And some days, you wake up to this.

Thanks for all your great work and caring! I would love to be able to link your site to my meager one; ecosystemengineers.wordpress.com Thanks again! Rick

Of course I had to check out the website right away. I found this.

That’s right! A year old blog called “Ecosystem Engineers” from an author in Maine. I just did a beaver background check and saw that he was the fellow who helped Lega last year on the beavers in Bridgeton Small world. Of course this was my favorite part: Apparently we’re founding fathers. Who knew? Off to add him to our blog roll. Beam.

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And then this from yesterday’s Great Blue Heron story:

Dear Dr. Heidi, President and Founder of Worth A Dam (terrific name),

Thank you for kind words about our recent beaver-heron article. Please send me your lodge address and I’ll send you a book with about 300 such essays written 2006 to 2011. There must be 30 that feature our beaver populations and their largely good works since the beavers returned here in 1996. Our Stream Team’s Water Closet column appears weekly in our Ipswich River Watershed Association site and once or twice monthly in the local weekly Tri-Town Transcript. Over the years people have urged us to put our essays on natural and social history with an environmental slant into a book. Last year, I, the author, and other Stream Team members, with professional help did. I’ll send you a copy of The Water Closet: Ipswich River Watershed and Beyond in hope that you will read and review. We would like a review by someone unknown and unconnected. Many people on our mailing lists receiving weekly or who have read the book have said they like the essays. Those that don’t are perhaps too polite. We’ve sold over 200 books and would like to sell more. Money above cost goes to the Middleton Stream Team, a small but long active environmental group.

In any event you are welcome to visit us. We’ll show you some our 40 dams in just small Middleton alone.

Peace, Pike Messenger

Gosh, what a nice email. Any Worth A Dam ambassadors that want to take up Pike’s field trip offer? Of course I said I’d be thrilled to review the book and promote their smart work! And sent their response on to Mike Callahan because all Massachusetts’ beaver friends should definitely meet.

How long do you think it will take the book to arrive?

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Final word, Ian’s last art project for the high school he has now left behind involved making ‘little busts’ of his favorite influences. There’s Nick Park, Walt Disney, Jane Goodall, but I thought I’d share this. It’s about two inches tall.

John Muir by Ian Timothy

“In every walk with nature, one receives far more than he seeks.”

In late March a properly licensed trapper cut two 2-ft. wide 2 ½-ft. deep notches in a 170-ft. long beaver dam in the northern tip of Middleton. This dam and the rich wildlife habitat it produced are often featured here in the Water Closet. The trapper set two traps, legal by human law, near these breaches.

The breaches quickly did enormous damage to one of our favorite places in the Ipswich River watershed. At this critical time of the year for wildlife, about one hundred acres were soon without near as much water as the beavers there and we spectators have enjoyed for fourteen years since beavers built the dam in 1999.

The breaches allowed very roughly seven million cubic feet of water to leave the vast impoundment around Pond Meadow Pond and drain into Pond Meadow Brook which took it to Boston Brook and eventually the Ipswich River. The loss changed much of the shallow lake into a place of wide muddy beaches and flats strewn with tree trunks that had fallen and were partially pickled over past decades. Zero to three feet deep impoundment water and mud are somewhat acidic and low in oxygen, hence the preservation. In the draining, much of the impounded area went from 2 ½ feet deep to exposed bottom. In a few biologically active early spring days, rich habitat was greatly changed.

This entire article is so grippingly well written that I’m having a very hard time pulling important bits to share with you. Whatever else you do in your busy long weekend friday, you should really, really go read this. I have written before about the amazing habitat created by beaver ponds for the heron rookery. I have sent that article to folks in Oregon, Utah and Scotland. I have even sent it to a famous author who promptly went to photograph them for his book. These are some well-followed Great Blue Herons. It’s stunning that anyone would let this happen.

The most noticeable habitat there in the last decade has been the aerial great blue heron rookery. About 2005, it was started with a half dozen nests high in beaver drowned, needleless, white pines. There are over 40 nests now in pines still standing. On an afternoon visit the last day of April, we found the rookery strangely silent. The herons, except for three on nests near the Boxford State Forest side of the rookery, were gone. What happened? Our guess is that loss of water below them, due to the breaches, had led to abandonment.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how Audubon turns into a feathered Worth A Dam. Lets hope this excellent writer decides to submit this article for publication in the chapter journal, and then in the national journal. People need to think about the wildlife they’re going to impact when they trap pesky beavers. Agencies need to require them to think. And articles like this need to make agencies think harder.

Another finding that bothered was the absence of frogs. Usually in hiking the perimeter of the impoundment we’d scare hundreds causing them to leap from shore edge to water. On the last two visits we only startled a half dozen along the remaining shallows. Frogs are certainly an important food for herons. Could their and other aquatic prey decline be reasons for herons moving away?

I don’t know a single person who’s not impressed by the uncannily long and awkwardly graceful Great Blue Heron. When we canoe in the coastal rivers one of our favorite sights is watching them incredibly land in the trees along the water’s edge – they precariously perch and tilt struggling to settle in and it always makes us laugh so hard I’ve never been able to get a good picture. Great Blue Herons are arguably the ‘flag ship’ species of all waterfowl. It’s a big deal to destroy the homes and of 40.

In our opinion there is a great loophole in the Massachusetts’ wetland protection laws, which don’t, with a few minor exceptions, otherwise allow the alteration of wetlands. All human activities that affect beaver impoundments should require a permit from both the Board of Health and the Conservation Commission. More regulations you say? Please put yourself with the voiceless animals in and above the beaver meadows and with their human admirers.

Beautifully written and passionately defended. This is the way to make a difference in how folks see beaver habitats. Look beyond the nuisance and see the wetland.

Here Endeth the Lesson.

Mary Schwalm: Great blue herons at a Rookery at Carter Fields in North Andover. (2 of 4)

Homeowners get nod to deal with beavers

KENT — The North Spectacle Lake Homeowners Association will soon address flooding caused by beaver dams.  The group got the green light Monday from the Inland Wetlands Commission to proceed with its plan to work with Beaver Solutions of Southampton, Mass., to minimize the flooding caused by beavers. The company plans to raise and widen a culvert but not remove the beavers.

Good work, Nutmeg State! You won’t regret it. And moving on to less pleasant discoveries, there’s this news from the Master Chef auditions.

‘MasterChef’ Premiere: Can Roadkill Earn Brian A Spot On The Show?

Texas stay-at-home dad Brian certainly got the attention of the judges with his dish: roadkill. He served up stripped and shaved Cajun beaver tail. “Literally, you could pass that off as beef,” Graham Elliot said, but Brian disagreed with him on that point.

In case you can’t make it out, that’s Chef Brian running onstage wearing a beaver tail after serving beaver tail road kill that apparently tasted like beef to at least one judge.

Ugh.

Need better news? Last night Jr. showed off some new maturity skills, never whining for food from an adult and never provoking a single snap even in side-by-side feeding. Looks like he has adapted to life as a yearling. Congratulations and Happy Birthday!

If you live in Warren County and have a beaver dam on your property, you’re probably going to hear from the county attorney’s office in coming weeks.  The county Board of Supervisors asked county Attorney Martin Auffredou to send letters to those who own property on which beavers have built dams, after county highway crews conducted a survey.

The goal is to inform property owners they may be liable if a dam bursts and damages public or private property, and supervisors hope property owners will decide to remove the beavers and/or their dams safely, said Chester Supervisor Fred Monroe, chairman of the county Board of Supervisors Legislative & Rules Committee.

Lord knows, we don’t like for the government to tell us how many guns to have, or whether we can spank our children or what kind of pesticides to use near our creeks, but apparently it’s perfectly fine to send spies onto private property to count how many have beaver dams, and tell them to get rid of them. Honestly, sometimes I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. It’s bad enough that cities quickly dispatch them on public land. But now you’ve got to scare property owners who appreciate them? Let’s hope your message is neither convincing nor contagious.

The decline of the trapping industry has led to a growing beaver population, Monroe said.  “Property owners need to understand there could be some liability if a beaver dam goes,” he said. “If it’s on public property, the municipalities can take care of them, but it’s a difficult problem if it’s on private property.”

The state Department of Environmental Conservation can issue permits to landowners and municipalities to have nuisance beavers trapped and their dams removed.  Stony Creek Supervisor Frank Thomas said the DEC should handle removal of nuisance beavers, with Monroe pointing out the animals technically belong to the state.

Trapping is an industry now? An industry in decline! Stand back – here’s yet another  politician at his desk fondly missing the days when it was easier and more profitable to kill beavers.  Get me a tissue. Do you really think they’ve thought this through? What if a landowner rips out the beaver dam, and the draining of water and reduction in hyporheic exchange causes a subsequent drop in the water table, and their neighbor’s well dries up? Is he liable for that too?

We need something nice after that article. Isn’t he looking fine! I think we are about a week before his first birthday.

Jr at secondary dam: Cheryl Reynolds

Beavers create scent mounds which act as sentinels and sign posts, alerting beaver passersby that the nearby pond is occupied. (Mary Holland photograph)

Naturally Curious: Scented Signposts

Mary Holland

When they disperse, most young beavers go downstream to look for unoccupied territory. Ideally they come upon an old, abandoned beaver pond that has regrown a good supply of aspens, willows and birches — a beaver’s preferred diet. However, young beavers are rarely that lucky. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility for these young upstarts to attempt to move into an inhabited pond site, so resident beavers take measures to alertthese youngsters that the pond is spoken for.

In an attempt to discourage young beavers from lingering, one of the first things adult beavers do in the spring is to mark the perimeter of their territory. They do so by gathering mud and leaves from the bottom of their pond and making piles, or “scent mounds” to advertise their presence as well as ownership to any beavers passing by. They deposit castoreum, a secretion that conveys information such as the beaver’s age and sex, on each mound by straddling it, everting their castoreum sacs and dragging them across the mound. Scent mounds vary in size, from a height of just a few inches, to three feet or so and they are usually located within two feet from the water’s edge. The pheromones in the castoreum are broadcast far and wide from these mounds. An encroaching 2-year-old beaver detects the odor, and, if it is smart, continues on its way. If a stray male beaver deposits some of his own scent on a resident’s scent mound, or stops to feed, the resident male drives him off by hissing loudly, and if that doesn’t work, he attacks the interloper.

This is a nice article about a little appreciated beaver behavior that really only gets talked about at all if we’re complaining that castoreum is used in strawberry flavoring, or some such nonsense. Scent marking is essential to beaver survival and indirectly lead to the success of the fur trade – since even once metal traps were invented, trappers had no idea what to bait them with, until someone accidentally tried castoreum! Wham! Instant beaver!

We have been avidly looking for scent mounds in Martinez, but never spotted any. We’ve even asked visiting beaver experts to hunt them down with no avail. Where ever our beavers are marking their territory, we it’s a secret we haven’t yet uncovered. Mary’s article is on the Valley news site and definitely worth a read, but the paper has an impolite subscription policy that might not let you come back so just between us shhh.

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Late-breaking news: our friend Malcom Kenton of Washington D.C. was inspired enough by beavers to write his own ballad and he’s looking for a musician! Here’s a taste but you really should go read the rest of it!

Inspired yet? Cheryl took this photo last night of some hard working-stewardship happening at the secondary dam!

Beaver Mudding: Cheryl Reynolds

Feeling nostalgic I posted this on our Scottish friend’s facebook page, asking about beavers in celtic mythology and Paul Scott (who is one of the Tay beaver champions), replied that he personally had always thought about the Kelpie or water-horse as a likely celtic or pictish representation of a beaver. This is the most depicted animal on scottish stones and no one knows what they might have referred to. Of course there are no more Kelpie’s in Scotland but until recently there were no more beavers either – coincidence? This was was so intriguing I had to start researching and reading all over again.

Stone carvings of this mysterious ‘pictish beast’ are seen all over Scotland. It has been described as like a seahorse, or a dinosaur. In most tales the Kelpie is noted to be very black, very at home in the water, but breathing air. Usually only its eyes are seen above the surface of the water, it’s very strong and its mane is constantly dripping. It’s fur is smooth like a seals but it is deathly cold to the touch. The mythical beast has both sinister and magical properties, In tales it lures children into the water to offer it rides on its back, sometimes even changing its length to hold as many as 20. Then it dives, drowning and devouring them. In many tales the Kelpie acts like fresh water mermaid to take the shape of beautiful woman to lure the men to their deaths beneath the water.

Here’s a famous tale of a Kelpie victim from an 1889 retelling. It’s beautifully archaic language, but give it a try.

A party o’ Highlanders were busily engaged, ae day in harvest, in cutting down the corn o’ that field; an’ just aboot noon, when the sun shone brightest an’ they were busiest in the work, they heard a voice frae the river exclaim, “The hour but not the man has come.”

Sure enough, on looking round, there was the kelpie stan’in’ in what they ca’ a fause ford, just foment the auld kirk (old church). There is a deep black pool baith aboon an’ below, but i’ the ford there ‘s a bonny ripple, that shows, as ane might think, but little depth o’ water; an’ just i’ the middle o’ that, in a place where a horse might swim, stood the kelpie. An’ it again repeated its words, “The hour but not the man has come,” an’ then flashing through the water like a drake, it disappeared in the lower pool.

Spooky huh? A man on horseback then comes crashing down the hill to try and get to the Kelpie, but his friends stop him and lock him up to protect him, whereupon he promptly drowns himself in a water trough, because some fates you can’t be protected from, I guess. Ain’t that the truth.

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Speaking of the hour coming…guess who graduated from high school this weekend? Our good friend Ian Timothy who will be off to CalArts in the fall for their experimental animation program. Here he is posing with his rightfully beaming parents. The ceremonial cords represent National Art Honor Society.

Can I say how much like yesterday it seems when I first saw Ian’s Beaver Creek animation? He was 13 when he made it. Ian has been part of the Martinez Beaver story since there was a story. He and his parents visited last year, and the entire beaver world wrote letters on his behalf when the beavers in draught park were threatened. Still not convinced his graduation is relevant news for a beaver website? He asked me to submit letters of recommendation to colleges (which I did) and when he was being wooed by two amazing art and design schools and not sure which to pick I asked the producer of the Beaver Whisperer’s documentary and she asked her animator who pitched in with excellent advice on where he should go! Small, small beaver world.

Ian has already gathered such an amazing wealth of awards and experiences he won’t need beaver contacts or praise from me anymore, but I’m so proud and grateful our paths crossed that I had to send him this photo I found on the web. Yes that’s a cake showing a beaver graduating. I don’t know why either.

At the end of Bridle Path stands a big yellow house on 3.6 acres of secluded land and an interior fit for a magazine. You’d think people would be racing to put offers in, but it’s been so difficult to sell that the price was just reduced by $200,000.

“I can’t figure out why this house isn’t selling,” Margo Kealler, the homeowner, said as she walked into her gourmet kitchen. “This kitchen was once in a magazine.”

Kealler — who runs her business, Park Street Travel, out of her home — believes what’s keeping buyers away isn’t inside the house, but rather outside. Down a slope from her house sits a beaver pond, and Kealler said several potential buyers have shown up, looked at the pond and left.

Beaver real estate prejudice in Massachusetts? Well, knowing how deeply insane some folks are there about beavers it’s certainly possible. Still, 3 acres of woods with your OWN BEAVER POND! I know what I’ll be fantasizing about tonight. That and this kitchen.

Beaver ponds are not known to be problematic for homeowners. Rarely will a beaver go near humans or pets. In fact, for many people, a pond is an added bonus. It’s protected so no one can ever build there. Kealler said she’s never even seen the beavers in the Bridle Path pond. And there are geese, blue herons and many other birds that add to the scenery.

“Someone said to me, ‘you have a bird-seeker’s paradise here,’” she said.

I’ll bet! If anyone happens to be sitting on an un-invested 999,000 burning a hole in their pockets, you should seriously consider this. Beautiful, remote, peaceful and BEAVERS. Great place for an ECCC (East Coast Castor Conference!)