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I was searching around for images of ponds. I came across this lovely one that seemed to be missing someone important. Ahem.
I posted it on FB and said as much. Which prompted our beaver friend Art Wolinsky of New Hamshire to fix it with photoshop. Much better.
My enthusiasm must have egged him on because then he put this short film together.I liked it so much I talked him into adding the last bit. I think you’ll know why.
We are having quite an adventure in beaver-less Mendocino. (Some were introduced in little river in the 20’s but they have mostly died off or were killed. We did see one beaver once on Big River nearly 20 years ago when we were canoeing. And were rewarded with are very first tail slap.
Ahh memories.
No beavers now, but we did have a special visitor yesterday, which I was told by Megan Isadore of the River Otter Ecology Project is a Sheep Moth. Isn’t she beautiful?
So here’s the scoop on Ranger Rick. I heard yesterday from Brock Dolman of the OAEC and he said that they were contacted for a short piece about beavers and drought in California. I also heard from Suzi Eszterhas that our beaver article won’t be until next summer. So yes, beavers will be in RR next month, but only a little story and not our big 8-page story, which will still come next June or July.
Yesterday Rickipedia included me in an email discussion he is having with the authors of this book who are consulting him about how to research the historic prevalence of beaver in the Santa Cruz River.
Seems there aren’t many remains there either. And we’re surprised that beaver bones didn’t survive in waterways 170 years after being burned and discarded? How many fish bones did the archeologists find? Or otter bones?
Speaking of otters, there’s a really wonderful piece in the October issue of Bay Nature that features our friends at the River Otter Ecology Project and their work to document population dynamics.
We’re peering down into a ravine carved out by Lagunitas Creek, looking for North American river otters. According to official California Department of Fish and Wildlife records, last updated in 1995, we are officially fools; there are no otters anywhere near here. They are “non-occurring,” wiped out from most of the Bay Area long ago by trapping, pollution, lack of prey, loss of habitat—any and all of the difficulties that wild animals contend with in urban areas.
But according to the data collected in the last four years by Megan Isadore and her corps of citizen otter spotters, these little fish-eating predators are all over the place, particularly here in Marin County. On the website of her small nonprofit River Otter Ecology Project, the reports of sightings pour in, from anglers and dog-walkers and nature lovers and amazed suburbanites: Hey, I just saw an otter! As of 2016, ROEP has catalogued more than 1,730 sightings and added to that tally close to 5,000 camera-trap videos and photos and roughly 1,300 samples of otter scat.
The fact that otters are back in the Bay Area of their own accord without any reintroduction program to help them looks like a reason to declare victory. It seems to be proof that cleaning up watersheds makes a difference, that restoration works, that species will bounce back if we only push hard enough. “Their recovery in the Bay Area is, I believe, the result of conservation and restoration activities: the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, all these things we
ROEP now counts otters in two ways. Anyone can report an otter sighting online by providing enough details to rule out mistakes. But that only tells you where otters are. In order to get other dimensions of information—what they’re doing, what their niche might be—the group also trains and sends out volunteers who visit specific field sites weekly throughout the summer and early fall, when mothers have brought their new pups out from their dens and most other otters tend to stay put in their territories. Using an app designed to capture otter data, volunteers record the locations of signs (latrines, paw prints, tail drag marks, slides, dens), maintain motion-activated camera traps, and review the footage to document family life and behavior. (The cameras have caught other creatures too: bobcats, a badger, a merlin, baby foxes, and once a woman skinny-dipping.)
Isadore sees otters as a way in to understanding relationships between other things—how otter prey like the endangered coho rise and fall, whether local improvements in water quality outweigh the new pressures of climate change for otters. As an animal that relies on land and water, fish and fowl, it’s a species that can tie a lot together.
That’s how it works, Isadore says later: Efforts have ripples and consequences that you never anticipate. By showing a high-school student a video, you might awaken an interest in art and environment. By cleaning up a watershed, you just might find yourself surrounded by otters. “I want people to understand we have the ability to work for positive effects, as well as [have] the negative effects,” she says. “I want people to believe we have the ability to change things. That’s what I’m constantly trying to get across.”
Great work team Megan! We really didn’t realize otters were missing because we always saw them on our canoe trips (in Mendocino county) or at Jon’s work (On the Delta). This is really an outstanding and well-written article to promote your remarkable work and be inspirational to others who want to start citizen science of their own. We’re proud to say we knew you when. This is great promotion for ROEP and otters, and should help drive attention (and funding) your way. I personally am thrilled that otters can serve as the ambassadors to our creeks systems and get folks thinking of water health.
I may have ulterior motives.
(Mind you…the Martinez Beavers only merited a single page BN article after being missing from the entire bay area for 150 years and never got mentioned again even though we did publish ground-breaking research on historic prevalence and start a festival that has 2000 attendees, and win the John Muir Conservation education award (a year after you), complete a mural and get added to the congressional record, but never mind.)
More great coverage of the otter recovery out of Sonoma. Humans are happily taking credit for restoring the streams and improving their fish, but I’m guessing they had some other flat-tailed helpers along the way. Great photo from beaver friend Tom Reynolds too.
Winter rains have swollen streams and rivers, recharging groundwater, filling ponds and lakes, and making more visible the network of waterways that traverse Sonoma County. One species that makes good use of this aquatic web is the river otter. Have you seen a river otter recently? If so, you’re one of a growing number because river otters are on the comeback.
The Bay Area is seeing a rebound in river otter populations. Experts speculate that this is a testimony to many overlapping efforts to improve water quality and restore habitat. Megan Isadore of the River Otter Ecology Project says, “The most amazing thing about the otters’ return is they have done it completely on their own. There have been no efforts to reintroduce otters. What we are seeing is the response of the species to improved conditions.”
This time of year, female otters are denning and having pups. Maternal dens can be under large fallen trees or even inside old beaver dams. Each female gives birth to between one and four pups and then, shortly after, will breed with a male in preparation for the following winter. One amazing fact is that females experience “delayed implantation,” harboring fertilized eggs and then keeping the pregnancy dormant for up to 10 months.
Most young otters live with their moms for at least a year, with females often staying to act as helpers with the new pups. Young adult males leave after a year and strike out on their own to find and establish their own territory. Otter observations are often made during the February through March time frame as these disbursing juveniles take chances crossing subdivisions, ridges, roads and farm fields in search of a new and abundant source of fish.
Otters have benefited from on-the-ground habitat improvements and from the evolution of environmental policy. In 1961, California outlawed commercial otter trapping. Otters were trapped for two reasons: to sell their rich, thick pelts to the garment industry and sometimes to protect localized fish populations. Otters have large home ranges and are constantly on the move, so large scale fish populations remain intact even if individual fishing holes get temporarily depleted.
Another policy assist came from the 1972 passage of the Clean Water Act. This ushered in a generation of investments in cleaning the bay and eliminating many sources of industrial and agricultural pollution. Like bald eagles and peregrine falcons, otters illustrate that policy decisions do matter, and that we can repair degraded environments. As recently as 1995, state maps did not even show Marin and Sonoma counties as part of the river otter’s range. Today, scientists confirm that otters occupy much of their former Bay Area territory.
We’ve all benefited from the evolution of environmental policy, that’s for sure. But I’m also thinking that the recovery of another mammal who actually happens to make the water cleaner and increase the fish population might have helped a little too. (Ahem). Congratulations to Meghan Isadore and her merry band of Otter Spotters at the River Otter Ecology Project. We’re always happy when creeks draw human eyes!
Here’s a lovely promotional message from an otter himself demonstrating who he believes has helped his survival. Just look at the shapes he is posing under for a clue about who he thinks helped him most. This video by Moses Silva on Valentine’s day a few years ago shows an otter grooming atop the old beaver lodge.
Although, if otter trapping has really been outlawed 55 years in this state I’d be cautious about how much promotion of their “healthy recovery” I’d want to do in the media. Just sayin’. The nearly extinguished beaver population was protected for all of around 11 years and they decided the population had rebounded enough to restore trapping. River otters have been spared in California for more than half a century!
Ixnay on the opulation-pay evovery-ray is my advice.
Our friends at the River Otter Ecology Project get a fitting tribute to their hard work and recent publication. Congratulations for making an important difference! They are proud to welcome otter presence back to eight of the nine bay area counties. Since otters are no doubt there because of the recovering fish population and cleaner water, it’s something we should ALL be happy about. We’ve watched ROEP grow from a hint of an idea, to a plan and into a massive success and I couldn’t be happier for them! They are this year’s winner for the John Muir non-profit of the year conservation award, and have always been grand beaver supporters of our efforts and happy to cross pollinate. Check out their new publication and enjoy the recovery for yourself.
I have to admit though, despite all good intentions, when I consider the charmed life otters lead, with their cheerful beloved antics and their lithe fish-eating ways, I can’t help getting jealous. No city ever makes a decision to kill otters and no one gets mad at them for flooding roads or blocking culverts. In California the otter’s biggest threat is accidental trapping if it wanders into a conibear set for a beaver on purpose. Otters rarely get mistakenly attributed in photographs, and people don’t call them pests. Their comeback inspires a ticker-tape parade, and beavers are greeted with pitchforks and torches. It can feel like beavers are the red-headed step child of the aquatic mammal world. And for that matter, why didn’t our three beaver prevalence papers make the news? The three were monumentally hard work overturning 70 years of thought!
And then I read this:
“…we strongly recommend attention to their potential role as a keystone species in the San Francisco Bay Area”
Could that be true? I knew of course that sea otters were a keystone species, because of their diet of sea urchins, which otherwise deplete kelp forests, where so much sea life lives. But river otters? Was nothing sacred? Would there be otter keystone charm bracelets next? I went searching around for clues and found this from our old friend Steve Boyle saying it has to do with the role of nutrient exchange:
The river otter has been termed a keystone species because of its role in nutrient transport between aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, and a sentinel species because of its sensitivity toenvironmental contaminants and other disturbances (Bowyer et al. 2003). As such, river otter presenceshould be considered an important element in aquatic and riparian ecosystem health in Region 2 habitats potentially suitable for river otters. The existing and additional management efforts described below should help to make river otter populations across Region 2 more widespread and secure.
Oh alright then. Otter poop it is. (Snark Alert: Can’t really imagine what that bracelet would look like?) I hrmphed off to Rickipedia who reminded me not to worry because the thing that makes beavers wondrous is that in addition to being a keystone species they’re also ecosystem engineers. Which is much, much rarer.
So I think it’s time for new graphics, don’t you?
Now here’s something entirely positive about beavers, Peter Smith’s discussion of their Economic Impact at the recent Scottish Beaver Conference.
The otter folk are having a welcome back party and silent auction. I know because one of their offerings will be a beaver safari proved by yours truly. They posted this announcement the other day, which was prepared for Barry Deutsch and Lori Wynn formerly of the top notch SF design firm Deutsch Design Works. I loved the brilliant idea of using the silhouettes as negative space, but sadly no SF graphics firm was around to help.. So I sat down with my inadequate skills and tools and tried to see what I could accomplish.
Since I don’t have photo shop I have to get buy with three inadequate programs, with which I can only make one thing transparent, not both the figure and the ground. The finished product has more white than I wish, but it came out alright. Now I am totally addicted to this and can’t seem to stop myself. As you can see the possibilities are endless.
The inspiration for all this is the Otter event which promises to be great fun, attracting the very best sorts of people. You should really go. And when you do stop by and say thank you again!
The fact that otters are back in the Bay Area of their own accord without any reintroduction program to help them looks like a reason to declare victory. It seems to be proof that cleaning up watersheds makes a difference, that restoration works, that species will bounce back if we only push hard enough. “Their recovery in the Bay Area is, I believe, the result of conservation and restoration activities: the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, all these things we 
