Tag: Mary O’Brien

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:

Subscribe to all episodes in iTunes here.

Bring your ‘kit’ to work day!

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, kits August 26, 2012

Two pieces of excellent news that you absolutely will not want to miss, and (like all good Catholics), I’m saving the best one for last. The first is an excellent op-ed from beaver champion Mary O’brien of the Grand Canyon Trust in Utah, where the cartoon-cat county that is holding the beaver festival next month just decided it didn’t want beavers.

The good beaver do

If there’s any wildlife species that should unite Utahns it’s the beaver. After all, we’re the second-driest state in the nation, and more water isn’t likely. Our state’s southern half is hot and getting hotter. We’re in trouble, but beaver are waiting in the wings to help us.

Their dams slow the run of snowmelt off the mountains, which can transform creeks that have begun to dry up by late summer into creeks that once again run all year. While the temperature rises, their dams transfer water underground that emerges cooler downstream. As our wetlands disappear, their dams create new wetlands. As reservoirs fill with sediment, their dams extend reservoir life by capturing and storing sediment upstream.

This sediment raises the beds of streams that have become incised ditches and reconnects them with their floodplain, allowing the streams to once again support the willow, cottonwood and aspen that play key roles in holding our watersheds together. As the gouging of storms increases, beaver dams act as speed bumps.

Ranchers get expanded riparian areas, a livestock heaven. Anglers and hunters get more fish and ducks, and enlarged wildlife habitat. Wildlife watchers get more birds, frogs, otter, mink, and … beavers. Children get to hear a beaver’s tail slap a warning that humans are around. We all get new ponds and meadows.

Now do you see why the first time I read about Mary O’brien I thought she was the most amazing and wonderfully brilliant ecologically minded woman in the known world? The article that first tipped me off (and remains my favorite beaver article ever) was from the High Country News lo these many years ago, and described her as having a ‘thick rope of a gray braid’. It makes me smile to remember wandering star struck around at the start of the beaver conference in 2011 checking everyone’s hair to see which one was her!

This one!

What’s not to like about beavers? Why did Garfield County commissioners recently request that the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources not move beavers from problem sites to good sites in their county? According to Commissioner Clare Ramsey, it’s because the motives of environmentalists are suspect: They might use beavers to attack livestock grazing on public lands.

The truth? Well-managed livestock can allow streams to become great habitat for beavers, and then beavers can return the favor by expanding the riparian meadows in which livestock love to graze.

Which brings us to a great first-ever beaver celebration scheduled here in Utah — in Garfield County, no less. The Leave It to Beavers Festival will take place Sept. 21-22 at Escalante Petrified Forest State Park near Escalante. There will be music, food, a live-trapping demonstration, great children’s activities, Hogle Zoo animals, hikes to beaver dams led by local residents, informational displays, and art and photos of Utah’s beavers (it’s not too late to enter one of the four art and photo contests).

Nice! This is as good a time as any to remind readers about this from their festival website under ‘about’:

Why a Leave It to Beavers Festival?

In July 2011 Mary O’Brien of Grand Canyon Trust had a grand day in Martinez, California at the fourth annual Martinez beaver festival sponsored by the local group, Worth a Dam! (Their rollicking, inspiring website: www.MartinezBeavers.org) We decided to shamelessly copy in Utah the spirit, fun, and great information of that Martinez beaver festival.

And that’s what I call full circle. Go read the entire article and add a yea-beaver comment to the mix! Garfield will thank you!

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And now for the even more exciting news on last night’s kit-watch. We arrived early because we wanted to see if Jr was coming out from the regular bank hole and then going upstream before coming down from the primary (thus giving a false impression of having slept up there!) I have a hard time imagining that beavers decide whimsically where and with whom they are going to sleep every night, and wanted to understand it better. It was very high tide, so high that the secondary dam was sunk under a foot of water that extended all the way into the scrape where it hasn’t reach for years. No beavers emerged until almost 7:30 and then SURPRISE) it was Jr. coming obviously from upstream and browsing the blackberry bushes before swimming ‘through’ the secondary dam and toodling around the boundaries.

He was so relaxed and far afield that we were beginning to get nervous that the high tide had ‘taken away the toddler fence’ and he was going to swim out to sea, when along came two adult beavers swimming side by side from upstream. (Mom and Dad?) The larger one went ‘through’ the dam and the smaller one swam up to the kit, touching noses and swimming in a circle with our little fellow who (much to my delight and amazement) gave the classic KIT VOCALIZATION and whined several times, paddling onto her back and tail.

It was too dark for photos but we stood on the bridge oohing and ahhing as mom and Jr. swam side by side past the secondary, and far down stream out to the wide world beyond. Dad was ahead of them but still visible and I could tell it was an important night for beaver education. I wondered if the parents had ‘decided’ this ahead of time? Or just read his behavior and responded? We have never seen them both come at the same time. and never from upstream. It made me also realize that in super high tides their usual bank hole might not stay dry, that that might be why they move up stream, which makes sense.

The very best part was that our little one wasn’t alone anymore and we got to see how careful and caring his parents are of him. That was easily worth an early dinner, rowdy homeless, and a pesky yellowjacket. I am so proud of our beaver family! In case you forgot what a beaver kit sounds like, here’s a reminder.

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Finally: Your Help is Needed

Moses said someone was fishing from the footbridge the other night, an adult man who refused to leave and was dropping his baited hook in front of the little kit to get him interested and dropping it on his back on purpose because it was ‘funny’. Obviously a kit doesn’t want to eat a worm but Jr won’t actually know that until he takes a bite and by then the hook would be in his mouth or throat or intestines. The protective disapproval of a bold community needs to help keep an eye on our little kit and make sure this @$$-%#*% fishes somewhere else. Please, if you have time in the next couple of weeks in the evening come by and lend a watchful eye.

What to get for the beaver lover who has everything…

heidi08 Beaver News, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental, Video June 6, 2012

I can’t exactly decide on the title for this post. I’m torn between the “Agony and the Ecstasy” ,”The Sacred and the Profane”, “Mary to merry” or maybe even from “‘kits’ to ‘kitch”, but to paraphrase Donald, you go to press with the title you have, not the title you wish you had. Let’s start with the lovely upcoming beaver festival in Utah which recently added this to their webpage.

Can you read that? The part where it says they got the idea from a GRAND DAY in MARTINEZ and the good people at WORTH A DAM??? Isn’t that a warm, cozy, accomplished feeling? Well, actually when I first saw it on Monday it produced more of a cold, prickly, stiffening feeling since it said the good people at GIVE a dam. (Horrors!) After the convulsing stopped and I could feel my fingers enough again to dial I called Mary right away and begged her to please, please change it. I decided not to mention that it was actually August and not July: priorities. Everything is much, much nicer now, and I’m so happy our influence is memorialized.

This morning I was greeted with the most-adamant-ever tail slap. It was delivered with such drama that it even had springback action over the head! Here’s the inadequate video with slow motion so you can see for yourself how much s/he wasn’t kidding.

Now onto the more jaw-dropping part of the morning. Imagine my surprise when I read this:

Animated beavers busy educating children

BEIJING – While “Tom and Jerry” and Mickey Mouse still reign supreme in kids’ entertainment in China, a band of highbrow beavers have arrived on the scene to help fill a void in early-childhood education.

As Chinese children’s new online friends, the beavers from Beva.com sing, tell stories and encourage kids build good habits. As a hit among young parents and their children, the site has over 3 million registered members since its launch in 2010.

Its popular children’s songs and original Flash cartoons have an average of 10 million online views every month.

That’s right. Hello Kitty-like beavers are busy teaching Chinese toddlers to brush their teeth, respect authority and play fair. Apparently since 2009 it has steadily grown to be the ‘can’t miss’ cartoon for millions of children. It was designed by one of the youngest CEO’s in the country, who quit his IT career to start launch this idea instead.

“Children need a partner to understand society and obtain knowledge and skills. The beavers meet their emotional needs, and that’s why they’re so popular among children,” said Yang Wei, co-founder and CEO of Beva.com.

In just two years, Yang has expanded his business beyond the Internet and into the development of mobile applications, books and educational toys for children and parents. “As the kids love the beaver, they take his ‘advice’ very seriously,” Yang Wei said.

Castor Kinder-Care! To be fair, the animation is no worse than ‘My little pony’, the songs no more insipid than Barney and the whimsy no more plastic than ‘Teletubbies’ – but even I don’t believe I will be watching Beva any time soon. Still I would be remiss not to assure all young fans and their parents that they are of course welcome to join us for the Beva – festiva August 4th.

And because this site is perhaps the only one with the word Beva in it that will escape a particularly scouring kind of attention…

Minding other people’s beavers…

heidi08 Beaver News, Beaver-themed merchandise, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers June 4, 2012

Yesterday was literally absorbed with details about other people’s beavers. I spent the first half working on my response to the ominous Wildlife Services plan to kill 500 beavers a year in Massachusetts, and then looking up all the sympathetic players I should send it to as well. Here are my comments if you’re the kind of person who’s interested.

Then I got an email from Mary O’brien of the Grand Canyon Trust who will be holding their first-ever beaver festival in Escalante this September. Could I help with a conference call for her and her interns sometime that afternoon so they could ask me questions? There were lots of details for the festival that they needed help with. Of course, after I got over my crippling intern-envy (thinking what it would be like to have hard working brilliant grad students to help with all this) I said absolutely!

What kind of fabric did we use for the tails? Can I send her the designs for them? What kind of paint did we use? How much did we buy? Were there more children or adults at the festival? How did we teach about the Keystone Species idea? Could I send her the sheet we used for the charm bracelet? Could I give her contact info for Mike? How many shirts did we make? How did we divide the sizes? What kind of promotions did we use? How did we advertise the festival? How did you keep one child from painting over everything? Did children ever ruin community artwork?

Well, I loaded her up with information, but I actually never realized how much we did on our own until I heard Mary’s team taking notes on what I worried and puzzled out all by myself during sleepless hours between December and July every year. I had a moment of being very proud of myself, and then a moment of being very jealous when I heard they were having Sherri Tippie come out and do a lecture the night before. (Sigh) One cool idea that they came up with all on their own was to give monetary prizes for an art contest to children, teens and adults. Winning entries will be added to a calendar for a sale next year! The entries from older contestants all need to be done on site in Utah, but little ones from all over are welcome to enter the children’s contest. Here are the rules if you have any budding artists in mind.

After seeing Saturday’s idea of how to visually explain the importance of a keystone species,

Mary found an artist who is going to work on a large scale display. We both liked the idea of having an archway people had to walk ‘through’ to get to the festival! Of course she’s still using her fantastic sound booth concept for having people tell their stories of individual beaver sightings. Honestly, the two-day affair sound like a BLAST!!!

This morning I heard from Lega working on Maine ‘Beaver Daze’. While Mary is committed to not reinventing the wheel, Lega is a veritable wheel-inventing machine!. Here is her graphic for Sharon and Owen’s upcoming talk;

Don’t you want to be there AND Utah AND Colorado? Not to mention her design for a coupon called a ‘beaver buck’ which folks can spend for a 15% discount at participating stores that day! Smart!

Honestly, why is this darn country so big anyway? If these women were my next-door neighbors imagine what we could accomplish together! We would have the biggest, grandest most persuasive beaver festival yet! Even with all the extracurricular activity, our own festival is still coming along. This weekend I had the donated artwork framed, the t-shirts contracted, and the initial map layout completed.

Also I heard from the very generous Chris K. that he had finished our ‘plywood beaver’ silhouette for children to paint on! Imagine this with 500 birds, turtles, and otters painted in! This is about 8 feet wide and should look familiar. Recognize her?

The Horse Race is On!

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, City Reports, Creative Solutions May 11, 2012

Beavers have new forest digs in first test of new Utah plan

Revised management plan lets rodents be relocated.

By Mark Havnes | The Salt Lake Tribune

Cedar City • The first relocation of beavers under a revised state management plan went swimmingly, according to state wildlife officials.

Since Friday, nine of the rodents have been released in a southern Utah stream in the Dixie National Forest under terms of a plan that allows biologists to trap and transplant beavers to sites where they can help restore watershed and landscapes.

This relocation was set in motion by Merril Evans, who owns irrigated pasture land in Panguitch where six of the beavers were trapped. Evans said he called the Division of Wildlife Resources (DWR) and asked what he could do when he noticed beavers were cutting down trees on his property. He gave permission for the animals to be trapped.

“They were really great guys,” he said of a biologist and a volunteer from the Grand Canyon Trust. They not only trapped the rodents but protected still standing trees with wire fencing to prevent future problems from other beavers.

Utah has released a shiny new beaver management plan that allows beavers from problem areas to be moved to areas where beavers are needed. Check out the whole thing here and pause to appreciate the rolling mountains of hard work by Mary Obrien in bringing this about – she has literally been at this since long, long before I even found out that beavers don’t eat fish. If you never listened to her interview, you might enjoy it now, and get her introduction to the remarkable up-and-commer Jeremy Christiansen who is featured in the article.

The new management plan reflects the current thinking that beavers can improve landscapes. Jeremy Christensen, a biologist with the Grand Canyon Trust, which played an active role in revising the management plan, said the transplant should provide a prime example of how relocation can be used as a management tool.

Beaver dams are a natural way to regulate stream flows, especially in areas of heavy runoff where the animals have been eradicated. The dams create ponds that slowly let out water as needed. Once a pond is created, it can spur development of meadows and habitat for other species, including the boreal toad, listed as a sensitive species in Utah that survives best in conditions created by beavers,

Is it just me? Or in the back of your mind do you hear an old time radio announcer at the race track, broadcasting:

Washington is firmly in the lead, with only Oregon trailing at her heels. Idaho is cresting at the bend and around the stretch comes Utah! She’s gaining, look at that stride as she passes the others on the rail! Now its Utah and Washington neck and neck! Where did she come from? Washington is starting to look nervous as its first real competitor comes into her own! And in the lead by just a nose as they finish —–

Great work Utah! Finally a real horse race in the west! (Obviously California is still having some trouble trying to get out of the gates.)

Oh and after all that excitement some relaxing Castor Fiber filmed was last night at Paul and Louise Ramsay’s beaver haven in Scotland. It was done by the creator of this remarkable blog which we should probably all be checking every morning (right after this one – of course!)