Tag: Mary Ellen Hannibal

Father’s Day good news

heidi08 Beaver-themed merchandise, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? June 18, 2017

Well what do you know, folks are finally getting around to opening the memo on beaver benefits to trout. Do you think this came as a shock? Now I dearly wish this had been reported in Wisconsin, but hey, North Carolina isn’t bad either.

Beaver ponds actually keep the water cooler, study says

Now scientists and conservationists realize that beavers and the dams they make across streams have a lot of benefits. Most recently a study showed that the big pools of water backed up by beaver dams actually help keep the water cool, and cool water is important to a lot of different types of fish like native trout, steelhead and salmon.

To figure this out, scientists built fake beaver dams and recorded the water temperatures. Although it would seem like a pool of slow-moving water would get warmer, this study found that the water actually was cooler. Why would that be? One reason was there was more and deeper water backed up by the dams. What’s more, the big pools of water seem to help feed water that’s in the ground which also circulates back to the surface, keeping the creeks cool.

Knowing that beavers can play an important role in nature, humans are now putting beavers back in wild places. The Forest Service hauled beavers on horseback into Buffalo Fork Creek, which flows into Yellowstone National Park’s Lamar River. Idaho game biologists dropped parachuted beaver in cages into a remote wilderness area in the 1950s.

Lot’s of generous gifts this week. Starting with a wonderful collection of puppets from Folkmanis which include some delightful hedgehogs, an english badger, a wild-toothed crocodile and a delightfully soft white dog. Thank you a million times over puppet wizards for supporting our beavers since the very, very beginning.

And a wonderful donation from San Francisco author Mary Ellen Hannibal with a fine copy of her recent book where people like us do remarkable things for wildlife.

“For me the most compelling reason to do citizen science is the sixth mass extinction of plants and animals currently underway. In the book I do a lot of reporting and research on this scourge, but contextualize what’s happening within a broad framework. “Extreme citizen science” often focuses on indigenous traditions for caring for the land, and I learn a great deal from the Amah Mutsun tribal band. I take great inspiration from three literary figures who contributed to citizen science—John Steinbeck, Ed Ricketts, and Joseph Campbell. While the hero’s journey as discerned by Campbell needs updating for dealing with today’s global issues, he still provides a model for aggregating individual efforts on behalf of nature to achieve collective impact. That’s the job of the citizen scientist.”

The book is signed. Mary has also been a supporter of the Martinez Beavers since the beginning, and I am grateful that she will continue to encourage citizen science by donating it for the festival.

Of course the beaver problem isn’t extinction, it’s depredation. But I’m sure she’s working on that book next. Thanks Mary!

Finishing the Last of the Mohican’s last night, I thought of my own dad with this quote by the affable, skilled and boyishly cheerful Hawkeye,

“Think of me sometimes when on a lucky trail, and depend on it, boy, whether there be one heaven or two, there is a path in the other world by which honest men may come together again.”

What if concerned citizens themselves are the wildlife corridors?

heidi08 Educational, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? March 20, 2016

*Writer Mary Ellen Hannibal, author of Spine of the Continent. Photo: Richard Morganstein*

Do you recognize this face? You really should as it belongs to one of the most brilliant nature writers of the day. Mary Ellen Hanibal is the author of the well-embraced “Spine of the Continent”, and a major subject this month at the Bay Nature website. She is currently working on a book on the subject of citizen science and wildlife corridors. A lecture series is promoting it and it’s not due for release until the end of August. I know you’ll recognize some of it though.

Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction

Noted environmental author and Bay Nature contributing writer Mary Ellen Hannibal was moved to write about large-scale efforts to protect the planet after watching conservation scientists weep as they shared their fears that the species they were studying wouldn’t be able to keep up with the rapid pace of environmental change. Out of that experience came The Spine of the Continent, a description of the large-scale effort to promote biodiversity along the chain of mountain ranges from Canada to Mexico. Her next book hones in on a new hope for preserving biodiversity: groups of concerned citizens who faithfully count and study the animals and plants in their local parks, in the wild, and even virtually.

It’s a great interview, and you really should go read the whole thing. In the mean time, I think we should play a game. Let’s pretend that you were a bay area writer tackling the subject of citizen science for an important book. Who would you be sure to interview? Who are the major players in Bay Area wildlife? And before you even start suggesting those river otter people you keep hearing so much about, read this.

Hi Heidi — I’m a journalist and the author of The Spine of the Continent: The Race to Save America’s Last, Best Wilderness. I’ll paste a short review of it below.

I actually wrote quite a bit about beaver in the book — two chapters. One chapter is about Mary O’Brien and her work with the Grand Canyon Trust to bring beaver back to Utah. Just this month Mary has put out a notice to the hundreds of volunteers who over the years have helped her collect data with which to get the Forest Service to change their grazing rules so that beaver habitat can be maintained. It was working with Mary that I conceived the idea of the book I’m writing now, about citizen science, since this is such a fantastic way to get people galvanized and making change.

I’m focusing on California in my book and would love to feature Worth a Dam. I can’t find a list of volunteer activities on your website but I bet you have them. Any other citizen-related engagement, where people actually help gather data and/or restore habitat? Do you know of other volunteer or citizen science related work around beaver in California?

There’s a cool beaver dam app also in Utah and I’m going to write an update about Mary but would love to have a California connection. In any case I’m writing about how beaver were here historically and that in some cases the agencies persist in looking at them as invasive — I’m going to suggest, hopefully in a tactful way, that this is an outdated way of looking at things purely through the lens of agriculture, ranching, and business in general, and that we have to look beyond those interests to the functioning ecosystem.

Thank you for doing your wonderful work — did you write the “beaver pledge” on your site? I’d love to include it in the book.

best,

Mary Ellen September 2014

p.s. I’d ask to come meet you but my deadline is crazily close and I really can’t leave my desk.

I’m sure part of what she was hoping our volunteers did was take fur samples or gather scat. Because that would be ‘science-y’. Just watching the beavers and observing what they do for 9 years apparently isn’t that science-y. Citizen science according to much of the world involves using cell phones to collect data that actual scientists would have gotten themselves if they had enough funding. It is not about observing a father beaver care for his kits when widowed or seeing him get remarried a 18 months later. It is not about noticing that one kit always used reeds when he built dams and his father tried on at least one occasion to show him that trees were more useful, and he ignored him.

That’s not ‘citizen science’. That’s ‘colorful science’.

But regardless, Mary wanted to include Worth A Dam in her book, and specifically asked to include this, which I’m dearly hoping made it past the final edits. I’m asking for an early copy for the silent auction, but you’ll have to come see for yourself whether its available.

Beavers and Wolves…

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental September 29, 2012

Great column yesterday in the New York Times about the role that wolves play in creating habitat for beavers, who in turn create habitat for everyone else.

An example of this can be found in Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park, where wolves were virtually wiped out in the 1920s and reintroduced in the ’90s. Since the wolves have come back, scientists have noted an unexpected improvement in many of the park’s degraded stream areas.

Stands of aspen and other native vegetation, once decimated by overgrazing, are now growing up along the banks. This may have something to do with changing fire patterns, but it is also probably because elk and other browsing animals behave differently when wolves are around. Instead of eating greenery down to the soil, they take a bite or two, look up to check for threats, and keep moving. The greenery can grow tall enough to reproduce.

Beavers, despite being on the wolf’s menu, also benefit when their predators are around. The healthy vegetation encouraged by the presence of wolves provides food and shelter to beavers. Beavers in turn go on to create dams that help keep rivers clean and lessen the effects of drought. Beaver activity also spreads a welcome mat for thronging biodiversity. Bugs, amphibians, fish, birds and small mammals find the water around dams to be an ideal habitat.

If you’re more of an auditory learner, allow me to recommend that you listen to my interview with Suzanne Fouty on this very topic.

And since we’re following other species today, lets talk about the fastest bird in the world who was nearly destroyed by DDT and is now making enough of a comeback to show up at the coast where I haven’t seen him in 15 years. This is a peregrine falcon who was flying back and forth between two craggy ocean perches and somewhere around the corner are the piled bodies of a hundred sanderlings or oystercatchers that he is feasting on. Tennyson springs obviously to mind.

Alfred Tennyson The Eagle (er…peregrine)

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ringed with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

Friends in Utah

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental September 8, 2012

Excerpted from THE SPINE OF THE CONTINENT: THE MOST AMBITIOUS WILDLIFE CONSERVATION PROJECT EVER UNDERTAKEN by Mary Ellen Hannibal. Copyright © 2012 by Lyons Press, an imprint of Globe Pequot Press. Reprinted by permission.

Run don’t walk to this issue of Scientific American where an excerpt of Mary Ellen Hannibal’s new book features the smart work of our good friend Mary O’brien returning beavers to the Escalante Basin. Here’s a taste to whet your appetite:

One five-star general in the campaign to save nature is Dr. Mary O’Brien, and she has a thing for beaver, the championing of which she has completely converted me to. In the first place, the quest for beaver has arguably had more impact on American history than the pursuit of any other single natural resource, its influence lasting well over 200 years. Sixty million or so beaver populated North America before 1600, and had a huge effect on the hydrology of the landscape – beaver dams stored water, slowed its flow and rate of evaporation, slowed erosion and supported a wealth of fish and bird species. In fact, the extermination of beaver from North America arguably marks the point at which our landscapes began to buckle and slide down the ruinous course we find them on now. Especially in the West, where water has always been an enormous issue and will become more important as climate change affects it, there is a real imperative to put beaver back on the waterways.

How’s that for an opening paragraph! Apparently everyone was a little surprised they ran the chapter now, but what a delightful read for the beginning of September, when so many cities are going to be panicking about new dams and possible flooding! September is ‘decide to kill beavers’ month, so this couldn’t be a better time to see them in a new light. Of course I wrote the author to let her know that beavers can have a similar transforming effect in a city too!

Everything is different when beaver are around. Here’s what happens: Beaver move into an area along a stream or a creek, part of the freshwater system that ultimately connects over the continent in a vast network like human veins and arteries. In that they affect whole cascades of other interaction, beavers are known as a “keystone” species, though some scientists prefer the term “highly interactive species.” They function as multiconnectors. Beavers not only rejigger the ecosystem, but also affect the lay of the land itself. Cutting down trees on the edge of the streams opens up the area, creating new ponds, swamps, and meadows. They actually store a supply of water that can be released in the event of drought. This slowing, spreading, and layering of water is precisely what makes them pests in some areas—you may not want your backyard flooded, for example. But there is no downside to letting beaver help the miles and miles of wild land creeks in a place like Fishlake National Forest attain better resilience, especially confronting climate change.

Do yourself a favor and go read the whole thing and all its wonderful details, including monster aspen stand named “Pando” which is latin for “I reproduce” – (As opposed to the more commonly recognized term “PandA” which apparently means “I don’t”!) With the first ever Escalante Beaver Festival right around the corner, the timing of the article couldn’t be better, and I am certain the commissioners of Garfield county are feeling the heat right about now.

Just to remind you that all roads lead to Rome, here is Dr. O’brien inspecting our children’s tiles on the Escobar bridge in Martinez in 2011: