It seems like its been ages since we talked about OUR VERY OWN beavers, but my oh my have they been busy! This weekend the tree above Reeds sleeping hole was artfully felled and polished off, then used to rebuild the now-curved secondary dam AND it turns out the long-lost third dam! Pictures will follow but you can rest assured that Martinez Beavers are no slackers!
This weekend I was able to complete a wonderful interview with Mary O’Brien of the Grand Canyon Trust, and our conversation took so many exciting directions that my head has been a little dazzled trying to follow them all. She told me about the beaver management paper they had just submitted to the forestry service, getting tuned into beavers by attending Suzanne Fouty’sdissertation defense, and Newspaper rock in Utah with hundreds of tribal images of humans and animals.
Of course this is my favorite part:→
Getting ready for the interview I went to re-visit the article that first introduced me to Mary lo these many years ago. “Voyage of the Dammed” in High Country News remains my favorite beaver article ever written. This time when I looked at the photo I saw it in a new light – an OMG-that’s-a-muskrat-light!
Of course I wrote everyone involved about the error: the author, the publisher and the hapless photographer, but they’ve made no response so far. It’s the only photo without a description, so maybe they know its not a beaver and just used it to ‘imply’ beaver? Still it’s a little like finding out Jesus on the Mount was reading from a teleprompter. Sigh.
Oh and this photo from Mike Callahan’s facebook page explains why we should be happy that our beavers are busily taking down trees and building third dams instead of occupying their time in a more insidious way:
Dammed up Intake Exclusion Fence on a Flexible Pond Leveler
Check out the new poster for Utah’s Beaver Festival! Mary O’brien came this last year to observe ours first hand and has been hard at work implementing her own. Okay, its slightly bigger than ours. Two days instead of one. A life sized lodge and bigger donors. In a State Park and not a featureless city square that Martinez won’t even honor with a name. BUT it’s our idea that set it off and it will teach folks across Utah about beavers and I couldn’t be happier.
Mary O'brien photographs bridge tiles
Here’s a nice photo of the close attention Mary paid to our efforts last year. She flew out to visit her son in Berkeley and then took the train to the festival. After seeing everything we put together she trotted off to the John Muir House before jogging back and joining us for dinner. If it hasn’t occurred to you already, Mary is no slacker.
Okay team, beaver festivals in California and Utah! Only 48 more states to go!
Other good news of the day includes this compromise from Estes Park in Colorado where Sherri Tippie worked hard to slow down the whirring wheels of back room deals and save some beavers.
Colorado Division of Wildlife officer Rick Spowart explains the compromise that kept the beaver dam and lodge intact. The roadside trail will be narrower, but the beavers won’t be pushed out.
And this article from Maryland where some beavers have made their presence known in a city park but they aren’t on the hit list yet. Yesterday I wrote the major players and heard back that they will be looking into sand-painting trees as a less obtrusive way to handle the problem.
Beavers are chopping down trees along the shoreline in Salisbury City Park near Picnic Island. / TODD DUDEK/THE DAILY TIMES
SALISBURY — A beaver that has taken up residence in the City Park is there to stay, according to officials.
Public Works Director Teresa Gardner said the city is not considering removing the beaver, as the state Department of Natural Resources has recommended the animal remain in place for now.
Which, from my point of view, is a pretty good news for beavers in three states. Not too shabby!
Oh and we’ve had confirmation from all the biggest fish names in the state that the little morsel being nibbled in Cheryl’s excellent photo is a Sacramento Splittail which happens to be a species of special concern. Another reason to have beaver dams in your creeks I guess!
Beaver friend Brock Dolman was alerted to this weekends beaver news by one of HIS beaver friends! Beaver restoration was discussed in Living on Earth – it happens to feature OUR beaver friend Amanda Parish from the Lands Council who came to dinner and a Martinez Beaver viewing last month!
GELLERMAN: For the past few weeks, Living on Earth has been reporting on the efforts to remove dams around the country. Well, this week, we talk about building them. On a tributary of the Spokane River in Washington state, new dams have gone up – helping to raise the water table, remove pollution and pesticides, attract fish and wildlife, and they cost: nothing.
Because we’re not building the dams, beavers are! Amanda Parrish has been busy with the new dams – busy as a, well, you know! She’s director of the Beaver Solution – a program run by Spokane’s Lands Council to protect beavers, and promote their engineering talents. We caught up with Amanda Parrish while she was knee deep at work.
The next segment was a reading from author Mark Seth Lender, author of Salt Marsh Diary. His description of the beaver and pond was so lovely I had to put it with footage (see below).
More treats, you ask? Well, okay “Oliver”, how about this? Remember the visitor from Utah who came to the beaver festival this year, Mary O’Brien? She just wrote me about this new site they are developing for beaver-assisted restoration. Click on the banner to check it out.
Not impressed yet? Well have a good look around and then stop off at the section titled “Interesting Web links on Beaver”. Hmmm, I wonder what’s there?
Now that’s what I call product placement! Thank for the plug, Utah!
Saturday’s festival was certainly the biggest and best we have ever had. By one o clock we had already distributed 100 bracelets, and tails were a huge hit all day. We started with 500 and there are 98 left so that should give you some idea of how popular the activity was. Gary Bogue has a nice homage today. How many people were there? It’s hard to know, but the first half of the day was unbelievably crowded. We distributed 750 brochures at the event, and the guideline was generally one to a group. It probably isn’t exaggerating to guess we had nearly 1500 people. We had visitors from Concord,Walnut Creek, Lafayette, Oakland, Vallejo, Sonoma, San Jose, Sacramento, Elk Grove, Placer and Jackson. Amtrak brought alot of attendees this year, from all along the San Joaquin line. For the first I’m aware of we took in more money than we spent for the event and two people this morning said that they thought our little nameless park had more people than the entire peddler’s fair.
Several folks have noted that our attendees this year we’re on the whole more knowledgeable about wildlife in general and supportive of efforts to care for it. There were fewer of the battle-curious and more of the beaver-curious. It was a palpable shift from a crowd eager to beat city hall to a crowd dedicated to living with wildlife, and the change was the perfect compliment to the day that included snakes, screech owls, turtles, tarantulas and bats. Corky Quirk’s amazing bat display was one of the best things about the event. I hope she comes back, but if you missed it or didn’t realize what a gift she was, this will fill you in.
I loved lots of things about the magical, exhausting day, (including the many wondrous volunteers that made our biggest event the easiest to pull off ), but one thing that I’ll remember above all else is greeting Mary O’Brien the Utah Forests Project Manager for the Grand Canyon Land Trust who came all the way to California to get ideas for a future beaver festival of her own. Mary was amazed at the crowd, touched by the children, indignant at the sheetpile, awed by the displays, enamored of wildbryde’s charms, and fascinated by every part of the story. After touring the event she walked to the Muir house and jogged back for dinner. We laughed. schemed and gossiped over margaritas and then went to see some beavers before she took the train back to Berkeley where she was staying. I dare say she’ll have plenty to say about her visit.
Mary admiring the tiles
I was relieved to see that all this fame hasn’t gone to the beavers heads this morning. Apparently it was a working day just like any other. Those are unusual construction materials. Drinking on the job?
A flooded Highway 9 in Blue River during July’s high water hearkens back to a Western landscape governed by beavers.
It’s been said that the West we’re accustomed to — the “fast-flowing streams and invitingly open banks, celebrated in photographs and songs and pickup truck commercials,” Kevin Taylor wrote in the June 2009 issue of High Country News — is an illusion. It’s a message Grand Canyon Trust project manager Mary O’Brien preached in Taylor’s story.
Gosh it’s nice to see a reminder ofTaylor’s seminal article again after all this time. I love that it made enough of an impression to get a mention two years later. I remember being so excited to read it and learn about heroine Mary O’brien preaching beaver gospel with “her thick rope of a gray braid” that when I travelled to Oregon for the conference I scoured the 200+ attendees looking for that rope.
(I quickly realized there were far too many gray ropes to identify hers in particular, and had to wait until we were properly introduced. Now she’s coming to the beaver festival to see about starting her own in Utah, and you’ll have a chance to see for yourself!)
Looks like at least half the gospel was heard in Colorado, since everyone is willing to admit that beavers are a Keystone species but no one seems willing or able to install a flow device.
“There’s been some pesky ones up there by Highway 9,” he said of the beavers — and Blue River second-home owner Mark Ronchetti agrees. Speaking on a drive to his Albuquerque, N.M. broadcast meteorologist job, he said when he bought his 9-acre property the area was “so choked off by beavers building dams that it stopped up the water to make it like wetlands.”
He said he found 10 to 15 dams “clogging the flow” that he’s since broken up. He’s also relocated some of the architects because beavers are such hard workers, they’ll rebuild a dam within days, sometime hours.
“Without that, the house would’ve been flooded,” Ronchetti said. He’s noticed properties north of his lot that are vacant, and where beavers are happily abiding. “It’s been ignored,” he said. “I understand having beavers and habitat, but we can’t just let it go. Some wetlands is good, but there must be some control of what’s going on. The Blue River has got to be able to flow through there.”
Hmm. “We only need so much of this habitat business. A river has to get where its going, otherwise they’ll be anarchy! I can’t be held responsible for ripping families apart when there are young to take care of. I’m a meteorologist for gawdsake. Never mind that if I move THESE beavers I’ll just get new ones. You can’t expect me to think of past tomorrow’s forecast.”
Taylor called the rodent a time shifter, “having the power to extend the release of water late into summer, saturating the ground and healing watersheds. It has the power to re-create the primordial, wetter West that existed for millennia — a West we just missed seeing.”
Beaver activity can transform an ephemeral stream that traditionally runs for just a few days in spring into one that lasts for several months. The present disconnect with the beaver comes largely from the trapping era, when beavers were extensively eliminated. North America had an estimated 60 million beaver before European settlement, which eventually dropped in a century of trapping to roughly 100,000, common figures show. According to Taylor, the West held just a fraction of that. They’ve since made a comeback that beaver-restorers believe still has a long way to go.
They are a keystone species that restores riparian habitat and raises the water table. Their fur was used for felt in beaver hats, a fashion later replaced by silk hats — a shift that likely saved the beaver from extinction, according to the Colorado Division of Wildlife.
“No mammal other than humans has a great an influence on its surroundings. This is a ‘keystone species’ in riparian communities; without them the ecosystem would change dramatically,” states the Colorado Division of Wildlife. The ponds that well up behind their dams create navigable waters beneath the ice so they can be active year-round.
Ahh Kevin, we missed you. It’s great to read you again. Come to think of it your article never mentioned flow devices. That might have been a mistake. Not quite sure the state of Colorado is quite ready for your vision. They seem to be missing a lot of the point.
Further north, in Silverthorne, public works director Bill Linfield and his crew spend hours, days and sometimes up to a month in spring breaking dams at Straight Creek as it approaches the outlets and Willow Creek upstream from the Willowbrook neighborhood.
Wetlands in Willow Creek require Linfield’s crew to go in with wader and pull the dams apart “one stick at a time,” Linfield said. “By the next morning, the beaver has rebuilt the dam. It’s a constant battle.”
Which is why he’s relocated several of the beavers. This year, no trapping took place, but it’s been an almost annual occurrence since public works took on the task of protecting the outlet buildings and the Willowbrook houses.
“We don’t want to kill them. We just want them to go somewhere else,” Linfield said.
Once again for the folks at home,you want these beavers to stay just where they are. Honestly. If you move them out new beavers will move in and you’ll have to deal with this problem all over.Figure out what are the conditions you require to maintain safe roads, properties,ranches and find out what tools will allow you to have those conditions EVEN IF THE BEAVERS STAY. A flow device? A culvert fence? A dam reinforcement? Figure out the right tool(s) for the job and then build it. Then thank your lucky stars that those beavers will keep any others away.
Nice article, but missing key points of the sermon kinda reminded me of this,
This weekend I was able to complete a wonderful interview with Mary O’Brien of the Grand Canyon Trust, and our conversation took so many exciting directions that my head has been a little dazzled trying to follow them all. She told me about the beaver management paper they had just submitted to the forestry service, getting tuned into beavers by attending Suzanne Fouty’s dissertation defense, and Newspaper rock in Utah with hundreds of tribal images of humans and animals.
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