Beaver Apes Poodle

Washington’s National Cherry Blossom Festival begins today, and any naughty children attending will be disciplined by huge, frightening  Paddles the Beaver.  The man-sized mascot is new, inspired by the Potomac beavers who felled several of DC’s cherry trees back in 1999.

Macon Georgia hosts the annual International Cherry Blossom Festival, and the mascot down there for the past few years has been Petals the Poodle, based on a real-life pink poodle named Lacie.

Coincidence?

Image and haiku by Mike Licht, based on a classic Japanese ukiyo-e print. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license. Credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not boring or obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.

Rogue Beaver!

A savage beaver is attacking dogs in Virginia. Washington’s WRC-TV reports that a dog owner posted a flyer in Alexandria’s Windmill Hill Park near the Potomac, warning that a beaver bit his pooch during a walk there.

Castor canadensis is a rodent, but don’t let your pooch think it’s a big squirrel with an odd tail. The beaver is four feet long, weighs 60 pounds, and sports claws and a mouthful of wood-chipper chompers.

Beaver couples welcome new litters of cute “kits” this time of year and may be more testy than usual. Local Potomac beavers might be even more ticked off. The National Park Service deprived them of a favorite food by putting plastic sleeves on the trunks of Tidal Basin cherry trees.

 

Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not boring or obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.

Arbor Day in DC

It’s National Arbor Day. While the official tree of the District of Columbia is the Scarlet Oak (Quercus coccinea), the Potomac area beaver community urges you to plant more of those tasty Yoshino Cherry trees (Prunus x yedoensis) near streams and rivers. The kits really love them.

Blossoms and Beavers

In Washington DC’, the symbol of springtime celebration is the flower of an unpredictable, fragile, alien species, the Yoshino cherry (Prunus x yedoensis).  This temperamental tree is a recent arrival to the shores of the Potomac, a  symbolic gift of friendship from a distant nation. The original batch of gift trees was diseased and had to be destroyed.

The trees are short-lived, bear no cherries, require extensive care, and fleetingly flash teensy, lightly-scented  flowers before they leaf out and look dull. Yoshino cherry trees produce no edible fruit, but lots of things eat these sickly shrubs anyway: insects, aphids, borers, spider mites, roundworms, fungi, verticillium wilt, bacterial canker, and beavers.