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’s dissertation defense, and Newspaper rock in Utah with hundreds of tribal images of humans and animals.
Of course this is my favorite part:
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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:
