SLO Beaver Brigade

Beavers mate for life and like to live in close family groups called colonies. They’re super social animals, like us; they groom each other and the young beaver play and wrestle. We’re lucky enough to have a tight knit family of healthy beavers right here in Atascadero. We can see that Mom and Pop beavers are well-fed, and they have two adorable babies!

When baby beavers are born they stay safe in the lodge drinking their mom’s milk and growing for the first several weeks. But they quickly start exploring around and learning everything it takes to keep a dam up and running, because pretty soon they’ll move out! After two or three years, most beavers leave home to find a mate and create a lodge of their own (seems pretty young if you ask me!).

Did you know… baby beavers are called kits? It’s true, beavers are usually born in early spring, so our kits are probably getting ready to turn six months old! I don’t want them to ever grow up and leave the pond, but momma beavers keep having babies nearly every year and can have up to 6 kits. So if we’re lucky, we’ll have baby beavers here for years and years 🙂

I can’t even begin to explain the excitement of getting to see OUR very own beavers! It is so special.

I have seen lots of beaver footage, and have enjoyed every bit of them, but nothing quite compares to getting to see the beavers that created the environment that I love so much.

Feeling super appreciative for the gifts of technology, visiting experts and beavers continuing to follow their natural instincts to survive. Here are a few glimpses for your enjoyment.

Riverbed Encampment Threatens Closure of De Anza Trail

It is understandable, the Atascadero Mutual Water Company is tired of removing couches and shopping carts out of the river bed, saying they pull about a dozen of each out each week! Yikes. The homeless encampment along the river is getting large, cutting holes in their fences, using the river as their bathroom.

The Atascadero Mutual Water Company owns the access to the river bed on the de Anza Trail, the one we use to access our beaver dams. And now they are threatening to close access to the river because of the work involved with dealing with the homeless encampments.

This is such a tricky issue. I have a soft spot for the homeless population here. It is so expensive to live in this county and if I were homeless, I would want to live near the river also. I don’t think kicking them out is a solution. Would these homeless go to a shelter if there was more rooms available? Should we help fundraise for the homeless shelters in our county? Should we encourage our city to provide bathroom facilities in the vicinity of the river? Should our naturalist community contribute to a county-wide education campaign to educate the homeless on how to shit in the woods? Is the world ready to learn how to compost Humanure ? and here ?

I just have questions. This is what I will be looking into in the near future. If you have suggestions or some energy to contribute in this realm, reach out to me. We can combine forces.

Thanks.

What a treat, I got to show our beaver dam to Dr. Emily Fairfax, Assistant Professor, California State University Channel Islands, Environmental Science and Resource Management. She was the researcher that studied large-scale wildfires and beaver habitat and made a great stop-motion video demonstrating her findings.

It was so fun to walk around the beaver dams and beaver lodges and learn so much about an area that I visit regularly. First, she called our beaver dam a “Jewel” of a beaver complex. She pointed out all the ways the beavers have committed themselves to this area, the 7-foot deep moat around their bank den, the beaver lodge (ie. second story) they were adding on to the beaver den (that I never even noticed before), the series of micro-dams on the hidden back side of the den that were widening the river and creating a safe hidden path to food sources. As we walked in the water, we would occasionally pass through really cold patches of shallow water, she said these were places where the ground water was coming up, cooling the water and recycling the river water back into the ground (something like that), keeping the river water at that perfect fish-loving temperatures. She took a thermal image of the water and the dams also, which are sooooo cool.

And the best part!?!?!?! She wants to do a study of this beaver complex, watching, recording, capturing photos, as the seasons change, gathering data within the beaver complex and comparing to data outside of the beaver complex. Is that the most exciting news ever or what!? I can’t even believe it.

Here is a 360 photo by Dr. Emily Fairfax of the beaver dam and pond, so you can feel like you are in the water with us!

More info on Dr. Emily Fairfax can be found here.

More to come!