Every animal advocate has heard this admonishment, usually when they supplemental feed in some way. The philosophy is offered as if it were a genuine respect for the value of non-interference in wild lives; a Muir-like admiration for unspoiled nature. But this fatherly advice is just selfishness wrapped in green paper with a pretense of being eco friendly.

Notice WHEN it is said.

“Let Nature Take its Course” is only said after the dam has been lowered by three feet, the forest has been harvested, the tract housing has taken the last hunting ground, the bird nest has been disturbed, the whale has beached on landfill, and the elk have starved because the field they used to graze became a parking lot. It is offered with no acknowledgment or awareness of how enormously humans have altered that natural course. In some ways it bothers me more than the man at the farmer’s market who said outright that beavers should be shot. At least that is obvious and frankly intolerant. “Let nature take its course” is much more pernicious because it offers an illusion of concern for the enviroment, and pretends to argue against any intervention out of that concern.

Humans build, encroach, destroy and interfere all the time, interrupting populations, feeding ranges and life cycles. It is only when some pesky advocates attempt to fix the effects of our actions we hear this line delivered. “Let nature take its course”.

Truly letting nature take its course would mean keeping the dam at its original height, not protecting trees and letting the beavers feed and travel wherever they liked. Of course that isn’t going to happen. The advice is offered with all the compassion of a BMW driver who ran over a bunny that was injured but not killed. His tearful child asks him if they can take it to the vet. “Let Nature take its Course” is the answer for someone who doesn’t want to admit their responsibility. Let the animals die, move, starve. Let the young be orphaned, eaten, scattered.

It’s “natural”.

If only we really let nature take its course. If we let streams go where they planned to go, and let animals have their spaces back, didn’t get upset when gophers took our tulips, and didn’t cut down trees to build more houses and walmarts. If only we had beavers every couple of miles up every river and creek in the nation like we did 200 years ago, with a system of dams that regulated water in drought and flood and maintained an even flow. If only.

It is no longer possible (if indeed it ever was) for us to “Let Nature Take its Course”. Our footprints have changed and continue to change the landscape in every possible habitat, on land, in the air and under water. Since we can’t be observers, we must become stewards, and take care of what we have altered. In the words of Colin Powell, “You break it. You buy it”. Or Antoine de St. Exupery “You are responsible forever for what you have tamed”.

From now on when people say “Let Nature Take its Course” I’m going to say, “Great idea! Help me unwrap these trees, will you? And then we can work on uninstalling the flow device.”

Heidi P. Perryman, Ph.D.

April is the cruelest month

TS.Eliot

In case you’ve been too busy to notice, it’s spring out there and birds are pairing off. Nests, long since crafted or discovered or reclaimed, are now natural Easter baskets full of eggs, and parents are trapped by their biological inheritance into sitting on them, waiting for precious cracking noises. ‘Tis the season for Nest cam watching, and from New York to Singapore devoted fans check in on feathered families from eagles to owlets.

A famous local webcam follows the peregrine falcons who nest in the PGE building in downtown San Francisco. The word “peregrine” means “wanderer” and peregrines have one of the largest migrations of any bird. Tundra-nesting birds winter in South America, with a yearly range of 15,000 miles.  Now peregrines are medium sized falcons that eat smaller birds and catch their prey in flight. Falcons can dive at about 200 miles an hour. They are a species of bird we almost completely eliminated in the 60’s by our use of the pesticide DDT.

In case you haven’t heard this story, DDT was a cheap efficient pesticide used for years to control mosquitoes and other disease-spreading insects around the world. In the 60’s, naturalist-author Rachel Carlson drew attention to its harmful effect on wildlife with her famous book Silent Spring. She described how birds in particular were harmed because DDT affected the thickness of the eggshell, so loving parents trying to hatch their young were crushing their offspring to death. Her book was a best seller, compelled the issue to the forefront and by the 1970’s we had stopped using DDT in the united states.

Fast forward to 2009 and there are still only 45 breeding pairs of Peregrines in the state of California, so interested parties like the Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Group tend to keep a close eye on them. In fact, a couple years back the PGE peregrines thought maybe they’d find new real estate and took up shop in another very expensive building in down town San Francisco. The birds pull so much weight that the new million dollar renter couldn’t even move in until nature had taken its course.

I got interested in the SF Peregrines after reading about them in the paper. Local businessman Glenn Nevill began photographing their escapades on his lunch hours or before and after work. George and Gracie were the lovely pair in residence at the time, and in 2005 they launched four beautiful offspring. It may seem odd to think of Peregrines in big cities, but remember they are used to steep cliffs, narrow canyons and vast buffet tables of pigeon. One of the most amazing parts of Peregrine courtship was when George would bring food to Gracie on the nest: he’d drop it for her from the sky, and she would catch it on the wing.

Some have asked why my youtube name was “Bigonegeorgegrace” and its actually for them. (Its supposed to be Bygone not Big One)…and my first movie was an attempt to record their interaction using the webcam. At that time I saw a huge community grow around interest in these birds, people who would show up every week to watch in person or just keep track on line. As they got closer to first flight, volunteers were all over the city to spot if their were problems. One bird jumped before his time and fell into traffic in front of a Fed Ex truck. The quick-thinking driver wisely stopped, put the squawking fellow in a box, and brought him up the corporate elevator back to his nest.

He was nicknamed  “Otis”.

Through Glenn’s amazing photographs, or in person with binoculars and scopes, we watched those birds learn to fly, joining their parents, practicing diving, catching a pigeon of their very own. One of those four fledges hit a clear windowed building and was instantly killed.  People were heartbroken, and I was much sadder than I expected to be. I realized that care for these birds had made a community which stretched from Marin to Santa Cruz and the wide world beyond. Now the big faceless city of San Francisco was this intimate little peregrine feeding ground and the home of thousands who cared about them.

Perhaps you can see some similarities.

Why would Eliot call April, bursting with life, the cruelest month? Well anyone who watches it closely knows it’s also bursting with death: eggs that don’t survive or nests that are raided and failed launches that end in instant loss or slow suffering. I can’t say whether that’s what he meant, but its what I think when I read it. The more species you care about in the world, the more risky April becomes.

This year’s peregrines are Dapper Dan and Diamond Lil. She has laid four eggs in the scrape (peregrines nest on gravel) and you can watch their progress here.

Apparently this email has gone “viral”, and who can blame every adoring admirer that sends this to all their friends and relatives? You may have read something about the weather in Victoria Austalia, they say its the worst heat wave in a hundred years and fire crews are working like mad to keep things safe. This is back story to explain the little visitor that appears in this photo.

The baby was found shaking underneath a verandah and “looking very sick” after its mother was apparently overcome by the ferocious heatwave that struck Victoria last week.

So the kids found it and the mom invited it inside while they were waiting for the wildlife experts. Read the whole lovely story in the Daily Telegraph. This lost and unmothered little critter was so grateful for the bowl of water offered, it just hopped in.  If you feel brave enough to face unruly popup ads, there’s a photo show in the article that won’t look anything like you expect.

I keep looking at this picture and wondering about this little girl. Was this her most magical day ever? Or do they have Koala’s on their porch all the time? I do think experiences upclose with wildlife change (summon) you in a powerful way: well, they did me.

This is as good a time as any to post this newly available video of my OTHER favorite mammal from Australia, maybe one you’ve never heard of. The Honey Possum (Tarsipes rostratus) feeds entirely on nectar and is small enough to fit on a finger. The colorful locals call them “Noolbenger”, which is reason enough to catch your interest. They are having a tough time as their favorite food (the nectar-heavy native Banksia) is getting less and less common under the influence of urban development.

Maybe its a nocturnal rodent-looking thing, but I definately plan on making the pilgrimage down under to stumble about in the dark and see these little fellows with a flashlight.

Last tag:

Beaver friends LK and GTK are working on a Facebook presence for our beavers, since last night I’m told we’ve made 17 friends, many of them from Turkey?

Last night we paid a visit to the dam and did a little New Year’s beaver watching. Three kits were milling about and feeding on some willow, and a fellow was there watching them with his son. He had the air of someone who had been watching them for a while and wanted to explain all about them. He liked to wait at the dam, he explained, to get his Blood Alcohol Level down so he could pass check point on the way out of town. Did I know that the lodge was under the dam? Did I know that the city had done a really great job handling this? Did I know a beaver expert had come out and installed that “culvert”? Did I know that the city had built the dam around the culvert? Did I know they had to install the sheet pile to keep the beavers from tunneling under the building? Did I know how great it was that the city had handled this so skillfully and taken such care to let the beavers stay?

Sigh.

Here’s the thing: for the benefit of the beavers it is wonderful that the city gets credit for doing humane and creative ecological work. Give Martinez accolades for trying something new and let them bask in the glow of responsible stewardship. Never mind that there are deep claw marks down the length of Castro Street where we had to drag them kicking and screaming and whining every beaver-dam inch of the way. Never mind that they lied and manipulated and distorted figures every opportunity they got. The truth is, we should be happy when the city gets to look good because its good for the beavers.

But (and this is my point)  it sometimes bugs me.

Its not like I can’t acknowledge their accomplishments though. There are things the city has done exceptionally well. Their “Campaign to Convince” has been remarkably successful. They convinced Martinez and the media that they had to spend half a million dollars to stop rodents chewing through concrete. They convinced everyone that they spent 75,000 dollars already on the beavers, 6000 alone on elevated police presence for the November 7th meeting. Heck, they  convinced Fox News that the body of water wasn’t a creek. They even managed to convince Martinez and the media that never voting on the issue was the same as letting them stay.

Now that’s one heck of a job!

I mention this last stroke of genius because it was the most common error on our First Night Quiz. Very compassionate, intelligent people who knew what beavers ate and how they lived misunderstood their fate and thought the city had decided to let them stay for good.

Sadly no. The pope may have decided to close down limbo, but our beavers still live there.

Last night at the dam was an annoying and minimally beavered night. Lots of sassy barely teen boys, with fishing poles, one of whom responded to the request to fish elsewhere with the pithy comebacks “The beavers are ruining Martinez!” and “You can’t tell me what to do. You’re not my Dad”.  I believe this is conclusive proof that ill-tempered and ill-informed people use use the logic of middle schoolers everywhere when they complain about letting the beavers stay.

Are the beavers ruining Martinez? Hmmm. They are apparently ruining it so much that the creek has gotten more attractive to more kinds of fish and the fish that were here already are happily getting bigger by eating the newcomers, which is attractive in turn to strapping lads like you with your fishing poles.

“Well if the beavers come I’ll stop” is the minimally compliant answer, but of course this concern isn’t about beavers at all. They are vegetarians and they mostly don’t care about whatever is on that hook. This concern is about snags. It’s about the piles of fishing line we find matted on the banks or in the creek, often of TUNA weight, with vicious looking rusty hooks at the end. Have you ever seen a waterbird caught in fishing line? Or a hook through its beak?

Keeping fishers away from the beaver habitat in summer is a constant, annoying and unrewarding struggle. Sometimes efforts to communicate work, and sometimes they don’t. The best we can do is keep trying to spread the word, to kids, to parents, and to little old ladies who stop at the dam. We can make it less convenient even if we can’t make it illegal. Fishing is harmful to wildlife. This is a sensitive habitat area. Fish somewhere else.

The word camouflage comes from the French camoufler which means to veil or disguise. Animals use camouflage to elude predators and hide from danger, or to deliver a sneak attack and creep up on a meal unannounced. Both the hunted and the hunter benefit from its obscuring defenses, and evolution has taken care of the animals that are best able to blend into their surroundings. Hiding means success.

Unless your a Martinez Beaver.

We were talking this weekend about how the work of Worth A Dam has been almost entirely about visibility: public events, conversations, photos, videos, letters, tours, activities, lectures, displays. We have done more outreach in the past year and a half than most organizations do in a decade. Our mission statement begins with “maintaining the Martinez Beavers” but mostly they maintain themselves just fine. The work we do is to try constantly to keep them from being meddled with so they can get on with their furry beaver lives.

Sometimes that takes the form of direct advocacy work, like when we took the city to court last year to challenge the sheetpile. Ultimately it was the spotlight of public opinion that  got the city to hire a biologist to supervise the work, and protect our beavers during the action our lawyer could not stop. Talking to the Rotaries and Kiwanis clubs of the world help calm peoples enormous fears about this issue. Teaching children about wildlife and the watershed has been our secret weapon against beaver prejudice, and I cannot tell you how many police, council members, biologists, and country workers have ruefully offered their support because their children “love the beavers”. A cheerful community presence has made all the difference for our beavers lives, across the city, and across the nation.

It’s the opposite of Camouflage.

If our beavers had chosen a less visible home, outside the center of town, without access or easy observation they would have been long ago exterminated. Seeing their actions and efforts has made them part of the public conversation. Caring people instinctively worry about the accessibility of our colony. Will people harm them? Do they mind the interference? But honestly their public presence is the only thing that has kept them alive.

I hear whispers of lots of “secret” beaver dams that are allowed to exist only because the “authorities” have never seen them.  This is a risky option, because all water flows into someone else’s property eventually. People tend to notice if you have an illicit beaver dam some how. Making sure no one knows about them is one way of assuring that beavers continue to survive. Worth A Dam has added another.

Making sure everyone knows about them.

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.

Scott Artis writes that the owl kick-out order was apparently granted just in time. Before the ink was dry on the CDFG signature allowing the eviction of the burrowing owls and the fumigation of the ground squirrels, Kiper went to work.

In any event, I stumbled upon the first round of evictions by Kiper Homes’ consulting firm way sooner than expected.  As I wandered through the unlocked chain link fence I found a team of 3 actively enlarging the burrows of the owls my wife and I have come to obsess over in terms of their protection.  I continued down the middle of the street looking over burrows marked with flags of orange and red, plexi-glass fitted one-way doors blocking burrows that sheltered a family during breeding season, and adjacent burrows that provided extra cover were now overflowing with soil and rocks.  The eviction of the first section was just about complete and the process continued uninterrupted in the background as I spoke with the principle biologist.  I couldn’t help but glance over his shoulder as the shovels filled in burrows that months earlier I had cleared of garbage and debris.

Scott and his wife were there, sadly recording the damage as burrows were widened and fitted with one-way doors, and other adjacent areas were filled with soil and rocks. Scott had a talk with the biologist hired gun on site, who admitted that the squirrels were enormously important to the habitat and thought they deserved protection. In this discussion Scott also learned that there is no data on how evicted owls recover, or whether they recover at all.

The eviction process simply functions by ASSUMPTION that displaced owls do fine and is apparently at the behest of the California Department of Fish & Game who no longer requires banding of the evicted.  So again I am left with the feeling that the owls are a Species of Not So Special Concern.

Burrowing Owl Eviction Begins.

Obviously Kiper (rhymes with viper) wanted this done in time for the holidays. Who can celebrate with their family while bands of hoodlum owls are loose in the neighborhood? When I look at Scott’s smart, bitter video I know exactly how he feels. There but for the grace of 200 people…

Have I told you all lately how much I love you?

I was driving home last night listening to Michael Krasny interview author Terry Tempest-Williams, and she was describing her Mormon upbringing, which taught her both that every life had a spirit and that prairie dogs were worthless vermin that should be shot. She was interested in how enormously social the colony was, and how they survived through dependence on their community. She told Krasny earnestly (which made me pay attention) that Prairie Dogs were a keystone species, and that the holes and burrows they created made habitat for some 200 other species, including burrowing owl and rattle snake.

Just like beavers, America used to have millions more prairie dogs, which supported much denser wildlife. She told a breathtaking tale of the 1950s when the government decided it was going to exterminate the burrowers on the Navajo land to protect the roots of sparse grasses so sheep could graze.

The elders objected, saying to them,

“if you kill all the prairie dogs there will be no one left to cry for the rain”.

The officials smiled at these primitive words, assured them there was no relationship between prairie dogs and rain, and went off with their shotguns and poisons to eradicate the dog population. Let’s let her tell the rest of the story:

The desert near Chilchinbito, Arizona, became a virtual wasteland. Without the ground turning process of the burrowing animals, the soil became solidly packed, unable to accept rain. Hard pan. The result: fierce runoff whenever it rained. What little vegetation remained was carried away by flash floods and a legacy of erosion.

Finding Beauty in a Broken World: Terry Tempest-Williams

Without the network of holes to break up the soil, the ground could soak up no rain, and could only flash flood, not store water. These hard working and social animals (sound familiar?) tilled the land and made it possible for a very dry terrain to retain some moisture. America seems to have a learning disability when it comes to understanding how a bunch of rodents could impact the water table.

Just sayin’.

Do you remember wayyyyyyy back in the seminal November meeting when we all gathered at the High School Performance Art building to make the wacky suggestion that Martinez keep its beavers? We had to march down to the microphone when our name was called and there was this slight dark young man who was actually filming the whole thing and checked the mic from time to time? That was Don Bernier, a documentary filmaker who had already started a project about Urban Wildlife, and won an award from HSUS in the process. Don just heard about the beavers on the news, and wanted to see if the story belonged in his larger project. It turned out that beavers would dominate his project, and he was in Martinez filming everything from the beaver festival to the very first meeting of Worth A Dam. He even had two friends filming the night of the April meeting when Mary Tappe wandered down the aisles with her white cardboard beaver displays.

Well, he’s in the stage of the project where you go around and tell people how cool it is and hope you get a buyer. He sent me a copy of the trailer a while back, but its finally online for you to see. Check out how charming Martinez looks on the big screen! This first interview was filmed in my living room, complete with those umbrella things that refract light and a wired microphone through my shirt. At the time it was a very unusual experience. Hmm.

TRAILER: The Concrete Jungle from Don Bernier on Vimeo.

I am reminded again what a long, successful story the Martinez Beaver Tail is, and how many, many voices it contains. Enjoy!