Santa Clara Creeks Conference

Some pretty sophisticated reporting from Kay Young of WAVY-TV in Virginia. Amidst some exciting graphics and sound effects, she notes that beavers are destroying roads and making dams and ew they’re RODENTS! At one point she even shows the viewer some footage from the living history museum so “you can get a good look at these KIND of cute creatures”.

Then she bemoans the woeful figures VDOT has to spend maintaining the roads by killing wildlife and asks for some help in the local area. Apparently Virginia spends LOTS of its beaver killing money in areas where there is water. Who knew? This was my favorite part of the report:

Some property owners prefer to keep beavers, the dams, and ponds they create. In those cases, when roads are in jeopardy, VDOT and the USDA work with property owners to find solutions.

Those whacky property owners that want improved fishing and duck hunting on their land! I guess there’s no accounting for taste, but some people just INSIST on letting beavers improve water quality and raise the water table. Sheesh! USDA tries to tolerate those whackos as long as it can, but they can’t be held in check forever.

All these beavers won’t kill themselves!

In the meantime, you might drop WAVY a note to let them know there are other benefits to beavers. The single comment to the story offers some insight, from “James” and tells me there are some smart beaver folk in Virginia who recognize a ‘blame the rodent’ ass-cover when they see one!

Beavers know more about flood control than VDOT can ever hope for. They are tring to use the beavers to get them out of the spot light for all the pot holes still out there. Such a shame, blaming wild life, always pointing the finger.

Ah James, I couldn’t have said it better myself!

All three kits seen last night, arriving from completely unexpected locations. (We were having the two larger kits sleep downstream and the little one sleep upstream, yesterday everything was shuffled and the largest was down stream and the other two were upstream). I have thought about giving up trying to understand the family patterns, but I’m not yet ready to throw in that particular towel. In the mean time GOOD LUCK to LORY who is driving to Tahoe tonight to talk with the Kings Beach people. And wow, I just got to preview slides for Ricks presentation at saturday’s conference and its going to be a show stopper!

So Jon was down at the beaver dam last night checking on our heroes who made a little berm in front of the gap to stop the flow over the dam. Three tough young men were gathered there, a little bit appreciative and a little bit menacing. While he watched the three kits chewed on leaves and swam about. Then GQ came over the gap and the smallest kit swam quickly to him and onto his back and they swam together into the lodge. And everyone there said pretty much the same thing,

“AWWWWWW”

These are the essential traits that protect our beavers: understandable family attachments, understandable work ethic, understandable tragedies. Populist beavers. To the extent that people care about our beavers it is mostly do to the ways in which their behavior doesn’t take a park ranger to explain. The beavers, quite without our help, showed their value to the public and allowed their activities to be observable. Since most colonies keep their private lives private I’m not sure why ours decided to lift the curtain – maybe they had no choice because of their locale, or maybe they knew something we didn’t – but they did – and more so than any organization or media or advocate it’s what kept them safe.

I’m thinking especially about this because we are getting closer to the Santa Clara Creeks conference date where I’m going to talk about their role, and I’m supposed to have a chat with the Washington DC HSUS urban wildlife today to see if our beavers would fit with a ‘success guide’ for helping people help animals nationwide. I’m thinking over what worked and what didn’t. There are lots of things we did that helped save the beavers, chase media, write articles, put out video, work every farmers market for a year, talk to children, talk to Rotary and Kiwanis and Elks, talk to experts, and get children’s artwork and display in every single place we could imagine. But all these things wouldn’t have been nearly as effective if our beavers weren’t relatively easy to see and understand.

There are, of course, people who care about the beavers and have never seen them. Still one of the reasons beavers are a ‘charismatic species’ is that its easy to see sign of them. These people have mostly seen the dams, or the old lodge, or a beaver chew or even just footage on the news. It’s important to remember that Worth A Dam didn’t come to be until March of 2008 and didn’t generate a press release until June of that year. Most of the early coverage was pretty organic and based on luck. It was public support that got our beavers in the news, including this inexplicable report which gave us our furthest (national) reach.

I took the liberty at the time of editing the version I put on youtube to reflect the city’s obvious campaign not to call it a CREEK. But its interestesting to me now that this was reported in April of 2008 and there is no mention of the flow device or footage of it.We had already solved the problem but no one knew it. The city never really believed it was going to work three years ago, and didn’t even bring the issue up.