Our friends Mary and Sherry at the newly-formed Sierra Wildlife Coalition have developed such a taste for saving beavers they installed their first-ever flow device in Truckee while there was still snow on the ground. This is the group who received our first -ever beaver management scholarship, and it looks like we couldn’t have chosen a better recipient! I received these last night:

Here, finally are a few photos from our flow device installation last Monday – and yes, the white dots are snow… It went very smoothly, thanks to all the good info from Mike. Ted’s in the green hat, Patrick (who arranged this with his wife Elaine) is in the yellow, and Bill, Forester for the subdivision, has the red hat. Bill is ready to install more, as needed! Tahoe Donner is the largest residential subdivision in California, and they have 2 creeks with active beavers.

Mary and Sherry went from casual involvement to full-bore beaver saving with a road trip to Oregon for the conference! They sand-painted trees in the snow and made tails with children on earthday. They swooped a community along with them and this is the result in a neighboring town. I honestly couldn’t be more pleased or proud, and reading the remark from the subdivision forester that he’s ready to install more may very well be the best news I read all month.

All this was possible because of the clear guidance from the installation DVD produced by Mike Callahan under a grant from the Animal Welfare Institute. I think this kind of beaver heroism is exactly what they had in mind!

I’m hoping the success of this installation leads to a domino of flow devices all across the sierras. Oh and I’m hoping that someone from Fish & Game owns one of the subdivisions and notices how WELL this worked!