So I’ve been scrambling about this weekend to get ready for my presentation tonight at Close to Home. There’s aren’t many beaver-speaking events I get nervous about. The Flyway Festival…the April council meeting….and this. It’s partly because it’s a paid event. Worth A Dam gets a 100 dollar donation for the talk. It’s partly because these are smart compassionate people who are for the most part well educated and ecologically minded.They’ll know what I’m talking about, both the advocacy and bureaucracy.  If there is a “choir”, tonight I’m preaching to it. And I don’t know about your church, but when I gathered to sing in choir the priests act terrified around us.

This arrived today on my google alerts for “Martinez Beavers”. No pressure.

It’s also because I plan tonight to tell the full story of the sheetpile saga, and I haven’t really done that before. Mostly because the layers of lies are so convoluted and tangled trying to tell it leaves listeners glassy eyed and confused. Even my very kindest documentarian said to me gently, when I tried to explain on camera, “No. Just try to make it simple, okay?” I WISH. But tonight I’ll try, and I’m very interested in how I’ll do.

I’ll repeat the invitation to come. I would love some familiar faces in the audience. Hopefully they’ll be some heartily persuaded friends there as well. I’m fantasizing about a wordpress technician, an environmental lawyer, and a regional head of Fish & Game, who hear the presentation and just can’t wait to help. Dream big, I say.

I’ve been fiddling for a while with a list of things the beavers have taught me and trying to turn it into something helpful to present at my talk at Close to Home in June. Mind you, this isn’t Letterman’s top ten list, but I’m pretty happy with it. Let me know if you think I missed anything.

1. Pick a subject that you love. Because you’re going to be stuck with it for a while.

2. Bring a camera. It helps if you can show people what you care about.

3. Offer solutions, approach the problems realistically. Find out whose famous for solving that problem and email them for help. It’s surprising how many well-known people return an email and how few will return phone calls.

4. Media. Don’t expect them to know about natural concepts like predators or tides or habitat or gravity. Provide photos, they like cute animals. Provide pithy quotes, they like easy copy. Provide video that is worth stealing and don’t expect credit.

5. When you say something don’t expect to be able to take it back. You have to get it right the first time. There is no time for context or mitigating circumstances. Short understandable sentences that are easy to relate to are best. Be prepared for the media to give the ’powers that be’ lots and lots more chances than they give you. Understand that they will probably never call them on obvious lies.

6. Identify your ultimate goal and be willing to make temporary alliances with anyone that moves you towards it. I mean anyone.

7. Remember that ultimate goal in your heart and be willing to sever or interrupt ties with anyone that threatens it. I mean anyone.

8. It’s not about you. Officials won’t do the right thing because they like you and for the most part they won’t do the wrong thing because they hate you. Mostly they have their own goals, alliances and Faustian contracts. You don’t matter at all. Keep that in mind.

9. Bring children. Children’s Art. Children’s Education. Images of children with the animal you are trying to save. Mothers with Children! Repeat as necessary.

10. Realize that the powers that be are counting on the fact that by the time you truly learn and understand steps 1-9, you’ll be so exhausted and demoralized that you won’t have the energy or inclination to do this again for some other species. Save something for the ride home and prove them wrong.

LA-17, a female Loggerhead, has just arrived at Audubon Aquatic Center, a facility of Audubon Nature Institute.Pictured from left to right Amanda Adkins, Jamie Mullins and Melissa Tomingas. photo credit Meghan Calhoun

Okay I’ve been biding my time to tell hard core beaver fans about the VERY EXCITING DEVELOPMENT this weekend in identifying the historic range of beavers in California. This is a rarefied topic I know, not of obvious interest to everyone, but it matters because beavers all over are routinely killed with the justification “well they’re not native anyway”.(See Kings Beach). A very important historic paper by Tappe has been quoted by every possible source saying that beavers weren’t native over 1000 feet. We want to verify whether this is true.

Imagine how excited I was to meet Barry Hill this weekend at the Flyway Festival. He’s a regional hydrologist for the USDA working out of Vallejo. One of his jobs is to verify the activity of historical beavers so that meadow restoration can be justified by the US forestry service. (Meadows are linked to the soil deposits of old beaver dams.)

So in his research he came across an archeologist who was doing some digging near Feather River, Northern California, 4500 feet elevation. He now works with the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Oregon. Well his excavations included an old beaver dam which he had the foresight to have carbon-dated. Are you sitting down?

It was 750 years old.

The archeologist was interested in writing a paper on this find, but wanted a co-author. I said I’d be happy to introduce him to several, and Barry wrote me monday that we can organize a conference call on this topic for March.

Flyway Festival > Birds > USDA > Soil > Archeology > Beaver Dams > Worth A Dam.

How’s that for connections!

So I sent Cheryl’s lovely photo to Lisa Ownes Viani yesterday and she sent it around to her fish buddies, Bruce Herbold, Ph.D. and Robert Leidy. Ph.D. of the EPA. They got out their detective skills and set about counting fins.

well, Rob Leidy and I both think that it is probably a tule perch.  We both also first thought that it was probably some sunfish, but magnification clearly shows the line of scales along the dorsal fin that make it an Embiotocid rather than a Centrarchid and the absence of barring on teh body and the fact that it is in or near fresh water would make it most likely the tule perch Hysterocarpus traskii.

Bruce went onto say that a tule perch was his favorite because of its unique reproduction. Mom bears all the young live! That sounded pretty wild to me, but after learning that our snipe engage in joint custody arrangements, anything was possible. The UCB California Fish Website had this to say about tule motherhood:

Young perch then begin to develop within her, slowly at first, and more rapidly in the final two months. In around May or June the female bears 10-60 live fish. The number of young produced increases with body size and may vary from one environment to another.

It also pointed out that these perch require “cool well-oxgenated water”, a description that many beaver-phobic biologists have warned would never happen because of the beaver dams. But my favorite message came from Robert Leidy, who added this little tidbit:

By the way, I think this is the first record for tule perch from Alhambra Creek, as I am not aware of any historical collections or records!

The keystone beaver strikes again! Let’s just take a moment to enjoy the series of connections necessary for this to happen. Cheryl took the photo because she was out watching for the beavers. I sent the photo to Lisa because I met her through the beavers. Lisa sent the photo on to the top fish biologists in the state who worked to agree on its identification. Robert recognized it was a first sighting. And our wikipedia friend immediately recorded the find on the Alhambra Creek pages.

That’s what I call successful cooperation! And the beavers get the credit for it, which they genuinely deserve. Keep your eyes out for new species down at the dam! A team of experts is standing by….

Remember the burrowing owls that adopted the abandoned development site in Antioch? Beaver friend Scott Artis of JournOwl wrote about them on his website, and followed up with an article in the Contra Costa Times and the MDAS Audubon newsletter. The owls were threatened by the removal of fencing which had offered them protection and kept the traffic and dumping away. Scott worked hard to get the city to force the developer to replace the fencing.

He wrote yesterday that he received the mitigation/relocation report from the city. It read:

The California Dept. of Fish & Game (CDFG) has signed off on the plan and provided them with a letter to proceed with eviction.  Communication from the developer in September indicated that they will move forward with construction in Spring 2010. The report dictates that the passive relocation timeframe is Oct. 1, 2009 -Feb 1, 2010. The CDFG has not yet approved eviction for Oct. 1, 2010 to Feb 1, 2011 for any owls that show up or remain after initial relocation efforts, etc.

In short, the owls will be passively relocated through the use of one-way doors and the California ground squirrel population on the land will be fumigated.  Unfortunately, the owls will not be tracked or checked up on after their eviction.  I have provided details and excerpts from the document at http://journowl.com/index.php/archives/1063

I guess its a kind of victory that Scott was able to get anyone to pay attention to the owls at all, and passive relocation is definitely better than active destruction. But his email made me very sad. Does Fish and Game ever say anything but “yes”? Okay, kill the woodpeckers. Kill the beavers. Evict the burrowing owls. How about advising cities to work on accommodating their animal population? How many cities know of a nesting ground for 4 pairs of burrowing owls? Are there any cities that would like a greater mouse population? Why not make the owls into a feature of the housing project? You could call it the complex the “Burrows” and have an owl logo on your street signs. Children could learn about them in school and there could even be a local TV station Owl Cam. Antioch could be famous as a friend to owls, instead of only boasting a gloriously corrupt Redevelopment Agency.

Aside from the fact that the city is ignoring a precious resource it is lucky to possess in favor of the almighty dollar, it is startling that permission is so cheerfully given to evict “this species of special concern” by CDFG. As Scott said, clearly the owls are a “species of not so much special concern”. No effort will be made to track them to make sure they relocate into safe stable territory. The holes will be blocked with one way doors, and after two days the burrows will be collapsed. (I guess following the foreclosure model practiced heavily in Antioch where people leave their homes in uninhabitable states and strip every sell-able thing from the walls.)

After which, the ground squirrels will be fumigated. No story is complete without the dramatic death of a rodent. The fact that the squirrels are a keystone species and provide food and burrows for all manner of animals is really just a bonus.

I’m sorry for your owls, Scott. I know its sad to lose site of them, but know in your heart that getting them the attention you did was no small feat for a city that is known for the most famous harboring of a kidnapped child in history. Getting Antioch to pay attention to anything but outbuilding is a lion’s struggle. The owls were lucky to have you.

Beaver friend GTK sends the following addresses in case you want to write the Antioch mayor and council your opinion.

Yesterday I got word from ESA instructor Rona Zollinger (and long time beaver friend!) that our student helpers had finished with their “ascribing tiles” for the bridge art project. Would I like to come pick them up? Rona and her students were at the original beaver meeting in 2007, and told me once at the farmer’s market that it had been “thrilling” to attend and show her students first hand how all those people caring about something can make a difference. I was immediately fond of her after that! Since then I have really been drawn to learn about the academy and the remarkable way it teaches stewardship not just for the earth but for the humans that populate it. I did a beaver presentation to the class last year, and was definitely impressed.

What this means is that if the weather gives us a few dry days we can start installation. Take a moment to contemplate the distance crossed in spanning  this particular hurdle. First we had to convince the donors to give us money for the pens and the tiles. Then we had to encourage copius young artists at the festival and John Muir Mountain Camp, then we had to bake all 120 tiles in the oven, (which if your oven is 100 years old will only hold 12 tiles at once), then we had to find a contractor and get him to pledge to the project, then we had to beg, plead, muscle and cajole our way onto the Agenda for the Marina, Pool, Parks and Cultural Commission, then we had to present to them and sit through their 3 hour meeting, then we had to meet with the director of public works, then photgraph every tile for their inspection, and FINALLY we had to present to the city council and get final final final approval.

Whew. I’m exhausted just typing it.

Coday, Jessica, Roger and Maddy did a stellar job with their civic art. Check it out. I can’t wait until this project is lauched! Hmmm…what will we do next year?

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Before the beavers came to Martinez, in all the wide world we had only seen one. A single tail slap when we canoed up this river in Mendocino. (Mybluehouse is my non-beaver account). It was thrilling, and I wished we had seen more, but it had to suffice until beavers moved in downtown.

After our beavers moved in we felt like we were finally getting a glimpse of a treasure that always hid beneath the surface before. Given the distance between Martinez and Mendocino there must be thousands of beavers just waiting to be discovered by someone had the time and energy to locate them. As avid canoe-ers we are fairly familiar with the waterways between here and Big River. Surely we would come across more beavers now that we know what to look for?

Only yesterday I got an email from Brock Dolan talking about “reintroducing” beavers to Russian River. I wrote back with disbelief. What made him think beavers weren’t there already? In a large river beavers won’t build dams, and they would use bank lodges which are harder to spot. He very convincingly told me had explored every mile of the river and all of its forking tributaries, and knew people who lived on it, kayaked it, hiked it every day. He sent a round of emails to people who had done water studies for DFG, or for their own non profits. And everyone agreed. No beavers in Russian River. None at all.

Where are they beavers near the coast? Well we have the ones reported in Sonoma a while back. A colony in Big River in Mendocino. That’s it. That’s the known population density. Remember that Fort Ross, the Russian trading post, grew specifically out of the beaver trade.

However the founding of permanent British and American Settlements on the Pacific Coast , took place as part of the terrestial, rather than maritime,  fur trade. The westward expansion of trading outposts took place with amazing rapidity as the commercial exploitation of beaver and other valued pelts devastated faunal populations from local rivers and creeks.

Historical Archeology: Back From the Edge Martin Hall & Stephan Silliman pg 275

So beavers in every “river, brook and rill” were trapped and skinned and the fur traders were so good at their job, the remaining beaver along the pacific are few and far between.  To think that I personally have seen all the beavers from Martinez to Mendocino is a terrifying thought.

We know we have beavers in the delta. We heard from someone who had two in a creek in Danville. We know they’re in Los Gatos Creek. We know they’re in Sonoma and Sutter Creek. We know there’s a colony in Cordelia. Where are the beavers on Russian River? Willow Creek? Napa River? Gualala River? Where are the beavers in the Albion, the Noyo or Ten Mile River?

“Dead!” I answered, and amiably
“Murdered,” the Hangman corrected me.

California is “hollow” of beavers. Its center echoes with the ring of places they should be but aren’t. No wonder NOAA says that loss of beaver habitat has been the prime assault to Salmon. No wonder we complain of droughts and damage. No wonder people think beavers eat fish, or mistake them for Nutria or muskrats or otters. No wonder a city could go into two years of apoplexy by being forced to deal with this simple social mammal.

It’s a beaver wasteland out there.

So here I am, a beaver advocate, who has resisted reading the most famous beaver story of all time; Hope Ryden’s Lily Pond. Everyone said it was sad and beautiful, and I had enough sad and beautiful right here in my own backyard thank you very much. I will say my curiosity was peaked when I learned that our German beaver friend and foreign correspondent Alex, had sent her a few of my columns. I later learned that Alex had spent a summer working with her and later Sherri Tippie in Colorado. Recently a beaver supporter sat me down with an original signed copy and insisted I read a little.

I’m so glad she did!

I am slowly savoring the earliest chapters, but I had no idea it was so science-thoughtful. It’s like reading Gorilla’s in the Mist or Never Cry Wolf. As the story opens she has obtained a permit from the Ranger to study a local colony in New York. She is waiting silently for a glimpse of a beaver, patient for hours, days, longer. Then sees a large beaver she calls the “Inspector General” who comes out at the same time every night to check the dams. At first he is the only beaver than can tolerate her approach and allow her to get closer.

It’s wonderful to watch her learn things that we have learned by accident, but I was most excited by her use of night photography. She was trying to take pictures without disruption and painstakingly used red lights and strobe lights so the beavers wouldn’t be upset by the light. (!) Then an accident happened and she turned light upon them, and lo! the beavers were unphased! and she learned that beavers have no Eye Shine!

In this moment she realized what we’ve long realized. When you shine a light in a beavers eyes there is no reflection. Nocturnal animals like raccoon, bobcat, deer and possum have light gathering crystals called tapetum lucidum. They evolved this ability to help them manage life at night. Hope wondered why beavers didn’t have it? Could it be that the species is too newly adapted to night life to have evolved the trait?

She did the work I admire and went searching through historic records. Early trappers often mention beavers out during the daytime, and even “Sunning themselves on their lodges“. She writes

If these descriptions can be believed, they raise another question: what would cause a diurnal species to become a nocturnal one? Could such a change have come about as a result of the extraordinary trappping pressure exerted on the beaver over three centuries?

Hope Ryden, The Lily Pond pg 45

She goes on to convincingly describe the horrific “beaver ethic cleansing” that was perpetrated by the Dutch, the Canadians, the French, and the Native Americans in service for all of the above. The market was already hurting because the European Beaver had been trapped to extinction in the 1600’s. So it was wonderful to find a new source for pelts and castoreum. There were no restrictions at all placed on the number of beaver. At the end of the 18th century there were so many beaver pelts on the market that 75% of the pelts taken were burned to hold the price of fur at a profitable margin. In fact, in  1811 John Jacob Astor’s fur trading post had taken all the beaver from Oregon and systematically removed every them from every last tributary in the Columbia River. By the time of the invention of the steel-jawed leg hold trap in the 1840’s, there weren’t many beaver left to trap.

In 1895, fourteen states announced they had no beavers at all. Not one. These included Massachusetts (where Beaver Solutions is located) Vermont (where Skip Lisle is located!), New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, delaware, Maryland, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, and Florida.

One can speculate that the few animals that escaped this continent-wide decimation must have been the wariest of their kind, deviants, disinclined to build conspicuous lodges. And inded, the late ninteeth-century reports of sightings describe the beaver as a reclusive bank-dweller. One can also speculate that these survivors escaped the notice of trappers by turning night into day, for by the end of the last century, no further mention is made of beavers “sunning themselves on their lodges”.

Hope Ryden: The Lily Pond pg 48

Okay, I know I’m a huge beaver nerd, but that’s FASCINATING. It makes so much sense to think of bank lodges as an adaption to hunting, and beavers  being nocturnal out of necessity and not out of genetics. The book was written in 1989 and I haven’t yet heard what beaver-ologists like Muller-Swarze or Baker think about it, but you can be I’ll be asking them.

In the meantime, you can pick up your own used copy of Lily Pond from Amazon, and follow along at home. I am sure I’ll have more revelations soon.

I excitedly opened my July issue of Mt Diablo Audubon Society Newsletter: The Quail to check on whether the beaver article I had written had been included. I wanted to spend the morning talking about the delightful connections I had made with audubon since speaking there, but I found that the same issue is plastered with horrific woodpecker headlines that I simply can’t avoid discussing this morning. The beaver story is a bright spot on a very dark horizon, and one that deserves our attention.

When we last visited the story I had told you that the mutuals in question had seen the end of days on their 50 bird-killing permit, and had decided to seek an additional permit, this one from the Department of Agriculture. This allowed the “trapping for scientific research” of 20 additional birds. I had thought this meant they would just be quietly killed off sight, but I had not truly considered the terrifying options in depth.

Audubon pursued the issue with USDA and received back two responses weighed down by their own great respect for their own very high ethical standards. One was from the US Department of Agriculture National Wildlife Services Research Center (NWRC). The other was from the Washington DC and the head of the Ornothological Council who wanted to further defend the very respectable credentials of NWRC scientists. Apparently the very highest ethical standards were applied to the pointless but ethical capture, ethical interstate transport, ethical detention and ethical interference of our acorn woodpeckers. After which time they will be ethically euthanized, or, if they’re lucky, spared to participate in other highly ethical experiments for years to come.

NWRC scientists, with the help of WS Operations field specialists, live-captured 20 acorn woodpeckers from the Rossmoor community in late May. Capture was delayed until after documented egg laying dates by acorn woodpeckers in this region. Care was also taken to not remove birds observed feeding young or sitting on eggs. The birds arrived at the NWRC in Fort Collins, Colorado, on May 27.