Best Phone call Ever

Nothing Succeeds like Success – (Beaver Edition)

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Environmental October 16, 2013

I’m guessing you recognize the hardworking smile on the left, which belongs to Mike Callahan of Beaver Solutions in Massachusetts. The one with the shovel is Kevin Swift, of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center who is working with Mike to learn the trade and eventually apply it in California. Kevin came to this year’s beaver festival with Kate Lundquist of the OAEC and we couldn’t be happier that solutions will be closer to home. Great start, men! Apparently yesterday’s job was ripping out a Clemson and replacing it with a Flex pipe. How symbolic is that? Here’s Mike’s rundown:

Good news. Kevin Swift arrived here in Massachusetts today to learn how to start his own business installing effective flow devices in his home state of California. Here he is performing maintenance on a Flexible Pond Leveler pipe. This is the site of my first flow device installation in 1998. The original Clemson Pond Leveler was eventually replaced with a Flexible Pond Leveler, and the fencing on that pipe was replaced last week. Beavers are still there and continue to maintain the dam. We’re doing three new flow device installations the next three days. We’ll keep you posted!

But wait, Heidi, maybe you’re saying. That’s not enough good news of people living with beavers. California and Massachusetts are crazy liberal states with campuses full of tree-huggers and tofu! Who cares what they do? This just isn’t enough to float my beaver boat, so to speak.

Well, then, how about Idaho?This is Mike Settell who you might recognize as the man from Pocatello who got the local chapter of Audubon to fund his beaver count a few years back because the animals affect bird population so significantly. He came to the state of the beaver conference last year, met the gang, and presented on his hard work in the granite state. Like all the attendees he was graciously given a copy of Mike’s DVD, and after reading and watching and learning went on to do his first install this weekend. I am very happy that Idaho is willing in this instance to apply a long-term solution instead of a short term (trapping) bandaid. Congratulations Mike!

There was a bundle of good news yesterday, I can barely keep up. We’re off to the Boys and Girls club today to talk beavers, which should be fun. And I just got an email from Jari Osborne of the Beaver Whispers that her excellent documentary (which you will see on PBS next year) is up for a digi award for Best in cross-platform nonfiction. GO VOTE RIGHT NOW. I know you haven’t seen it yet, but trust me, it should win. It will save the planet. You can help. GO VOTE

And my all-time favorite news I can’t share just yet but I just found out last night and it has to do with a a topic that rhymes with “weavers in postal quivers.”

Beam.

New Kits in Argyll!

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers August 13, 2013

The official Scottish Beaver trial has been very happy to announce that this year they have observed 5 new beavers in their pond! If the trial is “can beavers thrive in Scotland” I’d say they have their answer. If the trial is “can humans possibly tolerate how well they thrive?” the answer is more iffy.

New born beavers pictured at trial site aimed at bringing the animal back to the UK

NEWLY born beavers have been spotted at the site of a five-year trial aiming to reintroduce the mammal into the UK. The five youngsters or “kits” have been spotted at the Scottish beaver trial site at Knapdale in Argyll, the only licensed reintroduction scheme for beavers – and the first attempt to reintroduce an extinct mammal – in the UK.

Their appearance means beavers have bred every year since the trial started with the arrival of animals from Norway to Knapdale in 2009, the managers of the scheme said. Eurasian beavers were once native to the UK but were wiped out by hunting by the 16th century.

Roisin Campbell-Palmer, field operations manager for the trial, said: “The arrival of new kits means that the beavers have bred every year of the Scottish beaver trial.

“We are now attempting to establish how many there are in total – but five have been observed so far.”

The appearance of the beaver kits was welcomed as a boost for tourism as well as for the trial. Visitors to Knapdale can go on evening guided tours for a chance to spot the mammals on Dubh Loch, home to one of the project’s four beaver families.

The trial’s project manager, Simon Jones, said the sighting of the kits was “great news for the Scottish beaver trial – and for local tourism as more people will want to travel to Argyll to come on our guided walks for a chance to see the new arrivals”.

Five blessed events so far! I’m so jealous. We never got five. (Except an uncomfirmed 5th kit that was found dead in 2007. Never was sure if the report was accurate or not, but she swore she saw the tail and I counted four kits that night, so who knows?) The good news is that Argyll is going in the right direction. This formal trial is acting like a kind of cow-pusher on a the beaver-train and clearing out all the fears and objections that would be hurled at the much larger free beaver population along the Tay and beyond. Good!

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I heard from Michael Callahan that he was heading to Sonomish WA (home of retired watershed steward Jake Jacobsen who is practically a founding father of beavers and helped tremendously with our early questions in Martinez) to install some special flow device adaptions for fish passage. I passed this news along to our Beaver Believer documentary friends and they were excited about the idea of connecting with Mike and including him in the film, which I’m very happy about because even if beavers help climate change, or save salmon, or rotate your tires, no one will ever let them stick around unless human interests can be protected. We want solutions to be visible and obvious. On an even better note, a little bird told me that one of the good folk at OAEC will be heading out to Massachusetts in October to learn installation, which going to be excellent news for California!

Before you ask why, I will just say that I got an email yesterday from Canada from a farmer who had been trapping the beavers on his land and recently saw the documentary “The Beaver Whisperers” and was stunned to learn that beavers could be effectively managed by Michel LeClair and how could he go about doing that on his land? Of course I sent him info on Mike’s DVD and Sherri’s book and forwarded his email to Jari Osborne, the filmmaker, who had what I imagine is the best day ever thinking that she had made such a dramatic difference in peoples thinking.

What can I say, I’m have no actual skills or training, but I have had the strange fortune of becoming a kind of beaver hub. Which beavers apparently need.

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Now for some very good news. The grown-up in charge of these excellent workers is Kimberly Robertson, who lives on site at Safari West in Santa Rosa and is the official animal registrar and manages the Jr. Keeper program. She was very excited about our festival and has already made plans to attend next year. We got to talking about the beavers and getting kids interested in wildlife and she said she would like to be involved with Worth A Dam. Of course we would like that very much. So welcome to our new board member! I just know that our two organizations will benefit each other. Teaching kids to love what’s wild and free around them requires many voices, from the exotic to what’s right in their own back yard. Welcome aboard!

Surprises

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Environmental, Festival, Friends of Martinez Beavers July 12, 2012

Remember the washout tale from Spring Farm Cares a month ago? Well things are looking up and Matt Perry is continuing to carefully observe their robust recovery. Four kits were born in his very healthy colony this year, and he’s enjoying their nightly interactions. He hasn’t seen Dad since the washout and that’s very familiar since our patriarch left after the big washout too. Actually some biologists suggest that this wandering is looking around at p0ssible suitable territory in case the family needs to move. Anyway, he’s a lovely writer and watcher, so you’ll want to go read for yourself.

Great news from the beaver festival: we just found out director of the OAEC Water Institute and winner of this year’s ‘Golden Pipe Award‘ Brock Dolman will be joining Kate Lundquist to host their booth. Brock is a permaculture expert and educates landowners, laypeople, politicians, and anyone who will listen about the benefits of beavers and better water storage. He is a dynamic and coveted speaker all over the country where he uses his uniquely curly, rhyming, thesaurus-laden, language stream that you have to hear first hand to believe to change minds and waken sleepers. In fact he would never say ‘educate’. He’d say something like ‘watershED-ucate, faciLACTate, permaCOAXE the Re-inVENTture map-italism of land-escape artisTRY. Really. If you don’t believe me come be dazzled in conversation with him yourself. You’ll never look at storm drains, beavers, or salmon the same way again.

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And for your daily dose of snark I will just add that last night we heard a rumor that someone who should know better [meaning everyone should know better, but this person REALLY should] was talking to Moses at the dam and actually asked if “This was all the kits we were going to have” or if we thought “they’d LAY MORE”.

We’ve been giggling about it all night. Lay more? Since beavers are MAMMALS, born live, nurse on their mothers and don’t actually hatch from an egg, the kindest explanation I can possibly offer is that they mixed them up with these. I guess the bill looks kind of like a beaver tail.

SEA BEAVER!

heidi08 History May 20, 2012

As if the world of beaver research wasn’t confusing enough! What with beaver photos actually being nutria photos, and nutria being the spanish word for otter, and now the discovery of the very, very desirable SEA BEAVER. The illustration is from AUDUBON. (I guess there just so far an interest in birds can take you!)Just look at how happy Captain Cook was to find sea beaver in his third voyage along the pacific which dealt a blow to the Russians.

The object of this excitement was a playful marine mammal with a lustrous coat–the sea beaver. Its pelt was first encountered by Cook at Nootka Sound. The Nootkas also swapped fish, whale oil, venison, and even wild garlic.But the Englishmen preferred furs. Midshipman Edward Riou of the Discovery wrote: “The Natives continue their Visits bringing with them apparently every thing they are in possession of, but nothing is so well received by us as skins,particularly those of the sea beaver, the fur of which is very soft and delicate…The Englishmen literally bought the Nootkas’ clothing off their backs! Ledyard summarized the trading:We purchased while here about 1500 beaver.

1500 beaver. Meaning otter. Meaning modern man just taught the natives the disgusting value of taking far, far, more than you can use. And incidentally meaning if you were trying to establish for your dissertation that the Nootkas used beaver skins as part of their clothing you would be stitch out of luck, because to the fur crazy minds of the time, (with dollar signs where their eyes should be), BEAVER didn’t mean beaver with a flat tail, building dams and chopping trees with its teeth. It meant “Wow, that’s nice looking fur that could make me a lot of money, lets kill it.” So there was River beaver, Sea beaver, and heck in the 1930’s they even referred to Space beaver!

Which is why, if you are finished with the papers firmly establishing beavers in the sierras and starting to work on the paper that shows beavers in California’s coastal streams, you’d be so happy with this find from Kate Lundquist of the OAEC who has been painstakingly hobnobbing with scholars to learn about the history of the Russian River:

The juiciest find I have gotten thus far is from archaeologist Glenn Farris. In 2006, he translated, annotated and published Cyrille Laplace’s account of his visit to Bodega Bay and Ft. Ross in 1839. Laplace was a French rear admiral who circumnavigated the globe from 1837-1840. On his tour of the Russian Ranchos, he states: “It was thus that we came at last, after several hours en route, to the second farm that we were to see, but not before we had stopped a moment by a little river on the banks of which my traveling companion pointed out to me the former habitations of beaver, probably destroyed by the Indians in order to catch the rich prize that lay within.

You see, young Jedi, beavers make lodges but otters don’t. So if Mr. Laplace saw a lodge that had been ripped apart by indians, that means it was a real BEAVER lodge on the Russian River about 150 years ago. Castor Canadensis in the wine country like we always knew was true.

Paper three here we come!