Tag: Worth A Dam

So much ignorance, so little time…

heidi08 Educational, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Who's Killing Beavers Now? November 29, 2012

It seems that everywhere else in America (and probably Canada too) it’s beaver killing season. Reports from New York, and Illinois and South Carolina bemoan the dastardly fiends and praise the heroic johnny-come-deadly beaver trapper who saved the town by snagging the culprits. So much so that this is the cover photo in this mornings Lincoln Courier.

Click for Image if you are that kind of person.

LINCOLN —

For residents who live in the Brainard Branch area in Lincoln they can breathe collective relief sighs in regards to the problems they have with beavers.

Lincoln Streets and Alley superintendent Tracy Jackson said his department has continued to tear down many of the dams the animals make and has been battling this since the early spring.

Jackson said he is grateful to the efforts of Troy Hanger, of Lincoln, for his tenacity in wanting to rid the area of this problem.

Hanger, a licensed trapper, says the 62-pound beaver was not an easy catch.

“He avoided me for two weeks. I would put three or four beaver casters out to attract them by scent and I would see the trees chewed but he wouldn’t go near the trap,” said Hanger who started this project on Nov. 5, the first day of the trapping season.

Articles like this make me very discouraged that we will ever get to a more intelligent place in beaver policy. On mornings like today when there are so many stories of carnage that I get to pick and choose between varieties of beaver stupid I worry that it is hopeless and it will never get better. The beaver moon was named because its a good time to remember to kill beavers, and that’s true for everywhere in America.

Except Martinez.

60c03adb80a571e18c5f65858846a739 — A group of beaver supporters gathered on the bridge near the Amtrak station in Martinez on Wednesday to celebrate the Beaver Moon Credit David Mills

Perhaps it was because it was the night of the Beaver Moon. Whatever it was, two of Martinez’s beavers made an appearance at sundown Wednesday while a dozen onlookers watched. The crowd had gathered on the bridge near the city’s Amtrak station downtown at 5 p.m. under the November full moon known as the Beaver Moon or Frost Moon. About 5:15 p.m., the first beaver swam out from its den along the banks of Alhambra Creek. He disappeared, but a few minutes later another beaver came out, swam near one of the colony’s dams, grabbed a vine and brought it back to the den. The event, organized by the community group Worth A Dam, was designed as a celebration of the beaver community in town.

Worth A Dam. Changing the world one beaver at a time.

Beaver Summit

heidi08 Beavers, Creative Solutions, Educational, Environmental, Friends of Martinez Beavers, Why We Care October 11, 2012

This film was made by last night’s dinner guests. The narration is by Sharon Brown and the filming by her husband Owen. Owen is a doctor of Chemistry and Sharon a biologist, who became friends with Dorothy Richards of ‘BeaverSprite’ and inherited her preserve and work to form Beavers: Wetlands and Wildlife. Amongst their many adventures teaching, writing, and advocating for beavers they once adopted orphaned set of four kits and raised them for two years before setting them free on their own. You can see it was a fairly memorable experience.

Jon, Heidi, Owen, Sharon, Kate, Lory (and Cheryl taking the picture!)

The couple came first to our house for lemonade and beaver talk, and then came with us down to see Junior and Mom swimming about the dams, before joining us for dinner at Lemongrass. Most of Worth A Dam was there, and Kate from the OAEC water institute drove down from Sonoma to meet them. It was a strangely familiar meeting, in which many beaver tales (tails?) were swapped. I tried to put Owen to work finding a scent mound for us, because he has a great nose for castor! But sadly none were forthcoming. They are off for an adventure in the city today and heading next for the sierras to meet Mary and Sherry and check out their flow devices. Worth A Dam is thrilled they made the trip and wishes them the happiest of trails!

Martinez has now had interstate beaver pilgrimages from Washington, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Kentucky and New York. Not bad for a small town! (Still waiting for Alberta and Colorado!)

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Now its off to Canton PA where some beavers are willfully rebuilding their dam even after a backhoe has generously removed it three times. The nerve! It’s like they think they have a right to exist and feed their family or something!

CANTON – There’s some persistent beavers in the borough. At Canton Borough Council’s meeting this week, councilman Kurt Bastion, the street superintendent, spoke on the issue during the street department report. The problem isn’t new. State officials have been involved in the past, trapping the beavers, but they keep coming back. The dams are a danger because they can exacerbate flooding.

He said a beaver dam was torn out three times with a backhoe, and “the next day it was right back there again.”“We’re going to have to address that issue some other way,” he said.

Ooh, I know, I know! call on me!

“Mike Lovegreen from the Bradford County Conservation District had talked to one of the residents on Lycoming Street about this, I want to say maybe at the beginning of summer or end of spring,” she said. “There is a grant available to the residents that the municipality would apply for, but the residents need to come up with a plan, prior to us being able to apply for that.”

Well, okay, you tried “Quint” and it didn’t work. How about trying Mike or Skip? Beaver Solutions is 5 hours away and Beaver Deceivers International is 7. Either one could install a flow device that controls dam height and prevents flooding but keeps a pond high enough for these beavers to store food for the winter freeze. Gosh you could even buy the DVD and do this work yourself! Maybe get the community to volunteer and have a potluck with the rest of the grant money that night?

Or you could keep doing the exact same thing over and over again and acting surprised when it fails? Lots of folks choose that option.

Founding Beavers

heidi08 Beaver Behavior, Beavers, Beavers elsewhere, History, In the News February 24, 2012

How Beavers Helped to Build America

Once abundant and widespread, beavers helped to forge the ground under our feet, making water safe to drink and the land an oasis for life. Yesterday’s update from the Discovery News blog was as good as we’re likely to see in this year or the next. It reviews the newly published research by some folks at Colorado State who have been using Ground Penetrating Radar to identify the effects of beaver dams on the substrata for the last 4300 years.

For the study, Wohl and colleagues Natalie Kramer and Dennis Harry used both ground-penetrating radar and near-surface seismic refraction to detect beaver-induced sedimentation.

My my my. The article is written by Jennifer Viegas who has been a benignly distant observer of the Martinez Beaver story for years. (I guess at one time we were fairly difficult to ignore).

The study determined that beavers contributed 30-50 percent of post-glacial sediments in the target area. “I think it very likely that our results are not unique to the Beaver Meadows study site, but also apply to other regions with relatively low rates of sediment yield to valley bottoms,” Wohl said.

She explained that beaver dams interrupt the flow of a stream, creating a backwater effect of reduced velocity. Sediment deposits in the backwater zone of the beaver pond, with this material remaining “in storage” until river erosion may mobilize it and carry it downstream.

The process is beneficial to humans, she continued, because “wet meadows associated with beaver dams have higher habitat and species diversity for plants, insects and other invertebrates, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals — pretty much all forms of life.”

Can I get an Amen? Astute readers of this blog will already know immediately where my mind headed the moment I read this article: If historic beaver dams can be identified from above ground in Colorado why not in the Sierras? Why not use GPR to prove what we’ve been struggling to document with painstaking ethnographic & archival research?

(Odd aside. I stumbled into GPR during the great sheetpile panic of 2008 when I was unsuccessfully imploring the city council they didn’t need to stick steel plates through the beavers’ living room. I suggested that they use GPR to find those alleged “tunnels” and make sure there was actually any problem in the first place. I even raised a few eyebrows when I suggested that they take a lesson from family court and if the study FOUND holes the city could pay for the radar, and if there WERE NO HOLES the property owner could pay. Of course you all know how that worked out.)

Never mind. This is an EXCELLENT article. Go read the whole thing. My very favorite paragraph comes at the end, and it kept me grinning for much of the day.

Due to intense beaver hunting, habitat destruction, pollution and other problems, the beaver population has plummeted by the millions in recent decades. Since beavers can impact human activities, their presence in areas remains controversial. Conservation groups such as Worth a Dam in Martinez, California, however, work hard to maintain beaver dams through responsible stewardship and to educate the public about the many benefits associated with beavers.

Thank you Jennifer for dropping our name at the end of such a bountiful list of beaver beatitudes! And thank you University of Colorado for showing us the beaver foundation beneath our feet! Next time you hear folks talking about our “Founding Fathers”, spare a thought for those Founding Beavers who laid rich soil across the united states, shaped our waterways and were trapped and made into hats as a thank you.

Maybe we can do better?

Agents of Change

heidi08 Beavers November 4, 2011

Haven’t bought Glynnis Hood’s new beaver manifesto yet? Well, this should whet your appetite.

In the mean time it’s as good a day as any to introduce my next new plan which is to do a series of interviews with beaver folk discussing how and why they got involved with the animal. I plan on podcasting the series under the title “Agents of Change” referring to the fact that beavers both change their environment AND the lives of people who defend them. I’ve already heard from more than 20 beaver advocates around the globe that they’d be happy to do an interview, now its just up to me to figure out the technology part and practice asking questions. How hard can that be? If you’ve ever done a podcast and you feel inclined to share, drop me a line.

Earth Day Again

heidi08 Earth Day, Environmental April 14, 2011

Four years ago we received a last minute phone call to do a beaver display at the John Muir Historic Site’s Earth Day. We were still hot on the heels of the final beaver subcommittee meeting at county chambers where the city council ‘declined to vote’ on our plan and brought in a secret expert to stagger up and down the isle with cardboard saying that our beavers were leaving and flow devices don’t work. Remember?

We didn’t’ have an awning or a table cloth, but we did have a partial scrapbook, a chewed beaver stump and some photos. I stopped on the way and picked up some felt pens and paper at walgreens because I thought children might enjoy drawing our beavers. It turned out to be a hugely successful activity which even the council member’s children couldn’t resist. I still treasure those drawings as a turning point in our new focus and campaign. You might call chapter 1 of our story “Facts” but chapter 2 was definitely “Hearts & Minds”.

Well it’s Earth day again, and I’m a member of the John Muir Association board now and this year in charge of entertainment again. I invited Zara McDonald of Felidae to be our speaker because Mt. Lions are on everyone’s mind and Tom Rusert (who invited us to speak in Sonoma) said she was the best presenter he had ever heard. Come get the straight scoop on the lion that was recently shot in Redwood city and what to do if you encounter one of your very own. Worth A Dam will be there painting watercolor beavers with children, teaching about the gift beavers give to our tired earth every day, explaining humane solutions, and answering questions about the dam washouts and the family.

Two important authors will signing their books that day, Scot Miller, who just photographed an anniversary edition of My First Summer in the Sierras and, Garrett Burke, the designer of the California Quarter. I’ll be having dinner with them the night before to welcome them to Martinez and make sure they care about beavers. I might just have to drop a canadian nickel casually on the table, just to seed future designs…

Im told there will be mascots in Puma costumes. No one dressed as a beaver. Probably. You never know.