Wow. Yesterday was a dazzling blur, and I’m still trying to feel my way through it. We woke up early to pick Michael Pollock up at the train station, then drove to the meeting at Occidental where we found a room full of 20+ folks I had been emailing for the past year from various government and environmental agencies all ready to work hard, talk about beavers and change the way folks saw the role of beavers in watershed.
Some of them I knew, like Brock, Rick, Lisa and our Tahoe friends, but some were a delightful introduction to someone I had swapped email with but never met. It was a positive, knowledgeable, cheerful, pragmatic and very intriguing group. Michael found out at the last minute that he lost travel funding so Worth A Dam made the decision to pay for him to come down. I figured that having him there would really make a difference and was worth the train ticket. Brock and Rick are kicking in too.
The meeting was well facilitated by the OAEC’s director Dave Henson, and started with introductions and background. Then Rick and I reviewed the historical distribution paper and talked about where beaver belonged. Pollock made the excellent point that he couldn’t think of another instance where government agencies were relying so heavily on a 70 year old paper, and we all talked about how to change the mindset of today.
Then he presented his data from the current work which is looking particularly at beavers and steelhead, having pretty handily answered any Coho questions. After which we were treated to a delicious lunch, mostly grown on site, and a tour of the gardens. I chatted with our Tahoe friends about their upcoming grant project to get funding for school presentations and their 501.3(c) application.
After lunch we talked about obstacles and made schemes for the work that needs to be done to get a beaver management plan at CDFG that recognized beaver’s incredible assets, acknowledged the damage done to habitat and wetlands by their removal, and required that certain steps be taken to try and solve the problem humanely before trapping. Then we went around the room and discussed what we had taken from the day and what we were going to do next to advance our goals.
Somewhere in the day, Eli Asarian agreed to do the hydrology graph for our article, Lisa gave me a present of a lovely antique postcard from her grandmother, Rick gave me an adorable and entirely fitting ornament of a beaver curled up in a gift box, and Pollock gave me a series of frames containing the historic 1930 article from Popular Science about beavers on Mars – along with the most whimsically charming beaver card I believe I will ever see that he bought in Montana. Here’s the Monte Dolack painting that it’s from.
Afterwards there was dinner, conversation, and wine before a stroll under a brightly jeweled cold and clear starry sky that poured the Milky Way right onto our car.
Chuck James, the archeologist who found the remnant beaver dam all those years ago and kick started the historic paper with his efforts, followed us back to Vallejo before heading off to Redding), and we got home sleepy and dazzled from the day. After a chat by the fire and look at the giant beaver skull (which Pollock had always wanted to see) and the scrapbook of our first year’s beaver story, (which he was less eager to see but he just had to look at to ‘get’ Martinez story), we brought him back to the train station where he embarked on another 22 hour journey home.
(My lost weekend was unbelievable, but his has to be something out of Salvador Dali.)
Well 2012 might not be the “year of the beaver” but I am more hopeful than ever before that big things are moving and shifting on the beaver front. This is as good an opportunity as any to thank the literally thousand of helpers that have cared about our beavers, cared about beavers in general, or taught us valuable lessons along the way.
It is said that the journey of a 1000 miles begins with a single step but when I finally fell asleep last night it felt more like we had just taken a series of sprinting leaps.
