Beaver is Lost: Elisha Cooper

A friend presented me with a copy of Elisha Cooper’s adorable ‘Beaver is Lost‘ picture book yesterday. It illustrates the bustling adventures of a lost little beaver who finds his way back through the city to locate his family. Along the way he is chased by a dog, climbs through a culvert and appears fairly urban.  I am sure his face looks rather more like a Capybara than a beaver but beggars can’t be choosers and we won’t quibble. This is a lovely work published in 2010 and you should really buy one for yourself and maybe the Martinez Library.  Come to think of it, maybe Mr. Cooper wants to come to Martinez and spend a little time watching beavers up close for his next book: What happens to a city that loses its beavers?

Speaking of artwork, Caddo has turned up where we all knew he would. Remember the orphaned beaver in Shreveport Louisiana who was being hand reared by the woman who had him ‘painting’ pictures that she was using for fundraising? Well now he is fundraising at the Gannett zoo.

Comments A A Caddo the Artful Beaver is shown with some of its paintings. The beaver began painting while being cared for by an art enthusiast in Shreveport. Now, the furry animal is housed at the Alexandria Zoo, which hopes sales of Caddo’s paintings can generate revenue for the zoo. The paintings are on sale at the zoo. Caddo the Artful Beaver is shown with some of its paintings. The beaver began painting while being cared for by an art enthusiast in Shreveport. Now, the furry animal is housed at the Alexandria Zoo, which hopes sales of Caddo’s paintings can generate revenue for the zoo. The paintings are on sale at the zoo. / Gannett Louisiana

Michael Beran, who runs a wildlife-control business in the Shreveport area, first discovered little Caddo when he was trapping a group of beavers causing tree damage in a Shreveport neighborhood

Ahh the heroes journey! So Mr. Beran killed his mom and dad and siblings and decided, on a whim, to let him live by dropping him off at a neighbor’s house with a rodent-feeding bottle. That’s nice. And now he wins a trip to the zoo where they can work him fast before he gets to big.

Beran said that while Caddo is a pseudo-celebrity in Shreveport, he’s relatively unknown in Central Louisiana. Beran is hoping the zoo can capitalize on the animal’s fame, thereby selling paintings and attracting people to come visit the painting beaver at the zoo.

“With these sorts of things, notoriety doesn’t last long,” Beran said. “It kind of goes in spurts. Caddo’s getting big. Beavers get big pretty quick, so there’s going to get a point where he’s too big to handle to do the art. The time is coming soon where he’s going to lose his edge and be too big to handle, so we want to try to maximize his publicity if we can for the zoo. The zoo’s always hurting for money.”

With your line of work Mr Beran this could be a whole sub-career for you, get called to do a trapping, make some more orphans, farm them off to some L’O'L for watercolor lessons and then haul them off the the zoo. Coyotes? Raccoons? Alligators? It could all happen!

In the meanwhile poor Caddo will sit in a cage and occasionally play in splashes of color. I guess that’s probably a nicer fate than lots of beavers meet in Louisiana.

A Year Ago Today

How’s that for a beaver anniversary card? It’s been a full year since I went to the Oregon conference. A year ago today I was walking anxiously among the registration tables and meeting strangers I had only read about.  Funny how things unfold.

Speaking of ending up places you never expected, I thought I’d give you a little tribal lore today and talk about beavers at the beach. What’s that you say? Beavers never go to the beach? Ahh, watch and learn young Jedi.

Apparently the Hočąk (Winnebago) tribe in Nebraska and Wisconsin knew all about this. The beaver is the master of water in their tales, including the ocean.

Beavers, as masters of water, play a prominent role in one of the stories about Hare. Hare was led to a mysterious man who had lost his red scalp and wanted Hare’s help in getting it back. This man was probably Redhorn, one of whose wives was She who Wears a Beaverskin Wrap, the outer garment perhaps suggestive of her inner nature. The mysterious man knew that Hare could depend on a family of beavers who lived at the edge of the Ocean Sea that surrounds the island Earth. When Hare arrived, the father beaver told him that he would ferry him across the ocean on his back, but his wife interrupted and said that if they were to get there in a decent amount of time, that she had better do it. In their ability to ferry Hare across the ocean, the beavers show their mastery of the element of water. Hare presented his hosts with a hoe as a gift, an implement reminiscent of the front teeth of a beaver as well as the beaver’s cultural preoccupation with removing trees the way a people sculpt their gardens.

Still not sure beavers belong in an ocean? Think of an area with two parallel rivers that both run to the sea. Like the Albion and the Navarro in Mendocino for instance. When dispersers are looking for new territory they could go up and over the mountains in between I suppose, but an easier way would be to follow the river downstream and through the ocean until they come to the next fresh water and then turn inwards. Sure, they need fresh water to drink, but they can  go without drinking for a good long time.

Near as I can tell this unmistakable video comes to us from somewhere around Vancouver BC. (Aren’t there killer whales there? Yikes!) The beaver is clearly using the bay to get around from one freshwater body to another. When I was talking with Michael Pollock on the way to Occidental, he told me about some early research he did in Alaska, referring to island beaver colonies who could only have gotten there by way of ocean travel. And then there’s always the briney beavers from the Salty Seaside Ponds in the work of  Greg Hood.

Remember a beaver has everything it needs for long aquatic voyages. Webbed back feet, and a nose, eyes and ears that sit above the water line. Around here March is disperal month! So if you’re at the ocean anytime soon keep an eye out for a unusual flat-tailed seal. It could happen!

AYER — With the aim of cataloguing and eventually managing all of the town’s ponds and dams, the Dam and Pond Management Committee held its inaugural meeting Monday night to begin consideration of a vital component of Ayer’s ecological profile.

Selectmen charged members with coming up with an inventory of the town’s dams and ponds, an assessment of their conditions and maintenance needs, and the compilation of a dam and pond management plan that would address issues requiring attention.

Imagine an entire committee in charge of monitoring all the dams and ponds in a city! I can’t even fathom what that might look like, but that’s the job of this Massachusetts team who are now tracking every beaver dam and pond in the area.  Mike Callahan says he recently installed a flow device there and did a presentation a few years back, so maybe his message sunk in. Or maybe this bit of dramatic stupid made the town aware that beaver dams are important.

Adding to the board’s concerns about Flannagan’s Pond, one of a half dozen major bodies of water that are inter-dependent, was an important beaver dam recently breached, possibly by an explosion deliberately set by a person or persons unknown. The result of the dam’s destruction caused massive flooding that left hundreds of acres under water.

Yeah, you really shouldn’t blow up beaver dams. Aside from all the fish and birds you disrupt, its bad news for your down stream neighbors.

In opening their discussion of the issues last Monday night, members began to realize the challenge they faced when presented with a list of the dams in town including the Balch Pond Dam on Cold Spring Brook owned by the town, the Ice House Dam on the Nashua River owned by Ice House Partners, Inc., the Upper Flannagan Pond Dam owned by Linda and John Wesley, the Lower Long Pond Dam owned by Sandy Pond Real Estate, the Plow Shop Pond Dam owned by G.V.M. Realty, Inc., the Plow Shop Pond Dike owned by the town, and the Long Pond Dam on Upper Long Pond also owned by the town.

With the scope of the issue somewhat identified, members decided that for their next meeting, they would need certain informational material at hand in order to begin planning including an exact inventory of dams and topographical maps, sample management plans from other communities to review, and local environmental reports

Other concerns raised by members over the course of the Jan. 30 meeting included liability and enforcement issues, the town’s relations with the owners of private dams, the disposal of yard waste by abutters to the town’s ponds, the role if any of the state in oversight of the ponds, and beavers.

Oh to be a fly on the wall at the next meeting! Well, good luck ‘dam posse’! Feel free to call on us if we can be of any help or assistance!

More good news comes from the Midwest Beer Collective in Milwaukee where efforts to improve the watershed have lead to returning salmon and [incidentally] beavers!

It was a big surprise when salmon stopped their annual river run in the Kinnickinnic River, one of Milwaukee’s most ecologically strained waterways. Imagine people’s surprise when the salmon started coming back: The revitalized salmon population comes as a direct result of Milwaukee’s watershed cleanup plan. City officials have been constructing green roof, setting up rain barrels and buffering watersheds to stop toxic runoff before it pollutes the freshwater. These techniques have allowed the river ecosystem to reestablish itself, and the wildlife is returning. Very simple cleanup plans like these are finding success across the nation.

The author, Anthony Cefali offers the tale of beaver and salmon primarily as a way to re-introduce a new [old] word “Umwelt” which he describes as, ‘A German word, umwelt came about in the 1920’s. It poorly translates to “self-world,” or the observable world of an organism occupying a certain habitat.’ What he never quite acknowledges is that the Umwelt of the beaver dramatically becomes habitat for salmon, birds, mammals and amphibians. This is why the beaver was counted as an indicator for multiple species in the award winning Mannahatta project. This was the central thesis of Dietland Muller-Swarze’s Beaver: Natural History of a Wetlands Engineer.

The beaver requires only food and water, but if those needs are met he can produce ideal conditions for an increased riparian border, salmon, things that eat salmon, stream channelization, silt removal, water quality improvement, bird population increase and diversity, water table raised, change vulnerability to drought all the while creating conditions that create more beavers to do it all over again.

Thanks for the new world and the positive article. But here’s what Mr. Cefali should have  mentioned:

Smot production: Beaver Dams vs. Large Woody Debris LWD (Pollock et al)

This weekend I was able to complete a wonderful interview with Mary O’Brien of the Grand Canyon Trust, and our conversation took so many exciting directions that my head has been a little dazzled trying to follow them all.  She told me about the beaver management paper they had just submitted to the forestry service, getting tuned into beavers by attending Suzanne Fouty’s dissertation defense, and Newspaper rock in Utah with hundreds of tribal images of humans and animals.

Of course this is my favorite part:→

Getting ready for the interview I went to re-visit the article that first introduced me to Mary lo these many years ago. “Voyage of the Dammed” in High Country News remains my favorite beaver article ever written. This time when I looked at the photo I saw it in a new light – an OMG-that’s-a-muskrat-light!

Of course I wrote everyone involved about the error:  the author, the publisher and the hapless photographer, but they’ve made no response so far. It’s the only photo without a description, so maybe they know its not a beaver and just used it to ‘imply’ beaver? Still it’s a little like finding out Jesus on the Mount was reading from a teleprompter. Sigh.

Oh and this photo from Mike Callahan’s facebook page explains why we should be happy that our beavers are busily taking down trees and building third dams instead of occupying their time in a more insidious way:

Dammed up Intake Exclusion Fence on a Flexible Pond Leveler