As we close the distance towards the Second Annual Beaver Festival there are a hundred details to secure. Things look good for three acoustic bands, and a bagpipe. I’m thinking of a children’s procession to celebrate the re-introduction of beavers to Scotland after 400 years, where our friendly clay beavers will play a starring role. Preparations are in place for a silent auction with donations from around the bay area that will include such goodies as a years supply of Peet’s coffee, art work from Frogard Butler and handmade pottery from the Civic Arts studio in Walnut Creek. We plan to offer two children’s art projects. The ceramic tile “beaver art” which will eventually be used for a tile wall, and a beaver tail bookmark which will allow children to leave something behind and take something home. Confirmed environmental displays include the National Parks, Wild Bryde Jewelry, the California Native Plant Society and the Paula Lane Action Network to save badgers to name a few! More are joining all the time.Like last year we will have t-shirts, memberships, tours and activities for all ages.

By all events you can expect a dam good time!

While I was checking out the line-up for last week’s wildlife conference, I noticed this presentation from Linda Huebner of  MSPCA.

Turns out they have a pretty impressive website where you can identify the part of your home you want to keep animals out of, and they’ll tell you some simple steps for getting the job done. It’s a nicely developed tool, but I think needs a little more pragmatism sprinkled with the kindness. For example, suggesting that a homeowner wait eight weeks for the raccoons in their attic to reach maturity before excluding them from the premises may not be a workable solution for most home owners. (I mean most beaver supporters would probably do it, but we’re hardly typical.)

Anyway, play with the website, check out what’s eating your tulip bulbs, and drop them a note about what you think of it.

There are some 5000 species of dragonflies, broadly spread around the planet. Fossilized records show a wing span of more than 2 feet! Dragonflies are hugely important as an indication of the health of a creek, and last year we noticed an encouraging expansion of them. The young are entirely water dwellers and feast on mosquito larvae (thankyou!). Adults live for only about 2 months, after they emerge from their nymph state, unfold their wings and take to the sky.

Dragon flies have better eyesight than any other insect. Their eyes are massive, and can scan both down for food and up for danger at the same time. They are predators on a mission and are excellent hunters on the aerial serengeti. An adult dragonfly can eat up to 600 insects a day. Many’s the time I’ve rescued a soggy dragonfly from the water in my canoe, and allowed his colorful body to dry out on my knee. It is in these moments that you realize what an alarmingly large BUG the dragonfly is, but I’ve been assured it can’t bite and it never has yet.

Dragonflies wings are independent of each other, which this Attenborough video shows very well. Their long legs can grasp and hold but they cannot walk. Watch a dragonfly when its resting to figure out what family it belongs to. Heavily bodied (or true dragonflies) hold them out to the sides, slender winged damsel flies fold them on their backs. Dragonflies have been studied by everyone from NASA to the Air Force who have been eager to learn how they manage speeds of 60 MPH and then come to a complete stop in mid air.

So far they’ve kept most of their secrets to themselves.

Photo: Nikolai Panteleev

Yesterday’s “welcome to canada” footage was shot by Nikolai Panteleev while driving in Quebec on Christmas Day.The poor little beaver had wandered out to traffic and was having a hard time getting back across the lanes of impatient drivers eager to get to aunt josephine’s for the holiday brunch. Nikolai pulled over and got out of his car with camera in hand. He tried to shoo the fellow across the lanes and got bit for his effort. Undaunted he returned with a snow brush and pushed him along while traffic eventually stopped to let the strange procession by.

Photo: Nikolai Panteleev

A heroic deed by beaver standards, and one that I am very grateful for.

The beaver escaped into the nearby woods and an annoying SUV that had tried to pass on the right shoulder spun out on the ice and crashed while the beaver romped away towards freedom. Sometimes Karma is kind. Nikolai was soon contacted by the Discovery Channel who wanted to purchase his footage. The video you saw yesterday was made by another filmmaker using the footage as well.The local papers (english and russian) ran stories of the event and it was a Christmas to remember.

Photo: Nikolai Panteleev

Nikolai, who by my reckoning is fluent in at least 4 languages, wrote the following account for the Discovery Channel:

HIGHWAY BEAVERY: Incident: A beaver is wandering down
the Transcanada Hwy as traffic whizzes by. Nikolai stops his car
to help the beaver out of danger. The beaver makes it across the
road. A SUV tries to pass on the icy shoulder but spins out into
a snow bank. The beaver walks away safely towards the woods.

He enjoyed visiting the website and seeing our beaver videos in which the beavers are refreshingly not in dangerous traffic. He wrote enthusiastically;

From my part, I enormously enjoyed your lovely Beaver Tango clip, made it my favorite and shared with my friends. If the mood gets lower, I would watch it for another couple of times, and then feel myself much better. I enjoyed viewing the website you mentioned and, yes, of course, I would like to contribute in different ways.

Gosh Nikolai, you already have!

Once I talked to a good friend who had just taken her three year old to see 101 dalmations. Knowing how frightening Disney movies could be for the very young I asked how her daughter had handled the scary parts. She incredibly thought her daughter had not been frightened at all, and pointed out that during the dramatic scenes Emily could be heard saying to herself over and over “Dalmations get home safe. Dalmations get home safe.” The child psychologist in me had a very different understanding of her daughter’s experience, but the primitive tribal woman in me loved the magical “spell casting” part of this incantation. To this day I have been known to repeat it when my luggage is lost, my car won’t start, or when things get otherwise out of hand.

I preface this video with the story in order to tell you “dalmations get home safe” so that you too can be comforted. Whatever fate befell this little beaver, he did not die crossing the snowy highway.

I confess this video made me very anxious, and for such an enduring period of time I couldn’t post it until I had written the author and got an answer back. More on that tomorrow in Part 2 of our exciting christmas beaver story. Still, I can’t deny that it made me giggle more than once, so I thought I’d share. In fact, it has now become the thing you say to people when you are trapped in the middle of an  inescapable event that is enormously dangerous but impossible to discuss. For example, a visit with your accountant, oncologist or city manager. I highly recommend you try it!

Beyond the obvious social value, it does serve as a fairly irrefutable proof that beavers disperse over land. In this case over four lanes of traffic.

So my parents tell me that they were having lunch in Calistoga and my father was wearing last years Worth A Dam t-shirt when a woman stopped him and said, “Hey, I have one just like that!” They chatted for a while and my dad reminded her not to miss the festival this year (although he couldn’t remember the date). “Never mind,” she assured him. “I’ll look it up on the website”.  Unable to resist the parent impulse he explained he was “Heidi’s father” and the woman nodded politely and asked, “Who’s Heidi?”

Ahhhh this is a lovely and affirming story on so many levels. It shows how beaver people can recognize each other, even in far away places. It shows how the website exists in the minds of people who might not regularly check it, but know it’s there if they ever have a question. Best of all it shows how the beavers’ safety does not rest on the shoulders of a single person or even a single organization, but rather on the backs of the many who carry their story with them. 

zeitgeist

I want one!

Wednesday’s city council meeting was almost of beaver vintage. It was SRO packed full of teachers and parents and city workers. A sea of orange caution t-shirts lined the first three rows of chairs and sat there ungraciously while old ladies stood at the back. In silent pauses you could hear the sound of children playing on the porch while they waited for their parents. Patient-looking women with classroom poise passed around tupperwear containers of chocolate chip cookies.

At that first body count everyone should have known how the meeting would end. A room beyond full of people willing to share cookies is a dangerous thing. The city should have just unfolded its hands and wrote out the check right then. Superindentent Rami Muth (who inherited woes she could not have possibly imagined) stood up and gave an impassioned, level, persuasive speech for the city to unclench its purse strings and help MUSD maintain the important 20-1 teacher ratio for K-3. She spoke so well the room was silent when she left the podium. A few of us clapped like it mattered and the room burst into applause.

The first speaker was an 11 year-old boy whose mom had gotten a pink slip. He bravely took the podium and started to say how important that school had been to him. He promptly burst into tears as only an 11 year old boy can. His mom came to stand with him. He finished his comments through sobs and then took his seat.

Game. Set. Match. At that moment the city should have just handed its atm card to the crowd and said, is this enough? The meeting was over, the brittle back of “withold” had been fractured by the gentle persuasion of “give”. I knew how it was going to end. (To be honest, I may have cynically wondered how that boy felt about beavers because he would be a powerful weapon if carefully used….) Still the city insisted on protocol and the meeting wore on.

I will say our City Manager, from the very get-go, seemed to know which way the wind was blowing. Before the meeting there was a deal in the works for the school to pay back a loan through turning part of one of their playgrounds into the Corp Yard for the city, (ostensibly so the then-vacated area next to the beavers could be used to make another 4 story senior center). The City Manager began by saying that the idea wasn’t possible, because of hazardous materials, etc, and looked at the council as if he had told them this before. It reminded me of the story I heard about his hiring. When asked about handling the beaver issue in Martinez he had apparently shaken his head and said knowingly, “You are never getting rid of those beavers. Better just face it”.

So how many nails is that in the city’s coffin (coffers?) SRO, cookies, crying and City Manager. There were more. The biggest came from the city workers union representative. The orange shirts were there because they objected to the city refusing to open its reserves to pay them, but agreeing to do so for the school district. They felt that the city giving up this money meant further cutting down the road. It reminded me again of the beaver subcommittee when one night their actions of allegedly ripping out the dam was up for discussion. News of the damage had hit the papers and the director was very upset about it.  That night a similar sea of orange lined the back row to show solidarity.

On Wednesday they were a wave that couldn’t read which way the tide was turning. Instead of earning brownie points by gallantly standing up to offer their chairs to little old ladies in the back, (which would have allowed them to stand on strapping young lad display at the wall), they hunched their shoulders and ignored the entire room. Their representative got up and described how he had graduated from larger classrooms and turned out fine. With ear-splitting tone deafness he suggested that parents needed to volunteer in the classroom. (You could literally see the hair stand up on the backs of all the parents and teachers necks.) He pointed out helpfully that grades k-3 were not that important and its not like they were teaching the kids Calculus. I wanted to say sit down!  Stop helping these men! Someone hand that man a cookie so his mouth is full. You are doing your union no favors.

One of our more colorful regulars called it like it was when he got up to accuse the city of playing both ends against the middle. “These guys work hard, they deserve to be compensated.” He argued. “And these teachers have important jobs and they deserve to be protected.” His accusation was hard to question, “You guys do this all the time. You make different sides fight each other. The truth is you can do this all, and you should.”

Even the obligatory public comment that questioned why a city could spent 300,000 on BEAVERS (goodness our beavers are greedy) and not on its children, wasn’t too upsetting. It, like everything, was fairly well articulated and impassioned. The Virginia Hills dismissive man who suggested that the city money should not go to the district where only half of Martinez residents are enrolled was countered by the mayor’s own admission that for years the city has paid for crossing guards in that district and never for MUSD.

It reminded me most of the beaver meeting because the community tipping point had been reached. What I mean by that is that there are regulars at city meetings, like the colorful speaker, and the city is used to lying in front of them. Then there are semi-regulars at some city meetings, of which I have unwillingly become one, and the city would prefer not to lie very much in front of them, (although they will if sheetpile is involved). And then there are those rare meetings full of people who have never been to a meeting before, who believe in their trusting hearts that the council represents their interests. The city HATES to be caught lying in front of them. And when they show up, the outcome is always predictable.

I’m reminded of Abraham Lincoln…

You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

The vote was 4-1 to award the school the loan. Chocolate chip cookies all around!

Yesterday morning was a super high tide and the water level rose past the secondary dams and easily over the first. It gushed through the muskrat passage at the main dam and filled up the lodge pond with a healthy amount of water that was lovely to see. A huge log floated or was dragged downstream into the creek and dad could be seen bringing willow branches into the old lodge, where one can only assume our elusive kits are still hiding out.

Last night Cheryl thought that passage had been officially plugged, even the muskrats had to walk around the hard way. The tunnel area was obviously a mixed blessing and they weren’t sure they wanted to give it up. It was a useful way to sneak by pesky photographers, and a handy cove for sitting and munching without prying eyes. Still, it drained away their precious water and I think they were getting the idea that water is not going to be replaced any time soon. A true approach-approach beaver conflict where the scales were finally tipped.

Hmmm…I wonder what will happen next?

So the other day I visited the nearby animal park, Safari West, in Santa Rosa. I had heard about it first from a cheerful beaver visitor who said they had spent the day there and weren’t ready to stop watching wild things so visited the beavers on their way back to their home in San Francisco. I was not disappointed. The park is animal and people-friendly, and has a glorious wild feeling, like you could go exploring for days. All the guides were knowledgeable not only about individual species, but about unique quirks about individual animals. They were easily able to answer and encourage questions. There is an amazing aviary where exotic birds were nesting and feeding their young. But the most exciting part is the trek in an old Korean War vehicle out into this fabulous mountainous terrain covered in amazing blue oak and surrounded with zebra, gazell and gunu.

After my exciting trip I thought I’d drop the owners/directors Nancy & Peter Lang, a note to mention the Martinez Beavers and the way they have helped children in the Bay Area learn about local nature.  They are deeply committed to conservation and involved in research and education. It is the kind of informal, pushy, self- introduction that I do fairly often for Worth A Dam. Usually nothing comes of it, but one never knows. So I thought I’d try.

To my delight I got a call monday from the coordinator of the “Animal Encounters” program of Safari West. This program allows up close comercial events and donates 10% of its earnings to non profits involved with teaching children about the natural world. After we talked enthusiastically about the beavers in our creek and their influence on the habitat (and the people) we confirmed that Worth A Dam would be one of those lucky non-profits. I may be asked to come present on beavers for the staff, I’ll definitely keep you posted.