Oh you pesky “worth a dam” tree and beaver-huggers. You don’t understand that planting trees in our creek can slow the water down and cause significant flooding problems. Sure roots hold the soil, but trees get in the way, so you can’t plant any near the water, or near the channel. There are important safety issues at stake here, and these larger concerns matter more than your silly beavers.

HYDRAULIC CHARACTERISTICS OF CALIFORNIA NATIVE RIPARIAN PLANT SPECIES (SANDBAR WILLOWS) UNDER FLOOD CONDITIONS IN A FLUME¹

• “The willows decreased velocity at the bottom and increased it at the top of the flow profile.”

• “The willows decreased bottom erosion.”

Please look closely at the following graph from L.K Kavvas at UC Davis. The left axis indicates erosion, and you can see that the bare creek produced much much higher erosion, which means more landloss and greater silt in the water. The right axis indicates velocity, or the speed at which the water moved through the flume. The willow creek not only had less erosion, it had demonstrably faster water, and moved more water through at a quicker rate, leaving less water backed up to hang around and cause flooding.

Too bad the city moved all those trees last year.

¹Riparian Habitat Joint Venture: Dec 2007 Section 2 Page 40

M.L. KAVVAS, Z.Q. CHEN,
H. BANDEH, M. CAYAR, N. OHARA,
D. COCHERELL, JOSEPH CECH, JR.
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS
STEPHAN LORENZATO, TED FRINK
DEPARTMENT OF WATER RESOURCES
JOHN CARLON AND TOM GRIGGS

The remarkable beaver-guardians of Worth A Dam gathered last night to finesse plans for Earth day and our tree planting project. Our intrepid potential eagle scout was there boldly getting ready to go before the council to offer our tree-installation plans. It was a lively meeting, but one of my favorite parts was our brainstorming session about the art project we might offer at earthday.

Artist and teacher Frogard Butler has been helping us with these activities since she generously volunteered to paint a portrait of one of my beaver photographs and gave it to me in support. We decided that since clay was such a huge hit at the beaver festival, we would try it again, inviting children to help us build a diorama representation of the beaver habitat in miniature. Jon volunteered to make the landscape/box that could get us started, and of course we’ll be putting dams and lodges and tiny peices of sheetpile.

I can’t wait.

Beaver people are good people. We signed our 2009 executive agreement, with two additions who will become official worth a dam-ers. Lory will record donations, and Linda will track down research questions. Hard to believe only a year has passed since Worth A Dam was formed. In that time we’ve given presentations to the Elementary and High schools, Audubon, Sierra Club,and all of downtown Martinez. We’ve held a festival, applied for a grant, and expanded our web page. We even found time to work over 20 farmer’s markets and take the city to court. During our first year we raised more than 7,000 in donations.

Not bad for 365 days work.

Maybe all this talk of our accomplishments has inspired you to offer your own. We’re looking for a new tee shirt design for 2009 and would love to encourage you to fiddle with the concept. We want our name and web site address on it, but other than this we are open to suggestions. Why not try your hand at graphic beaver design and give us a couple ideas. If we love your design will make it into 100 shirts this year, and we’ll give you yours for free!

When the lights went out last night, we trekked down to the dam for some some truly fine beaver watching. It started with the unmistakable appearance of mom, who came and sat near us to give the necessary view of her tail. Then all three kits and later the lumbering figure of dad, coming down the creek with a huge branch and pulling it out onto the dam so we could verify that he was indeed an adult, with an unblemished tail.

It was very cheering.

Photo: Cheryl Reynolds

Another couple saw the light and came down to join us. We didn’t recognize them but they had been to both beaver meetings and knew the story. The man recalled that they had used to see a beaver colony regularly in Plumas County, to which I remarked this was where these beavers were supposed to be relocated. Turns out the woman had been the one to mention our potentially homeless beavers to Beverly Ogle of the Mountain Maidu tribe of Greenville Rancheria. Trappers and US Forestry took all their beavers, and they would have been grateful for ours.

Well, I’m grateful for ours too, but its nice to know how that link got established. I had always wondered how plumas county knew about them, and thought maybe city staff shopped around, but what are the odds of them handling anything so delicately? I just scanned through the Novemeber 7th video to find them, but could not. What I did see that I never did before is that Don Bernier, the documentary guy who got interested in our beavers, was there that night adjusting the microphone. I knew he he’d attended, but didn’t know he was recording it. Good. Honestly that meeting was so inspiring, it really needs to be on the big screen someday.

Four more interested watchers were drawn by the light and came to appreciate beavers in grand display. One man thought they had left becuase “he hadn’t heard anything about them on the news in a while”.  (!) They all had things to say about the unattractive and unnecessary sheetpile, and were all very enthusiatic about the animals they were watching. With a crowd of beaver supporters, and some active healthy beavers, it was a very familiar and warm scene.

We came home in beaver-high spirits.

To turn your lights off tonight for Earth Hour. From Sydney Harbor to the Pyramids, lights will dim from 8:30 to 9:30 pm (local time) to show support for responsibly addressing Climate Change. I was a little worried about the implications of powering down until I read the website and saw that you were invited to still use your computer to upload videos on your dramatic hour.

That’s a sacrifice I can survive.

What else are you going to do at night between 8:30 and 9:30 without lights? You better bring your flashlight and come down to the beaver dam. I hear they are going without lights too.

Every now and then you run into the story of some patient farmer who doesn’t want to kill his beavers and spends his free hours scraping away the problems they cause. Maybe they have small children on the farm, or were involved in a wildlife hand-rearing project somewhere in their lives, or they just admire anything that works harder than them. Whatever the reason, its a lovely thing to stumble upon, especially when so many beaver stories end badly.

Meet Kristen Iden of South Carolina:

Our farm is blessed with a LOT of water. We have water on three sides of the property, and are basically a penisula into a small lake. We have a medium sized stream that runs around the back and curls around one side, a black water pond which spills into the “big water”. Perfect habitat for water loving creatures: herons, turtles, otters, egrets (Egrets? - I’ve had a few!) snakes, and the hero of this blog, at least one beaver.

Most local animal control and even state wildlife people consider beavers nuisances. In South Carolina, the preferred method of getting rid of a nuisance beaver is to kill it in a drown trap. Obviously, for an animal lovers like me and Joe, that is not an option. The beaver is just doing his job of making his home liveable. I met an orphan baby beaver, a kit, once. He was just as adorable and cute as any puppy or kitten and just as well behaved.

Ahhh Kristen, we are very very fond of you and your patience with beavers. Remember that it was North Carolina where stimulus money was going to blow up their dams and kill them. Reading your careful response makes me rethink the whole frustration.

As my brother and father know who have helped unblock and clean up after him, we have a very busy beaver(s). Unless the temperature dips below 30, or the water is flooding over our spillway, we wake up 5 days out of 7 with Mr. Beaver blocking our spillway overnight. So every day, Joe (or more normally me) goes down and fishes out all the crap he has piled in there the night before. I am utterly amazed at the size of some of the logs (think small telephone poles) that end up blocking our spillway, and the engineering that goes into the construction of his (or her) dam.

Goodness gracious, your brother and father help unblock the spillway? Are there more like you at home? I mean MANY more? Here’s my favorite part:

So low and behold, I was just cursing the beaver again when I caught a show on Animal Planet called “Leave it to the Real Beavers”. It introduced me to the Beaver Deceiver, a way to keep beavers from damming culverts using cedar posts and fencing. (See the Beaver Deceiver here: http://www.beaversww.org/solutions.html). So now my problem is to adapt the deceiver to a spillway, not a culvert.

The program features Skip, some lovely beaver photography, and a pesky waitress in Canada who forced her city to do the right thing by organizing public response. Its a great tale, and we showed the video at our First Night event. She goes on to say she wrote Fish and Wildlife for more information (ahhh you poor innocent soul. I don’t know about South Carolina but here Fish & Game would just shake their heads and say ignorantly, “those things never work”.) So I sent her blog to Skip and asked him to get in touch with her.

Beaver Kindness should always be rewarded.

Beaver Supporter and all around remarkable human,  Kelly Davidson Chou, of Mt. View Sanitation, has spaces open in her Saturday workshop on Bay Friendly Gardening. Kelly is an environmental education specialist, and volunteered to take on the pesky job of organizing our ephemeral ideas to meet the demands of the FWC grant application for interpretive signs at the dam. She worked at the festival and helps us keep an eye out for non Alhambra Creek beavers.

You can add your name to the list today, call her at 228-5635 x 19, or even just show up by 9:15 tomorrow.

Saturday, March 28, 9:30 am - 12:30 pm
Considering form and function before planting can save you time and
resources. This workshop provides an overview of design & maintenance
practices that will help you make smart choices at the nursery.

Help your garden. Help your pocket book. And help a friend of the beavers. Sounds like smart thinking to me.

In other environmental news Beaver supporter LK writes excitedly that she caught a glimpse of migrating butterflies

Did you see them? There is a butterfly migration happening!!  dunno what kind…noticed them yesterday and again today flying to the north over highway 4.  they seem so fragile to be making such a trip!

I don’t know what kind either, but that’s very exciting. I forwarded her email to Gary Bogue and hopefully will have some answers for you soon. In the mean time, don’t forget to look up.

Gary is probably still proudly enjoying his seven “It a gosling” cigars from this week’s hatching and launch from the roof at the Contra Costa Times.

Apparently the entire sage created quite the buzz. The leap off the roof produced such alarming video he took it off his website, even though it came with warnings and the preface that “all the goslings made it safe”.  I would advise the kinder, gentler photo essay rather than the video, or at least turn your sound wayyyyy down.

Anyway, mom and babies are doing fine apparently. And the friends of Walnut Creek are keeping a careful eye out. Thanks Gary! He will be the host of the Muir Earthday-Birthday this year, so you should really come by to thank him for all the good work he does.

Finally, my friend DS from Santa Cruz sends this story about a pair of golden eagles returning to the campus. It s very reaffirming to think about all the ways that nature reasserts herself in our little lives. Somewhere right now, nests are being built in unused bicycle helmets, strawberry pots, and the shovel of an old bulldozer. Compassionate, frusterated and wildly busy humans seem to just stop and let them have their space. They sometimes need a little nudge to do the right thing, but it is lovely to watch hearts soften. While nature renews itself, we humans have our own rebirth.

Maybe the first robin of spring was never truly worth reporting, but the first human awareness of a robin in spring is a story that never gets old.

Last night I was treated to dinner and conversation by the retired board of “ANTS”, which stands for Audubon Nature Training Society. It was organized by Ellis Myers, who is the editor of Mt. Diablo Audubo Quail Newsletter. He had heard my Audubon presentation and wanted to follow up with something more up close and personal. The eight avian experts at the table packed a considerable environmental weight, one of them a retired photographer who was recently featured on PBS. While my host sipped milk, I drank a nicely blended margarita and talked beavers. One couple lived at Rossmoor and had lots to say about the woodpecker controversy and its parallels to our beaver-madness. There were a host of questions both about the animal activities and the human response they elicited. I brought the mighty scrapbook which held their attention and discussed the emerging science behind the relationship between birds and beavers.

My host thought that was a great topic for the Quail newsletter and I said I would be delighted to write it, so look for me in the finely designed pages some time to come. MDAS will have a fellow booth at the Muir Earth Day, which always has delightful nest displays as well. We talked about wood duck boxes and their likely location, and I reminded them that our photographer Cheryl Reynolds had some lovely bird images of the dam site. Ellis thought he might want to connect with her since he “has almost run through all his own” for the publication.

After dinner we bundled up and walked down to the dam site. I explained sadly that it was too early for beavers but showed them the lay of the land and explained how they use their habitat. I was reminded for the millionth time that talking to people who care about the earth’s creatures is much much better than attending a subcommittee meeting. Beaver regular LB by chance met us at the site and quickly adapted to help out explaining things and keeping folks on the path. Worth A Dam was asked for more t-shirts and praised for our very hard work at protecting these beavers and raising awareness of the environment in general.

For the first year of this ‘campaign’ nearly every conversation I had about beavers was a fight. I was struggling to deliver data that would persuade unbelieving beaver foes that this was worth doing, and it was like pushing a grand piano through a transom. Yet since April nearly every conversation I’ve had about beavers has been an inspiration, a revelation, or just a delight, like rolling a snowball downhill in freshly fallen powder. It always becomes something newer and larger by the time it reaches the bottom. Maybe I’ve earned the right to talk to audiences who can appreciate the beavers, and appreciate Worth A Dam in general. Last night I was reminded about how I called the Sierra Club, and Audubon in a panic back when the city said the beavers were going to be killed. I got very little response at the time, because no one could see how the fate of two beavers had much to do with their concerns and focus.

We can safely say that now they get the connection.

Photo: Cheryl Reynolds

Click to enlarge:

Brought to you by our friends at Beavers: Wildlife and Wetlands!

“A society will be great when old men plant trees whose shade they will never sit under”

Obviously the unwritten corollary of this proverb is that a city will be respected when they plant willow for their beavers to eat. Worth A Dam has been hard at work to push the slow-moving boulder of progress in this matter, so that we can use our generous donations for a second planting project. Surely you remember lasts years’ feel-good/feel-bad adventure, where responsibly donated labor and hard working beaver friends put 30 trees in the ground. There’s footage in the sidebar, that sadly lost its original “I’d like to teach the world to Sing” soundtrack when WMG decided to fight with You Tube. Meanwhile these finely installed trees  were obviously so deeply planted their roots reached all the way to the underworld and awakened the cloven-hoofed property owner who demanded that they be moved out of the channel to “prevent flooding”.

Ahh those were the days.

This time the city engineer is taking no chances and asked us to begin with a biologist report on the habitat to see whether or not there is actually a good reason to plant the trees in the first place. Apparently declining songbird habitat, increasing water temperature, and decreasing fish population just isn’t compelling enough on its own. One might argue that It seemed almost like the kind of hoop designed to discourage jumping, but we were up to the challenge. I started writing our ecological contacts, and was told by our friends at the Urban Creeks Council that we had a perfect environmental consulting firm here in town!

Of course I put on my sunday come’a courting email and introduced myself to Condor Country Consulting to explain our predicament. I heard back from the Principal biologist and President Wendy Dexter that she could probably offer some pro bono assistance, but maybe not until after May. She gave me some other names, one of which I recognized as the gentleman who is helping us with the Interpretive Signs Grant (if we get it). We talked a little more and she volunteered that her four year old daughter loved the beavers. I immediately confessed that the affections of children were the secret weapon of Worth A Dam and I hoped she could find a way to help us take care of our beavers and our creek.

Can I get an Amen? Yesterday she assigned biologist Felix Ratcliff to work on this issue and he contacted me to arrange a survey visit.

So that’s part one of the tree operation. Part II is the Eagle Scout Project for a local beaver fan who contacted us to be involved with the planting and tree maintenance. He came to our Sierra Club talk in Antioch to catch up and then met last week with the City Engineer, his Scout Leader, and our VP Linda Meza to talk plans. In addition to planting and wrapping trees, he is offering to install a few wood duck boxes which the scouts could help make. He and the city engineer can hand select tree sites and install survey flags for people to plant later. In addition to fellow scout help, Rona Zollinger’s ESA class and another High School class want to assist.

So on to Part III which will be buying the trees and helping the city engineer to convince the council to let us plant them. Stay tuned.

You’d think we were planning the invasion of Normandy.

Hundreds came to the shoulder-to-shoulder town hall meeting with George Miller Saturday, but only tens showed up for the council retreat later that afternoon. Beavers were mentioned at neither, sadly. There were massive cameras and reporters at the first, and only the Gazette at the non-recorded second. Can you guess which spent a greater percentage of time on questions, incorporated greater audience feedback and created a friendlier atmosphere?

Lets be clear: my interest in local politics was generated by exactly two furry creatures in Alhambra Creek about two years ago. There are big historic fights in Martinez that I know nothing about. Still, advocating for these animals has required me to be at fairly close quarters with our city council, to hear their thought processes, listen to their promises, and see how they weighed decisions. If any single issue has forced you to do that at one time or another, you know the result of this discomforting intimacy. Here we are, almost at anniversary of the subcommittee report being delivered, still without a vote on whether the beavers can stay. When I proposed planting to replace the alarming vegetation loss caused by the flood plain scraping, I was told to let “nature take its course”. Staring at the faces who made the decision to install a sheetpile wall in front of what they knew was another sheetpile wall I saw that they were simply relieved that their real commitment had been honored. Each was completely unburdened by wondering how vastly flood conditions would have improved for the entire town if they had voted to invest that half a million dollars somewhere else, say the creek banks by the adult school.

I say this to preface on my remarks. The no-retreat retreat started with city manager Phil Vince outlining the plans for using measure H money by rebuilding the Rankin Park Pool. This was responded to by Lara Delaney who wondered if it might not make more sense to use that money to rebuild the pool somewhere more centrally located in Martinez. Mark Ross reminded her that the bond measure specifically talked about rebuilding the existing pool, and she said again that it didn’t make much sense to go all the way across town for a pool. The city manager even added that the weather was warmer south of highway 4. Mayor Schroder cautioned them away from these speculations saying that the voters might feel this was a “bait and switch” technique to get money approved for one project and use it for another.

All in all, it took 20 minutes for our elected representatives to remind each other that they had an obligation to implement the will of the voters. Whew. Time well spent.

Janet Kennedy raised the issue of a city wide disaster plan, and talked about our failure to provide one. Then it was off to the blue-light special of the day:

A Redevelopment Agency for Downtown Martinez.

Phil Vince began this talk by saying that Martinez had enormous jewels to offer, the open space, the Marina, the train station, but that no city’s general fund should be forced to carry the burden of managing these things on its own. It was time for Martinez to form an RDA. He had worked most recently in Moraga which wasn’t “right” for an RDA because it was just “open space on either side and a few shopping centers in the middle” and did not “have enough blight”. (Never mind that Martinez is equally landlocked by open space, a refinery, and the marina. Apparently we have enough of the blight that Moraga lacked. Interestingly, Moraga didn’t have enough, but apparently Lafayette did.) He said that this time around the city would invest funds and effort to educate  residents about the benefits of an RDA.

40,000 of our tax dollars set aside to teach us what we should think.

The fact that this had been a divisive issue in the past for Martinez was raised, stressing the need for unity. The city manager reassured that this education money would outline the pros and cons of a Redevelopment agency and then simply let the voters decide. Janet Kennedy said that she had never seen an RDA that didn’t improve the city she was in, including San Pablo where they used it to fund a casino. Mark Ross said that if you didn’t have your own RDA on board your funds were siphoned into other projects in the county. Given the fact that 40,000 dollars was going to be spent to teach us pros and cons, someone from the audience asked the council to list any “cons” they could think of.

They could not name one. .

After I raised my concerns about it (which are in yesterday’s gazette and hopefully wednesday’s record) Lara Delaney argued heatedly that an RDA is just a tool, and that it can be used for whatever the city needs, and if there is a powerful tool that can help the city, she was going to use it.

Here’s my thought about the “tool” argument. An RDA is powerful tool, yes. So is a chain saw. It is not the kind of tool you hand to just anybody and promise they can use for the next 40 years. We are in an economic crisis which means that any RDA is going to be poised to siphon a greater portion of any recovered city wealth until 2050. Think of it this way, with the economy down each of our homes have lost value, maybe 30% of their value. That wealth will come back when the dust settles, but forming an RDA now means that any taxes on that recovery will belong to the RDA, not the schools, not the fire department, not the general fund. Yes cities can be responsible and create “pass-throughs” to protect that money, but how good has our city been at saying “no” to big money interests and protecting the needs of residents?

(Consider the Albatross).

It’s time to ask ourselves three important questions:

• Is this the right tool?
• Is this the right time?
• And is this the right council ?