreciative diners came down for the beaver show and were rewarded with a full stand in the water and a nice glimpse of orange teeth.

Photo: Cheryl Reynolds

Haven’t seen mom go for any fennel yet, but its about ten days before observed it last year. Mom is looking very round indeed, and we are fairly certain she’s pregant. Check out the video in the sidebar and pause a moment to remember that we are heading for the anniversary of the presentation of the beaver subcommittee report. You remember, the meeting where the council refused to vote and Mary Tappel said the beavers were leaving?

Friday snippets

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental April 3, 2009

During the week I usually get a few beaver-related blurbs that aren’t juicy enough for a full post but are still are worth sharing. This week was no exception, and I’m thinking that Friday is the perfect day to run some little stories to get us ready for the weekend.

First up is the exciting back story to LK’s butterfly observation. She wrote that she was seeing clouds migrating over highway 4. Apparently she wasn’t the only one. Gary Bogue wrote a column for this week’s Contra Costa Times on the enchanting migration of “painted ladies”, from the desert of their birth in Southern California. In case you missed them, here’s one to identify for next time.

How about another reason to reintroduce beavers in Scotland? This news from the BBC talks about an alarming decline in the Cranefly population, leading to a staggering loss in the bird population. The problem is climate-change related, cause by the loss of pools where flies can reproduce. The article suggests creating a series of (wait for it) little dams. “For example, by blocking drainage ditches on our Forsinard reserve in the North of Scotland we hope to raise water levels and reduce the likelihood of the cranefly larvae drying out in hot summers.” Now we know what can make and maintain those little “ditches” for you.

Remember the beaver problem that appeared every morning for conflict resolution to a South Carolina Farmer? Kristin was wondering how to adapt a beaver deceiver to a spillway, so I wrote Skip Lisle and he got in touch with her. Soon those beavers will be roundly deceived.

If you have an even longer memory you might recall the beavers at the Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau Alaska. They had the good fortune to attract some hardworking volunteers (and an award winning photographer) who gathered together to regularly help undo the beavers most troublesome handiwork.The beavers were slated for extermination but temporarily saved from the executioner. We admired their effort and got in touch with them. The primary concern was allowing passage for large Coho Salmon and making sure that beavers, (or beaver-devices), didn’t interfere with this lucrative fishy business. Word is that they are working hard to secure a comprehensive beaver management plan for the area; one that doesn’t include trapping. More on this later.

There will be another class at Mt. View Sanitation next weekend, specifically on planting for pollinators. It will be taught by Jeff Alvarez, founder of The Wildlife Project who it turns out is a big fan of our beavers and has agreed to help his friend Kelly help us with our interpretive sign design. Let’s get some beaver friends to increase the turnout.

Go Native – Planting for Pollinators
Saturday, April 11, 9:30 am – 12:30 pm
Attract birds, butterflies and beneficial insects. Learn to diversify
your garden by including California native plants that provide food, shelter and nesting places for wildlife.

Nothing to do the weekend after that? Wrong. The John Muir Birthday-Earthday Celebration will be an rollicking good eco time. Plan to be there on Saturday April 18th between 10 and 4. In addition to the bagpipes, remarkable displays, performances, and the ever popular recycled trash fashion show, Worth A Dam will be in prominent display, our first since fall. We will be raffling two hard to get tickets to the Creek Seekers Express eco tour ride from Jack London to Martinez. It will feature a guided lecture from the marine curator of the Oakland Museum and never before seen footage of the Martinez Beavers. Don’t miss your chance at getting to participate in this historic opportunity.

Worth A Dam

heidi08 Beaver-themed merchandise, Festival March 30, 2009

The remarkable beaver-guardians of Worth A Dam gathered last night to finesse plans for Earth day and our tree planting project. Our intrepid potential eagle scout was there boldly getting ready to go before the council to offer our tree-installation plans. It was a lively meeting, but one of my favorite parts was our brainstorming session about the art project we might offer at earthday.

Artist and teacher Frogard Butler has been helping us with these activities since she generously volunteered to paint a portrait of one of my beaver photographs and gave it to me in support. We decided that since clay was such a huge hit at the beaver festival, we would try it again, inviting children to help us build a diorama representation of the beaver habitat in miniature. Jon volunteered to make the landscape/box that could get us started, and of course we’ll be putting dams and lodges and tiny peices of sheetpile.

I can’t wait.

Beaver people are good people. We signed our 2009 executive agreement, with two additions who will become official worth a dam-ers. Lory will record donations, and Linda will track down research questions. Hard to believe only a year has passed since Worth A Dam was formed. In that time we’ve given presentations to the Elementary and High schools, Audubon, Sierra Club,and all of downtown Martinez. We’ve held a festival, applied for a grant, and expanded our web page. We even found time to work over 20 farmer’s markets and take the city to court. During our first year we raised more than 7,000 in donations.

Not bad for 365 days work.

Maybe all this talk of our accomplishments has inspired you to offer your own. We’re looking for a new tee shirt design for 2009 and would love to encourage you to fiddle with the concept. We want our name and web site address on it, but other than this we are open to suggestions. Why not try your hand at graphic beaver design and give us a couple ideas. If we love your design will make it into 100 shirts this year, and we’ll give you yours for free!

Beavers in the Dark

heidi08 Beaver News, Recent Sightings March 29, 2009

When the lights went out last night, we trekked down to the dam for some some truly fine beaver watching. It started with the unmistakable appearance of mom, who came and sat near us to give the necessary view of her tail. Then all three kits and later the lumbering figure of dad, coming down the creek with a huge branch and pulling it out onto the dam so we could verify that he was indeed an adult, with an unblemished tail.

It was very cheering.

Photo: Cheryl Reynolds

Another couple saw the light and came down to join us. We didn’t recognize them but they had been to both beaver meetings and knew the story. The man recalled that they had used to see a beaver colony regularly in Plumas County, to which I remarked this was where these beavers were supposed to be relocated. Turns out the woman had been the one to mention our potentially homeless beavers to Beverly Ogle of the Mountain Maidu tribe of Greenville Rancheria. Trappers and US Forestry took all their beavers, and they would have been grateful for ours.

Well, I’m grateful for ours too, but its nice to know how that link got established. I had always wondered how plumas county knew about them, and thought maybe city staff shopped around, but what are the odds of them handling anything so delicately? I just scanned through the Novemeber 7th video to find them, but could not. What I did see that I never did before is that Don Bernier, the documentary guy who got interested in our beavers, was there that night adjusting the microphone. I knew he he’d attended, but didn’t know he was recording it. Good. Honestly that meeting was so inspiring, it really needs to be on the big screen someday.

Four more interested watchers were drawn by the light and came to appreciate beavers in grand display. One man thought they had left becuase “he hadn’t heard anything about them on the news in a while”. (!) They all had things to say about the unattractive and unnecessary sheetpile, and were all very enthusiatic about the animals they were watching. With a crowd of beaver supporters, and some active healthy beavers, it was a very familiar and warm scene.

We came home in beaver-high spirits.

I See Tree People…

heidi08 Creative Solutions, Environmental March 24, 2009

“A society will be great when old men plant trees whose shade they will never sit under”

Obviously the unwritten corollary of this proverb is that a city will be respected when they plant willow for their beavers to eat. Worth A Dam has been hard at work to push the slow-moving boulder of progress in this matter, so that we can use our generous donations for a second planting project. Surely you remember lasts years’ feel-good/feel-bad adventure, where responsibly donated labor and hard working beaver friends put 30 trees in the ground. There’s footage in the sidebar, that sadly lost its original “I’d like to teach the world to Sing” soundtrack when WMG decided to fight with You Tube. Meanwhile these finely installed trees were obviously so deeply planted their roots reached all the way to the underworld and awakened the cloven-hoofed property owner who demanded that they be moved out of the channel to “prevent flooding”.

Ahh those were the days.

This time the city engineer is taking no chances and asked us to begin with a biologist report on the habitat to see whether or not there is actually a good reason to plant the trees in the first place. Apparently declining songbird habitat, increasing water temperature, and decreasing fish population just isn’t compelling enough on its own. One might argue that It seemed almost like the kind of hoop designed to discourage jumping, but we were up to the challenge. I started writing our ecological contacts, and was told by our friends at the Urban Creeks Council that we had a perfect environmental consulting firm here in town!

Of course I put on my sunday come’a courting email and introduced myself to Condor Country Consulting to explain our predicament. I heard back from the Principal biologist and President Wendy Dexter that she could probably offer some pro bono assistance, but maybe not until after May. She gave me some other names, one of which I recognized as the gentleman who is helping us with the Interpretive Signs Grant (if we get it). We talked a little more and she volunteered that her four year old daughter loved the beavers. I immediately confessed that the affections of children were the secret weapon of Worth A Dam and I hoped she could find a way to help us take care of our beavers and our creek.

Can I get an Amen? Yesterday she assigned biologist Felix Ratcliff to work on this issue and he contacted me to arrange a survey visit.

So that’s part one of the tree operation. Part II is the Eagle Scout Project for a local beaver fan who contacted us to be involved with the planting and tree maintenance. He came to our Sierra Club talk in Antioch to catch up and then met last week with the City Engineer, his Scout Leader, and our VP Linda Meza to talk plans. In addition to planting and wrapping trees, he is offering to install a few wood duck boxes which the scouts could help make. He and the city engineer can hand select tree sites and install survey flags for people to plant later. In addition to fellow scout help, Rona Zollinger’s ESA class and another High School class want to assist.

So on to Part III which will be buying the trees and helping the city engineer to convince the council to let us plant them. Stay tuned.

You’d think we were planning the invasion of Normandy.