Birds of a Feather

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, City Reports, Creative Solutions, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers, New Species February 20, 2012

On the Fly – Birds of the Beaver Dam

Jeannine Gendar – Martinez Patch

The people at Worth A Dam, the group that has been advocating for the Alhambra Creek beavers since their 2006 arrival, have film of hooded mergansers at the beaver dam and great photos of other birds that are taking advantage of habitat improvements the beavers have made: kingfishers, cormorants, grebes, and egrets to name a few, and a couple of herons. Okay, technically egrets are herons, but I’m talking about green herons and black-crowned night-herons.

If you missed Jeannine’s beautiful ode to birds and beavers you should hop over to our friends at Patch and savor it. It’s a delightful reminder that the beavers have played a huge environmental and civic role in Martinez, and a good place to begin gathering your thoughts for their upcoming 5th anniversary!

Back at the beaver pond, songbirds too are finding their habitat improved. A 2008 study by the Wildlife Conservation Society found that where there are more beaver dams there are more songbirds. The dams and ponds recharge water tables and improve the health of streams. Taking out pondside trees, the beavers encourage low-growing plants; chewing willows and cottonwoods to the nubs, they stimulate new shoots on those trees. All of this creates cover for songbirds and nesting habitat for waterfowl.

Don’t you wish every the ‘Patch’ of EVERY city had a similar bird & beaver report? Hmm…we’ll work on that. For now THANK you Jeannine! This lovely article prompted two donations this morning from beaver supporters I haven’t even met! What an important look at our creeks through a new lens of feathers and fur!

Speaking of new friends, yesterday I interviewed FS hydrologist Suzanne Fouty of Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, and I will tell you that in addition being thoroughly delightful and dazzlingly brilliant she brought a lot of new words to the habitat conversation, including ‘cross-sectional’, ‘ungulate’, ‘buck and pole fencing’, and WOLVES.

You won’t want to miss this.

Lost & Found

heidi08 Beaver News, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Environmental January 10, 2012

Is your family big enough to have one of those cousins that always got in trouble at family gatherings for chasing the cat or trampling grandma’s petunia bed or stealing cookies off the dessert tray before dinner was even served? You know the kind that started taking Ritalin in grade school after he set fire to his friend’s dad’s garage? Maybe he went on to be come a challenging teen who slouched through high school smoking weed and skipping classes before getting his girlfriend pregnant and dropping out entirely. The family eventually stops expecting him for Thanksgiving and finally only mentions him in hushed “bad-seed” tones .

UNTIL one evening he’s suddenly on the news for saving a baby from a burning building, or opening a dance club that attracted a movie star or maybe even finding a cure for throat cancer. The point is, that this thuggy kid that no one expected anything good to come out of, suddenly shines by doing something amazing and the first reaction out of the family, even though its really, really good news, is just, “HUH???”

Well, meet your cousin.

The Forest Service is known for developing partnerships to get the greatest good out of scarce fiscal resources. On the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest one of the partners is four-legged.

Human activity has damaged the habitat for many species in and around the streams and rivers in eastern Oregon.

The Forest Service hopes to reverse these decades of neglect by first restoring beaver habitat and enticing the animals back in several tributary streams of the North Fork Burnt River.

“Beavers have a knack for environmental restoration,” says Suzanne Fouty, District Hydrologist for the Whitman Ranger District.

“As they build their dams in streams they transform those systems from single thread channels with narrow riparian zones to complex systems with wide riparian zones. Beaver dams enhance watershed conditions by raising the water table in the valley floor leading to more forage, diversified and improved wildlife and fisheries habitat, and improved flood control,” she explained.

I’ve seen a lot of surprising things in my time as beaver crossing guard and I’ve covered stories from Saskatchewan to Sedona but I must say that I never expected to read ANYTHING like this from our very own USDA. It’s true that we mostly notice what happens at APHIS and the forestry service is a kinder, gentler, fruit-producing branch but still I must have stared at that page for five minutes before I believed the acronym. Suddenly I risk becoming the bitter grandma with a grudge who can hardly bring herself to say something nice when the kid does better than anyone expected him too.

The goal is to have beavers establish a core zone of stable beaver dam complexes that will allow them to expand their water storage and modification influences outwards into other tributaries.

“It’s exciting to be part of a project that has multiple partners, can begin to yield results within a couple of years, is cost effective and produces multiple environmental and economic benefits,” says Fouty.

Wow. Just wow. Suzanne Fouty is a beaver hero of epic proportions and is obviously doing something amazing by nudging things on the inside one stream at a time. I’m so grateful for her work and pleased that it caught the attention of Matthew Burks who posted it for all to see that I won’t even comment on the blog’s kind of creepy motto of “Reaching out. Every day in every way“. I’ll just enjoy this moment for what it is, and hope for more on the horizon. Bring on the fatted calf or whatever…

And he said unto him, Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. It was meet that we should make merry, and be glad: for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found.

And then there were three…

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers elsewhere, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental May 20, 2011

Yesterday beaver watchers were treated to the sight of three beavers in the bank near the footbridge. Three! This morning we watched from 5:30 to 7:00 and saw no one but these three little fuzzy ducks, who had gone to nap on the bank while mom preened. Two days ago there were four and a week ago there were eight, but such is the life of baby ducks! Lets hope these last three are the smartest ever.

What I was able to see, though, was video footage of three otters at the old lodge taken on wednesday morning by Moses who sadly declined to share it with the website. They were popping out of the water, chewing dramatically and going in and out the lodge. Otters are talented in lots of ways, but they can’t dig their own burrows or make a lodge. They are ‘obligate nesters’ of a sort. They often use abandoned beaver lodges to have pups, who are born helpless and furless and unlike beavers, can’t swim for weeks. Every year we have seen otters march hopefully into our beavers lodges and watched as beavers marched them right out. This year things may be different.

After a while the otters started to do something I have never seen before. Ripping out tules and carrying them into the lodge. A lot of tules. Bedding? Certainly they aren’t planning to eat them. It looked very much like nesting but it is late in the year for mom to pup I think, and unlikely that two others would be with her when she did. I can’t imagine what was going on but I’m inclined to think that it has something to do with why none of our three beavers went upstream to sleep yesterday. Hmmm. Stay tuned and keep watch on the upper pond.

Yesterday I got word from Sharon Brown of Beavers:Wetlands & Wildlife that an article she wrote with hydrologist Suzanne Fouty was appearing in this Sping’s issue of LAKELINE magazine. It’s sadly not available online, but I’ll give you an illicit taste in case you want to track it down. Great work ladies, if I wasn’t a beaver fan already this would be a powerful sell!