I promised I would offer Cheryl’s adorable otter picture from Friday night, when he snorted at her and demanded she leave the area in his “I’m an otter” manner. Look at the teeth on that charmer and tell me he isn’t eating well! With our kits long past danger-size its easier to just enjoy this unexpected visitor. Lots of water movement. Lots of noisy eating and satisfied crunching. Otters are fully prepared to enjoy everything they do — and you just ruin it. They make sure you know.

Let’s see what else. Well, the city of Oshawa promised their beaver-saving residents they’d find a non-lethal solution. They pointedly ignored the names and suggestions of every single professional we sent them and went back to the same environmental firm that said killing them was the best option in the first place. Then they awarded them a contract of 60,000 dollars to do a few tweaks and monitor the situation. 60,000 dollars! You could bring Skip, Mike and Sherri in dancing costumes for that kind of money! (Hmmm…that sounds kinda fun. Next years festival?) The paper is calling it a ‘temporary solution’ which it may well be. (I of course wrote and asked if they used the same headline when they recommended trapping, which is also a ‘temporary solution’.)

Oh and the council did keep their promise and try to find out the gender of the beaver that was ‘accidentally’ trapped after the trapping had been halted. Guess what they learned? The trapper, a seasoned and pragmatic animal culler with years of experience, told them that “you couldn’t know the sex because beaver sex parts are all on the inside.” No, I’m not kidding. (Mind you, I’m fairly certain that delicate condition describes half of any species ever discovered). He means of course that even male beavers have no external sex characteristics. They do have a different anatomical structure but it takes a moment (and an ounce of training) to identify and by then the body was already tossed in the incinerator and he was off for his next job. For the record, I am wholly certain that sexual organs would be of no use to any species whatsoever if they all remained inside…just saying.

Which brings us to Riga, Latvia where the city kept its promise to hold a ‘contest’ to solve the pesky beaver problem which gave them an excuse to let maintenance slag while tires and crates clog up their culverts. It rained a massive amount a while back and now their streets and parks are flooded and of course its the beavers fault. Go watch the video and tell me whether you think a few beaver dams created that problem.  Apparently 90% percent of the population thinks they did, which was obviously the point of this machiavellian delay. One article says that the items seen here, ripped from a culvert were “used by beavers in their dam making”.  (Ahh many’s the morning I’ve watched mom and dad beaver painstakingly laying tires on the dam. I just start to worry when they take them directly off the cars.)

Now before we in Martinez get full of righteous indignation at those Northern European Neanderthals, I must keep my other promise, which was to talk about sheetpile and what I learned from Alex’s Riga photos. The city park has a series of canals that are lined with sheetpile for stability. Alex sent some lovely pictures for us to ponder including this one:

Click on the picture to see it larger. Look at those lovely manicured banks. Gosh, I would like to go there. Look at that even line along the waters edge. It almost makes the sheetpile invisible.  I wish our sheetpile ended at the waterline like that. Wait a minute. Wait just a worthadam minute! Why doesn’t it? Why on earth does the sheetpile wall in Martinez continue 8 feet up the bank? Um, because of the beavers? Nope. Beavers only dig holes they started under the waterline, not into the bank like badgers. Are you sure about that? I mean they are pretty darn destructive. Yes I am sure. When beavers dig their massive caverns under the ground they enter from below the water line. Look it up.

So what’s all that sheetpile there for? Why is their concrete poured behind it? Why doesn’t ours end at the water or a foot above it (to account for tides) like Riga’s? Why isn’t it like the historic sheetpile wall at the waterline Worth A Dam discovered in historical photos? Because, dear readers, the sheetpile wall was never put there to stop beaver damage. It was put there to stop water damage. So that in the high flow months, when water pours down the gutters and streets and floods the creek like it did last winter (when the beaver lodge was completely under water), it won’t erode the bank and cause damage to the property. This is what the city of Martinez promised to do way back when they made creek businesses pay a special assessment into the flood abatement project 10 years ago. This is what Martinez ran out of money for by the time they got to Escobar Street. This is what that particular property owner always resented and why he wanted meeting after meeting about the beavers. And this is how the beavers gave them all an excuse to solve the problem once and for all.

(Beavers change things. It’s what they do.)

So we get 8 feet of sheetpile, lose half a million dollars, turn one of our most visible and visited stretches of creek into a scene from “cannery row” and the floods are averted.

I guess cities do keep promises – just not in the way you’d expect.