Martinez, Shiftwork and Beavers.

Beavers:From Main Street to Wall Street!

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental August 30, 2011

Finally the article featuring last wednesday’s Worth A Dam visitors is featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. What a treat! First watch the video all the way through to see what Joe and Amanda do for a living, and then go read about it here.

“We can spend $200,000 putting wood into a stream, cabling down logs. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t,” she says. “Put in a colony of beavers and it always works.”

The believers’ beavers come from places like Tumtum, Wash., where Amanda Parrish checked beaver traps one morning early this month by the Spokane River.

What a fantastic article! Thanks so much Amanda and Joe, and everybody else for the work that you do! Now if we can just get folks to see the forest for the trees, so to speak, and realize the good that beavers do everywhere, not just on ranches!

Thank you from the Lands Council

heidi08 Educational, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers August 28, 2011

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

heidi08 Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, Educational, Environmental, Festival, Friends of Martinez Beavers August 17, 2011

Meet Joe Cannon & Amanda Parrish from the Lands Council in Washington. Amanda is the Director of the Beaver Project and Joe is its Senior Ecologist. They came to the Lands Council as Americorp volunteers and now are golden employees running a prestigious program that California needs to copy. Together they run an all expense paid relocation resort program for beavers in Washington. I met them in Oregon at the State of the Beaver Conference where they presented on their community outreach programs and work with the public. (Amanda likes ma king candy dams with children which is a delicious way to learn ecology!) They had planned to come down for the beaver festival, but missed it by ten days. Instead they will come tonight for a meet and greet and get to sit in on the Worth A Dam post-mortem of the event.

These are beavers in Hancock (live) traps

Amanda & Joe with two beavers in transport cages ready for their new home.

This is what the back of Joe's car looks like when he's working...

Welcome to your new home little beavers! Good Luck!

Tonights conversation should be fascinating! No word yet from Brock on how yesterday’s capital Coho meeting went, I’ll keep you posted.

Beaver Hub!

heidi08 Beavers elsewhere, Beavers or Social Ambasadors, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental August 17, 2010

Remember Ian Timothy’s wonderful packaging of his five part claymation series “Beaver Creek” that he offered for the Silent Auction? Well he was pretty happy with how it turned out, too. Amidst the flurry of launching episode V he generated lots of new viewers and interest. I received an email yesterday from Joe Cannon of the Lands Council in Washington State. As you might recall, the Lands Council is the powerful information and advocacy group behind the “Working Beaver Conference” a few years back and the “Beaver Solution” production last year. It also has two Americorp positions teaching beaver management and stream solutions.

My Americorps coworker and I are coordinating a film fest themed on environmental issues and sustainable living. We’re showing several films, including the Imax “Beavers” film, and would like to show Ian Timothy’s Beaver creek animations series shown on your website. I’m so glad you’ve promoted his talents! These episodes are really great, and would be perfect for short segments between films! What would the best way to coordinate getting the DVD from him? If nothing else, I can try to connect with him through Facebook. I’m pretty sure the theater we are coordinating with can show DVD format.

Thanks! Joe

Joe Cannon

Beaver Solution Project Assistant

The Lands Council

So of course I got pretty excited and did a “Ian this is Joe, Joe this is Ian” email. I just hope Ian isn’t so bogged down with the beginning of the school year he can’t get to the post office! An environmental film festival is a great and well deserved honor to add to his resume. You know, of course, there should be an “introduction to the artist” segment included in the series, with some footage of him painstakingly fixing the clay scene, photographing and then moving it a fraction of an inch, and doing the whole thing again. It could show him doing his homework and sitting with his friends at high school and maybe it could say how he got interested in beavers?

Beaver donations…

heidi08 Festival, Friends of Martinez Beavers April 30, 2010

In the past seven days we’ve received a flurry of donations or promised donations for the silent auction at the beaver festival. Last year we raised nearly 2000 dollars and our most popular items were a certificate for two to Safari West, dinner at chez panisse and a years supply of Peets coffee! This year we are hoping for bigger and better offerings to tempt open the hearts and wallets of the beaver devoted and the beaver-curious.

{column1}The Friday before last I had a remarkable conversation with Niels Usden, the owner of Castoro Cellars in Paso Robles. His ‘dam fine wine’ has been a regular at Worth A Dam planning meetings and discussion groups, and is a natural addition to the auction. I was still ready to offer five more persuasive reasons why he should consider donating to the festival when he asked me for a formal donation letter and said it would definitely happen! Clearly a man who was nicknamed ‘il castoro’ in Italy understand how to support hard work!

Back when I was excitedly writing about Hope Ryden’s remarkable book, ‘Lily Pond‘, we struck up a little correspondence. I was particularly interested in the powerful solitary grief the author communicated about the loss of her beaver heroine, and how different that was from Martinez, where the experience was so communal and shared. She generously donated a signed first edition of her book and shipped it to me last week. It is dedicated “To Martinez”.{/column1}

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{/column2} On wednesday I got a lovely email from New Jersey beaver-advocate Sarah Sumerville of the Unexpected Wildlife Refuge. She is very pleased about the work that we’ve been doing for beavers all over, and offered to ship the following items for our auction;

· T-shirt (you pick the size) “I support the Unexpected” with beaver – back/ our logo and name on crest – front;

· Mug – our logo, cream mug/green logo;

· Cards – b/w linoleum block carvings by fifth graders with poems by Beaver Defenders (12 cards / 2 of each in the pack of 24 – fit legal envelops);

· 8×10 beaver puzzle (our dining beaver photo on balsam wood scrapped from the local yacht manufacturer – laser cut);

· Books: Beaversprite: my years building a Beaver sanctuary by Dorothy Richards (Hope Sawyer Buyukmihci wrote it for her from her notes)

· Year’s subscription to The Beaver Defenders newsletter.

Did I mention Sarah is a very enthusiastic friend? She also suggested that we poke other wildlife groups to offer items and it got me thinking about all those attractive shirtless b&w photos the Gazette snapped of Skip while he was installing the flow device. Maybe they’d be willing to offer one or two and Skip would be willing to autograph? Maybe Beavers: Wetlands & Wildlife could be persuaded to part with a year of their newsletter? Maybe the Lands Council could part with one of those snappy vests or Sherri Tippie could donate one of those little clay beaver figures she is famous for making? Certainly a copy of the new Beaver Solutions DVD just HAS to be included!

Any other ideas? It’s not even May 1st. We have lots of time to beg!