So after yesterday’s unplacid Placer research I started to think about how I could do more outreach there and start educating the people about the reasons not to kill beavers. (Because obviously CDFW was going to be zero help). I presented on fish twice last year in the area (trout and salmon) and thought there might be another toehold we were overlooking. What about Audubon? The regional chapter is the Sierra Foothill Audubon Society which includes Placer, Nevada and Yuba counties. What if I could talk to them directly about the relationship between birds and beavers? They publish a newsletter every other month, what if there was a beaver and bird column as well? That would be a good way to at least start the conversation. And get folks thinking that every time they remove a beaver they are harming a bird.
So I went hunting for their website and read up about their leadership. It started me looking for a quote by John James Audubon about beavers, because I thought that would be a good way to fashion an approach. I was more than a little mortified to find that Mr. Audubon actually went out beaver trapping in preparation for his Viparious Quadrapeds volume. But I guess I shouldn’t have been. Everybody was doing it. (I suppose the only reason John Muir didn’t trap beavers when he grew up in Scotland was because they had been extinct 300 years, and by the time he got to Wisconsin they were already trapped out.) In 1843 John James Audubon went on a Missouri river trek with an old trapper looking to look for beaver. He was lucky enough to see footprints and hear a tail slap. But the beaver population had already been decimated by then and I was delighted to learn he caught nothing. The journal entries read like a post-apocalypse sci fi novel. Just look.
May 12 – We passed the river called the Sioux Pictout,[ a small stream formerly abounding with Beavers, Otters, Muskrats, etc., but now quite destitute of any of these creatures. _____________________________________________________ June 3rd – We passed four rivers to-day; the Little Chayenne, the Moroe, the Grand, and the Rampart. The Moroe is a handsome stream and, I am told, has been formerly a good one for Beaver.Beaver guru Bob Arnebeck has a charming column about it here that I was delighted to find. It concludes with this fitting failure.
Audubon closed the day’s Journal with a wish: “I hope I may have a large Beaver tomorrow.”
He didn’t. People back in the boat down river saw the beaver swim by them and away. Audubon had to be content with just taking apart the lodge. Three men climbed inside it. Audubon and Provost were too plump to even try that. Audubon “secured some large specimens of the cuttings used to build the lodge and a pocketful of chips.” He gave no report on Provost’s feelings. The Mountain Man hurried off to hunt an elk. Audubon headed back to St. Louis a few days later.
Good Riddance! I thought the whole shocking story needed a graphic.
Well okay, Mr. Audubon was going to be of no help in my quest for nice things to say about beavers and birds. But I already wrote one article for an audubon newsletter about beaver building bird habitat. Maybe that would help me establish first contact.
So I wrote the president and vice president and politely asked to start a conversation about beavers and their importance to birds. And William Hall wrote back and said he was very interested in my doing both, he’s a wildlife management graduate from Humboldt and loves beavers. He also happens to be their program chair and their grant chair. He suggested a possible June 2016 date with an article in the November issue of the Phoebe newsletter. He noted there were beavers near his home in Grass Valley and they had effectively plugged a culvert to make a pond that attracted Virginia Rail and Wood Duck. The dam was constantly being ripped out by the road manager, but he kept gamely rebuilding.
Ahh. Silly me. Sometimes in my effort to function as beaver publicist I forget that they already do a great deal of work on their own to spread the word. Good for them.
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Hank posted this lovely photo of the napatopia kits yesterday, but I noticed a notch in the tail that I hadn’t seen before. I 
asked about it and now Robin, Hank and Rusty are fiercely going back through prior photos to see when it appeared. It’s possible some beaver or otter took a nip, like they did all those years ago to our old mom. But it’s possible that there’s just a weird leaf or photo anomaly going on. I’ll let you know what they decide.
Here’s video of the three kits in June very kindly offering us their tails for comparison. (Warning: if your zip code is 94553 you might need a kleenex after viewing.)
