Tag: Mike Callahan

Kind Words

heidi08 Beavers August 25, 2011

Keeper Kristin at the Oakland Zoo’s Western Pond Turtle Table. Photo credit: Cindy Margulis

Kristen Mealiffe ran the fantastic booth for the Western Pond Turtle program by the Oakland Zoo at the Beaver Festival. She recently posted a lovely “Turtle’s-Eye View” of the festival on the Zoo’s website. Here’s a glimpse but you will really want to go read the whole thing!

Why was the Oakland Zoo at the 4th Annual Beaver Festival in Martinez? No, the Zoo doesn’t have beavers, but it does have Western Pond Turtles which rely on beaver habitat. The event was a wonderful opportunity to create awareness about the Zoo’s Western Pond Turtle Head Start Program and the conservation efforts involved to protect the only aquatic turtle native to California. The Oakland Zoo along with many other environmental organizations participated in this festival to create awareness about native species in the Bay Area and the fragile ecosystems where the animals live.

Thanks so much for making our festival better and helping people learn about the importance of native turtles!Our own turtle population is getting alot better now that the dams are back in residence.

Lory found more kind words that came all the way from Massachusetts. This article about the benefit of beavers was written by Stephanie Kraft of the Valley Advocate in Northampton, MA. It mentions in passing the work of the Lands Council and Grand Canyon Land Trust and they mention US!

People in Martinez, California learned what beavers can do after a pair of the passionate chewers built a dam 30 feet wide in Alhambra Creek, felling willows and other decorative vegetation. But local residents got the City Council to put a pipe through the dam to prevent flooding and let the beavers stay. The creek grew into a rich wetland habitat that within three years was hosting river otter, steelhead trout and mink.

Wow, thanks Stephanie. I assume you didn’t come to the beaver festival, but what a nice plug! Folks can go read the whole article here. The only explanation I can come up with for appearing in a Massachusetts paper is that the town of Northampton is directly above Southampton which is where Mike Callahan of Beaver Solutions operates. Maybe he dropped our name somehow.

Or maybe we’re just FAMOUS.

The First of Many!

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Friends of Martinez Beavers May 13, 2011

Our friends Mary and Sherry at the newly-formed Sierra Wildlife Coalition have developed such a taste for saving beavers they installed their first-ever flow device in Truckee while there was still snow on the ground. This is the group who received our first -ever beaver management scholarship, and it looks like we couldn’t have chosen a better recipient! I received these last night:

Here, finally are a few photos from our flow device installation last Monday – and yes, the white dots are snow… It went very smoothly, thanks to all the good info from Mike. Ted’s in the green hat, Patrick (who arranged this with his wife Elaine) is in the yellow, and Bill, Forester for the subdivision, has the red hat. Bill is ready to install more, as needed! Tahoe Donner is the largest residential subdivision in California, and they have 2 creeks with active beavers.

Mary and Sherry went from casual involvement to full-bore beaver saving with a road trip to Oregon for the conference! They sand-painted trees in the snow and made tails with children on earthday. They swooped a community along with them and this is the result in a neighboring town. I honestly couldn’t be more pleased or proud, and reading the remark from the subdivision forester that he’s ready to install more may very well be the best news I read all month.

All this was possible because of the clear guidance from the installation DVD produced by Mike Callahan under a grant from the Animal Welfare Institute. I think this kind of beaver heroism is exactly what they had in mind!

I’m hoping the success of this installation leads to a domino of flow devices all across the sierras. Oh and I’m hoping that someone from Fish & Game owns one of the subdivisions and notices how WELL this worked!

MARTINEZ BEAVER UPDATE:

Cheryl saw two this am and snapped this liquid picture.

Oregon-ized

heidi08 Educational, Environmental, Uncategorized February 6, 2011

My mind is still buzzing with beaver echoes from the dazzling conference. The above is a neat trick Brock introduced me to, called ‘Wordle‘. It analyzes text and produces word clouds based on frequency of use. The more a word shows up the bigger it gets. This is from the ‘our story’ section of the website. Isn’t it beautiful?

I would love to do as good a job as Alex Hiller did reporting as our foreign correspondent on the Lithuanian conference, but for much of the time I was too awestruck to take notes and too excited to write them down. I can’t tell you what it was like to be amongst brilliant minds who knew far more than me about beaver science and advocacy. Here’s a brief summary of some of the presentations I enjoyed the most. They are in order of appearance, because honestly if they were in order of preference, Sherri would probably be first the last and the middle. No offence.

Dennis Martinez started the conference with a discussion of TEK (Traditional Ecological Knowledge). He was very interested in the interface between science and TEK and how true environmental solutions blended the two. He talked about the fact that as science grew more about calculation and less about OBSERVATION everyone lost out. He had remarkable things to say about fire and water, and observed that one of the biggest mistakes the settlers made when they came to America is that they assumed the land was ‘naturally’ that way, and not carefully tended by native peoples.

Glynnis Hood has produced such remarkable research that she has become the go-to scientist on beavers. She teaches at the University of Alberta and presented research on a remarkable project documenting the way beaver habitat augments surface water and storage – even without dams. She showed a map of four isolated ponds that beavers eventually connected with a system of canals, increasing interactivity and flow between ponds. She and her researchers mapped the floor of those ponds and found that beavers dug and carved in the bottom, creating differing zones and augmenting biodiversity. In colder areas beavers dig holes in ponds so that when they come out of the lodge during a freeze they have room to get to the food cache. We were both thrilled to wonder what the bottom of ponds in temperate zones look like. It’s never been studied.

Yet.

Dr. Hood is so famous that I was afraid to talk to her at first. Then I had the weird good fortune to be stranded at the airport with her for 90 minutes waiting for the plane that didn’t take me. She told me that after the article on our website about her presentation in Lithuania she had wondered ‘who these martinez beavers’ were and what was the story. I made sure she left with a Worth A Dam hat, and plenty of gossip. Since she was interested in beaver canals I told her about the Popular Science article of beavers on Mars and sent it to her. I just got a note back that she loved the picture and will send her paper when its done.

Mary O’Brien has been on my beaver radar since the seminal article in High Country news a few years back. I was excited to find out she was coming and hoping for great things. I wasn’t disappointed when she presented a work in progress about identifying the economic value of beavers for things like water management and silt trapping. She apparently has decided to do a beaver festival in Utah next year and wanted lots of ideas for involving the community. She decided that she will come to our festival this summer and see for herself.

Sherri gets her own post, but for now I’ll just say that she is a powerful, compassionate, humble speaker with a truly awesome gift for taking a roomful of people intimately into her world of caring for beavers. I am quite certain that not a single person in that conference was unchanged by the experience. Myself included.

The very best part of Mike Callahan‘s presentation was his pragmatic invitation for others to practice his craft. “Flow devices work and anyone can learn to use them” was his message, and his style was to sit down and answer questions with anyone at any time. His excellent images showed me things I had not understood before, and he generously promised that any attendee at the conference could receive a free copy of his DVD. I first wrote Mike on November 4th, 2007 when I was consumed with a great sense of panic. Meeting him after so many years was powerful in ways it will take me a while to process.

Joe Cannon and Amanda Parish are the beaver division for the Lands Council and gave a delightful presentation on their beaver relocation and community education program. one idea I particularly enjoyed was the concept of the beaver picnic, where families gathered to learn about the animals, see the habitat and have some fun. Amanda also talked about a delicious children’s activity making ‘candy beaver dams’ using m&m’s, pretzel sticks and frosting to stick it all together.They had a long drive back to Washington but I’m so glad they came! Hopefully at least one of them will make it for the festival this year.

Chris Vennom was the biologist for the Methow beaver project. This bit of genius ecology is using fish hatcheries to house beavers before reintroducing them at carefully selected sites. We swapped beaver stories for much of the conference, I loaned him my mac when his didn’t work, and he was kind enough to repay me with remarkable footage he had take of a beaver underwater in the raceway. Trust me, it’s nothing you’ll forget.

Of course I already knew Brock Dolman and had heard him speak before, but his presentation was truly dynamic. His basic idea is that as global warming escalates the effects in communities are going to be felt keenest in the watersheds. Your watershed was your ‘lifeboat’ that would either buffer you or exploit you and it was in your self-interest to take care of it. Brock referenced our historical prevalence study and provided this excellent graphic which he graciously sent me last night. He also introduced me to a couple from Marin whose land may become the site of the next huge beaver reintroduction study. Stay tuned.

All this could never have been possible without the thoroughly gracious attention of Leonard and Lois Houston, who must have slept 5 hours in four days. They were the first at every event and the last to leave, provided countless introductions and made every single person feel like this particular conference was going to be especially better because they were there. There were a hundred details they saw to, and they rarely enjoyed the luxury of just sitting and listening to the wonders. It is their vision, wisdom and tenacity that made it all possible

A final mention for Stanley Petrowski, president of SURCP. He was the ’emcee’ for the entire event, and seemed inexplicably good at everything: ecology, technology and psychology. He introduced every speaker, kept things running on time and made sure the electronics were agreeable. He greeted me with such enthusiasm I felt like a rock star and any time he needs a vacation I am certain he can fill in for the finest cruise director in the Bahamas.

Okay, that’s it for now. Don’t think for a moment that I am giving these folks anywhere near the credit they deserve, but I hope this gives you a flavor of what I experienced. Unfortunately, Michael Pollock had an urgent situation and wasn’t able to attend, so I will have to look forward to meeting him. It will take an enormously long time for me to sort through everything, but in the meantime let me just say that on the way home I was stuck waiting for a shuttle with a man from the Georgia Railroads who said, sagely, “Beavers? Beavers aren’t a problem. They’re easy to take care of. You just shoot them.”

Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.

Beavers Overseas

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere January 13, 2011

I wasn’t going to post more this morning but I just saw this:

Eric the Ericht beaver has an American following

by Andrew Harris, Blairgowrie Adv

ERIC the Ericht beaver has gained a worldwide following from people opposed to the trapping by Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) who have resumed operations after the big freeze.

Heidi Perryman, president and founder of Worth a Dam, a beaver lobby group in California USA, contacted the Blairie after reading the article two weeks ago on the possibility of there being limited accomodation for the wild beaver population once they have been rounded up.

She said from her experience in the States, rehoming has proved problematic.

I’m a lobbyist! So far so good, (if by “experience” you mean: never doing it myself but listening appreciatively to other people who actually DO it) Unfortunately the reporter then proceeds to quote the article I quoted to him as if it were me saying it. I sent him the article “Management by Assertion” by Longcore, Rich & Muller-Swarze, and highlighted my favorite quote about relocation.

“Thirteen beavers were trapped live and removed, one died struggling in a snare, and one was killed by a predator while held in a snare.. Virtually all mortality could have been avoided if Hancock traps had been used (and properly deployed).The end result was not satisfactory to the majority of opponents because of the Reserve’s failure to engage the underlying scientific questions, the mortality during trapping, and philosophical opposition to the exploitative placement of the relocated animals. Six beavers were confined in zoos or other captive display facilities (one beaver subsequently died in a fight resulting from inappropriately co-housing two males), four were relocated to a reserve in Texas, and three went to a movie production company.¹

¹Management by Assertion: Beavers and Songbirds at Lake Skinner (Riverside County, California)

Travis Longcore Æ Catherine Rich Æ Dietland Mu ller-Schwarze (2007) Environmental Management Volume 39, Number 4, 460-471, DOI: 10.1007/s00267-005-0204-4

So now in addition to being a lobbyist and a ‘Mrs.’, (which I can live with), it looks like I’m a plagiarist in (at least) two countries. Sorry about that. I wanted to make sure everyone read that quote because sometimes the term ‘relocation’ makes people think everything will be all right and then they stop caring. Well if my precariously preserved good name’s tarnish can help keep free beavers in the river Tay I guess its worth it. I wrote the reporter to clarify and the authors to apologize, but in the mean time its pretty remarkable that Worth A Dam shows up in Scotland, don’t you think? Go read the whole thing and if you haven’t sent Eric your new years wishes yet there’s still time!

Now on to Germany! Where beavers are willfully preventing themselves from drowning on the Odin River in Germany. Their selfish attempt to live by seeking higher ground during flooding has caused the dikes to erode. (Is anyone else having flashbacks ?) Our Northern cousins with the excellent back to their nickle covered the story this week, on CBC the Current interviewing Mike Callahan about options and impact. Enjoy.

To hear the full program go here.

Not a Concerto

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Who's Killing Beavers Now? January 7, 2011

Monday beaver friends Sharon Brown of Beavers: Wetlands & Wildlife and Mike Callahan of Beaver Solutions will be trotting down to their local public television stations to record an interview for Canadian Broadcasting about the beaver situation in Brandenburg Germany. Click the video for a nice summary of the situation. Officials are concerned that (wait for it) burrowing into banks could cause a collapse of the levee that protects the town. (Gosh sounds familiar…) Apparently there are still a few level heads in the country who have suggested that digging produces irrational fears in humans and people are panicking unnecessarily. I made sure they had Skip’s digging report and wished them well.

UPDATE: Beaver friend and WORTH A DAM foreign correspondent Alex Hiller sends these remarks:

What is being reported in the article is a long lasting problem depending on poor dam protection at the Polish side of river Oder. The border between Poland and Gerrnany goes along the middle of the river. On German side all dams were improved after the so called century flooding of 2001.

On the Polish side of river Oder nothing was done – except for repeated complaints. I learned about that situation from local German beaver defenders of that region when I was exploring beaver sites over there in autumn of 2005. It was supposed the complaints were meant to receive money from European Union funds, getting flood protection sponsored.

The big dams along the riverside are set back into the flat land at least fifty yards or more. I haven`t seen a beaver lodge being build on dry land with a tunnel of fifty yards to get access to the water.

What was in discussion and is still highly recommended are emergency hills to be built artificially between the riverbank and the flood protection dams that would offer refuge to all kind of wildlife. I learned about people that had stepped onto dams in the century flooding of 2001 after their villages had been flooded due to broken stretches of the same dams and started clubbing beaver families that climbed up onto the same dams because the people were afraid the beavers might dig into those dams and destroy them.

Beavers are being strongly protected by nature protection law in western European Countries ending at the eastern boarder of Germany, exactly in the middle of river Oder. In all eastern European countries, starting with Poland just across river Oder beaver affairs are being covered by hunting law. Complaining about the beaver means increasing the numbers of beavers for shooting ( they do not set traps in eastern European countries but shoot ). The Riga beaver conflict of Latvia was about hunting by shooting in town which is prohibited,

In Germany we have two cities named Frankfurt: Frankfurt at (river) Oder, a big town at the German-Polish boarder about an hours drive east of German capital Berlin vs. Frankfurt at (river) Main where I live just in the middle of Germany and about five hours drive southeast of Berlin.

Alex

Thanks SO much Alex! Of course remember all too well our own sheet-pile-palooza.

(A little aside. For some reason the German video was only possible to embed in – uh – German so I downloaded it in English, converted it and put it back up since I discovered that my personal Youtube account has been ‘upgraded’ to hold longer files. Hmmm. Who knew? Documentary?)