Occidental Arts and Ecology Center

Milestones

heidi08 Beaver-themed merchandise, Beavers, Beavers and Birds, Beavers and climate change, Beavers and Forests, Beavers and Frogs, Beavers and salmon, Beavers and trout, Beavers and water, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, Who's saving beavers now? July 1, 2016

Our friends at Occidental Arts and Ecology Center just released their new ‘beaver guide’. It’s well done and beautifully presented. You can download your free copy here, or pick up a hard copy for 10.00. It’s definitely worth checking out!

Sometimes I see glossy productions like this and feel guilty that Worth A Dam hasn’t done more of lasting value that you can hold in your hands. But then I remember than maintaining a beaver website for a decade and literally flooding the internet with information ain’t nothing. And then there’s that other thing we do. The part that makes me laugh is at the end where they list ‘what can you do to help’. I especially like the last one.

Heh heh heh. Been there. Done that. Literally have the tee shirt.

Speaking of new releases, Love Nature just released a beaver video for Canada Day with a photo of a nutria, so I made them this helpful graphic. Unfortunately the video can’t be embedded, but click on the link if you’re curious. I expected better from a country with a beaver on their money! (I bet no one has nutria on their money.)

WATCH: Historic footage of magical animals returning to the English countryside

The endearing youngster with its lavish coat was filmed swimming in Devon’s River Otter, marking an important milestone to bring the rare creature back to the countryside.

Beavers were hunted to extinction in Britain 400 years ago but conservationists are striving to see them return to quiet waterways and play a positive role in natural cycles.

In CS Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, a family of beavers help save the lives of four children transported to the magical world of Narnia.

Footage captured by wildlife expert Chris Townend shows how the endearing creatures are themselves being nurtured through an reintroduction project to establish them back as native British mammals.

His delightful clips show a nursing mother and her cute kit, one of the triplets she has recently produced.

Triplets! So exciting. I want beaver triplets! You know when I first posted the beaver kit news article on the english facebook beaver group they asked me to take it down, because they were worried about the media bringing foot traffic. I said, okay but um, cats outta the bag? Use this moment to educate people about how to behave around wildlife? But they were sure the story was in a tiny paper and would die down.

I think they forgot that baby beavers have been missing from the english countryside for 4oo years and are going to make news. The video first shows mom grooming and then the kit hurling himself indelicately underwater.

It’s July First! And end of Map day! Who hoo, after rearranging and squeezing I’m finally done arranging the festival map, and any one else who comes just has to tag along at the edge and deal with being unlisted. We are about as big as we can be anyway. See for yourself.
Oh and Suzi Eszterhas is donating an archival quality matted print to the auction. And guess what which one she is choosing?

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!

Once begun is half done…

heidi08 Beaver News, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, featured January 24, 2012

Some day, when California’s beaver policy is so well crafted and skillfully implemented that even the state of Washington looks at our borders with envy, when our rivers and streams are meandering with desilted channels and lovingly restored from Fresno to Truckee, when our bumper crops rely securely on higher watertables and our delta-drainage battles are a distant memory, when even our toxins and mercury from past mistakes are trapped and sequestered in millions of dams across the state – when that day comes, remember this meeting, where it all started – or rather where it all finished starting and actually “began“.

And these are the folk who helped make it happen.

Watershed moment, indeed!

heidi08 Beaver Art, Beaver News, Beavers, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, Why We Care June 20, 2021

Wow. Yesterday was a dazzling blur, and I’m still trying to feel my way through it. We woke up early to pick Michael Pollock up at the train station, then drove to the meeting at Occidental where we found a room full of 20+ folks I had been emailing for the past year from various government and environmental agencies all ready to work hard, talk about beavers and change the way folks saw the role of beavers in watershed.

Some of them I knew, like Brock, Rick, Lisa and our Tahoe friends, but some were a delightful introduction to someone I had swapped email with but never met. It was a positive, knowledgeable, cheerful, pragmatic and very intriguing group. Michael found out at the last minute that he lost travel funding so Worth A Dam made the decision to pay for him to come down. I figured that having him there would really make a difference and was worth the train ticket. Brock and Rick are kicking in too.

The meeting was well facilitated by the OAEC’s director Dave Henson, and started with introductions and background. Then Rick and I reviewed the historical distribution paper and talked about where beaver belonged. Pollock made the excellent point that he couldn’t think of another instance where government agencies were relying so heavily on a 70 year old paper, and we all talked about how to change the mindset of today.

Then he presented his data from the current work which is looking particularly at beavers and steelhead, having pretty handily answered any Coho questions. After which we were treated to a delicious lunch, mostly grown on site, and a tour of the gardens. I chatted with our Tahoe friends about their upcoming grant project to get funding for school presentations and their 501.3(c) application.

After lunch we talked about obstacles and made schemes for the work that needs to be done to get a beaver management plan at CDFG that recognized beaver’s incredible assets, acknowledged the damage done to habitat and wetlands by their removal, and required that certain steps be taken to try and solve the problem humanely before trapping. Then we went around the room and discussed what we had taken from the day and what we were going to do next to advance our goals.

Somewhere in the day, Eli Asarian agreed to do the hydrology graph for our article, Lisa gave me a present of a lovely antique postcard from her grandmother, Rick gave me an adorable and entirely fitting ornament of a beaver curled up in a gift box, and Pollock gave me a series of frames containing the historic 1930 article from Popular Science about beavers on Mars – along with the most whimsically charming beaver card I believe I will ever see that he bought in Montana. Here’s the Monte Dolack painting that it’s from.

Afterwards there was dinner, conversation, and wine before a stroll under a brightly jeweled cold and clear starry sky that poured the Milky Way right onto our car.

Chuck James, the archeologist who found the remnant beaver dam all those years ago and kick started the historic paper with his efforts, followed us back to Vallejo before heading off to Redding), and we got home sleepy and dazzled from the day. After a chat by the fire and look at the giant beaver skull (which Pollock had always wanted to see) and the scrapbook of our first year’s beaver story, (which he was less eager to see but he just had to look at to ‘get’ Martinez story), we brought him back to the train station where he embarked on another 22 hour journey home.

(My lost weekend was unbelievable, but his has to be something out of Salvador Dali.)

Well 2012 might not be the “year of the beaver” but I am more hopeful than ever before that big things are moving and shifting on the beaver front. This is as good an opportunity as any to thank the literally thousand of helpers that have cared about our beavers, cared about beavers in general, or taught us valuable lessons along the way.

It is said that the journey of a 1000 miles begins with a single step but when I finally fell asleep last night it felt more like we had just taken a series of sprinting leaps.