Yesterday our good friend Janet Thew forwarded the “Giving Tuesday” request she received from the Wetlands Conservancy. If you’ll remember, they’re the group in Oregon that brought me to Portland in 2015 to speak about what we did in Martinez, and organized the huge art exhibit this year that traveled the state. They are still working hard on behalf of beavers. Here’s how you can help:
Who doesn’t want to give to beavers? Click on the image to go to their giving page. The Wetlands Society works hard to make a difference and keep the value of beavers on everyone’s mind. And the beavers they support of course work hard for all the wildlife and streams in Oregon. It’s a pretty smart investment in the future of the planet to support them.
(Of course we’re helping beavers too and we’d send you a poster. :-))
Just one state over, I got a note from Sara Aycock yesterday about the work her dad is doing with the local environmental education facility in Idaho. You’ll remember Sara because she’s the one who donated those wonderful Victorian animal prints last year for the silent auction as part of the release of her first detective novel about Mr. Beaverton. Remember?
Now the Nature center is one of those places with an underwater viewing station so you can see the salmon or what have you, and it recently was visited by a beaver! Her Dad is working hard talking to the staff about how important beaver are to the landscape and she says pretty much everyone is trying to help that beaver out.
The center is very interested in wildlife and uses those wildlife cameras to find what’s happening in and around the facility. This is the bold adventure of a hungry and ambitious mink they caught recently that I thought you would enjoy.
I can’t wait to see some underwater footage of that beaver!
You notice that despite the city’s goal of ‘coexistence’ they still managed to find a few folk who call beavers pests for the interview. Journalism! Then there was this lovely article from Oregon yesterday. When it was published it had the photo listed as ‘courtesy’, I wrote the managing editor that we weren’t feeling particularly ‘courteous’ and he needed to change the credit immediately. All better now enjoy.
While some see the beaver, officially a semiaquatic rodent, as destructive, beavers are “woefully misunderstood,” says Esther Lev, the executive director of The Wetlands Conservancy, a statewide group based in Portland.
Beavers got more than their usual share of attention in May, during the 24th annual celebration of American Wetlands Month. The beaver was a headliner this year.
The North American beaver (Castor canadensis) — Oregon’s official state animal — possesses an instinctual work ethic that is closely connected to the way it builds its habitat. Beavers create stick-and-branch structures with underwater entrances for protection from predators, and in the process expend an enormous amount of energy gnawing and gathering wood. If their lodge gets destroyed, they’ll rebuild twice as fast and twice as sturdy.
Lev, a widely respected expert in wetlands education and conservation with more than 30 years of experience, says beavers make a multitude of important contributions to our ecosystem. “Beavers not only create wetlands, but also create spawning and rearing habitat for salmon and steelhead,” she says. “Their ponds help filter water and moderate fluctuations in water flow downstream.” They also provide habitat for a wide array of insects, birds and amphibians.
While research shows that beavers make ecosystems more complex, they’ve long been incorrectly blamed for flooding, Lev says.
She calls them “nature’s hydrologists.”
Streams and rivers where beaver dams are present show high clarity and low pollution levels. As beavers build their dams across waterways — with their lodge at the center of it — a pond is created. As the water flows and filters through the dam, water quality improves and nutrient-rich sediment collects in the bottom of the pond, creating a food source for bottom feeders. Eventually, the beavers move on, their dam breaks down, and the pond slowly percolates into the surrounding terrain, leaving behind a lush meadow composed of nutrient-rich soil.
Studies suggest that there are a number of species whose survival is dependent on beavers’ “engineering” their environment. Typically, when beavers fell a tree, more light gets to the forest floor, which, in turn, helps remaining trees grow and thrive. Better light also encourages a diversity of plant life. And as the remaining stump grows new shoots, that serves as food for moose and elk.
Research shows there’s a greater abundance of birds, reptiles and plant life in areas inhabited by beavers. Migratory birds prefer the safety of landing on beaver-created ponds to open bodies of water.
Fantastic article! And following nicely on the heels of the Portland talk. Lev is the woman who was grateful my talk ‘ wasn’t delivered by a biologist’. So I know she received excellent reminders of beaver value in the landscape fairly recently if she needed them. I’m so old I can remember when talking about beaver benefits raised many an eyebrow, now we get two examples on the same day! What will tomorrow bring?
But the very best part of yesterday had to be this, which almost brought me to tears when I opened the door. That beaver and I have been through a lot together.
There’s been such a flurry of news since I got back from Portland I never really wrote about the beaver event I traveled all those miles for. I guess like any thing you prepare for months in advance, you’re so focused on your preparation the event itself kind of feels unreal or like it happened to someone else. (Much like a beaver festival for instance). Your mind is busy doing a million things and attending to details so doesn’t really have time to experience the event fully.
I was surprised to see how much like a big city and how much like a little neighborhood Portland was. It reminded me of the way you are startled in San Francisco to come out of these busy streets where everything is shaddowed by towering offices to suddenly be in Noe Valley where mothers push strollers and ride bicycles on wide sidewalks.
.0.
Portland had flavors of Berkeley and San Francisco layered together like fused glass. There are endless one way streets with stoplights or dead ends so you can’t fix mistakes easily, but sudden restful places of four way stops, were you have all the time you need to look at a map. There are brightly beautiful homes where children leave toys in the yard and dogwoods are bursting in bloom.
The Village Ballroom where I spoke was in this adorable young neighborhood were parents stopped for a pint with their toddlers on outside benches, and the toddlers were pulled in bicycle trailers sporting polka dotted helmets fringed with curls. The only scary thing about that neighborhood was finding a place to park. The ballroom itself had burnished wood floors and hallways scattered with pews. It felt like the place where many weddings had been before you. It was already set up with wooden chairs and we embarked on arranging the equipment as people filled in. The sound equipment was at the other end of the room from me so Jon needed to hold the mic into my computer to get audio, which actually worked well but meant that he couldn’t snap as many photos as I hoped during the talk!
I already felt like I knew Kaegen Scully-Englemeyer who had invited me in the first place and had worked with me on the urban beaver chapter. But it was nice to put a friendly face with a voice. He introduced me to his boss the Esther Lev executive director of the wetlands conservancy who was really excited to have me there. The lead author on our chapter Greg Lewallen was also there and introduced himself. There were others I met in that performance anxiety haze where you instantly forget what you are told. But they all seemed nice and eager to remind me that in Portland it was the officials who wanted beavers, and the people who needed convincing.
When the room was mostly full, there was a short welcome and I launched into the talk. Since I was the only speaker I took time for all the parts, including the drama of the beavers, the festival, the paper on historic prevalence, the discovery that Enos Mills had come to Martinez, the mysterious deaths, the mural, and the joyful new arrivals. I ended with my top ten list of advice for advocates, which made for a little more than an hour. Folks laughed almost everywhere I expected and oohed at the children and gasped at the footage of mom walking on her hind feet to work on the lodge.
When it was over there was warm applause and questions from the audience. About the beavers, about the deaths, and one about mussels (?) that confused me a little. Then some folks came up to talk in person, including Alexandria Costello the Geology grad student who had included the Martinez story in her beaver poster session at the conference in SF, then visited Napa and met Robin and Rusty. She brought her friends who were fellow students interested in water and beavers. One was Erin Poor, on the Watershed Council for Tualatin basin the source of that wonderful beaver newt photo. They gave me a gift of a set of coasters made from a beaver chewed tree, which was still sticky with varnish since they made it themselves! They were off immediately for a ropes course and training in some beautiful oregon backcountry.
Afterwards Greg came up to congratulate me (he couldn’t believe the images) and was accompanied by his cheerful girlfriend who burst with the news that we had actually met before! She had visited her grandmother in Walnut Creek a few years back and talked her into visiting the John Muir House on what just happened to be earthday! She was so happy to see Worth A Dam there working with the kids on bag puppets! I actually remembered her very clearly because she had told me her boyfriend worked on a beaver project in Portland and was studying their role in streams! I thought it especially funny when she blushed, smiled at Greg, and said embarrassedly, oh that was a different boyfriend.
Obviously a girl with a particular taste in men!
There were a few more appreciations, one especially memorable from Esther who offered what I’m sure must have been intended as a compliment but came out rather oddly when she said “Oh, its so wonderful to have that talk not delivered by a biologist!”
Um, thanks?
And then we packed up our equipment and headed back into the neighborhood night where there were still late families and sleepy children sitting at the outside tables. Jon said he thought it was the best talk I had ever given, and repeated again how surprised he was at how much it changed every time. I was happy my voice held up and I didn’t forget anything. We treked back to our little room and drank wine on the porch knowing that we had an early morning the next day with Clean Water Services in Beaverton.
They call Portland the city of bridges, and it occurs to me now that the beavers themselves have functioned as bridges in many stages of my life. Bringing me places I had never been and talking to people I would never have known without their influence. In almost every relationship or room in my house there is something that wouldn’t have been there without these ‘bridges’. I have lived in Martinez all my life, but the beavers introduced me to this community in ways I never would have known without them: the politics, and the homeless, and the social structure of a city I had always ignored while focusing on my work.
The experience of Portland is still unfolding in my mind, but at least now I’m paying attention.
I was doing some more research on the topic of urban beavers, and was really surprised to come across this bold sentence on a page called “What can beavers do for you?”:
TWC is collaborating with the guidebook authors to add a chapter focusing on urban beaver in the next version of the book to be released next summer.
Of course, all kinds of bells immediately sounded in my brain. Hurray! More people talking about urban beavers! And then: Exactly who ELSE was doing this topic and were they trying to release their chapter before we got around to ours and steal our thunder? Had I tipped our hand by writing about it here and been hoisted on my own petard? Then I put my speculations away and actually read a little more closely.
TWC stands for “The Wetlands Conservancy” and if that sounds vaguely familiar it should. Hmm, who’s the Urban Land Steward for the organization? Kaegan Scully-Englemeyer who just happens to be one of the co-authors of the chapter. Our chapter. That chapter I’m working on. Duh.
OHHHH, okay then.
Guess what I found next? A very lovely column from an old friend.Well not that old, but Simon Jackson of Ghostbear photography was kind enough to donate some of his remarkable images to the auction at the festival in 2014. And pleased when we noticed that his awesome photo was of a nursing female, which he hadn’t seen before. He was a great sp0rt so that makes him pretty friendly.
The odd thing about this article featured in the Yellowstone Daily is that it allows me to copy the photos but not the text. Which is the opposite of what you’d expect for photos of this caliber. Of course I found a way to do it anyway, but still, it’s odd. It’s hard to see how Urban it is because it just looks beautifully snowy. But I trust Simon, don’t you? Here the beaver is surrounded on either side by photographers.
The amusing thing was that this cooperative beaver disliked Simon’s fiance for reasons known only by the beaver. And would get upset every time she tried to watch him. This bit of beaver quirkiness made me smile.
It’s a lovely article and a fine study of urban beavers. Go check out the whole thing here, and let’s keep our eyes peeled for when our own UB’s return, which I’m feeling right now that they will!
Just one state over, I got a note from Sara Aycock yesterday about the work her dad is doing with the local environmental education facility in Idaho. You’ll remember Sara because she’s the one who donated those wonderful Victorian animal prints last year for the silent auction as part of the release of her first detective novel about Mr. Beaverton. Remember?
on outside benches, and the toddlers were pulled in bicycle trailers sporting polka dotted helmets fringed with curls. The only scary thing about that neighborhood was finding a place to park. The ballroom itself had burnished wood floors and hallways scattered with pews. It felt like the place where many weddings had been before you. It was already set up with wooden chairs and we embarked on arranging the equipment as people filled in. The sound equipment was at the other end of the room from me so Jon needed to hold the mic into my computer to get audio, which actually worked well but meant that he couldn’t snap as many photos as I hoped during the talk!
