Photos: Martinez beavers at home in Alhambra Creek
Springtime has brought out wildlife at Alhambra Creek in Martinez, Calif. Right at dusk, beavers were spotted swimming about and chomping on a fallen arroyo willow tree. Heidi Perryman and her husband Jon Ridler make a comfy spot with camping chairs as they wait to see the beavers. Perryman, president of Worth A Dam, and Ridler, treasurer, were perched quietly hoping to see a newborn kit. On its website, Worth A Dam describes itself as a citizens group that fought to protect the beavers and sponsors the annual Beaver Festival that will take place on Aug. 1, 2015.
This was a nice surprise after meeting photographer Susan Tripp Pollard at the dam on Wednesday night. Follow the link to see all the photos, because it won’t allow me to embed. Nice to see that she got the name WORTH A DAM and the date of the Beaver Festival correct! Of course it prompted other media outlets to contact me yesterday and say “oh the beavers are back”? I did an interview with Doug Padilla of KCBS at the dam trying to explain that the beavers never actually left, just the media did. Ahem.
Looks like the Oregon discovery was big enough to make the Smithsonian.
Mini Beavers Once Roamed Oregon
Fossils of a squirrel-sized from in eastern Oregon may be related to modern beavers; Oregon was once home to rodents of unusual size.
Paleontologists have unearthed fossilized remains from 21 ancient rodent species in eastern Oregon, including the skull and teeth of a previously unknown miniature beaver called Microtheriomys brevirhinus. At about the size of a squirrel, this particular beaver would have been ten times smaller than modern relatives, as Tara Kulash reports for The Oregonian. The finds appeared in the May issue of Annals of Carnegie Museum.
In 2012, the beaver fossils were unearthed less than a mile from the visitor’s center for the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, reports Jeff Barnard for the Associated Press. Nine other new species of rodents have been found in the area — some in the same fossil beds, most on nearby government lands. Some of the fossils are more than 20 million yeas old. The sediment surrounding the beaver fossils contains layers of volcanic ash, and by dating radioactive elements within the ash suggests the fossils are from the Oligocene period between 28 and 30 million years ago.
While the burrowing beaver’s line went extinct, it’s also possible that this ancient aquatic mini beaver has modern relatives.
You mean there might have once been many mini beavers? Hey I know what news from John Day about beavers belong in the Smithsonian and National Geographic and Time and every other magazine you can think of. It’s the news that the normal-sized beavers we have right now could save our salmon and restore our incised creeks if we could stop killing them for a while.
How about leading with that story for a change?
Fun footage from Rusty in Napa last night. That’s a yearling and adult in back and a night heron in front. Because beavers, as you know, build the neighborhood for everyone to move in.
Off to San Pedro Valley Park in Pacifica tonight to talk about the ecology of urban water-savers. Wish beavers luck!
